This has gotten ridicules. I’ve held back for a long time and put up with the bad software. But have had it.
I’ve been a Plex subscriber for over 5 years.
Maybe its because I use it so much - But its the buggiest software I’ve ever used. It will restart its self a few time s a day if watching a lot.
Plex - YOU NEED TO HIRE QA PEOPLE THAT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING.
You have the worst quality control I’ve ever seen in software. Has your QA team ever heard of regression testing - or even testing???
Plex has broken basic functionality on two different platforms in recent updates. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Plex breaking something in an update happens more times than it doesn’t.
I even bought a FireTv because they broke the Sony Android app and have not fixed it for over 3 months now. And yesterday - THEY BROKE THE FIRETV with the latest update.
There is no winning with plex.
Sony Android TV:
Cannot use shuffle or auto play in playlists, collections and tv shows
It may play a second episode every once in a while but just goes BLACK 90% of the time.
You press back and you see an error Unable to find content or something like that.
The you have to start over again.
FireTV:
Cannot even SELECT the Play or Shuffle buttons when in a playlist or collection unless you know to exit to the left menu - go up to search, then press right and you can get to them.
You use to be able to just press up LIKE YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO!!!
And on top of all that. Plex has now been restarting about 3 times per a 2 hour movie.
It is TOTALY useless now.
They had three releases in a row in which you couldn’t properly access the server settings. How is that possible? They keep breaking the subtitles support every third release. They were NEVER able to properly implement the sync functionality, for which most of us paid the lifetime license, and now they gave up and replace it with the inferior Downloads functionality. The same with Camera Sync, they were not capable of implement it properly so they just removed it, they didn’t care that plenty of people paid for their license just because of that functionality.
My bet is that their QA tests everything by hand. No way something like that could happened if they had some sort of automatic regression testing implemented. Their QA department probably still lives in the 00s era.
I agree! it’s really bad atm for users who just want a stable platform. At the same time we don’t want to stop development/improvement of the product.
IMHO they need to implement a 3 tier release process like most developers have - beta - standard - stable/production and let users select the one they want to be on depending on their willingness to risk.
100% Agreed. It’s insane how every update breaks basic functionality. The recent (September 2021) update has introduced several fun new bugs to the FireTV plex app. I couldn’t even use it on one unit, and on another FireTV unit playback would freeze every 30 minutes and require jumping through hoops to exit plex, then return to plex, re-start playback, and wait 45 seconds for it to resume. I’ve always felt bad that I never purchased a lifetime plex membership, but years and years of broken updates and I don’t feel so bad.
My bet is that their QA tests everything by hand. No way something like that could happened if they had some sort of automatic regression testing implemented. Their QA department probably still lives in the 00s era.
Back in the 00’s I visited Great Plains Software in Fargo before they were purchased by Microsoft and they showed us an entire room dedicated to automated regression testing. This was before VM’s were big so they had 100’s of computers setup with monitors and each one was running through tests on various OS’s and builds of their software.
It’s likely that the team at Plex does not have a proper handle on this aspect of development given the number of regression issues that occur with releases across the various platforms. I don’t like throwing fellow programmers/teams under the bus, but this is an area that Plex needs to improve and it likely requires some outside help before we’ll see meaningful change.
FTV has been broken for the past couple of months (from around June), at the moment, at least for myself and family, the crashing is intermittent and happens maybe twice a day, so we’ve basically accepted it at this point, as long as it doesn’t become unwatchable, although I personally have moved to using my LGTV to avoid the FTV issues.
