Well.. I was really excited to experience HDR when I was reading conference proceedings about it in the early 2000s. But when I got to see how it was standardized I could think nothing for "For Christ's Sake, this is going to make sure it never looks right in either SDR or HDR"
Dolby Vision addresses some of the problems of simpler standards but it is such a botch I wouldn't expect it work at all.
Why is it so hard to find screenshots for this app? I've tried many apps the past days as they all are in a half-done state and I would be in the market for a good, Apple TV native client.
The new Apple TV app is terrible. It’s completely designed, and visually looks good I suppose, but it’s so buggy and has terrible UX. So terrible, in fact, that after a decade of using plex I finally became a cliche and switched to jellyfin. The player isn’t quite as polished as plex, but it isn’t as buggy, and I’ll probably just take an open source player and have Claude customize it to my liking. Honestly plex deserves to fail at this point. They’ve been doing stupid user hostile shit for years. They finally cross the line though and made the core experience of watching something on their app significantly worse.
I was watching a movie last night with the updated Apple TV app last night and said to myself, it's time, this UX update has pushed me over the edge. Jellyfish migration is happening this weekend.
Yeah, I can't believe how bad the UI/UX is for the new Apple TV Plex app. I switched to Plezy as a client (still Plex server) but don't love it either. I really did like the old Plex UI on ATV.
I don't know what I'll do going forward. Jellyfin is rough (I've tried!) and especially for external users (family).
It's a shame Plex has failed to be functional. The moment a product has a bunch of UI refreshes but no core fixes is when you know the wrong work is being done.
I'd still be happy if Plex could turn things around, but until then Jellyfin seems to be king.
I have a player with wide compatibility, including P7 DoVi, for Apple TV (and iOS) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hanaplay/id6782382601 works with Plex and Silo - an up an coming media server that could be a replacement. Android/Roku are in beta. It's free and will be open sourced.
Do you have external users (outside your network)? My understanding (and the last time I tried) is that Jellyfin lacks in this department quite a bit. That and ubiquitous clients.
Plex client is available almost everywhere and overall, Plex mostly "just works". The latest Apple TV client changes have me hot and there are things I don't love but that's what's kept me in the Plex ecosystem. I am looking around now though since I'm so disappointed with the new clients/UI.
I have my friends and family using tailscale + jellyfin. Their only complaint is not having an easy way to watch on Xboxes. I convinced a few of them to plug old laptops into their TVs which is working fine.
I don't want to be a jerk and I know engineers writing the code don't always make the decisions but the new Apple TV Player was dog shit. Just horrible. 10 steps back in UI/UX and frustrating to use. I've been using Plex for well over a decade and to throw that all away on that new player... Just damn.
Not sure why Plex laid off the team, was it the response to the new updates (doubt it), was it "AI", are they planning on going in a new direction?
I think it's past time we stop letting the doers of an org pass off responsibility for their actions. The engineers coded this. It is on them as much as it's on some nameless exec
I don't agree. There's a limit on how much you can influence things, and as a dev (or product owner or whatever) you need to pick your battles.
How a decision is made, what gets released etc. are all opaque processes and blaming the devs from the outside is not productive.
That said, I'm all for it for devs becoming more responsible for the end result, evaluated within the org boundaries. Especially these days when people tend to cop out with "oh cloude did it / didn't catch it" responses (before, it was "oh I had to come up with something quick and couldn't check everything").
Unless they're founding engineers, engineers are exployed to work on what a company wants. If the company wants to cut corners in exchange for something else, their only usual options are cutting corners indeed, or quitting.
More than likely Plex realizes where their money comes from. It's not streamlining personal video content playback. That's how they built their reputation, but they make their money on integration deals and filling your home screen with other people's content. I paid for Plex Pass and they still feel entitled to put advertisements in front of my local media content. I've since switched to Jellyfin.
