Plex laid off the whole player team | Hacker News Reader

Plex laid off the whole player team

forums.plex.tv

170 pointszzyzxd117 comments

A better link to point to the comment from the former employee:

https://forums.plex.tv/t/2026-20-0-beta-ios-and-tvos-4k-dovi...

Plex stopped working on any DoVi/HDR10 videos I have, and today I found this thread.

I have a player with wide compatibility, including P7 DoVi, for Apple TV (and iOS) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hanaplay/id6782382601 works with Plex and Silo - an up an coming media server that could be a replacement. Android/Roku are in beta. It's free and will be open sourced.

Silo looks interesting, I wish it supported OSX servers though but I imagine that's so fringe.

https://pixelbrite.site

web + native; works on about any Apple hardware from the last 15y

woah this looks great

Seems like the comment was edited to remove "Move over to Jellyfin and/or Infuse"

From /r/plex:

https://i.imgur.com/87huC1b.jpeg

I just looked at the thread and I think that comment might be gone entirely. Though some script on that page is breaking find in page on my phone so maybe I simply didn't scroll enough.

Dev seems to have deleted his Reddit account too

https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=comments_s...

fwiw I noticed a while ago their PS4 app refused to play a file, but it was playable in the PlayStation web browser

Thank you. I was really confused about the story initially.

I think the comment has been completely deleted now.

Definitely got nuked

I’m putting a lot of effort into HDR in all its forms at https://pixelbrite.site

If interested in native apps hit testflite@pixelbrite.site

I don't want to be a jerk and I know engineers writing the code don't always make the decisions but the new Apple TV Player was dog shit. Just horrible. 10 steps back in UI/UX and frustrating to use. I've been using Plex for well over a decade and to throw that all away on that new player... Just damn.

Not sure why Plex laid off the team, was it the response to the new updates (doubt it), was it "AI", are they planning on going in a new direction?

> Not sure why Plex laid off the team, was it the response to the new updates (doubt it), was it "AI", are they planning on going in a new direction?

Pure speculation - maybe it was the kind of response you're definitely not hoping for. Get ready for more dog shit apps :)

I think it's past time we stop letting the doers of an org pass off responsibility for their actions. The engineers coded this. It is on them as much as it's on some nameless exec

I don't agree. There's a limit on how much you can influence things, and as a dev (or product owner or whatever) you need to pick your battles.

How a decision is made, what gets released etc. are all opaque processes and blaming the devs from the outside is not productive.

That said, I'm all for it for devs becoming more responsible for the end result, evaluated within the org boundaries. Especially these days when people tend to cop out with "oh cloude did it / didn't catch it" responses (before, it was "oh I had to come up with something quick and couldn't check everything").

It is usually an exec with a name, just like engineers have name.

Quality is achieved by process - testing, coherent requirements etc. Individual engineer cant change those.

Unless they're founding engineers, engineers are exployed to work on what a company wants. If the company wants to cut corners in exchange for something else, their only usual options are cutting corners indeed, or quitting.

More than likely Plex realizes where their money comes from. It's not streamlining personal video content playback. That's how they built their reputation, but they make their money on integration deals and filling your home screen with other people's content. I paid for Plex Pass and they still feel entitled to put advertisements in front of my local media content. I've since switched to Jellyfin.

I don't mind the new UI for the Apple TV app, however there's a new bug where pressing pause can cause playback to completely freeze up. I keep hearing people talk about how software has taken a nose dive in quality now, and haven't really experienced it but if this Apple TV app update was AI heavy driven and real developers were laid off it might be my first experience with it.

Once upon a time, Plex started as a fork of XBMC/Kodi.

I'm still using Kodi. It still does everything I need it to do, user complaints about "dated UI" be damned.

About the only thing I wish it shipped was a built-in renamer utility to help organize the media to the naming scheme that Kodi expects in order to scrape metadata properly. Most of the leading third-party utilities for this are proprietary subscription apps, which is a huge shame when the core product is FLOSS.

