Submitted 5 days 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.
Enshittification engaged. /j
I’m done with Plex - They won’t get my recommendations. My holdoff buying PlexPass were the little bugs that always mattered - Pausing for more than a few minutes HARD locked up the stream, the stream had to re-init to load subtitles, and then the MAJOR issue with “What files is Plex NOT seeing” and other indexing issues. I paid for my Android app, happily. But now, telling me I can’t stream my own media, after paying for the app? Y’all can F right off with that. I’ll be finally setting up Jellyfin ASAP.
Wonder how long before those 2.99 a month figures will last. I give it a year before there’s no seperate remote streaming package and the only remaining one is >10$. The main appeal of Plex was not paying. It’s used by pirates. The goal is content for free. It’s no longer free. I don’t care at all if random people can use my Plex server. If they are unwilling to adapt to a new platform, then I guess they’ll resubscribe to Netflix. Most of them never unsubscribed from Netflix to begin with.
This was the end for me. Used Plex for almost a decade. I’m off to Jellyfin. It’s actually almost no change whatsoever to integrate it into my home setup.
Seeing how they now want 250 for lifetime Plex pass?! Over double what it was just a few years ago? Ridiculous, and us server owners haven’t seen really any new features come out recently. Jellyfin was a bit fiddly at first, but I’m getting used to it, and enjoying it more now I think
If you bought a Plex pass in the past your users won’t notice a difference. And I assume most server owners did it for the hardware encoding alone
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.
If you consider paying a monthly fee for something that was free yesterday then I guess I’m wrong, go ahead and pay the subscription
Open Source
LOL, there are at least a half dozen open source alternatives for Plex.
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.
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!
Indeed, no need to have Plex anymore. Will probably set up a family VPN and we can all stream directly from my harddrives, bandwidth is not an issue anyway.
No need to abandon all the user-friendly aspects of a self-hosted streaming platform. Just use Jellyfin. I switched to it from Plex years ago and have never looked back.
With a shared drive over a vpn connection everyone can choose their own player. No need for a streaming server anymore. Given the mbit bandwidth, a streaming server isn’t needed anymore. Reduces load on server.
It was announced some time ago. I started using Tailscale because of that
No matter how bad someone might think Jellyfin is, it is a million times better than subjecting yourself to endless ad slop on one of these ““free movies”” websites.
the link sends me to an cue of ads and dead pages.
You should have an adblocker like ublock origin or Adnauseam installed.
Your users are getting that because they have a plex account that they use to stream. They might stream from just you, but they could stream from any other shared server they’re connect to. That’s why they get this email.
If you have a plex pass and are a server owner, they can ignore this and keep streaming from you for free.
If they try to stream from a server owner who does not have plex pass, it won’t work u less the user themselves have a plex watch pass, whoch let’s them stream from any server that doesn’t have plex pass.
Since you have plex pass, your users won’t be impacted at all.
It’s a very confusing and poorly worded email. My users were equally confused. Not everyone is techy or even deeply aware of how Plex even works. Nor should they be expected to.
The message was designed to confuse and extract money from people who don’t know better. It’s trashy and they should be ashamed.
That said, I’m still using Plex for the time being.
How would you have worded it differently? Since the email needs to be sent because the person is losing a feature (they might not use it because they only stream from you, but they might stream from someone else, so they should be made aware of it)
This. Only the server owner needs a plexpass.
I am very fortunate in that before Plex I found and used ps3 media server/universal media server. Because of that, it always felt odd paying just to stream my own content on my own hardware. I am certainly not against paying developers, but Plex always felt like paying for another service, not donating to an awesome Dev cause I love what they do. Another reason I stopped using Plex, I couldn’t get anyone but myself to give a dam and use Plex, (suddenly, when NETFLIX gets The Last Air Bender, NOW my sibling wants to binge watch it. 🙁). Jellyfin has served me just fine so far, it fucks up only in the same situation plex did, when I try watching with someone else.
