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.
As someone, who started with jellyfin, I never saw the reasons for the existence of Plex. There is no difference and people pay for it?
Hey Plex users, save your money and buy a coffee for the jellyfin team!
Should have use libre software from the start my guy! Jellyfin / Kodi let’s go
“Your friends” hahaha good joke
How does this affect people who bought the lifetime service back in 2010?
Heloooooo Jellyfin!
I don’t see this talked about much anymore, but the day Plex added telemetry in 2017 was the day I became five-alarm desperate for an alternative. Had to wait a 2-3 years with Plex’s telemetry IP’s and domains blacklisted before Jellyfin was mature enough for me to make the change.
How Plex users can be comfortable with any telemetry is beyond me.
Do you guys know a way on jellyfin to download media to the phone in lower quality/ less storage intense? This is the only thing I miss in my jellyfin instance
The business model here is to basically paywall one user sharing (probably) pirated content with another person?
I started on Plex and even considered a lifetime Plex pass, but I felt like it was more interested in showing their content than my content. It was a lot of effort just to show music and movies.
My family and I use jellyfin every day now, and a key thing is it starts off boring but it shows your music, your movies, your books, your photos.
For folks who migrate who were paying, consider a donation to projects you make heavy use of. They don’t usually have big companies behind them and can use the help.
Been on Plex for years, I will be fully migrated to Jellyfin by the end of the week
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.
So let me get this straight: you own the content, you host the content on your machine, you pay the electricity and internet and plex says it can’t afford to let you share it to others without a subscription fee?
I mean making plex a one time fee if it’s good turnkey solution is fine but subscription…
Wonder how long before those 2.99 a month figures will last. I give it a year before there’s no seperate remote streaming package and the only remaining one is >10$. The main appeal of Plex was not paying. It’s used by pirates. The goal is content for free. It’s no longer free. I don’t care at all if random people can use my Plex server. If they are unwilling to adapt to a new platform, then I guess they’ll resubscribe to Netflix. Most of them never unsubscribed from Netflix to begin with.
This was the end for me. Used Plex for almost a decade. I’m off to Jellyfin. It’s actually almost no change whatsoever to integrate it into my home setup.
I don’t understand why anyone who has Plex hasn’t paid for a lifetime pass. They used to give them away basically for like $80 every winter holiday for years. None of these changes impact you if you have it.
Until they revoke it
If
It is a matter of when
Nothing lasts forever
Seriously for the 1000th time I have a plex pass.
I was speaking generally and you didn’t say that in the body of the post. You expect me to scour all the comments on the off chance that my general statement might not apply to you?
I don’t get why you’re being downvoted for spitting facts.
I didn’t know why anyone who has Plex would pay for a pass. The whole time I used it, I never felt any need for additional features.
if you like software you should support it.
Absolutely true for FOSS. For freeware? My opinion is that it’s money wasted because, unlike FOSS:
- I have no way of auditing what I’m putting money toward.
- There’s no way for the community to keep it going if it stops or goes to shit.
- Money given toward proprietary software is money that would be better donated to FOSS whose developers actually give a shit about and make progress toward bettering the world.
- Proprietary software isn’t worthy of your respect or support. At best, use it if there are no FOSS alternatives, but don’t give money to something that could rapidly enshittify at any moment with no recourse and no way or recouperating your money.
Here’s Jellyfin’s ‘How to Contribute’ page, incidentally, for no particular reason. Let Plex eat up their $90+ million in venture capital instead of taking money from the little guy and then fall off a cliff into an abyss of enshittification.
I have no way of auditing what I’m putting money toward.
same can be said of FOSS. back channel deals, betrayals, hostile takeovers. all of these things can(and have) happen to FOSS projects. all under a false pretense of “openness”.
There’s no way for the community to keep it going if it stops or goes to shit.
previous point. it’s stupid easy to change licenses and lock out contributors. it’s happened several times. although you can technically argue anything before the license change could be forked, the event usually puts a bad taste in the public mouth and contributions dry up anyway. nobody wants to support a project with uncertainty.
Money given toward proprietary software is money that would be better donated to FOSS whose developers actually give a shit about bettering the world.
I’ve known plenty of FOSS founders that were huge pieces of shit. racist bigoted sexist shitheads. At least with proprietary vendors I can trust they will do anything to continue being fluid/viable.
just want to add, not all FOSS founders are pieces of shit. same can be said for vendors as well.
