Oh, interesting. I knew something was off about the place when I kept seeing anti-“woke” conservative opinion pieces posted there, but I thought it was just a bunch of MAGA morons voluntarily role-playing as “independent” “journalists”.

I actually jumped ship a while back. I agree that Plex is a business and they do deserve to get paid for development and infrastructure costs, but it’s the blatant enshitification that I have a big issue with.

They chose to lock a previously-free feature behind a paywall for everybody and asked for even more money to get it back. The less shitty alternative would have been to ask only the users who needed to use the relays to purchase a Plex Pass. Or, if they wanted to make it seem like a positive thing, they could have made the new subscription into an “enhanced quality” remote streaming experience that enabled higher bitrates over relays.

They gave their users the middle finger by picking the most transparently greedy option that they could get away with justifying.

Fair enough, although that actually has worse optics IMO. It goes from “this costs us money, so pay us” to “we need money, so we’re creating an artificial reason for you to pay us”

The self-hosted servers use UPnP and NAT-PMP to automatically forward the port used for media streaming.

Very, apparently.

They use UPnP and NAT-PMP1 to have clients directly stream the media from users’ own self-hosted servers. It costs them almost nothing in bandwidth to do that.

Software costs money how would they continue to developed it if not getting paid?

Apparently a hot take as evidenced the downvotes on my other comments here, but by adding things people want instead of taking away things people already have and charging more for it.

They don’t even have the excuse that they need to pay for the bandwidth costs of relaying video from servers to clients. Video is streamed directly from the user’s self-hosted server, using UPnP or NAT-PMP to make the server accessible from outside the local network.

And this isn’t a new feature they’re adding. Remote streaming was already implemented and generally available to users.

I don’t discount there being a cost in maintaining code over time, but it’s not as though they have to spend any significant employee time on improving it. They already support UPnP and NAT-PMP to have the clients connect directly to the self-hosted servers.

It would be nice if they added NAT hole punching on top of that, but it’s evidently good enough to work as-is in its current form. If they’re not even running relays to support more tricky networks (which the linked support article has no mention of), keeping this feature free costs them literally nothing extra.

No, it’s still wrong.

We have ways to do NAT traversal and hole punching on consumer routers. Failing that, UP&P and port forwarding exist. Or, god forbid, IPv6.

In the rare case that literally none of those are an option, they would have to use TURN to relay between an intermediary. That is a reasonable case to ask the user to pay for their bandwidth usage, but they don’t have to be greedy fuckers by making everyone pay for it.

This is enshittification and corporate greed. Nothing more, nothing less.