Plex has paywalled my server!
Plex has paywalled my server!
Plex has paywalled my server!
I tried testing a movie from my home server in plex through firefox and repeatedly got this message, even after reloading.
I knew that they had paywalled the apps on mobile and streaming from outside the network but now they have also blocked watching your own movies through your own hardware.
I do get the point that making software should be able to sustain people but I dont see the move of plex as a fair thing to do. Yes, they have made great software but taking your home server hostage feels like the wrong move.
Even a pop up that says "we need you to donate please" would have been fine. make it pop up before every movie, play donation ads before any movie but straight up disabling the app is kinda cruel.
Anyway, i have switched to jellyfin and it is insanely good. please give it a try. you can run it alongside plex with not issues (at least i had none) and compare the two.
In any case, good luck. Let me know if you need help.
Every non-Free Software will betray you eventually. It's only a matter of time.
I just wonder if plex will ever sell the list of movies and IP address of everyone. Many people have the ARRs to auto download, even stuff still in theaters. What good is a VPN when plex knows your email and IP.
Honestly, I'd be rather shocked if this wasn't already the case.
Moreover they probably have a database of everything you've ever watched and your IP and email address, just waiting to be leaked to the internet through sale or ransom.
Sell or get subpoena'd; tomayto, tomahto.
A little oversymplified but i'll take it. :)
I thought free software was when you were the product and non-free software actually supported developers.
Or do you mean non-OSS?
"Free Software" is a defined term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
Free as in freedom, not as in free beer.
Yeah, the wording is confusing. A long time ago, there was no paid software, there was only software where you got the source code and other software where e.g. it was pre-installed on some hardware and the manufacturer didn't want to give the source code.
In that time, a whole movement started fighting for software freedom, so they called their software "free".
I mean non-Free Software.
In this thread:
Welcome to “People rushing to suggest a solution that they fawn over because it’s open source.”
How do you personally 100% beyond a shadow of a doubt know that Jellyfin is the right solution? Why not a VPN, shared folder, and VLC? What about running a DNLA server?
Edit: All of you downvoting don’t know; and it makes you salty.
Seriously. I hate when people assume default settings are the only option. You don't even need a Plex account to set up Plex. It will just be less seamless and user friendly. Never adopt the server, configure these via localhost (ssh tunnel works) and then set up your networking. Don't even need to update it, it will run for as long as the database stays stable. Which should be years or more.
I'll add to #2 (IDK if it's open source, though):
Give Stremio a try. Once you set it up (basically just add the Torrentio plug-in then whatever content catalogs you want), the workflow is much better and simpler than Plex.
You just browse it like Netflix: see something you want to watch, select it with your remote, then stream it immediately. No server to run, you don't have to build libraries, you don't even have download the content beforehand. Just select and watch. Could not be easier.
Is it torrenting in the background? Because, if it is, then you need a VPN and I don’t know how to set one up on my LG TV. Would you happen to have a guide?
Is Streamio considered safe/private? I remember looking into it a while back and saw something about needing an account on their servers or something.
I used Kodi with addons for ages but switched to jellyfin because kodi felt too clunky and slow for my wife.
I always see people advocate for Stremio. But my experience was always very mixed. Half the time it would just buffer all the time. I guess it's s my own fault for having little interest in the latest Marvel/Hollywood movies, but alas. I way more prefer my jellyfin/jellyseer/arr stack. Once it's available I'm (99%) sure it works from everywhere in the world.
Actual answer for 3:
All the fear-mongering about exposing jellyfin to the internet I have seen on here boils down to either
(Not saying YOU say that; just preempting the usual folklore typically commented whenever someone suggests hosting jellyfin publicly accessible)
@smiletolerantly @AtariDump
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate/_Transparency
Makes sure bots will hit you as soon as the certificate for your domain is issued
For #3, subnet routing.
Remote, yes, they announced you need Plex pass one side or the other for it to work.
