This was the point that made a bunch of people (me included) absolutely furious with Plex. Like I gladly pay for services and donate to open source projects. But it hits differently to pay for my very own hardware being used.
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As a more serious response - The last time I purchased MS office (decade+ ago) I paid once for a product license I could use forever. That felt fair - I buy a tool, I use it.
Plex had that payment model and got a lot less pushback from the community - but this whole "we're a SaaS now!" thing is just not going to fly.
I just don't trust the company anymore, and Jellyfin is absolutely great.
As a matter of fact, I paid them 150€ for a "lifetime license" - because a long time ago, that was their business model.
I too left for jellyfin because of their pivot to being "Netflix" as paxys phrased it.
They just decided to throw away the market they established themselves into previously. Saltines should be expected at that.
Images are worse still, I know anyone serious about personal photos probably uses Lightroom, but damn. There aren't any rips harsh enough to describe Plex's image support.
And really, it would've been nice if we could share game roms for emulation (with high-score support and remote game-saves).
But damn if it wasn't magical having all those movies at your fingertips in the early 2000s.
Meanwhile most of their updates were about streaming support, and then they started cramming their streaming service into it, and pushing it, and I just got sick of all of that. Eventually I just switched to jellyfin. It is far from perfect. The music player isn't as good as plex's, there is no download feature. But at least it hasn't turned on me yet.
Finamp is the app to use for proper offline playback/sync of music from your Jellyfin server. Go for the beta version, it's far ahead of stable and works well.
The streaming issue is another matter though :/
Syncing (a paid feature) was broken for years. It might download video, it might fail. You will find out on the plane.
When internet goes down, Plex becomes weird...my home network still works just fine.
Library navigation follows netflix pattern, but netflix pattern is to let me browse for hours without finding anything.
The irony is they won't have a customer base from my mom/dad. Why in god's green earth would a layperson pay for Plex when they can get streaming bundles? I just don't get it. And that's why I got rid of my ~10 year plex instance and replaced it with Jellyfin in maybe ~1 day.
Happy to help others do the same!
Plex is a VC funded project, they've raised some $50m to date. Crazy what money can buy, isn't it?
You obviously know a lot about this, and your comment contains fine information, but unfortunately the negative elements do more harm than the fine ones do good.
Plex is for streaming my media from my server to my clients. I know a decent number of people who use (or used) Plex and I don’t think any of them would ever use it to access streaming services.
I have no problem with charging for functionality that needs their servers, or introducing streaming. But the way their authentication, “services”, and streaming features hae been shoved in our faces in the UI over time feels like a rug pull to those of us who paid for something else.
Yes, Plex _should_ work without an internet gateway. Why? Because it’s a client/server media application; it transcodes media to clients/players over the network.
Plex used to work like this. Actually, it was exclusively unauthenticated. Then early 10s they added optional auth, and eventually allowed you to reserve “server names”, and finally enforced with for running their server. But you can still use a client without auth today. Just read their docs: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200890058-authentication-fo...
All I wanted to do was self host a Plex server and access it from devices on my intranet using Infuse. Why should I have to bounce to a third party server to do that?
And to be clear, the devices using Infuse didn't have to do that, but accessing the dashboard (for admin) did require an external hop. There's no reason IMO for that to be necessary.
You don't. There's a setting for which networks are allowed access without authentication.
Cool, a real discussion. Plex has the weakness of requiring a first time online auth because they didnt implement a local ldap/oauth/sso pathway. After that point, Settings > Network > "List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth", use a generous netmask. Entirely local after that point if desired.
> https://support.plex.tv/articles/200890058-authentication-fo...
They certainly try to scare people away from changing this setting, which is not a good look IMO.
* Social sharing stuff that shows what you watch to others by default.
* Adding their streaming services and other paid services.
* Changing the UI layout to hide self hosted content, promote paid services, with poor UX for changing it back.
* Ignoring bugs that have been known and unfixed for years.
* Ignoring user feedback, doubling down on their poor decisions.
I too have a lifetime subscription, I don't mind a lot of what they do, but it feels like our media has become less centric, they want to stream pluto.tv channels and stuff like that.
The biggest thing I dislike was how I had a single app to all my media and then they blew that up and I need multiple apps. It's not that big of a hassle; I just wish I had more heads up to when it was going to happen. And while I'm not aware of them having any music-streaming media, the music app ever only streams my own media and feels like it might be on life support. Maybe music streaming is "done" but it feels kind of neglected.
That's what I was implying with saying "existing users." It seems they're caring less about their self-hosted core userbase and trying to expand to other types of users.
If Jellyfin was a comparable product (in user experience and ease of use for my extended family's platforms) I'd switch tomorrow.
Spoken as the person hosting a jellyfin instance for my extended family. I switched years ago and it's only gotten easier.
You can find things to complain about if you want to, but generally speaking - Jellyfin just works. The idea that it's not comparable is pretty silly.
My point exactly. If you want the timer pay for it? Otherwise what are you complaining about ?
Ferrari dont’ even let me use a car for free, and I dont post complaining about how if I wanted one I would have to pay.
So it would be more like Ferrari giving me the car for free, and then after a while when it starts raining I find out the windshield wipers are behind a paywall. Sure that would also be my fault, technically but it's also a shit company for doing that.
Many TV's also have an explicit sleep timer. Yes this doesn't resolve plex issue but could solve the issue in the meantime. Or go old school and plug an actual electric timer in the socket and cut power to the TV after X minutes/hours
That's actually clever, I didn't think of this and is much better than just a timer. I'll check that out later!