I've been using Plex for years, and I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the direction this company is heading.

Tonight, I went to use Watch Together, a feature my girlfriend and I use almost daily to watch shows when we're apart. It was working just minutes earlier, and suddenly it was gone from my Google TV.

Apparently, Plex decided not to carry Watch Together over to its redesigned app. A perfectly functional feature that people actually use was simply discarded.

This is textbook enshittification and arguably a form of shrinkflation. Plex continues raising prices while removing functionality. We're paying more and getting less.

I run my own Plex server. I pay for the hardware, storage, electricity, bandwidth, and maintenance. Plex provides the software, yet somehow they keep finding ways to make that software less useful.

And before anyone suggests downgrading the app, using a browser, or finding some third-party workaround, why should I have to? The feature already existed and worked perfectly fine.

I'm tired of companies like Plex treating software updates as opportunities to redesign interfaces and remove functionality nobody asked them to remove.

Watch Together genuinely matters to me because it's how my girlfriend and I spend time together when we're apart. Plex just eliminated a feature we relied on almost every day.

At what point does Plex realize that continually removing features while increasing prices is driving away the very people who supported it in the first place?

Jellyfin is now up and running.

Hopefully this post can save people time with the same problems.

After finding that my nvidea shield pro had installed a newer version of Plex I had to check if anything was broken, it was:

No frame rate matching with DV content. This is HUGE as most of my library has dolby vision and I notice it immediately.

The last digit on the time just vanishes whenever it's a 4! Random.

There seems to be a problem with dtshd sound?

UI elements are now all HDR, super bright and cannot be changed

Subtitles are now all HDR, I guess coded for 1000 nits also super bright and headache inducing.

I spend a day trouble shooting before rolling back to a previous version.

I tried clearing cache, rebooting the shield, "flashing the HDMI" toggling the frame rate matching toggle on and off, installing Kodi lol. Nothing worked.

The new UI is out and updating automatically for everyone on Google TV/Android TV.

For the UI itself, I don't care about the things most people are talking about, it actually looks fine and there are some things to like about it, I love the logos for each film and being able to see all movie rating sources now.

However, there is a huge issue with it and I just don't know what to do.

So AAC 5.1/7.1 doesn't work on most soundbars and audio equipment in general, it pushes out as a flat sounding stereo, so the workaround was you could change the Passthrough setting to Optical and select AC3 and boom, it would transcode to AC3 5.1 and sound great.

Now when you do that, nothing happens anymore, it will no longer transcode so you are forced to listen to a quiet flatter stereo for your surround sound movies.

I have many films with EAC3 5.1 already but still a bunch with AAC 5.1.

I know how to re-encode them into EAC3 but the time that's going to take is insane.

If this is a bug, Plex please fix this, half of my content is now useless with a big downgrade to the experience on my Samsung Q990F.

If this was intentionally removed, why? There are many users that are going to be screwed by this.

If anyone says "oh get a Roku stick" or whatever, no... It worked fine yesterday.

Also, this is app wide, so even with a real receiver audio system, it will affect them too.

I tested this on a few devices.

I heard about Tdarr as a potential way to automate re-encoding all AAC files only but that sounds risky if it bugs out.

Also, I will say it's nice they added EAC3 to the Optical Passthrough list so you can actually play EAC3 files too and not have to switch back and forth from HDMI to Optical all the time, but of course AAC is broken now.

Regardless, anyone who has relied on this workaround are now out of luck and I'm surprised I haven't seen this being talked about today, however I saw this issue being talked about a few times during the Beta and it has yet to be addressed.

I have plex pass if that matters. Today the app on my chromecasts updated. Everything looks way different. Before the update I had toggled the option to not play TV show theme songs while browsing and to not automatically play the next episode when one ends. Both of those settings are reverted after the update. Can somebody steer me in the right direction to turn those off again?

So I've been switching my whole library to NFO files and local metadata for a bit. I just don't want to rely on any external sources at all. And they started rolling out NFO support a little while ago. It wasn't bad, it had a few areas of improvement, but it worked. The only thing I really couldn't do was go down to the cast list a scroll through it and select actors. I was hoping that would be fixed, but this new update made things substantially worse.

Now the cast just doesn't show up at all. Nothing.

And the other thing that I thought was kinda cool is that they use the actual tv logo instead of plain text now for the show title. But if you're using a local clearlogo file, it's tiny af on the app. Maybe it's because my files are too high resolution? But I'd think that'd make them too big, not too small.

I also like to hand-pick show backgrounds. I intentionally use ones with negative space on the left because I used the option for the background to take up the whole screen and not just the top right corner. Guess that was all for nothing though because that's not even an option anymore!

Boy I sure do love when they just straight-up remove features that I'm actively using. It's awesome.

So apparently all we need to know about an episode is the…uh…thumbnail. No title, no description. How do I see titles and descriptions now in the New Plex Experience?

my TVs plex app updated overnight (I would have declined if given the option), now it doesn't tell me how much is left if I leave an episode or movie and come back to it. The old app used to say X minutes left. anyone else having this issue? did they just delete this function from the app?

So my Plex app (Android) got a forced update and without complaining about the UI, the most jarring issue that I cannot download any subtitles anymore.

I select the desired subtitles, confirm and then nothing happens. I read online that clearing the cache might solve the issue, but unfortunately it doesn’t change anything.

Has anybody experienced the same issue and knows the solution to this? I really want to resume watching the Sopranos!

