Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April
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It used to be against their TOS. They removed the language over a year ago last I saw.
That’s good to know.
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No, it's still wrong.
We have ways to do NAT traversal and hole punching on consumer routers. Failing that, UP&P and port forwarding exist. Or, god forbid, IPv6.
In the rare case that literally none of those are an option, they would have to use TURN to relay between an intermediary. That is a reasonable case to ask the user to pay for their bandwidth usage, but they don't have to be greedy fuckers by making everyone pay for it.
They make a product. It's not just the cost of infrastructure.
They have developers and other employees
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Glad I bought the Plex Pass like 13 years ago. While I understand everyone seems to think everything should be free, I'm sure your boss wishes you worked for free too, but the world doesn't work that way.
I'm OK supporting products I use , and Plex is an example of this for me. It was a well spend $75 in 2013
OK, but why is it a for profit company in the first place?
And why does open source Software like xz, ffmpeg, etc still work without being for profit?
Fucking liberal.
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Makes sense. I’m fully dockerized so I’ve got that going for me
I'm fully Dockerized (well, uhh... Podmanized) and I'm dual-wielding Plex and Jellyfin. Runs smoothly and both only have read to the content. All management of the media is handled by the *arr stack anyway. I even set up a volume for Plex to throw conversions into that Jellyfin can't see. I'm currently personally using Jellyfin and I'm waiting for Jellyfin to be good enough (or Plex bad enough...) for the users I share with to switch over.
I can definitely recommend that setup.
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They make a product. It's not just the cost of infrastructure.
They have developers and other employees
And this isn't a new feature they're adding. Remote streaming was already implemented and generally available to users.
I don't discount there being a cost in maintaining code over time, but it's not as though they have to spend any significant employee time on this. They already support UPnP and NAT-PMP to have the clients connect directly to the self-hosted servers.
It would be nice if they added NAT hole punching on top of that, but it's evidently good enough to work as-is.
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We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
So it looks like the server will need plex pass in order to stream to users, or the user can pay about $2/mo to stream from servers without plex pass. I feel like this is fine, doesn't really come across as greedy or egregious.
I've set up plex, overseer, sonaar, and radaar in such a way that my family and friends can request and watch videos on my server. I use plex because it's the easiest for my less than tech savvy family to use, as it's just an app on their TV.
I have never paid a cent for Plex while Plex has allowed me and my family to save hundreds in subscription fees, so I'm feeling rather ambivalent about this new requirement for me to get plex pass in order to stream to the small horde of people I serve. I was considering getting plex pass to unlock hardware acceleration for transcoding anyway.
I've considered Jellyfin, but plex has a ton of features that allow for scripting that keeps me from having to manually do maintenance. Not to mention how hard it would be to get people like my father to use Jellyfin on his TV, last I checked there isn't even TV app available for most platforms.
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I'm not pirating a bunch of shows just to pay Plex for the privilege of watching it.
Also remember to give them your credit card, name and address for the privilege of pirating the content.
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Nah. Cool that you think that, though. The moment they started charging for what was a free service, they lost me. I have gigabit internet. The only reason i used their service to begin with was ease of use.
Hot take but maybe everything doesn't need to be an infinitely expanding business. Just imagine for a second that it's fine for something to just break even, pay for the few mainteners salaries and not expand the business at all ever. I know that I just uttered the cardinal evil under capitalism but fucking seriously. The primary userbase of plex is pirates. The whole incentive is not having to pay for a streaming service. Charging money for it is just torpedoing your entire userbase. The entire appeal of Plex was it not charging money.
Yah and I still bought a plexpass and then left Plex. Do I care no I got my money worth. Software costs money how would they continue to developed it if not getting paid?
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I fucking hope to god they don't go full enshittification and decide to revoke the lifetime licenses.
Nah they'll just release Plex2
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Lots of businesses have and do exist without a subscription model. I'm fond of the Paprika Recipe Manager, for example, which asks a one-time payment for each major version. All commercial software worked this way in the 80s.
