cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/2333639
I was just forwarded this someone in my household who watches our server. That’s it folks. I’ve been a hold out for a long time, but this is honestly it.
They want me to pay to stream content that I bought from my hardware transcoded also on my hardware.
I’ll say it. As of today, I say Plex is dead. Luckily I’ve been setting up Jellyfin, I guess it’s time to make it production ready.
Edit: I have a Plex Pass. More comments saying “Just buy a plex pass” are seriously not getting it. I have a Plex Pass and my users are still getting this.
And for the thousandth person who wants to say the same things to me:
- YES I know I’m unaffected as a Plex Pass owner.
- My users were immediately angry at it, which made me angry. Our users don’t understand what plex pass is, and they shouldn’t have to, that’s why I had it. The fact that they were pinged even though it should have kept working is horribly sloppy
- Plex is still removing functionality. I don’t care that “People should pay their fair share”. If Plex wants to put every new feature behind a paywall, that’s completely okay. They are removing functionality.
- “But they have cloud costs”. Remote streaming is negligible to them. It’s a dynamic DNS service. Plex client logs in, asks where server is, plex cloud responds with the IP and port of where server is located. That’s it.
- “Good luck finding another remote streaming” - Again, Plex just opens up an IP and port. Jellyfin also just opens up an IP and port (Hold on jellyfin folks I know, security, that’s a separate conversation). All “remote streaming” is is their dynamic dns. Literal pennies to them. Know what actually is costing them money? Hosting all of that ad-supported “free” content that they’re probably losing money on.
In short, I don’t care how you justify it. Plex is doing something shitty. They’re removing functionality that has been free for years. I’m not responding to any more of your comments repeating the same arguments over and over.
Seems like it was only a matter of time.
20% more will jump to Jellyfin. The other 80% will entrench and talk even more about how great Plex is. I mean Jesus, $250 to watch pirated movies. lol wtf It’s also fucking wild to me that people are defending a monetization model that is on self hosted hardware. Like, I gotta pay for my server and then a license to avoid buying DVDs. Fuck it, at this point just buy the fucking movie.
Ya’ll are brain dead. Plex loves you tho.
I see some posts taking about jellyfin and tailscale and I find it interesting that it’s not mentioned tailscale is a private company. Why are they not being held to the same standard as Plex? How long before it becomes enshittified? I saw they have a free plan but give it time until they realize the number of users in the free tier are large enough to monetize.
edit: I’m prepared to be down voted but mark this and see where it ends up at.
Edit2: and I’m not defending Plex. I agree it’s a shitty move.
not a plex user but someone buried the lede here… to me, this is the neon sign that screams GTFO:
we noticed that you’ve accessed libraries in the past
what business of yours is it to notice my private comings and goings?! what other actionable intel do y’all keep in your logs?! bye!
“On 21 May 2008, XBMC developer Elan Feingold forked the source code of XBMC and started a new project called Plex”
GPL v2 source.
They’ve long been suspected of being greedy lil GPL violaters.
This doesn’t really affect my household. My wife, my daughter, and I all have lifetime PlexPasses.
That said, this level of enshitification has me wishing there were options (yes I know about Emby and Jellyfin and I’ve investigated both more than once) but they have me ensnared by PlexAmp and Sonos integration. I’ve been around since before anyone had even seen the letters MP3 strung together, and I have never had a music player as capable as PlexAmp.
This was announced several months ago
I’m a server owner and had no idea. If I did, I would have left then.
What’s the alternative you’re going with?
I’ve been testing out Jellyfin for a while anyway. I’m honestly surprised how much they’ve caught up
That’s another service that doesn’t provide free remote streaming, not without setting up remote access in a way that would also work for Plex. So why is this the change that’s making you leave Plex?
Jellyfin absolutely does provide free remote streaming. Plex use to, but no longer will. That is why it’s a change making people switch.
I’ll ask you the same question… What steps did you take to get it streaming outside of your house?
Give the address of the server and login info
You can forward a port in your router like you would with Plex, or you can use a reverse proxy, or Tailscale Funnel if you want to get jazzy wit it.
