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While that sounds bad, I must admit Plex has been chasing “the wrong things” compared to what I want a Plex instance for. I have streaming services for content

While that sounds bad, I must admit Plex has been chasing “the wrong things” compared to what I want a Plex instance for. I have streaming services for content I want to rent. I don’t need Plex for that. I use Plex because it’s currently the best way to stream and organise content I own and have curated. But they’ve completed ignored that use-case for 5+ years now. It’s frustrating. Jellyfin is still not quite there in the “it just works” department, but if it does, I have no doubt what’s going to replace my Plex instance. Being open-source it will hopefully not pushed to weird commercial ventures and use-cases not actually wanted by its users.

causality0 3y ago
Plex "just works" until it doesn't. The further away from the desktop you get the less reliable Plex becomes. In the browser it's flawless. On smartphone and tablet native apps I get maybe a one to five percent rate of not being able to see the server despite the fact I'm logged into it on the same device's browser. On embedded devices like smart TVs and streaming sticks Plex is a stinking pile of shit of an app. It's laggy, it crashes incessantly when you do something like skip forward after skipping back, and it constantly fails to see the server running on the same LAN as the device. This happens across android TV, Roku, Chromestick, and Firestick. It happens across different locations, routers, and ISPs. Plex is high on my list of "things I use because there isn't anything better but I still hope their developers stub their little toe every day of their lives".
- prepend 3y ago
  I run Plex on an appletv with the server running on a synology. It’s ok. The subtitles don’t work unless I switch off and on for each show. Anything over 1080p gets too laggy and it doesn’t buffer. But I like enough to just download stuff in 720 and watch at that resolution.
  - Arn_Thor 3y ago
    Sounds like your Synology just isn’t up to it in terms of transcoding. Direct playback to an Apple TV Plex app is virtually flawless in my experience (exceptions were HDR content but that seems to be fine now)
- deckard1 3y ago
  Plex has the annoying habit of stalling indefinitely for me. I don't know what it's doing. I believe it's transcoding so that it can "burn" in the subtitles, but I have no clue. I've mostly given up on it. I use sshfs and mpv when sitting at a desktop, which actually does work flawlessly.
- lelandbatey 3y ago
  I find that using the Plex native app on my TV works great, a near perfect success rate. Meanwhile chromecasting Plex to a TV works quite poorly and has frequent problems.
freeone3000 3y ago
Plex never worked for me. The autotagging was frequently wrong, their version of libass has been years out of date FOR years (did they ever update it since the mid-00’s VLC version?), and it kept trying to lossily transcode videos that it couldn’t handle (such as WMV7) and failing hard when it didn’t. I’ve replaced it with VLC+SMB and am way happier.
pinko 3y ago
Agree completely on all counts.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Media ownership, whether we like it or not, is trending down. If media ownership is trending down then the number of potential Plex customers is trending down. It is imperative that they offer some sort of streaming on the side.

causality0 3y ago

Plex "just works" until it doesn't. The further away from the desktop you get the less reliable Plex becomes. In the browser it's flawless. On smartphone and tablet native apps I get maybe a one to five percent rate of not being able to see the server despite the fact I'm logged into it on the same device's browser. On embedded devices like smart TVs and streaming sticks Plex is a stinking pile of shit of an app. It's laggy, it crashes incessantly when you do something like skip forward after skipping back, and it constantly fails to see the server running on the same LAN as the device. This happens across android TV, Roku, Chromestick, and Firestick. It happens across different locations, routers, and ISPs. Plex is high on my list of "things I use because there isn't anything better but I still hope their developers stub their little toe every day of their lives".

prepend 3y ago
I run Plex on an appletv with the server running on a synology. It’s ok. The subtitles don’t work unless I switch off and on for each show. Anything over 1080p gets too laggy and it doesn’t buffer. But I like enough to just download stuff in 720 and watch at that resolution.
- Arn_Thor 3y ago
  Sounds like your Synology just isn’t up to it in terms of transcoding. Direct playback to an Apple TV Plex app is virtually flawless in my experience (exceptions were HDR content but that seems to be fine now)
deckard1 3y ago
Plex has the annoying habit of stalling indefinitely for me. I don't know what it's doing. I believe it's transcoding so that it can "burn" in the subtitles, but I have no clue. I've mostly given up on it. I use sshfs and mpv when sitting at a desktop, which actually does work flawlessly.
lelandbatey 3y ago
I find that using the Plex native app on my TV works great, a near perfect success rate. Meanwhile chromecasting Plex to a TV works quite poorly and has frequent problems.

freeone3000 3y ago

Plex never worked for me. The autotagging was frequently wrong, their version of libass has been years out of date FOR years (did they ever update it since the mid-00’s VLC version?), and it kept trying to lossily transcode videos that it couldn’t handle (such as WMV7) and failing hard when it didn’t. I’ve replaced it with VLC+SMB and am way happier.

pinko 3y ago

Agree completely on all counts.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Media ownership, whether we like it or not, is trending down. If media ownership is trending down then the number of potential Plex customers is trending down. It is imperative that they offer some sort of streaming on the side.