We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
I dumped Plex years ago even though I paid for it. Too many issues with it. Constantly losing movie folders, unable to stream to the device I wanted to watch on, wrong codec, wrong sound, etc, etc. I gave up. I’m sure it worked fine for most, but it got to be a pain. Switched to Jellyfin and a DDNS address and have had zero problems since. And it’s free.
So it looks like the server will need plex pass in order to stream to users, or the user can pay about $2/mo to stream from servers without plex pass. I feel like this is fine, doesn’t really come across as greedy or egregious.
I’ve set up plex, overseer, sonaar, and radaar in such a way that my family and friends can request and watch videos on my server. I use plex because it’s the easiest for my less than tech savvy family to use, as it’s just an app on their TV.
I have never paid a cent for Plex while Plex has allowed me and my family to save hundreds in subscription fees, so I’m feeling rather ambivalent about this new requirement for me to get plex pass in order to stream to the small horde of people I serve. I was considering getting plex pass to unlock hardware acceleration for transcoding anyway.
I’ve considered Jellyfin, but plex has a ton of features that allow for scripting that keeps me from having to manually do maintenance. Not to mention how hard it would be to get people like my father to use Jellyfin on his TV, last I checked there isn’t even TV app available for most platforms.
Glad I went Emby.
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Why do people use this when Jellyfin exists?
I took a dive into linux and jellyfin and im too stupid for it.
Because of the Wife Factor. Getting people to convert requires getting past a lot of social inertia. It requires you to first convince them that the convenience of streaming services isn’t actually worth paying for. Then it requires an elegant onboarding experience. Lastly, Plex simply makes remote access easy. Sure, you could fiddle with reverse proxies for Jellyfin. But that’s easy to mess up. Instead, it’s much smoother to simply sign into Plex.
I can talk my tech-illiterate “My google chrome desktop icon got moved, and now I don’t know how to check my email” mother-in-law through Plex’s sign-up process over the phone. In fact, I did. It’s familiar enough that anyone who has signed up for a streaming service can figure it out. I can’t do that with Jellyfin, because their eyes glaze over as soon as you start talking about custom server URLs or IP addresses. Hell, my MIL’s TV doesn’t even have a native Jellyfin app available on the App Store. If I wanted to install it for her, I would need to sideload it.
Jellyfin does a lot of things right. But by design, the setup process will never be as elegant as Plex’s, because that elegant system requires a centralized server to actually handle it. And centralized servers are exactly what Jellyfin was built to rebel against.
To be clear, I run both concurrently; Jellyfin for myself, and Plex for friends/family. I got the lifetime Plex Pass license a decade ago, and it has more than paid for itself since then. But it sounds like a bunch of my friends and family may end up switching to Jellyfin if they don’t want to deal with the PlexPass subscription.
Setting jellyfin up is for the technically inclined, i’ll agree there, but once deployed I don’t really see where Plex fundamentally excels over Jellyfin when it comes to “the wife factor”?
You open the app, app shows library, you click on desired media item, desired media item plays. What am i missing?
It’s the setup which doesn’t pass the “wife” test. The more setup friction, the lower the likelihood that average users will bother. It requires a very easy setup experience to retain the average user. Even us technical people have limited time in the day. If I get a similar experience out of both Plex and Jellyfin, I’m going with the software which is easier to set up. Most of us are at that point in our lives where we’ll pay for convenience.
So lazyness is the real answer. ;) This is fair enough, to be sure, but logically I continue to have problems with it when looking solely at the wife factor.
My wife sets nothing up, that’s my area of expertise. My wife’s a user. This is true for Jellyfin but also things like our home automation that she very much enjoys but has no clue to how I made work on a technical level. She just taps things in the Home Assistant app as desired and things happen.
I would also argue setting up Jellyfin, though more a complex proposition as Plex, is a lot easier then setting up things like an *arr strack or ripping the media you eventually play back with it.
Plex does very little in a vacuum so despite it being easier to set up, it would be equally unlikely she ever would.