Local, no, that shouldn't happen. Your device isn't reaching your Plex server locally.
To work around the remote issue, you can VPN to your local network.
But you're better off in the long haul with Jellyfin as you're doing now.
Yeah no. That is local. But thanks for the suggestion. Jellyfin works well.
It isn't hitting it locally is the issue. Not an uncommon problem with plex unfortunately, its going out to come back in, so the server and client see it as remote.
Without playback you wouldn't even be able to see that in the dashboard, which just makes the direction Plex is going so much more problematic.
Like I said, better off using JF.
Its not a local connection if you're getting this message. You might be in the same network, but for some reason it's not connecting directly.
Old news, but time for Jellyfin. I made the switch a couple months ago. Some minor teething issues, but better, IMO, especially now as my family all have LDAP users and that just works.
I made the switch a few months back as well. Have you had the issue where"Recently Added" just straight up doesn't work? It's about 50/50 for me whether my new downloads show up there or not, and if they do, it's usually inserted somewhere down the list between other things I added months ago. Not sure if there's a workaround, but it's my #1 complaint with Jellyfin. Otherwise, it's been great.
awesome. thanks for chiming in. I will have to check how to do external streaming without opening my network up to the world (metaphorically).
...wireguard
(there are android TV apps for wireguard, not that any normie can actually move a client file to it and turn it on, or could be bothered to)
You’ve got options.
Can your router open ports from a hostname vs an IP? If so, clients could run dynamic DNS.
WG client side isn't really that hard, though. All the fam run WG 24/7 on devices, and only traffic for the internal network goes through it.
I used synology and reverse proxy. It was pretty easy to set up. The tricky part was going into jellyfins setting and connecting your reverse proxy to the path you made.
Overall my kids and family can now access it anywhere.
Give me a package that runs on my ds214play and I'll switch in a heartbeat
https://github.com/SynoCommunity/spksrc/issues/5941 ?
I really wanted Jellyfin working in my DS214Play with DSM6, and I noticed that a package for these evansport CPUs doesn't exist and it's officially not supported, so I tried myself and I succeeded.
It's pretty rare that a company starts taking away free features and doesn't end up fucking payers in the end.
The biggest bar to Jellyfin is TV clients, the second biggest is security.
TV clients can be fixed with a one-time purchase of a $20 android TV stick. If viewing your familys ARR content isn't worth $20 you probably don't need to do it anyway.
Security for remote streaming is a harder thing to handle. Most people are capable of port forwarding, But just hanging a smallish public project out there in the open is always a dicey proposition. It honestly needs real fail2ban, probably SSL, 2FA and password complexity requirements.
We could probably make a jellyfin helper container to handle some of this. Walk people through Let's Encrypt, dynDNS, port forwarding tests, add fail2ban with a firewall, maybe even slap suricata in it.
We need to convince the project to add 2FA and password complexity requirements.
I don't know guys what do you think is it crazy? does it make sense? Would anybody actually use it?
I access my stuff via VPN. As for sharing with others, I simply don't do that. VPN is still an option though. Or temporary client whitelisting, etc.
Now that's an interesting thought.
A web page with Authelia, login and a firewall.
If you're not logged in, All you get is a login page. If you are logged in, It passes you straight through to jellyfin.
So any device and client would be able to access it without issue once a phone or computer on the network had logged in just once.
The web page modifies the HA proxy ACL and forces a reload.
Yeaaah ! Most people anyway have some kind of VPN installed on their device... Just slap in a wireguard VPN config to tunnel your traffic home... bOOm jellyfin everywhere and 99% secure !
I think you make a hugely important point and I would definitely use it and I might even be able to help making it.
Current Idea:
Traefik does most of this through plugins, except the whitelist modifier,
Whitelisted?
Not Whitelisted?
Whitelisted or Not whitelisted?
