I bought Plex pass years ago for £79. The new price of $749.99 is INSANE.
No wonder all the cool people are using Jellyfin.
My friend showed me Plex once but I never really understood what it was for or how it worked. When I looked up something I wanted to watch it would just link to other streaming sites like Stan or Netflix
You’ll retain your existing lifetime pass, fwiw. This is just price gouging new customers.
Wait what. $750? I think I paid like $100 years ago. Damn.
Same. It was my Xmas gift to myself. If not, I’d learn Jellyfin.
I paid 75 for mine and 150 for work.
Now I run both and use JF for myself and local and Plex for friends and family.
When Plex finishes fucking us over my friends and family can decide wether they want to deal with tailscale or go without.
who is this for?
those unicorn users who make 150k++ a year and pirate all their media and then wanna share it with their friends that they don’t have?
travelling salesmen who pirate all their media??
To be fair there are plenty of users who rip their own media. But sentiment stands
Sure if plenty means less then 10. Most people just stream from one of the providers.
Roon did this and it made me stop using Roon.
Home assistant +music assistant is better now, and has fully replaced that for free.
Goodbye, shit companies.
I do wonder if this is a last ditch effort cash grab before they go under or a “we really thought we’d be acquired by now so now we have to plan ahead” move.
I imagine most of their revenue comes from the ad supported “channels” they provide, which non-technical people are tricked into using since they have a technical friend or relative who set them up with Plex 10 years ago. With the Fox acquisition of Roku, the merging of Tubi and Roku Channel would be huge and probably cause Plex to lose streaming licenses of certain properties which will end up as lower revenue.
I like jellyfin
Plex works just fine without a subscription. What is the subscription even for?
It has centralised features like proprietary user sharing (which is neat but still), arbitrary limits like device limits, the ability to transcode using your server’s hardware, and other stuff that Emby/Jellyfin users have as standard. So we generally see the restrictions as taking power and ownership away from our own media/hardware.
And any cool premium Plex features like merging multiple servers into one UI get adopted and ported into Emby/Jellyfin pretty damn quickly
Downloads for Offline Viewing (jellyfin has this for free) and Remote Access (stream videos while outside of your home network, you can just use tailwind with jellyfin for free)
What is this ‘offline’ thing I keep hearing about?
You can download media for when you’re not able to reach your server. I use it to be able to watch things on my iPad at work. My iPad automatically downloads the next few unwatched episodes for whatever I have queued. And whenever it reconnects to my server, (like when I connect to WiFi) it automatically syncs to update the downloaded episodes. That way I don’t need to connect to my employer’s WiFi.
You can download episodes/movies to your device for offline playback. Not groundbreaking, you could just copy the files to your device manually, but if you do it via the plex app it will sync your watch progress once you connect again.
You can also use it to bulk-download shows from other people’s libraries.
Why would I need to copy the files to my media player when it can just stream from my NAS directly, regardless of internet connection.
Example - You have a tablet and want to preload content into the Plex app before a flight.
Well if you don’t leave the house I’m sure that’s fine. Some people use it to watch stuff when they’re away, or if they have a job that lets them play something while they work.
I do leave the house but I generally don’t bring my home cinema with me.
I used it when I travel abroad and want to watch something, like when you’re on a plane or train with shitty internet or roaming charges.
If you host a server and have a lifetime pass, you’ll be able to share your collection with anyone. It will allow hardware encoding so less lag on your users end. You can also locally download content on your devices to watch offline.
So no useful features for me.
I don’t want to share my media with anyone and see no reason to stream from outside my house, it’s not like I can take my home cinema with me. Also, why would you want to re-encode and lower the quality?
Well in your case you don’t need the subscription at all, apart from some minor things the subscription won’t do anything for you.
But I do all the things you’re not doing. I share my server with dozens of friends/family so I need remote streaming. I can watch shows on my own server no matter where I am (at work or when visiting relatives, or even on the phone on the train). And if you streaming on the phone or with bad internet in general it might sometimes be a good idea to reduce quality to save bandwidth.
