A New Experimental Plex Front End

chrisjdavis
Mon, 17 Nov 2025 16:07:33 +0000
Apps & Creations

UPDATE!

Genus is now in testing, and we have a GitHub repo where issues are being reported and worked on! If you run into a problem, check there first to see if its been reported, and if not open a ticket!

GitHub

chrisjdavis/Genus-Public

Contribute to chrisjdavis/Genus-Public development by creating an account on GitHub.

Well, this will be an interesting post.

As a long time lover of Plex (Pass holder since it launched, been using Plex since 2009) I really dig the relentless forward momentum, it’s great to see, but for some of us, myself particularly, it can create moments that are frustrating, which is where I find myself now.

I really just want to watch crap I have in my own library. I don’t want to watch free streaming movies, share stuff with friends, rate, etc. I just want to watch my content, in the most streamlined, attractive and performant way. The current plex front end app makes that a pretty difficult prospect and as time goes on, I assume it will get worse and worse for folks like me.

So, being a software developer and a designer, I thought I would do a few weekends worth of work and test out some ideas. Much to my surprise, things went pretty well and I now have a mostly functional front end app that does exactly what I want, and nothing else. Since I assume others out there feel like as I do, I decided to see if any one on here would be interested in helping test and validate my assumptions.

I have another maybe week to two weeks of work before this can be used by other people without too much grief, and at that time I am thinking of releasing it with Apple beta testing app, if there is a large enough group of people who are interested that is. So, let me break some things down.

1. This is 100% a test of the user experience and design. It uses 100% native tvOS components.

2. Since we are using all native components, and the AVPlayer framework doesn’t’ support MKV, etc this version of the app relies on transcoding for everything.

3. If you test this, you are doing so acknowledging the above two facts and won’t complain to me about not being able to play your 4k HDR SuperStuff without it being downgraded to 1080p.

I have a few branches that incorporate 3rd party players, so that the app will support everything Plex can throw at it, but I don’t want to put significant effort into this if I am wrong, e.g. people don’t want something like this, only I do. If that is the case I already have a new step in my toolchain worked out that converts all of my MKV files to MP4 so they can be played in the default player.

Anywho, here are some shots of what we are working with, in my app, codenamed Genus.

I think that is enough to get the idea across. I guess let me know if there are people out there who want to test it out and provide feedback. If not that’s okay too. Doesn’t hurt to ask!

136 posts - 28 participants