What's going on with Plex's professionalism lately?

General Discussions
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(this is not about social features)

I’ll be honest, I’ve always seen Plex software as very polished. Sure there are bugs here and there, but that’s expected. But generally, things have been very stable since I joined in 2015. And I think above all, things have felt very professional.

But to be completely honest, lately that feel have come crashing down hard for me. I feel myself losing that confidence in Plex that I’ve always had.

There has been some serious snags over only the last few months, regarding professionalism.

First, it seemed like an intern had taken over the PMS changelog and release schedule: Plex Media Server - #596 by drzoidberg33 because the build was delayed by over a month (that’s fine, they changed staff) but then, despite that, it was pushed out to stable with a serious breakage bug. And this was caught literally the day after it went into public, but was not caught in the month delay. Very unprofessional. This never happens with Plex, in my experience. So this caused them to pull the release. Again this is exactly a day after it went into public, so most servers already updated. So pulling it seemed like an overreaction, and caused people to start downgrading their servers, which can be damaging to the database. But no note was made of this. Highly unprofessional.

Furthermore, someone put a link in the changelog to read about the issue. It links to a thread with very spurious comments about the problem that caused the release to be pulled, an extremely uninformative thread with no real summary. And to make matters worse, when reading the thread there is an employee spouting internal company struggles and hardships all over the thread, seemingly without reason and in rambling fashion. Extremely unprofessional.

And secondly, now the Web client (very much a core and integral component of Plex) has a breakage problem in the public version also: Music Artist with no album groupings results in an error - regression with 4.121.1 - #5 by JTWMCA

And thirdly, I have a friend which just signed up for Tidal via Plex. Even in a case where money is involved, there are issues. She contacted Plex billing for professional help, and they literally gave her general advice and sent her to the forum. She then contacted Tidal which confirmed something had gone wrong with her subscription from Plex’s side and they needed to fix it for her. She forwards this to Plex billing and gets simply no answer. I never expected this from Plex. This is what caused me to write this whole thing.

These are just my experiences and it seriously feels like the professionalism has taken a nosedive lately. It was a very special thing with Plex. I just hope you’re not throwing it away now.

Tbh it would probably be a little calming for both me and others to get some developer input here of what’s going on with Plex currently… @McWanke @drzoidberg33

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As for this one, firstly apologies about that release and the haphazard communication surrounding it.

This was just one of those perfect storms where we ran into multiple issues one after another. We had also just recently lost some key staff who worked on, and were most familiar, with these parts of the product. It took some time to get new eyes up to speed on these things and address all the issues.

You may have noticed that our release cadence for PMS has slowed down since then, and that is deliberate. We historically have done a new beta release every 2 weeks or so but have since moved away from that schedule and will move forward with a release once a month going forward. These releases will also stay in beta for a longer period.

That experience is really not something any of us want to repeat.

As for this, all I can say is that I reported it internally and I believe the issue has been fixed but is yet to release. I don’t work directly with the web client so I’m not entirely sure when this will release.

I’m about to head off for a week of holiday, thanks for the posting this as we always appreciate it when can get any constructive feedback on what we do here. I didn’t want to get into too much detail here as this is just an informal response before I head out. I hope it answered your questions somewhat at least but I’m happy to go into more detail in the new year.

Happy holidays! :santa:

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Thanks for the response, I appreciate it.

That’s reassuring to know.

Thanks but it was not a question of whether or when it would be fixed. I was simply pointing out that breakage bugs seems to be currently slipping through at alarming rate in comparison to at least my own experience with Plex.

Thanks for taking the time. Happy holidays to you as well!

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Well, it’s a new year :slight_smile:

To be honest, the issues just keep coming still. I have had more bugs in the last few months than I’ve had the last 7 years. And with that I mean breakage bugs, that completely removes functionality. This never used to happen. I use Plex every day, and normally without issue. Now this is currently my experience:
(I don’t want or expect you to answer them, I’m just pointing out the current amount of very obvious breakage bugs in Plex)

Music playing on the Nvidia Shield is completely broken: Music is finally completely broken on the Shield? (complete loss of functionality)

The database is being slow lately, causing various timeout errors to creep up in clients: Plex Becomes Unresponsive - DB Locked / Busy logged while unresponsive - pragma integrity_check ok - #30 by d2freak (a severe issue, causing issues both big and small in various parts of the Plex ecosystem)

The Web client getting more breaking issues: New bug: The Web client hangs (just keeps spinning) (the web client took a full month to be released and this happens? Very unprofessional.)

