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Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

I hope plex devs read this thread and get the clue that their system is totally ripe to be replaced with something else, I've used plex for many years and the technical quality of the server has just declined. people who use plex, who are therefore the types of people with an appetite to "run their own server", have absolutely no interest in having to sign up on a website, or get ads, see anything "streaming" (insane! the streaming market has tons of huge players, plex...) or any other kind of crap, all of which has been added to plex over the years, while meanwhile the server uses tons more disk space and memory than it used to and still fails to classify some very simple content quite often.

I havent bothered to look at alternatives in a long time and it seems there are more now than there used to be. will be looking when i next have time.

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I do have some sympathy for Plex trying to run a viable business based on a fairly niche product, but I agree the direction they've gone is pretty puzzling. People use Plex for basically the opposite reasons that they use streaming services - they want to actually own their content libraries, they don't want to pay subscription fees, they don't want their personal information stored in the cloud, they don't want to see advertisements, etc. Plex's strength was that they offered an alternative to all of that - and I wish they would have doubled down on just making that whole experience as nice as possible, while also maybe adding in some tools to make it easier to obtain content from "alternative" sources.

Instead they've kind of gone down the route of trying to copy streaming services, and done a really poor job of it, and my experience the last time I logged into Plex was basically "wtf is all this nonsense?". To be fair though I was actually able to accomplish what I wanted - which was to be able to stream a ripped DVD from a media server (Raspberry Pi) to my TV - and for that it still worked pretty well.

It's not puzzling at all if you think about a couple other Plex "audiences": SmartTV and STB makers, and investors.

What story works better for those two (valid) audiences?

Everyone knows nobody has massive libraries of home movies. These other features offer a more clearly supportable "look, it's not just for (ahem) home video libraries" narrative.

With respect, don’t make such absolutist statements. I have a very large Plex library that I use every day. I am really not concerned with off-site auth or whatever. The “free” movies took me all of about 30 seconds to remove. Other people that use my Plex can remove them if they want, too. My parents have access to my Plex and they like the wider range of moves offered by Plex’s streaming service. I’m not going to kick up a fuss if they use it.

These are largely puritan nerd arguments that I see plastered all over the Plex subreddit but that I simply don’t experience day to day and haven’t in the 10+ years that I’ve used Plex. Plex is probably right to ignore what I personally perceive to be a vocal minority.

I've used many systems over the years from PS3 Media Server, to XBMC, and finally landed on Plex and loved the simplicity of it just working and happily paid.

The past year or two on Plex has been super annoying unfortunately. I have been getting lots of transcoding and caching issues.

I've reached the point where I will be trying out some alternatives again when I have the time.

The alternatives to Plex are like comparing Linux to MacOS as a desktop OS. If you want to put in the work, you can probably make something work, but it's not going to be a plug and play experience.

On the other hand the amount of crud the app has just for streaming movies from my NAS is ridiculous. All I really want is a prettier interface to DLNA.

Check out Infuse if you’re an Apple user.

VLC is a pretty viable alternative, and it has client apps for pretty much every platform. There could be some basic features added to make it a bit more usable (text search/filtering), but for basic use cases it works pretty good for me

How do I use VLC to watch my Blu-ray collection that I have stored on my desktop? If I have the VLC application installed on my Windows desktop and I have the VLC app on my phone, how do I browse, select, and watch on my phone a movie that's stored on my desktop? Is this possible? Since if it is I would LOVE to use VLC!

You can't use VLC as a server, but you can use it as a DLNA client.

That setup would be a media server on your desktop (I'd recommend Jellyfin for this, there's a windows app) which broadcasts a DLNA server on your local network.

Then in VLC, you click on "mDNS Network Discovery" in the sidebar that comes up in the playlist view and your computer will show up with a folder structure.

Here's what that looks like for me: https://f002.backblazeb2.com/file/ATibPod/vlc-as-jellyfin-cl...

I use the android version of VLC to browse a network share of movies and play on my Chromecast.

I just use an sftp server, which you can add a connection to in VLC and explore your files like a file explorer

This isn’t even remotely an alternative.

I'm eager to jump to any alternative that doesn't stall forever when skipping backwards, which plex does most of the time for some reason.

Have you tried Jellyfin?

Jellyfin is awesome, but scrubbing isn't its finest feature.

So you think they should stake their whole business on pleasing customers who not only don't pay for the product but who make a hobby out of not paying for media? How do you supposed they keep the lights on?

Keep taking VC money? /s

Remove the login requirement except and unless users try to access PlexPass features.

That's the strange part though. The streaming service and most of these new features are free. Most of the major features they charge for via Plex Pass are geared at people running their own servers. So they seem to be alienating the only people who have any reason to pay them in the first place.

You realize they sell those tv spots and/or share ad revenue. Every 5 minutes a 1 1/2 minute ad appears.

I *do* pay for plex. I would gladly pay much more to have a simple server that works and for which I can have support when it can't classify things. Also the vast majority of media I serve from plex are my own drum practice videos for my own review. It has other uses besides commercial content.

I paid for Plex. I also paid for the media I accessed through it. I don't mind paying for these things. I do mind losing access to my local library because my internet is down, though. I do mind paying a decent amount of money and still getting garbage shoved in my face and a poor and declining user experience.

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