cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/2333639
I was just forwarded this someone in my household who watches our server. That’s it folks. I’ve been a hold out for a long time, but this is honestly it.
They want me to pay to stream content that I bought from my hardware transcoded also on my hardware.
I’ll say it. As of today, I say Plex is dead. Luckily I’ve been setting up Jellyfin, I guess it’s time to make it production ready.
Edit: I have a Plex Pass. More comments saying “Just buy a plex pass” are seriously not getting it. I have a Plex Pass and my users are still getting this.
And for the thousandth person who wants to say the same things to me:
- YES I know I’m unaffected as a Plex Pass owner.
- My users were immediately angry at it, which made me angry. Our users don’t understand what plex pass is, and they shouldn’t have to, that’s why I had it. The fact that they were pinged even though it should have kept working is horribly sloppy
- Plex is still removing functionality. I don’t care that “People should pay their fair share”. If Plex wants to put every new feature behind a paywall, that’s completely okay. They are removing functionality.
- “But they have cloud costs”. Remote streaming is negligible to them. It’s a dynamic DNS service. Plex client logs in, asks where server is, plex cloud responds with the IP and port of where server is located. That’s it.
- “Good luck finding another remote streaming” - Again, Plex just opens up an IP and port. Jellyfin also just opens up an IP and port (Hold on jellyfin folks I know, security, that’s a separate conversation). All “remote streaming” is is their dynamic dns. Literal pennies to them. Know what actually is costing them money? Hosting all of that ad-supported “free” content that they’re probably losing money on.
In short, I don’t care how you justify it. Plex is doing something shitty. They’re removing functionality that has been free for years. I’m not responding to any more of your comments repeating the same arguments over and over.
I love Plex and will continue using it. I bought a lifetime Plex Pass years ago for and have no regrets. My Plex Pass means none of my watchers have to worry about paying anything.
Use jellyfin, it’s much better. Also do not kill Elon Musk and Donald Trump, as much as they may deserve death.
The more users on Jellyfin the better shot it has at getting more developer attention and users willing to contribute financially even if just occasional one off donation. How it goes with any open source application. More users, more developer interest, more feedback from users, subset of users willing to financially support the project
People use Plex?
This doesn’t really affect my household. My wife, my daughter, and I all have lifetime PlexPasses.
That said, this level of enshitification has me wishing there were options (yes I know about Emby and Jellyfin and I’ve investigated both more than once) but they have me ensnared by PlexAmp and Sonos integration. I’ve been around since before anyone had even seen the letters MP3 strung together, and I have never had a music player as capable as PlexAmp.
Lol “Your Friends at Plex”
get fucked, assholes, Jellyfin is better anyway
I fucking hate corporate speak.
Jellyfin is better anyway
I wish this were true, but as a multi-year Plex-to-Jellyfin migrant, I have to point out that Plex was the better software.
I still choose to run Jellyfin for other reasons (don’t like the commercial path Plex is taking, among others), but I still do miss the better reliability and larger feature set in the Plex software stack.
Literally for now. They’ll be plex in 5-10 years.
That’s what Emby thought.
Good thing jellyfin is open source then.
Doesn’t jellyfin just not do this at all? Like if you want to stream remotely you need to figure out a vpn solution to do it?
“Very easy” assuming you aren’t trying to share with non-technical people or your elderly parents.
I’ve walked them through using tailscale. You install it once and forget it.
Also Wireguard, which is what Tailscale uses.
Yeah, they both do. That’s a lot more manual though.
Completely unreasonable to need to walk people through this. It’s OK to say jellyfin can’t do remote access.
Dude how the hell am I supposed to walk my mom through setting up tailscale on her Roku?
And what if you have multiple friends all sharing each others libraries?
This is not a feasible solution let alone a “very easy” one.
That’s correct
That is not correct. A VPN would be one method but you can also just expose the service to the internet in a number of ways and accomplish the same thing Plex provides.
That’s correct
You probably shouldn’t just expose jellyfin to the internet quite yet though. There are some ongoing efforts to fix unauthenticated endpoint problems.
‘Ongoing efforts’ is a funny way to phrase ‘refuse to fix’
To be fair, there has been very slow progress toward securing some endpoints. But yeah, I was probably being too charitable; the project places way too much emphasis on “backward compatibility” and not enough on security.
Not to be “achtuallying” bit VPN is not a way to remote stream, it’s a way to bring remote clients in the local network.