I really would like to use Jellyfin, but the remote access is quite useful to me personally. My immediate family lives far away and they can access my library remotely quite easily. They just want to watch their requested shows and don’t need 4k HDR 7.2 surround sound for their cooking shows.
I guess I could set up tailscale or some other vpn access to my network but I don’t feel like explaining that to parents and siblings. Even my partner, who lives with me, has little patience for all things electronic. They’re an Apple user and I’m aware enough not to constantly pester them with my ideals and preferences. Plex works on our Apple TV and is easy so it’s the best solution right now. Am I in the minority? Probably, but different strokes for different folks.
TLDR: Jellyfin is awesome, but Plex currently makes more sense for my needs.
I guess I could set up tailscale or some other vpn access to my network but I don’t feel like explaining that to parents and siblings.
Just set up VPN between your router and their router, no need to explain anything.
Jellyfin is quite easy to use remotely (prerequisite: purchased domain (easy), tunnel VPN (complex) or public static IP (not always an option)). I confess I use Emby as I bought premium for it once I learned how much it suits me, and the UI is much nicer and rounded – although I didn’t need to pay in order to do most of what I wanted. I can say that my friends access the library with a one time login and minimal friction, but I’m also not going to preach further - sometimes it’s better not to fuck with a working system, and I respect your choice
Been on jellyfin since day one. Works fine, UI is great and gets the job done. TV UI maybe not top notch, buy usable. Mobile UI just fine and usable.
Also, exposed on the internet (reverse proxy, OIDC, https the works) for years now with zero issues whatsoever as well .
There are a few users always throwing thrash on jellyfin, maybe pissed off users that paid for Plex, or Plex shills that like to denigrate jellyfin, I don’t know.
Just ignore them.
Jellyfin is perfectly usable, yes you need to setup port forward, VPN or whatever, but it’s exactly our target audience so move along and stop bitching, Plex shills.
Stay with Plex, use jellyfin, whatever fit your bill.
Anyway plex does not fit my concept of self hosting to be free from cloud lock ins.
Yeah I changed to Wholphin recently, and it’s pretty cool — though you may need to tweak a couple of things depending on your TV
Wholphin
thank you for the suggestion, will try it out! I am using a Fire Stick
How am I just learning about wholfin now? They need to add that to the third party clients list on the main site because at a glance that’s easily top 3 best looking jellyfin clients
Yeah, easily the best one I’ve used on TV; that’s for sure. I found it randomly on some forum a few months ago.
Moonfin is also pretty great on Android TV too imo
This is a new one for me. Looks pretty sleek.
I happened to setup jellyfin when i had first heard about it while I was already hosting plex, so when plex decided to charge for remote streaming years later I was already halfway there.
Even now - at the peak point of the Memory/SSD price bubble - about 1/3 of that lifetime pass buys you enough dedicated hardware to do it yourself for at least the next decade, probably more.
Lifetime single pay subscriptions don’t make financial sense at all for a company. As much as I hate subscriptions, it’s the only way to get long term support, which software needs.
They managed years without going to a subscription model. This is about shareholder needs not software upkeep.
If Jellyfin can fill most Plex features for most people, maybe it’s not that they need to charge money to survive. Maybe it’s that their product value proposition has eroded.
Certainly, but open source projects rely too heavily on the goodwill of volunteers who still need to feed their families. Hopefully Jellyfin’s incoming users contribute to the project.
Don’t worry. My family isn’t going hungry. Enjoy your media.
Jellyfin
But Plex’s subscription plan is also priced like shit. Netflix is like 2$/month, Debrid is 3$ while plex is 10$ for me.
Where in the world do you get Netflix for $2?
India, Bangladesh, plenty of Asian countries. I was using a vpn to pay for netflex through Bangladesh. A $25 plan in the US was $3.23 there. Its all a scam.
India
netflix is $20/month, so what you’re saying is that plex is cheap (I have no idea what plex offers but I don’t pay for either)
Two dollars/month
i just need a video player on my tv that pulls shit from my computer why do people think that’s worth SUBSCRIPTIONS
You don’t need a subscription for that.
