A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Why would you expect this to NOT be paid? It requires them to be running servers to stream the media through, I wouldn't expect this to be a free feature.
I dislike Plex for several reasons, but asking for payment for stuff that costs them money is completely justified.
Well this is a good reason to finish my migration to Jellyfin I think.
I only use remote streaming a couple times per year, so paying for plex pass just for that seems a bit silly. Their online-only account auth is also super annoying if the internet is down.
They seem to be getting a lot of hate for this, but Plex is not FOSS... They have the roots but they currently have like 100 paid employees and are trying to make a business out of it. They have to do something to make money to pay people every month. My $75 10 years ago isn't going to do much for that... The fact that they've made it this far without folding is impressive.
I gotta be honest, when I look at the problem pragmatically, it'll be a lot easier to pay $20 a year than to switch to jellyfin and get all my users to figure out how to install clients and make it work for them.
I'm already at the point in my life where my primary concern is making things work smoothly, and if I need to throw money at something to make it work smoothly, the choice is a no brainer. (At least for some values of "money")
Jellyfin works in the browser just like Plex.
And for now you can do that, but that's not the first, and not the last update trying to prevent people selling access to their server.
I don't really have a problem with this. I paid for a lifetime quite a long time ago. Right now I only use Plex for plexamp and everything else is on jellyfin.
Is finamp at a point that it can replace plexamp yet?
How to kill a service speedrun any%
They think they have enough users locked in to just pay over setting up another server. They might.
I just want to make sure I read this correctly. It says that if you're a Plex plass holder already that remote streaming changes won't affect your service. This means that if I have the lifetime subscription and host my own server than users whom have not payed for Plex pass can continue to access this server without issue correct?
Yeah. The day they start making something subscription that isn't included in the lifetime pass is the day they get their office burned down by a lot of angry people.
I stopped using Plex shortly after they started forcing logging in with your online Plex account to connect to LAN only based server. The writing was on the wall all those years ago. Who wants to be locked out of their media when the internet is offline, completely defeated the point of self hosting local infrastructure
Jellyfin, while lacking a bit when I first migrated, has continued improved over the years and it has been joyful to use. Plus Jellyfin supported hardware transcoding before Plex did, which was a gripe I had with Plex at the time.
I stream from my server remotely and share with Family without hassle. I dunno where Plex is trying to go, glad I bailed long ago
This is the best ad campaign Jellyfin could have asked for.
I absolutely love that Emby is such a third thought that they don’t even get a mention anymore. They fucked their loyal users over so much that they don’t even get mentioned anymore. Can’t wait for plex to suffer the same fate
Unless Jellyfin becomes more plug and play Plex will be fine. I like Jellyfin but there is a reason Plex is still around. People are willing to pay for how user friendly it is. Every time I've reinstalled Plex it just works with no issues. I can literally set it up at a friend's house once and never have an issue ever.
With jellyfin Its just never been that experience.
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.
100% agree with the reverse proxy set up, it's not hard but it is intimidating at first and just fyi, reverse proxy set up is a ton easier if you're using swag with the drag, drop, run for a ton of apps including SSL certificate renewal.
https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2020-08-21-introducing-swag
With that reverse proxy and SSL set up, no problems with the wife test or parent test and jellyfin for me at least.
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?
Requiring a subscription for remote access is actually fucking insane, they don't have any bandwidth costs associated with that other than authentication so ???
They have provided a free relay service for years that makes it possible to access a server even if there are things in the way like CGNAT. That service had a low bandwidth limit but undoubtedly cost them money, so yes. But yes, they should have just moved that feature entirely to Plex pass (there is already a higher bandwidth limit for Plex pass users)
Ehhh i don't think that justifies having people pay to stream, i doubt a lot of people even ever used that functionality and yeah they could have just pay walled it if it was that much of a problem.