Kodi front end - emby back end. Best of both.

This. Transcoding is a dream and the Emby apps are flawless (the ones we are using at least).

I've been on Emby for a long time, just waiting for them to make the system abrasive enough to switch to Jellyfin.

Breaking the usability of the Android TV app and requiring us to switch to the mobile app on the TV was pretty bad. But since the last update I get delays of "connecting to the server". I think we are there now, I just need a free weekend to get everything set up.

Ironically (or fittingly) given that origin, the Xbox version of the Plex app may be the best one to use now because it's been abandoned and was never updated to the terrible redesign.

Your favorite agent is really good at organizing media files, if you haven't tried that and it happens to fit your situation. I usually make it write out a list of move/renames as a script so I can double-check, but bet it's fine without most of the time.

It's not just dated, it's unusable on a TV. Just the keyboard is reason enough not to use it. I should have written down everything that was wrong with Kodi when I used it, I could have filled a whole page of 1 line complaints after a month. It technically works I guess but it suffers from the death by a thousand cuts syndrome.

I've got nothing but good things to say about Jellyfin, Infuse in Apple's ecosystem and Wholphin in Android's.

How large is your music library? Jellyfin is unusable with my large music library and I was forced to use Navidrome.

How large is your library?

Over 110,000 tracks mostly FLAC

Thank you, I am building a music library, collecting data points :pray:

Dude how do you survive every day and not have anxiety about the maintainability of that? Seems like you have to be a full-time sysadmin with your music hobby and an appropriate recurring IT hardware budget.

That's the problem I'm solving:)

It's only a few TB on a small NAS which backs up to the cloud. No anxiety. I've been building the library for about 20 years, if anything gives me anxiety it's thinking about when I had no backups or RAID.

How large are we talking here?

I'm currently sitting at 35k~ tracks, primarily FLAC with some 320kbps mp3 sprinkled in. I also use Jellyfin for anime and have a LOT of shows on there. Haven't noticed any issues yet, so I'm curious where your tipping point was.

Jellyfin after the 10.X update changed their database. This introduced a major performance issue with SOME large music libraries. There doesn't seem to be a hard set of criteria besides "some large music libraries suffer from bad performance degradation". I finally managed to upgrade after just brute forcing it and trying several times. It finally just worked.

Okay here's what I did to finally update Jellyfin to work with my 300,000+ size flac library.

I copied my 10.X whatever Jellyfin 3 times. So I basically setup 3 identical Jellyfin instances. I then upgraded each of them to the latest version. 2 of them upgraded but had horrible performance. The third one finally works the way it should. I have no idea why that worked but after seeing tons of comments that were basically "Idk mine just works" or "idk mine just sucks" it seemed worth doing.

So, maybe try that.

To be clear I didn't copy the libraries. Just the Jellyfin docker data.

Their new database is just bad.

I use Navidrome for music as well — I'd say it's about 800 artists and thousands of albums. I've also built a rather convoluted workflow around it that meets my needs.

https://pixelbrite.site

I have about 32k tracks and I’m obsessively making this product as fast and beautiful as I can. Email me if you have problems with it and I will resolve them.

I switched over to Emby a while back for video, but kept plex in a limited capacity for music since I really like Plexamp.

The thing I really like about plex was that 99% of the time, it would scan and match up my media, even if file formats were inconsistent. That was a growing pain for Emby, so it was another reason I kept plex for music.

Is there a good alternative to plex for music?

The closest alternative that I've found to Plexamp is MusicAssistant. It's still really rough around the edges as a full replacement. For example: Smart playlists are lacking and/or don't work at all; "Recently Added Albums" goes by file modified time and not when it was actually _added_ (and they fought me on this saying I'm wrong that it doesn't seem right)

This is replacing Plexamp for me:

https://pixelbrite.site/

+1 for MusicAssistant. I have been using it for about 2 weeks with Plex as the source, but MA as the player after "we" (my wife) decided Spotify is too expensive.

