Projects like Plex, they started out from the open source community, had free contributions, and then monetized. People are bastardizing open source.
The reason Plex is as popular as it is is because of their infrastructure and software that lets users stream video and music remotely on any device at the press of a button. That costs money to build and maintain.
Really? Cuz Jellyfin literally does the same thing and doesn’t cost money.
It certainly doesn’t cost what they’re charging. They have a cache, a relay and an auth service. I’ll grant them some more allowance for an active security team. They’ve wasted manyears on features nobody wants and have eliminated any feature that costs them any amount of money to maintain if they can’t make money off it. (sync, client serve, yada yada)
In fairness to Plex, I bought a Lifetime subscription during a Black Friday deal over a decade ago and it’s still serving me well to this day.
I have jellyfin set up ready to go but Plex has the UX down at this point. I’ll keep using it whilst my lifetime subscription remains valid.
Same here, JF is on reserve but I’ll be sad if I ever need to switch. Ever since they fixed downloads I have 0 major complaints. Plex just works, and it works very well for my and my family’s needs. I am perfectly happy paying once for software that I use every single day.
God I hate their last UX change. It’s like they specifically designed the roku client to hide your own content and favor theirs, used to be one click into my library and everything was there.
Plex is a series C for-profit company and is 100% beholden to its investors who expect a handsome return on investment; the enshittification & price hikes are literally guaranteed to continue. Existing users can, and should expect to be squeezed for profits until they have nothing left to give
Strange, I haven’t paid another cent since I paid like AUD$50 for the lifetime pass well over a decade ago.
You can’t say their service hasn’t gotten worse though :)
I paid $75 USD, but they took my plugins, (pour one out for youtube on plex for my DanTDM obsessed kid back in the day) made my interface hard to navigate, try constantly to shove their own content down my (and my users) throats. Hey, remember when you used to have that sync feature that kept you up to date with a selection of titles, then you could use the client on your phone to serve to other phones even offline, god that was awesome with kids on vacation.
made my interface hard to navigate
How? What is hard to navigate in Plex?
try constantly to shove their own content down my (and my users) throats.
I assume you don’t know you can customize your home screen and menus? You can only have your own content showing if you want.
You can’t say their service hasn’t gotten worse though :)
I absolutely can. It has only improved since I’ve been using it, which is from the very start.
How? What is hard to navigate in Plex?
That last ui update was a open abomination and every plex forum out there was all over it, you can’t hide that by saying nuhhahhhh
Since you’re so enamored with plex and I’m quite versed on it, Let’s talk about the horrors of plex
They are collecting data on your and your friends, what you’re watching and what media you have. If the country or state you live and ever decide to go after pirates, they will absolutely hand that data over to whatever state wants it for a song.
Using plex is selling your self and your family out.
They have consistently removed features that people loved and used to focus on delivering you ad content and enshittifying the average experience until they pay. And how much are you paying to watch your own content? What other services could you be spending that on?
I assume you don’t know you can customize your home screen and menus? You can only have your own content showing if you want.
I assume you’re either shill for the company or an outright PR plant, that last ui change was pushed to put their content first. that’s BS. I had my stuff customized, I disabled their crap, they undid it again. My family had to have me go and dig through those tiny top menus on roku to find my own shares. The average person watching my stuff complained to me that i put ads in my stuff. that’s not by fucking accident, it’s a business decision to give me and mine worse content so they can make an extra buck off me. Every change they make is company first, every requrest we make is forums for user helpful change is years old.
The whole company is absolutely horrible and selfish.
I absolutely can. It has only improved since I’ve been using it, which is from the very start.
How about give me examples instead of just shilling. The people here are owed the truth, not your company first attitude.
There are two ways to increase profits:
- Charge more for the same services
- Remove services or features from paid subscriptions
Plex has done 2 a few times now.
If you like being told you can stream remotely and then later have the feature yanked and slapped behind a paywall, then by all means use Plex.
I bought a lifetime license on day 1 iirc. I wanted to support the software that was so good and better than everything else at the time. I have had zero features yanked.
I want to stream remotely, share my library, and watch on any device I come across, so I’ll use Plex.
That’s all well and good for you, but they pulled many rugs out from under free users. This is arguably bad, depending on who you ask, but they most certainly did flat out lie about, which is the core issue.
There’s no “rug pulling” for free users. Expecting a service run by a for-profit company to keep everything free forever is naive and just plain dumb.
This is arguably bad, depending on who you ask, but they most certainly did flat out lie about, which is the core issue.