I don't mind the new UI for the Apple TV app, however there's a new bug where pressing pause can cause playback to completely freeze up. I keep hearing people talk about how software has taken a nose dive in quality now, and haven't really experienced it but if this Apple TV app update was AI heavy driven and real developers were laid off it might be my first experience with it.
I often run the server and the media player app on the same system. When the server analyzes a new movie, the spinning circle animation in the corner of the player app uses more CPU than the server’s transcoding and analysis processes.
Dude how do you survive every day and not have anxiety about the maintainability of that? Seems like you have to be a full-time sysadmin with your music hobby and an appropriate recurring IT hardware budget.
It's only a few TB on a small NAS which backs up to the cloud. No anxiety. I've been building the library for about 20 years, if anything gives me anxiety it's thinking about when I had no backups or RAID.
I'm currently sitting at 35k~ tracks, primarily FLAC with some 320kbps mp3 sprinkled in. I also use Jellyfin for anime and have a LOT of shows on there. Haven't noticed any issues yet, so I'm curious where your tipping point was.
Jellyfin after the 10.X update changed their database. This introduced a major performance issue with SOME large music libraries. There doesn't seem to be a hard set of criteria besides "some large music libraries suffer from bad performance degradation". I finally managed to upgrade after just brute forcing it and trying several times. It finally just worked.
Okay here's what I did to finally update Jellyfin to work with my 300,000+ size flac library.
I copied my 10.X whatever Jellyfin 3 times. So I basically setup 3 identical Jellyfin instances. I then upgraded each of them to the latest version. 2 of them upgraded but had horrible performance. The third one finally works the way it should. I have no idea why that worked but after seeing tons of comments that were basically "Idk mine just works" or "idk mine just sucks" it seemed worth doing.
So, maybe try that.
To be clear I didn't copy the libraries. Just the Jellyfin docker data.
I use Navidrome for music as well — I'd say it's about 800 artists and thousands of albums. I've also built a rather convoluted workflow around it that meets my needs.
I have about 32k tracks and I’m obsessively making this product as fast and beautiful as I can. Email me if you have problems with it and I will resolve them.
Once upon a time, Plex started as a fork of XBMC/Kodi.
I'm still using Kodi. It still does everything I need it to do, user complaints about "dated UI" be damned.
About the only thing I wish it shipped was a built-in renamer utility to help organize the media to the naming scheme that Kodi expects in order to scrape metadata properly. Most of the leading third-party utilities for this are proprietary subscription apps, which is a huge shame when the core product is FLOSS.
Ironically (or fittingly) given that origin, the Xbox version of the Plex app may be the best one to use now because it's been abandoned and was never updated to the terrible redesign.
Your favorite agent is really good at organizing media files, if you haven't tried that and it happens to fit your situation. I usually make it write out a list of move/renames as a script so I can double-check, but bet it's fine without most of the time.
It's not just dated, it's unusable on a TV. Just the keyboard is reason enough not to use it. I should have written down everything that was wrong with Kodi when I used it, I could have filled a whole page of 1 line complaints after a month. It technically works I guess but it suffers from the death by a thousand cuts syndrome.
Mismanagement and disastrous redesigns aside, the "lifetime" funding model was flawed from the beginning and imo played a serious part in leading Plex down this path.
Were that something to worry about, I imagine we'd be seeing it now as well - I don't think a lifetime license option would sway people away from that option were it a viable one.
Question for Jellyfin users - how's the support for non-tech people that were using your library? Like my parents use my Plex, and getting them switched to something else is going to be a hell ride.
>Question for Jellyfin users - how's the support for non-tech people that were using your library?
As much as I hate what Plex has been doing in the last period, here Jellyfin is not as good as Plex. Most shows I download, Jellyfin can't detect which show it is, and instead just lists them as raw video files in a folder since it expects a strict naming convention which most torrents don't follow. Plex probably has a much better content detection engine since it rarely misses regardless of how fucked the naming convention is.
Also, Plex tablet and TV UX feels simpler and easier than OOTB Jellyfin unless you tinker with it.
