I reported the playback problems with 8.12.0 before the release went live on the app stores.
Plex, I’m a retired senior software developer and product manager. What you’re doing isn’t working. It seems like every Android release is worse than the last. You’re going to keep getting the same results if you don’t change your behaviour.
Also, you been cultivating a negative relationship with your users for years now, treating us like beta testers without even providing a proper way for us to report bugs. We lack a one and done bug report process because we don’t want our attachments to be public. So we have to wait for someone to respond, (which sadly often never happens) so that we can direct message the attachments to someone.
I don’t mind having to report bugs once in a while but for god’s sake, please make that a simpler process for us.
Also, we’re forever having to uninstall and go back to a previous version. Then we have to customize the app to our liking all over again. Could you please make it possible to save our settings and ui customizations to a file before upgrades and provide a way for us to restore them afterwards if we have to revert. On my 8.12 bug report, I was asked for logs and I said no because I had already gone back to the 8.11 version that worked – I was not willing to upgrade again to get logs and then revert again, having to redo all my settings/customizations again.
If you want us to help you, you have to make it easier for us to do that.
I had noticed certain items no longer playing in the 8.12 beta but didn’t bother to report it because posts in the beta forums seem to go ignored anyway and I also had to revert and wasn’t willing to keep changing versions. If we had a proper way to report bugs I would be much more inclined to do so.
I posted a similar rant yesterday. I’ve had to resort to using the ancient Plex client that is on the TiVos to play music. The Music portion of the 8.1x Android(FireTV for me) is completely unusable now. Hey, but we can almost play video games from the 80s now, so there’s that, right?
I’m incredibly frustrated at this point, but there don’t seem to be any real alternatives to Plex yet. I tried Jellyfin yesterday, and that was atrocious. I might try Emby, but it’s gotta easy enough for the wife to use, or it won’t fly in this house.
I think people put too much expectation into Jellyfin. Its free software that let’s you stream outside of your home network for no additional fee. I give it a lot of leeway because of that. No, its not as polished as Plex or Emby, and I’m certainly not going to leave Plex for Jellyfin as far as serving content to my family, but it fails a lot less often than Plex does when I want to stream from my phone while sitting in a parking lot during my lunch hour, and items that Plex drops frames on when using the Fire Stick 4K stream just fine with Jellyfin.
Unfortunately, there’s no perfect solution to what we want just yet. I see many longstanding complaints in the Emby forums and Jellyfin forums just like I do here. Sadly, the entire yard isn’t greener on the other side of the fence… just a few patches here and there.
There were huge playback problems with 8.12.0 and 8.12.1. I was really talking to Plex rather than the user base. They know because they had to pull the 8.12 versions off the stores and revert to 8.11. But the update should have never ended up in the stores in the first place.
Ok, Plex, the 8.12.0 bug (link above) that I reported is still there according to posts. Could you please pull the 8.12 versions off the stores until you’ve had time to do a proper evaluation of what is going on. Again, I’m a recently retired senior system programmer/product manager and this is just pathetic behaviour on your part.
This appears to be happening on Android TV as well, not just the Fire TV Stick that I reported before 8.12.0 even went on the stores.
Yeah i have several users who cannot play 4K due to the bug introduced in 8.12 (my server does now allow 4k transcoding). Please pull the 8.12 release while a fix is being introduced.
Ok, I see 8.12.3 is on the stores now. One problem though: Home Screen is broken and a whole lot of customers are not going to be happy about that. I don’t know if customers didn’t report the problems for the previous 8.12 versions because they’ve given up or whether you ignored the reports again. I don’t really care which. I don’t even have the words for how stupid this is.
