Plex today announced the launch of an updated Apple TV app that's available right now in a beta capacity.
The updated user interface has been designed for the larger screen of a TV with a side bar rather than a top menu bar, which is meant to be a better use of screen space.
The side bar is customizable so you can pin your favorite media sources, put them in the order that you want, and send the rest of the content to the "More" menu that's out of the way.
Plex is aiming to make it easier to get to where you want to go, with more discoverable actions and sources and more intuitive navigation. Customizable navigation is also a key part of the new Plex experience for Apple TV. More features are listed below:
- Customizable & always accessible sidebar navigation.
- Ability to pin your favorite libraries from all your servers to the sidebar.
- Reorder your libraries in the sidebar.
- Quick access to all the rest of your media through the "More" menu item.
- Redesigned tab views that remember your previous view within each library (can be controlled via setting).
- A customizable home screen including pinning content rows from any library to home.
The updated Plex interface is available for beta testers, and you can sign up to be a beta tester on the Plex website by filling out a registration form. Beta access can take up to one week as requests need to be processed by Plex.
![Apple Pulls Keynote, Pages and Numbers From App Store [Update: Back]](https://images.macrumors.com/t/Okb7kitB_gNr6qe5Pex9nQIysD8=/112x112/article-new/2026/01/Apple-Creator-Studio-iWork-suite.jpg)
Top Rated Comments
- they are notorious for breaking things and then fixing them and call it progress
- their UI changes are awful, constant regress, they actually killed amazon fire tv in my household. I could not look at it their UI anymore
- on Samsung TV app, everyday is a lottery what would work what would not
- scrolling through content is pathetic, just compare it to Netflix
- they never got a handle on 4K playback
- iPhone offline sync shows items synced but cant play them back
I’m trying to figure out why the side bar is necessarily better. In the screenshot it looks like you can’t see much of your media. Most other apps use a bar at the top. I’ll give it a go though.
A video file is made up of a container, MKV, MP4, etc. And an audio and video file. Sometimes a sub file. If all are supported by the client then it direct plays.
If the audio and video are supported but not the container then it direct streams. This doesn't use much CPU.
If the audio isn't supported but the video is then it transcodes the audio but not the video. This doesn't use much CPU either.
Only if the video file isn't supported then it transcodes and this is what uses more CPU.
Most of my content are MKV with H265 video and the HD audio track. So mine direct stream, video is not transcoded as it's supported on the ATV4k and it transcodes the audio. Only a small amount of CPU is used.
Any shows I download are almost always supported on the ATV4k and thus no transcoding at all.