Also 2, transcoding on Plex is somehow more power efficient than Jellyfin. When I monitor intel_gpu_top, Plex hammers the intel iGPU with far less interrupts than Jellyfin, resulting in lower power consumption on my 12th gen NUC during transcoding.
It's pretty easy and straight forward, the login UI is similar to netflix where you can have profiles per user and have them shown on the login screen, etc. They get placed straight into the view of your library, from there they can simply click play.
I'm not up to speed on transcoding, but I do notice my web users always have to transcode, assuming due to their native browser playback support for codecs. Local installs of the Jellyfin player seem to avoid this on most systems.
Its pretty simple to use and manage. I actually ended up creating an android tv (and phone) app that mimicks windows media center for live TV, and an on demand section that serves the jellyfin library. This has given the family I give access a more familiar interface. https://imgur.com/a/oUDr1Gu
If anyone is interested I may do a post about this app, but I figure in the AI age you'd probably rather I keep it to myself!
this is my main blocker to Jellyfin too. if it were just me, no problem. but my (divorced, over 60y/o) parents and my sister's family use my plex too. each of them has some mix of LG, Samsung, Roku, Android, and Apple devices. they all live half way across the country.
every time i've checked in with Jellyfin, the ecosystem has been way too fragmented to consider migrating.
It's usable, but there's plenty of room for improvement. Never got started with Plex since it's not free software. No matter how much better Plex was it would never have been worth it down the line. I learned that lesson by using Opera circa 2012.
It used to be free! That's how I got started with it at all. I bought a lifetime pass in 2011 for $50 on the hope it would still be working and get better as time went on. I guess I'm at ~$3/year now and just continue to amortize that cost per year down.
Really good, though client quality/UI varies per platform. My relative's Roku client isn't as good as my Android TV client.
My only annoyance with the Android TV client is that preferences for audio/subs don't stick within a TV series. If I set audio to JP and subs to EN on episode 1, I expect that the preference would carry over next episode, but it doesn't always.
That's a really minor thing, though. Non techie relative doesn't have a problem with playback.
I switched over to Emby a while back for video, but kept plex in a limited capacity for music since I really like Plexamp.
The thing I really like about plex was that 99% of the time, it would scan and match up my media, even if file formats were inconsistent. That was a growing pain for Emby, so it was another reason I kept plex for music.
The closest alternative that I've found to Plexamp is MusicAssistant. It's still really rough around the edges as a full replacement. For example: Smart playlists are lacking and/or don't work at all; "Recently Added Albums" goes by file modified time and not when it was actually _added_ (and they fought me on this saying I'm wrong that it doesn't seem right)
+1 for MusicAssistant. I have been using it for about 2 weeks with Plex as the source, but MA as the player after "we" (my wife) decided Spotify is too expensive.
Handing off between devices is my current pain point with it. It can group players so that you can do multi-room synced play, but I use that to hand off from my desktop to my phone. You can transfer the active playlist to another device. But in either case it's a manual interaction and doesn't "just happen". To be fair, I didn't have 100% success rate with Spotify doing this correctly either. Sometimes it did it, sometimes it just started in its own world.
The MA IOS app is REALLY rough; but I have had very good success with Xonara on ios, which is currently available through testflight.
I've used Gonic[1] for music server purposes and Symfonium[2] for streaming said music for a while now, nothing but good things to say about both. The only downside is it does not do automatic media tagging like Plex, but if you ingest with something like MusicBrainz Picard[3] then it'll never be a problem.
Absolutely, but that said, the web app is very good and may get you farther than you expect (i.e. combined with chrome casting).
That even works remotely if you connect via dashboard.pixelbrite.site
I've been running an older client version (last one before the new UI) on both Android (mobile) and Fire TV Stick 4K. Hasn't been too much of an issue to setup for friends, you just have to make sure to disable auto-updates.