Security for remote streaming is a harder thing to handle. Most people are capable of port forwarding, But just hanging a smallish public project out there in the open is always a dicey proposition. It honestly needs real fail2ban, probably SSL, 2FA and password complexity requirements.
Yeah.
It's tough because I get they're an open-source project, and they're volunteers, but at the same time, security is something that should be the highest priority.
Though, you could just make it so that it's not accessible via WAN and instead has to go through a VPN, though that'd make it harder to share with others.
That's what I do myself but in a lot of cases VPN is beyond the grasp of the grasp of the friends and family that are being shared with.
Tailscale is somewhat approachable for this, there are a number of streaming devices that support TS clients. But then tailscale will eventually enshittify their free offering. Wrapping headscale into this will add yet another layer of complication. VPN is far more secure but I think it makes it unapproachably complicated for many.
As someone who is … lazy and took advantage of some Amazon Black Friday Fire TV stick deals, and who doesn’t want to drop the $200 for a Shield:
Any Android sticks/players you might recommend?
The Onn dongles from Walmart are probably the cheapest. The firestick should work fine and there are also Chromecasts from Google.
Bittorrent joined the room.
Basic functionality, I've heard good things about the crappy Walmart ONN branded ones.
I know there are Alibaba options, But I'm awfully afraid of a lot of those have worst security issues than opening up jellyfin.
What are my realistic security concerns with a jellyfin server that I let friends and family watch while trying to minimize the troubleshooting and steps they need to take to get started?
realistic security concerns
If you're running a binary installation of Jellyfin on your server and exposing it to the public internet, you can face significant risks:
There might not be any vulnerabilities at this moment, but they might come in a future release. And we might not even know they exist. It's a small team of volunteers, and they'll do their best. This is just what is reasonably possible when installing the server as an application on your OS and exposing it to the Internet.
You can minimize risk with a safer setup, as someone else in the comments here mentioned (and I think they even linked to their setup)
Using a Docker container version of the app significantly reduces your attack surface. This isolates the app from your host system. If they get in, they only get into the container and whatever that container is allowed to do.
Mount your media files as read-only to prevent accidental modifications or potential malicious changes. Now that container can't do any real harm do your data.
Avoid making the container privileged. A privileged container can interact with the host system in risky ways.
Use reasonable unique usernames and passwords. If the container does manage to get compromised, they will likely be able to read usernames and passwords stored in the container.
Regularly update your container – Ensures you have the latest security patches.
Short of some massive Docker vulnerability, (which is on you to keep updated) the worst case should be public enumeration of your media, exposure of your JF users/passwords, and denial of service. Which IMO isn't very serious.
For even tighter access control, don't whitelist the entire world.
Whitelist specific IP addresses. Have users visit WhatIsMyIP to get their IP, then configure port forwarding to allow only trusted addresses. This allows the clients at their houses in without any serious hinderance, but would block them from accessing your media when they're not at their house.
If they're accessing you through a phone or PC, setup headscale or tailscale or any VPN and allow them to get to you through VPN
I would be very interested in an answer to this as well. Also any how to guides that would be useful for a guy whose technical high-water mark was getting mint set up on my laptop.
Someone else already said it and you've already swapped but I'll say it in detail:
when setting the server connection up you selected "ServerName (long string of numbers)" and not "ServerName (your IP - SECURE)"
this routes your connection through the Plex servers and makes it not a local connection anymore. this is extremely easy to do and forget you've done because it barely impacts performance
In other words, it's a dark pattern that tricks users into letting Plex MITM their connection.
It gets around port forwarding/firewall issues that most people don't know how to deal with. But putting it behind a paywall kinda kills any chance of it being a benevolent feature.
dark pattern
Nope, not at all. Its extremely forward, your local IP is listed first every time IME, and your lower-down comment has it backwards as it's your local IP that had "secure" written on it
it's not a dark pattern at all, people are just stupid and don't read (including me, I fucked this up too at first)
Welp, i killed mine yesterday as it wouldnt let me stream while offline. Modem died so no Internet for me. Why do i have everything local if it dosent work while offline...
