Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April
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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
I fucking hope to god they don't go full enshittification and decide to revoke the lifetime licenses.
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Yeah that doesn’t sound like the first stop, that just sounds like internal drama. That just truly isn’t a concern to any end user, nor does it affect the value or usability of the product in any way.
It's very relevant, it directly speaks to how they'll behave themselves closed where they can make crap decisions even easier.
Plex for all its issues, at least was upfront most who jumped on the Plex train did so with the knowledge that it might enshittify and honestly it's not as bad as it could be
A bunch of us who started on the Emby train did so under the pretense that at worst we might have to deal with a paid subscription or support contract type of deal.
That was a lie, I was there 10 years ago when it went down, that's when I pivoted to Plex full time (I had been running both for like a year at that point)
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Except, it isn't, .NET Core is an open source framework by the .NET Foundation
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Ah, I see. I've not tried Snaps, been avoiding Ubuntu because of Canonical's weirdly corporate angle. Once they baked in Amazon into Ubuntu I was out.
I like the bundling of deps. Sure it's inefficient, but it runs, and storage comes cheap nowadays anyway.
Storage is cheap until it isn't.
On my desktop where I have something like 6 TB of NVME storage because I am a sicko? The only thing that makes me think twice about a flatpak is if I need to give it access to devices or significant parts of my filesystem (yay permissions weirdness).
On my laptop where I can have one drive and replacing it involves opening the entire laptop AND reinstalling Fedora (or dealing with clonezilla/
dd)? Yeah... I very much care about just how much bloat I am dealing with. And, as the other person pointed out, flatpaks can balloon REAL fast. -
I mean, I'm with you, it is nice to support something you use, financially. But you made a one time payment 12 years ago. Your money is certainly not there anymore, they used it and paid something with it. I don't know, it just sounds like a really weird take reading your post. But maybe its me whose weird, I would prefer one time payment over subscriptions too.
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.
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I give all my friends the choice between Plex and jellyfin (I run both containers side by side pointed to the same media folders) and they all invariably choose Plex. I think it has a lot to do with the jellyfin UI, and I think an overhaul like jellyfin-vue or something that looks like findroid needs to happen in order for jellyfin to really appeal to regular people.
Yeah, I've written some custom css to get some better wrapping of libraries and such.
There's also the community themes worth looking into.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/css-customization/#community-themes -
I agree, but having looked down this road, finding a quality external player that users will understand and is inexpensive is ... not easy.
I like my Shield TV: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/shield-tv/
I did need to install a custom launcher on it when the standard AndroidTV launcher added ads.
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Roku does it well enough. not perfectly but it's still not as shit as my Google tv
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How is the general perception of emby?
They're closed source and US based.They're not just closed source, they started as the open source project response to Plex. It was promised that they would be open source forever. They lied, slammed the source door shut a few years later and pivoted to a paywall.
There was no discussion with the community or contributors, no alternatives explored, no surveys or polls.
Just a "Sorry we're going closed source" blog post, Jellyfin was forked from them in vengeance.
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Hot take here but not wrong
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.
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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.
