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.
If I didn't already have my lifetime pass, I'd use Jellyfin as my primary media server platform instead of Plex.
One of these days though, I'm sure Plex will make a mistake serious enough that it impacts me, and I'll end up switching to Jellyfin as my main media server platform.
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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 love Jellyfin, but it has weak weak searching, tagging, and TV show identification compared to Plex.
I tried using it even as recent as yesterday for some searching and tagging, but it's searching, tagging, and even TV show identification is weak in comparison to Plex. I couldn't mass-tag certain videos which was annoying for me, I had to do it one-by-one and it ended up taking a long time. Also, tags don't show up in searches anymore because it hurts performance apparently. With that said, maybe Plex has the same limitation, but it doesn't mean that Jellyfin has to.
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Before now I was on the sunk cost fallacy of not wanting to teach my extended family how to use Jellyfin instead of plex but after this I'm already mid-way through setting up a Jellyfin docker container on my server and I only found out an hour ago
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I've paid for the lifetime subscription for Plex...Still only using Jellyfin
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Yea because like I said, they're on an enshittification train on the same track just some stops behind, except they started with far worse decisions
It sounds like they haven’t even made their first stop, nor do they even have the train yet. And it seems like none of those bad decisions have even been made yet.
I guess you could predict that one day they will start their enshittification journey, but that day is not today.
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I'm not pirating a bunch of shows just to pay Plex for the privilege of watching it.
lmao me either
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Part of it is that Ubuntu/Canonical so aggressively pushed Snaps which became a huge culture war. So you have people who hate the idea of those style of packages because they hate Snap AND people who hate flatpak because they are Team Ubuntu for some reason.
And the other aspect is that it is incredibly space inefficient (by the very nature of bundling in dependencies) and is prone to "weirdness" when it comes to file system permissions and the like. And many software projects kind of went all in on them because it provides a single(-ish) target to build for rather than having a debian and an arch and a redhad and a...
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.
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I mean, except for Tizen OS isn't most available? You can find the client for Android, Android TV, Windows, Linux (Flatpak), macos, apple ios, and more.
https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients/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.
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Careful with that I think it’s against their TOS to do that due to the large volumes of data video streaming takes.
It used to be against their TOS. They removed the language over a year ago last I saw.
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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
Jellyfin
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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.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CURRENT PLEX PASS HOLDERS:
For users who have an active Plex Pass subscription, remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media Server, after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge—not even a mobile activation fee. More on that later in this update.I guess that's something.
Gonna be a long slow explanation to my family and friends how to switch to jellyfin. Hopefully there's an app ecosystem there as well. I was lucky to get a lifetime pass way back in 2009 when I did some work for them. It's very different now.
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Jellyfin depends on proprietary Microsoft .NET, even on Linux.
It's still better than Plex and Emby, which are fully proprietary, and have no source code. But I will stick with sshfs with kodi, and nginx plus mpv for now.
Except, it isn't, .NET Core is an open source framework by the .NET Foundation
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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?
Here, I fixed it:
The reality is that we need more
resourcesmoney tocontinue putting forth the best personal media experienceincrease our profit margins. -
I agree, but having looked down this road, finding a quality external player that users will understand and is inexpensive is ... not easy.
Roku does it well enough. not perfectly but it's still not as shit as my Google tv
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Emby’s enshittification train isn’t a couple stops back, there’s currently no evidence it exists. Simply having an Emby Premiere license is not enshittification for the same reason it wasn’t for Plex. Even in Plex’s most beloved golden age they had the PlexPass. That is not now nor was it ever an issue. Not every software existence has to be FOSS to provide any value. Emby went closed source and Jellyfin got to pick up the torch from that point on. That is a perfectly reasonable resolution as thats how things are supposed to work, that’s a good thing. Do you see Plex being forked into an open source version? No you don’t.
The first stop was when they went closed, they didn't just go closed peacefully and Jellyfin didn't fork off in a quiet way either
It was a complete betrayal, Emby made promises that they would remain open source forever. They broke that promise in a slow walked plan. It started with "Oh just some of the build scripts will be closed source, but don't worry the rest of Emby will stay open!"
Until one day they slammed that door shut with a no notice relicensing and an "Oh sorry we're going closed source because we just can't make enough money"
There was no discussion with the community, no alternatives explored and it was mainly the arbitrary decision of a single person. It wasn't even discussed with contributors.
Jellyfin was forked in vengeance, not some sort of planned fork like you're making it seem
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Why are they proxying the stream through their server though
They aren't, all their server does is handle the login authentication afaik, and then streaming happens directly from the server to the user.
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Part of it is that Ubuntu/Canonical so aggressively pushed Snaps which became a huge culture war. So you have people who hate the idea of those style of packages because they hate Snap AND people who hate flatpak because they are Team Ubuntu for some reason.
And the other aspect is that it is incredibly space inefficient (by the very nature of bundling in dependencies) and is prone to "weirdness" when it comes to file system permissions and the like. And many software projects kind of went all in on them because it provides a single(-ish) target to build for rather than having a debian and an arch and a redhad and a...
The space inefficiency is definitely there.
I find that clients, such as Jellyfin, Moonlight and Signal, works just fine as flatpaks but with those three apps my /var/lib/flatpak/ lands on 6.4GB.
When I temporarily had Discord installed it grew to 6.7GB, so the inefficiency is frontloaded and lessens the more of them you use. -
Part of it is that Ubuntu/Canonical so aggressively pushed Snaps which became a huge culture war. So you have people who hate the idea of those style of packages because they hate Snap AND people who hate flatpak because they are Team Ubuntu for some reason.
And the other aspect is that it is incredibly space inefficient (by the very nature of bundling in dependencies) and is prone to "weirdness" when it comes to file system permissions and the like. And many software projects kind of went all in on them because it provides a single(-ish) target to build for rather than having a debian and an arch and a redhad and a...
A lot of flatpaks early on wouldn't survive a major point release upgrade or worst case would hold on to dependencies and the user would end up with an unbootable mess after an upgrade.
I haven't seen that recently though.
However I regularly run appimages on my fedora silverblue system so take what I say with a grain of salt.
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Jellyfin is still way behind Plex in general performance but I keep a VM of it running and updated, for when the day comes that Plex is absolutely worthless.
Which at this rate, is, well, we're getting there.
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The first stop was when they went closed, they didn't just go closed peacefully and Jellyfin didn't fork off in a quiet way either
It was a complete betrayal, Emby made promises that they would remain open source forever. They broke that promise in a slow walked plan. It started with "Oh just some of the build scripts will be closed source, but don't worry the rest of Emby will stay open!"
Until one day they slammed that door shut with a no notice relicensing and an "Oh sorry we're going closed source because we just can't make enough money"
There was no discussion with the community, no alternatives explored and it was mainly the arbitrary decision of a single person. It wasn't even discussed with contributors.
Jellyfin was forked in vengeance, not some sort of planned fork like you're making it seem
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.
