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.
It’s wild to me that people who claim to be tech savvy don’t understand that Plex Server, the software, is what makes Plex what it is and as popular as it is. No other solution exists that is as easy as Plex and as secure as Plex. Jellyfin, Emby, Kodi, etc are nowhere near as simple to use and don’t have the breadth of app support that Plex does. Plex is basically on every device anyone owns. They sign in and they can stream from everyones libraries. No VPNs needed, no other hoops.
I paid like $100 for a lifetime Plex Pass like 10 years ago. The 2 dozen friends and family that share my server don’t pay a cent and this changes nothing.
This place sucks at times as it becomes clear it’s just an echo chamber that we used to call the Donald for.
My users don’t like the UI of Jellyfin as it isn’t as polished as Plex. I do this for my users and although it costs me money, it does save them a whole lot more money and means they’re taken out of some capitalist systems which should be the goal no?
I also have the cost of a VPN too.
Edit: The comment I replied to was on -6 upvotes at the time of posting.
I use jellyfin, and jellyfin is not safe to expose to the internet.
They have a handful of vulnerability and security holes that have been open for like 5+ years now. And the old emby architecture is quite difficult to work with.
A load of those so called vulnerabilities are way overblown and in most cases require you to be logged in anyway.
So you’re saying there are some vulnerabilities which are not overblown and therefore should be a concern?
That is with any piece of software. their will always be some vulnerabilities that are very bad. so by your definition using any piece of software is a concern.
I agree with you, it’s likely this vulnerability is only known because Jellyfin is open source… how many are hiding in Plex’s proprietary source code…
Anyways when has anyone ever been pwnd by this “exploit”, I have seriously never heard of anyone being “hacked” by one of them.
Definitely overblown as far as I am aware… don’t post your instance url all over the internet and you will likely be fine.
Using Plex (is fine, do whatever u want) and giving them your data instead doesn’t really help you (or at least sending your data through them).
You don’t need to post your IP. Any server admin would tell you that if you have a server exposed to the internet then you’re going to get people / bots knocking and your doors (ports) to see what is open. They could then use something like meta spoilt to find vulnerabilities and gain access to your server.
And they actively refuse to do anything about them because it would force clients to update. You could just just as well open an unsecured ftp server to your content
The UIs are nearly identical, though.
Not in the slightest.
On iOS for instance there is a weird thing where it has a set of Ui controls and then if you double tap the screen it turns to the iPhone default Ui controls.
This.
I just set up Plex for my mom on her bargain bin cheapo android TV. It had the plex app right there and it’ll play without transcoding.
Can’t do that with Jellyfin.
Entrenchment. This is a profoundly absurd statement.
You paid $100 to access software hosted on your own devices. That’s wonderful you think that’s a great idea. I’m sure the Plex devs love you and would kiss you right on the mouth.
Because you’re vendor locked in… lol.
I paid $100 to play Forza Horizon on my own device too - should that have been free?
That no other solution exists that is as easy and secure as Plex? That’s not just absurd, but profoundly absurd? What other solution is there that is?
Your entire argument seems to be that software should be free if it’s on your own device, which is a profoundly absurd statement. The only paid software should be on hardware you don’t own?
This is a complete false equivalence and I feel that you know that. The idea of a console is to expand it by buying new games. That’s not unexpected.
I am a software developer. The argument isn’t that software should be free. The argument is that this is an exceptionally poor business model and as a developer I’m disgusted that people are defending it. The VC which owns Plex and other VCs will use this “logic” that you have to move the goal posts further, and further, and further, and further until there’s no such thing as free software anymore. And I think that’s fucked up.
At the end of the day you’re paying twice to avoid buying IP. Just fucking buy the IP if you’re going to be stupid. Movies are like $12. At $250 you’re paying $2.10/mo in addition to your hosting costs.
Just go buy 20 movies for the same price. It’s so dumb.
It’s not though. The idea of self hosting isn’t to not have any software costs associated with it. Domain names aren’t free. VPNs (that you use to aquire content) aren’t free. Cloud backups aren’t free. Would you prefer everything was free? Absolutely. Do you sometimes have to pay to get the best software for the job? Absolutely, and Plex is that software.
