Plex laid off the whole player team

A better link to point to the comment from the former employee:

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.

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've got nothing but good things to say about Jellyfin, Infuse in Apple's ecosystem and Wholphin in Android's.

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.

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.

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.

Is there a good alternative to plex for music?

Looks like the comment was deleted, insane to think dropping that in a community forum discussion was a good idea.

Bummer. Anyway, the Nautilus Jellyfin client for the Apple TV rules.

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.

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.

Remember that there are alternative playback clients which use Plex's backend. Infuse is one, but I think VLC also works. Both have Apple TV apps.

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.

Mad thread to drop that bomb in.

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.

Curious why one would pirate media but pay for a media streaming system. Not like there aren't any alternatives like it's the case with VPNs

That reminds me... need to cancel plex pass.

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.

ive got plex and jellyfin running but jellyfin hasn't won me over yet for movies / tv shows. guess it's going to have to

I don't understand why anyone continues to give Plex the time of day. Jellyfin has far and away eclipsed them.

There are several good alternatives to Plex. Time to give them your support.

The new Apple TV app is terrible. It’s completely redesigned, 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.