Handing off between devices is my current pain point with it. It can group players so that you can do multi-room synced play, but I use that to hand off from my desktop to my phone. You can transfer the active playlist to another device. But in either case it's a manual interaction and doesn't "just happen". To be fair, I didn't have 100% success rate with Spotify doing this correctly either. Sometimes it did it, sometimes it just started in its own world.

The MA IOS app is REALLY rough; but I have had very good success with Xonara on ios, which is currently available through testflight.

I've used Gonic[1] for music server purposes and Symfonium[2] for streaming said music for a while now, nothing but good things to say about both. The only downside is it does not do automatic media tagging like Plex, but if you ingest with something like MusicBrainz Picard[3] then it'll never be a problem.

[1] https://github.com/sentriz/gonic [2] https://www.symfonium.app/ [3] https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

I ditched Plex for Jellyfin + audiomuse AI. So the front end is any Jellyfin app.

Audiomuse has a Jellyfin plugin that automates a lot of the playlist creation.

https://pixelbrite.site

Music is a top priority for me. If there’s something missing it’s either coming soon or you can email me and it’ll be added

I landed continuous playback yesterday, where it automatically picks more tracks like your been playing https://pixelbrite.site/en/music-discovery

Any plans for Android (phones or TV), or Roku clients?

Absolutely, but that said, the web app is very good and may get you farther than you expect (i.e. combined with chrome casting). That even works remotely if you connect via dashboard.pixelbrite.site

Well.. I was really excited to experience HDR when I was reading conference proceedings about it in the early 2000s. But when I got to see how it was standardized I could think nothing for "For Christ's Sake, this is going to make sure it never looks right in either SDR or HDR"

Dolby Vision addresses some of the problems of simpler standards but it is such a botch I wouldn't expect it work at all.

How is that related to this story? Are you commenting on the wrong Hacker News post?

Did you read the story?

Plex broke Dolby Vision. Plex is working fine for me because I'm not using this botched format and don't have a TV which is designed to make sure everything is too dark for you to see anything, the same way Chris Nolan poisoned movies by making sure you can never make out what people are saying.

> Chris Nolan poisoned movies by making sure you can never make out what people are saying.

why did he do that?

Nolan doesn't want you to focus on the dialog, he says. He considers dialog to be just another sound effect. He's an overrated bozo who either needs more cocaine, or less.

See also: idiot directors who shake the camera constantly because it's "realistic," neglecting hundreds of millions of years of evolution geared towards stabilizing vision while moving.

It's mostly that Nolan makes camera and sound decisions based on the theater experience which assumes a certain visual scale, projector dynamic range, surround sound system, and so on. Because the format and equipment utilized in a high end movie theater is significantly more capable than everyday home televisions, these choices often lead to a poor viewing experience at home. All these issues could be resolved technically, but home theater formats are kind of a mess in general.

Unfortunately that's not it at all. He's widely quoted as considering dialogue to be just another sound effect.

It is that, just not only that. You saying dialogue is "just another sound effect" collapses all nuance out of a broader artistic preference on Nolan's part for authentic performance recording and diegetic sound (of which the dialogue is one part of many). You may not care about this-vs-that filmmaking choice, but they are intentional decisions with a rationale. In a movie theater setting, the problems introduced by these choices aren't as acute because there is a physical and spatial separation between speakers dedicated to primary dialogue vs environmental sounds, etc. The same is true for scenes being "too dark" or characters being framed too widely to read their performance because it was framed for IMAX not an iPhone.

You saying dialogue is "just another sound effect" collapses all nuance out of a broader artistic preference on Nolan's part for authentic performance recording and diegetic sound

I see

... Also you gotta be one of the 40% of the population that lives in a Nielsen "A" market to have an IMAX theater, a lot of us are stuck with really bad movie theaters that are worse than a good home theater. Like if I burn out a speaker I'll probably fix it, a movie theater might have a burned out center for months and only get an occasional complaint about it. After the pandemic just the thought of a popcorn-and-coke mess would make my skin crawl.