Same here! That makes your argument even crazier to me! Someone demanding that your software should be free and should never be changed to be paid even if it means the company goes under is bananas.
The business model of having the people that use their main product that requires the most development and time and resources, Plex Server, pay either a cheap one off fee (that regularly goes on sale for half price) or a monthly subscription fee in order to use it, is “exceptionally poor”? How so? Is it just that it was free? This business model has been around for eternity. Get people in the door and hooked by offering it for free, then start charging for it. It’s one of the actual best business models around, not “exceptionally poor” lol. You’re looking at it from the “I want it to be free forever” point of view, not the “We need it to be a viable business with revenue to be able to sustain it” point of view.
That will never happen, because people will always be making free software to put out there for people to try and to use - and many of them will then transition to PAID because it’s not sustainable otherwise. For software to thrive you often have to have full time developers working on it, and full time developers need to be paid.
I paid ~$100 ~10 years ago for Plex Pass. It paid for itself instantly as I was simply supporting the developers of the software. As a software developer I have no problem doing that. I wasn’t forced to buy it, but I did.
I’m not quite sure where you got this $250 figure from though? What is that, the monthly remote pass x 12? Also most people running a plex server get far more than 20 movies a year lol. Pretty sure I got 20 movies last night.
Yup, read through this thread and it becomes clearer and clearer. and trust me, I’ve been a long time hold out, I’ve been through this many times - but this is the first time I’ve seen functionality removed from Plex to be put behind a paywall. And doing a price hike at the same time. Absolutely shitty. I’ve already migrated off.
You have a plex pass though, so nothing changed for you - you just got all angry because you didn’t read the email properly.
Your users are going to be much worse off now than they were, and you will absolutely lose a bunch of them who don’t want to (or can’t) have to connect to a VPN every time they want to stream from your library.
Why would they need to connect to a VPN every time they connect to Jellyfin?
Jellyfin has some security issues that, depending on who you ask, are either critical vulnerabilities that make it completely unsafe to expose to the Internet or largely unconcerning for regular users.
I’m not overly concerned about my instance running behind a reverse proxy. Perhaps I am just naive…
Honestly yeah. The Jellyfin Backend is basically unauthenticated for a large part, allowing anyone to map and stream your content as soon as they guessed the ids, which isn’t that hard, since they are based on the paths on your device. So if your movie sits in /mnt/media/movies/the_bee_movie that is pretty esay to guess and calculate the id from, allowing anyone to stream that content from your server
And apart from an undesirable bandwidth usage resulting from someone guessing their way to my file structure, how can this be used to compromise my server?
They can stream content from your server or map out what you have on there by using a rainbow table. Depending on the country you live in they can and will use that combined with your IP to start litigating you
if you reverse proxy (w/ proper headers etc.) into a VPN this isn’t an issue
The magic bullet in that sentence is VPN not reverse proxy
I always see this and I have to ask: why do you care?
They likely aren’t paid customers of yours, if they don’t follow your rules and the software you like to use, then they are free to use any other method of consuming media.
Have to agree with the other comment that asks why do you need to use a vpn. Fax
I dunno man, I don’t care much, when Plex gets shitty enough I’ll jump. But paying for the ongoing maintenance of software isn’t some evil thing, even if I self host it.
You’re not paying for software maintenance, you’re paying a subscription service to a private company that has already decided to cut back on features that others also thought they were paying to maintain.
If you want to actually pay for software maintenance, migrate to Jellyfin and pay them instead, rather than filtering your payments through middle managers and shareholders first.
Problem is jellyfin (apps and server) is shit
You didn’t ask, but if you’ve had a bad experience with the apps, you could try one of the native apps.
My friends on Apple devices think Swiftfin (https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin) is much better than the normal jellyfin app.
I haven’t used this one/know anyone that has: Findroid (third party) (https://github.com/jarnedemeulemeester/findroid). Mostly because I haven’t had any issues with the official jellyfin app for android, but it would probably give a cleaner experience, being native and all.
For the server, I think it’s fantastic. Never had any problems that weren’t a few clicks to resolve. Pretty much use it and forget I’m the one maintaining it for the most part. I wonder what issues you encountered?
But that’s not what you’re paying for. You’re paying for access to that software…
I know. And some of that money, funds development, and some of that development includes security.