Plex has paywalled my server!
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I bought a media management and consumption platform running on my own server using my own clients. For what reason do I need a relay service to watch content in my house on my server?
No idea, you're the one that bought it. I did the same thing for a few years and never bought a plex pass.
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The same tailscale that announced last week that they are going to start charging?
Says personal is still free? Not seeing what you’re saying
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The same tailscale that announced last week that they are going to start charging?
wrote last edited by [email protected]Took a quick look at the free tier,
- 3 users
- 100 devices
- Basically all tailscale features
That seems pretty reasonable to me. Main account and two accounts to share. With just friends and family, I doubt most people will reach the 100 device limit.
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- Open source has high immunity to devs making changes at the expense of the user for their benefit because anti-features can be removed. Recommending another proprietary alternative here would be like saying they aught to leave an abusive partner but then recommend someone with the same red flags.
- It’s also the most complex to set up, and for many people the threshold is “walking your tech-illiterate mother-in-law through side loading it over the phone, because she lives 100 miles away… She’s afraid to touch her computer for anything except email and Facebook. And then resetting her password every 30 days, because she keeps locking herself out of it.” Suddenly the “just fucking sign into Plex and it automatically discovers your server” option becomes a lot more appealing.
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- It’s also the most complex to set up, and for many people the threshold is “walking your tech-illiterate mother-in-law through side loading it over the phone, because she lives 100 miles away… She’s afraid to touch her computer for anything except email and Facebook. And then resetting her password every 30 days, because she keeps locking herself out of it.” Suddenly the “just fucking sign into Plex and it automatically discovers your server” option becomes a lot more appealing.
Jellyfin is the most complex to set up, right? (Just making sure I’m reading this correctly)
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- Open source has high immunity to devs making changes at the expense of the user for their benefit because anti-features can be removed. Recommending another proprietary alternative here would be like saying they aught to leave an abusive partner but then recommend someone with the same red flags.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Welcome to “People rushing to suggest a solution that they fawn over because it’s open source.”
How do you personally 100% beyond a shadow of a doubt know that Jellyfin is the right solution? Why not a VPN, shared folder, and VLC? What about running a DNLA server?
Edit: All of you downvoting don’t know; and it makes you salty.
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It gets around port forwarding/firewall issues that most people don't know how to deal with. But putting it behind a paywall kinda kills any chance of it being a benevolent feature.
port forwarding/firewall issues that most people don’t know how to deal with
This sort of thing makes me want to tear my hair out when I hear "Why bother rolling out IPv6 when IPv4 just WORKS!?"
NAT, port forwarding and the problems they cause are seen as expected, just the way the internet works instead of the dirty hacks they actually are. Most people aren't old enough to remember the time when everything connected to the internet had a routable IPv4 address.
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I'll add to #2 (IDK if it's open source, though):
Give Stremio a try. Once you set it up (basically just add the Torrentio plug-in then whatever content catalogs you want), the workflow is much better and simpler than Plex.
You just browse it like Netflix: see something you want to watch, select it with your remote, then stream it immediately. No server to run, you don't have to build libraries, you don't even have download the content beforehand. Just select and watch. Could not be easier.
Is it torrenting in the background? Because, if it is, then you need a VPN and I don’t know how to set one up on my LG TV. Would you happen to have a guide?
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I tried testing a movie from my home server in plex through firefox and repeatedly got this message, even after reloading.
I knew that they had paywalled the apps on mobile and streaming from outside the network but now they have also blocked watching your own movies through your own hardware.
I do get the point that making software should be able to sustain people but I dont see the move of plex as a fair thing to do. Yes, they have made great software but taking your home server hostage feels like the wrong move.
Even a pop up that says "we need you to donate please" would have been fine. make it pop up before every movie, play donation ads before any movie but straight up disabling the app is kinda cruel.
Anyway, i have switched to jellyfin and it is insanely good. please give it a try. you can run it alongside plex with not issues (at least i had none) and compare the two.