OP couldn’t comprehend an email, and when everyone tried to reassure them that nothing for them has changed they doubled down. The closest thing to justification I can figure is “all my clients are borderline illiterate as well and it upset them”.
How in the world could you be upset that a product you already paid for is not providing that specific feature for free anymore. They’ve even made the phone software free!
The closest thing to justification I can figure is “all my clients are borderline illiterate as well and it upset them”.
And now OP is saying that he’s switching to Jellfin and thinks that all of his borderline illiterate “clients” will be ok with using a VPN to access Jellyfin, if their device even has Jellyfin lol.
Also the way that OP says “users” and “clients” makes it pretty clear that he is charging people for access to his library. He is ok with making money off Plex’s work, but hates the idea of Plex making money.
I’m just curious, why are you so vehemently defending a shitty move by a corporation? No matter how you tackle the issue, taking away a function that used to be free and evidently has no costs associated to the corp is a textbook example of enshittification.
It is pretty damn obvious how this will continue.
Every time one of these gets posted I say “wait what? That was free before??”
This is the kind of feature I think is reasonable to charge for. As were the others people were complaining about. Plex lifetime pass is a one time fee.
I’ve used it briefly in the past but with all the streaming services popping up and prices going up I thought it will be a matter of time for Plex to follow suit. So I moved to Jellyfin and never looked back. I kept account (ok I forgot about it) but when I saw that email today in my mailbox I just logged in and deleted it.
Can I still watch from my pc to my tv locally through the Plex app?
Yes, its for external address using remote play.
I switched to Jellyfin recently and I mostly prefer it over Plex, except for lack of organization tools and the goddamn roulette wheel that is seeking. Why is it that seeking defaults to 30 second intervals, requires a click to confirm, and occasionally just jumps to some random point near the beginning of the file? Great software overall, but it’s wild to me that this basic playback functionality is so hit or miss.
I had the point near the beginning of the file thing once and it was a really shitty file that only VLC could seek in.
ffmpeg fixed it, but I’ve no idea how because ffmpeg command lines are some arcane black magic shit.
“Your friends” hahaha good joke
This only applies if you AND the server owner don’t have a pass: …plex.tv/…/requirements-for-remote-playback-of-pe…
No, as long as the Server owner has a Plex Pass the people on the other side don’t need to do anything… its only if the Server owner doesn’t have a Plex Pass then remote users would need one
That is correct and echoes what I said
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.
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.
jellyfin should make a plugin that changes their name to remote watch pass
It changes absolutely nothing, but it charges you $5 a month
What’s Plex’s use case? Why not just mpv locally?
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
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
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.
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!
Some pretty easy work arounds.
LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I don’t get why you’re being downvoted for spitting facts.
1000001490
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 5 days ago
Seriously for the 1000th time I have a plex pass.
catloaf@lemm.ee 5 days ago
I didn’t know why anyone who has Plex would pay for a pass. The whole time I used it, I never felt any need for additional features.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 5 days ago
if you like software you should support it.
blitzen@lemmy.ca 5 days ago
The skip intro/credits feature is nifty, and sonic analysis if you run a music library is worth the purchase price alone.
jumjummy@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Besides supporting them, the offline download feature on mobile is amazing for travel.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve tried to watch some downloaded Netflix content, only to realize it had “expired” and no longer worked.
merthyr1831@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
They doubled the price lol. And why pay $80 for something that they have the right to gut at any time?
LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Until they revoke it
LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
HappyTimeHarry@lemm.ee 5 days ago
How mamy months of server costs do you think those lifetime passes cover? If everyone just paid once for a lifetime then plex as a service can no longer function.
pory@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Server costs? Plex’s serverside only handles auth and verification. Once the client connects to the server, any media is sent peer to peer. There’s no stage where the video goes “to plex” or “from plex”. Saying plex needs to charge a sub fee to make up for bandwidth is like saying qbittorrent should do the same.
Unless you’re talking about the content Plex serves, the ones you have to walk every user of your Plex server through deleting from their apps’ homepage.
LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 5 days ago