I’ve been a Plex user for a long time. And it worked fairly well. Sure, there were a few hoops I had to jump through, like renaming my collection properly. Reasonable enough, for getting the proper identifications. Streaming for my Plex phone to a Chromecast has certainly been useful when at a TV elsewhere.
Over the last year or two their focus shifted to integrating the various streaming services. I can see a point to that too. A “one stop shop” is certainly convenient for some, and it keeps the number of apps on your device to a minimum. Unfortunately, there has been downsides to that.
This integration has taken away development effort in core functionality. The onset of new codecs that are becoming mainstream that Plex has not been able to include these past few years is one. A minor problem (at least for me). But, first and foremost, the feeds from streaming services are rock solid. If there is ever a problem it seems to always be the availability of my own collection. I mean, it’s right there. Don’t you see it, Plex? Why not? I understand the features you can get with being logged in to “Plex Central”. But why not have a fallback so that everything local is provided regardless?
The recent data breach has brought this server limitation into light. I don’t fault Plex for a data breach. Anyone who wants to get in bad enough, is going to get in eventually. There are data breaches all over the place these days. To be fair, they gave everyone effected new user IDs to re-hook their collections to. What they didn’t provide (IMHO) was an adequate step-by-step process to migrate to the new user IDs. That should have been provided in a post to cover this unusual occurrence, with a link provided in the e-mail. Not that hard to do.
The Plex community is extremely helpful to be sure. My hat’s off to their efforts on Plex’s behalf. You all have saved my bacon more than once with minor glitches. But the recent breach didn’t allow me to “claim” either my old account or my Plex provided new one. The Claim Server button was ineffective. The pop-ups on the player were occurring, and even dismissed, the “remind me later” option was not one I was looking forward to. The fact that the “fix” was to go in and purge registry entries also didn’t sit well with me. As tech-savvy as I am, what is the layman supposed to do? The update mechanism also become broken. “Something went wrong. Install manually.” I did, to no effect.
As is, the current installation seemed too unstable to trust for the long term. So, what is one to do? I could have completely purged and re-installed Plex and connected my libraries again. Too much work… So, I opted to try Emby, if my only recourse was to set up the libraries again.
Of course, with Emby you have to pay for the apps for the other devices. Since I didn’t see a viable alternative for the immediate future, I blew for the $120.00 lifetime sub. I’ve used it for about a day now, and there are a few things I like.
The emphasis is on my collection. It’s there, and it works. Streaming performs well. Casting from the phone also works. (Haven’t tried remote, and don’t have an antenna feed.)
In spite of my many file naming typos, and not being able to identify some titles because of it, there is a way to search for titles and tell Emby “this is it” (by name or title ID used by the various websites). And one button refreshes all the necessary art for me. 30-minute tidy up. No more having to be so picky with how the files are named.
Thanks to Plex for all the years. It’s time to try something new. And thanks again to this community here. You guys are the best.