What did they lie about exactly?
deleted by creator
You were right to switch whether the price increased or not.
I’ve had so many instances of free to use, lifetime licenses, and purchased software that have turned into subscription services that I refuse to install anything that requires an account unless it can’t be avoided. The fact that Plex required an account be created to view my own local content years before they started charging for use made it obvious subscription fees were coming.
Jellyfin works great. Combined with Wireguard it works great anywhere.
My only hitch making the switch to Jellyfin is that a couple of my TVs just don’t have a jellyfin app whatsoever. I wish they did, I can’t stand all the changes Plex has made over the last few years specifically.
Spin up pihole and just look at the data coming to your “smart” TV’s even when you are not using them. Then consider the data they must be sending home, the only thing “smart” TVs are good at is watching you watch them (or not watching them). I would highly recommend getting a pi or media computer for your TV’s.
I do not think I can stress this enough smart TV’s are not smart for you they are smart for whoever made the TV. Manufactures sell TV’s at a loss now because they get more by selling you.
I have an Nvidia Shield stick that’s android based and one day Google started pushing live Taco Bell ads to it on the ambient Home Screen. That was the last day pi-hole ever let it phone home.
Agreed. Watching the queries on the pi-hole dashboard has been eye-opening.
highly recommend getting a pi or media computer
Been looking at this for years, Fam is absolutely refusing to use a keyboard in the living room. They’ll watch on their phones first. I can’t find a clear, easy solution to run a quality remote on a SFF pc. It’s like the decades old mediacenter hole that never gets filled.
I had a pi 5 that I was going to use as my set top box and install the media centre OS on it, Jeff Geerling shows how you can do it with a pi 5, but it got damaged when my place flooded and insurance does its thing to screw you over and I never got around to testing it.
Thanks for that, flirc might be worth my time to look.
I need some of those codecs to perform better, but I can probably stand up a more agile box than a Pi.
They do not sell TVs at a loss lol.
Retailers don’t, but those $300 60" TVs cost manufacturers more than that in parts and shipping. They are 100% making up for it in LTV from your data, that’s why some are trying to make it impossible not to use them when not connected to the internet.
but those $300 60" TVs cost manufacturers more than that in parts and shipping.
They don’t.
nice argument you place there. meet my blocklist
Wait, you’re that same guy just shilling for plex aren’t you?
Oh my, go check that post history people, they’re either a PR plant or just trolling
Look at an major TV manufactures books and the TV part is a loss, the income they get from the TV is selling you to advertisers.
Look at an major TV manufactures books and the TV part is a loss, the income they get from the TV is selling you to advertisers.
I’d love to see your source for this. I won’t hold my breathe because it’s simply not true.
I am waiting on your apology or rebuttal!
https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/01/16/people-think-roku-makes-money-selling-streaming-st/
https://www.mensjournal.com/entertainment/tech-smart-tv-screenshots-acr-tracking-privacy-lg-samsung
https://jamestown.org/connected-smart-tv-security-risks/
https://taurusx.com/resource/480275.html
For a peer-reviewed (means scientific) article here is https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565251327885
I guess Sony does not, but they allow Amazon and/or Google onto the TV and if you think they are not getting money from you that way I have some nice ocean side property to sell you here in Saskatchewan.
A cheap device like an Onn (~$20) would solve that, probably without requiring the device have Internet access once set up.
Researching now. I figured there were things out there like that but didn’t know they were so inexpensive. Thanks for the suggestion!
couldn’t you also do a little raspberry pi setup? little more work but a lot more control.
I’d love to! Those things are expensive now though. My old Pi is running my Pi-Hole now. If they were affordable, I’d buy a whole ass pallet of them for all the projects I want to do.
Yes the whole poop load of them would be great to get, I have so many projects I would like to do with them.
Are they Samsung TVs?
They are, at least the one that’s given me the most trouble is.
I think Jellyfin already released to Tizen OS, although not all model supports it https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-tizen/issues/222#issuecomment-3831638580
If you want to try, it should be possible to install it yourself instead of waiting it to be available in Tizen app store
Yeah, my TV doesn’t have Tizen as far as I know. I found that jellyfin-tizen app and tried manually installing it but my TV is about 8 years old now.
Imo anyone who stayed with Plex after they required you to create an account is insane, especially considering there have always been good alternatives.
This exactly.
I looked into setting Plex up a few years ago. It installed, and then starts talking about making a cloud account. I don’t want to talk to a cloud I just want to organize my own shit on my own network. Why does that need a cloud?
