Unfortunately, the biggest red flag about Plex is that they now offer their own streaming media. That means they’re in bed with media companies which is at odds with the goals and needs of the original fans and users of Plex servers.
When I saw the first slow steps Plex’s encruddification, I was relieved to find out Jellyfin exists. I wish it had more features, but it’s being actively developed and totally usable already. Also, I’m not a fan of the name, but that’s a stupid thing to complain about.
I’m not sure why you think that’s the case. I use Plex entirely locally and have never had an issue when the internet was out. In fact my modem went kaput last year and I had a solid 2 days without internet connection. Plex didn’t even blink. The only thing I couldn’t access was Actor/Crew individual pages, as those don’t store metadata locally and are fetched on demand by the client.
so your issue is not that you can’t access the server offline, it’s that you can’t log in while offline?
i have never needed to log in locally since the initial setup. it can also broadcast as a DLNA server which would be trivial to access without authentication.
you’re very opinionated for someone who is totally clueless on the subject.
I’m still waiting for it to be up to par, I have jellyfin on the server and I check it maybe once a month with the latest version but it still fails miserably with my library.
It’s a very clean high organized library managed by sonarr. All Files are in
“series name (year) > Season xx > series name SxxExx (episode title)”
format and yet it still just fails miserably at matching so much of my content (its a rather massive library) especially on anime. Half the time I have to manually match it, and I have to use the Japanese title in order to pull up the English metadata, because that makes sense.
Playback also just… Fails for no reason on tons of my devices. It’s been getting better recently but until it’s on par with Plex I am not leaving sadly
Yeah no, i don’t have the time I’ve got my own shit to do. My Plex system is almost entirely automated. Ombi let’s me request a show with a single tap, sonarr finds it from my sources, sends that to transmission, then once it’s download imports it and puts symlinks with proper naming into the library folders. And then plex properly matches up the metadata.
The point stands: open source products are only good because people make them good.
If you want to put your eggs in the closed sourced paid basket, by all means go ahead. Plex will still bite you, eventually, just like every other for profit business does.
No, and thank fuck for that. I don’t think Plex would end up that bad.
I hope.
Edit: Also it isn’t “doomer” to say that for profit businesses almost always end up screwing their users over eventually. Usually it happens after the business is sold.
Plex has already deprecated the original Android app which had a “lifetime” payment.
i paid for a lifetime subscription in like 2016 and i still use and install apks downloaded direct from the official forums for the android app on my shield. nothing has been deprecated at all.
you can prefer jellyfin, that’s fine, but making stuff up to scare others is just wildass doomer shit.
it’s a media player. if they go under or get too shitty, i’ll use a different media player. for now, and the foreseeable future, plex is miles ahead of the competition.
You paid for the main lifetime subscription, I paid for the Android app directly. You paid more than me, but both sales were “lifetime”. My app has long since been deprecated, while your Plex Pass still lingers on.
I won’t be all that surprised when the “Plex Pass lifetime subscription” ends. It shouldn’t, and I hope the legal landscape changes such that it can’t (or at least so that sellers are required to define the terms more clearly), but at the moment your lifetime subscription is just as vulnerable as mine was.
This is all a lovely segway into Ross Scott’s potential lawsuit against Ubisoft for shutting down The Crew. PCGamer article, original YouTube post. The goal isn’t necessarily to win, rather to legally challenge and clearly define the terms under which software is sold.
Jellyfin is what Plex should be.
Yea, Plex requiring an internet connect just to stream locally tells me all I need to know about them.
If I understand correctly, it was originally implemented when they made it so you could use ssl to access your media without any configuration or cost: https://www.plex.tv/blog/its-not-easy-being-green-secure-communication-arrives/
I also think you can watch locally without logging in, but, it’s a less than ideal way of doing it: https://www.plexopedia.com/plex-media-server/general/plex-no-internet/
Unfortunately, the biggest red flag about Plex is that they now offer their own streaming media. That means they’re in bed with media companies which is at odds with the goals and needs of the original fans and users of Plex servers.
When I saw the first slow steps Plex’s encruddification, I was relieved to find out Jellyfin exists. I wish it had more features, but it’s being actively developed and totally usable already. Also, I’m not a fan of the name, but that’s a stupid thing to complain about.
I’m not sure why you think that’s the case. I use Plex entirely locally and have never had an issue when the internet was out. In fact my modem went kaput last year and I had a solid 2 days without internet connection. Plex didn’t even blink. The only thing I couldn’t access was Actor/Crew individual pages, as those don’t store metadata locally and are fetched on demand by the client.
I’m pretty sure that if you had not already been signed in, you would not have been able to use it. As the login page requires an internet connection.
so your issue is not that you can’t access the server offline, it’s that you can’t log in while offline?
i have never needed to log in locally since the initial setup. it can also broadcast as a DLNA server which would be trivial to access without authentication.
you’re very opinionated for someone who is totally clueless on the subject.
I’m still waiting for it to be up to par, I have jellyfin on the server and I check it maybe once a month with the latest version but it still fails miserably with my library.
It’s a very clean high organized library managed by sonarr. All Files are in
“series name (year) > Season xx > series name SxxExx (episode title)”
format and yet it still just fails miserably at matching so much of my content (its a rather massive library) especially on anime. Half the time I have to manually match it, and I have to use the Japanese title in order to pull up the English metadata, because that makes sense.
Playback also just… Fails for no reason on tons of my devices. It’s been getting better recently but until it’s on par with Plex I am not leaving sadly
Plex makes it a lot easier for things like hardware encoding and sharing outside of network, but jellyfin needs some work to get there
If it fails on anime maybe someone (such as yourself) needs to do the leg work and set build a database for it to match against?
Yeah no, i don’t have the time I’ve got my own shit to do. My Plex system is almost entirely automated. Ombi let’s me request a show with a single tap, sonarr finds it from my sources, sends that to transmission, then once it’s download imports it and puts symlinks with proper naming into the library folders. And then plex properly matches up the metadata.
The point stands: open source products are only good because people make them good.
If you want to put your eggs in the closed sourced paid basket, by all means go ahead. Plex will still bite you, eventually, just like every other for profit business does.
Okay doomer but my media isn’t going anywhere.
No, and thank fuck for that. I don’t think Plex would end up that bad.
I hope.
Edit: Also it isn’t “doomer” to say that for profit businesses almost always end up screwing their users over eventually. Usually it happens after the business is sold.
Plex has already deprecated the original Android app which had a “lifetime” payment.
i paid for a lifetime subscription in like 2016 and i still use and install apks downloaded direct from the official forums for the android app on my shield. nothing has been deprecated at all.
you can prefer jellyfin, that’s fine, but making stuff up to scare others is just wildass doomer shit.
it’s a media player. if they go under or get too shitty, i’ll use a different media player. for now, and the foreseeable future, plex is miles ahead of the competition.
You paid for the main lifetime subscription, I paid for the Android app directly. You paid more than me, but both sales were “lifetime”. My app has long since been deprecated, while your Plex Pass still lingers on.
I won’t be all that surprised when the “Plex Pass lifetime subscription” ends. It shouldn’t, and I hope the legal landscape changes such that it can’t (or at least so that sellers are required to define the terms more clearly), but at the moment your lifetime subscription is just as vulnerable as mine was.
This is all a lovely segway into Ross Scott’s potential lawsuit against Ubisoft for shutting down The Crew. PCGamer article, original YouTube post. The goal isn’t necessarily to win, rather to legally challenge and clearly define the terms under which software is sold.