- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
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Well, looks like my decision to stick with Kodi and never bother with Plex is about to pay dividends.
I moved on to jellyfin after I found out the hard way Plex servers need to authenticate for use. I’m sure by now there are ways to set up offline authentication but I already didn’t like the idea of paying monthly to stream my own content from my own machine. It just didn’t make sence to me. Jellyfin isn’t perfect, or as flashy as Plex, but it works, looks fine, and its free, not counting a much deserved donation to the devs .
So basically… this is a blatant cash grab, and a nearly 200% one depending on the level of service you pay/paid for. Wonder how long it will be before the lifetime pass is discontinued and everyone gets forcibly moved over to a monthly subscription model
Every service is doing this as expenses and interest rates go up. Its the driving force of enshittification. All the VCs want internet startups to finally turn a profit.
I don’t like it, but it’s a pragmatic decision.
Hosting for a simple website can be as little as a few bucks a month. That’s easy for any project to absorb, even if they are open-source with no one pulling a paycheque.
Streaming requires high-performance, high-bandwidth machines that cost anywhere from several dozen dollars to several hundred dollars a month. You build a resilient high-availability network, and you could easily be looking at several tens of thousands of dollars a month.
That isn’t easy to absorb, even for a for-profit company with clearly-defined revenue streams.
Some people want everything for free, but free doesn’t pay the bills.
Full disclosure: I don’t use the streaming feature. I prefer to grab actual copies to drop onto my NAS. I also don’t share to friends and family, as I am the only one I know of who uses Plex.
All those resources and costs are borne by the person hosting the video, NOT Plex.
Streaming requires high-performance, high-bandwidth machines that cost anywhere from several dozen dollars to several hundred dollars a month. You build a resilient high-availability network, and you could easily be looking at several tens of thousands of dollars a month.
Are you under the impression that Plex uploads the movie files to their servers and then transcodes them there, or something?
And the hard work happens on your own hardware. All Plex’s servers are doing is acting as a signaling server, but no media or routed through Plex’s servers.
Plex actually does have streaming services. The ones we’ve never asked for. And live tv.
It depends on if you use the “relay” feature. If your server is accessible from the outside it shouldn’t be using this though.
First thing I disable.
Man, my Jellyfin subscription just rose in price too.
sometimes good software is worth paying for
Big facts. Even the FOSS software, I buy the premium or donate a bit to it. It only feels right. I couldn’t imagine making something millions of people count on and not throw them SOMETHING. Especially when its such a good experience.
remote streaming rarely works for me so I won’t be losing anything.
All these comments mentioning jellyfish and I haven’t see a single mention of emby. Is it considered bad or something? Because I switched over to it and I am liking it a lot better than plex so far
I believe emby went proprietary, and jellyfin is the fork that stayed open source. Naturally Lemmy prefers the FOSS one 😅
Yup, that’s why I was on NextCloud, why I avoid MongoDB like the plague, and why I’m here on Lemmy (I justified Reddit because of their open API).
So yeah, that tracks.
I greatly prefer Emby to Jellyfin.
I use Emby with the lifetime premier (their ‘premium’ version).
Works great, but honestly I would just point people to Jellyfin unless Emby provides something specific you need. I just use it because it’s what I’ve had for years.
Emby subscription costs a lot even if you just want to use it on a home server. It can work without subscription but will display a warning before playback. Jellyfin is free.
Its quite annoying how licensing is tied to devices. I can’t even sign in after reinstalling my OS.
I like Emby a lot. It’s my backup for Plex. I even give them money as development isn’t free (frequently)
If you don’t like the price there’s always jellyfin.
Got to say that I have been very happy with it.
Jellyfin is just so much better, imo. Much cleaner, less stuff that I don’t actually need.
I’m a plex pass lifetime owner, but I don’t regret switching to Jellyfin one bit.
Yeah I switched 2-3 years ago because so many features were paywalled and on jellyfin I can at least use plugins
I switched when I had an internet outage and couldn’t log into Plex locally to watch my own media. Very happy with Jellyfin since then.
does jellyfin have a roku app?
It works, but isn’t nearly as user friendly.
does jellyfin have a roku app?
Yes, it streams pretty well, it has some UX issues, but it will let you get off plex as it stands right now with most of your needs covered.
Yes. I use mine daily and it works great
Does Jellyfin do remote streaming?
Yes. You’ll have to set up a reverse proxy, I use nginx, and get yourself domain, I use duck DNS, and get a SSL certificate from let’s encrypt if your wanting to steam to something like a Chromecast or Roku.
It’s not all that hard honestly and there’s a good guide here for general home media, including both Plex and jellyfin
Assuming you know them well enough, can’t you just give your IP address to folks and forward the port on your router?
