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.

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[–] 30p87@feddit.org 216 points 1 week ago (48 children)

I never got the idea of selfhosting but paying (except for enterprise-grade support or donations) anyway.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 57 points 1 week ago (8 children)

For a good while, Plex was the only game in town that did the job well, and they put the transcoding feature behind the paywall.

Given it wasn't that expensive for a lifetime pass a number of years ago (I remember it was cheaper than a game anyway) and they still seemed relatively user-centric at the time, many people like me felt like they were supporting developers building something that was useful to us.

I still run my Plex server since it's not really costing me not to, but I've been running Jellyfin too for a little while and it more or less can do the same job these days

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[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 37 points 1 week ago (3 children)

In the case of plex, it's not 100% selfhosted. There's a dependence on plexs public infrastructure for user management/authentication. They also help bypass NAT by proxying connections through their servers so you don't have to setup port forwarding and can even easily escape double NAT situations.

I can understand paying for that convenience, but cost keeps rising while previously free features continue to get locked behind paywalls.

Tbh, having users required to authenticate with plex.tv was enough for me to look elsewhere. The biggest reason to self host for me is to remove dependency on public services.

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[–] SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 171 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Lol "Your Friends at Plex"

get fucked, assholes, Jellyfin is better anyway

[–] legion02@lemmy.world 34 points 1 week ago (50 children)

Doesn't jellyfin just not do this at all? Like if you want to stream remotely you need to figure out a vpn solution to do it?

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[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 121 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (46 children)

Seems like it was only a matter of time.

20% more will jump to Jellyfin. The other 80% will entrench and talk even more about how great Plex is. I mean Jesus, $250 to watch pirated movies. lol wtf It's also fucking wild to me that people are defending a monetization model that is on self hosted hardware. Like, I gotta pay for my server and then a license to avoid buying DVDs. Fuck it, at this point just buy the fucking movie.

Ya'll are brain dead. Plex loves you tho.

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[–] drspod@lemmy.ml 117 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Trying to monetize the piracy of your users. That's a bold business strategy.

Look, I know a lot of people could be using the sharing feature to share material that is in the public domain or that they own the copyright to, but let's be honest: most of that sharing would be considered an "unlicensed public performance" by the MAFIAA.

[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 69 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They sold to private equity a couple years back. The enshittification started that day.

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[–] glitching@lemmy.ml 108 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

not a plex user but someone buried the lede here... to me, this is the neon sign that screams GTFO:

we noticed that you've accessed libraries in the past

what business of yours is it to notice my private comings and goings?! what other actionable intel do y'all keep in your logs?! bye!

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[–] shan23@lemmy.world 87 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Guess it’s time to start using jellyfin and contributing

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[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 69 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] secret300@lemmy.sdf.org 68 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Oh no a paid, proprietary, piece of shit software does something shitty. Who could've ever saw this coming?!

I've said it for years anytime anyone mentioned running a Plex server. As soon as you install that on your server or your homelab it's no longer your server. Proprietary software is malware

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[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 59 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Exhibit #46,853 for why freeware will inevitably fall out from under your feet and why you should exclusively use FOSS wherever possible.

EDIT: Here's Jellyfin's 'How to Contribute' page.

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[–] commander@lemmy.world 54 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The more users on Jellyfin the better shot it has at getting more developer attention and users willing to contribute financially even if just occasional one off donation. How it goes with any open source application. More users, more developer interest, more feedback from users, subset of users willing to financially support the project

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[–] dezmd@lemmy.world 54 points 1 week ago (2 children)

"On 21 May 2008, XBMC developer Elan Feingold forked the source code of XBMC and started a new project called Plex"

GPL v2 source.

They've long been suspected of being greedy lil GPL violaters.

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/2974

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[–] HulkSmashBurgers@reddthat.com 53 points 1 week ago (10 children)

I've only ever used jellyfin and have no complaints.

I avoided plex and went with jellyfill because it's free/libre software.

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[–] ozoned@lemmy.world 48 points 1 week ago (26 children)

YES JELLYFIN! Thank you Plex for enshitifying!

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[–] Jiggle_Physics@sh.itjust.works 46 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Dropped this for jellyfin years ago

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[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 46 points 1 week ago (15 children)

I got the same email.

I haven't had plex installed for over 7 years, and I've NEVER used the shared libraries feature.

We noticed that you’ve accessed libraries from friends and family in the past

They've apparently noticed activity that's never occurred.

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[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today 41 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I don't use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn't surprise me even a little bit.

Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.

Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.

I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn't like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.

My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.

The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn't, and it's usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.

Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for 'unsupported' drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.

Bottom line though is don't do business with companies that don't respect you.

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[–] bktheman@awful.systems 40 points 1 week ago (15 children)

Thank you for posting this. I thought it was just me.

In my case, one user actually lost access entirely to my libraries, the updated app was trying to force him to buy a personal pass, even though I have a Plex pass.

I had him reset his app and clear cache, to no avail. I ended up having to REMOVE his access to my libraries, and then reshare them to him, before he could access them again.

He was quite upset at Plex during the entire process.

Then the next day, he got this same email, and was frustrated all over again thinking he was gonna have to fight it again.

Really terrible customer service here, very sloppy. Aside from the fact that this is a greedy cash grab, it's just being done poorly.

Jellyfin still isn't feature packed enough for me to switch to, unfortunately.

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[–] njm1314@lemmy.world 39 points 1 week ago (9 children)

So as long as the server owner has Plex pass everyone's still able to stream from the server?

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[–] veng@lemmy.world 39 points 1 week ago (5 children)

My bad, this is all because I finally decided to purchase a lifetime pass.

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[–] pyre@lemmy.world 37 points 1 week ago (2 children)

"your friends"

dude my friends don't charge me for shit

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[–] Alph4d0g@discuss.tchncs.de 34 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Jellyfin. Tailscale. Bob's your uncle.

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[–] ClemaX@lemm.ee 33 points 1 week ago

Fuck them, glad I switched to Jellyfin years ago.

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