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.
Correct! Having users connect to your server and your hardware is now a cloud service according to them.
It IS a cloud service. You should be smart enough to understand why.
How many manual connections have you had to set up for your users? That's right, none. Why? Because Plex does it for you. That's that cloud part that you are so desperately ignoring.
It's literally just pointing them to my IP. It's a bit of networking. How many manual connections have I set up? Most of them. I have DNS. I opened up 32400. That's also all I had to do to get streaming to work with Jellyfin. Literally the only difference in getting Jellyfin "remote streaming" up and running is giving my users their username, password, and (DNS or IP) address.
That's literally all plex is doing. It's a dynamic DNS service, that tells your users how to connect to you for you. DynDNS or any dynamic DNS service can do that for you for like, 2 dollars a year, if not for free - or you can pay for a static IP. If someone can run a plex server, then they have enough networking knowledge to be able to set up dynamic dns.
Plex works even without DDNS and port forwarding. What you are talking about is otherwise not possible for people with restrictive firewalls or with CGNAT.
I agree with you that if you expose the service through the internet, then yes, it's just a DDNS remapping and their costs are tiny, but if you don't it does go through their infra.
It does, and I concede that, but they do nag you constantly about it. And honestly, if that was the case then I'd say they could charge on that if they were clear why they had to all of a sudden after 10 years, but then I would say it should just be a charge to use their relay network, and have it be easily opt-out able. Maybe a guide on how to set it up yourself
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
Yeah, you should stop that right now.
Two of my favorites are streaming without authentication and the fact that it is possible for a non-user to create a user and then edit other users.