The app isn’t available on as many platforms. The original comment claimed the TV their MIL uses doesn’t have a Jellyfin app and would require side loading. I would argue that’s a pretty big barrier for most people.
So far I’ve had no problems using jellyfin on basicly anything that exists in my house which includes a Apple TV, Xbox SX and a Xiaomi TV Box S.
But I can see there’s probably no Tizen app for things like Samsung TV’s.
https://github.com/Georift/install-jellyfin-tizen
Samsung is being a bit of a dick apparently.
I think its a great idea to run the two concurrently. I didn’t see the point but given how plex is evolving i think its time to start getting familiar with jellyfin.
Well that’s the beginning of the end for them.
I’m about half-way off the platform already (and I’m a lifetime subscriber)
The only thing I go back for is Roku use (better app), PlexAmp (better app) and offline viewing. I don’t have to go off JF for those, but it’s a lot better on Plex.
But it’s not so much better than I can’t protest.
So basically… this is a blatant cash grab, and a nearly 200% one depending on the level of service you pay/paid for. Wonder how long it will be before the lifetime pass is discontinued and everyone gets forcibly moved over to a monthly subscription model
Every service is doing this as expenses and interest rates go up. Its the driving force of enshittification. All the VCs want internet startups to finally turn a profit.
I stopped using Plex shortly after they started forcing logging in with your online Plex account to connect to LAN only based server. The writing was on the wall all those years ago. Who wants to be locked out of their media when the internet is offline, completely defeated the point of self hosting local infrastructure
Jellyfin, while lacking a bit when I first migrated, has continued improved over the years and it has been joyful to use. Plus Jellyfin supported hardware transcoding before Plex did, which was a gripe I had with Plex at the time.
I stream from my server remotely and share with Family without hassle. I dunno where Plex is trying to go, glad I bailed long ago
Not here to defend Plex’ enshittification but you can still use Plex offline just fine. I had 0 issues yesterday when I had no internet all day.
I’ll probably get the details wrong but my understanding is that when you sign in, you get an authorization token. That token is valid for some period of time, let’s say 48 hours. You can use that cached token but let’s say it’s on your phone and not your TV. Maybe you haven’t used Plex on the TV this week. Want to use your TV, out of luck. Want to use a different local account, out of luck. Want to use Plex longer than the token is good for, out of luck.
Wow, I had no clue it worked like that. That’s actually really bad.
Can’t say I have a huge issue with this - Plex isn’t FOSS and the infrastructure to make this happen isn’t free. Other options are available if you don’t want to pay the fee.
Yeah I don’t see the big deal tbh
But what infrastructure does this feature require? I’m direct connecting to my own personal server with perhaps credential handling and a handshake handled by Plex servers to connect. None of the media is passing through their servers - or it shouldn’t be if it is.
I would look into how Plex works.
In a nutshell, if your app isn’t able to make a direct connection to your Plex Media Server when you’re away from home, we can act as sort of a middle man and “relay” the stream from your server to your app. To accomplish this, your Plex Media Server establishes a secure connection to one of our Relay servers. Your app then also connects securely to the same Relay server and accesses the stream from your Plex Media Server. (In technical terms, the content is tunneled through.)
So, your Plex Media Server basically “relays” the media stream through our server so that your app can access it since the app can’t connect with your server directly.
Source: https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-server-through-relay/
It’s not a requirement to stream and it’s sort of dumb they are lumping this relay service as a part of the remote streaming. Remote streaming should be allowed for free - if you are not a subscriber. The relay should just be a paid service, which makes sense. But if it’s a direct connection to my server, it should be free.
That being said, I understand how Plex may have built some technical debt into this relay system. It might be hard for them to decouple the relay from the remote streaming. What they should have done is:
We are removing the relay service as a free service, but you can still do remote streaming with a direct connection.
And they should have built their architecture in a way that’s easy to decouple the two services.
