It's very interesting to see Plex users slowly turn against the platform primarily due to costs being imposed. Plex has better client software than Jellyfin but the 'proprietary vs open source' debate for NAS/video streaming software seems to be reversing. Jellyfin is catching up to Plex and in a few years despite Plex having a first mover advantage here -- I expect it to surpass Plex in monthly active users.
It's about more than just costs. Plex started out as a home media server (a direct port of XBMC/Kodi in fact), but over time due to its success the creators decided they wanted to turn it into Netflix instead. So using Plex to stream your own media to your own local or remote devices is being made harder with every update.
This was the point that made a bunch of people (me included) absolutely furious with Plex. Like I gladly pay for services and donate to open source projects. But it hits differently to pay for my very own hardware being used.
What is the difference between paying for plex to stream your own video from yourown hardware and paying to use microsoft word to write your own letter which also runs on your own hardware?
As a more serious response - The last time I purchased MS office (decade+ ago) I paid once for a product license I could use forever. That felt fair - I buy a tool, I use it.
Plex had that payment model and got a lot less pushback from the community - but this whole "we're a SaaS now!" thing is just not going to fly.
I just don't trust the company anymore, and Jellyfin is absolutely great.
Accurate. I'd pay for Plex if I was supporting the development of software designed for watching your personal media collection. Genuinely I considered it not long ago, until I found out that they'd shifted away from caring about local media.
There's so much media that it can't support though. It could've been managing and sharing ebooks, and karaoke. Hell, audio's a complete shitshow... ever tried to load comedy albums into Plex? It's pretty fucking sure that the only recommendation that makes sense for Steve Martin is his late-life banjo albums (which, don't get me wrong, I like, but still). Even classical music is completely screwed up, because of it's band/performer-centric preconceptions. Jazz is a total dumpster fire.
Images are worse still, I know anyone serious about personal photos probably uses Lightroom, but damn. There aren't any rips harsh enough to describe Plex's image support.
And really, it would've been nice if we could share game roms for emulation (with high-score support and remote game-saves).
I paid for Plex, but then they broke the the downloading features from the server to the Android client, and never repaired it to work reliably.
Meanwhile most of their updates were about streaming support, and then they started cramming their streaming service into it, and pushing it, and I just got sick of all of that. Eventually I just switched to jellyfin. It is far from perfect. The music player isn't as good as plex's, there is no download feature. But at least it hasn't turned on me yet.
Jellyfin's Android app does let you download files but having to do music tracks one by one isn't very useful.
Finamp is the app to use for proper offline playback/sync of music from your Jellyfin server. Go for the beta version, it's far ahead of stable and works well.
It's still poor after the new design. If I downloaded N episodes for M shows, it shows me N*M episodes all at once. No way to say "Hey, filter this list to just episodes of show M, Season K".
It's not just that. It was great for all of us with large media archives, but every "big" release is making things better for those who don't run their media libraries at expense of those who do.
Syncing (a paid feature) was broken for years. It might download video, it might fail. You will find out on the plane.
When internet goes down, Plex becomes weird...my home network still works just fine.
Library navigation follows netflix pattern, but netflix pattern is to let me browse for hours without finding anything.
Not to pile on, but the reason we're pissed at Plex is because they did a classic rug-pull: advertise to nerds like us who own our servers + media, then slowly make deals with publishers, requiring them to police _my_ content. Then start adding subscriptions and limiting how I can share (again) _my_ content - what are they offering me anymore?
The irony is they won't have a customer base from my mom/dad. Why in god's green earth would a layperson pay for Plex when they can get streaming bundles? I just don't get it. And that's why I got rid of my ~10 year plex instance and replaced it with Jellyfin in maybe ~1 day.
For me it wasn't even about cost, it was the fact that logging into my self-hosted Plex server required an auth flow that went to Plex's servers for some reason.
'For some reason'? You mean for the sharing library and streaming services and all the other features that require identification to even use ...?
People like you are why I hate these plex discussions, because motivations and reasoning for functionality are quite clear and obvious but I have to play a game where I have to to discern whether comments like this are just being intentionally obtuse, or are genuinely unaware of what architecture and scale of services they provide, or are aware and are simply opine-ing about functionality you dont like ("bloated").
Jellyfin is a cool alternative to plex, keyword alternative. Its kind of a joke that all the capability it provides is even 30% matched by these other clients but what people are doing unconsciously is just admitting they dont know what they want out of a media server or HTPC. If your needs are met by providing an NFS share and using a vanilla media player to handle buffering, then I dont even see why you're in threads like this.
Also a strange technical ineptitude / fake "blindness" is accepted around here while talking about plex for some reason. Plex offered a free 5mbps reverse tunnel service that allowed you to use THEIR SERVERS to stream to others in a secure and anonymous way if you were unable to open ports. This is the functionality they put behind a paygate, the functionality that had a cost they were floating for free... youve never been restricted from sharing your media to yourself internally or externally, but I still have to pretend that comments from supposedly tech minded people who intentionally misrepresent reality are worth respecting. It really makes browsing ANY jellyfin thread unpleasant.
Can you please refrain from personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? and also please avoid denunciatory rhetoric? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You obviously know a lot about this, and your comment contains fine information, but unfortunately the negative elements do more harm than the fine ones do good.
> You mean for the sharing library and streaming services and all the other features that require identification to even use
Plex is for streaming my media from my server to my clients. I know a decent number of people who use (or used) Plex and I don’t think any of them would ever use it to access streaming services.
