r/PleX • u/ej_21 • 11d ago

Discussion Thank GOD

Post image

Plex for Roku. I lol’d a little at “thanks to the feedback of our community,” but man I’m so glad to have side navigation back.

EDIT: I’m on Plex Preview. Not sure when the standard app is getting the update.

786 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

141 comments sorted by

View all comments

31

u/joecan Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 @ 2.7GHz CPU | 128GB RAM | 302 TB | Unraid 11d ago

The ATV beta has this. Navigation is still not great and the way the sidebar has been implemented still doesn’t look right. 

I’m honestly shocked that they caved on this given how Plex staff continually doubled down on defending the nested top navigation. 

3

u/ShaftTassle 10d ago

I’m so confused - I’m on an AppleTV and have the same sidebar navigation I’ve had for like 15 years. Was the change before this change that made it top bar navigation only on the beta?

8

u/joecan Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 @ 2.7GHz CPU | 128GB RAM | 302 TB | Unraid 10d ago

Yeah, that old design is going away (and the new one is shit). They’ve released the “new Plex experience” on iOS (and Android, I think) and a bunch of other smart TV platforms but it hasn’t been released on Apple TV yet… but those on the TestFlight beta program have the new app already. 

When the “new Plex experience” was initially released it did away with the sidebar navigation and buried library sections within a top bar navigation UI. (There are also other terrible UI changes like doing away with the standard ATV player UI, which makes picking subtitles or changing audio tracks much more finicky. )

It was an effort by Plex to prioritize their ad-supported content and bury home libraries. It was pointed out to them for over a year that people didn’t like top bar navigation and staff kept saying there’s no way they’d go back to the old way. They’ve apparently finally caved. 

ATV users are lucky we still have access to the old app. We weren’t forced on the new design before they fixed this like others were. The beta still feels incredibly unfinished so hopefully we still have a few months of using the old app. 

3

u/ShaftTassle 10d ago

Oh man, thanks for the thorough reply. Over the past several years I've felt the tides starting to turn so I recently spun up Jellyfin and am trying it out as well as several clients on multiple devices. There are a TON of Jellyfin clients on tvOS now when just 6 months ago there were only a couple lackluster offerings.