first a quick question, if I switch over to jellyfin, is the same thing going to happen in four or five years? I'll be all settled into a nice ecosystem and then they'll just shit all over my face and I'll have to start over?
how did they manage to break it so thoroughly so quickly? the Plex server is less than 100 feet from my bedroom, but ever since the update, the lag and buffering has been so bad (even when I turn it down to 240p, when I used to be able to watch it original quality) and they've broken the download for later feature so that I have to manually go get the files I want off my server and on to my phone for that evening, and then watch them on my phone using VLC.
they claim they made these changes based on user requests. oh yeah? prove it. I want to see exactly how many people asked you to make it so you can't download an entire show at once. I want to see exactly how many people ask you to move the subtitle settings to a completely different menu from the subtitle toggle. I want to see how many people told you they wanted to learn a whole new layout for no apparent reason without the ability to change it back.
and I don't know what you did on the back end, but I don't think anybody asked you to make it buffer 10 times more than it used to. I don't think anybody asked you to make it so that it's harder to add things to playlists. I just flat out don't believe you that anybody asked you for this stuff. you can prove me wrong pretty easily, just show us the data
because I'm 100% certain you made these changes for somebody other than your users and I want to know who and why. the fact that I can no longer share my library with my mother is pretty telling as to who you're trying to please. let them know that the only reason I learned how to torrent in the first place was because something was inaccessible to me; do they really want me out here teaching retirees how to torrent their favorite shows? because if they can't share my library, they're going to have to build their own.
https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-android-app-doesnt-work/916336/5
same as usual: team of long-existing, beloved product feels need to justify existence / "modernize" product. it starts off with a plan of having feature parity, but over time the project starts to drag on and features start being cut as "unimportant" or "for later". eventually the team says fuck it and launches what they have, assuming it is good enough since it works in all the ways they test it themselves.
fuck plex, Jellyfin forever. That said you can use alternative frontends like kodi with plex for kodi plugin (you can do this with jellyfin as well though the plugin is different, jellyfin for kodi). This can be a better option to avoid this bullshit for both as the weakest part of jellyfin imo is the client apps (depending on platform, some are pretty solid)
convenience attempt by committee
Well also from the dev in that thread:
“Dev here, this is correct. Casting is done through them [Vizbee] to simplify our end of the implementation for device discovery and any future new protocols such as Matter Casting. But there is absolutely no tracking being done whatsoever.
They have a tracking product as well which is probably why their domain names ended up on these ad blocking lists, but Plex uses none of this. You can validate this yourself by looking at any network traffic to their actual analytics domain name, events.claspws.tv.”
Maybe plex is changing things for the sake of changing things, maybe they are seriously concerned about matter support for the 3% of users that care about such a feature, or maybe they’re setting up the framework for ad tracking now so it can be easily deployed later. They do have a 40 million dollar investment round to make good on, and that might be a “other things aren’t working to make us profitable enough” idea