Plex no Longer Offers Free Remote Playback for Personal Media
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
But here is the thing: It is a wired Ethernet network between the server for both and the Apple TV, so there is absolutely no justification.
Jellyfin is going to be THE answer one day, but still has some growing to do.
0 issues, InFuse is much better at doing the playback correctly.
Of course transcoding on the fly and stuff is there but I just want to stream the direct file to the tv so none of that matters.
*edit: For anyone else reading down here the parent's solution was better for me vs Plex. Simply streaming through infuse via SMB removes all the issues I don't want to deal with with Plex as it has gotten worse over the years and has invaded my purely local setup more and more. As long as it is encoded in a way Infuse can read it works great. I didn't have a file Infuse couldn't play.
Jellyfin split off from Emby years ago, which does have a commercial side. Perhaps their Apple TV client is better?
E.g., the native, built-in Apple TV video player expects everything in an MP4 container, and Plex appears to seamlessly repackage content into MP4, whereas you need to dig into the settings to force an MP4 container and force the native player on Jellyfin. Otherwise, Jellyfin will try to use VLCKit or some other player that has other issues (like with HDR content).
Apple TV also has very limited subtitle support in the native player, and Plex does better at accommodating that.
I'm assuming Jellyfin is closer to parity on hardware with more capable native players, though.
Plex has a much better UI and UX than anything else.
When that happens, I open up Handbrake and re-encode the media as H264 (8-bit), which Jellyfin can direct-stream to all clients. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/
/done
I have plex pass lifetime and have for almost a decade, best $70 I ever spent.
EDIT: It has been over a decade (June 2014) and it was $74.99
From the blog: "The price increase applies to new and existing subscriptions, with the exception of existing Lifetime Plex Pass holders. The good news is that you can still purchase a Lifetime Plex Pass subscription at the current price of $119.99 USD* before the increase goes into effect on April 29, 2025." [0]
Also with respect to streaming costs - as long as you have a Pass there's no cost: "IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CURRENT PLEX PASS HOLDERS: For users who have an active Plex Pass subscription, remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media Server, after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge—not even a mobile activation fee." [0]
Had they changed that they'd probably be experiencing additional lost revenue. Either way, glad I got Lifetime back when it was sub $100. I think it's worth it for those of us who enable family members to leverage our deployments.
What cost does Plex incur when I watch something from my friends server? They're not footing the bill for bandwidth that I can tell, so why is there going to be a cost associated with this beyond "we can"?
Agreed. The article says:
> Plex says that it needs to raise prices to keep up with rising costs, and that the added funds will ensure that Plex is able to keep developing new features.
and yet they also offer a lifetime pass. If I were considering paying a company that just did this, then I'm not sure I'd have much faith in the lifetime value of that lifetime pass.
"Past performance is not indicative of future results." and all of that but just wanted to provide an example.
We all have bills to pay. Upping prices because I want more money isn’t a very understandable reason.
It’s not like we have any visibility into Plex’s costs. So it’s just as likely that the owner wants more profit than they have costs.
Things that were added in the last 10 years off the top of my head:
* 10 years of updates to the iOS/Android/GoogleTV/AppleTV/Mac/Windows/etc clients (that doesn't come for free)
* OpenSubtitle search built in
* Intro detection
* Credit detection
* Watch Together
* LiveTV/DVR support
* PlexAmp
* PlexDash
And more that I'm not thinking of.
You can say "I don't care about those features", which is a tired take IMHO, but there are plenty of features they have added to keep up with the online streaming platforms.
That is, your host gets a DNS entry along the lines of 1.2.3.4.something.plex.com, where 1.2.3.4 is your Plex server's public IP, and they have a deal with a cert issuer so they can get valid certs for that hostname.
edit: It's Let's Encrypt these days[1], was sure it wasn't that when it started, but it's been a while.
[1]: https://support.plex.tv/articles/206225077-how-to-use-secure...
That almost made me switch to Jellyfin, but every time I look into Jellyfin I hear people saying it's not quite fully cooked, but that's been years now they've been saying that. So I stick with the devil I know.
Jellyfin+roku works great for me.
All of that has a cost. It costs money to maintain, it costs money to develop, it costs money to host.
It's a commercial product. They have been inching more towards monetizing their product for a long time. Being able to pay for a lifetime is a huge win imo. I wish more companies offered that.
Before folks get the wrong idea, this isn’t true. Plex uses universal plug and play to open ports in your firewall, unless you explicitly configure plex manually. At that point you still have an open port but you get to pick it.
That being said, the remote access functionality plex provides is very nice. The shocking bit but to me is that they are pricing remote play at 20$/yr. As far as I can tell you only use plex infrastructure when a direct connection can’t be made. I’m my experience that’s seldom.
My pet peeve is that they focus too much on that side of the business (adding new content) while ignoring the streaming experience. There are feature requests on the forum that are being ignored. For example, I would like music artwork per song instead of per album so kids can find their songs more easily. I would also like offline content to be available in the standard catalogue without going through "Downloads". The device that plays the content should prefer that downloaded copy instead of fetching it again via a network when you play it. And so on...
As someone already said, this is probably intended to squeeze some money from the illegal content streaming farms before they close them. They are probably forced to suspend anything suspicious by the legal departments, and this way, they get a bit out of it.
I would guess a good number of plex setups cost more than "all streaming services" x "lifetime of plex server", I know some people where this is the case. They could have paid for every streaming service for over a decade for what they put into their Plex/media server.
It's been pretty good! Gerbera has worked pretty well as a MediaServer. Every TV I have has a builtin MediaRenderer, and some of my controllers like BubbleUPnP on my phone let me cast to Chromecast. I love that gmrender-ressurect is a really good MediaRenderer I can run on laptops and desktops. Bubble also has a media transcoder that as part of their pro package, which was pretty affordable & an easy to use proxy.
As in, Plex will prevent you remotely accessing your own server, even if you're not using Plex's services for that remote access. So this is purely extractive move, and not really based on their costs at all.
There is a thread of anti-Plex talk all over the place that I really don't understand. I don't think there is even any XBMC/Kodi code in it anymore.
I am a longtime user of Kodi/XBMC back to the soft-modding an OG Xbox days, and I eventually moved to Plex for the client-server model. It was and still is a great piece of software
Plex might have more features, but I found not having to install (plex/jfin/etc) server software worth it. To each their own.