I've been turning up the brightness really high with certain video games for a really long time because, as a player, it's just not fun to not be able to see something I'm supposed to interact with. A creative product that isn't just something you do for itself doesn't just belong to the creator but also belongs to the audience... You can do what you like but don't expect anyone to fund it or exhibit it or buy it. If Hollywood put 1% of the energy into connecting with audiences that it does into winning Oscars things would be quite different.

The actual thread the post being referenced is in is about Dolby Vision and HDR10 playback on Apple devices, so I can see where a rant might come out I guess...

edit: Yup just saw GP's reply and they clearly have opinions about HDR.

I often run the server and the media player app on the same system. When the server analyzes a new movie, the spinning circle animation in the corner of the player app uses more CPU than the server’s transcoding and analysis processes.

Looks like the comment was deleted, insane to think dropping that in a community forum discussion was a good idea.

Bummer. Anyway, the Nautilus Jellyfin client for the Apple TV rules.

Swiftfin got a huge update recently too!

Why is it so hard to find screenshots for this app? I've tried many apps the past days as they all are in a half-done state and I would be in the market for a good, Apple TV native client.

The new Apple TV app is terrible. It’s completely redesigned, and visually looks good I suppose, but it’s so buggy and has terrible UX. So terrible, in fact, that after a decade of using plex I finally became a cliche and switched to jellyfin. The player isn’t quite as polished as plex, but it isn’t as buggy, and I’ll probably just take an open source player and have Claude customize it to my liking. Honestly plex deserves to fail at this point. They’ve been doing stupid user hostile shit for years. They finally cross the line though and made the core experience of watching something on their app significantly worse.

I was watching a movie last night with the updated Apple TV app last night and said to myself, it's time, this UX update has pushed me over the edge. Jellyfish migration is happening this weekend.

Yeah, I can't believe how bad the UI/UX is for the new Apple TV Plex app. I switched to Plezy as a client (still Plex server) but don't love it either. I really did like the old Plex UI on ATV.

I don't know what I'll do going forward. Jellyfin is rough (I've tried!) and especially for external users (family).

It's a shame Plex has failed to be functional. The moment a product has a bunch of UI refreshes but no core fixes is when you know the wrong work is being done.

I'd still be happy if Plex could turn things around, but until then Jellyfin seems to be king.

How has it stopped being functional? As far as I know it's still just as functional as always?

Question for Jellyfin users - how's the support for non-tech people that were using your library? Like my parents use my Plex, and getting them switched to something else is going to be a hell ride.

Even easier to use, from what I've experienced. Feels like a middle ground between Roku and Plex's interface.

>Question for Jellyfin users - how's the support for non-tech people that were using your library?

As much as I hate what Plex has been doing in the last period, here Jellyfin is not as good as Plex. Plex tablet and TV UX feels simpler and easier than OOTB Jellyfin, unless you tinker with it or use alternative clients. My parents far prefer Plex's UX.

Also, what grinds my gears the most is that most movies and shows I download, Jellyfin can't detect what content it is, and instead just lists them as raw video files in a folder since it expects a strict naming convention which most torrents don't follow. Plex seems to have a much better content detection engine, probably based on fingerprinting, since it rarely misses, regardless of how fucked the naming convention is.

Also 2, I noticed transcoding on Plex is somehow more power efficient than Jellyfin. When I monitor intel_gpu_top on my 12th gen NUC, Plex hammers the iGPU with far less interrupts than Jellyfin, resulting in noticeably lower power consumption.

Are the shows foreign or rare media? I almost exclusively use Jellyfin for TV and generally the only media that breaks from weird metadata tagging is asian stuff like Animes. Naming convention of the episode titles usually has very little to do with how Jellyfin shows them, unless that's the only data it can see.

>Are the shows foreign or rare media?

No, mostly US/Western productions. Clarkson's Farm, Stargate SG-1 for example.

Shoko server and shokofin plugin solved the anime issue for me.