Or just use tailscale. Much easier.
Yes
Well that sucks.
Just put it behind tailscale and use the IP. Doing this for a two years now with weekly anime watch togethers with my friends. Not elegant but enough.
Yeah, welcome to the easy, fast, cheap conundrum.
If you’re willing to do a bit of learning and asking the community for help if you get a little stuck, you’ve got a free solution, if not, which is perfectly okay mind you, then Plex is your solution and you have to decide how much you’re willing to pay.
And honestly, of you’re going down the home media route with friend and family, you’re going to want to set up sonarr, radarr, ombi, transmission with VPN anyways.
With the caviat that you have tailscale enabled on both devices. This prevents it from being used on a roku outside your home but you could access it remotely from your computer/phone/tablet.
It is significantly harder than Plex, currently. There are improvements happening all the time though.
You very much can create an external port and access anywhere without any of this. No tailscale needed but I’d recommend one knows what they are doing…
Hmmm, i use a Synology NAS with Jellyfin installed and my family can use their Roku TVs without issue. I didn’t realize Synology made a difference there
It totally depends on how you expose it to the outside world. If it’s exposed just like it is, it works fine with every device. If you put an authentication before it (e.g. Authelia), it can only be accessed by browsers from outside the network. That being said, it’s not recommended to expose Jellyfin directly, because there are a ton of security flaws. Best practice is to use a VPN
Well I’m a Luddite so I’m probably exposing myself to miners or something
Better than exposing yourself to minors
I do this too but it only works on my home network not remotely.
Huh? I’m streaming from my Jellyfin just fine when I’m on the go, with no tailscale or other VPN set up
It was significantly harder to set up remote access for Jellyfin than Plex 6 months ago. I ha ent attempted since. With Plex there was literally no set up, it just works. Until it just works without having to do any extra work, Jellyfin will struggle with adoption.
I have both running, and thatd a big difference to me. Also I prefer the way Plex detects intros and credits for skipping and their detection for captions. Once that’s all sorted Jellyfin wins in every field.
So I have a lifetime Plex pass, but my friend (who is remote) does not. Does this change mean they have the have a Plex pass to connect to my device remotely?
Edit: thanks for the info! After I posted I continued reading and realized that question was already answered! Appreciate the help!
From what I saw, they will be able to remotely stream from your PMS (if you don’t have Plex Pass) for a fee of $2/month or $20/year.
Option 1: Remote playback with a Plex Pass
Upgrading to any Plex Pass subscription is a great option for server owners, as it ensures all users accessing the Plex Media Server can stream remotely, without an additional charge. Even if you don’t run your own Plex Media Server, a Plex Pass subscription will not only allow you to stream remotely from any server to which you have access, but also lets you make use of other Plex Pass functionality like Skip Intro and Skip Credits.
From reading the article, sounds like you’re situation won’t change.
No. You’re good.
Before now I was on the sunk cost fallacy of not wanting to teach my extended family how to use Jellyfin instead of plex but after this I’m already mid-way through setting up a Jellyfin docker container on my server and I only found out an hour ago
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.
Jellyfin depends on proprietary Microsoft .NET, even on Linux.
It’s still better than Plex and Emby, which are fully proprietary, and have no source code. But I will stick with sshfs with kodi, and nginx plus mpv for now.
I’ve been testing out jellyfin for the last couple months but it doesn’t really fill the void of this specific feature that’s being locked behind a pay wall. If anyone has good recommendations for securely and reliably hosting jellyfin behind SSL and auth with email password resets where I don’t have to worry about it as much as Plex.
I use jellyfin locally but for a handful of remote clients I have I may well block off their access they’re not going to be able to figure out my hand spun services and wall of text.
I’m not pirating a bunch of shows just to pay Plex for the privilege of watching it.
Also remember to give them your credit card, name and address for the privilege of pirating the content.
Even better, it’s now a nice database of who companies and governments can go after when they want or need to!
Jellyfin ftw
Time to move to Jellyfin for the rest of their users?
I dumped Plex years ago even though I paid for it. Too many issues with it. Constantly losing movie folders, unable to stream to the device I wanted to watch on, wrong codec, wrong sound, etc, etc. I gave up. I’m sure it worked fine for most, but it got to be a pain. Switched to Jellyfin and a DDNS address and have had zero problems since. And it’s free.
With Plex every time I try to sync new content I put in the folders it says I’m unauthorized and have to close the server and reopen it.
Haven’t bothered to trouble shoot it yet as it’s annoying but not annoying enough.
If the server you are stealing movies from has a pass you still don’t need to pay
They could have worded this better
