Submitted 10 months ago by scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech to selfhosted@lemmy.world
https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/pictrs/image/4e4e5a49-2af2-46fe-82cf-a0e15e3fb8f9.png
cross-posted from: 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.
Totally agree with this. Plex has been drifting away from what made it great — the whole “own your media” ethos. I’ve been slowly moving my setup toward Jellyfin too, and honestly, it feels so much more in line with self-hosted values.
If anyone still wants a simple, lightweight media streaming option (especially for Android devices), CloudStream APK has been surprisingly solid no paywalls, no cloud lock-ins.
Jellyfin. I’ve been waiting for Plex to do this for years. Enshitification is everywhere.
As someone, who started with jellyfin, I never saw the reasons for the existence of Plex. There is no difference and people pay for it?
Hey Plex users, save your money and buy a coffee for the jellyfin team!
There is no difference and people pay for it?
There are several differences. Let alone the fact that Plex existed first and therefore people have been using it since before jellyfin was created.
Should have use libre software from the start my guy! Jellyfin / Kodi let’s go
“Your friends” hahaha good joke
How does this affect people who bought the lifetime service back in 2010?
It doesn’t, even when you share the Server, your users will be able to stream remotely.
Heloooooo Jellyfin!
Not everyone cares that much. I don’t.
Do you guys know a way on jellyfin to download media to the phone in lower quality/ less storage intense? This is the only thing I miss in my jellyfin instance
There are several third-party clients that you could try, depending on which OS you are using
I tried Streamyfin on android but that one is not working. Can you recommend something for android?
Not really a big deal for me but I looked around and couldn’t find anything sadly. My media is generally 2k with a larger phone it hasn’t not me to hard to switch seasons in and out (as they allow bulk downloads of seasons). Certainly would be a good feature of say!
The business model here is to basically paywall one user sharing (probably) pirated content with another person?
I can’t imagine how that could go tits-up for them in court
I’m sure their TOU moves all risk and liability to the users, so if anyone is getting sued, it’ll be the users.
The more likely outcome is that Plex just loses most of their users, since pirates (the majority of Plex users) won’t be willing to pay to access the content they already pirated.
Been on Plex for years, I will be fully migrated to Jellyfin by the end of the week
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.
You have had one of the more reasonable outlooks of this. I get that most of this stuff is fairly advanced for the average person who may be wanting to host, but anymore with letsencrypt, if you can port forward and spin up a container to run a plex server… you’re pretty close to just doing everything yourself. I don’t know why Plex feels the need to charge for “remote streaming” when from what I can tell, the most they’re doing is pointing a client at my server. As I said in other comments, it seems like a fancy dynamic DNS service, which is like, pennies for a multi year subscription. (Because it really doesn’t do much)
It really doesn’t do much and the cost is barely pennies per user when you operate at scale. The largest costs will be for the DNS resolver service and the domain registration, both of which you are already required to have, in order to have a functioning presence on the Internet. The cost of the issuing intermediate certificate is probably the largest single cost of the whole operation.
To be fair to Plex, they run some intermediary (caching) metadata servers to offload the demand their users put on services like the tvdb and IMDb. Honestly, is probably not required… But they do it. (I’ve seen their caching system fail more often than either site, so, it’s not all good), but even with that, you can put most of that load into your existing webhost, and it’s unlikely to make an impact on performance.
When you do this stuff at scale, the costs of simply having it set up, usually cover the costs of using it for thousands, if not tens of thousands of users.
So let me get this straight: you own the content, you host the content on your machine, you pay the electricity and internet and plex says it can’t afford to let you share it to others without a subscription fee?
I mean making plex a one time fee if it’s good turnkey solution is fine but subscription…
What’s Plex’s use case? Why not just mpv locally?
Plex (originally) and Jellyfin are a centralized way of managing your media with aesthetic and easy to use interfaces. I have one Jellyfin server and I have a Netflix/Display+ type interaction with my media. I have the same content on my phone, wife’s phone, my desktop, laptop, my TV, etc.
All watch history, recommendations, up next queue, and so on.
And with the right setup (Wireguard in my case) I can access that content from anywhere.
Plex sucks but jellyseer, the *arr stack and jellyfin are all open source and entirely free. Together they provide an experience almost as straightforward as any commercial streaming platform: find a media on jellyseerr and request it with a single click. A few minutes* later the media is available in Jellyfin, and you can watch it on your computer, smartphone, smart TV, …
*with Usenet and a good internet connection
It’s useful to have one of your friends host a home server and share all the movies with your friends. Then you can watch from the smart tv
Enshittification marches on.
I bought Plex Pass when it was $75 for the lifetime option.
I prefer Jellyfin, but sharing is harder for family members with it because I can’t get them to just log in without existing credentials (Google Account, Apple ID, etc). Trying to convince me 67 year old mother-in-law to enter a URL, username, and password into an app with a remote is like asking my child to eat broccoli.
