Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April
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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.
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It doesn't require Plex servers, though. I do this on jellyfin for free.
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.
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ur getting what u paid for, why the guilt
I feel like I'm getting more than what I paid for. I understand it was a legal contractual exchange. I'm merely commenting on the value I've received relative to what I paid. Especially given the continued improvements over time.
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Yeah the warning is definitely annoying and especially the ten second counter on it pisses me off. But honestly I would much rather see an unskippable ad for the premium version of the program I am currently using and enjoying than an unskippable ad for literally anything else
My problem with it, it's like WinRAR trial. I know I will never subscribe. Developers know I will never subscribe. They lost me as a potential customer when they refused to revise their pricing model. I switched to Jellyfin and will not go back to Emby. Guess a lot of people did the same, so I can say it's their own fault.
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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.
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You need an internet connection to connect to a offline LAN Plex server... Just so unessessery, otherwise it doesn't find your server (I was quite confused on that one, when that started happening)
Plus having to pay for multiple user accounts, all just seemed like it was heading towards user extortion.
It also lacked hardware transcoding at that point in time, which isn't a huge issue, but did make it harder to run if you had a client that didn't support a specific codec.While jellyfin requires zero internet to be functional and login, supported hardware transcoding before plex and has multiple user accounts usage out of the box, at zero cost.
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.
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I have fewer issues with the jellyfin app on my TV than I do with literally any of the streaming apps on the same television. My only gripe with jellyfin is there's no PS5 app.
The TV app for my LG is just a webview of the webpage and works great; but on my android devices FinDroid has problems with decoding the video, and the official app kinda sucks, and on my apple devices swiftfin works ok, but sometimes doesn't load the videos and has to be manually relaunched. Dunno about other streaming apps since I never used them, but for me jellyfin's clients are very unreliable.
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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.
I already pay for plex pass but I'm going to start looking into jelly fin out of principle. I will not support the enshitification of a service I use and this is how it starts. Soon they will have tiered subscriptions and then the cheap one will be taken away and the cheapest paid one will be stuffed with ads then all tiers will be stuffed with ads then they will jack up prices again or charge more for sharing with family or block it all together to force your family to get their own sub and the circle of enshitification will be complete.
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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.
Hellooooo jellyfin!
Only use open source software
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How is it irrelevant? Plex offers a bunch of services that cost them money that we don't use, so they jacked up prices for streaming our own data.
It's irrelevant because even Plex themselves made no mention of their in-house streaming stuff. The discussion is about being charged to view your videos, hosted on your own self-hosted server, viewed on your own device.
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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.
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.
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I don't really have a problem with this. I paid for a lifetime quite a long time ago. Right now I only use Plex for plexamp and everything else is on jellyfin.
Is finamp at a point that it can replace plexamp yet?
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Or you just get a smaller version to begin with and save your hard drive space and your compute time.
You've kind of keyed in on one of the things I was hesitant to say:
There are two big uses for an "offline" media library.
Some people just use it for all the stuff they grabbed off the pirate bay (probably avoid TPB in 2025 but...). You don't really care about quality and just want to consume media.
Others, like myself, primarily use it to rip/back up their blu rays and UHDs and the like. If I am watching on my TV in the living room? I want that to be the highest quality I have available and I want to revel in every shadow gradient and so forth. If I am watching it on my computer? I don't need anywhere near that much detail. And on a tablet? Compress that shit like an exec at netflix just saw the storage arrays.
That is the benefit of transcoding and offline caching. It means you, as a "server", just focus on backing up your library/finding the best quality rips or whatever. And you, as a "user", don't have to worry about figuring out how many different versions to keep so that you always have an appropriate version for whatever your use case is that week.
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It's irrelevant because even Plex themselves made no mention of their in-house streaming stuff. The discussion is about being charged to view your videos, hosted on your own self-hosted server, viewed on your own device.
I disagree. Sometimes you need to look at the situation as a whole in order to understand the motivation.
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If I reverse proxy does the video stream itself travel via the proxy too?
In case this helps as a reference point, I use a $5 digital ocean droplet as my Plex and Jellyfin reverse proxy and it seems to handle the traffic of 3-5 simultaneous streams just fine. I use Haproxy in tcp mode (so no http interpreting, just passing packets) in an attempt to keep the CPU load minimal and just make it a pure I/O task.
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The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience
How stupid do they think we are?
Wait, why do you say this? I’m no Plex shill, this is disappointing news to hear and is the strongest push toward Jellyfin I’ve had yet. But they’re certainly a business with employees they need to pay, and their app has an objectively large feature set that needs to be maintained. Their employees deserve raises and benefits, and if costs are rising at the grocery store, they’re probably rising for businesses too. Why are we stupid to believe their financial burden is growing?
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In case this helps as a reference point, I use a $5 digital ocean droplet as my Plex and Jellyfin reverse proxy and it seems to handle the traffic of 3-5 simultaneous streams just fine. I use Haproxy in tcp mode (so no http interpreting, just passing packets) in an attempt to keep the CPU load minimal and just make it a pure I/O task.
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.
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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.
Wait a moment. I always thought that Plex’s servers only facilitate authentication (to verify your account) and discovery (to help your device find your server). They do not handle the actual media data. And if there is no Direct Remote Access, Relay usage is capped at 1 minute per day for free users. This looks like a cash grab to me.
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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?
