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this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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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.
LOL, aren't there at least a half dozen open source alternatives for Plex?
I'm done with Plex - They won't get my recommendations. My holdoff buying PlexPass were the little bugs that always mattered - Pausing for more than a few minutes HARD locked up the stream, the stream had to re-init to load subtitles, and then the MAJOR issue with "What files is Plex NOT seeing" and other indexing issues. I paid for my Android app, happily. But now, telling me I can't stream my own media, after paying for the app? Y'all can F right off with that. I'll be finally setting up Jellyfin ASAP.
Use jellyfin, it's much better. Also do not kill Elon Musk and Donald Trump, as much as they may deserve death.
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Should have use libre software from the start my guy! Jellyfin / Kodi let's go
I have plex set up with cloudflare tunnels, with the url configured in plex under Settings > Network > Custom server access URLs, does this mean that my users will no longer be able to view content inside the plex app or app.plex.tv? The enshittification is real
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It was announced some time ago. I started using Tailscale because of that
I am also a Plex pass person. Multiple times over in fact. I actually have a dedicated account for my server administrator that's separate from the account I use to watch content. Both have Plex pass lifetime.
I've been familiar with this coming down the pipeline for a while and because I have Plex pass, I too, am unaffected, as are my users.
At the same time: here is a piece of software that I paid for. It's "server" software, sure, but it's just a software package. What it does isn't really relevant. The fact is that it processes data stored on my systems, processing by my systems, using my hardware, and sends that data over the Internet, using the Internet connection I pay for separately, and delivers that data directly to the people I've designated as capable of doing so.
The only part of this process that Plex, the company, has any involvement in, is limited to: issuing an SSL certificate, managing user accounts and passwords, and brokering where to find data (pointers to my systems).
You can get a free SSL certificate from let's encrypt. User accounts, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), is a function of pretty much everything that you remotely connect to, whether a Windows SMB/cifs share, your email, even logging into your own local computer regardless of OS..... And honestly, brokering the connection isn't dissimilar to how torrent trackers work, DNS or a goddamned IP address punched into a browser.
They're offering shockingly little for what they're asking, and the only thing that's on the list that would be costly in the slightest is having a DNS name for the server (registration of the domain, DNS services, etc). And given the scale that they're doing these things at, the individual costs per name is literally pennies per year.
This is not a good look at all.
I have domain names coming out of my ears. I'm tempted to buy one more and just offer to anyone that wants it, to have a subdomain name under that to run their Plex alternative on, so you can get a let's encrypt SSL certificate, and stay safe on the Internet. I don't want the feds snooping into what totally legal Linux ISOs are being shared.
I just don't know how to program at all, so I have no idea how I would go about setting up a system for that. The concept would be to automate it, and have people create an account, then request a DNS name under one of my DNS domains, and have a setting if you want it to have an A record, AAAA record, or cname (if you have a ddns setup). Once the request is in, it would connect to be DNS provider and add the record for you.
The part I'd want to have as a check on the system is to make sure that you're hosting jellyfin or something from the address you submit, to prevent people from using it for unrelated purposes; but even with that.... Do I care of people do that? Probably not. I would limit how many addresses you can have per account.
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Indeed, no need to have Plex anymore. Will probably set up a family VPN and we can all stream directly from my harddrives, bandwidth is not an issue anyway.
No need to abandon all the user-friendly aspects of a self-hosted streaming platform. Just use Jellyfin. I switched to it from Plex years ago and have never looked back.
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