Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April
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Because of the Wife Factor. Getting people to convert requires getting past a lot of social inertia. It requires you to first convince them that the convenience of streaming services isn’t actually worth paying for. Then it requires an elegant onboarding experience. Lastly, Plex simply makes remote access easy. Sure, you could fiddle with reverse proxies for Jellyfin. But that’s easy to mess up. Instead, it’s much smoother to simply sign into Plex.
I can talk my tech-illiterate “My google chrome desktop icon got moved, and now I don’t know how to check my email” mother-in-law through Plex’s sign-up process over the phone. In fact, I did. It’s familiar enough that anyone who has signed up for a streaming service can figure it out. I can’t do that with Jellyfin, because their eyes glaze over as soon as you start talking about custom server URLs or IP addresses. Hell, my MIL’s TV doesn’t even have a native Jellyfin app available on the App Store. If I wanted to install it for her, I would need to sideload it.
Jellyfin does a lot of things right. But by design, the setup process will never be as elegant as Plex’s, because that elegant system requires a centralized server to actually handle it. And centralized servers are exactly what Jellyfin was built to rebel against.
To be clear, I run both concurrently; Jellyfin for myself, and Plex for friends/family. I got the lifetime Plex Pass license a decade ago, and it has more than paid for itself since then. But it sounds like a bunch of my friends and family may end up switching to Jellyfin if they don’t want to deal with the PlexPass subscription.
100% agree with the reverse proxy set up, it's not hard but it is intimidating at first and just fyi, reverse proxy set up is a ton easier if you're using swag with the drag, drop, run for of apps including SSL certificate renewal.
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That works but is pretty insecure as you have nothing protecting your server outside of a basic password.
I'm pleading full ignorance here. Because I opened the port for JF, doesn't that mean the only thing exposed would be my jellyfin? I thought having the rest of my ports closed would not allow access to the rest of my system?
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How do you do this on Jellyfin? The only ways I'm familiar with is to expose Jellyfin to the internet or access it through Tailscale, would love to hear alternatives.
My home connection is behind cgnat so I got a free VPS from oracle, install caddy on VPS, install tailscale on VPS and router, expose routes from LAN to tailscale network.
Now you can use caddy to expose, for example, a docker container (jellyfin) at 192.168.1.100 to subdomain.exampledomain.com with ssl cert provided by caddy.
VPS also requires some other stuff like ddclient and fail2ban.
I pieced this all together myself... it's doable if you spend some time reading.
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So far I've had no problems using jellyfin on basicly anything that exists in my house which includes a Apple TV, Xbox SX and a Xiaomi TV Box S.
But I can see there's probably no Tizen app for things like Samsung TV's.
https://github.com/Georift/install-jellyfin-tizen
Samsung is being a bit of a dick apparently.
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i'm fairly familiar with reverse proxies and how to set them up, but I'm mostly worried about the monthly bandwidth limits here. especially with hetzner's recently lowered limits. since I have a life time plex pass i might be able to hold off from switching until I figure something else out, at least.
Gotcha, I've never actually considered the bandwidth limits. It looks like digitalocean includes 1TB per month and I used 242GB last month. If I ever get close to the limit I will just spin up another droplet. I don't think I would even need to load balance unless the first one is struggling since the bandwidth allowance across all droplets is pooled together.
If you aren't already using a reverse proxy, then do you currently just port forward or use the Plex relay? The only reason I use one is because of CGNAT. Before I moved to a place with only CGNAT I port forwarded for both Plex and Jellyfin.
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That exposes Jellyfin to the internet, so it's my option 1.
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It's not that hard to get a reverse proxy up, get a free DDNS, and a SSL certificate from let's encrypt.
https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2020-08-21-introducing-swag
This is a pretty solid one stop shop for handling all reverse proxy for jellyfin and other applications like sonarr, radarr, transmission, ombi and lists of others.
That exposes Jellyfin to the internet, so it's not the same feature
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My home connection is behind cgnat so I got a free VPS from oracle, install caddy on VPS, install tailscale on VPS and router, expose routes from LAN to tailscale network.
Now you can use caddy to expose, for example, a docker container (jellyfin) at 192.168.1.100 to subdomain.exampledomain.com with ssl cert provided by caddy.
VPS also requires some other stuff like ddclient and fail2ban.
I pieced this all together myself... it's doable if you spend some time reading.
That exposes Jellyfin to the internet
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Alright, so I have had Jellyfin installed for years now, but my primary issue is that most devices myself or my users use lack official, readily-available clients. For example, the Samsung TV app is a developer mode install. Last I looked, nobody has put a build into the store.
I really want to use Jellyfin, but I feel like my users simply can't. I'm interested in others' experiences here that could help.
I run an Android TV box on my Smart TV, because I don't trust them on the internet.