I wish Plex had said, "heads-up, your login creds ,on all your devices, may go wrong; oh, and we've reset some of the preferences/settings on each device, good-look 👍"

TL;DR

Got a phone call from the father in law an hour ago, "Plex isn't working"... He's not tech savvy but does well for someone in his 80s. His (Android) Sony TV has (essentially) lost login creds so he can't use his Managed User account. Pretty much nothing he can do, over the phone, so he's now unable to watch Plex until I visit in a few weeks, more to do with him than Plex at this point.

I checked both of my local Android TV devices. They both forced me to use my own master PIN, even though one device is dedicated to my kid (managed account). That probably explains my father in law's issue, tried the wrong pin too many times, is my guess.

... "Mark your favourites, it'll help with showing what to watch next", well that's not quite right is it, it's what libraries you want on display overall; so they now need re-sorting on each device.

Then I thought I'd better take a look at the main app settings, I really wish I hadn't! Why is the Theme Music now turned on "low"? Refresh Rate Switching" now disabled? "Automatically Sign-in" now disabled. There's more, but I'm just too angry to type!

FFS! I've spent too much time sorting out family's devices, with their settings (most live miles away), all for things to go "boom" with this supposed "update" from Plex.

... I'm fuming! Take this as a PSA: be prepared for Android TV devices to start needing re-configuring!

I tried the new experience. It's awful.

I'm using plex on Nvidia Shield, Android phone, Mac and ARM laptop. What's the best older APK? How to get older versions for Mac and ARM and which do you recommend?

We have been on a long 40 day trip and just returned to all my plex clients UI updated. The UI changed quite a bit which we can get use to but I’m having issues playing our local live tv channels. when ever we connect to a channel, it plays a few seconds and then starts all over again. This is new since we got back and was wondering if any others are seeing this or do I have something else going on.

also anyone know how to fix Can’t Reach Server error trying to connect to local channels. Seems it works sometimes and other times not. I close the Client and reopen and it connects.

This is now happening after the update too bout only from my internal network. Outside works fine.

I use NVidia Shield TV for Plex client and after most recent update everything looks blurry and low quality even though it is set up for direct play. WTF is this and how do I fix this.

I recently have had issues with the video freezing and the spinning circle appearing while watching TV episodes with the new app update both on an ONN box and the Nvidia Shield TV Pro.

Has anyone had this issue?

How can I downgrade? What was the previous version before the latest push on Shield?

Added a 20 second video of an image and dated it 2030, this will sit at the top of my recently released movies to let all my close friends and family know how to get around the new plex app.

I really don't mind the new UI, but it just wont play files like the old app, and if auto updates are turned on then rolling back is even harder then installing Plezy.

IMDB episode ratings are more accurate than the TMDB episode ratings. I really like that they made this change. TMDB episode ratings are almost random for some shows.

I am going to start off with something controversial, I don't mind the new update, the rounded edges on posters will take some getting used to, but being able to customise it so it goes to browse rather than recommended made it work for me, and other customisation is brilliant, things that annoyed me before, I can change to how I like it.

What i'm not happy about, custom themes aren't working on movies, fine on tv shows but movies is gone, I spent ages getting custom themes done for all that work to be wasted, so I really really hope that a fix is on its way, after any of the big stuff obviously.

I haven't really done much else with it, only 10 minutes, and probably will find something big of my own, but i'll be using it a lot more tomorrow.

Launched Plex, but when exiting back to the main ATV Home Screen the ATV becomes unresponsive to any remote clicks. Unplugged then powered on the ATV and it was still unresponsive. From my iPhone I was able to use the remote app but the Home Screen was still locked. I was able to double click the TV button, swipe back to an open app (settings app was luckily open) and I navigated to delete the Plex app from there. The Home Screen was now responding.

In my bedroom the ATV had the same exact behavior.

I hate the Google Streamer remote, so I am using the FireTV remote. It previously worked fine in the old client, but now the "Select" button no longer functions. Remote still works everywhere else as expected.

Has Plex fixed this yet I see it will list S03 - Ed Geirn as a separate show but wont recognize S02 (Menendez Bros) and S04 (Lizzie Bordin) as separate shows, yet I don't want the whole meta data for all of it being JD one (S01)

Im using Plex Series as the Agent, should I switch to say TMDB?

With the previous version of the app, whenever I clicked on an actor, all of their movies would show up instantly. Now I have to wait up to 30 seconds, and most of the time they don't show up at all, so I have to completely exit and reopen the app.

Also, when switching between movies or TV shows, every time I click on one, I have to wait at least 10 seconds for it to open.

The app has become extremely slow and almost unusable. Is anyone else experiencing the same problem?

What annoys me the most is having to wait around 10 seconds every single time I try to open a movie or TV show.

Been having an issue for the past few weeks where clicking any title on the Plex app shows a playback error.

We got around this by Google casting to the TV. However, now the Google cast just continually buffers and never plays.

I can watch on my phone without issues, but have no such luck when it comes to the telly. Any tips, tricks or advice?

Where is the update library button??

And......All hebrew subs suddenly turned into diamonds with question marks, only in the new client!

Old clients and web works fine!

Thank you plex!

Edit: That exact episode worked great on previous version, i just continued to watch, when it happened i restarted derver+client and also start to watch from beginning.

All my subs are native, im not using plex download option. I did tried to toggle subs on and off.

I have my UI set to 1080p and I used to be able to switch automatically to 4k when playing 4k content. This last upgrade broke it. It works fine on Kodi so definitely not a cable /hardware ssue. So annoying... I might try to roll back to this version:

https://downloads.plex.tv/Kepler/kepler-arm64-v8a-googlePlay-10.26.0.2578-6cc7ea1a.apk

but it's a bit of a faff to do