Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April
-
True and while they are both enshitifying their services. Somehow in this one area Google seems to be going slower. And making slightly less bonehead moves
-
Jellyfin needs to partner with someone people can pay a very low and reasonable and/or one-time fee to enable remote streaming without the fuss of setting up either dangerous port-forwarding or the complexity of reverse proxies (paying for a domain-name, the set-up itself including certificates, keeping it updated for security purposes).
And no a VPN is not a solution, the difficulty for non-technical users in setting up a VPN (if it's even possible, on smart-tvs it's almost always not, and I don't think devices like AppleTV and other streaming boxes often support them) is too high and it's an unwanted annoyance even for technical users.
I'm not talking about streaming video's through someone else's servers or using their bandwidth. I'm talking about the connection phase of clients and servers where Plex acts like an enhanced dynamic DNS service with authentication. They have an agent on the local media server which sends to the remote web service of the third party the IP address, the port configured for use, the account or server name, etc. When a client tries to connect they go to this remote web service with the servername/username info, the web service authenticates them then gives them the current IP address and any other information necessary. It then sends some data to the local Jellyfin server about the connecting client to enable that connection and then the local media Jellyfin server and the client talk directly and stream directly.
Importantly the cost of running this authentication and IP address tracking scheme would be minimal per Jellyfin server. You could charge $5/year for up to 20 unique remote clients and come out ahead with a slight profit which could be put back into Jellyfin development and things like their own hosting costs for code, etc. Even better if they offer lifetime for this at $60-$80 they'd get a decent chunk of cash up-front to use for development (with reasonable use restrictions per account so someone hosting stuff in Hetzner or whatever and serving 300 people with 400 devices will need to pay more because they're clearly doing this for profit and can afford to throw some more money at Jellyfin).
Until Jellyfin offers something that JUST WORKS like that it's not going to be a replacement for Plex, whatever other improvements they offer to users it's still a burden for the server runner to set up remote streaming in a way that isn't either incredibly dangerous (port forwarding) OR either involves paying money to third parties AND/OR the trouble of running your own reverse proxy and/or involves walking users through complicated set-up process for each device that you have to repeat if you change anything major like your domain name when using a VPN.
Umm AppleTV has a Tailscale app and it's dead simple to set up, so I would argue that it is a solution.
-
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.
-
Umm AppleTV has a Tailscale app and it's dead simple to set up, so I would argue that it is a solution.
That's what I do. Jellyfin + Tailscale + Apple TV box. It works like a charm.
-
All these comments mentioning jellyfish and I haven’t see a single mention of emby. Is it considered bad or something? Because I switched over to it and I am liking it a lot better than plex so far
Its quite annoying how licensing is tied to devices. I can't even sign in after reinstalling my OS.
-
Jellyfin needs to partner with someone people can pay a very low and reasonable and/or one-time fee to enable remote streaming without the fuss of setting up either dangerous port-forwarding or the complexity of reverse proxies (paying for a domain-name, the set-up itself including certificates, keeping it updated for security purposes).
And no a VPN is not a solution, the difficulty for non-technical users in setting up a VPN (if it's even possible, on smart-tvs it's almost always not, and I don't think devices like AppleTV and other streaming boxes often support them) is too high and it's an unwanted annoyance even for technical users.
I'm not talking about streaming video's through someone else's servers or using their bandwidth. I'm talking about the connection phase of clients and servers where Plex acts like an enhanced dynamic DNS service with authentication. They have an agent on the local media server which sends to the remote web service of the third party the IP address, the port configured for use, the account or server name, etc. When a client tries to connect they go to this remote web service with the servername/username info, the web service authenticates them then gives them the current IP address and any other information necessary. It then sends some data to the local Jellyfin server about the connecting client to enable that connection and then the local media Jellyfin server and the client talk directly and stream directly.
Importantly the cost of running this authentication and IP address tracking scheme would be minimal per Jellyfin server. You could charge $5/year for up to 20 unique remote clients and come out ahead with a slight profit which could be put back into Jellyfin development and things like their own hosting costs for code, etc. Even better if they offer lifetime for this at $60-$80 they'd get a decent chunk of cash up-front to use for development (with reasonable use restrictions per account so someone hosting stuff in Hetzner or whatever and serving 300 people with 400 devices will need to pay more because they're clearly doing this for profit and can afford to throw some more money at Jellyfin).
