The 8.17 build in TestFlight expires in 4 days now. By the look of it, I think I shouldn’t be holding my breath waiting for Plex to fix the bug before then.
So this situation happening so quickly right after another baffling regression bug on the Apple TV player app had me reevaluate my whole setup. During the last few weeks, I’ve been exploring a few things.
First, I need to say that barring some new severe regression bugs in the area, I plan on continuing using Plex for music. I already said it in other threads, but Plexamp to me is the best music player around. It’s just a joy to use, I love it. And the people behind Plexamp seem to genuinely care about investigating and fixing high impact bugs affecting people.
But I can’t say I’ve had the same great experience with the movie/TV show side of Plex, especially in the last few months. So I decided to delete all the Plex player apps from all my devices (except Plexamp).
I was reluctant to do so because I really wanted to keep using the Apple TV app from Plex (it’s a great app – when it works), but I began experimenting with the Infuse app. And it’s really good! The video/audio playback is perfect (and in sync!), it has noticeably better picture quality when upscaling 1080p content, and has way better HDR/DV support.
There are some important things Infuse can’t do compared to the Plex player, though. It doesn’t support managed user profiles, doesn’t support local extras, and doesn’t have the amazing actor profile pages the Plex player has. But I began realizing that these things don’t amount to much if the fundamental functionality of actually playing videos gets broken so often and for such long periods of time.
I guess I’m lucky to be using Apple devices for everything I want to watch videos on, it means I can use Infuse on everything (Apple TV, iPad, iPhone, MacBook Pro). I’ll probably buy a lifetime subscription to Infuse soon. I doubt I’ll go back using the Plex player for movies and TV shows, unfortunately. The trust just isn’t there anymore. Like I said in the first post of this thread, always worrying about new updates suddenly breaking some critical functionalities isn’t a great experience.
I might also stop using the Plex server completely for movies and TV shows in the near future. Infuse supports products from other companies, and also supports handling metadata and playing files directly without using something like Plex. There wasn’t any incentive for me to do so before, but now I’ll definitely explore all of these possibilities soon to see if any of it could make sense with my setup.