Just for good measure, I just an hour ago realised the notification settings no longer loads: Notifications not saving - #5 by d2freak (complete loss of functionality)

Edit: I forgot. The DVR is broken now too: Fast-Forward / Rewind are unreliable on Apple TV - #4 by d2freak (watching live is fine, but it’s impossible to seek, pause etc without the stream crashing - loss of functionality and also data loss because you lose the content that was stored ahead in the buffer when it crashes)

And this goes on and on. These are the most severe issues at the top of my head, but Plex is really starting to feel unstable or at the very least untested. And these examples are only my own current experiences. Some of these issues prevents me from interacting with Plex normally at all.

So, to be honest, my fears were removed a bit by your reply in December, but this really keeps happening.

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This is a pretty bad one too. I’ve had to unshare my movie libraries because of how often it happens. The prior fix of refreshing metadata doesn’t seem to always fix it anymore.

There definitely seems to be a focus on the money-making new features. The music library browsing bug was present for at least a month IIRC and was a 100% error for a lot of people.

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So Plex fired or underpaid key members of their team and now development is in shambles? Latest release notes are identical for the last couple patches, no changes promised last year were implemented.

Remember that huge thread where plex promised they’d start working on plexamp more, add speed controls and a lot of other goodies people have been requesting for years? What happened with that? What is the status on any of those changes?

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@firesidethe I wonder the same thing

@drzoidberg33 Since you were so eager to explain the last time, would you mind sharing some information on my followup post? Again, I’m not asking you to answer about the bugs I posted, but it would be nice if you can clarify the situation on Plex recently. Like what was just said, there were a lot of talk about stabilizing Plex not long ago, and yet things just keep getting more unstable? What is happening?

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Long time lurker first time poster I love these forms because you come here for Gray information that have solved my minimal Plex issues over time. Have been with Plex forever and yes the issue have seem to have grown exponentially lately. My set up has not changed much and is in great shape so it’s not something at my end. And with this post, I see other people are encountering the exact same issues I am. Fully understand that as of 2019, and on everybody’s lights has changed, unbelievably, and life has changed unbelievably. I agree with the original poster that since you’ve acknowledged, there is a big issue once a week once every two weeks once a month would be pushing it some type of update of this post. Understand people don’t like to air their dirty laundry, but you’ve already slightly aired your dirty laundry in previous replies, saying there were issues please understand us. We want to understand you, but the problem is communication coming back and saying no progress since last post is at least the acknowledgment that you’re working on it.

Thank you and hope to get the Plex I loved back soon

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And now we have this string of huge problems with the Web client. I have reported at least 3 major issues (the client entirely stopps responding, metadata fails to load, the rows under artists getting stuck etc) and all goes ignored of course.

And now the client just simply spontaneously refreshes itself, causing more issues. And this is after moving to a longer release cycle. How is this not caught in testing? @drzoidberg33

I’m losing all faith in Plex right now. I’m literally avoiding the Web client. And I had to buy completely new hardware (speaker equipment) to move away from my established music setup that was the Nvidia Shield into my receiver. I’m literally being forced away from several aspects of Plex. And Plex was the reason I even made those setups in the first place.

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Very interesting thread. To the original post, “Kudos!” for providing specific examples. I feel this thread captures a frustration you see in many other threads all over this forum. We all see and experience a culture change among the people we entrust with helping us manage and present our personal media. I agree, it was the most polished software to do this job. It might still be. But that’s not the direction the Plex organization seems to be headed. At some point I expect, that at least for me, Plex will cross the threshold of no longer being the best. I’m keeping an eye out for the new best personal media server software. I just don’t see myself ever interested in a package that primarily focuses its resources on integrating 3rd party media streaming. Appropriately resource to maintain dominance in YOUR niche or you won’t dominate anything.

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11

Here’s another major embarrassment. They pulled it after a few hours because of how obvious and serious it was.

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Beta version having bugs is a sign of a lack of professionalism?

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Putting out a beta version that appears to not have had a single regression test done on functionality that was touched is, yes.

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So it used to be that I could download a new release and not have to worry about things breaking. But somewhere around the last year or two, I’ve been very afraid about upgrading to a new version, so I only do it every 4-6 months or so.

Even the beta versions used to be pretty safe. I stopped downloading beta versions a year ago. Now the public release has major playback-breaking problems.

With the latest web client problem. I’m even more afraid. I was just thinking that there should be a third category, “rock-solid” to add to the “beta” and “public” releases. Maybe make that version 6 months behind and tested to be as solid as possible.

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That’s a public release, not beta.

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Release notes.

1.40.1.8111 is a beta release, as is 1.40.1.8120.

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The issues caused by public release 1.40.0.7998 has pushed many to treat beta releases as public given no solution seems forthcoming.

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Nothing was pulled.

It was a beta version, it had a bug, we patched the bug and released the fixed version.

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20

Reminds me so much of Nvidia GPU drivers :smiley:

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Not sure what this means but you should only be using beta versions if you don’t mind running into new issues.

We’ve changed it so our beta version will be in beta much longer than in the past in order to ensure that we have enough time to catch any big problems before it goes public.

1 Like