I uninstalled it. Everything I’ve seen since, and I mean EVERYthing, tells me I dodged a bullet. Not once have I read an article that makes me wish I’d continued the install.
I have a Jellyfin server as backup, but its clients are shit for anything that uses subtitles. I bought plex pass years back for $80 on sale, can’t complain, but I’m never going to wholly rely on something closed source that requires online credentials.
Plex still costs the same to me. Lifetime pass means no price hike, and it “just works.”
it just means the costs to you are less visible, you are still the product you have paid to pretend that you are not the product.
I’ve finally switched to Jellyfin, even though I have a lifetime Plex pass. It isn’t really a downgrade. I think I ran into more bugs on Plex. Using Jellyfin is like switching from Windows to Linux, on a smaller scale. Plex was always trying to sell you something, get you to use the other features, etc, whereas Jellyfin just gets out of my way and lets me watch media.
Sure but Jellyfin just works too so thats cool, it took me like 5mn to switch our devices and the fact I could stream anything instantly on any of them without warning or whatever was immediately a breath of fresh air
Unless you want to stream remotely of course.
But when you want to give access to others outside of your network they need to subscribe to a plan to get a watch pass. That’s the main issue a lot of people are facing.
The person you replied to has a lifetime-license, so no need for the clients to have a separate plan. Edit: Only thing where a separate license is needed afaik is the Download/Offline Watching feature. This will not work if a plex license owner adds a new User. Old/Existing Users can still use the download function. Here Plex made a change i think around 2 years ago.
Not if you’ve got a lifetime license, which anyone running a Plex server should already have.
Also if you want to give access to your jellyfin server to people, well you’re shit out of luck basically. You’re out of luck if you want to even watch jellyfin on most devices that aren’t a pc or android device.
But tailscale gets around that by creating a secure external tunnel that allows others to connect to your inside from anywhere in the world?
Tailscale isn’t on 99.99% of TVs and devices that people want to stream videos to, and asking people to connect to your VPN whenever they want to stream video is a no-go. Anyone suggesting it is has never actually done tech support for regular people.
Not quite, I’m a software engineer that was literally a support technician before this role and I’m the go-to tech support person for my friends. Most of the complexity is on the hosts end ~ https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel
I have a pretty old lifetime Plex pass that I got on sale.
I’m still 100% a Jellyfin convert. Keeping my Plex server while trying out Jellyfin myself lasted even less time than my Windows partition after I had linux installed.
I’ve never used Plex, but I have my own server at Hetzner with large drives and I love my Jellyfin server. I use it every day for shows, movies, and tons of music at home, in the metro, and walking around town and traveling. I’ve never had a problem with it. Honestly, it’s fantastic.
I can’t comment on Plex vs JellyFin, but it’s an interesting perspective that $3/mon for remote access is too much
I use another piece of opensource software, where I consider that a plus. It takes the headache and security issues off my hands, while I can support the developers with a small contribution for an optional feature
$3/mon is $36 a year. That adds up - most people have to work several hours to earn that money.
Plex may also be harvesting your data. When I used it years ago it was already trying to send logs back home, blocked by the firewall.
Plex may also be harvesting your data.
You mean to say “Plex is harvesting your data.”
I like to not legally commit myself
🤣
I run both concurrently, but Plex has had a rash of outages recently that led to it and any services relying on it completely useless. It’s insane that an online service outage would cause me to be unable to stream media locally, so yeah Jellyfin has been all but essential, recently.
That’s a big red flag for privacy imo
Oh, I generally couldn’t agree more. In this specific case it was actually their authentication service that was down, but it meant if you use multiple accounts with Plex or have a pin on your singular account that you were essentially locked out. But I agree it’s a bad look to have remote dependencies at all.
I literally pay the same for Nebula, which is decidedly not my own media. Paying a subscription for your own media playback is so stupid.
I’ve been self hosting for about 2 years now. I never gave Plex a thought. I immediately went with Jellyfin and setup tailscale for remote access and its been awesome. We have our phones and tvs with android boxes all connected. Only we use Wholphin on the android boxes bc its better but extremely happy with the Jellyfin/Tailscale setup.
when are they going to completely drop the lifetime license? they must at some point right?
I paid a lifetime thing for a medication app, to help me keep on track of my meds. It was free for x number of drugs but then they wanted me to pay for more. A few months ago I got notified that my “life time” access was going to become a subscription so I said nope, no thanks, nada and uninstalled the app and set up HA alerts that remind me. Finding out I could do that was such a freeing feeling, I set up reminders to do a whole bunch of things and they remind me on my watch.
