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Comment by Mithaldu | Hacker News Reader

It'll be nice to have a media player that's native and not running in a browser, but according to what i can see in the forums, the UI is the usual brand of "our way or the high way" with little to no configuration or customization and even at least in one way a step back² from Plex Home Theater, which this replaces.

Not to knock Plex itself. The server/encoding/play-on-any-device pipeline is amazing.

Just saying that their UIs need developers who actually care about what their users want.

² http://i.imgur.com/Ygde8Px.jpg

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Agreed. I watch a lot of sports and have been disappointed that they removed slow motion and frame by frame advance years ago and have little interest in adding it back. Still, I am paid for Plex pass to support them because I find it works better than anything else for me.

How are you watching sports on a Plex?

I find plex works "better than anything else" too but it's in desperate need of an open source alternative.

The media player they just released is open source … https://github.com/plexinc/plex-media-player

I suppose their server software isn’t … I’m not sure.

Correct, the server software is not open source. If you want an open source alternative: https://emby.media/

https://emby.media/

Agreed. I love what Plex allows me to do it, but the UI has taken a nose dive in recent months. Or at least the Roku app, which looks identical to this, has.

Though for all their steps backwards, this is a big step in the right direction. According to them, they can now develop and improve upon a sole app for all devices. With this move, we'll finally start seeing more features and refinement. See -> "massively improved efficiency when it comes to adding features and fixing bugs"

We won't.

Just now i browsed through a thread where a user was complaining about about the UI being atrociously lacking of options and how it slows down people.

A plex employee said:

  > I personally think 'just add an option/setting' is not the ideal
  > solution. Death by 1000 cuts, and all. I can see the argument for one
  > setting, but they add up. And then it's combinatorial attack. 'Oh, did
  > you toggle switch X and Y?' 'No?' 'Oh'. Not where we are now, but I
  > don't want to end up there, so am (probably overly so, as my coworkers
  > can attest) aggressive in avoiding explicit settings

Consumer software options must be added carefully and parsimoniously to avoid the "death" envisioned by the employee. Apps like this should just do the right thing, and PMs should spend some time figuring out what that is. If you want to spend hours tweaking something then get a bicycle or something. Once the interface is complicated at all, it basically just lies to 90% of users. (cf. Facebook and their ever-changing privacy options)

There's a bit of context that goes along with this, but in short the above quote is ridiculous, because they're throwing up a slippery slope argument in response to the smallest and most reasonable request, in a situation where there is no "right thing", since the software serves different people in different ways and making one way that serves all equally well is impossible, and hard-coding one locks out one user base. This is made worse by them locking out previous users with their changes by disabling usage patterns they previously provided.

>little to no configuration or customization

this has kind of always been the Plex way, hasn't it? If you want powerful customization and configuration you use XBMC/kodi, and if you want a pre-configured player that just works with as little config as possible you use Plex. It's never been a very customizable player.

Last i checked XMBC wasn't even remotely able to provide the backend features Plex has, so switching from one to the other is not viable.

There's an add-on for Kodi called PleXBMC that lets you look up your Plex libraries, and some skins have specific support that replaces the default XBMC libraries.

Just in case i can save myself a bunch of time messing around: Will Kodi and PleXBMC run directly on android and connect to plex media server instances without needing an intermediary?

I can't say that I've tried, but it should run directly on Android (since it's a standard Kodi add-on).

I'll admit it's not perfect (and would like to customize some of the options), but once they released that new UI in beta I couldn't stand using the old one. In general I find it much easier to navigate - and prettier to look at.

Yeah, before I tried it I envisioned some kind of VLC-like interface... but no, I installed it and it requires a key be input to identify and it goes fullscreen.. oh well, the browser app and mobile apps are fine.

It seems to work... not amazing, but okay, in windowed mode (settings, disable fullscreen). It still needs a "not ten foot" mode and proper scroll wheel support, but the mouse actually works with it by default, and it seems to have finally fixed the previously XBMC-derived trait of hidden menus and options with no on-screen controls for them.

I've been using it a few hours now. My only real annoyances are the lack of a quit button, and that they have buggered up remote control (harmony) support - windows htpc/steambox/vr rig.

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