1179
Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April (www.plex.tv)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
678 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

No, it's still wrong.

We have ways to do NAT traversal and hole punching on consumer routers. Failing that, UPnP and port forwarding exist. Or, god forbid, IPv6.

In the rare case that literally none of those are an option, they would have to use TURN to relay between an intermediary. That is a reasonable case to ask the user to pay for their bandwidth usage, but they don't have to be greedy fuckers by making everyone pay for it.

This is enshittification and corporate greed. Nothing more, nothing less.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
    •
  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    Reading about NAT Traversal and all that nonsense makes me want to start out my own ISP and we just configure things to be good because the corporate assholes clearly haven't. Imagine how much better things could be if hosting stuff from your home internet connection was just a thing you could do with no drama

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    If anything is to blame for that, it's the lack of momentum behind IPv6. We're out of IPv4, so NAT is inevitable, and IPv6 doesn't have enough inertia for single-stack to be viable (certainly wouldn't be described as "no drama" at least).

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    The fact that people still try to do bullshit like Nat on IPv6 is completely crazy. It's like they've never heard of the idea of a stateful firewall and just want to recreate bad old patterns again, combine with the fact that many internet service providers still don't allow you to host anything from your home connection. We need to fix all of that of an IPv6 first Network. Ipv4 is several layers of exhausted by now so it should be considered deprecated but for some reason isn't

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    A big part of IPv4's persistence I think is that people insist that IPv6 is complicated, but then refuse to learn it or think outside their IPv4-brain. It's just different enough that it's easier to stay in v4, even if it requires a million hackjob fixes to keep around.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I haven't really messed around if the intricacies of computer networking but the only downside I personally encountered to use an IPv6 is that it's a bit harder to memorize the IP addresses but I usually copy paste those anyways so it doesn't matter. People use names for stuff anyways so why use bare ips?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    They make a product. It's not just the cost of infrastructure.

    They have developers and other employees

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    And this isn't a new feature they're adding. Remote streaming was already implemented and generally available to users.

    I don't discount there being a cost in maintaining code over time, but it's not as though they have to spend any significant employee time on improving it. They already support UPnP and NAT-PMP to have the clients connect directly to the self-hosted servers.

    It would be nice if they added NAT hole punching on top of that, but it's evidently good enough to work as-is in its current form. If they're not even running relays to support more tricky networks (which the linked support article has no mention of), keeping this feature free costs them literally nothing extra.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent