I don’t see this talked about much anymore, but the day Plex added telemetry in 2017 was the day I became five-alarm desperate for an alternative. Had to wait a 2-3 years with Plex’s telemetry IP’s and domains blacklisted before Jellyfin was mature enough for me to make the change.

How Plex users can be comfortable with any telemetry is beyond me.

The business model here is to basically paywall one user sharing (probably) pirated content with another person?

Do you guys know a way on jellyfin to download media to the phone in lower quality/ less storage intense? This is the only thing I miss in my jellyfin instance

Been on Plex for years, I will be fully migrated to Jellyfin by the end of the week

So let me get this straight: you own the content, you host the content on your machine, you pay the electricity and internet and plex says it can’t afford to let you share it to others without a subscription fee?

I mean making plex a one time fee if it’s good turnkey solution is fine but subscription…

I am also a Plex pass person. Multiple times over in fact. I actually have a dedicated account for my server administrator that’s separate from the account I use to watch content. Both have Plex pass lifetime.

I’ve been familiar with this coming down the pipeline for a while and because I have Plex pass, I too, am unaffected, as are my users.

At the same time: here is a piece of software that I paid for. It’s “server” software, sure, but it’s just a software package. What it does isn’t really relevant. The fact is that it processes data stored on my systems, processing by my systems, using my hardware, and sends that data over the Internet, using the Internet connection I pay for separately, and delivers that data directly to the people I’ve designated as capable of doing so.

The only part of this process that Plex, the company, has any involvement in, is limited to: issuing an SSL certificate, managing user accounts and passwords, and brokering where to find data (pointers to my systems).

You can get a free SSL certificate from let’s encrypt. User accounts, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), is a function of pretty much everything that you remotely connect to, whether a Windows SMB/cifs share, your email, even logging into your own local computer regardless of OS… And honestly, brokering the connection isn’t dissimilar to how torrent trackers work, DNS or a goddamned IP address punched into a browser.

They’re offering shockingly little for what they’re asking, and the only thing that’s on the list that would be costly in the slightest is having a DNS name for the server (registration of the domain, DNS services, etc). And given the scale that they’re doing these things at, the individual costs per name is literally pennies per year.

This is not a good look at all.

I have domain names coming out of my ears. I’m tempted to buy one more and just offer to anyone that wants it, to have a subdomain name under that to run their Plex alternative on, so you can get a let’s encrypt SSL certificate, and stay safe on the Internet. I don’t want the feds snooping into what totally legal Linux ISOs are being shared.

I just don’t know how to program at all, so I have no idea how I would go about setting up a system for that. The concept would be to automate it, and have people create an account, then request a DNS name under one of my DNS domains, and have a setting if you want it to have an A record, AAAA record, or cname (if you have a ddns setup). Once the request is in, it would connect to be DNS provider and add the record for you.

The part I’d want to have as a check on the system is to make sure that you’re hosting jellyfin or something from the address you submit, to prevent people from using it for unrelated purposes; but even with that… Do I care of people do that? Probably not. I would limit how many addresses you can have per account.

Enshittification marches on.

I bought Plex Pass when it was $75 for the lifetime option.

I prefer Jellyfin, but sharing is harder for family members with it because I can’t get them to just log in without existing credentials (Google Account, Apple ID, etc). Trying to convince my 67 year old mother-in-law to enter a URL, username, and password into an app with a remote is like asking my child to eat broccoli.

For now, I’ll keep running dual stack with both. If Plex pulls lifetime passes, even though it’ll be a PITA, I’ll convert everyone to Jellyfin despite the pain.

Ditched this crapware for Jellyfin several years ago. Glad I did. It’s been great.

What’s Plex’s use case? Why not just mpv locally?

Use jellyfin, it’s much better. Also do not kill Elon Musk and Donald Trump, as much as they may deserve death.

Dropped this for jellyfin years ago

Uninstalled. I don’t mind as much for sharing my library but if I have to pay to stream MY OWN SERVERS CONTENT using your service, that’s a hard pass. My homes all use jellyfin now

thats closed software 101 now, hook us then make us pay if only there was something that was always free forever

Oh no a paid, proprietary, piece of shit software does something shitty. Who could’ve ever saw this coming?!

I’ve said it for years anytime anyone mentioned running a Plex server. As soon as you install that on your server or your homelab it’s no longer your server. Proprietary software is malware