Why does Plex ignore problems? Why do users put up with it?

General Discussions
1

I’ve been using Plex for about a year. A month ago, I became a Plex Pass subscriber. Lifetime membership. I did so because I wanted to be able to do more with Plex. But I’ve found that Plex is considerably more hype than substance. To wit:

The News channel gets announced with considerable hoopla. But several news stations don’t work (some comment about this video not being available on this device…a Roku…at the moment…try again later).

The ability to use the Cloud (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc) gets announced with considerable hoopla. But Google Drive seems unable to offer download speeds that permit watching a 720p mkv file. It just hangs and tries to reload.

The ability to use Amazon Echo (Alexa) gets announced with considerable hoopla. But it proves to be extremely difficult, mostly beyond the practical, to get it to work. The Alexa commands have to be extremely specific and spoken in just the right way. And even then, it often fails (I’ve only tried it with music).

Subtitles with Roku don’t work. Or rather, they do, but only by enabling Roku’s closed caption, which means that (on Roku 2 and 3), you get not only subtitles, but all closed captions, throughout the video.

Note that all of these complaints are commonplace and discussed over the years in the forums. Note, too, that nothing actually is done. People on the forums create workarounds in some cases, throw up their hands in exasperation in most cases, and occasionally threaten to discontinue the use of Plex.

But Plex does absolutely nothing about any of it. In fact, Plex offers no assistance or help whatsoever. They can’t be contacted. Help is available only through documents on line and through the forums. So if they haven’t addressed it in a document (and they haven’t), then the only help has to come from other users. Sort of Uber or Airbnb for the streaming software community.

What I’m curious about is why Plex ignores all of these problems. Is it because they can? They can get away with it and end users will simply endure? And why do the end users put up with it? They don’t want to demand more?

As I said, I’m in it for a lifetime, and I will use Plex when it works. But I will certainly caution anyone who asks: buy this service at your own considerable risk. It doesn’t provide much of what it promises.

1 Like
2

Because there is no choice in the matter.

3

They didn’t use to. There was a time when support was pretty good and issues were fixed pretty quickly, but they have so many platforms now it’s clearly grown too big for them. Most of the forum posts are different users asking about the same bugs, and when they don’t get fixed it just generates more and more posts. A bit of a vicious circle that appears to be spiralling down and out of control very quickly :frowning:

4

It seems almost like a new company policy or something. Back in the day people from Plex were around here frequently, like in the PMP forum, Kodi forum etc. It almost felt as if we were heard and at least a dialogue existed. Should things get a little heated there was always the friendly sheriff @elan who restored the peace with a joke and an answer and all was well again.

These days there never are any Plex people here anymore and support is users helping users only. I noticed it at first in the PMP forum back when it seemed like a viable successor to PHT, when it became clear that PMP was kinda … lacking Tobias and his colleagues kinda abandoned the forum as well alas.

5

What saddens me is that the Plex developers and even some founders are very active in Plex Reddit, but can’t seem to bother to be involved in their own forum.

6

I’ve never really paid much attention to Reddit, but after 10-15 minutes of reading some threads, there are more posts by plex employees than I’ve seen here in months and month. Maybe they moved support to Reddit and forgot to mention it?

7

Would fit into the overall picture …

8

You forgot the fac that plex DVr, which is supposed to be a fully released live feature, is incredibly unreliable and broken for a lot of users. That forum is full of people who are missing recordings and it has been going on for months.

9

Anyone who has been around since the early days of Plex can see that the company policy has clearly changed to aggressively add new features, promote them heavily to acquire new Plex Pass subscribers and ignore any bug fixes along with any user support. Forums have gone quiet with official support, features half baked released into the wild and then promptly ignored, multiple clients left to rott (hello Apple TV) etc.

It is ABUNDANTLY clear they’re on a pre company sale mode of aggressive subscriber expansion to boost subscriber numbers to fatten up the worth of the company.

1 Like
10

I still love Plex. Annoyances like not being able to customize the gui in say roku and such were on my top of my list for a while but I have grown to just accept them. The main focus should always be on making sure media plays without issue. Problem is so many users try to use Plex on a underpowered NAS and do not understand if a file cannot Direct Play they have issues. Sometimes it is the boxes that Plex runs on fault (Roku 7.7 firmware) and Plex still has to deal with those issues to troubleshoot and contact Roku. Some limitations are also the boxes such as Apple TV, Fire TV and sometimes Roku. I really wish Plex would have partners or produced a streaming box but they probably would of ended up like Boxee Box. Not much competition for Plex either only one other company.