Luke 37070 Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 Please provide more detailed feedback on where you feel their UI is more polished. We are happy to look at possible improvements. Thanks ! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chyron 221 Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 (edited) Please provide more detailed feedback on where you feel their UI is more polished. We are happy to look at possible improvements. Thanks ! For example, here is the Now Playing screen for music on Emby for Android vs Plex for Android. Emby on the left; Plex on the right, with the queue playlist accessible from the Queue icon at the top. Emby's posters are frankly a bit on the large side, and can't be resized (except by zooming on the web app with Ctrl+scroll_wheel, which also resizes the font) Edited October 18, 2018 by chyron8472 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37070 Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 Thanks, yes the now playing screen has been on my to do list to redesign for a little while now. I would also eventually like to add poster resizing as well. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chyron 221 Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 (edited) Please provide more detailed feedback on where you feel their UI is more polished. We are happy to look at possible improvements. Thanks ! Also the Settings menu, the Metadata Manager, and the Server Dashboard feel... umm... unhomogenous. They have completely different layouts and even color schemes, and you don't necessarily access one from the other. ...as opposed to Plex where everything feels located in a central backend, with some tabs only visible to the admin. Edited October 18, 2018 by chyron8472 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chyron 221 Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 (edited) I will add another pro for Emby: when I was looking for a song to screenshot just then, Plex took something like 10 whole seconds to buffer the song. Emby started the song up quicker than you can say "Wow, that was fast." The same goes for shows and movies. Emby is a lot quicker to play and seek content, and really respond in general than Plex, especially while remote from the server. Edited October 18, 2018 by chyron8472 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37070 Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 Also the Settings menu, the Metadata Manager, and the Server Dashboard feel... umm... unhomogenous. They have completely different layouts and even color schemes, and you don't necessarily access one from the other. ...as opposed to Plex where everything feels located in a central backend, with some tabs only visible to the admin. We kind of did this by design. If you're the admin and you want to browse your library, do you really want to see that blended in with settings and admin screens? that is why we separated them. You can always use the themes feature to give them the same color scheme if you want. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dibbes 431 Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 We kind of did this by design. If you're the admin and you want to browse your library, do you really want to see that blended in with settings and admin screens? that is why we separated them. You can always use the themes feature to give them the same color scheme if you want. This is one of the things I really like. There is absolutely no mistaking in which screen you are Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TylerV76 84 Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 I do agree Plex looks a bit more polished. I think its because they used a very simplistic design. Plex has alot of open space on the screen that makes things seem a bit more organized and modern. I personally wish on the apps that you could change a lot of colors of the UI (Shield TV for example). I cannot stand the green that's used when highlighting items, for example in the guide. I would love to have the option of changing the highlight from green to a blue. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamstewiegreen 147 Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 Emby's posters are frankly a bit on the large side, and can't be resized (except by zooming on the web app with Ctrl+scroll_wheel, which also resizes the font) On my browser (firefox) i keep emby zoomed out at 80%. That way I get 10 posters across rather than 8 and 3 complete rows rather than 2 and a bit. Plus, over all I think it looks a bit better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mypanasonic 8 Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 (edited) i binned Plex after it stopped supporting ".strm" also the dvr on emby actually works on my rig ! Edited October 18, 2018 by mypanasonic Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arrbee99 1560 Posted October 18, 2018 Share Posted October 18, 2018 Talking of polishing, still don't like the way on some screens you see little bits of actors posters along the bottom of a movie page in some apps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37070 Posted October 19, 2018 Share Posted October 19, 2018 Talking of polishing, still don't like the way on some screens you see little bits of actors posters along the bottom of a movie page in some apps. Nowadays that is a