FYI you can definitely watch while your network is offline. You just net to tell it that you're happy with that (it's not activated by default for security reasons).
List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth192.168.0.50#Important thing to be aware of:
What this setting does is tell your local Plex server to simply give any Plex client that connects from that specific IP full admin access to your Plex server, ignoring any account restrictions. This means that if you have things in place to restrict access to some libraries (kids blocked from 18+ movies etc) those restrictions will have no effect. Also if you have the option set to allow file deletion, then any client from that IP could also delete items. And they could of course change any settings in your Plex server. So your kids can watch anything on your server, if you have a guest in your network and they browse to the Plex web interface, they can mess with things.
Because of that I would recommend to limit the amount of IP's you enter in that field to the absolute bare minimum. For example, only whitelist the "main living room device" plus one device you to admin the server, such as a laptop.
If you want to whitelist multiple devices, this is a example:
192.168.0.50,192.168.0.77,192.168.0.80
If you want to whitelist a entire network, these would be examples:
192.168.0.0/24 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.255)
192.168.0.0/16 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255)
And of course those involved network devices should use static IPs in your home network.
What about switching to Jellyfin?
Already done. Thanks for the suggestion though. :)
I have been using rygel. I don't need anything fancy, dump a few media folders onto any VLC player on the LAN.
Plex has pay walled FREE servers streaming to FREE clients only.
If you have a plex watch pass (for client) you're good and can stream from any server. If you have a plex pass (for server) any one can stream from your server. But you have to have one or the other.
For software I like made by people getting paid, I was happy to pay the one time fee. It's really good, secure, and downloads are fast now.
And I just tested streaming from my free server to my free phone while said server is at my house, and my phone is with me at work.
Works fine over a VPN.
Yep, VPN will allow you to be on the same local network, and they're only pay walling remote play.
Yes. But it used to be free to watch remotely. It's 99% your own hardware doing everything. Their services get used for discovery, not as proxies for the connection itself, AFAIK.
You already had to pay them to allow transcoding with your own GPU, etc.
Right now it's still not too bad, but just watch, enshittification will affect paid users too. For one, I expect the lifetime pass to go away, and go away retroactively eventually.
She needs to update her app probably, it works fine for my wife on my server
Why anyone still uses Plex for new setups is beyond me.
pretty much the only reason I still use Plex is because I like to be able to watch stuff during downtime at work and plex.tv isn't blocked on the work network while my private domain is.
And no, using a hotspot off my phone on a personal computer isn't an option, both because the security requirements of my job site prevent us from using personal devices in the main area where I work and because the building itself is a massive concrete structure that blocks most cell signals.
Strange that plex.tv isn't blocked while a "personal" categorized website is. Have you looked to see what category your domain is shuffled under? You could try submitting a recategorization request to Cisco Umbrella or Fortinet databases. Requests for recategorization are free to do.
Well, i didnt. Its a legacy install and i had jellyfin already running parallel because of the remote streaming paywall they introduced.
Plex has paywalled my server!
Skill issue tbh.
Yeah but not on my end.
I've never been a Plex user. Always been with Jellyfin. I've heard that plexamp is a killer app but finamp has always been sufficient for my pretty basic needs. But I have a question for you (meant in good faith). You say,
I do get the point that making software should be able to sustain people but I dont see the move of plex as a fair thing to do. Yes, they have made great software but taking your home server hostage feels like the wrong move.
If Plex needs a sustainable business model, asking for donations isn't enough. So what is the move for them? What do they do to both fulfill their need for a sustainable business and also not upset their userbase? (I'm not defending Plex or this move of taking your server hostage, in any way.)
I'm genuinely curious how, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, they should have played this or at a minimum, made better moves than they did.