There are not any alternatives that match every feature. The account system and number of platforms with a Plex app is unmatched. This matters when you share it with others who won't want to tinker with anything.
Someone created a native Plex client[1] for WebOS and it's an absolute dream. The responsiveness of the interface is really very impressive, especially considering my TV is coming up 10 years old.
As someone who has a lifetime Plex subscription but who hasn't used it in years, I'm mildly surprised they had a significant team to layoff.
It has felt like they were in a Bending Spoons-esque mode for many years where they just tried to suck all the money possible out of it without actually supporting it beyond a bare minimum level.
My disappointment with Plex aside, my heart sincerely goes out to anyone who was laid off.
Given their output of the past two years, perhaps firing them was the right move.
I'm not one to ply Plex with praise. They've concepted and birthed every conceivable mistake in the last two years. But the player is a mess. The whole app is a mess. And because they unified, they're all a mess.
People do deserve to lose their jobs over this. I just hope it was the same people pushing for this crap in the first place.
Now I have to decide: vibe code some alterations to Plezy so I can see more than a few things at a time on the home screen, or move away completely.
I found some content I wanted to watch in their streaming library, but it wouldnt even play the (2 minute) ads correctly. It would start the ad, but then another ad would start playing behind it at the same time, and when the and 2nd ad ended, the whole player freezes and you cant play another video until you quit the app.
Not to mention the pause screen ads. So I'll just keep using it for my local content until they make that impossible too.
Not a great way to keep users OR advertisers i.e. make any money at all.
96 comments
[ 28.3 ms ] story [ 428 ms ] threadDolby Vision addresses some of the problems of simpler standards but it is such a botch I wouldn't expect it work at all.
I don't know what I'll do going forward. Jellyfin is rough (I've tried!) and especially for external users (family).
I'd still be happy if Plex could turn things around, but until then Jellyfin seems to be king.
https://forums.plex.tv/t/2026-20-0-beta-ios-and-tvos-4k-dovi...
Plex stopped working on any DoVi/HDR10 videos I have, and today I found this thread.
web + native; works on about any Apple hardware from the last 15y
From /r/plex:
https://i.imgur.com/87huC1b.jpeg
https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=comments_s...
fwiw I noticed a while ago their PS4 app refused to play a file, but it was playable in the PlayStation web browser
If interested in native apps hit testflite@pixelbrite.site
Plex client is available almost everywhere and overall, Plex mostly "just works". The latest Apple TV client changes have me hot and there are things I don't love but that's what's kept me in the Plex ecosystem. I am looking around now though since I'm so disappointed with the new clients/UI.
As far as I understand it Jellyfin has been improving client availability and to me seems to work well for friends.
* a native Xbox app (I believe Jellyfin may now have one)
* non-techie acceptance (Plex seemed more polished at the time, will need to reassess now)
Either way, I'll be warning my spouse that things may be changing soon.
Not sure why Plex laid off the team, was it the response to the new updates (doubt it), was it "AI", are they planning on going in a new direction?
Pure speculation - maybe it was the kind of response you're definitely not hoping for. Get ready for more dog shit apps :)
How a decision is made, what gets released etc. are all opaque processes and blaming the devs from the outside is not productive.
That said, I'm all for it for devs becoming more responsible for the end result, evaluated within the org boundaries. Especially these days when people tend to cop out with "oh cloude did it / didn't catch it" responses (before, it was "oh I had to come up with something quick and couldn't check everything").
Quality is achieved by process - testing, coherent requirements etc. Individual engineer cant change those.
I'm currently sitting at 35k~ tracks, primarily FLAC with some 320kbps mp3 sprinkled in. I also use Jellyfin for anime and have a LOT of shows on there. Haven't noticed any issues yet, so I'm curious where your tipping point was.
I copied my 10.X whatever Jellyfin 3 times. So I basically setup 3 identical Jellyfin instances. I then upgraded each of them to the latest version. 2 of them upgraded but had horrible performance. The third one finally works the way it should. I have no idea why that worked but after seeing tons of comments that were basically "Idk mine just works" or "idk mine just sucks" it seemed worth doing.
