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Comment by coreyburnsdev | Hacker News Reader

I find plex unusable since the latest UI updates in any place but my PC browser. It's so slow that Jellyfin is really my only option now. Did the vibe-code the new changes or what?

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There seems to be widespread disdain for it. AFAIK they switched to a shared codebase to make it easy for the devs to deploy to multiple devices. But, it came at the expense of UX for pretty much all devices. They don’t use native video services on things like iPhone.

The Apple TV UI change drove me crazy. I switched to Plezy but it’s still not quite what I want. The good news is, it’s open source, so I can modify it if I want to, and it supports Plex and jellyfin, which would make switching to jellyfin in the future easier.

I use Pleezy which has been a nice open source alternative to the Plex UI. The only issue we've had is that on wake, you have to press back once to do anything else. I'll eventually debug it and see if I can fix it.

*Plezy.

$7.99 on the Canadian iOS App Store. Looks great, bought it immediately. Thanks for the rec!

It's not unusable on my shield but it's definitely worse. Not just 'change is bad' worse, but actually worse.

Selecting a season and then the episode gives you the episode summary instead of just playing the episode.

Hitting back on an episode brings up a side menu sometimes and others it leaves the episode like it should.

Why Plex?

On my iOS devices, hitting a season and then the episode always took me to the episode detail. I'm not sure if this is a setting to configure, I never changed any plex settings other than setting direct play.

I don't have the "back" issue, there's an "X" on the iOS app to tap to exit the video, and the "menu" key on my Apple TV works as always.

So much for unifying the code bases! :D

The new UI version never made it to the Xbox client so that's what I switched to using about 6 months ago. As a bonus, I got to ditch my Roku altogether.

Yes, its completely unusable on my fire stick. I ended up sideloading the old apk.

There's a few alternative jellyfin clients that are really good and fast.

Yes its obviously a thin wrapper over the core too; many timing bugs can be seen.

Plex has been enshittified since at least 2021. Most moved to Jellyfin.

When Plex made their free TV channels front and center, I knew things would only get worse. I've been really happy with Jellyfin, especially with the Moonfin plugin. There is a weird issue with my Samsung TV never showing subtitles but that's my only complaint.

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