Update on the new Roku App

Announcements
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We recently released a brand new Roku app, and for a very important set of you, it wasn’t a smooth landing. While we made an early beta and preview channel available, we should have better communicated the existence of the preview, and done more to incorporate community feedback from the start.

We are listening to your feedback, and wanted to share our next steps:

  • We will improve the navigation and many other UI elements, based on your feedback. We will be sharing some details about the changes before we make them, so you can have a chance to let us know what you think.

  • We have updated the Plex Preview channel to include new awesome features like Live TV “grid view”, MPEG2 direct stream, TIDAL, and many bug fixes, including some UI improvements. Check it out and let us know how it works for you. Plex for Roku

  • Additionally, we have temporarily released the previous Roku version, named “Plex Retro”, as an unofficial channel while we improve our current new channel. Make sure you adjust any settings here as this is a new channel. We want to be super clear and up front here, though: Plex Retro will not be a permanent channel and we plan on removing it once the official channel has been updated with all the goodness and love mentioned in the first bullet; and plugin support will not be returning to the new app. https://my.roku.com/add/PlexRetro

One important note with the new official Plex channel is that the old channel settings were not transitioned to the new channel. This was a mistake, as a few of the default settings can result in poor playback experiences for some users (primarily video quality levels and insecure connection settings). Both of these settings can cause additional transcodes depending on your setup and media played:

  • If you have a lot of HEVC (H.265) content and a modern Roku, we recommend using the “Original” quality level.
  • If you are running into a lot of loading errors and video buffering, try changing the `Settings > Advanced > Allow Insecure Connections preference to “On same network”. (You can also try “Always”, but for better security, “On same network” is preferred.)
  • Media formats vary, but we are also evaluating our default settings to help improve everyone’s streaming.
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