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Plex has fallen behind free alternatives, which is no surprise because they already have most people's money. You're not paying for a higher quality experience when you pay for Plex Pass. You're paying for functionality that has been free in other alternatives for awhile, like hardware transcoding.

Performance wise it's also bad compared to the competition.

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So... No specifics other than hardware encoding?

I don't pay them for hardware encoding but for other services that the alternatives suck at. Once you know you have to pay you don't really care what you have to pay for and what you don't.

There are downsides to Plex, but do realize you're conversing with people who've used multiple options. I try Jellyfin once or twice a year and it's objectively a worse experience each time.

And again, when I used the free version of Plex the viewing experience was perfect. I guess I just don't need hardware encoding?

Hardware encoding and general performance are quite a lot of reasons. I don't think you're making your argument in good faith when you are clearly not pushing these systems to their limits like some of us are. There's no need to act like you've really tried running Jellyfin when you just chose the easier option and stuck with it.

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