Plex Raises $40M | Hacker News Reader

Plex Raises $40M

inc.com

26 pointsSytten29 comments

As a long time, happy, paid user of Plex, this makes me worry that they're going to continue to make it a worse experience...

Try Jellyfin. It’s the same thing Plex once was but fully open source.

I have (and have a Jellyfin server running on the network). IMO, it's nowhere near as polished as the 2017 version of Plex. Cover art and metadata matching is terrible. Plex seems to handle slightly "off" filenames and folder names far better.

Every so often I update jellyfin and try again, only to find it's still a worse experience than Plex.

I'm more than willing to take the trade off of slightly worse metadata and a less polished UI vs plex reporting all my media, habits, etc to their movie studio bed partners. They've already turned on their users and are abandoning what made plex great to begin with. Once you get used to JellyFin it's really great.

This is why I never take the jellyfin evangelicals seriously. Plex is good software - nothing has been taken away and my experience with it has been consistently good and stable for multiple years.

> plex reporting all my media, habits, etc to their movie studio bed partners

There is no proof that they're doing what you're claiming. From what I've seen, people love trying to to push jellyfin by making things up about plex. Also a polished UI/UX counts for a lot more than the solo-user jellyfin crowd thinks.

Yep, tried Jellyfin, UX was terrible, got back to Plex. If it’s not as good as Plex, it doesn’t matter if it’s open source or not.

> This is why I never take the jellyfin evangelicals seriously.

It's mostly better not to take evangelicals anything seriously but I don't think you calling them evangelicals is a bit too far.

> There is no proof that they're doing what you're claiming.

do you recall when Plex started ingesting your media history and then emailed all shared users in your library what you were watching?

Many Plex users were pretty embarrassed to be outed for soft porn to family members and colleagues.

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/180maoe/plex_cr...

> reporting all my media, habits, etc to their movie studio bed partners

is the claim. What you posted does not support that.

I have had a devil of a time getting Plex to recognize file names. I wish I could just directly write things to its damn fucking database.

Follow the naming standard:

https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-...

You can go to open subs and use those names alternatively, which follow the standard. Or just use jellyfin.

I have also googled this, and this does not reliably work - especially for things that aren't TV shows, such as videos from YouTube channels or music videos.

for that I dump them in an "other" library and it uses the file name title. though I mainly use it for my blu ray rips.

FileBot is your friend ;)

That said, it does feel like PLEX hsa been introducing better features and cleaner UI since jellyfin launched. I wonder if they keep track of Jellyfin installs on local system. Competition is good.

It's not as good as Plex. I hope one day it will be, it continues to improve, but it's a worse experience. Once they have proper intro skipping, I'll check it out again to see if they have fixed their other issues.

Fwiw, the Intro Skipper [0] plugin is actually fairly straightforward to install and set up and works as advertised (I personally just have it configured to auto-skip).

[0] - https://github.com/306bobby-android/intro-skipper

Note that packing in ads for a lot of off-brand streaming services is why I quit Plex and switched to the otherwise inferior Jellyfin. Way to go!

Good. Nice to see it becoming better funded, but I hope the growth doesn’t bite it in the butt.

I use Plex and turned off all of the sponsored stuff. It’s easy. Jellyfin is neat too but I find Plex to be superior, albeit not open source. Ymmv

I do always wonder why folks complain about Plex ads. It’s pretty trivial to remove all of them.

Because we paid for lifetime licenses before the enshittification started.

I’m confused - is the experience different if you pay now?

One major paint point for me is their policy concerning the mobile app. I paid for the lifetime pass for my account with the goal that Plex would work well for my users and myself.

This is not the case anymore since now users need to pay to be able to use the mobile app to stream from my server, otherwise they're limited to 5 minutes.

I ended up making a small web UI where they can log in, search for movies and episodes, and download them.

Why? Why do my users have to pay to stream from my server?

No, I paid for a lifetime license to an application that didn't have ads, didn't collect viewing data (and email it to my friends!), and wasn't blocking people hosting Plex wherever they want.

If you can find a company that went from simply paying for a license to incorporating data collection, advertising, and raised VC funds and became better after, I'd love to hear about it.

I hope they toss a few million to make sure that jumping forward and backward work properly. I can fast forward or backward once and then if I try again, it hangs. That’s pretty much my biggest Plex woe. Unless someone has a solution to that?

I use plex daily on fire tv and have not had any issues with seeking forward or backward. I use the “skip back 10 seconds” with the left button all the time when I miss some dialogue.

When speaking of Plex you have to mention the client, it runs on almost everything but some clients work better than others.

How would you bring media ownership to the masses? A hardware "hub" you can put a disc in and it rips it and organizes it and allows your family to stream it?

They could add a cloud based subscription for storage if you don't want their hub. The tech is all out there, someone just needs to do it in an Apple-like dead-simple manner.

Can they use some of that money to actually fix there horrible syncing with music on Android? Its been years now since it worked right.

Oof, I keep thinking of switching off Youtube Music in favor of Plex :/

I’ve been buying Blu-ray’s.. so tired of plex messing up the simplest of encoded videos.

Was good while it lasted.

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