best practice. It would be less polished if we didn't do that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FrostByte 5049 Posted October 19, 2018 Share Posted October 19, 2018 Agree, that way I know there are more actors. Otherwise I may think that what I see is all there is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arrbee99 1560 Posted October 19, 2018 Share Posted October 19, 2018 Still think the words Cast & Crew at the bottom should be enough of a clue. But I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jachin99 82 Posted October 19, 2018 Share Posted October 19, 2018 For example, here is the Now Playing screen for music on Emby for Android vs Plex for Android. Emby on the left; Plex on the right, with the queue playlist accessible from the Queue icon at the top. Emby's posters are frankly a bit on the large side, and can't be resized (except by zooming on the web app with Ctrl+scroll_wheel, which also resizes the font) I actually like the look of emby in each of those compared to plex. UI has a lot of personal preference involved but an option to size posters, and text independently wouldn't hurt I guess. the text looks a little small on the plex screen captures. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ginjaninja 536 Posted October 19, 2018 Share Posted October 19, 2018 Please provide more detailed feedback on where you feel their UI is more polished. We are happy to look at possible improvements. Thanks !imo plex's ui is more fluid and responsive, meta data is loaded asynchronously from the screen structure.eg the screen does not build as you look at the ui, eg as librarys/next up are enumrrated and added to screen , the place holders are there from the get go. you do not need to wait for metadata to load to browse. aesthetically and ergonomically this is appealing. plex's homescreen is immediate so i think the server might precache the homescreen content ready to serve. plex does somewhat 'cheat' with its home screen in that either (roku client) alot of data is hidden behind 'more' buttons or (android client) plex doesnt load metadata until you scroll to content, but plex is right enough of the time about what content you want (showing first) its perhaps forgiveable. Emby's just in time loading of metadata is improving all the time as is the asyncronous loading. and perhaps on a par if the homescreen loading times could be improved. plex is able to provide a reasonable video experience over 300KB/s range in term of quality/bandwidth, emby requires a bit more bandwidth. cast and crew searching is superior on emby although this seems under threat reading between lines, hopefully developers can find a way to keep improving client responsiveness without dumbing this feature down. Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carlo 4330 Posted October 19, 2018 Share Posted October 19, 2018 I have always been a staunch Plex user, tried Emby a few times in the past but always ran back to Plex. Until recently... around the time that (I feel) Plex lost it. First they introduced totally idiotic additions such as News and VR. Then they upgraded the Android app to some unusable monstrosity. Now they are doing away with plugins (the only one that will affect me is trakt, but it just so happens to be the one feature that keeps me sane between 3 Plex servers and now Emby). What is worse, almost all complaints and concerns are met with silence or disdain from the Plex employees. Their standard response is mostly "...silence...", "it works for me, therefore the problem must be you", "you are just a vocal minority" or "your feedback is useless because you need to give us the exact placement of the pixel you want moved". About 2 months ago I reinstalled Emby and to my surprise they have improved the app tremendously since the last time I tried it (well over a year ago) and they keep on improving it. They respond quickly to technical issues (Luke is a machine!) and they seem to actually listen to their community. On top of that, new additions are almost always useful in some way, unlike the nonsense Plex keeps adding these days. I haven't abandoned Plex altogether, but my main driver is Emby now. They both work well, but to me, Emby has the edge now. I hope they keep doing what they are doing! Edited to add that Hitsville below pretty much nailed what I meant Hey bud Nice to see you around here. Any regrets now that you've been here and using Emby for a while? Plex and Emby both have their own strengths and weaknesses. Plex pros: Plex's UI is cleaner and appears more polished. Emby's UI is comparatively rough around the edges in places but is (more) customizable. Plex's music player on mobile, at least on Android, is quite superior---again with an interface that is both cleaner and prettier, by among other things making use of Google's Material Design design language. Plex has limited audiobook support; but Emby's is barebones to say the least, with the inability to play multi-track books easily. Emby pros: Emby's posters cache and do not need to constantly refresh when scrolling back and forth on a page or when browsing different pages; Plex's posters reload every time they move off of and onto the screen again, even while on the same page. Emby has receptive Support staff; Plex's support staff (esp. employees) are largely either absent or dismissive. Emby does not bloat its app(s) and