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.
Playon, Evernote, Lastpass, there have been plenty of examples.
Whenever a company starts charging for previously free features, it's time to GTFO, even if you're on their pay side.
I've got lifetime Plexpass, but I can read the writing on the wall. It's only a matter of time before they enshittify my product or stop providing updates. They'll sunset Plex and start Plex+ or some shit, give em a year or so.
Get your Jellyfin installed and working, they can work beside each other. Tailscale if it's just you, reverse proxy if you have the fam on in.
Oh god playon. They burned me hard, and were shocked when I turned them down for 3 free months of generous free subscription fees. Never even checked, did they crash and burn?
They are still going. I would have thought that there will download it for you and let you watch it as long as you can prove you have the login would have gotten them enough legal attention to shut them down. Apparently it's either a gray area or they're below the radar.
I think one or two of the smallest properties are still usable in the old desktop app, but nothing that isn't already serviced by YTDLP.
You have valuable insight. I guess we all just look for better products and services. Ultimately it seems like the market will always extract and give nothing back.
I would rather stop sharing completely before I make a Jellyfin accessible to the internet with the state their Backend is in. If you want people to be able to use it on TVs, Jellyfin is also not an option because most of them don't support vpns
You could throw Authelia or HAProxy in front of it.
You could do a port knocking daemon.
Tailcale is available and free on half a dozen different video viewing devices.
There's about a million ways to skin that.
Also, keep in mind, it was a Plex security vulnerability In a lastpass admins home box that caused their asses to get leaked.
None of this shit deserves to be openly hosted online
Everything besides VPN breaks their clients because they can't handle authentication.
My main gripe isnt even that they have these issues, but the way the jellyfin devs are handling, or more correctly, not handling them.
They actively refuse to fix them because it might break client support. Instead of forcing an update or starting a secured v2 of their API, that actually active clients could then update to, they just do nothing
Using something to whitelist the firewall doesn't require any client changes. For the less technically competent it could be as simple as setting their TV's web browser to default to the white list page.
Haproxy could be convinced to whitelist people based on DNS entries. Each one of your remote consumers could set DNS to their house and once a day HA proxy would rewrite itself to match those addresses. If they're coming in from a fixed client, The DNS would white list and let them in, If they failed the IP check they would pop a login so you could still use the service via the web.
It's a hassle,It's nowhere near as elegant is what plex is doing but without a data center...
They really could stand to add TOTP to the clients and server. I wonder if they're open to pull requests. It can't be that hard to add the option to the server than the clients can pick it up whenever they get around to it.
This mindset is bizarre.
"Everyone should get out now because at some stage in the future Plex might get greedy and ruin it all and charge us through the nose. Move to Jellyfin! They'll definitely never ever do anything like Plex."
I think you know where this is heading....
I don't know why you'd equate might-enshittify to already-enshittifying. Especially when Jellyfin isn't VC-funded, the leading indicator for enshittification.
Precisely, the worst thing that happens is jellyfin pulls open source or stops getting updates, At which point someone forks it and the next generation picks up the ball and we keep going.
If it's open source, and it's interesting and useful it will be maintained.
I also want to emphasize that relicensing from the GPLv2 to something proprietary is damn-near impossible for a project this large with a team who are so ideologically motivated to make FOSS. If I today submit a PR to the Jellyfin codebase, they can't legally relicense to a proprietary license without 1) getting my consent to give them ownership of my work (I'm not likely to be paid off or convinced it's a good thing that work I submitted for free is being enshittified), or 2) removing my work from the project if they can't get in touch with me or if I say no. To emphasize: this consent is affirmative.
Thus, the process is to survey who's contributed to the project, reach out to anyone whose work is still in the project (preferably in writing in a permanent, court-admissable format like email), ask them to transfer ownership of their copyright to you, keep track of who's said no, said yes, or not answered, fulfill conditions for anyone who wants something in return, and meticulously rip out all of the code from people who say "no" or don't answer. One of the project's major contributors died 10 years ago? Legally, too fucking bad: they didn't relinquish shit to you. Rip out that legacy code and start over.
Just like for instance if you want to take a Wikipedia article and own it for yourself, you can't just go ask the Wikimedia Foundation nicely. You have to contact every single contributor whose work is extant in that article, and rip out work that isn't explicitly given to you by its owner.
Jellyfin isn’t yet. It will if they ever want to actually compete and make a living from it.
They are not a company. Why would they want to "make a living" from it?
Jellyfin has a BDFL and is an organisation with assets, so it's not impossible. However, considering it was forked from Emby by GPL nerds in response to licensing issues, I think it's very unlikely.
If they ever want to we fork it and make a new thing. It's the great thing about open source it's ours.
Everyone should get out now because Plex has started to ruin things and you should seek alternatives now, while you have time, and not wait until they finish shitting the bed.
And no, jellyfin won't do anything like this because they don't have control over how you use it and don't force their cloud on you.
Plex is in control of their user's computing in a way Jellyfin isn't. You can remove anti-features from Jellyfin software and even redistribute it. So it's much less likely they would do something like Plex and it even doesn't matter if they did as you can find others to work on it in a way you want. Plex is proprietary software, Jellyfin is software freedom.