For now, I’ll keep running dual stack with both. If Plex pulls lifetime passes, even though it’ll be a PITA, I’ll convert everyone to Jellyfin despite the pain.
I can’t even get my mother in law to use Plex tbh
One other sad thing of Jellyfin is that you can’t access multiple server at once with a unified view
Also true
Ditched this crapware for Jellyfin several years ago. Glad I did. It’s been great.
Use jellyfin, it’s much better. Also do not kill Elon Musk and Donald Trump, as much as they may deserve death.
2nd amendment is the only check and balance left and the idiots need to realize this within a month before it’s too late.
Martial law and gestapo raids were just legalised against anyone.
Some pretty easy work arounds.
I feel like people getting mad at this shit don’t even use plex. I run my server on lifetime pass. Have it on my Nas with overseer, radarr, sonarr, all that shit. Just a couple of months of not having subscriptions for me and my family pays for plex. If you log on plex once a month this shit ain’t for you to worry about.
thats closed software 101 now, hook us then make us pay if only there was something that was always free forever
Uninstalled. I don’t mind as much for sharing my library but if I have to pay to stream MY OWN SERVERS CONTENT using your service, that’s a hard pass. My homes all use jellyfin now
Dropped this for jellyfin years ago
Jellyfin users have been warning about such things for a long time, but very few actually listened. Well, here we are, hope more people migrate now
What’s the jellyfin experience like nowadays?
It is still more spartan than plex, more of a media library serving framework only. However even people who aren’t particularly well adjusted to tech (like my 75 yo mom), don’t seem to have an issue using it once it is set-up, and younger people with marginal tech expertise seem to be able to set up a server, and clients, with a little time on google. People complain about it not working on a lot of smart TV OSs, but I have not run into this, at least with the most popular ones, Roku, WebOS, TVOS, Google tv, Samsung, Vizio, however I have not tried it with an Apple TV. The biggest complaints I have personally received are mostly secondary features like polished library management interfaces.
I’ve had them side by side in preparation for this day.
Us jigglers tend to prefer jelly
Same. Plex is wack
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.
Woosh ? Thats literally the proble. thr OP referred to,he to has a Plexpass and his watchers are being notified.
My apologies for not coming back and reading all the comments left after mine to find that OP responded to a comment with that info. I stand by my original comment. His watchers should be notified. How do you or OP know that those watchers don’t steam content from other servers that don’t have a Plex Pass? Or did I miss that info buried in a response to a response too? 🙄
I have plex set up with cloudflare tunnels, with the url configured in plex under Settings > Network > Custom server access URLs, does this mean that my users will no longer be able to view content inside the plex app or app.plex.tv? The enshittification is real
If the host has Plex pass other accounts dont need it to watch, iirc.
I saw that in the email. I’ll be switching to jellyfin or emby before I give Plex my precious schmeckles to unlock a feature that doesn’t cost them any money.
Open Source
People use Plex?
“On 21 May 2008, XBMC developer Elan Feingold forked the source code of XBMC and started a new project called Plex”
GPL v2 source.
They’ve long been suspected of being greedy lil GPL violaters.
Another reason donating to FOSS is better than paying for proprietary software. Proprietary software devs get to run around stealing whatever code they like from the open-source community and never suffer any consequence because they don’t make their source available. I can think of a select few proprietary projects that have the balls to be source-available.
If you want to intentionally create a system that lets you evade accountability for stealing code, “fine”, but I have zero respect for you or your product, and I’m certainly not paying you a dime. I’ll put my money toward the developers who work to better the world instead of the rat fucks who steal from them to make money and pollute the software ecosystem with proprietary trash.
Oh no a paid, proprietary, piece of shit software does something shitty. Who could’ve ever saw this coming?!
I’ve said it for years anytime anyone mentioned running a Plex server. As soon as you install that on your server or your homelab it’s no longer your server. Proprietary software is malware
The worst part for me was reading that they monitor everything you do, and what you streams and who looks at your stuff.
Wtf
I hope more people realise this.
If it’s not Open Source, I don’t want it
B-b-b-but my convenience!!!
sj_zero 10 months ago
I started on Plex and even considered a lifetime Plex pass, but I felt like it was more interested in showing their content than my content. It was a lot of effort just to show music and movies.
My family and I use jellyfin every day now, and a key thing is it starts off boring but it shows your music, your movies, your books, your photos.
For folks who migrate who were paying, consider a donation to projects you make heavy use of. They don't usually have big companies behind them and can use the help.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 10 months ago
Exactly how I’ve felt. I paid for a pass a long time ago, when they were actively making features for us server owners - but lately it’s been a good 80-90% of their crap content and very little for server owners. I’m not even upset about their content really, it’s just they blately have ignored everything else. It’s shifted, and so I have to as well.