I have no problem with charging for functionality that needs their servers, or introducing streaming. But the way their authentication, “services”, and streaming features hae been shoved in our faces in the UI over time feels like a rug pull to those of us who paid for something else.
Your response is both unnecessarily aggressive and plainly wrong.
Yes, Plex _should_ work without an internet gateway. Why? Because it’s a client/server media application; it transcodes media to clients/players over the network.
Plex used to work like this. Actually, it was exclusively unauthenticated. Then early 10s they added optional auth, and eventually allowed you to reserve “server names”, and finally enforced with for running their server. But you can still use a client without auth today. Just read their docs: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200890058-authentication-fo...
> 'For some reason'? You mean for the sharing library and streaming services and all the other features that require identification to even use ...?
All I wanted to do was self host a Plex server and access it from devices on my intranet using Infuse. Why should I have to bounce to a third party server to do that?
And to be clear, the devices using Infuse didn't have to do that, but accessing the dashboard (for admin) did require an external hop. There's no reason IMO for that to be necessary.
> All I wanted to do was self host a Plex server and access it from devices on my intranet using Infuse. Why should I have to bounce to a third party server to do that?
Cool, a real discussion. Plex has the weakness of requiring a first time online auth because they didnt implement a local ldap/oauth/sso pathway. After that point, Settings > Network > "List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth", use a generous netmask. Entirely local after that point if desired.
You're being a bit obtuse here yourself. The original premise of Plex was to stream your own media on your own network. I was a very early user of it, before these additional "features" that were pushed more by the Plex team than by user demand were added. They made it so you had to hack the xml config file to be able to use it in the traditional no login way, that was a pretty hostile move in my opinion and was the first eyebrow raiser for me. They also made it so you had to have a paid account to use any of the mobile clients in a clear monetization move there is no technical reason why you can't open your plex server to the internet and connect a mobile app that way, that's what jellyfin allows. I worked around this for a while by connecting to my home network on a VPN and just using chrome mobile to stream but it was less than ideal, obviously. Yes then they offered the proxying service with dynamic TLS cert generation as another paid for service, I remember it, but having never had a plex account let alone a paid one it was no interest to me. Do you work for Plex? Because your post reads like you do, especially the attitude of people not knowing what features they want and needing Plex to tell (sell) them.
Agree with others it's not solely about cost. For me it was about the very clear monetization drive Plex started doing years ago, while remaining nominally free to use for your own media. At some point, and I've already switched off it so maybe it's already happened, they will monetize tracking/meta data about what is in your own collection.
I have a lifetime subscription to Plex. I hate everything they've been doing over the past few years. They're completely ignoring their existing users in the quest for growth.
* Social sharing stuff that shows what you watch to others by default.
* Adding their streaming services and other paid services.
* Changing the UI layout to hide self hosted content, promote paid services, with poor UX for changing it back.
* Ignoring bugs that have been known and unfixed for years.
* Ignoring user feedback, doubling down on their poor decisions.
Are they that terrible, or is it the market and those of us with our own media are becoming more of the minority? I do question, at times, the amount of effort I put in to curating and backing up and maintaining our media.
I too have a lifetime subscription, I don't mind a lot of what they do, but it feels like our media has become less centric, they want to stream pluto.tv channels and stuff like that.
The biggest thing I dislike was how I had a single app to all my media and then they blew that up and I need multiple apps. It's not that big of a hassle; I just wish I had more heads up to when it was going to happen. And while I'm not aware of them having any music-streaming media, the music app ever only streams my own media and feels like it might be on life support. Maybe music streaming is "done" but it feels kind of neglected.
> Are they that terrible, or is it the market and those of us with our own media are becoming more of the minority?
That's what I was implying with saying "existing users." It seems they're caring less about their self-hosted core userbase and trying to expand to other types of users.
I've never paid Plex a dime because I don't need any of the paid features. But its usability gets worse with every update, which is an underappreciated reason to want off the platform.
Totally. I'm not into politics and basically all I want is a local streamer and I'm running Plex (on an old HP EliteDesk NUC) but... I already tried Jellyfin (and trial was successful with a few movies), so I'll very likely be switching my entire setup from Plex to Jellyfin soon.
I never even looked into Plex, I don't want to run proprietary software I have to pay for on my own computer to serve my own music. I've only ever used Jellyfin and it works more or less ok for my use cases.
We run a plex server and I hate it. Hiding "timer" functionality (turn off in x minutes) behind a paywall feels like a shit move to me as a parent for whom this is a pretty basic functionality.
Sure obviously you're right. I think it's shitty of them because I learned about it after already setting up everything because I thought this was basic functionality. My bad.
So it would be more like Ferrari giving me the car for free, and then after a while when it starts raining I find out the windshield wipers are behind a paywall. Sure that would also be my fault, technically but it's also a shit company for doing that.
Can you not just set your TV to turn off after X hours ? In the EU this is actually a legal requirement that they can do this. (for 'energy saving')
Many TV's also have an explicit sleep timer. Yes this doesn't resolve plex issue but could solve the issue in the meantime. Or go old school and plug an actual electric timer in the socket and cut power to the TV after X minutes/hours
I also want to shout out to Emby, which is almost identical to Jellyfin. It seems a bit more polished, and works very well. I've been using it for over 2 years. It does have a paid tier and nags me to upgrade for 10s on my TV, but that doesn't bother me. I have it running in a freebsd jail and it's been rock solid.