I tried Plex once, before I knew about jellyfin. I just wanted an open-source self-hostable media server with my own media.
When I tried it, after installing Plex, I was presented with a login for a Plex hosted account. Iirc that was optional and I skipped it, after that came the nags for Plex pass. Piss off. That’s exactly the opposite of what I wanted out of something like jellyfin.
Oh yeah and apparently you can’t stream remotely without a subscription either? If it were a feature they had to spend time on I’d still not want to use it, but I’d understand at least.
From the application’s point of view, there is no difference between internet and intranet access. I just saw that downloading the media you already own, using your own infrastructure, requires an even more expensive subscription.
How tf did people stick around with this shit for so long.
Remote streaming costs money because relay servers cost money. You don’t get worldwide nat traversal without a vpn or wide attack surface for free
If the owner of the Plex server has lifetime and other users that don’t have Plex pass at all and want to watch it remotely, they just need to be part of your home.
They don’t even need to be a part of your home. The server owner just needs to have a Plex Pass. None of my users are in my home group and can still stream remotely since I got a Lifetime pass back when they were, I think, $99.
Haven’t used it myself, but wouldn’t something like Tailscale solve the remote access limitation?
It does, but the limitation just doesn’t make any sense.
Much like USA Mobile carriers treating hotspot data differently than the phone’s own data, under the ancient premise that phones use less data than PCs - something that hasn’t been true for well over a decade.
The same reason most foss projects are barren. Plex focuses on ease of use and giving people what they want. Users mostly don’t care about the sub. It’s easy to use and works.
Meanwhile jellyfin doesn’t have a remote first interface that isn’t absolute dog shit and I need to set up a reverse proxy and potentially idp to get the ability for my family to log in.
This shit isn’t hard. The answer to the community is, make the product better, and start bundling shit in. But I’m sure I’ve already offended some nerd who thinks this is all just so easy and requires no work to tell me I just need to learn Linux better. And that putting in a reverse proxy by default will make maintenance a pain and I just have to put portainer and LE to fix it.
The shit y’all are bitching about is the problem.
This shit isn’t hard
Well it certainly would be hard for me, as I don’t know anything about the UX needed for these features, and very little about networking in general, and probably close to zero about the networking concepts required to make something like you describe work.
But it sounds like you know a lot, jellyfin is a project that is 100% volunteer developed. Maybe you could contribute your expertise either via code or by providing a concrete action plan to the jellyfin team?
Be the change you want to see and all that.
It really, honestly, is super easy to get going. All you need is a folder with your media and a compose file you can find in plenty of tutorials.
The thing we Linux nerds often forget, I think, is that we know what we’re doing (most of us at least I hope), and regular people don’t.
I can read a simple compose file and pretty quickly notice if there’s something off.
If you wanted to do that, you’d first have to read up on containers and compose and all that stuff. You can, of course, just grab a compose file and run it, but that’s generally not a great idea if you don’t know what you’re doing.
This is peak Linux nerd shit.
No. I payed $200 and Plex is better. My needs have been perfectly met for the past 10l5 years and foreseeable future.
Second, fuck off with this attitude. I came here answering a question how, ‘ohhhh it’s so fucking complicated why normies might want to pay’ with 2 concrete use cases and you immediately go off with that nerd bullshit that I need to contribute more.
I had 3 prs hit main in Apache last week. Fuck off, your nerd shit isn’t helping adoption asshole.
Bro flexes Apache contributions and still can’t paste 10 lines to make a reverse proxy
No my time is just more valuable to me and I have money 🤷♂️
Love offending the nerds with no familyies hunched over a desk all day 🤣
Good old case of “mad cuz bad”
Tipster is that you?
Most FOSS projects are barren? Huh
I’m here to say it’s all very easy and requires no work.
Seriously, you literally just install Jellyfin (or run it in Docker), set up nginx with certbot and make a port forward on your router. Zero maintenance at all.