Proprietary software isn’t worthy of your respect or support. At best, use it if there are no FOSS alternatives, but don’t give money to something that could rapidly enshittify at any moment with no recourse and no way or recouperating your money.o keep it going if it stops or goes to shit.
why isn’t it? if it’s a generally better solution don’t you owe it to yourself and your “customers” to use the best solution? yes, use FOSS. yes, work with FOSS devs. What do you do when the project refuses to incorporate features you would like, even if you’re willing to pay for them? then there’s no difference between proprietary and FOSS, right?
enshitification doesn’t just affect vendors, it happens to FOSS projects all-the-time. I’ve personally experienced it when a bookkeeping app removed support for USD. when asked the founder refused to address it and simply stated that they couldn’t continue supporting a currency that fuels so much corruption in the world. now tell me, how does that garner my respect or support?
Money given toward proprietary software is money that would be better donated to FOSS whose developers actually give a shit about bettering the world.
see point above. you hold FOSS too highly as if the people who create these projects are impervious to corruption or greed. these are regular people like you or me. they have goals and dreams they want to achieve too, and sometimes the projects they started become vessels for them to achieve those dreams.
Proprietary software isn’t worthy of your respect or support. At best, use it if there are no FOSS alternatives, but don’t give money to something that could rapidly enshittify at any moment with no recourse and no way or recouperating your money.
You’re just repeating yourself now.
my point is, there cannot be light without darkness. FOSS and proprietary software are two halves of the same coin. to be so blinded by principles or to fool yourself with some moral superiority complex is only going to make things worse.
use what you need to solve the problems you have. sometimes that includes using vendor locked solutions. it’s not wrong, it’s just life.
same can be said of FOSS. back channel deals, betrayals, hostile takeovers. all of these things can(and have) happen to FOSS projects. all under a false pretense of “openness”. it’s stupid easy to change licenses and lock out contributors. it’s happened several times. although you can technically argue anything before the license change could be forked, the event usually puts a bad taste in the public mouth and contributions dry up anyway. nobody wants to support a project with uncertainty.
“you could technically argue”??? That’s literally, unambiguously the law. That’s how the licensing works. This isn’t a technicality; it’s a fundamental, widely understood feature of the license. That’s how the license was designed to work. On top of that, licenses like the GPL have extremely stringent requirements for changing the license. (Here, Jellyfin uses GPLv2, so we’ll go with that.)
Everyone with work in the current codebase has copyright over that work under the GPLv2. Nobody relinquishes that to some centralized entity. Thus, you have two options for every single individual person whose contributions are still extant in your project (no matter how large): 1) get their consent not just to relicense but to the specific license you want, or 2) remove their work from the project either because you can no longer contact them or because they’ve said no.
The fact that you called this process “stupid easy” for anything but the smallest, most insular project is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve heard today, and I’m not even wasting my time reading the rest of your comment given how shockingly willing you are to not just speak about things you have zero understanding of but to somehow arrive at the most false statement possible about them.
cool. go be angry somewhere else.
The skip intro/credits feature is nifty, and sonic analysis if you run a music library is worth the purchase price alone.
Besides supporting them, the offline download feature on mobile is amazing for travel.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve tried to watch some downloaded Netflix content, only to realize it had “expired” and no longer worked.
They doubled the price lol. And why pay $80 for something that they have the right to gut at any time?
Why pay for anything ever if it’s going to potentially get taken away?
I paid like $80 and have already gotten over a year out of it. I pay for literally no subscription media services. The math is clear and obvious on this one.
My wife and kids can access my server on any device without any fuss. Updates are trivial - I use a $100 beelink I update/check on maybe once a month. If you can’t see why this is an attractive situation for people I don’t know what to tell you
Do you change the oil in your car (if you have one) yourself or do you go to a shop? Have you ever gone out to dinner? Sometimes we pay for convenience. $80 is nothing for what I’m getting out and have gotten of Plex. I got tired of fucking around with Jellyfin and trying to get my wife and kids on it. I am pretty tech savvy but I had a lot of trouble getting it to consistently work outside of my home in a secure way. So I use Plex now with Jellyfin some internally.
Why pay for anything ever if it’s going to potentially get taken away?
Because it’s called “lifetime”? As in the entire point of the product is that it will not ever be taken away with the exception that you close your account? “Why pay for anything if there’s nothing enforcing the core premise of the product?” The gardener advertised a “whole-yard mow” for $100, but I’ve already gotten the area around the driveway, and honestly would it really be that bad if they just stopped right now?