Very glad you're with jellyfin btw. You can check out some cool plugins at awesome-jellyfin.
Donations isn’t going to cover the hunger of a 40 million dollar VC round. Those investors want more than a return, they want plex profitable ASAP
Investors are like parasitic leeches to any business model. As soon as you add them, the business has to grow in order to satisfy the leeches who provide no benefit to the model other than to be attached to it. If you ignore the leech, they'll drain all your lifeforce, so your only option is to satisfy them and feed them. Unfortunately, they are also ravenous creatures who are never satisfied. If you feed them a little, they'll want more next time in an endless cycle.
Once you are infected by investors ... eventually they will destroy whatever you created.
Exactly. Plex could have been “profitable” in the sense that revenue covered infrastructure and paid a handful of full time employees, but that’s not what VC money needs.
So what is the move for them?
Plex has a two-pronged VOD service. They have ad-supported "live television" and they have content to rent.
I don't know if that's enough to sustain them but I don't really care. I've been a PlexPass owner for over ten years. I have only asked that they resolve bugs and made requests for things like proper organization of classical music (which they've explicitly stated they will not consider).
You do bring to light something I hadn't considered; that they see Plex as a business model. From my perspective, I want to buy a fully developed product with the expectation of bug fixes and security patches etc over time. I genuinely can not think of a single thing the developers have added to the service that I've used in the past ten years.
So, what kind of business model charges money to do things that don't have an apparent impact on the user experience?
Plex has been one of my most used applications in the past decade. However, it has its limitations and they are actively imposing more limitations on the experience in favor of "a sustainable business model".
The issue is that their sustainable business model is interrupting the users' sustained use of a platform they've already paid for. I've had to go through all of my devices and disable all auto-updates to ensure I do not get the "New Plex Experience".
What we should be asking is why "selling a product" is no longer a business model.
What we should be asking is why “selling a product” is no longer a business model.
Such a good question. Off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons: one cynical, one a little more practical.
Cynical first lol: Maxmize profits. Why charge once when you can charge monthly. I'll move off this bc it's a topic that's been beaten to death, esp. here on Lemmy.
The more practical reason is probably because most software interacts pretty directly with the internet in some way. When we were just installing MSOffice98 with clippy, software didn't need constant security updates, patches, etc. Remember when there was an update for MSOffice and you'd install Service Pack 1? That was one of the first patches I downloaded from the internet and it was a big deal back then. Now updates come out at least monthly, many times more often than that. I guess that means that you have multple product cycles occuring concurrently, which creates a financial model with a lot more unknowns... which in turn makes it harder to forecast what a product should cost, considering it would be the only revenue generated, per license for the life of the product.
I think selling a product is still a very viable business model, but you have to be a lot more accurate about revenue forcasting and product pricing. I guess it means you have a lot less room for error (from a business perspective).
What we should be asking is why “selling a product” is no longer a business model.
Because they're not selling a product, they're selling an ongoing service. They run the relay servers, and those cost money every month.
There are a few ways Plex could have played this:
The point is there are lots of companies who do this right and don't have such a blatant disregard for the user. In the long run, this will not help Plex, it will help other streaming service helpers who are actually willing to respect users.
I know you're not defending Plex and I acknowledge that. However, I see a lot of "How are they supposed to make their money?" arguments here, hence my description above of just a few models Plex could have chosen instead of f**king the customer.
Yeah. "How are they supposed to make their money" is a question that I'm grappling with right now. OSS is hard enough with a straightforward MIT license but figuring out how to monetize in the OSS space (that doesn't always reward nuance), adds a lot of complexity. I'm starting fresh, so I'm not changing anything on anyone... but getting a monetization strategy that is 100% perfect out of the gate is not likely so seeing this vs. a response like Pangolin's is helpful.
From my view, a sustainable business model is very different from the way things are done lately. I built and managed multiple successful businesses and making them sustainable is doable without fucking over your customers.