Any LLM can give you a complete step-by-step guide that takes 10 minutes to follow if you don’t know what you’re doing.
I cannot understate how bad of an idea it is to expose something to the Internet when you don’t know what you’re doing.
Jellyfin is not designed to be exposed directly. They have a number of outstanding security issues. You should really use a VPN to access your local network instead.
I expose plenty of services. I like to live life dangerously 😎
ADHD linux zealots will argue anything, no matter how stupid, if you dare hold any comparison to a commercial product. It’s literally built into their ADHD brains need to argue and be right.
They will sit there and argue insane shit and pretend like most people have a desktop sitting in their living room much less setting up an entire *arr stack with reverse proxy. And then scream at you when you say that sounds like work I don’t have to do for less than a hamburger meal.
It’s easy bro, just learn docker, get it set up so that services boot at launch, and I’m sure nothing will never break or need to be updated again.
yup people forget about convenience. its why I’ve been building retrovibed for the last year. that *arr + plex/jellyfin + vpn + reverse proxy nonsense is insane. yes you can do it… but seriously who the fuck wants to manage that many moving parts.
Meme material.
You are absolutely right about all of that, I did it exactly like that, had ChatGPT tell me what to do and done. I am not an IT person, but I still like messing with tech. But that’s more than 95% of people are willing to do, and that’s why people use plex. Takes literally a minute to set up and it just runs. That’s why people choose Apple. Simple and easy, little to no maintenance. That doesn’t make it a great product, but an accessible one, and that’s what counts for most people
My breaking point was to pay for transcoding.
Paid for the android app which allowed HWA but then I wanted to watch it on my chromecast TV. Welp gotta pay or bust.
So I bust, went through the early adopter pain (early 11th gen Intel Xe gpu, no actual knowledge of linux or docker, little experience with linux and docker) and set it up.
Working great since then.
Currently restreaming japanese IPTV with jellyfin via an m3u stream at work (and through a mobile VPN router)
Not the most stable stream but sufficient
Oooh. Can you give some more details about how you did that? I have a Japanese friend coming to visit for about 2 months and she might want to watch TV during the day.
Something something akariko something netgenx on google.
My stack is including dispatcharr for managing m3u streams (and fallback sources) and jellyfin to watch it.
When I first used Plex, it didn’t even have accounts. I don’t even understand what the account is for.
jellyfin: hey here i am you can have me for free. i even run on your own server.
Yeah but I hear they recently decided to raise their pricing by like 30%.
Joke being 30% of 0 is still 0
Was any justification provided for a nearly 10x price increase!?
Glad I started with Jellyfin
It’s because lifetime licenses aren’t sustainable. I’m surprised they still offer it.
Plex is an actual company that has an office and employees, so they have recurring costs every month. A lot of people already have lifetime licenses that they’re not likely to receive any more revenue from. It’s likely they’re increasing the price to help recoup costs or convince people to subscribe to a monthly subscription rather than get a lifetime license.
Nah, they increased the cost to drive people to the monthly subscription. I’m guessing in a year or two they’ll announce the lifetime subs have been revoked and everyone needs a monthly sub.
Why do they have an office and employees? It’s a damn ffmpeg wrapper.
They’re already charging comparible amounts as Netflix but they don’t do half the things that Netflix does. $750 at $10/month is over 6 years. That’s more than double what is reasonable. If I pay for 3 years of software development, shouldn’t I be allowed to keep the software?
Anyways, I use Jellyfin and donate to their development.
EDIT: meant years not months
Not saying you’re wrong, but I wonder how many people that were willing to pay 250 dollars for lifetime would actually pay more than 3 years of subscription.
I believe most lifetime buyers do it for FOMO. They pay it believing that they won’t ever need to worry about it again and that they’re making a good or safe deal… but most of them won’t be using Plex that much anyway.
With this price hike Plex is basically killing the lifetime option. Sure, they might get more subscribers at first, but in the other hand they will also lose a lot of impulse buyers that will hardly pay them 250 dollars in monthly subscriptions at the long run. At least, that’s what I think…
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