We need a support group for the whiners.
It’s been dirt cheap and you still don’t have to do it.
At the end of the day the core of the software is free. They still have to support and develop the clients and services… Go shit on emby or the other one for how unfriendly they are to deal with.
Time to set up Jellyfin instead!
https://gardinerbryant.com/plexs-lifetime-pass-is-basically-dead-heres-how-to-switch-to-jellyfin/
Plexamp is the reason I’m still using Plex. I’ll fully transition to Jellyfin as soon Finamp (or another music app) incorporates robust caching to handle internet deadspots.
It’s still hilarious to me that Plex, a project forked from the XBMC (now Kodi) free open-source app for organizing and playing one’s own entirely legally obtained video files, is a big streaming business thing that charges people money.
It’s like finding a tree in the forest that gives out infinite free apples, and then setting up an apple-selling table right next to it stocked with apples you obviously got from that tree.
No… it’s like picking up those apples, shipping them across the country, and then charging customers a delivery fee. Which is perfectly reasonable because time and fuel cost money.
Plex helps you (and others) stream from your library pretty brainlessly. Sure there are other options, but all of them are more complicated.
Technically, it’s like facilitating the shipping of those apples, but leaving the customer to ship.
Plex server->client streams don’t go through Plex’s servers themselves, but directly from server to clients. P2P. AFAIK the only exception is when something goes wrong and it falls back to a Plex-hosted server as an intermediary, which should be rare.
That’s still a pretty useful service though. Getting P2P reliable and easy isn’t trivial, and is one reason why open source projects haven’t really supplanted it yet.
This is it. People have always paid for convenience.
Just look at console vs PC gaming.
Steamdeck made Linux gaming mainstream because it’s brainless. Backed by proton.
But console has a vice grip on some communities / groups due to a long standing “plug and play” sales pitch. Now they’re stuck because “my friends are there.”
My brother-in-law is a sysadmin and stuck on Playstation due to his friends. Doesn’t even own a gaming PC because “he doesn’t have the time to tinker.”
I’ve never used any of the features they’ve added after they allowed me to host my library of ripped optical media ~2013-2014.
Sigh. I still enjoy my Plex pass that I bought for < $100 but this is another sign to bail on them. I don’t particularly like them trying to further monetize my collection.
I do like the ease of sharing with friends and it does generally just work. But this is bad.
The rate of change in their eco system certainly does not justify the price they’re charging. Still, an IPO looms and business gotta business, so here we are. Ready for those stock options to tank and the boat to sink.
Jellyfin: free Cloudflared: free
Jellyfin behind Cloudflared is probably the best move ATM.
It’s not specifically against TOS, they do provide you some modest protection against infiltration.
combine that with running it from a container with RO access to your media and you have a damn nice home solution.
While Cloudflare tunnels do work, streaming Jellyfin through them is technically against their TOS and they could shut you down for doing so. Instead, I recommend setting up Pangolin with a cheap VPS. Although, it will cost ~$5 a month or so.
You don’t have to use a tunnel, for example I use a reverse proxy to a domain I own, and set a cache rule so cloudflare doesn’t get mad.
Duckdns is free too
I have a static IP (didn’t particularly want it but my ISP required it for port forwarding for some reason). I’m not currently hosting anything, at least not anything externally accessible, but when I did I had a tiny AWS instance configured as a reverse proxy to a separate reverse proxy VM in my house. It worked for me and if anything I hosted ever got compromised it escaped my notice.
However, I think the advantage of using something like Cloudflare rather than the way I did it (and as it sounds like you might) is threat mitigation. Especially stuff like DDoS protection.
I really need to take a weekend to learn Jellyfin and set it up in my environment.
This is almost certainly a ploy to get an influx of buyers before the cutoff of July.
They want to round up all the people that they think were considering a lifetime pass, but were holding out.
I guarantee you when July comes they’re going to reduce the cost to somewhere less than $750 and much closer to the current price due to “we listen to our customers” when really it was the plan all along.
They’re using the Decoy Effect and FOMO.
Or maybe they want monthly/annual/whatever subscribers, not lifetime, and so they’re making the lifetime pass prohibitively expensive. I have a lifetime pass I purchased a few years ago but after running Jellyfin alongside Plex for a few months, I don’t think I could recommend Plex to anyone who simply wants to host their own media.
Wait, ya’ll are paying for Plex??
Paid 70€ maybe a decade ago
Best bang for buck so far
What a joke. Plex isnt worth paying for
As always, donate to the FOSS alternatives instead.
In the case of Youtube Premium, donate to Ad Blockers instead.
One question, lets say that I bought this subscription. What kind of advantages has it, does it cache your media? Or if you have multiple users, you still need to be able to upload media to miltiple users?
It’s the same as the regular subscription benefits, just permanent.
Permanent as in as long as its lucrative. Then some investor buys Plex, stoops honoring Lifetine Subscription (aka transforms them) and you are left with nothing.
based on the history of other companies, permanent until they sell the company and buy some island, at which point they’ll freeze all updates (feature and security) to Plex and release PlexGO for a fixed monthly fee.
It’s not permanent, but lifetime. When they go bankrupt, they’ll just eliminate those subscribers.
But how about those benefits. Is there caching or no?
No, there isn’t.
There are a lot of gated features, the most useful of which is a low quality proxy that transcends CGNAT and Firewalls when you really need to share a video but don’t have a real ip.
Gating hardware encoding is a pretty dick maneuver IMO.
Yep, definitely heading for bankruptcy.
Jellyfin Lifetime Pass continues to be better value.
I heard their quadrupling their lifetime membership.
Oh bugger, I might actually have to start still paying nothing
Hmm, perhaps I should sell my lifetime pass. I won’t, but I should. (Switched to Jellyfin long ago)
What are you hosting jellyfin on? I find it crashes when scanning on my Synology
I guess it depends on which synology/ size of media collection. I also host jellyfin on a synology (DS923+), in a moderate-sized media collection (~ 9TB) and it never crashed
I hosted my jellyfin in Synology DS224+, but I need to upgrade the RAM first, 2GB is not enough for jellyfin, I added 16GB so it has 18GB total now
To be clear, you still need your own HW and electricity, right?
