My main complaint is that there isn’t a consistent experience between apps. Things are in different places, actions do different things in different apps, no gesture support, subpar players with horrible scrubbing, etc.
I think all apps should be held to a few basic UI/UX standards so going from one app to another isn’t a completely different experience.
The attached photo is just one example. Within the Apple TV app itself, long pressing an icon brings up this great menu allowing you to go straight to the show or the episode page. Long pressing in most other apps removes the show from your now playing list! All of these conflicting actions need to be rectified.
Would love them to, especially when you look at apps like prime video, YouTube and YouTube tv, who insist on using their own players, that are not as good of an experience.
If a developer is going to use their own player, they should be required to do two things.
Provide a reason which must be approved by Apple during certification. What do they want/need their player to do that the default player cannot do. There are plenty of good justifications for implementing a custom player, and the developer better have at least one otherwise what's the point? For example, the YouTube player allows users to thumb-up/down a video which is a thing they should expect to be able to do while watching YouTube via AppleTV.
Alternative players MUST be required to have feature parity with the default player. It's fine if they want to add more features, but they sure as hell should not be allowed to submit an app with a player that can't do everything the default player can. I want to pull my hair out every time I use apps that don't have the 10-sec skip feature, or ones that don't let you "circle the ring" to scrub, or even worse ones that don't allow you to effectively scrub at all.
Any attempt to force the use of Apple's player would return the Apple TV to "pretty much useless" status when it comes to Plex. So, personally, I really don't want to see that.
as I said on /r/plex, this is why I pay for infuse with free plex account 🤷♂️
I can’t sacrifice the Plex UI and features. It was a harder choice when Apple TV’s Plex app transcoded everything but now it hardly ever does so Infuse holds no real benefit for me.
The tvOS Plex app currently has a massive stack of issues, including a critical one that overheats the third gen Apple TV 4K with high bitrate 4K remuxes to the point that it chokes on them and stop playing (I´m not joking!).
Infuse does not overheat it because it uses the Apple TV hardware acceleration for every aspect of their custom player (Metal), whereas Plex still uses Open GL for quite a lot.
My recommendation at this point is to use Infuse instead. Yeah, its not free, but it uses the Apple TV hardware and feature set to its full potential, and performs so much better.
Never ben an issue for me, and Infuse is far too ugly and lacking features for me to use it.
Infuse would be equally as worthless
what? their player is (at least looking like) the stock apple TV SDK one.
u/GenghisFrog
Infuse is a great case of making exceptions pertaining not using the native player, yes.
The prime video app scrolling is so bad I have to browse on my phone and then search for it on the TV
Dolby Digital on YouTube flashes black for a full second everytime I load a video or ad, it’s so infuriating
Change your AppleTV to 4k sdr, with matching on, and it won’t do that anymore. You’ll get a quick black flash when loading Dolby or hdr content, but there’s way more sdr content out there.
The apps you've mentioned are simple web wrappers that display HTML5 content. If you go to youtube.com/tv you'll get the exact same web page that these streaming apps display. They do this because it's cheaper to maintain and you get the the exact same experience on every device. Not playing the devil's advocate here, just explaining why these apps are so bad and why I don't think this is going to change. In fact, Google did provide native apps on some plattforms and later replaced them with their low-quality HTML5 apps.
Besides, if you leave or turn off the atv with a video from YouTube onscreen, it will ~cock~block whatever you try to airplay later. That’s super annoying