So, maybe try that.
To be clear I didn't copy the libraries. Just the Jellyfin docker data.
Their new database is just bad.
I have about 32k tracks and I’m obsessively making this product as fast and beautiful as I can. Email me if you have problems with it and I will resolve them.
I'm still using Kodi. It still does everything I need it to do, user complaints about "dated UI" be damned.
About the only thing I wish it shipped was a built-in renamer utility to help organize the media to the naming scheme that Kodi expects in order to scrape metadata properly. Most of the leading third-party utilities for this are proprietary subscription apps, which is a huge shame when the core product is FLOSS.
As much as I hate what Plex has been doing in the last period, here Jellyfin is not as good as Plex. Most shows I download, Jellyfin can't detect which show it is, and instead just lists them as raw video files in a folder since it expects a strict naming convention which most torrents don't follow. Plex probably has a much better content detection engine since it rarely misses regardless of how fucked the naming convention is.
Also, Plex tablet and TV UX feels simpler and easier than OOTB Jellyfin unless you tinker with it.
Also 2, transcoding on Plex is somehow more power efficient than Jellyfin. When I monitor intel_gpu_top, Plex hammers the intel iGPU with far less interrupts than Jellyfin, resulting in lower power consumption on my 12th gen NUC during transcoding.
I'm not up to speed on transcoding, but I do notice my web users always have to transcode, assuming due to their native browser playback support for codecs. Local installs of the Jellyfin player seem to avoid this on most systems.
If anyone is interested I may do a post about this app, but I figure in the AI age you'd probably rather I keep it to myself!
every time i've checked in with Jellyfin, the ecosystem has been way too fragmented to consider migrating.
Send them a hostname, username and password. Jellystat is a nice companion app if you like seeing metrics.
My only annoyance with the Android TV client is that preferences for audio/subs don't stick within a TV series. If I set audio to JP and subs to EN on episode 1, I expect that the preference would carry over next episode, but it doesn't always.
That's a really minor thing, though. Non techie relative doesn't have a problem with playback.
The thing I really like about plex was that 99% of the time, it would scan and match up my media, even if file formats were inconsistent. That was a growing pain for Emby, so it was another reason I kept plex for music.
Is there a good alternative to plex for music?
https://pixelbrite.site/
Handing off between devices is my current pain point with it. It can group players so that you can do multi-room synced play, but I use that to hand off from my desktop to my phone. You can transfer the active playlist to another device. But in either case it's a manual interaction and doesn't "just happen". To be fair, I didn't have 100% success rate with Spotify doing this correctly either. Sometimes it did it, sometimes it just started in its own world.
The MA IOS app is REALLY rough; but I have had very good success with Xonara on ios, which is currently available through testflight.
[1] https://github.com/sentriz/gonic [2] https://www.symfonium.app/ [3] https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
Audiomuse has a Jellyfin plugin that automates a lot of the playlist creation.
Music is a top priority for me. If there’s something missing it’s either coming soon or you can email me and it’ll be added
I landed continuous playback yesterday, where it automatically picks more tracks like your been playing https://pixelbrite.site/en/music-discovery
[1] https://plxnative.com
It has felt like they were in a Bending Spoons-esque mode for many years where they just tried to suck all the money possible out of it without actually supporting it beyond a bare minimum level.
My disappointment with Plex aside, my heart sincerely goes out to anyone who was laid off.
I'm not one to ply Plex with praise. They've concepted and birthed every conceivable mistake in the last two years. But the player is a mess. The whole app is a mess. And because they unified, they're all a mess.
People do deserve to lose their jobs over this. I just hope it was the same people pushing for this crap in the first place.
Now I have to decide: vibe code some alterations to Plezy so I can see more than a few things at a time on the home screen, or move away completely.
Not a great way to keep users OR advertisers i.e. make any money at all.