@mikehadfield said:
But I thought your intention was to bring the same UI to all devices?
Ah the good old times where every device was using the “PMP 1.x” interface… of course everyone was complaining for the horizontal scrolling, but at least it was the same complain on every platform (XBox, PS, PMP, OperaTV, FireTV, Roku and more). There were still “custom” UIs for Apple TV and Android TV, but everything else was consistent. You may say it was “poor” but at least it was consistent.
Now we have some devices stuck with PMP 1.x, some with PMP 2.x, Plex for Kodi is still different, and it looks FireTV is now using the Android (or Android TV? but the screenshot doesn’t look like the Shield version) interface… I miss completely the “vision” that was before
@“Thanasis P.” said:
None of the Plex users asked for a UI change
Actually there was a lot of complaints about the horizontal scrolling in the old interface, maybe not on FireTV specifically but for sure Plex Media Player forum was full of very vocal people not satisfied with that. The result is a PMP 2.x UI that, IMVHO, is worse than its predecessor, and maybe because the old PMP 1.x interface is going obsolete Plex decided to ditch the custom UI of the FireTV app and use the vanilla Android UI instead.
I know you are shocked by the new UI, but please give it a try for a little while before complaining. Then, please provide constructive criticism if you want something changed.
Huh? How long should I use this new horrible UI before my feedback is considered valid? I used the previous UI for years and have found more faults in a few hours with the new UI than I ever had previously. Really disappointing response.
I know you are shocked by the new UI, but please give it a try for a little while before complaining. Then, please provide constructive criticism if you want something changed.
Huh? How long should I use this new horrible UI before my feedback is considered valid? I used the previous UI for years and have found more faults in a few hours with the new UI than I ever had previously. Really disappointing response.
Havent seen you mention any faults? care to list some so that @“MovieFan.Plex” can pass them on?
I know you are shocked by the new UI, but please give it a try for a little while before complaining. Then, please provide constructive criticism if you want something changed.
Huh? How long should I use this new horrible UI before my feedback is considered valid? I used the previous UI for years and have found more faults in a few hours with the new UI than I ever had previously. Really disappointing response.
Havent seen you mention any faults? care to list some so that @“MovieFan.Plex” can pass them on?
No need to mention more than already is in this thread:
awful look, looks like a cellphone screen is scaled up
scales not properly on TVs
fonts are way to big
controlls take up half the screen
the need of a lot more clicks to get to yout stuff
lack of the “play” button. No excuse that it didn’t exist on the android tv version. Makes it even more sad how bad the android tv version seems to be
I know you are shocked by the new UI, but please give it a try for a little while before complaining. Then, please provide constructive criticism if you want something changed.
Huh? How long should I use this new horrible UI before my feedback is considered valid? I used the previous UI for years and have found more faults in a few hours with the new UI than I ever had previously. Really disappointing response.
Havent seen you mention any faults? care to list some so that @“MovieFan.Plex” can pass them on?
No need to mention more than already is in this thread:
awful look, looks like a cellphone screen is scaled up
scales not properly on TVs
fonts are way to big
controlls take up half the screen
the need of a lot more clicks to get to yout stuff
lack of the “play” button. No excuse that it didn’t exist on the android tv version. Makes it even more sad how bad the android tv version seems to be
etc. etc.
Awful look? its a 10ft interface, cant say that ive seen any funky scaling at all, and ive been using a shield since it came out in my living room, and fire tv in the bedroom for longer, and it scales just fine on a 60" display, and a 32" display…
Fonts are fine… again, something could be off in your TV here.
Yeah controls are a bit funky, but it isnt really a fault…
Lack of play button is a fairly good excuse, considering the actual android tv specification does not include provision for a separate “play pause” button kinda why every android tv device hasnt had one
Moire clicks to get to everything? really compared to clicking more?? or movies… then browse all… this UI shows you more than 5 things odd at time…
No way of is showing a permanent progress/time indication when a track is playing. The info bar disappears after a few seconds. You can press OK to bring it back, but it disappears again after a few seconds.
Album review text display has no option of showing more info if the amount of text is longer than what is displayed by default. It does sometimes give me a “more info” button, but usually doesn’t.
