Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April
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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.
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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
I mean, I'm with you, it is nice to support something you use, financially. But you made a one time payment 12 years ago. Your money is certainly not there anymore, they used it and paid something with it. I don't know, it just sounds like a really weird take reading your post. But maybe its me whose weird, I would prefer one time payment over subscriptions too.
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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
Nah. Cool that you think that, though. The moment they started charging for what was a free service, they lost me. I have gigabit internet. The only reason i used their service to begin with was ease of use.
Hot take but maybe everything doesn't need to be an infinitely expanding business. Just imagine for a second that it's fine for something to just break even, pay for the few mainteners salaries and not expand the business at all ever. I know that I just uttered the cardinal evil under capitalism but fucking seriously. The primary userbase of plex is pirates. The whole incentive is not having to pay for a streaming service. Charging money for it is just torpedoing your entire userbase. The entire appeal of Plex was it not charging money.
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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 thought that was already true
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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.
If dependencies are articulated (and maintained...) properly, it is very doable and is intrinsically tied to what semantic versioning is actually supposed to represent. So
appfoodepends inlibbar@2:2.9and so forth. Of course, the reality is thatlibbaris poorly maintained and has massive API/header breaking changes every point release and was dependent on a bug in[email protected]anyway.Its one of the reasons why I like approaches like Portage or Spack that are specifically about breaking an application's dependencies down and concretizing. Albeit, they also have the problem where they overconcretize and you have just as much, if not more, bloat. But it theoretically provides the best of both worlds... at the cost of making a single library take 50 minutes to install because you are compiling everything for the umpteenth time.
And yeah... I run way too many appimages too.
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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
I fucking hope to god they don't go full enshittification and decide to revoke the lifetime licenses.
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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.
It's very relevant, it directly speaks to how they'll behave themselves closed where they can make crap decisions even easier.
Plex for all its issues, at least was upfront most who jumped on the Plex train did so with the knowledge that it might enshittify and honestly it's not as bad as it could be
A bunch of us who started on the Emby train did so under the pretense that at worst we might have to deal with a paid subscription or support contract type of deal.
That was a lie, I was there 10 years ago when it went down, that's when I pivoted to Plex full time (I had been running both for like a year at that point)
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Except, it isn't, .NET Core is an open source framework by the .NET Foundation
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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.
Storage is cheap until it isn't.
On my desktop where I have something like 6 TB of NVME storage because I am a sicko? The only thing that makes me think twice about a flatpak is if I need to give it access to devices or significant parts of my filesystem (yay permissions weirdness).
On my laptop where I can have one drive and replacing it involves opening the entire laptop AND reinstalling Fedora (or dealing with clonezilla/
dd)? Yeah... I very much care about just how much bloat I am dealing with. And, as the other person pointed out, flatpaks can balloon REAL fast. -
I mean, I'm with you, it is nice to support something you use, financially. But you made a one time payment 12 years ago. Your money is certainly not there anymore, they used it and paid something with it. I don't know, it just sounds like a really weird take reading your post. But maybe its me whose weird, I would prefer one time payment over subscriptions too.
Lots of businesses have and do exist without a subscription model. I'm fond of the Paprika Recipe Manager, for example, which asks a one-time payment for each major version. All commercial software worked this way in the 80s.
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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.
Yeah, I've written some custom css to get some better wrapping of libraries and such.
There's also the community themes worth looking into.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/css-customization/#community-themes -
I agree, but having looked down this road, finding a quality external player that users will understand and is inexpensive is ... not easy.
I like my Shield TV: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/shield-tv/
I did need to install a custom launcher on it when the standard AndroidTV launcher added ads.
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Roku does it well enough. not perfectly but it's still not as shit as my Google tv
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How is the general perception of emby?
They're closed source and US based.They're not just closed source, they started as the open source project response to Plex. It was promised that they would be open source forever. They lied, slammed the source door shut a few years later and pivoted to a paywall.
There was no discussion with the community or contributors, no alternatives explored, no surveys or polls.
Just a "Sorry we're going closed source" blog post, Jellyfin was forked from them in vengeance.
