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Well, the addition of Plex Movies and Live Channels is certainly shittier.
What’s the reason for $120 to stream my local files to a friend or family member? What exactly does Plex do in this process that would warrant a cost?
pay the license costs for the codecs your using...
granted... none of us care about that. but thats what they're doing. also developement on the software (for good and bad)
Doesn’t the player itself handle the codecs, not the Plex Media Server?
Transcoding...
Since Plex is distributing software that can re-encode video, the codecs that comes with the software must be licensed for many of the codecs.
Here's an article that covers some of the shenanigans around h264... Now realize there's at least a dozen others as well that are likely just as screwy. https://jina-liu.medium.com/settle-your-questions-about-h-264-license-cost-once-and-for-all-hopefully-a058c2149256
Their default Movies and Live Channels are bad, but that's not why we're using Plex right?
$120 is to support the platform and it provides the option to download movies/tv shows locally and allows for Transcoding to name but 2 benefits. It's also got clients for pretty much every device out there.
If you can't afford $120 for life then that's too bad. Move to JF.
I’m still confused. Plex isn’t hosting any of my files, so why would remote users downloading them cost Plex anything? If they Direct Stream, there’s no transcoding involved. And if transcoding is involved, and I am not paying for Plex Pass, doesn’t that just happen directly on my server? I don’t see any reason why Plex is charging for my server doing work. Bizarre.
They aren't charging users to cover their costs to stream your data from your server. It's to help them with their developper costs. Transcoding is something your server does and it's only unlocked with Plex Pass so if you don't have that, you can't use it anyway. I have only 4k movies so if I want to watch them at any resolution smaller than 4k, I need transcoding which was the primary reason I got the pass. They can also proxy your connection in case you have issues connecting directly so they are somewhat using their own resources for that. They offer a great service at a very low price, much lower than Netflix and it's much better. Everyone that connects to my plex server love the experience so it's well worth it for me. If it's not worth it for you, that's cool. Use something like JF and then deal with a lack of device support and any other issues that come with JF. I hear it's a also a great service but I also hear there are more issues with JF than Plex so I'm happy with Plex.
So, my users transcode just fine without Plex Pass. I believe. You are referring to enabling hardware accelerated transcoding, which is a Plex Pass feature. You don’t need Plex Pass to do basic transcoding. That’s a free feature.
As for the proxied connection, I believe. You are referring to Relay. Thats such a low quality that its recommended to disable it and that’s the first thing I do on my PMS.
I believe Infuse (for the ATV4K) will be a decent workaround in the meantime, since it seems to allow remote play from Plex servers without charging, and plays stuff better than the default Plex app anyway, fwiw (like Atmos content).
You could be right about the CPU transcode vs. GPU transcode. It was a long time ago when I setup my Plex but I do recall having performance issues with CPU transcoding. Either way it's a valid point.
I had to use relay only once at a Hotel and it was decent enough but the TV they had was pretty lame so I couldn't tell how bad Relay was vs. the TV quality. Either way I got to watch what I wanted without commercials.
Never heard of ATV4K but I'll check it out. Thanks.