cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/2333639
I was just forwarded this someone in my household who watches our server. Thatās it folks. Iāve 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.
Iāll say it. As of today, I say Plex is dead. Luckily Iāve been setting up Jellyfin, I guess itās time to make it production ready.
Edit: I have a Plex Pass. More comments saying āJust buy a plex passā 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 Iām unaffected as a Plex Pass owner.
- My users were immediately angry at it, which made me angry. Our users donāt understand what plex pass is, and they shouldnāt have to, thatās 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 donāt care that āPeople should pay their fair shareā. If Plex wants to put every new feature behind a paywall, thatās completely okay. They are removing functionality.
- āBut they have cloud costsā. Remote streaming is negligible to them. Itās 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. Thatās it.
- āGood luck finding another remote streamingā - 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, thatās a separate conversation). All āremote streamingā is is their dynamic dns. Literal pennies to them. Know what actually is costing them money? Hosting all of that ad-supported āfreeā content that theyāre probably losing money on.
In short, I donāt care how you justify it. Plex is doing something shitty. Theyāre removing functionality that has been free for years. Iām not responding to any more of your comments repeating the same arguments over and over.
No, you canāt.
Once again, this is wrong. They do have control over it, and they are blocking traffic to your server even if you donāt go through theirs, unless you pay.
You cannot do what youāre suggesting if you donāt pay, on Plex. You can only do it for free with Jellyfin.
Yes you can. If you know what youāre doing with networking, the Plex instance will have no idea whether youāre remote or not. You can make every remote user look like theyāre internal to your network. Plex would have no way to stop that. They could incorporate more intense DRM, requiring things like same GPS location, but even that could likely be spoofed.
Youāre saying two completely different incompatible things. In your last comment you said āYou can just forward a portā. You canāt ājust forward a portā or do any of the other things you suggested with Plex for free. Period.
The second thing youāre saying is using a VPN to trick Plex into thinking youāre local. You may be able to do that, but thatās entirely different from ājust forwarding a portā or using a reverse proxy, or any of the other normal, easy ways to remotely stream over Jellyfin. Itās not only more work than sharing Jellyfin, but itās also very limiting based on your users devices. For example, many people are streaming Plex, Emby, Jellyfin on RokuTVs. RokuTVs have an app for Jellyfin that can just connect directly, but it does not have a Tailscale client. So if you want to trick Plex into thinking theyāre local, youād now have to pay money to get them a new device, and then youād have the configure the VPN on it, and troubleshoot that when it breaks. A lot of people are going to just opt for Jellyfin which is much easier and doesnāt require buying new hardware.
The point that you are entirely failing to grasp is that unless you want to pay up for Plex streaming, it is much simpler, with less limitations, to just switch to Jellyfin for remote streaming.
You donāt need a VPN to trick Plex. Exposing the web ui to the world will likely show traffic coming from your router, which is internal. If it doesnāt, you may have to mess with some settings, but a VPN isnāt required to access the web ui.
Jellyfin is also very limiting based on your users devices. There is no Jellyfin app for Samsung TVs (without sideloading) or Playstation. Users there are shit out of luck.
The thing youāre failing to grasp is that Jellyfin is not nearly as simple as youāre making it out to be. They both have trade offs. One or which being every single Jellyfin app is complete trash.
If Jellyfin works better for you fucking go for it, but claiming this is the death of Plex, Jellyfin is way easier, is laughable.
This is not the case at all. Thatās not how routing, nor port forwarding works. This will work on Jellyfin, but if you do it on Plex without paying, this will be blocked. You are still fundamentally misunderstanding how literally all of this works. And itās getting to the point where Iām wondering if youāre actually this confidently ignorant, or if youāre just a troll, given the only comments on your account are pro-Plex and anti-Jellyfin.
Users there would be shit out of luck with Plex too, because neither of those platforms support Tailscale or any other VPN. More clients support Jellyfin than VPN apps, so if youāre not paying for Plex, then Jellyfin is less limiting than Plex.
What youāve failed to grasp is that Jellyfin is exactly as simple as Iāve made it out to be. You can forward a port, give your client an address to pop in, and remote streaming will work flawlessly, for free. You cannot do that same process with Plex for free. Only if you pay for it.