Thanks for that - I wasn’t aware of the relay service, but completely agree that this is what they should be charging for and not the remote play feature in its entirety. I’ll probably drag it out for a while by refusing to update the app and server… Might be able to make it work with Tailscale as others have suggested.
In the past I’ve paid for a month or two when I wanted to download to my devices remotely (and I think that’s the singular feature that I’ve ever cared about in the Plex pass). But to take features away and then try and charge me for them is a bridge too far, I can’t support that bad behavior.
I paid for the lifetime membership ~6 years ago so I’m going to stick with it. Plus I just use it for my own home. It’s not like I’m serving a bunch of other clients. But I’ll switch to Jellyfin if the lifetime membership ever gets taken away.
I considered it when they warned about the increase and offered it at $75, but I just didn’t have the money to spend back then. Felt pretty stupid for not doing it, but I don’t even know what paid features they offer, and I’m clearly not missing them.
99% of my usage is at home as well, so this is unlikely to affect me - until that random 1% anyhow.
I don’t like it, but it’s a pragmatic decision.
Hosting for a simple website can be as little as a few bucks a month. That’s easy for any project to absorb, even if they are open-source with no one pulling a paycheque.
Streaming requires high-performance, high-bandwidth machines that cost anywhere from several dozen dollars to several hundred dollars a month. You build a resilient high-availability network, and you could easily be looking at several tens of thousands of dollars a month.
That isn’t easy to absorb, even for a for-profit company with clearly-defined revenue streams.
Some people want everything for free, but free doesn’t pay the bills.
Full disclosure: I don’t use the streaming feature. I prefer to grab actual copies to drop onto my NAS. I also don’t share to friends and family, as I am the only one I know of who uses Plex.
That high performance, high bandwidth streaming machine is in my house, not Plex’s, though. I already pay for the maintenence, power and the bandwidth of that machine, not Plex.
they need none of that stuff. It’s your own pc that handles the heavy stuff. From their end, the only point is to allow you to stream videos from behind one or more NATs
All those resources and costs are borne by the person hosting the video, NOT Plex.
Streaming requires high-performance, high-bandwidth machines that cost anywhere from several dozen dollars to several hundred dollars a month. You build a resilient high-availability network, and you could easily be looking at several tens of thousands of dollars a month.
Are you under the impression that Plex uploads the movie files to their servers and then transcodes them there, or something?
And the hard work happens on your own hardware. All Plex’s servers are doing is acting as a signaling server, but no media or routed through Plex’s servers.
Plex actually does have streaming services. The ones we’ve never asked for. And live tv.
But the blog post from Plex was specifically talking about charging for remotely accessing your own files. So your point is irrelevant to the discussion.
How is it irrelevant? Plex offers a bunch of services that cost them money that we don’t use, so they jacked up prices for streaming our own data.
It’s irrelevant because even Plex themselves made no mention of their in-house streaming stuff. The discussion is about being charged to view your videos, hosted on your own self-hosted server, viewed on your own device.
I disagree. Sometimes you need to look at the situation as a whole in order to understand the motivation.
Ok, so you’re implying people were using their videos for free instead of paying for the streaming services. Then Plex wanted more money so they’ve started to charge people for using their own stuff.
That’s fine, and frankly I agree with that.
But your initial reply to me is still irrelevant to the discussion.
It depends on if you use the “relay” feature. If your server is accessible from the outside it shouldn’t be using this though.
Yeah, my lifetime Jellyfin subscription wasn’t quite that much, thankfully. 😆
Another company fucked by executives.
Why would you expect this to NOT be paid? It requires them to be running servers to stream the media through, I wouldn’t expect this to be a free feature.
I dislike Plex for several reasons, but asking for payment for stuff that costs them money is completely justified.
Why is this getting upvoted? Plex isn’t running a server. You are. Your computer and your media files are quite literally “the server” that is serving the files to you remotely. Plex is at best doing authentication.
