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.
This doesn't really affect my household. My wife, my daughter, and I all have lifetime PlexPasses.
That said, this level of enshitification has me wishing there were options (yes I know about Emby and Jellyfin and I've investigated both more than once) but they have me ensnared by PlexAmp and Sonos integration. I've been around since before anyone had even seen the letters MP3 strung together, and I have never had a music player as capable as PlexAmp.
Plexamp is honestly amazing. I'm investigating finamp, but I know it won't be as nice. Them killing off the tidal integration did help the decision a bit though
I strongly recommend symfonium on android. Plexamp is a really polished app but I found the handling of downloaded files quite poor, I don't think you can even search downloads when you're offline? (other bonus to symfonium is it supports jellyfin and sources, in case you were to ever fully move away from plex)
I started looking at Symfonium some time ago, but something killed my interest. Maybe it's time to revisit it.
The tidal thing didn't bother me, as my music collection is relatively large. But yeah PlexAmp is truly an extraordinary bit of software.