I wonder how much money Plex still makes through their lifetime purchases. Is it that they were struggling and then made bad business decisions with the aim on increasing revenue (ad supported video on demand)? Or was it the other way around?
In the 80s new systems usually came with new OSs, which required porting software it. Thus a lifetime license was practically limited.
I wouldn't be as opposed to a subscription model if it was cheaper and they focused on their actual core product, not all the other fluff around. 5€/m is a bit much given they don't pay for my bandwidth.
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Lots of businesses have and do exist without a subscription model. I'm fond of the Paprika Recipe Manager, for example, which asks a one-time payment for each major version. All commercial software worked this way in the 80s.
Did you notice what you said there each major version. Plex has been rolling releases for years. Maybe they should have done Plex 1 2 etc. yes software has been that way forever but you would pay for a version and then a year later pay for another one. Now people expect to pay once and get upgrades forever.
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Nah they'll just release Plex2
Right ya at some point there will be a PlexPass Pro lol
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OK, but why is it a for profit company in the first place?
And why does open source Software like xz, ffmpeg, etc still work without being for profit?
Fucking liberal.
They don't. Most people get paid by companies to work on that stuff.
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Don't ask me? I'll ftp before I'll WebUI like so, but for online viewing, I'll take streaming please. My kids, wife, and mother-in-law find that a million times more convenient.
Meanwhile, there's a dude hating on the notion that Jellyfin's app will download the Raw file for offline viewing purposes. Please, do not ask me to pretend to care what is going on in that person's head. In my world, using VLC to play my files is a perk. Gimme that yummy 2x or slow-mo as I see fit, please.
I use Findroid for its great UI but also its ability to download and watch offline. It's a better experience and I was surprised Jellyfin Android didn't support it.
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We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
If you don't like the price there's always jellyfin.
Got to say that I have been very happy with it.
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If I didn't already have my lifetime pass, I'd use Jellyfin as my primary media server platform instead of Plex.
One of these days though, I'm sure Plex will make a mistake serious enough that it impacts me, and I'll end up switching to Jellyfin as my main media server platform.
I'm in the exact same boat. I have a Jellyfin server configured and ready to go whenever something happens to really piss me off. This nearly was it until I saw that my lifetime Plex pass I bought 10 years ago will make it still be free for my family.
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I've never had an issue with the apps. It's on my Chromecast and my android phone, and I typically stream to the TV from my phone.
My only issue is that they require a real cert (which is good tbh) and I am having trouble getting letsencrypt working due to my isp blocking port 80 and me dragging my feet getting DNS working
Let's Encrypt supports DNS verification, if you have access to update the zone file. It makes automation harder, but there are scripts to do the DNS update for the verification.
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Yah and I still bought a plexpass and then left Plex. Do I care no I got my money worth. Software costs money how would they continue to developed it if not getting paid?
Software costs money how would they continue to developed it if not getting paid?
Apparently a hot take as evidenced the downvotes on my other comments here, but by adding things people want instead of taking away things people already have and charging more for it.
They don't even have the excuse that they need to pay for the bandwidth costs of relaying video from servers to clients. Video is streamed directly from the user's self-hosted server, using UPnP or NAT-PMP to make the server accessible from outside the local network.
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No, it's still wrong.
We have ways to do NAT traversal and hole punching on consumer routers. Failing that, UP&P and port forwarding exist. Or, god forbid, IPv6.
In the rare case that literally none of those are an option, they would have to use TURN to relay between an intermediary. That is a reasonable case to ask the user to pay for their bandwidth usage, but they don't have to be greedy fuckers by making everyone pay for it.
Reading about NAT Traversal and all that nonsense makes me want to start out my own ISP and we just configure things to be good because the corporate assholes clearly haven't. Imagine how much better things could be if hosting stuff from your home internet connection was just a thing you could do with no drama
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We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
"A subscription"
Its the same Plex pass subscription for people who don't want to read a clickbait article.