Then all you do on the client side is pop in the address.
I don’t understand why people keep saying that. I can stream outside my network. Others can stream it from outside my network. That’s remote streaming in my book.
What steps did you take to get it streaming outside of your house?
Probably the same steps you’d need to if you use Plex and are CGNATED (thanks CGNAT for teaching me basic networking).
As a server owner, you should be keeping an eye on tos and updates/changes to the software you use. You probably got an email but ignored it?
That was announced 2 months ago?
I’m coming up on 5 years as a Plex pass owner, so my users and I will not be impacted by this change. In five more years if they asked me nicely to pay another $89 to support the service I would. Send me some stickers and put a badge on my server. I get a lot of use out of the software/service, as do my family members.
I will say, I am quite annoyed at the wording and audience of this email. Jellyfin is just not an option for me until there is excellent feature parity with Plex. I know they are a lot of Jellyfin fans here, in my opinion, Plex is a significantly better experience for me.
Thank you for posting this. I thought it was just me.
In my case, one user actually lost access entirely to my libraries, the updated app was trying to force him to buy a personal pass, even though I have a Plex pass.
I had him reset his app and clear cache, to no avail. I ended up having to REMOVE his access to my libraries, and then reshare them to him, before he could access them again.
He was quite upset at Plex during the entire process.
Then the next day, he got this same email, and was frustrated all over again thinking he was gonna have to fight it again.
Really terrible customer service here, very sloppy. Aside from the fact that this is a greedy cash grab, it’s just being done poorly.
Jellyfin still isn’t feature packed enough for me to switch to, unfortunately.
The beginning of enshittification.
Prices will keep climbing, functionality reduced in favor of service tiers, and of course ads, ads, and ads.
Can I still watch for free from my pc to my tv locally through the Plex app?
Enshittification engaged. /j
The more users on Jellyfin the better shot it has at getting more developer attention and users willing to contribute financially even if just occasional one off donation. How it goes with any open source application. More users, more developer interest, more feedback from users, subset of users willing to financially support the project
Open Source
Lol “Your Friends at Plex”
get fucked, assholes, Jellyfin is better anyway
deleted by creator
Good thing jellyfin is open source then.
That’s what Emby thought.
I fucking hate corporate speak.
Doesn’t jellyfin just not do this at all? Like if you want to stream remotely you need to figure out a vpn solution to do it?
No. You have to expose your server to the internet in some way bit you don’t have to set up some sort of VPN. There are plenty of people who will tell you how awful of an idea it is but if you make smart choices it’s not a big deal.
Well, as an application it has a huge attack surface, it’s also able to download stuff from internet (e.g., subs) and many people run it on NAS. I run jellyfin in docker, I didn’t do a security assessment yet, but for sure it needs volume mounts, not sure about what capabilities it runs with (surely NET_BIND, and I think DAC_READ_SEARCH to avoid file ownership issues with downloaders?). Either way, I would never expose a service like that on the internet.
This is also true about Plex which must also be exposed to the internet
No that’s the thing. Plex can also use their infra as a tunneling system. You can have remote streaming without exposing Plex publicly and without VPN. It is slow though.
You’re 100% correct. I always find it funny how hardcore some people are with jellyfin vs Plex. I’ll probably end up getting downvotes on this but imo Plex is way simpler to setup and keep running, and as a lifetime pass owner, I’ve very rarely felt like my experience has been deteriorated by any of the changes that the jellyfin crowd freaks out about. Plus plexamp is honestly such a great music player. I’ll happily keep running Plex for the foreseeable future.
Plex is more polished, but I love Jellyfin’s subtitle search; it blows Plex’s socks away.
Also, Jellyfin doesn’t nag me every effing time to enable DRM in Firefox for some unfathomable reason.
But Plex definitely wins on performance, IMO.
Set up Bazarr.
Ditto to all of this, except I don’t know anything about plexamp
If you have music on your server, I’d strongly recommend checking it out. I believe it was started as a side project by the Plex devs and it’s a way better music player than the one built into the Plex apps.
