I hope this doesn’t mean they are on the slippery slope of selling user data, thoughts?
Honestly the writing’s been on the wall for Plex for a while now. I think it was when they introduced podcasts or news or something that it first became clear to me that Plex was trying to grow beyond a software company for self-hosters and prepare themselves for an IPO or something. I still use it simply because their client availability is second-to-none and I’ve got a bunch of people signed up already, but I’ve already made my peace that the “Plex getting shittier” line and the “Jellyfin getting better” line are getting closer and closer to crossing each other.
I’ve been using Jellyfin on my firestick, roku, and android phone for at least a year now.
What’s your hosting solution for external access? I’m asking because right now, Plex has a lot going for it in terms of allowing me to securely host my own server and share it with the people I want who are outside my network without actually having to open up ports or compromise my network security in any way. I couldn’t imagine hosting costs on a cloud VM for a decently sized, fairly actively used media server, assuming you wanted to go that route. I guess you could set up a reverse proxy on a cloud VM and forward traffic into your local network, but then there’s still the added network traffic costs for your VM.
I think they may have dropped the feature but I distinctly remember being disappointed in the feature that it wouldn’t download MP3s to your server so I’m pretty sure it existed at one point.
At the moment all is fine. I’m just going to ride with it until I have to stop and change to something else.
I’m mostly in the same boat. So far anything I didn’t like could be easily turned off. I unpinned the Plex TV and movies so it never shows up. I don’t mind discover because it means it returns results for things I don’t have, letting me watchlist it so overseerr can request it without me needing to leave Plex.
I have a jellyfin container running in the same docker compose yml with the exact same media folders mounted to it with quicksync passed through to it in addition to Plex, reverse proxy already set up so switching is as easy as opening a different URL or app since it’s already up and running.
I had to drop Plex when it made me sign in for a locally hosted setup. I’d rather not have them in my library.
Replaced with Jellyfin as others here have, found every device in the house so far works with it and it streamed 4k to the TV from an RPI 4.
That is only true when you use their “home” feature. It puts the entire thing behind oauth because it has to do so in order to restrict libraries/content to non-full users. Think about the instance where you have a thirteen-year-old kid and you want to restrict them to pg13 and under. Without forcing oauth on local connections they could just sign out and watch all your star trek porn parodies or whatever you don’t want them to see. If you remove the server from a “plex home”, it disables the oauth workflow for local connections as expected.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really happy with a lot of their new sharing/social features, and their recommendations on the homepage can fuck right off, but I do think it’s important to be accurate when criticizing. Requiring oauth on local vlans when plex home is enabled is the objectively correct solution.
How about transcoding subtitles on those 4k titles? That’s where I find Plex is a bit worse for wear right now in my environment.
I use bazarr to automatically grab subtitles in .srt because VOBSUB cannot be trusted.
That pretty much solves any subtitle related issues.
What’s not to trust with VobSub? They are always in sync, unlike a lot of Bazarr fetched subtitles. Of course, only play VobSub on devices that can direct play them.
You know what would be a killer feature?
Being able to buy movies without DRM crap at full resolution (blu-ray or 4k HDR) at a reasonable price (same or less than physical media) that includes extras. Extra points if everything is already named and in the correct folder layout to just drop it on the server in the right folder. Extra Extra points if Plex manages the download in the background and puts it in the right place when finished, or an incoming folder that awaits approval. Even several hours or more to download it would be fine (just make download resumable).
(yes I know this is exceedingly unlikely to happen, but we can dream)
Sounds like gog for movies. And built into Plex? That’s one of those ideas that makes way too much sense to ever happen
Plex is yet another service on the enshitification high road, might aswell switch to Jellyfin now and spare the future trouble if you ask me.