waste man-hours with cash grabs like online sources for News and sponsored Web Shows; Plex does. Routinely. And we had to demand a way to disable them before one was implemented. Emby is MUCH more stable and less prone to crashes; Plex for Android alone crashes multiple times daily, and often syncing of content will malfunction or break. Emby has a straightforward "Server > Library > Content" approach; Plex is ditching this company-wide in favor of a "Content > Category > Library (username)" approach. The latter does not scale well and comes with a host of organizational difficulties. EDIT: Emby is more responsive. MUCH more responsive. While remote from the server, Emby takes a fraction of the time to play content or to seek while playing. As I have said umpteen times, if Emby will get on the ball with multi-track audiobook support, I will drop Plex like a hot potato. I do use Emby, and even have a Premier account, but I can't use Emby for all my content yet. I pretty much agree on all points. The "Server > Library > Content" approach that Plex is abandoning is one of the three main reasons I've given up on Plex. The second is their ludicrous Live TV/DVR implementation. Third is the ever changing lack of control from the server/user standpoint. Their (Plex) development style is like nothing I've ever seen. Left hand often doesn't know what right hand is doing. No pre-thought of how said new feature will fit in with other features. As a Ninja I was constantly pointing out the contradictions in features that have them fight each other. Even when pointed out and they agree and then wouldn't change things as that would be inconvenient to dev schedules and would worry about the issues later! That's just dumb and part of the reason why many "features" always felt 85% there but not really usable on a day to day basis (but make it to a marketing bullet list of features). Things like Optimize that doesn't count audio in bit rate, streaming "Brain" that uses overall bit rates (correct). So you could optimize your media and even sync it to the cloud but it would still transcode because of overall bit rate. Just dumb or lack of planning or devs not knowing how their own product works in the real world. Plex on the other hand still does a few things better than Emby (hopefully not for long) such as being able to jump 1/2 way into a large recordings such as a 3.5 NFL game and start transcoding/remuxing from there for near instant start or resume without having to transcode everything up to that point. Being able to direct play TS in many apps (devices with mpeg2 support). In Emby it doesn't matter if the video codec is mpeg2 or H.264 if the package is TS it will require a remux or transcode on many devices. This to me is especially annoying when using Theater on a PC, Xbox or a Shield TV which surely can direct play this package type as other apps do this. I'm probably annoyed by this far more than most users as I watch a LOT of sports which typically can be very long and jump between football games on Sat/Sun. Plex adding lots of new "features" such as VR, News, Podcats, Web Shows, Plexamp (nice but about 10 years late) while dropping support for things people use like plugins, plex cloud, plex cloud sync, premium music feature Gracenote data, etc. They also don't allow the Admin to control those features but require users to log into a website to turn said features on or off (just dumb, dumb, dumb). Plex seems to want to be like "Apple" and be known as being an innovator but ends up more like Google Labs where little ever makes it out of the Lab worthy of real world use. There're loosing focus on USER CONTENT and easy navigation and play back and have some major issues with their clients that have gone on for months to years without fixing. That's just not tolerable to me when they have burned years of dev time on these side projects outside the core. It would be fine if the core itself worked better. This to me is where Emby excels. If something major like this is broken in Emby server or one of the clients it's usually fixed pretty quickly. I've been watching ebr working with one individual from the UK on Live TV issues to get proper functionality for that ONE USER. That's dedication and determination to make the product work and you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning then seeing Plex do this routinely with it's users. Talking of polishing, still don't like the way on some screens you see little bits of actors posters along the bottom of a movie page in some apps. Of course on web this is all resolution and ZOOM dependent. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perplexed 25 Posted October 19, 2018 Share Posted October 19, 2018 Hey bud Nice to see you around here. Any regrets now that you've been here and using Emby for a while? Hiya cayars! Nice to see you here too To answer your question: I think it says all that a week ago I received my new Note 9 and have yet to install Plex on it Seriously though the Emby UI keeps growing on me, but more importantly: it just works. Never any buffering or stuttering, no Emby dance to perform, and no confusion as to what server I'm on. It's sheer bliss 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hitsville 37 Posted October 19, 2018 Share Posted October 19, 2018 Have you got time to be chatting on here? [emoji23] Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carlo 4330 Posted October 19, 2018 Share Posted October 19, 2018 The "Plex Gang" all moving over to Emby. See the grass is GREENER on the other side. LOL 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hitsville 37 Posted October 19, 2018 Share Posted October 19, 2018 (edited) Yep I got my Premiere a couple of years ago. But kept falling back to Plex. It was actually Perplexed who suggested I take a look again. It's expensive though. As a previous Plex fanboy I had a domain and dynamics dns with Plex in the name....they just had to go. [emoji1787] Plex will be a distant memory soon. Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk Edited October 19, 2018 by Hitsville Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