They could absolutely have done a lot better things to gain more income. The important base question here is "how much do they need?" Because software does not have huge ongoing costs but massive initial costs and lower sustaining costs. Of course, large changes or complete makeorvers will be intense but they are not needed in every company.
Once that is clear, they could have started with better public relations, engaging people about the need for a specific sum or recurring revenue. They could have gamified it by selling badges, additional functions, tiers, restrictions on new installations, etc. But they didnt. They chose to paywall existing functions. one. After. The. Other.
Dick move.
So yeah, building a business is no joke but thats not for me.
Saying software does not have huge ongoing costs shows you’ve never worked on any huge software system. My works ongoing costs for hosting/scaling/storing data are millions of dollars a year.
Really glad you replied. Thank you. Your points are really good ones. I want to build something (software) for myself and the community but also struggle with where to draw the line when it comes to making my product generate revenue too. It's a thing we don't really talk about when it comes to OSS. Maybe we should create a new category called SOSS, (sustainable oss) lol.
Are you saying that you’re on your home network with your Plex server and it won’t let you play your media without paying? That’s not true if so. You must be outside the network.
My guess is they have VLANs and they didn’t set up the server to treat them as local traffic.
I've had that happen to me with plex, it was probably 100% my fault because I specifically changed things during the setup of the docker file, but apparently Plex can't figure out that is local if it's running inside docker with non-host network, it probably only accepts local connections from the docker network, and I was never able to make it treat my actual home network as local.
That is exactly the case. It is absolutely true and accusing me of lying is not okay.
Plex really needs to do a Tailscale style connection to your server. But instead they chose to keep their outdated method of funneling all of their traffic through their servers, and need to charge lots of money in order to pay for it.
Considering both Plex and Tailscale are going toward VC exits, Headscale and Jellyfin is the only FOSS way atm.
Make sure your home server config isn’t mistaking this client as a remote user. Check your networking, etc
My networking is the same since i have plex (about 4 years). I now use jellyfin and it works well. But thanks for the suggestion.
Access via IP address and not the name. I've been having to do it that way for several days now, too.
Edit to add: It's due to a change I made in my OpnSense setup. I restored a ZFS snapshot and it's working again as it should.
So its a thing. Very interesting. Thanks for confirming. Have you tried jellyfin? i switched now and it works great.
I had a plex pass and was still having tons of issues streaming to other devices such as Apple TV. So I switched everything over to jellyfin with news server and have everything scheduled through radarr and sonarr. Never going back.
Damn. Thats a brutal report. Thanks for sharing. I was considering buying a plex pass due to the mobile apps fiasco, then came the remote thing and I thought nah. Now I'm happy i didnt
Yeah you’re better off.
If you were having troubles it’s because you did something wrong, though I don’t know how. Plex is literally the easiest and most straightforward media server to set up and get working out of all of them.
As was stated on the first post you made about this, it's a dns or nat reflection issue.
Plex sees you accessing it through your external IP address, and not through your lan IP.
I had a similar problem, and had to roll back some nat changes I made, and now it's working fine again.
Meanwhile, free remote streaming works fine if you have a proper VPN setup. I just tested it, and was able to stream to my phone, through the Plex app, over my tailscale VPN, and I do not have Plex pass on the server or on my phone...
This sounds like a whole lot of convoluted bullshit to use Plex locally and "looking local" through VPN solutions when you could just roll a Jellyfin instance and do things a more straightforward way..
Yeah, but my wife and kid also use it, and they're not going to be happy if I change things.
I did not make a "first" or "second" post about this. This is it.
This is just some glitch. They’ve not said anything about watching stuff locally becoming a pay thing.
yet
Much too convenient to be "just" a glitch. Anyway, jellyfin works fine. Has been a good ride mostly.
This is the reason I didn't go with Plex when I was setting up my server.
Exposing Jellyfin/ plex through routing or SNAT plus dyndns would be a cheap option.