You can talk about odds all you want (although I think around $100 million in VC funding puts those odds squarely in favor of “lifetime” users getting the floor sawed out from under them Looney Tunes-style), but the fact it’s even possible is what’s deeply disturbing, because it’s deliberate. Lifetime’s meaning should be unambiguously stipulated in a contract, not inferred. Know why? Because companies out there advertising “lifetime” subscriptions right now have little disclaimers like “approximately five years or so but honestly we don’t really know or care lol this license disappears whenever we want it to”).
People are assuming it’s for the lifetime of your Plex account, but my response is: based on fucking what? Plex on their website doesn’t seem to specify this anywhere, even in their terms of service. People asking on their official forums receive responses saying things like “probably for the lifetime of your Plex account” with no sources to anything. I’m not trying to sealion here; I literally can’t find a single instance of Plex stating officially in writing or verbally what “lifetime” actually means to the end user. If Plex isn’t going to rugpull, why can’t they add a single sentence to their TOS saying something like: “The purchase of a lifetime pass grants the user a non-transferable license for [blah blah] starting from the date of purchase. This license will not be revoked unless 1) the associated account is terminated by the account holder or 2) the aasociated account is terminated by Plex for one or more of the reasons outlined in section [blah]”?
They could, they should, they don’t, and you have no good explanation, otherwise you would’ve offered one by now. They have enough money to afford a legal team that wouldn’t overlook that. The answer is that they want to reserve the right to destroy the “lifetime” pass whenever they want. If you can find official documentation from Plex Inc. saying that if I buy a lifetime pass today for $250, the license will only end with the termination of the account, then I’ll have no idea why they make this too hard to find, but I’ll take back everything else I said in this comment and stop using “lifetime” in scare quotes. I genuinely want to know if they say anything about this anywhere.
How mamy months of server costs do you think those lifetime passes cover? If everyone just paid once for a lifetime then plex as a service could no longer function.
Server costs? Plex’s serverside only handles auth and verification. Once the client connects to the server, any media is sent peer to peer. There’s no stage where the video goes “to plex” or “from plex”. Saying plex needs to charge a sub fee to make up for bandwidth is like saying qbittorrent should do the same.
Unless you’re talking about the content Plex serves, the ones you have to walk every user of your Plex server through deleting from their apps’ homepage.
Im talking about all of plexs infrastructure, the hosting for the app, providing tunnels for users without port fwding, maintaining user accounts and usage data, emails… A lot goes into running a service like plex besides just “auth and verification”…and thats not even including the staff required to maintain it and developers to keep all the apps updated.
That’s not my problem 🤷♂️
It’s your problem now. This is the kind of thing that happens.
yes, but actually no.
Plex pass members can continue sharing.
this isn’t directed just at you, but the whole jellyfin community in general.
not sure why, but the jellyfin community seems to be becoming toxic as fuck. I’m getting hard “best friend” vibes from it. if the Plex community leaves for jellyfin it’ll be on their own terms. just be welcoming to us and your numbers will grow.
if y’all keep acting like a jealous “guy” friend we’re likely to go somewhere else.
It’s not though, because as someone that has a Plex Pass nothing changes for them or anyone who streams from their server.
Well it’s not happening now and it hasn’t happened yet and I’ve enjoyed my Plex pass for several years. So I’ll just keep doing what I do while you seethe about it.
I guess I could tremble and fear of some vague threat because some random dude on Lemmy says it’s going to happen. It’s not like he’s just pissy about Plex or something and has an ax to grind and would reach for any possible thing he can say to make it look bad. Nope, wouldn’t do that
Uh, ok
It will be if you depend on plex for streaming
I don’t really understand the point you’re making. When something doesn’t work anymore it doesn’t work? This isn’t a threat I have to worry about until there are indicators it is a problem. Why should I ditch plex for a theoretical? What are you expecting me to do here?
What if your ISP doubles the price of your internet? Better do gestures vaguely about it
What if your computer spontaneously stops working tomorrow? That’ll be a problem if you depend on it.
Point is you are setting yourself up for disappointment in the future.
Like you see this constant cycle of software becoming wosre as the companies want more and more money and your response is just “yeah but it wont affect my use case so i dont care”
Yeah im sure when it comes to plex, the app based off making pirates into paying customers, it wont fall victim to the same thing.
Gee leopards seem to be getting awful fat lately.
I have both running, but Jellyfin simply cannot fulfill the role Plex currently serves. If there comes a point where it can and Plex actually deteriorates to a point where I don’t want to use it anymore I will switch. I just don’t get why the Jellyfin fanbase has to be so goddamn emotional about this
Truly some of them are so insufferable - it’s as if none of them owns an iOS or Android device or pays for any subscription services.
I also use Jellyfin chill dude
ITT:
