Given the previews of the new Plex experience, I think I’m going to need an alternative media player.
Here’s my background.
• My media is stored on a QNAP NAS. All my devices are made by Apple.
• My library is a decent size. About 1,500 movies, 50 TV series, 75,000 songs, plus 2,000 classical pieces (would love a better way to manage classical music).
• I use PlexAmp on my computer to listen to music all day. If I were to listen to music outside the house, PlexAmp is my only music app.
• I use Plex on Apple TV to watch my movie and TV library. To a lesser degree, I watch home movies, music videos, and various media obtained from archive.org - I call this my VHS library. I also listen to music and look at my photo library from my Apple TV.
• The Plex UX for VOD is bad so I instead use Pluto and Tubi (not that they’re much better).
• I’ll never watch content on my iPhone. I may watch on my iPad but not often.
• I share my library with family so we can watch home movies during the holidays. They sign into Plex on either Apple TV, Roku, or their phones. I’ve also been happy to share photos from within Plex but this is being stripped out to another app which will not work for us.
It’s evident that Plex is intent to shove VOD down our throats at the expense of an enjoyable experience with our own content. For the older people in my family, this simple will not work at all.
The most important aspects are (1) an Apple TV app and (2) music apps.
I want something that’s relatively easy to setup. I’m not going to spend time building docker containers and reverse proxies (unless it’s a one-click process).
So, you want to keep using plex but not use the plex apps or are you looking to switch media server software entirely?
I’m going to give this a try for watching movies on my Apple TV. It seems to fall short for everything else.
It’s going to. From what I know about it it’s just for AppleTV.
@oxjox I tested some 3rd party clients and the player is even better than the one on the plex app for appletv
I’m curious to see what suggestions you get. When it comes to “easy to set up”, usually Plex is the answer, and the only major alternative I know of is Jellyfin, which I assume is what you’re referring to when you mention reverse proxies.
I’m even willing to build docker containers, set up wireguard tunnels to a VPS, and reverse proxy through a chain of 2 reverse proxies (haproxy on the VPS and traefik on the local machine which is how I reverse proxy Plex and Jellyfin alike) yet I still use Plex because most of my friends/family prefer the Plex UI (though with how buggy the Plex app has been for some of my iOS users, I think Jellyfin apps could close the gap soon™)
This is so frustrating.
I was saying to people who were upset about losing TikTok that no one should be so invested in an app or some technology owned by someone else that losing it upends their life. And now here I am waiting for Plex to send out an update to all but exempt me from enjoying my own media.
I am exhausted with these companies making changes to their products. I have cancelled so many subscriptions, deleted so many apps, because someone wants to fuck with the user experience that helped them gain so many users in the first place.
Luidditeville, here I come.
I’ve finally started converting my family to jellyfin. They used to use Plex no problem, but when I noticed my stuff being displaced by streaming something or others in the Plex UI I dropped it for Jellyfin.
It’s not without issues. I’m still having trouble with program guide data for my hd homerun, but I haven’t had time to dedicate to sorting it out. There was a bug recently that caused my credentials to get locked out of schedules direct. That’s been a real pita.
I moved all our household content from Plex to Jellyfin a few months ago and it’s been pretty awesome. Can customize the shit out of it to suit your needs.
I have a QNAP server running it in a docker container and I’m not sure how to set it up on Apple TV. But if you do want external access without having to mess around with a firewall, tailscale works great and is fairly straight forward to set up.
