Plex: Watch Live TV and Movies 12+

Almost perfect...

For a long time, I couldn't find fault with this media app. It looks amazing and is extremely flexible and scalable. I use it at home on a Mac as the server and am able to run an Apple TV with its beautiful interface. My most irritating pair of bugs is with the iOS (iPadOS) app. When I'm watching content on my iPad, subtitles are shown when they shouldn't be. They show up as "OFF" in the settings, but they're most definitely on. The only way to get them to go away is to turn them on, then turn them off again. HOWEVER, after turning them on, the timing for tapping the required menu to turn them off again is very important, because there can be no subtitles present on the screen when the video is paused to turn subtitles off or that subtitle will be present at the bottom of the screen for the rest of the video, or until this whole maneuver is attempted again. Very distracting and an irritating bug to say the least. Most shows have a minute or two of recaps, so it's pretty much all nonstop dialogue (subtitles).

This all being said, the Plex team has created an AMAZING media environment for the user. This level of quality is what every media company should aim for. I'm sure once the folks at Plex discover this bug, they'll be able to squash it in short order.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for letting us know about your troubles. Unfortunately, we were not able to reproduce the issue. Would you mind filing it in the forums https://forums.plex.tv/ with the following information to help us debug it.
- logs https://support.plex.tv/articles/212639598-apple-tv-logs/ (Apple TV)
- logs https://support.plex.tv/articles/201636593-ios-logs/ (iOS)
- app version
- device version

Plex is the beat

I love Plex for it’s beautiful organization and easy to use interface. Having almost all my media in one place has always been the dream and Plex has done that for me (for about 80% - still missing native audiobook support and support for eBooks). Having full control of my own personal media cloud and server has been incredible. The movie and show ratings from Rotten Tomato are awesome and being able to watch a trailer of something is convenient if someone wants a quick synopsis. I love being able to put all our childhood videos converted from VHS on my own cloud and give access to my family to see any of the embarrassing and amazing home videos anytime.

***DEVS: Would love to see a audio only version for Apple Watch for streaming or offline usage to listen to podcasts, music, audiobooks - Audible does this now which has been amazing. Being able to listen to Plex media with only a watch and bluetooth headphones would be a game changer. Also native audiobook support and support for eBooks would basically round out any media needs I could possible want to have in one app!

Love what the Plex teams does and always looking to see what they’ve recently added. More than happy to be a part of the Plex Pass Lifetime member. Keep up the amazing work!

Local server connections

I have always had trouble with the iOS versions of this app, even though I’m only connecting to a local server. The app on my Roku has no difficulty connecting to the same server. It is extremely frustrating. I am now completely unable to connect to the server from my iPad, despite having tried logging out and back into the app, logging out and using a wait list of local network connection, deleting the app and re-downloading it, deleting all three instances of the iPad app from my list of allowed devices in my account, etc. For some inexplicable reason, my Plex account has now decided that my iPad app is also a server, so some of the other client apps now list two entries for my iPad as servers.

Also, when my home Internet isn’t working and I can’t go online, even though my Plex server is on the same local network/router as Plex app on my phone, iPad, and TV, none of them are able to access the server. They all say that the server is unavailable. My SMB file sharing on the same Mac at the Plex server works fine, so it’s not a problem with my local network. I would think that playing files in Plex over the local network would not be affected by an Internet outage…

I’ve had so many problems with the iOS apps that I don’t see how the people at Plex hope to entice me to purchase a subscription when I can’t even really use the features that a subscription affords. The app is nice when it works, but far too often it doesn’t really work.