Also, the display of albums is now useless. Because the text is big then very little of the title is displayed in the horizontal list of albums. I have some artist entries that have hundreds of albums (audiobooks for instance). Scrolling left/right through them is terrible, especially when you can’t see the full title.
For example, the album titles are like this:
Doctor Who - 4th Doctor - 02.04 - The Justice of Jalxar
Doctor Who - 4th Doctor - 02.05 - Phantoms of the Deep
The scrolling display now just shows them as:
Doctor Who - 4th…
Doctor Who - 4th…
There really needs to be an option of listing albums vertically (like the previous app could) so I can see the full titles.
This is just one example showing how the new “bigger text” layout just doesn’t work well.
I know you are shocked by the new UI, but please give it a try for a little while before complaining. Then, please provide constructive criticism if you want something changed.
Huh? How long should I use this new horrible UI before my feedback is considered valid? I used the previous UI for years and have found more faults in a few hours with the new UI than I ever had previously. Really disappointing response.
Havent seen you mention any faults? care to list some so that @“MovieFan.Plex” can pass them on?
No need to mention more than already is in this thread:
awful look, looks like a cellphone screen is scaled up
scales not properly on TVs
fonts are way to big
controlls take up half the screen
the need of a lot more clicks to get to yout stuff
lack of the “play” button. No excuse that it didn’t exist on the android tv version. Makes it even more sad how bad the android tv version seems to be
etc. etc.
Awful look? its a 10ft interface, cant say that ive seen any funky scaling at all, and ive been using a shield since it came out in my living room, and fire tv in the bedroom for longer, and it scales just fine on a 60" display, and a 32" display…
Fonts are fine… again, something could be off in your TV here.
Yeah controls are a bit funky, but it isnt really a fault…
Lack of play button is a fairly good excuse, considering the actual android tv specification does not include provision for a separate “play pause” button kinda why every android tv device hasnt had one
Moire clicks to get to everything? really compared to clicking more?? or movies… then browse all… this UI shows you more than 5 things odd at time…
Ok got it. You’re a fan of the new UI, the rest of us is not.
came here to post exactly this, but glad to see there is already a thread of sane reasonable people who agree.
this is complete and utter junk.
“give it a chance”???!? I can’t even get into settings because it crashes the application. every. single. time. and that’s not even to begin with out utterly unusable / non-intuitive the UI is, or how others have already mentioned about previously working (and USEFUL) things are broken / now-non-existent.
(was hoping to get into settings with the unreasonable hope there might be a “new” setting like back when some of the client apps let you choose which UI you’d prefer it to look like. but now apparently I’m not even allowed into settings at all. thanks, plex.)
while I have always been a fan of feature/UI-parity across client devices, this seems like taking the worst possible one to try to match.
even my xbox180, even my wife’s slow-as-beyond-slow roku, still have incomplete interfaces but guess what? they are sane.
and sometimes the plex/roku devs in their own infinite wisdom will ship/update the client-app without saying anything, and all of a sudden errors along the lines of, “can’t see any PMS, you must have broken your LAN settings somehow even though you have not changed them for years” - but guess what? in a day or two it’s back to normal (even tho I never “fixed” any LAN settings lol.)
signed, lifetime-paid plexpass user - plex client devs? you have a habit of not-listening to your users, and I hate you so much.
Please reload the old app and go back and redesign this IMMEDIATELY. It should offer more features, better design and more intuitive interface. If you can’t hear your users you will be the loser. I can flip to Kodi in a heartbeat and though not pretty, easy to use…plus I can skin it. It’s not faster, has no net advantage, has much fewer features --where’d the damn player go and how do I get to my friends servers? 5 clicks to do anything. Where’s all the nice artwork, shading, etc. If you are looking for a model to put across all streaming devices, why not take the Plex AppleTV app and modify that for Android and other streaming devices? Looks and works great.
agreed, 5 clicks minimum to do just about anything.
going back to the horribly-slow roku for now, at least the plex app there is still (for now?) non-insane. (would use the xbox but holy-wow is that thing an electricity-hog…)
I had started another thread before seeing this one specifically. Thought I would just add my voice to the other dissatisfied users regarding this, for the lack of a better or polite company word, “New” UI.
