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.
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.