melmi

The UX just isn’t there for MPV. Jellyfin isn’t always ideal but it gives an interface roughly on par with a streaming service. Why should I replace that with a tool like MPV? I don’t need keyboard controls, I watch from my couch. It seems like all downsides to me.

Be that as it may, the Plex official guide for setting up “remote streaming” walks you through port forwarding. That implies that when they say remote streaming, they mean port forwarding by default. I then had to go digging to find mention of the Relay service which seems to be a fallback. (Apparently it isn’t even supported by all clients)

Surely if they meant they’d start charging for Relays they’d mention that explicitly, and not use the term “remote streaming”?

It’s the confusing mess of subscriptions and seemingly locking basic functionality behind a paywall that’s skeevy, not paying for software itself. I have happily paid for software before and would again. Plex has never appealed to me though, and they’re certainly doing nothing to make themselves more appealing.

Do you have a source for this claim that the new pricing scheme only applies to the Plex Relays? As far as I can tell it applies to anything they consider “remote access”, regardless of whether it goes through their servers or not.

It seems deeply opposed to the spirit of selfhosting to have to pay for the privilege of accessing one’s own server. If the software itself cost money, that would be one thing, but this whole monetization scheme is skeevy.

It seems like multiple things are being conflated here and I’m not sure what the reality is because I’ve never used Plex.

Some people claim this has something to do with Plex needing to pay for NAT traversal infrastructure. Okay, that seems sort of silly but at least there’s the excuse that their servers are involved in the streaming somehow.

But their wording is very broad, just calling it “remote streaming.” That led me to this article on the Plex support website, which walks people through setting up port forwarding in order to enable “remote streaming”! So that excuse doesn’t really seem to hold water. What exactly is being paid for here then? How do they define what “local streaming” is?