It's pretty easy and straight forward, the login UI is similar to netflix where you can have profiles per user and have them shown on the login screen, etc. They get placed straight into the view of your library, from there they can simply click play.

I'm not up to speed on transcoding, but I do notice my web users always have to transcode, assuming due to their native browser playback support for codecs. Local installs of the Jellyfin player seem to avoid this on most systems.

Its pretty simple to use and manage. I actually ended up creating an android tv (and phone) app that mimicks windows media center for live TV, and an on demand section that serves the jellyfin library. This has given the family I give access a more familiar interface. https://imgur.com/a/oUDr1Gu

If anyone is interested I may do a post about this app, but I figure in the AI age you'd probably rather I keep it to myself!

this is my main blocker to Jellyfin too. if it were just me, no problem. but my (divorced, over 60y/o) parents and my sister's family use my plex too. each of them has some mix of LG, Samsung, Roku, Android, and Apple devices. they all live half way across the country.

every time i've checked in with Jellyfin, the ecosystem has been way too fragmented to consider migrating.

It's usable, but there's plenty of room for improvement. Never got started with Plex since it's not free software. No matter how much better Plex was it would never have been worth it down the line. I learned that lesson by using Opera circa 2012.

It used to be free! That's how I got started with it at all. I bought a lifetime pass in 2011 for $50 on the hope it would still be working and get better as time went on. I guess I'm at ~$3/year now and just continue to amortize that cost per year down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

Free software is not about money. It's the freedom to do anything with it, including redistribution. A concept that resists enshittification.

I've had no issues getting my friends and my parents setup. Its easier than Plex, since it's all setup in Jellyfin (user admin).

Send them a hostname, username and password. Jellystat is a nice companion app if you like seeing metrics.

Really good, though client quality/UI varies per platform. My relative's Roku client isn't as good as my Android TV client.

My only annoyance with the Android TV client is that preferences for audio/subs don't stick within a TV series. If I set audio to JP and subs to EN on episode 1, I expect that the preference would carry over next episode, but it doesn't always.

That's a really minor thing, though. Non techie relative doesn't have a problem with playback.

I found some content I wanted to watch in their streaming library, but it wouldnt even play the (2 minute) ads correctly. It would start the ad, but then another ad would start playing behind it at the same time, and when the and 2nd ad ended, the whole player freezes and you cant play another video until you quit the app. Not to mention the pause screen ads. So I'll just keep using it for my local content until they make that impossible too.

Not a great way to keep users OR advertisers i.e. make any money at all.

Mad thread to drop that bomb in.

I've been running an older client version (last one before the new UI) on both Android (mobile) and Fire TV Stick 4K. Hasn't been too much of an issue to setup for friends, you just have to make sure to disable auto-updates.

There are several good alternatives to Plex. Time to give them your support.

Sadly, the signs were all there, but it sucks that we need to start thinking of upending existing setups. That said, currently running jellyfin as a test to replace plex ( different reasons ). So far the experience was good. What seems to be missing is the ease with which you can share your library.

It's a great opportunity to use an open ecosystem that cannot be captured and enshittified. Better to build on a shared, open platform versus paying someone who is trying to squeeze the enterprise for all its worth over time.

Where Jellyfin lacks, I would encourage contributions so that it lacks less, over time. Hopefully, it will eventually surpass Plex, making Plex redundant while Jellyfin remains open.

(i run Plex and Jellyfin side by side on top of a multi PB library)

> multi PB library

Of? Ripped Blu-rays?

Library contents are out of scope and irrelevant imho. "You do you." I'm supporting end to end open media storage and playback in this context, regardless of underlying content or media. Legal content, pirated content, adult content, does not matter to me what folks want to store and serve up. The issue is digital sovereignty over your compute.

Over time, it'll all be served out of archive.org eventually anyway as copyright slowly expires over centuries [1] (life of the creator + 50-70 years lol). We can find more valuable topics to argue about, imho.