Until Jellyfin offers something that JUST WORKS like that it's not going to be a replacement for Plex, whatever other improvements they offer to users it's still a burden for the server runner to set up remote streaming in a way that isn't either incredibly dangerous (port forwarding) OR either involves paying money to third parties AND/OR the trouble of running your own reverse proxy and/or involves walking users through complicated set-up process for each device that you have to repeat if you change anything major like your domain name when using a VPN.
Authelia maybe?
-
Why do you need to explain to your family and friends how to switch to Jellyfin, if you have a lifetime pass and therefore aren't impacted at all by this announcement?
Just because I and my family benefit now, doesn't mean it'll stay that way. Also again, I don't want to support or platform an app that charges others, who are not me, to share their own collection.
If they want to charge for the Plex TV or Plex Movies they host, and leave the app free of cost for a person's own personal collection to be shared. That's fine.
I have no confidence that'll happen though.
-
Emby is a one time purchase for a lifetime subscription and I don't regret it for one second. It's open source and free, but some features are locked behind purchase. Worth every penny, in my opinion.
-
I'm not sure where you're getting that from, the article literally states the price hasn't changed in 10 years, and still hasn't, but it finally will on the 29th of April.
This tracks with my experience as it's probably been 10 years since I bought the lifetime pass and here in the UK it's often on sale for basically the same price (about £75 if I recall).
Well, it was $75 CDN when i bought in 2012, it's $150-170 CDN now, and going up to $249 USD which converts to $358 CDN, so I'm assumong they'll round down to $350 or up to $360 CDN.
The conversion from USD to CDN kills it for us sadly. It's just such a huge jump this time. More than double on this bump.
-
I believe emby went proprietary, and jellyfin is the fork that stayed open source. Naturally Lemmy prefers the FOSS one
Yup, that's why I was on NextCloud, why I avoid MongoDB like the plague, and why I'm here on Lemmy (I justified Reddit because of their open API).
So yeah, that tracks.
-
I would go for a reverse proxy to get ssl running.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/networking/#running-jellyfin-behind-a-reverse-proxyHandling users with forgotten passwords is, sadly, a manual chore for the administrator.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/users/adding-managing-users#profileIf I reverse proxy does the video stream itself travel via the proxy too?
-
Would Tailscale/ZeroTier work as a workaround for this or do you think Plex would also put that behind a paywall?
-
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.
-
What paid content? I have a Plex lifetime pass and I can't recall ever being asked to pay for anything? I can remember them dumping free TV channels in there at some point, but I simply switched that off and it's not come back.
Hmm, it's been a while, maybe I'm misremembering. There were definitely some categories of Plex content not from my library that kept reappearing on the home page of my server, despite trying to get rid of them a few times. Maybe they weren't actually paid, I just assumed they'd only be pushing something if it was going to bring them more revenue.
The other thing that made me want to jump ship extremely fast was when they started sharing your recently watched items with other users, without asking.
-
Alternately I could keep using plex.
I mean, I bought the Lifetime Plexpass when it was on sale years back, so I have little reason to change my own setup, but I still have even less reason to stan them at Jellyfin's expense.
Seriously, one is a paid service executing rug-pulls, and the other is a free and open-source project. This level of nit-picking at Jellyfin is a shit stance to take.
-
Well, it was $75 CDN when i bought in 2012, it's $150-170 CDN now, and going up to $249 USD which converts to $358 CDN, so I'm assumong they'll round down to $350 or up to $360 CDN.
The conversion from USD to CDN kills it for us sadly. It's just such a huge jump this time. More than double on this bump.
Canada can just become the 51st state and solve that /s
-
The fact that people still try to do bullshit like Nat on IPv6 is completely crazy. It's like they've never heard of the idea of a stateful firewall and just want to recreate bad old patterns again, combine with the fact that many internet service providers still don't allow you to host anything from your home connection. We need to fix all of that of an IPv6 first Network. Ipv4 is several layers of exhausted by now so it should be considered deprecated but for some reason isn't
People insist that IPv6 is complicated, but then refuse to learn it or think outside their IPv4-brain
-
All these comments mentioning jellyfish and I haven’t see a single mention of emby. Is it considered bad or something? Because I switched over to it and I am liking it a lot better than plex so far
I use Emby with the lifetime premier (their 'premium' version).
Works great, but honestly I would just point people to Jellyfin unless Emby provides something specific you need. I just use it because it's what I've had for years.
-
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.
-
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.
You know nothing very proudly