Agree with the group… Please change it back to the prior version.
I was travelling away for work during the ‘upgrade’ and came back to my kids and wife saying that Plex was broken. I thought it was another server problem but was shocked to find the interface on all 3 of my fireTV’s had been changed drastically. Being a loyal plex user and advocate for many years I thought i should give it a chance, i have but i still much prefer the old app. It looked good, was easy to navigate and looked and scaled nicely on all size TVs i have (22"-55").
Anyway assuming this is here to stay (and functionally it seems to work for me so far) the key things that would make it better are usability and visual tweaks:
Scaling, the text menu on the left takes up too much room and makes the stuff on the right look like it doesnt fit or scale properly. Maybe this can be user configurable
Now that the vertical Library choice is now horizontal and most of the originally horizontal options are now in the vertical menu there are too many in it - can they be user configurable so i can remove some.
Enable the up control when navigating up and down the menu to loop back to the bottom (and vice versa) as this would make getting to settings faster (i use this all the time to swop servers and change userIDs between mine and the kids).
Make the pop up controls when playing media smaller, they obliterate most of the screen, it just needs to be at the bottom like the old one or like Kodi.
Bring back the ability to highlight the progress bar in the pop up controls and jump forward or backwards quickly. This seems to have been replaced with chapter options which are not as easy\fast to use.
Hoping some if these things can be fixed, in the meantime im going to try and work out if i can obtain and sideload the old one before my family lynch me or start using Amazon and Netflix more and cost me a fortune
@mikehadfield said:
I was open to getting a new UI, but your own website led us to believe it would look like the images shown at the bottom of this page:
They are actually a fairly decent design and in high resolution. What we have actually got looks like a very crude earlier version of this. How you can hype up a new interface, show pics of it, then not actually give it us is very bad.
agreed, had the ui gone to that i think it would have been better.
What the atfv interface is some odd frankenstein of that and trying to fit into android tv interface. Plex really should take a page from netflix (even though their ui isnt the best) and make a consistent interface across all platforms and don’t try to cater to each default UI.
@pmisley said:
I could get over any UI changes if 5.1 would simply work on the Fire TV Gen2 . . .
Same here. The design looks ok to me, but i can only navigate 2 clicks in before black screen and returning to the amazon home menu. Constant freezing, and crashing.
Folks, after thinking about this and testing it some more I have come to the conclusion that my first impression was absolutely correct. This is the worst interface in the Plexiverse.
The reason it is so bad is also quite clear, it was designed for touch screens by people with no real idea of how a real TV device is used by real people. That is it was designed by Android developers and those developers probably exist in their own little world and only contact the real world on a rare, limited, basis.
It, probably, is good for the small screens and touch screens that you can swipe to move on but being operated with a remote where every incremental move must be accomplished with a button press and that makes the interface clumsy at best.
The attempt to move the Android interface to the big screen and operated with a remote is a major failure and Plex should realize that but instead they continue to push that the users are at fault because they are doing it wrong.
Plex the “wrong” is on your side:
It is WRONG to use the same interface on a full size TV as on Android tablets.
It is WRONG to remove functionality, like the play button, just because it is done that way on other devices.
It is WRONG to force users onto the new interface without warning. They should have released the new one, if they insist on releasing it at all, side by side with the old app and let the users decide which is preferred.
It is WRONG to come onto these forums and blame the users for not giving the new interface a chance and not providing detailed feedback. There is too much wrong to provide details and WE ARE NOT YOUR BETA TESTERS. Possibly small group of select users might be a better test group.
It is WRONG to assume that everyone uses or wants to use Plex in exactly the same way.
and there are many many other WRONGS this stupid fiasco has exposed.
I know Plex is neither intelligent nor customer friendly enough to do the right thing and roll everyone back but they should do what they did when they released the initially unpopular new interface on the Roku and release a “classic” version that has the interface most people seem to prefer.
Since that time Plex has steadily moved to being less friendly and more stupid so I strongly doubt they will do the smart and correct thing but one can always hope. The president was set with the Roku so, maybe, Plex will do the correct thing again.
