I’m delighted that the PC team are going to add options for the new UI. It clearly doesn’t work for a lot of people and that needs to be addressed.
For my use case? Much better. And the new CarPlay interface (again - my use case) is a much needed improvement.
He uses it as ‘burned into their brain’. It’s a charming Griff-ism, but I couldn’t see a post mentioning it.
For anyone still on the fence about the $750 Lifetime Pass: My Apple TV lifeboat
I almost ready to buy the Plex lifetime pass. Then the stuttering started. The tvOS app hasn't seen any real update for 18 months, announcing a $750 price gouge without fixing their platform was the nail in the coffin.
If you've got a straightforward Apple use-case (just serving media to your own Apple TV, no multiple external users, etc) here is my advice after a lot of wrangling:
Infuse lifetime is significantly cheaper than the new Plex pricing and does hardware decoding on 4K content flawlessly (which is what Plex haven't addressed in literal years). It directly connects to your existing Plex database. I didn't love the UI originally, but any UI is better than a $750 paywall - even a $250 paywall.
The remote playback restrictions Plex is trying to impose can be completely circumvented by putting both your server and your remotes into a Tailnet. They treat all remote streams like they are coming from the local network.
Infuse also natively supports Jellyfin, if Plex keeps locking down features in the future all you'd have to do is spin up Jellyfin, connect Infuse to the new server, and the front-end TV experience doesn't need to change. If you're used to the Infuse UI, it's not enormously different.
Just putting it out there for anyone else in a similar boat and needing a clean break without throwing away their entire library.
I appreciate this is a bit of a niche post, and a lot of people with different use cases will disagree. But I've seen a lot of people asking the question since the price hike was announced. This seems the best option for me,