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Gotcha, I've never actually considered the bandwidth limits. It looks like digitalocean includes 1TB per month and I used 242GB last month. If I ever get close to the limit I will just spin up another droplet. I don't think I would even need to load balance unless the first one is struggling since the bandwidth allowance across all droplets is pooled together.
If you aren't already using a reverse proxy, then do you currently just port forward or use the Plex relay? The only reason I use one is because of CGNAT. Before I moved to a place with only CGNAT I port forwarded for both Plex and Jellyfin.
I just port forward right now, so Plex’s system is basically an overpowered dynamic dns. I guess my next option is to self host a dynamic dns on a numbered xyz domain (yk the $1/yr ones)
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That exposes Jellyfin to the internet
Yes exactly. What do you think plex is doing?
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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.
Judging by the rest of the thread I'm going to get downvoted for this, but what the hell:
I'm sure I'll switch to Jellyfin eventually but I tried it out a few weeks ago to see what all the hype was about and it just... wasn't great. It was difficult to setup, with way too many overly-complicated settings, and then it refused to play one of the two test files I tried. Like it or not there's a reason that Plex is the dominant player in the game, and a large part of that reason is that it verges on plug-and-play for simplicity of both setup and use.
Yes, it sucks that they're removing remote streaming for free users, but I imagine there's a significant chunk of users who don't know or care how to properly open their server up to the world and are relying on the Plex proxies for their streams (which happens entirely in the background), and those aren't going to be cheap to run. Maybe putting them behind a paywall will provide the resources to make them faster.
I did buy a lifetime pass last time they announced a price hike; it's honestly paid for itself many times over, and I've been encouraging other users I know to do the same before this next one, because yes, it is a significant hike this time around. That said, while I wouldn't pay monthly for it, I do still feel like the lifetime pass is tremendous value for such a polished product. It's a shame they've had to do it at all, but I don't begrudge them for it.
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I disagree. Sometimes you need to look at the situation as a whole in order to understand the motivation.
Ok, so you're implying people were using their videos for free instead of paying for the streaming services. Then Plex wanted more money so they've started to charge people for using their own stuff.
That's fine, and frankly I agree with that.
But your initial reply to me is still irrelevant to the discussion.
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It's against CloudFlare ToS to use CF tunnels for media streaming like this. You can risk it ig but I have important stuff like domain registrations on CloudFlare so I'm personally not willing to risk getting banned.
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I would recommend audiobookshelf for the audiobooks, especially if you have your stuff running in docker. It seemed to me like the solutions to force Plex or jellyfin to do books were a bit more hacky than I wanted.
Dude, I'm blown away by how easy AudioBookShelf was to set up. I was going to go with Jellyfin for audiobooks too since I already had my libraries set up, but I wanted to try an alternative just to see. So easy, I was up and running in under 10 minutes! Thanks for the recommendation!
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How to kill a service speedrun any%
They think they have enough users locked in to just pay over setting up another server. They might.
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Well, looks like my decision to stick with Kodi and never bother with Plex is about to pay dividends.
NAS + Tailscale + Kodi is the easiest to setup for me. Works really good.
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Any Kodi users here?
I've been using Kodi to pull movies from my NAS for years.
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Why would you expect this to NOT be paid? It requires them to be running servers to stream the media through, I wouldn't expect this to be a free feature.
I dislike Plex for several reasons, but asking for payment for stuff that costs them money is completely justified.
Why is this getting upvoted? Plex isn't running a server. You are. Your computer and your media files are quite literally "the server" that is serving the files to you remotely. Plex is at best doing authentication.
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Judging by the rest of the thread I'm going to get downvoted for this, but what the hell:
I'm sure I'll switch to Jellyfin eventually but I tried it out a few weeks ago to see what all the hype was about and it just... wasn't great. It was difficult to setup, with way too many overly-complicated settings, and then it refused to play one of the two test files I tried. Like it or not there's a reason that Plex is the dominant player in the game, and a large part of that reason is that it verges on plug-and-play for simplicity of both setup and use.
Yes, it sucks that they're removing remote streaming for free users, but I imagine there's a significant chunk of users who don't know or care how to properly open their server up to the world and are relying on the Plex proxies for their streams (which happens entirely in the background), and those aren't going to be cheap to run. Maybe putting them behind a paywall will provide the resources to make them faster.
I did buy a lifetime pass last time they announced a price hike; it's honestly paid for itself many times over, and I've been encouraging other users I know to do the same before this next one, because yes, it is a significant hike this time around. That said, while I wouldn't pay monthly for it, I do still feel like the lifetime pass is tremendous value for such a polished product. It's a shame they've had to do it at all, but I don't begrudge them for it.
This is what people don't realize. If you want something good, you have to pay people for their time and talent. Free products that are free because of ideology are just exploitation with extra steps.
