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 didn’t think it would be possible to keep using the Plex server and user other apps. If so, that would be nice so as to maintain the meta data I’ve worked so hard on.
It isn’t really possible, which is why I’m wondering what you’re looking to do.
Infuse is what I recommend. It won’t play music but It’ll connect to plex, jellyfin, or emby. Has a good UI and can direct play anything you throw at it. The only issue you will have is transcoding. It will NOT request your server to transcode so if you are outside your house and have a bandwidth limit on your remote streams it’ll fail to play.
My assumption is, plex amp will expand to the appleTV since they are taking it away from the main app. I could be wrong though… plex team hasn’t really been listening to its users as of late.