ifItWasUpToMe

When you first set it up it asks what you want to see, you probably just kept everything. Seems odd to purposely keep all their stuff, then complain about seeing all their stuff.

If plex is “complex” to you then I don’t know what to tell you, my parents can use it with zero issue, and that’s saying something.

I don’t have a source but if you setup a VPN to your home there’s no way plex could know that you aren’t actually home. So as long as local streaming works, then streaming over VPN would work as well.

Similar thing with port forwarding on your router, except it’s much worse for security.

Mainly STUN and TURN servers to allow NAT traversal without having to configure port forwarding and leave your server exposed to the internet.

It’ll use those servers to setup a peer-to-peer connection which at that point you are streaming directly to clients.

If you want to setup a VPN for your users, or open/forward public ports to your server then you do not need to pay.

The same way you’d set up remote plex.

Plex will have some cost associated with remote streaming, so I don’t see any issue with them charging for that.

If people don’t want to pay then they should just set it up themselves, like they would have to do with jellyfin anyways.