Pure rent seeking. It’s not the only example. So many products have artificial defects deliberately added by the manufacturer so that they can then charge you to disable the defect.
Comment on Plex’s crackdown on free remote streaming access starts this week - Ars Technica
de_lancre@lemmy.world 6 days agoTwo years ago, when I found out that you need damn subscription, to watch stuff with transcoding (I believe it was for transcoding per se, not for watching itself), I complained on reddit and a lot of people was disagree with me for harsh position.
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eah@programming.dev 5 days ago
sunbeam60@feddit.uk 5 days ago
They deliver a working piece of software to you. They employ people to maintain it and add new features. They ask a price for this work.
How is this rent seeking?
Buckshot@programming.dev 5 days ago
Years ago now, they pushed an offer for lifetime subscription onto my server. I clicked it, went through to their website and bought it, paid, the subscription activated and worked.
The next day they emailed to say actually i wasn’t eligible for the offer, they cancelled it and refunded me and said it would actually cost $30 more.
I installed Jellyfin that same day, it was pretty buggy back then but was definitely the right decision.
PhAzE@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
Lies. Local streaming never required a plex pass. Its for remote streaming only, but keep pushing that false narrative.
Zanathos@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Welcoming the incoming dowvotes for correcting your comment just like the many similar comments and posts I’ve seen on Reddit, but this is purely a configuration issue.
Transcoding on local network is allowed without a subscription. If you are running your own DNS server (like pihole or unbound) you need to configure an internal “plex.direct” record. You also need to uncheck an option to “treat your WAN IP as internal” option which corrects double NAT issues.
I have yet to see a need to move away from Plex. I paid for the cheap lifetime sub over a decade ago at this point and everyone I invite has no complaints and has not had to pay Plex a dime. I will check out Jellyfin at some point if Plex makes things more difficult in time, but for now these articles are literally just rage bait in the homelab ecosystem. They enacted this back in April of 2025 already!
kalpol@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
I never checked to see what was actually in the logs but when i was running Plex, it constantly tried to send a lot of log data to its masters. That alone was enough to budge me up and get Jellyfin. Jellyfin isn’t as polished but it works perfectly fine for me.