As soon as one rents a VPS (to expose the selfhosted at home service through routing/ tunneling) it would cost at least 2€/ month?
Which has nothing to do with this local setup being suddenly paywalled. As others have pointed out, it seems like plex has led me to set it up in a way that always uses the remote connection and since they now paywalled that, i cant use it anymore until i either pay or change my setup.
Which i did. I now use jellyfin.
Good.
It's a fork of open source software. If only "line go up" didn't have to be the way things worked they could have stopped developing features no one wants just to squeeze out profit, and sustained without enshittifying. Maybe.
Yeah. I was a fan. I knew it would go down that road. When they paywalled remote clients i kinda smelled blood and started to try jellyfin. Best decision in hindsight.
This almost seems like a leopards ate my face situation. I remember Plex supplanted some other proprietary media server that went evil. I couldn't understand why people burned by the first one switched en masse to another one like it. Once wasn't enough? If you're going to switch at all, go to something that is 100% libre.
I have no idea what you're talking about but its definitely not a comparable situation.
Plex sucks the butt
They're definitely not doing the right thing with paywalling existing features on legacy systems.
I’ve never seen the appeal. A simple smb share and Kodi work perfectly fine no?
It's not great with a family, each with multiple devices. Years ago I used it with a central MySQL db, but it was a huge pain and frequently broke with updates.
As mentioned by others, Jellyfin is an amazing alternative and I've been using it for a few years already.
Not really, if you use Kodi the information on what you have watched remains on the PC running Kodi, if you always watch from the same device that's not a big deal, but if you like to watch stuff on your smart tv, then on your PC, and downloading some to watch on your phone on the go, having the information of which episodes you've watched on the server helps keep things organized.
Smb means you have to download the whole file. That isnt gonna fly in every configuration. But jellyfin does the trick easily.
Not on the go, but you can use your own DDNS/VPN & Jellyfin for that instead of Plex
Im using it locally with no subscription or any payment and it works fine. I stream to other smart tvs on the house not my phone though. If its connected to the local lan you shouldn't have this issue.
soap2day.pe etc. have never failed me.
Threads like this are why people don't use open source. It sounds like a reality-denying anti-intellectual one-size-fits-all cult in here. This is also like half the threads about Linux. Just armies of tech bros who couldn't put themselves in someone else's shoes if their life literally depended on it.
Plex server isn't open source.
They’re talking about the Jellyfin crew.
If people choose not to use software that's open source because of the way people talk on some thread.. were they intellectually thinking about their own best interests? It's like no longer enjoying a show because some fans did something cridge - anything popular enough will have weirdos (from someone's perspective).
Jellyfin is great, but in defense of Plex, they announced that remote streaming would require one of the two parties to have a Plex pass was coming back in March so I don't know if it's fair to say they are holding anything hostage.
I started down the Jellyfin path after they made that announcement. It's super easy to install, and in many ways the UI is nicer than Plex. But I ran into challenges getting my server safely accessible for users outside my LAN. And I haven't had the time to look into that further.
Would be great if there was a clean, easy way to set up the webserver portion so it's as easy to share content entirely as Plex. But I get they are a volunteer project with a lot on their plate.
I have had great success with tailscale in this regard.
FWIW:
Obviously not as trivial or seamless as Plex. Also I wouldn't try to complicate this setup by using docker for everything. But once its up you can basically host whatever you want on the WAN from your LAN.
I use wg-easy, which is a web ui bundled with wireguard and it works great. I only have to port forward a single wireguard port on my router.
If they’re calling it remote streaming when you’re on the same (local) network, that’s not exactly intuitive. I’d say OP’s phrasing was fair.
OP has a misconfigured server and isn't connecting to their server over LAN.
Yeah, there is no defence on enshittification, sorry. I have jellyfin now. Its also not remote which makes this a huge dick move too.
Wait its not remote? You're on your local network?