cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/2333639
I was just forwarded this someone in my household who watches our server. That's it folks. I've been a hold out for a long time, but this is honestly it.
They want me to pay to stream content that I bought from my hardware transcoded also on my hardware.
I'll say it. As of today, I say Plex is dead. Luckily I've been setting up Jellyfin, I guess it's time to make it production ready.
Edit: I have a Plex Pass. More comments saying “Just buy a plex pass” are seriously not getting it. I have a Plex Pass and my users are still getting this.
And for the thousandth person who wants to say the same things to me:
- YES I know I'm unaffected as a Plex Pass owner.
- My users were immediately angry at it, which made me angry. Our users don't understand what plex pass is, and they shouldn't have to, that's why I had it. The fact that they were pinged even though it should have kept working is horribly sloppy
- Plex is still removing functionality. I don't care that "People should pay their fair share". If Plex wants to put every new feature behind a paywall, that's completely okay. They are removing functionality.
- "But they have cloud costs". Remote streaming is negligible to them. It's a dynamic DNS service. Plex client logs in, asks where server is, plex cloud responds with the IP and port of where server is located. That's it.
- "Good luck finding another remote streaming" - Again, Plex just opens up an IP and port. Jellyfin also just opens up an IP and port (Hold on jellyfin folks I know, security, that's a separate conversation). All "remote streaming" is is their dynamic dns. Literal pennies to them. Know what actually is costing them money? Hosting all of that ad-supported "free" content that they're probably losing money on.
In short, I don't care how you justify it. Plex is doing something shitty. They're removing functionality that has been free for years. I'm not responding to any more of your comments repeating the same arguments over and over.
I don't use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn't surprise me even a little bit.
Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.
Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.
I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn't like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.
My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.
The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn't, and it's usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.
Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for 'unsupported' drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.
Bottom line though is don't do business with companies that don't respect you.
what's with h265 that's everyone's acting like it's some massive hurdle that you should have to pay to be able to use files with that encoding? that's one of the things Plex has paywalled already and it's becoming harder and harder to find good quality content that isn't in that format.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/10/30/h-265-hevc-license-pricing-updated-for-low-cost-devices/
Lot of companies don't want to pay it themselves... and lots of people don't see the point when there's a list of perfectly capable codecs that are free... including AV1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_codecs
Ultimately as a software developer making money... if you don't license the codecs that you're using properly (when using a non-FOSS codec) you are liable for damages at that point for violating the terms of the license for the codec. It IS a cost. And across millions of users that costs adds up.
I was an early Plex user and I ditched it completely when they first started the cloud account bullshit. There weren't as many good options at the time, but I just switched to a very simple dlna media server that my TVs supported. Now of course we have a wealth of options and Plex makes even less sense to me, but I can see lots of people will keep using it due to inertia.
I had exactly the same experience, at about the same time. Had been hearing good things about Plex so decided to try it out. Immediately noped out when it required me to create an account with them. Similar to you I looked around and found it to be a relatively new change.
Frankly baffling to me that anyone with the wherewithal to self-host was okay with it.
I think a lot of it was frog and hot plate situation. If they had done all this stuff all at once people would have dumped them immediately, but they did it slowly always seeming reasonable and considered at each step.
And a lot of people still adopt their product because for better or worse, it is the best known and relatively easy to use.