I used a reverse proxy just fine.
You can stream remotely via jellyfin if you expose your server to the internet. VPN is safer but not the only option.
Yeah, no way. Jellyfins Backend is like an open barn door. And with the kind of content most of us here offer through either Jellyfin or Plex, I wouldn’t want to open up like that.
Anecdotal but I’ve run Jellyfin publicly without any issues for around 5 years. It even has its own domain name.
Completely unreasonable to need to walk people through this. It’s OK to say jellyfin can’t do remote access.
Well, I never said it did out of the box. I was giving people the example of how I did it, in case they wanted an easy option for PCs. No offence meant, my friend.
Dude how the hell am I supposed to walk my mom through setting up tailscale on her Roku?
And what if you have multiple friends all sharing each others libraries?
This is not a feasible solution let alone a “very easy” one.
I was thinking a computer! Multiple people can connect to your tailscale and jellyfin at once. That’s not so much an issue. Other than that, there’s not so much more than installing the app and signing in with email or Google then sending them a link. I use a shared email and pass to speed up the process.
Also Wireguard, which is what Tailscale uses.
Yeah, they both do. That’s a lot more manual though.
“Very easy” assuming you aren’t trying to share with non-technical people or your elderly parents.
I’ve walked them through using tailscale. You install it once and forget it.
Not necessarily a VPN but you’re 100% on your own for security. When i used to run Emby, I had a white-list IPs but this doesn’t work great since most ISPs rotate IPs over time and if you’re on wireless it could change all the time.
Yeah a VPN isn’t “necessary”, but it’s the most straightforward way. Unfortunately it’s not really at all feasible for many people who currently play from other peoples plex libraries.
I use a non-rooted docker, reverse proxy, and cloudfare domain. I know Jellyfin has some API security issues but I’m still unconvinced that any of them can be used to escalate to any level that would threaten my server (or even my instance of Jellyfin).
They are not about escalating permissions but about unauthorized access to your library. As some living in a country with professional piracy lawyers, that go out and try to catch people in the act, I won’t open my server to that kind of risk.
I like Jellyfin being open source and all, but the maintainers made it clear that they prefer backwards compatibility with clients over fixing these issues.
Oh yeah I don’t buy the backwards compat stuff because you can version an API to preserve backwards compatibility to sensible ends.
I’d be very interested to see cases of streaming or copyright lawyers essentially hacking users to litigate them. The only stuff Ive ever seen on snooping by corps on pirates it’s usually collecting PII from public sources like torrent clients without VPN coverage.
The alternative is that dey just don’t care or are not capable of fixing it, despite numerous suggestions in the github thread. Both don’t bode well for the project, especially seeing as that ticket has veen open and discussed for almost 5 years
That’s correct
That is not correct. A VPN would be one method but you can also just expose the service to the internet in a number of ways and accomplish the same thing Plex provides.
That’s correct
You probably shouldn’t just expose jellyfin to the internet quite yet though. There are some ongoing efforts to fix unauthenticated endpoint problems.
‘Ongoing efforts’ is a funny way to phrase ‘refuse to fix’
To be fair, there has been very slow progress toward securing some endpoints. But yeah, I was probably being too charitable; the project places way too much emphasis on “backward compatibility” and not enough on security.
Not to be “achtuallying” bit VPN is not a way to remote stream, it’s a way to bring remote clients in the local network.
Likewise exposing services on the internet…not really going to happen esepcially for people - like me - that run plex/jellyfin on their NAS.
I don’t have a horse in this race, i don’t use remote streaming, I only ever streamed from my nas to my 2 TVs, and I am experimenting with jellyfin. But for those who do need remote streaming, jellyfin is going to be problematic.
Incorrect.
Jellyfin is better anyway
I wish this were true, but as a multi-year Plex-to-Jellyfin migrant, I have to point out that Plex was the better software.
I still choose to run Jellyfin for other reasons (don’t like the commercial path Plex is taking, among others), but I still do miss the better reliability and larger feature set in the Plex software stack.
