Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April
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Okay. I finally understand what you mean 🥲
Authenticate a self hosted software stack in someone else's cloud
That is a wild design choice. Glad it works for some...
Anyway... apologies for being ignorant
No need to apologize, it's a weird choice from Plex, I would have never guessed that this is how it works if I hadn't suffered outages myself, and I'm amazed that not many people call them out on this, it seems completely against what most self-hosting people are looking for, but they seem to defend Plex with teeth and nails.
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I used to use Plex, then one day my internet was down and since Plex couldn't phone home, it wouldn't let me log in to watch media ON MY LAN.
So yeah it's inherently broken. That's before you even consider the licensing.
I can watch it without Internet
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Or morally better than breaking TOS, use a FOOS alternative like Jellyfin.
Nothing morally wrong with working around a artificial limitation.
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You need an internet connection to connect to a offline LAN Plex server
Not true.
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One does not need an internet connection for offline use. Check this if you're having issues.
One does not need to pay for multiple user accounts. As per this update, they are actually removing the one-time fee for non family member mobile apps. Now it's all free, provided the server owner has a Plex Pass.
Plex has been supporting hardware transcoding since 2017.
To be clear, I'm not saying Jellyfin is bad. I think it's great to have competition and I understand plenty of people like it.
Lol, I'm the server owner, so I am expected to pay to allow multiple accounts. Which is my exact complaint.
I had issue with offline usage, and found, with time, it only got worse. My lan clients eventually stopped showing my server unless I logged into my Plex account first.
Maybe things changed since, my experience, Plex became overly dependant on a connection to their servers.To little to late, I've since moved to Jellyfin, which solved my frustrations.
I have no interest in moving back to Plex. -
If you say so, but my clients started refusing to locate my Lan server, but worked fine once I logged into my Plex account. I've never struggled since moving to jellyfin. No chance I'll ever go back to Plex
I might be a problem if you are logged out of your plex account while offline. But I didn't have to login for years on either of my clients.
You can also give special access to local IP addresses on LAN to ignore authentication. But yeah, that's a bit hidden in the settings. -
Yeah, so I have local accounts for my family, but only the last person signed in can get back in if the Internet goes down. We still have temporary access to most of the media, but it sucks.
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I really, really wish I could competently set up and maintain a Jellyfin server. But even if I could, I have to get my wife comfortable with interfacing with it too. She has really enjoyed using Plex because it basically slots right in any lineup of the major streaming services
I have offered logins to a couple family and they just say hmm, never heard of it, sounds illegal and don't use it lol
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A big part of the appeal with Plex is that you can run a server and friends can sign up for a FREE account and stream remotely. When you take this away, you're going to just kneecap the whole offering. This is such an arrogant move from Plex: they are thinking that when this change goes live they will get a flood of subscriptions. The more likely outcome is they will get a few subscriptions and a lot more angry and frustrated people that walk away.
Friends can still stream for free, as long as the server is paying for plex pass. That was my main concern, too, but they make a point of stating it directly in the release.
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They do not have chromecast support. (Atleat the last time i checked) Thats a deal breaker for me, would live to use it.
.... I'm using Chromecast and Google TV, though Chromecast isn't very good, really, and Google TV stared showing commercials every now and then since a while ago, so that too will be on its way out.
But yeah, they're supported
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I've got to admit that I've never used Plex (I'm a cantankerous open software fanatic), but how do you get your media on there? You're hosting your own server so presumably you're downloading the media somehow. Are you doing it manually? If so, you can do the same with Jellyfin. Is it automated with some tool built into Plex?
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Authelia maybe?
Interesting project. Thanks for the link and I do appreciate it and could see some very good uses for that but it's not quite what I meant.
Unfortunately as it notes it works as a companion for reverse proxies so it doesn't solve the big hurdle there which is handling secure and working flow (specifically ingress) of Jellyfin traffic into a network as a turn-key solution. All this does is change the authorization mechanism but my users don't have an issue with writing down passwords and emails. Still leaves the burden of:
- choosing and setting up the reverse proxy,
- certificates for that,
- paying for a domain so I can properly use certificates for encryption,
- making sure that works,
- chore of updating the reverse proxy, refreshing certs (and it breaking if we forget or the process fails), etc
Which is a hassle and a half for technically proficient users and the point that most other people would give up.
By contrast with Plex how many steps are there?
- Install (going to skip media library setup as Jellyfin requires that too so it's assumed)
- Set up any port settings, open any relevant ports on firewall, enable remote access in setting with a tickbox
- Set up users
- Done, it now works and doesn't need to be touched. It will handle connecting clients directly to the server. Users just need to install Plex client, login to their account and they have access.
By contrast this still requires the hoster set up a reverse proxy (major hassle if done securely with certificates as well as an expense for a domain which works out to probably $5 a year), to then have their users point their jellyfin at a domain-name (possibly a hard to remember one as majesticstuffbox[.]xyz is a lot cheaper than the dot com/org/net equivalents or a shorter domain that's more to the point), auth and so on. It's many, many, many more steps and software and configurations and chances for the hosting party to mess something up.
My point was I and many others would rather take the $5 we'd spend a year on a domain name and pay it for this kind of turn-key solution for ourselves and our users even if provided by a third party but that were Jellyfin to integrate this as an option it could provide some revenue for them and get the kinds of people who don't want to mess with reverse proxies and certificates into their ecosystem and off Plex.
