This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's still hilarious to me that Plex, a project forked from the XBMC (now Kodi) free open-source app for organizing and playing one's own entirely legally obtained video files, is a big streaming business thing that charges people money.
It's like finding a tree in the forest that gives out infinite free apples, and then setting up an apple-selling table right next to it stocked with apples you obviously got from that tree.
I've never used any of the features they've added after they allowed me to host my library of ripped optical media ~2013-2014.
Sigh. I still enjoy my Plex pass that I bought for < $100 but this is another sign to bail on them. I don't particularly like them trying to further monetize my collection.
I do like the ease of sharing with friends and it does generally just work. But this is bad.
One question, lets say that I bought this subscription. What kind of advantages has it, does it cache your media? Or if you have multiple users, you still need to be able to upload media to miltiple users?
It's the same as the regular subscription benefits, just permanent.
It's not permanent, but lifetime. When they go bankrupt, they'll just eliminate those subscribers.
Permanent as in as long as its lucrative. Then some investor buys Plex, stoops honoring Lifetine Subscription (aka transforms them) and you are left with nothing.
based on the history of other companies, permanent until they sell the company and buy some island, at which point they'll freeze all updates (feature and security) to Plex and release PlexGO for a fixed monthly fee.
But how about those benefits. Is there caching or no?
No, there isn't.
There are a lot of gated features, the most useful of which is a low quality proxy that transcends CGNAT and Firewalls when you really need to share a video but don't have a real ip.
Gating hardware encoding is a pretty dick maneuver IMO.
Jellyfin: free Cloudflared: free
Jellyfin behind Cloudflared is probably the best move ATM.
It's not specifically against TOS, they do provide you some modest protection against infiltration.
combine that with running it from a container with RO access to your media and you have a damn nice home solution.
Duckdns is free too
While Cloudflare tunnels do work, streaming Jellyfin through them is technically against their TOS and they could shut you down for doing so. Instead, I recommend setting up Pangolin with a cheap VPS. Although, it will cost ~$5 a month or so.
You don't have to use a tunnel, for example I use a reverse proxy to a domain I own, and set a cache rule so cloudflare doesn't get mad.
I really need to take a weekend to learn Jellyfin and set it up in my environment.
This is almost certainly a ploy to get an influx of buyers before the cutoff of July.
They want to round up all the people that they think were considering a lifetime pass, but were holding out.
I guarantee you when July comes they're going to reduce the cost to somewhere less than $750 and much closer to the current price due to "we listen to our customers" when really it was the plan all along.
They're using the Decoy Effect and FOMO.
Or maybe they want monthly/annual/whatever subscribers, not lifetime, and so they're making the lifetime pass prohibitively expensive. I have a lifetime pass I purchased a few years ago but after running Jellyfin alongside Plex for a few months, I don't think I could recommend Plex to anyone who simply wants to host their own media.
Wait, ya'll are paying for Plex??
Paid 70€ maybe a decade ago
Best bang for buck so far
And the software doesn't even work right most of the time anyway. It's easier to set up a file share and run it in VLC.
I dunno what's different between us, but I've found it to be rock solid for over a decade. I host it on a Mac mini.
For me I was trying to host it a few years ago on an Nvidia Shield. Found it kept forgetting media and had other performance problems. Was probably a function of trying to use media from an external drive, and maybe bugs with the Nvidia Shield implementation, android scoped storage issues, etc. I went to Jellyfin on a Pi and have found that mostly bulletproof
What a joke. Plex isnt worth paying for
As always, donate to the FOSS alternatives instead.
In the case of Youtube Premium, donate to Ad Blockers instead.
Digging their own grave
Yep, definitely heading for bankruptcy.
Hmm, perhaps I should sell my lifetime pass. I won't, but I should. (Switched to Jellyfin long ago)
To be clear, you still need your own HW and electricity, right?
Jellyfin Lifetime Pass continues to be better value.
I heard their quadrupling their lifetime membership.
Oh bugger, I might actually have to start still paying nothing