In any case, good luck. Let me know if you need help.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Are you saying that you’re on your home network with your Plex server and it won’t let you play your media without paying? That’s not true if so. You must be outside the network.
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Wait its not remote? You're on your local network?
OP has set it up wrong so it’s ALL going remote, even when he’s in the same house.
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The same tailscale that announced last week that they are going to start charging?
I’m willing to recommend Tailscale because I run headscale and it does basically everything a selfhoster needs. When the free version is passable, it’s harder to enshitify the commercial version.
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I had a plex pass and was still having tons of issues streaming to other devices such as Apple TV. So I switched everything over to jellyfin with news server and have everything scheduled through radarr and sonarr. Never going back.
If you were having troubles it’s because you did something wrong, though I don’t know how. Plex is literally the easiest and most straightforward media server to set up and get working out of all of them.
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I just use nginx on a tiny Hetzner vps acting as a reverse proxy for my home server. I dunno what the point of Tailscale is here, maybe better latency and fewer network hops in some cases if a p2p connection is possible? But I've never had any bandwidth or latency issues doing this
If you are using wireguard from the VPS to your home server, it buys you nothing more. If you have mobile devices connecting directly to the home server, Tailscale will let them connect directly in most cases, which is nice.
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Donations isn’t going to cover the hunger of a 40 million dollar VC round. Those investors want more than a return, they want plex profitable ASAP
Exactly. Plex could have been “profitable” in the sense that revenue covered infrastructure and paid a handful of full time employees, but that’s not what VC money needs.
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OP is also in the allegedly ultra rare camp of “successfully configured Jellyfin and lived to tell the tale.” Not what I’d expect of someone unable to configure Plex correctly. I’ve not set up a Plex server myself but my guess is it wasn’t clear that it was misconfigured - it did work previously, after all.
Well, with Plex constantly changing allowed abilities and such, it seems to me that this is the expected outcome.
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Jellyfin is the most complex to set up, right? (Just making sure I’m reading this correctly)
wrote last edited by [email protected]To set it up “correctly”, yes. It’ll require owning your own domain, being able to configure it properly (with either a static IP, or DDNS to point to your server at home), knowing how to automate https certificate refreshes, and a few other things. Plex just requires forwarding a port in your router.
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Yes, you got this bang-on. Plex made the decision long ago.
And they likely made it because without VC funding they would have gone under, because people that use services like Plex tend to not want to pay to use said services.
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I bought a media management and consumption platform running on my own server using my own clients. For what reason do I need a relay service to watch content in my house on my server?
What media management and consumption platform did you buy?
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From my view, a sustainable business model is very different from the way things are done lately. I built and managed multiple successful businesses and making them sustainable is doable without fucking over your customers.
They could absolutely have done a lot better things to gain more income. The important base question here is "how much do they need?" Because software does not have huge ongoing costs but massive initial costs and lower sustaining costs. Of course, large changes or complete makeorvers will be intense but they are not needed in every company.
Once that is clear, they could have started with better public relations, engaging people about the need for a specific sum or recurring revenue. They could have gamified it by selling badges, additional functions, tiers, restrictions on new installations, etc. But they didnt. They chose to paywall existing functions. one. After. The. Other.
Dick move.
So yeah, building a business is no joke but thats not for me.
Saying software does not have huge ongoing costs shows you’ve never worked on any huge software system. My works ongoing costs for hosting/scaling/storing data are millions of dollars a year.
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Well, with Plex constantly changing allowed abilities and such, it seems to me that this is the expected outcome.
This is one change (which isn't the cause of OP's problem) that they announced months ago. I've been using it for well over a decade and while I have had major issues with it in the past going so far as to setup Emby and buying a lifetime license for that, I would hardly say that they're "constantly changing allowed abilities."
Most people's issue with them is that they focus too much on adding new stuff that nobody asked for while ignoring longtime bugs. I can't recall a time they've ever locked anything behind a paywall that wasn't a brand new feature prior to this.