Because he’s right. You can’t access your own server remotely without plex’s infrastructure (provided you don’t just set up that infrastructure yourself). You don’t need to open ports or anything. Your server reaches out to plex server, which creates an entry point to your network. Your stream is then either routed through their servers or possibly setup as P2P stream.
I can’t back this up but I highly doubt that the media is played through Plex’ server.
Its not. It is setting up a secure route from the client to the server. That is quite literally not a server. No one thinks Tailscale is a Server. That’s essentially all they are doing but just handling adding the clients automatically when they authenticate.
That’s just not correct. Mate. It’s setting up a secure route from the client to your Plex server. It’s essentially doing what Tailscale does but just handling the client setup automatically via their Plex authentication. They are authenticating the connection and setting up the route from the client to the server. They are not handling petabytes of data people are streaming. The ISPs are doing that.
Ok sure, they aren’t routing, just using P2P like I mentioned. It’s still not possible to access remotely without using plex services. This is what you are paying for. If you don’t want to pay for their auto-config remote streaming it’s easy enough to do it yourself.
For remote streaming they do, here are their docs on it https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-server-through-relay/
From that documentation:
So, your Plex Media Server basically “relays” the media stream through our server so that your app can access it since the app can’t connect with your server directly.
It doesn’t require Plex servers, though. I do this on jellyfin for free.
How do you do this on Jellyfin? The only ways I’m familiar with is to expose Jellyfin to the internet or access it through Tailscale, would love to hear alternatives.
It’s not that hard to get a reverse proxy up, get a free DDNS, and a SSL certificate from let’s encrypt.
https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2020-08-21-introducing-swag
This is a pretty solid one stop shop for handling all reverse proxy for jellyfin and other applications like sonarr, radarr, transmission, ombi and lists of others that are pretty much drag and drop configuration files if you’re not mucking with the application’s default ports.
That exposes Jellyfin to the internet, so it’s not the same feature
My dude if you are connecting from outside your local network you are “exposed” to the Internet in some way. What magic are you thinking Plex is doing? Is someone hand deliverying the packets via USPS?
Plex runs relay servers where your Plex server will connect to the relay and your player will also connect to the relay, making both ends of the connection egress type as far as routing and access control goes. https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-server-through-relay/
It’s optional and likely not everyone uses it, but this provides a way for Plex to do remote streaming without the Plex server being reachable directly from the internet.
Separately, it costs money for Plex to run.
In some way is different from directly, on Plex you’re behind a relay server so it’s akin to being behind a VPS running Authentik/Authelia in front of the service on your home. Compromising the relay server does not necessarily compromises your home server, so it’s not direct like putting Jellyfin on a reverse Proxy would be.
And somehow you think that Plex isn’t exposing your server to the Internet for streaming while not on your local network?
Okay there Mr. Madison.
It’s not, not directly at least, and that’s what everyone is ignoring here. You probably understand the value on Authelia/Authentik but you’re failing to see that the Plex relay server is taking that same mantle here, so even if someone managed to compromise the relay server it’s still not on your home server, whereas exposing jellyfin directly to the internet only requires one service to be compromised.
Reverse proxy
That exposes Jellyfin to the internet, so it’s my option 1.
My home connection is behind cgnat so I got a free VPS from oracle (provides a public ip address), install caddy on VPS, install tailscale on VPS and router, expose routes from LAN to tailscale network.
Now you can use caddy to expose, for example, a docker container (jellyfin) at 192.168.1.100 to subdomain.exampledomain.com with ssl cert provided by caddy.
VPS also requires some other stuff like ddclient and fail2ban.
I pieced this all together myself… it’s doable if you spend some time reading.
That exposes Jellyfin to the internet
Yes exactly. What do you think plex is doing?
Using a relay server to separate online from home connection
I don’t see anything in the linked article about a relay server
Wait a moment. I always thought that Plex’s servers only facilitate authentication (to verify your account) and discovery (to help your device find your server). They do not handle the actual media data. And if there is no Direct Remote Access, Relay usage is capped at 1 minute per day for free users. This looks like a cash grab to me.
