Sure, can I bundle it winRAR subscription?
Time to set up Jellyfin instead!
https://gardinerbryant.com/plexs-lifetime-pass-is-basically-dead-heres-how-to-switch-to-jellyfin/
I have a lifetime pass already but I’ve been souring on the app as they changed direction.
Previously it was the best app for running your own personal streaming service. It lets you share your library with friends and it even had its own group watch feature allowing multiple people to watch the same stream together. It was perfect for remote friends and family, brilliant during Covid…. And they removed it for no obvious reason.
Now the company spends more and more time trying to promote their own ad-laden video streams, they want us to rate movies and presumably sell that data. The company lost its way.
Lifetime Plex was still worth it with those features at $200, not at $750. If I had to do it all over again I’d probably use JellyFin.
And they removed it for no obvious reason.
$
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.
Garbage take which amounts to bootlicking. To each their own though.
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.
This happens all the time in FOSS
Someone comes in, contributes a bit, then forks, then closes it off once they realize there’s a path to monetization.
Plex is a particularly egregious example: the initial author forked xbmc to make a mac port. This led to a crazy amount of popularity very fast and they saw the path to monetization. They soon after created plex server separate from the client and went to the crazy step of rewriting everything GPL so they could fully close source.
This is legally fine but ethically fucked; they had a derivative app that technically no longer shared code with kodi but there was the fact that design cues, data structures, etc were mostly inherited. Plex wouldn’t exist without kodi. And that’s totally fine, derivative works should be allowed and encouraged. But what’s fucked is that they made serious efforts to close source and give nothing back to the community that they were built from. Code? Nothing. When they got 40 million in VC? nothing.
See also a bunch of players in 3d printing, notably Bambu at the moment. But they’ll keep getting away with it thanks to a combination of governments that are like “money is more important than fairness or progress” and idiotic consumers that are like “oh I have to spend 30 seconds longer figuring something out? Ugh fuck you im gonna buy what some YouTuber was paid $400 to recommend”
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.
Jellyfin: free Cloudflared: free
I really need to take a weekend to learn Jellyfin and set it up in my environment.
Duckdns is free too
As always, donate to the FOSS alternatives instead.
In the case of Youtube Premium, donate to Ad Blockers instead.
my lifetime pass for jellyfin cost me $0, pretty good value
I didn’t get into self-hosting until recently, and people recommended Jellyfin, so I don’t even know what I’m missing with Plex, if anything. It feels like Jellyfin does everything I need.
You’re missing getting to pay for it. Imagine how good it would feel to see $750 less in your bank account.
I mean Plex definitely has a value add. Around here people will scoff but Plex is far easier to work with for non technical users.
If you shared your library externally Plex was definitely easier it’s just that they have started to extract value from that which does suck.
Plexamp is GREAT; I’ve not found another app like it that works with a home hosted music streaming server.
If you want to go all the way down the rabbit hole look into unraid and the galaxy of self hosted media clients
Easier sure, but it comes at the expense of all traffic (even streaming to a device on your local network) going through their servers. If you have an internet outage or their servers go down, you can’t even stream media locally with Plex. No such issues with Jellyfin.
Edit: apparently my frustrations about this were based on something I set up incorrectly, so +1 point for Plex working locally without internet, -1 point for ease of use/setup if I had this wrong for years without knowing it or finding the fix on my own.
This is incorrect, bordering on outright FUD. Plex only uses their servers for the initial server discovery. When you sign into Plex, your device basically contacts the central plex discovery server and goes “hey, which servers do I have access to? And where are they located?” Plex’s server then passes that info back to the device, so the device can reach those servers directly. No actual content hits Plex’s servers by default. Hell, Plex wouldn’t want content hitting their servers by default, because it’s a truly astronomical amount of bandwidth that would be required on their end, for no real benefit.
You can technically use their relay option to bounce the video stream off of their server, but they specifically say that it’s a last-ditch workaround for troubleshooting. Because their relay server is intentionally bandwidth-capped and will throttle your video quality. So the relay is only really meant to be used for troubleshooting and edge cases.
“Aha! But you need to contact their server to get access even on LAN! So it will stop working when your internet goes out!” You can just configure the device to use a direct connection instead. This will allow you to connect directly to a server on your LAN. No need for their handshake server.
Thank you, it needed to be said.
