2025-04-30 The New "Plexperience"...

You may have noticed some differences in Plex over the past few days. I should have notified before, but totally forgot to write an entry. 

Long story short:  Plex pricing has changed A LOT. It pretty much doubled. Not really an issue for most of you, probably, as I own a Plex Pass, so remote playback will be available for everyone. Furthermore, Plex has started rolling out new (mobile) clients.

I want to expand a little more into these new clients, as these WILL have an effect on the experience you have. Please check out this blogpost by Plex for more information. Plex will be rolling out new clients, starting with the mobile apps. This has two effects.

First, from now on, music libraries will no longer be available for playback through Plex (at least the mobile clients). Moving forward, these libraries may only become available through Plexamp, which doesn't (yet) have any TV clients. Which means playing back my surround music library may soon become impossible... For now the TV clients won't be updated, so the libraries may still be available for the foreseeable future. If it becomes fully impossible, I'll try to find a different solution for this.

Secondly, probably more important to most, when updating to the new mobile client, a few settings stupidly get reset to their default option. Most importantly, it will reset the remote playback quality to 2.0 Mbps (shame on you Plex, this setting has been outdated for at least ten years, 2G and 3G pretty much don't even exist anymore), which WILL prevent you from playing almost any content on the server. Go to Settings > Video & Audio > Cellular Quality and set it to "Maximum" to resolve. Also make sure "Allow Direct Play" and "Allow Direct Stream" are enabled. 

For anyone who didn't yet; I strongly recommend you check out these two pages: Client Config, Account Config. These pages contain almost all the information you need to setup you account and player correctly to prevent playback issues. I won't (and probably can't) help resolve issues if you didn't at least check out both these pages. They are based on the old mobile client, but as far as I know still hold up completely.

Personally, I don't really like the changes. I understand the necessity to change the subscription prices (for the first time in like 20 years, not the Netflix-esque bi-weekly price increase), but removing the possibility to play back music through the main app is a choice I can't get behind. We'll see what the future, and the new clients hold.

Hope I explained the most important things clearly, otherwise, feel free to leave a comment and I'll try to get back to you ASAP.

Kind regards, 

L