Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April
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And that’s where the extent of my technical knowledge smashes into a wall lol
Yes, it took me a long time to figure it out. Which is why Plex feels comfortable charging for it
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In a nutshell, if your app isn’t able to make a direct connection to your Plex Media Server when you’re away from home, we can act as sort of a middle man and “relay” the stream from your server to your app. To accomplish this, your Plex Media Server establishes a secure connection to one of our Relay servers. Your app then also connects securely to the same Relay server and accesses the stream from your Plex Media Server. (In technical terms, the content is tunneled through.)
So, your Plex Media Server basically “relays” the media stream through our server so that your app can access it since the app can’t connect with your server directly.
Source: https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-server-through-relay/
It's not a requirement to stream and it's sort of dumb they are lumping this relay service as a part of the remote streaming. Remote streaming should be allowed for free - if you are not a subscriber. The relay should just be a paid service, which makes sense. But if it's a direct connection to my server, it should be free.
That being said, I understand how Plex may have built some technical debt into this relay system. It might be hard for them to decouple the relay from the remote streaming. What they should have done is:
We are removing the relay service as a free service, but you can still do remote streaming with a direct connection.
And they should have built their architecture in a way that's easy to decouple the two services.
Thanks for that - I wasn't aware of the relay service, but completely agree that this is what they should be charging for and not the remote play feature in its entirety. I'll probably drag it out for a while by refusing to update the app and server... Might be able to make it work with Tailscale as others have suggested.
In the past I've paid for a month or two when I wanted to download to my devices remotely (and I think that's the singular feature that I've ever cared about in the Plex pass). But to take features away and then try and charge me for them is a bridge too far, I can't support that bad behavior.
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Thanks for that - I wasn't aware of the relay service, but completely agree that this is what they should be charging for and not the remote play feature in its entirety. I'll probably drag it out for a while by refusing to update the app and server... Might be able to make it work with Tailscale as others have suggested.
In the past I've paid for a month or two when I wanted to download to my devices remotely (and I think that's the singular feature that I've ever cared about in the Plex pass). But to take features away and then try and charge me for them is a bridge too far, I can't support that bad behavior.
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I paid for the lifetime membership ~6 years ago so I'm going to stick with it. Plus I just use it for my own home. It's not like I'm serving a bunch of other clients. But I'll switch to Jellyfin if the lifetime membership ever gets taken away.
I considered it when they warned about the increase and offered it at $75, but I just didn't have the money to spend back then. Felt pretty stupid for not doing it, but I don't even know what paid features they offer, and I'm clearly not missing them.
99% of my usage is at home as well, so this is unlikely to affect me - until that random 1% anyhow.
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i'm not sure why it would do this, i've never had any issues with watching plex while the internet is down (in fact that was one of my original uses for it, to have movies and tv in a building without internet). I don't have it turned on but I do know you can go into server settings -> network and set a list of IPs/subnets that can access without any authorization at all. That lets you use plex without even having a plex account afaik.
This is provably what I would have needed. But since I couldn't log in, I couldn't do anything.
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Yes, it took me a long time to figure it out. Which is why Plex feels comfortable charging for it
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
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I consider myself pretty tech savvy but after I got Jellyfin set up I accidentally broke it within weeks, I wasn’t even able to get it consistently playing outside of my home network to my devices. Some ISP’s also make it hard to tinker with their modems/routers, and let’s not forget that most people when they set up their Internet just use whatever the ISP provides for them.
Ok, that is a totally different use case than mine. I'm one of those guys browsing a selfhosting community on the fediverse and I only want to stream my own stuff to my mobile and provide my wife with audiobooks. If you're providing a bigger group of people with streaming services, who are not tech savvy, another software might be the better solution. But that doesn't mean that Jellyfin is bad - it's just another use case with different requirements
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Ok, that is a totally different use case than mine. I'm one of those guys browsing a selfhosting community on the fediverse and I only want to stream my own stuff to my mobile and provide my wife with audiobooks. If you're providing a bigger group of people with streaming services, who are not tech savvy, another software might be the better solution. But that doesn't mean that Jellyfin is bad - it's just another use case with different requirements
I don’t think I called Jellyfin bad or anything like bad in a single comment I wrote
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First of all I agree with most of your a, b and c points, just would like to point out that while it's true that Docker containers provide an extra level of security they're not as closed down as people sometimes believe, but as a general rule I agree with everything you said.
But you're wrong about the way Plex works, this is a quote from their documentation:
So, your Plex Media Server basically “relays” the media stream through our server so that your app can access it since the app can’t connect with your server directly.
If that's not clear enough:
Your security and privacy is important to us. When you have enabled secure connections on your Plex Media Server, then your streaming will continue to be secure and encrypted even when using our Relay feature. (When using secure connections, the content is encrypted end-to-end and tunneled through our Relay. The connection is not terminated on our servers and only your Plex Media Server has the certificate.)
So it's very clear data is streaming through their relay server, which goes back to my original point of I expect that to be a paid feature, it's using bandwidth from their relay servers.
As for the security again you're wrong, authentication happens on the Plex remote server, not on your local one, which is why you can't use Plex without internet (part of my dislike for them). So you connect to Plex remote server and authenticate there, you then get a client that's talking to the remote server, even if someone was able to bypass that login they would be inside a Plex owned server, not yours, they would need to then exploit whatever API exists between your home server and that one to jump to your machine, so it's an extra jump needed, again similarly to having Authelia/Authentik in front of Jellyfin.
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
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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?