You’re not alone. The first time I lost access to my locally-stored content when my internet went out, I searched for a solution. There is, one, but it’s not obvious–or at least wasn’t back when I encountered this problem. I don’t know why it would be the default setup, I can’t think of a good reason, only nefarious ones. It’s one of the reasons I dumped Plex, in spite of having a life-time pass I paid $75 for, I stopped trusting them.
You’re missing the early days when plex lifetime pass was ~$50usd and jellyfin wasn’t a thing (that I know of). I believe Kodi was the only real competitor at the time, and it was much less friendly.
Plex has slowly moved in a less user friendly direction, but still meets my needs and I’ve easily gotten over $750 in value from the…almost 20 years, wow…I’ve been using it.
You got the arr stack up too? Feels like magic when it’s all setup
It does feel magical :D
No, not yet. I took forever to manually rip what I have, which was a lot, and I’m still working my way through boxes of music (which I’m also hosting on Jellyfin). I’ll figure out that step next.
If you haven’t already, you may want to look into FileBot. It’s the only reason I was ever able to properly rip and rename all of my files so Plex/Jellyfin can automatically detect them.
Oh my god, you mean I didn’t have to do all this manually? I’ve spent so much troubleshooting time fixing file names.
Nope.
Trash-guides will be your savior
Wow, this is so much good info. Thank you
Ah fair, just take your time and feel free to ask
Jellyfin is amazing for a lot of things, but it shouldn’t be available externally. There are a few critical security concerns that devs have openly stated will never be patched. And that makes it a non-starter for sharing with people who can’t figure out how to use a personal VPN connection. It may be fine for me and my household… But there’s no way I’m going to be able to walk my tech-illiterate grandmother through it over the phone.
In contrast, Plex makes sharing server access very easy. Since they run a centralized server to handle all of the “which servers do I have access to, and where are they located” automatic discovery traffic, sharing content is as simple as sending an invite link. That centralization flies in the face of what Jennyfin stands for, so they won’t ever implement it. I even have a burner Plex account that already has access to my server, which I can use to sign into TVs when I don’t want to bother with the whole account setup process. Handy for things like parties, because I have a few “just hit play and drunk people will enjoy it” types of playlists ready to go.
Basically, Jellyfin for yourself and your household. Plex for everyone else. Luckily, the two will happily run side-by-side without any issues.
I’m not confident enough in my knowledge to ever open up my server externally, even after reading some methods that are allegedly safe (or relatively safe). I’d just rather not take the risk of me misunderstanding something or failing to keep current with vulnerabilities.
I suppose I see the appeal if Plex handles that without hassle, but man… not for $750. Lol
This is a concern if you just port forward through a router. This isn’t a problem if you simply use a reverse proxy, which is standard and normal and expected and not difficult at all.
It’s a concern even with a reverse proxy. The reverse proxy encrypts your connection from A to B, but does nothing to stop the various security concerns that have been noted. Because those concerns don’t rely on intercepting unencrypted traffic. If you can reach Jellyfin’s main log in page, you can exploit it. Full stop.
The only way a reverse proxy would stop someone from being able to exploit it is to include a separate login on your reverse proxy, meaning attackers wouldn’t even be able to hit Jellyfin’s landing page unless they know your proxy’s password. But notably, this breaks basically everything except for browsers. All of your smart TVs, mobile apps, etc would stop functioning, because they’d bounce off of that reverse proxy login page.
I don’t proxy the port, I proxy the routes needed for auth and interface. This isn’t that hard.
EDIT: ah I see what you’re saying, you’re talking about the app surface rather than the raw admin API. The risk is small enough with the remaining attack surface that I’m not particularly worried, though obviously I’d like it to be better.
Apparently they are going to DOUBLE that amount every year! Outrageous!
Ha, I came here to make this joke.
Ok, you got dibs on this joke next time plex raises prices
Wait, ya’ll are paying for Plex??
Paid 70€ maybe a decade ago
Best bang for buck so far
Yep, definitely heading for bankruptcy.
Couldn’t pay me to use that software lol
Used Kodi and now using Jellyfin.
As if there weren’t enough reasons to use jellyfin already.
To be clear, you still need your own HW and electricity, right?
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’m currently using a mini PC in my 10" rack, but also ran it on an old server that used to be my desktop.
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
