The Apple TV remote is terrible as it is. It looks and pretty much feels the same in any orientation, leading to frequent accidental input while blindly grabbing it.
So it’s baffling me why someone thought it would be a good idea for a single tap (not click, a light tap!) on the left or right side of the remote to instantly start fast forwarding or rewinding the video!
First time I noticed it I was trying to rewind 30 seconds, which doesn’t work. The new media player has broken the default behaviour set by the system and used by most video apps.
If I have this correct the new remote controls are:
Click in the middle: Play/Pause
Click on left/right: Play/Pause
Tap in the middle: Show progress bar (another tap shows the start time and end time)
Tap on the left/right: Rewind/Fast Forward
This is not what I was expecting to happen. You need to allow for accidental input on such a finicky remote. I’d change the left/right click to 30s skip and a long left/right click to fast forward/rewind.
Thank you for the constructive feedback, we take note of all that. However…
…there is no need for this kind of comments. This is a beta and is in constant development. There is A TON of work behind this. Even getting the remote controls to behave as they do right now was a lot of work because tvOS is, in that regard, broken in many ways.
Anyway, we’ll improve remote controls (and everything else) in future releases. Please, be patient, it’s not a simple task.
I appreciate all the hard work you do on Plex and believe in and support it, which is why I’m a lifetime subscriber. I also hold you all to a high standard because that’s what I’ve come to expect after all these years. The current remote settings should have been shot down in the planning stages and never even made it to beta in my opinion. If my comment came across as rude I apologise, that wasn’t my intention.
No worries, this is just… a lot of work and pressure that we put on ourselves to get out as much as we can in the best shape we can. And believe me, the remote control support involved so much pain… some of the issues have been haunting us for months or years!!
To give you some perspective about this, the options were:
Keeping a functional player (but far from perfect, specially on tvOS) in development for 1-2 more months until when we thought it was perfect, then open it to everyone and start gathering feedback about many things that we couldn’t even consider, and many many bugs and crashes we would never find by ourselves.
Get out an alpha/beta product, only to a few people that are actively interested in testing it, start gathering very valuable feedback (like the one you provided) and start including that feedback and bugfixes into our code as soon as possible. So instead of adding only what we think is best, we try to have a mix of our thoughts + your thoughts, which in my opinion leads to a better product. Then, when we open it for everyone is in a much better shape and closer to what everyone expects
So basically we’re adding and fixing things incrementally, bit by bit. You stopped seeing some of that progress because the beta builds you guys got are stable enough to be released soon. But we keep adding things to the beta builds of the next version, which we’ll deploy soon too
Seriously, keep the good feedback coming, we’re doing our best here to improve the new player and your feedback is essential. We can’t do everything, but we will try!
As I sad before, if the comment answers a question which is asked in multiple places and not addressed, why id it wrong? I believe I had slightly modified my response in each thread but since you’ve deleted them I can’t repeat it.
Here is a link to most of what I originally added.
some of the issues have been haunting us for months or years!!