[1] HN Search: public domain day - https://hn.algolia.com/?q=public%20domain%20day

Sounds about right. What have you (and/or fellow commenters) had good experiences with?

Mismanagement and disastrous redesigns aside, the "lifetime" funding model was flawed from the beginning and imo played a serious part in leading Plex down this path.

Plex seems to be the kind of software a lot of people would have acquired illegally.

Were that something to worry about, I imagine we'd be seeing it now as well - I don't think a lifetime license option would sway people away from that option were it a viable one.

So, what's the go-to client for Nvidia Shield Pro now? I've tried Jellyfin and it has a lot of trouble with fancy anime subtitles (forgot the extension)

Remember that there are alternative playback clients which use Plex's backend. Infuse is one, but I think VLC also works. Both have Apple TV apps.

Someone created a native Plex client[1] for WebOS and it's an absolute dream. The responsiveness of the interface is really very impressive, especially considering my TV is coming up 10 years old.

[1] https://plxnative.com

I don't understand why anyone continues to give Plex the time of day. Jellyfin has far and away eclipsed them.

Because I bought a lifetime pass a very long time ago, and their apps across all platforms look and work consistently. I only recently switched to Jellyfin because Hetzner blocks Plex, but otherwise I wouldn't have had a big reason to switch.

Do you have external users (outside your network)? My understanding (and the last time I tried) is that Jellyfin lacks in this department quite a bit. That and ubiquitous clients.

Plex client is available almost everywhere and overall, Plex mostly "just works". The latest Apple TV client changes have me hot and there are things I don't love but that's what's kept me in the Plex ecosystem. I am looking around now though since I'm so disappointed with the new clients/UI.

I have, after setting things up this year. Any user problems were always due to server-side or bad media files. Or on networking on the server side.

As far as I understand it Jellyfin has been improving client availability and to me seems to work well for friends.

I’ll probably be trialing it and Silo over the next little bit. Thanks!

I have my friends and family using tailscale + jellyfin. Their only complaint is not having an easy way to watch on Xboxes. I convinced a few of them to plug old laptops into their TVs which is working fine.

I went with Plex AV few years ago for two major reasons:

* a native Xbox app (I believe Jellyfin may now have one)

* non-techie acceptance (Plex seemed more polished at the time, will need to reassess now)

Either way, I'll be warning my spouse that things may be changing soon.

Really? Can it automatically transcode lower qualities for downloads on Android yet?

Isn't all that the falloff from their push for common codebase for all clients on different platforms?

Given their output of the past two years, perhaps firing them was the right move.

I'm not one to ply Plex with praise. They've concepted and birthed every conceivable mistake in the last two years. But the player is a mess. The whole app is a mess. And because they unified, they're all a mess.

People do deserve to lose their jobs over this. I just hope it was the same people pushing for this crap in the first place.

Now I have to decide: vibe code some alterations to Plezy so I can see more than a few things at a time on the home screen, or move away completely. Anyone else facing this choice, let me know what you're doing.

ive got plex and jellyfin running but jellyfin hasn't won me over yet for movies / tv shows. guess it's going to have to

That reminds me... need to cancel plex pass.

Curious why one would pirate media but pay for a media streaming system. Not like there aren't any alternatives like it's the case with VPNs

If you wanna share with friends and family; it's way more accessible than setting up access to a VPN/tailscale/etc.

There are not any alternatives that match every feature. The account system and number of platforms with a Plex app is unmatched. This matters when you share it with others who won't want to tinker with anything.

A media streaming system is a lot cheaper than the media. A lot of people bought Plex when it was a "buy once keep forever" payment model.

As someone who has a lifetime Plex subscription but who hasn't used it in years, I'm mildly surprised they had a significant team to layoff.

It has felt like they were in a Bending Spoons-esque mode for many years where they just tried to suck all the money possible out of it without actually supporting it beyond a bare minimum level.

My disappointment with Plex aside, my heart sincerely goes out to anyone who was laid off.

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