Likewise exposing services on the internet…not really going to happen esepcially for people - like me - that run plex/jellyfin on their NAS.
I don’t have a horse in this race, i don’t use remote streaming, I only ever streamed from my nas to my 2 TVs, and I am experimenting with jellyfin. But for those who do need remote streaming, jellyfin is going to be problematic.
Not necessarily a VPN but you’re 100% on your own for security. When i used to run Emby, I had a white-list IPs but this doesn’t work great since most ISPs rotate IPs over time and if you’re on wireless it could change all the time.
No. You have to expose your server to the internet in some way bit you don’t have to set up some sort of VPN. There are plenty of people who will tell you how awful of an idea it is but if you make smart choices it’s not a big deal.
You can stream remotely via jellyfin if you expose your server to the internet. VPN is safer but not the only option.
I used a reverse proxy just fine.
I use a non-rooted docker, reverse proxy, and cloudfare domain. I know Jellyfin has some API security issues but I’m still unconvinced that any of them can be used to escalate to any level that would threaten my server (or even my instance of Jellyfin).
Incorrect.
You’re 100% correct. I always find it funny how hardcore some people are with jellyfin vs Plex. I’ll probably end up getting downvotes on this but imo Plex is way simpler to setup and keep running, and as a lifetime pass owner, I’ve very rarely felt like my experience has been deteriorated by any of the changes that the jellyfin crowd freaks out about. Plus plexamp is honestly such a great music player. I’ll happily keep running Plex for the foreseeable future.
My bad, this is all because I finally decided to purchase a lifetime pass.
It was announced some time ago. I started using Tailscale because of that
“Your friends” hahaha good joke
Enshittification engaged. /j
I am also a Plex pass person. Multiple times over in fact. I actually have a dedicated account for my server administrator that’s separate from the account I use to watch content. Both have Plex pass lifetime.
I’ve been familiar with this coming down the pipeline for a while and because I have Plex pass, I too, am unaffected, as are my users.
At the same time: here is a piece of software that I paid for. It’s “server” software, sure, but it’s just a software package. What it does isn’t really relevant. The fact is that it processes data stored on my systems, processing by my systems, using my hardware, and sends that data over the Internet, using the Internet connection I pay for separately, and delivers that data directly to the people I’ve designated as capable of doing so.
The only part of this process that Plex, the company, has any involvement in, is limited to: issuing an SSL certificate, managing user accounts and passwords, and brokering where to find data (pointers to my systems).
You can get a free SSL certificate from let’s encrypt. User accounts, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), is a function of pretty much everything that you remotely connect to, whether a Windows SMB/cifs share, your email, even logging into your own local computer regardless of OS… And honestly, brokering the connection isn’t dissimilar to how torrent trackers work, DNS or a goddamned IP address punched into a browser.
They’re offering shockingly little for what they’re asking, and the only thing that’s on the list that would be costly in the slightest is having a DNS name for the server (registration of the domain, DNS services, etc). And given the scale that they’re doing these things at, the individual costs per name is literally pennies per year.
This is not a good look at all.
I have domain names coming out of my ears. I’m tempted to buy one more and just offer to anyone that wants it, to have a subdomain name under that to run their Plex alternative on, so you can get a let’s encrypt SSL certificate, and stay safe on the Internet. I don’t want the feds snooping into what totally legal Linux ISOs are being shared.
I just don’t know how to program at all, so I have no idea how I would go about setting up a system for that. The concept would be to automate it, and have people create an account, then request a DNS name under one of my DNS domains, and have a setting if you want it to have an A record, AAAA record, or cname (if you have a ddns setup). Once the request is in, it would connect to be DNS provider and add the record for you.
The part I’d want to have as a check on the system is to make sure that you’re hosting jellyfin or something from the address you submit, to prevent people from using it for unrelated purposes; but even with that… Do I care of people do that? Probably not. I would limit how many addresses you can have per account.
I don’t see this talked about much anymore, but the day Plex added telemetry in 2017 was the day I became five-alarm desperate for an alternative. Had to wait a 2-3 years with Plex’s telemetry IP’s and domains blacklisted before Jellyfin was mature enough for me to make the change.
How Plex users can be comfortable with any telemetry is beyond me.
Can I still watch for free from my pc to my tv locally through the Plex app?
What’s Plex’s use case? Why not just mpv locally?
Welcome to jellyfin!
