I have a >10tb collection in Plex and stream to a Nexus Player (among many other devices, some over WAN) with zero issues. The biggest "issue" I've ever faced is that sometimes I need to lower my playback quality to 720p when I'm streaming over WiFi.
So glad I bought the lifetime Plex pass- I am happy to support the folks who made such a reliable and lovely product.
Generally speaking, if you are having issues with a product that is almost universally beloved by tens of thousands of paying customers, the issue is most likely on your end.
edit: The downvoters are going wild in this thread. Anyone who advocates Plex is being buried. For a moment I thought I was back on reddit!
I've been running Plex off of a Freenas server franksteined together from spare parts (from pc upgrades) for nearly 10 years now. The Plex clients I use are Roku, PS3, App, and Browser. I've never had significant problems, I even ended up buying a lifetime Plex Pass.
It's a fantastic product, and I haven't even had to pay for it. I really ought to get a lifetime plex pass at some point.
Plex crashes constantly on my Roku. (This may no longer be true, as I haven't touched it in a year because it crashes so much). That's not low quality hardware, it's bad app.
I expect a dedicated hardware device for streaming videos that can stream Netflix, Hulu, Sling, etc, to be able to stream Plex.
The crash could very well be caused by some kind of incompatibility or issue with your server.
I'm sure that you've combed through your event logs on the server to verify this isn't the case, though.
>I expect a dedicated hardware device for streaming videos that can stream Netflix, Hulu, Sling, etc, to be able to stream Plex.
Why would you expect Plex, which plays back content served up by an environment which you control and maintain, to have similar compatibility as Netflix or Hulu, which plays back content served up by a multi-million dollar CDN infrastructure?
That's like saying "I expect my self-hosted WordPress blog to have the same level of reliability and usability as CNN.com" -- it's unreasonable to put the burden on WordPress/Plex when you are the one who manages the server that the content is served from.
Again: it seems to me that the issue is on your end, and not Plex's, because there are thousands of people who have no issues running Plex with Roku.
Either way, you could either:
a. Take the time to organize your library, like anyone who successfully uses Plex has.
or
b. Provide metadata to the open databases that Plex uses, to help both yourself and the next person who needs it.
The important thing to remember is that Plex is not made by wizards... it's software, and for it to catalog your library you need to name your files in a way that it can comprehend.
The notion of being able to find and play a file that isn't a formal mainstream movie doesn't seem all that obscure to me, and doing a search on filename isn't exactly what I'd classify as wizardry or difficult to implement. At the very least it doesn't seem like a crazy idea.
When I google solutions to these problems, I find threads up to two years old and end with Plex staff 1) not responding, or 2) saying, "We'll fix it eventually." And after two years they haven't!
That's not even counting how buggy or nonfunctional most channels are.
So glad I never bought the Plex Pass- wouldn't be right to give these people any more money when their product is so unreliable.