A New Plex Experience is Coming

Ah fuck. Sounds like a lot of marketing speak for "you're personal content is being moved into a separate tab", with focus on getting people to watch their streaming shit. I'll give it an honest shot, but this might be the kicker to move to Jellyfin. Now that tidal integration is gone I have fewer and fewer reasons to use Plex

- I can't answer all of your questions, but for a while now I've run both just in case of something like this.
  For media organization, if you use a renamer, arrstack, or just follow the recommended folder structures in plex's documentation, it should mostly just work™. I point my Plex and jellyfin to exactly the same folders and it looks like jellyfin matched everything with metadata correctly.
  You do have to do SSL yourself if you want https (which you definitely want if you're exposing it publicly, but you could skip if it's lan only or accessed through a secure VPN). You should be able to apply just about any reverse proxy that can do letsencrypt pretty easily since there's nothing particularly unusual about jellyfin. I use traefik and my config is almost copy pasted from their examples.
  The apps, imo suck. But if the community has a bad reaction to plex's changes then there could possibly be a lot more attention / development on jellyfin apps. So personally if Plex forces us to have free content and rentals mixed in with no ability to disable, I'll just put up with the apps and hope they get better. Imo for Android findroid is the best but it doesn't have casting support.
- Since I am hosting my own DVD rips on my jellyfin server, I got a let's encrypt certificate and verified it with nginx server and a reverse proxy to duck DNS.
  The entire process was arcane, but I simply followed the steps from an online tutorial and it just worked.
  I spent more time and energy worrying over whether or not I was doing everything correct then I did actually implementing it, and I've never had any issues with it.
the writing was on the wall when they removed the unwatched flags. everything is being catered to their streaming service.

Why does everything need to be a social app? I don’t care what my friends/family on my Plex watch. I don’t want it to do anything other than allow me to play my own media.

we have to drive engagement.
That’s what jellyfin is for
Use plex to watch their shows

Uh oh... Well I'll try it out when the play store beta link starts working for me but I'm glad I already have jellyfin set up.

Has anybody else been able to get into the beta and can report on how accessible personal media libraries are in the new app? I'm dreading having to remake my getting started guide that I send to friends with more steps than just "pin my library and unpin the ad supported crap".

Edit:

For personal media pros, we’ve centralized media libraries into a dedicated tab. With the option to favorite libraries and easily access power-user features, it becomes a more personalized experience, with more exciting updates to come!

I hope this means pinning is just turning into favoriting to enable personal content to show up in the main views similar to how pinning currently enables personal media to show on the home tab... And hopefully you will still be able to remove the free ad supported content...

Edit 2 electric boogaloo:

They posted the APK so I've taken a look and here's what I found that I think is important:

Favorited libraries basically works the same as pinned libraries - so your personal media is mixed into the home screen just like the current app
There is no unpinning of live TV or Plex free movies/shows so it gets mixed into the home screen by default, and from discussions in the forums it sounds like that isn't planned (yet), so as it is now the only way to remove those is to disable it account wide in your Plex account. Not ideal so I hope they bring back unpinning.

I tried the iOS beta. There's a Libraries tab on the bottom now. Honestly, I haven't used the mobile app enough to tell if it's better or worse. I think it might be better?
Current App - Home Tab > (top left) Menu > choose a library.
Beta App - Libraries Tab > (top left) Menu OR Libraries again > choose a library.
I guess the difference is that on the current version you can access your libraries right from the launch (Home) screen but on the beta you have to tap the Libraries tab first.
"Pinning" 📌 is now "Favoriting" ♡.
I find the Home and Libraries tabs to be confusing. They're too similar.
- I'm guessing they're trying to "clean up" situations where people have lots of shared libraries cluttering up their sidebar. I don't mind it that much since I rarely go into a specific library since all of the content is combined on the home screen. But yeah it does add extra friction if you want to go into a specific library.
  I am more concerned that, based on the forum comments, they are making it harder to hide the ad supported content and rentals, as you can't unpin those from the app and instead need to go on desktop and disable them from your account settings. And it sounds like they don't plan on adding the ability to unpin Plex content from within the app. Maybe it's not so bad since changing your account setting is more permanent and doesn't need to be done every time you log into an app on a new device, but I don't like needing to do it on desktop instead of having the ability within the app.

Plex, for when you want to pay a subscription to access data you host yourself!

$30/year is fine for them handling the SSL and SSO for remote access so I don't have to.
- I paid $70 for a lifetime PlexPass 11-years ago. It's been a great investment. Not sure how much longer I'll be using Plex, but I have no regrets.
- Yah vs free.

I'm more concerned about the future of the Apple TV and web apps.

I tired the iOS beta. Aside from a few minor UX issues, I think it's totally fine. If you rely on the existing tabs on the bottom of the app (Trending, Activity, Friends), you might not like the update.

Otherwise, what they've basically done is taken the streaming service stuff out of the Library and put it on the bottom. This kinda makes sense to me. Unless of course you have no interest in that and you wish you could hide it all together.

They're stripping Music and Photos out to their own apps. While PlexAmp is great, it's missing some organization features I prefer in the Plex app. And the beta Photos app is just trash at this point.

the beta Photos app is just trash
Yeah it is.

Jellyfin FTW!

just got the app and checked it out. the UI/UX feels like it’s three years old. I really want to know what they did to warrant two years of development time and why the focus is on mobile and not say Apple TV boxes or Smart TVs

The thing I liked about Plex over Jellyfin (or even Infuse) on AppleTV was the layout decisions they made that promoted a sense of place. From any screen, I know exactly where I am, and can jump to the right to scroll big libraries alphabetically, or jump left to move to a different folder. It makes perfect sense to my brain in a way other design choices do not. These changes make me a bit nervous.

One tip I’d offer is that for Infuse, pointing it to the raw NAS media folder is annoying as AppleTV doesn’t protect local image caches from being purged so Infuse has to recreate all the thumbnails from time to time and it is dog slow.

Instead, you can point Infuse at your Plex library file directly and all your artwork etc will persist instead of needing to be regenerated every so often.

Not a fan of this pointless redesign. I can't figure out how to view my TV channels from my tuner either only the crap live TV Plex thinks people want

After doing some reading apparently that's coming.
" The below list will be updated as those releases occur (presented in no particular order):

Playlists Casting Downloads: Advanced features Player: Advanced features (e.g. speed control, sleep timer, etc.) Where to Watch links Live TV (Over The Air) DVR scheduling Library management Movie rentals via in-app purchases Shared Sources / Single Item Sharing Watch Together"