This is the best ad campaign Jellyfin could have asked for.
Hypothetically, if I have tailscale setup, would that be a viable workaround since everything looks local on my tailnet?
I’m surprised by the resistance to Jellyfin in this thread. If you are using Plex, you’re already savvy enough to use bittorrent and probably the *arrs. If you can configure that stuff, Jellyfin is absolutely something you can handle. If you like Docker, there’s good projects out there. If you’re like me and you don’t understand Docker, use Swizzin community edition. If you can install Ubuntu or Debian, and run the Swizzin script, you’re in business.
The big thing for me with plex is user management. I am absolutely knowledgeable enough to set up jellyfin, but i dont want to deal with user management. Plex makes it easy, i tell them to make their own account and i just share my library. i dont have to reset passwords, they can do that themselves. However, it’s getting to the point where i will probably just switch to jellyfin and deal with it because of how bad plex is getting.
I’m only sharing access with a few friends and family, so I don’t find it cumbersome. Usually I make their account using the Jellyfin app on my phone. I do sympathize with not wanting to do support, which is the main reason I don’t even ask for help with the hosting costs. I don’t want to feel any obligation.
Plex is trivial to set up, most plex users I know actually don’t even use the arrs. They just host a drive someone gave them or they have an account already to access other people’s servers. Anyone can do it with a short list of instructions in minutes that mostly consist of “download app, make account, point to your media.”
I just setup jellyfin and it totally is the same. Install. Point it to a media folder. Setup port forwarding.
You don’t need to manually setup port forwarding with plex and if you want access outside of your home or to let others in it gets way more complicated with Jellyfin. Plex is turnkey in comparison.
That ease of outside LAN access poses a big risk tho. Plex can and eventually probably will share, be forced to share, get hacked etc Those cloud accounts imply the possibility of very detailed reports about who’s streaming what, when, where, from which source…
But let’s be honest - it really is not complicated. That was a one minute configuration in my router.
One minute for you and me, but that sort of thing just isn’t feasible for many even if they have someone walking them through it over the phone.
I consider myself pretty tech savvy but after I got Jellyfin set up I accidentally broke it within weeks, I wasn’t even able to get it consistently playing outside of my home network to my devices. Some ISP’s also make it hard to tinker with their modems/routers, and let’s not forget that most people when they set up their Internet just use whatever the ISP provides for them.
Ok, that is a totally different use case than mine. I’m one of those guys browsing a selfhosting community on the fediverse and I only want to stream my own stuff to my mobile and provide my wife with audiobooks. If you’re providing a bigger group of people with streaming services, who are not tech savvy, another software might be the better solution. But that doesn’t mean that Jellyfin is bad - it’s just another use case with different requirements
Me too. Docker isn’t hard if you use a compose file. It’s easy to read syntax.
Linux server.io has great documentation for their images.
I have Jellyfin and Plex running from the same virtual machine pointing at the same media. If it wasn’t for the one crappy TV I have in my house with no Jellyfin client, Plex would be gone.
Docker isn’t hard if you use a compose file. It’s easy to read syntax.
This is giving me “yaml isn’t hard to use if you use a compose file!” It is, actually. It’s easy for you because you understand the technology. The vast majority of people do not.
I think I represent a huge portion of Plex users; I am tech savvy enough to follow a simple walkthrough on YouTube to get my server setup. But the arrs, jellyfin, and docker both look like graduate level chemistry to me.
Plex has been around for ages and they have put money into making things easier for users like me to understand with events such as Pro Week and directly paying content creators to dumb things down for me.
I’ve got to admit that I’ve never used Plex (I’m a cantankerous open software fanatic), but how do you get your media on there? You’re hosting your own server so presumably you’re downloading the media somehow. Are you doing it manually? If so, you can do the same with Jellyfin. Is it automated with some tool built into Plex?
I’m ripping it with makemkv, actually. I have a fairly large blu ray collection that is slowly going onto my DAS.