speechles 1919 Posted October 19, 2018 Share Posted October 19, 2018 (edited) I honestly have never used plex. In 2012 I found out that you could do netflix style presentation through mb2. Right about that time welcome MB3. So okay, lets try this. Never knew plex existed. After I got into the community, and met redshirt, the gcw07, and the rest of the developers I knew I was in the right place. Even luke and ebr were over the top impressive back then as they are right now. So right about the time the Roku app came out on emby I figured hey, might as well get a Roku, this looks like a nice streamer. Got a roku3 late 2013. Still never knew plex existed until luke ported the plex codebase to emby for their Roku app. This was the original emby roku app, it was partially borrowed from plex's open source. This was open source.. OMG.. So I started to learn brightscript just to fix the issues on my Roku. This was right when Plex said, nope, we don't share code for the Roku app anymore. So I stayed with Emby and created Blue Neon as an expression of that freedom. I could just do whatever anyone wanted and let everybody be happy. This is something plex doesn't have. They do not have happy developers, and don't try to embrace their customers. The plex developers rarely take the opportunity to face the public. They maybe don't want to be flamed to death. They don't want to be the public face fronting their company. While ebr and luke both present themselves as such. They take the good, the bad, the ugly.. and do the right thing every time. No arguments, no threads just left to die, no hate threads, no real community policing required. This is because on this side of the fence we all want the same thing. To be happy with "Our media, Our way". I still to this day, have never installed plex, never used plex. Have read about it. Visited their forums. I do not have an account there. But honestly I have never needed to see the difference. When designing you must never feel the need to know what the competition is doing. You may want to know. But instead you should use the public and generate leads for feature requests, bug fixes, etc. Then use these leads users give you as an avenue to create something to fill the need those leads generated. These leads are used to generate more sales. To get sales you need leads. Leads are customers with demands/wants/needs. This is no different. Emby uses leads to generate features. Plex uses ? to generate features. ? = "their own internal hand-picked team of 5 people who really like movies".. or ? = "that dog they always show" .. or maybe ? = "adam west" .. and batman decides? damn.. really... but ? really means "not you". You don't. Edited October 19, 2018 by speechles 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hitsville 37 Posted October 19, 2018 Share Posted October 19, 2018 For me I discovered Plex simply through a new Samsung TV. I browsed the Samsung store, saw Plex and got curious. That was 2012. The Samsung Plex app itself was pretty great and trouble free. It just worked...and it was developed by a 3rd party. A few years later Plex themselves started doing TV apps and I also upgraded my TV to a model that no longer supported the 3rd party app. My Plex experience has been on a downward slide ever since. They just have no idea how to make a usable client. Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carlo 4330 Posted October 19, 2018 Share Posted October 19, 2018 My main server is still called "Plex" as I haven't gotten around to renaming it yet. I've got references to it all over the place so it's sort of a pain and I don't feel like breaking things. It's funny when Luke looks at my logs and says "you need to change your server name". Orca's Plex app was legendary. If someone asked for a feature he would add it if possible. That thing was feature packed and just worked! To this day it's still my favorite client for 3D video as it auto switches the TV mode. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Perplexed 25 Posted October 19, 2018 Share Posted October 19, 2018 The "Plex Gang" all moving over to Emby. See the grass is GREENER on the other side. LOL Hah... the grass wasn't always greener... but the simple fact is (or maybe I should say: in my personal opinion), Plex is rapidly sliding downhill whereas Emby keeps improving. It finally reached a point where Emby is now better than Plex in all the important matters, and I switched. I don't foresee many reasons to switch back, if both companies keep on doing what they are doing 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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