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.
I still remember sticking files on an apache server and openly sharing that with friends. Not had a need to do that lately but I can always start doing it again if necessary.
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Disclaimer: Plexamp used to be great, but it's stagnated badly. It was a good reason to buy plex pass at one point, though I don't think it's worth it now.
I'm not familiar with Symfonium, but the major defining thing with plexamp is the DJ features for exploring your local music library.
Unfortunately, a few months back Tidal support was removed from Plexamp and that was kind of a deal breaker because now it's only local library, and its "killer app" feature was using the DJ mixes in conjunction with Tidal to do real time mixes with your local and streaming music together.
I've switched to using Lyrion instead, along with the Blissmix and "Don't Stop the Music" plugins with LastFM support. It integrates with Tidal, Deezer, or Qobuz (and I think Spotify, but not sure, I only use hifi streaming services). They work similarly, and in some ways better because you have full control over Blissmix's functionality for chroma, timbre, tempo, album and track repeats, and more. Also, Lyrion can stream directly over DLNA to a client, whereas Plexamp was just Airplay/Bluetooth/Google Cast (I have Apple stuff, but Airplay is terrible quality).
It's sad, but plexamp is just my "local download" player now on my phone for when I'm driving, since it downconverts flac to Opus at higher quality than MP3 and at smaller sizes.
I highly recommend trying out Lyrion. I've used nearly everything for music in the past, including even having a year of Roon, but Lyrion has replaced pretty much everything.
That's what Symfonium can do:
And has these sources:
Your app sounds interesting though.
What I quite like about Symfonium is how much configuration freedom it gives you.
Might check yours out as well. -
The audacity of this company to increase prices when:
A) downloads are locked behind the paywall but havent worked in years (probably close to a decade at this point)
B) they focus all the development time on bringing bullshit to the platform (live tv, rentals, other streaming app searches, etc)Requiring a subscription for remote access is actually fucking insane, they don't have any bandwidth costs associated with that other than authentication so ???
This will drive people to Jellyfin, and watch how fast Plex drops into irrelevance when all the selfhosters move away. Plex is (now was) the #1 thing to that both myself and others in this community would recommend to someone looking to get into selfhosting. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ not anymore, wonder how much the revenue will drop?
Final thought: there's also a fair chance (I'd rate it at almost 70%) that they presented this to us because they knew it would piss people off. Then, in a week or so, they will post a "we're sorry, is this better?" with the changes they're ACTUALLY going to make. A ploy to make us blindly agree to whatever they want because "at least it's better than what they wanted originally"
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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.
Any Kodi users here?
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This always baffled me when I had a friend who showed me his Plex server years ago.
So you're using a service which makes it easy for you to host and access everything wherever you are, pulls in all the metadata for shows and movies and you're not worried about them tracking all of that?
When I finally set my own up I used Jellyfin from the start, I prefer as little tracking as possible but thats just me
What do you do to access jellyfin wherever?
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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.
Why do people use this when Jellyfin exists?
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You tell me Android TV (on a google chromecast) is not user friendly?
Same for Android? (Can't speak for iOS. Not using that)Bro, even my mother uses it and she uses a single browser tab for research and struggled to understand why a password manager is more advantageous than a piece of paper. Meaning she isnt a tech wiz beyond common sense.
Now playback is another story. Jellyfin still is a bit struggling playing back all files consistently out of the box that's true.
Some playback quirks like waiting for the transcode buffering on a black screen is usual for me but users expect feedback that something is happening.OK, do you want me to tell 50 users of my Plex server that they can no longer use their shitty 10 year old smart TV to watch my movie library, and instead have to pay money buy a chromecast dongle, and then get a completely different UI and lose all their view progress on TV series? They'd just go back to paying for Netflix
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What do you do to access jellyfin wherever?
Tailscale/headscale if you don't want just it exposed
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Why do people use this when Jellyfin exists?
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.
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Yes and I also remember when there were stupid things like early universal remotes that had big timers on them to circumvent the internal programming needs (but then you had to program the remote and sync it)
Managing your own AV equipment has always been a pain in the ass.
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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.
This is the best ad campaign Jellyfin could have asked for.
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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.
Setting jellyfin up is for the technically inclined, i'll agree there, but once deployed I don't really see where Plex fundamentally excels over Jellyfin?
You open the app, app shows library, you click on desired media item, desired media item plays.
What am i missing? -
People insist that IPv6 is complicated, but then refuse to learn it or think outside their IPv4-brain
I haven't really messed around if the intricacies of computer networking but the only downside I personally encountered to use an IPv6 is that it's a bit harder to memorize the IP addresses but I usually copy paste those anyways so it doesn't matter. People use names for stuff anyways so why use bare ips?
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Why do people use this when Jellyfin exists?
I took a dive into linux and jellyfin and im too stupid for it.
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So the flatpak version of Jellyfin works for you? I cant get it to play more then one thing. hitting the play button just does nothing.
Yeah. I had to go into the settings and change some setting to get it to work with keyboard input.
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There's a jellyfish app on Xbox?
Yep. My dad said it’s working great for him.
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Setting jellyfin up is for the technically inclined, i'll agree there, but once deployed I don't really see where Plex fundamentally excels over Jellyfin?
You open the app, app shows library, you click on desired media item, desired media item plays.
What am i missing?It's the setup which doesn't pass the "wife" test. The more setup friction, the lower the likelihood that average users will bother. It requires a very easy setup experience to retain the average user. Even us technical people have limited time in the day. If I get a similar experience out of both Plex and Jellyfin, I'm going with the software which is easier to set up. Most of us are at that point in our lives where we'll pay for convenience.
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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'm seeing a lot of negativity but I think they offer a great service and deserve to be paid for their work. I bought a lifetime pass many years ago and I almost feel guilty how much value I have received over that time.
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Setting jellyfin up is for the technically inclined, i'll agree there, but once deployed I don't really see where Plex fundamentally excels over Jellyfin?
You open the app, app shows library, you click on desired media item, desired media item plays.
What am i missing? -
The app isn't available on as many platforms. The original comment claimed the TV their MIL uses doesn't have a Jellyfin app and would require side loading. I would argue that's a pretty big barrier for most people.
