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Plex’s crackdown on free remote streaming access starts this week - Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Plex is starting to enforce its new rules, which prevent users from remotely accessing a personal media server without a subscription fee.

If anyone needs it: https://jellyfin.org/

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[–] 25 points 11 months ago (11 children)

Anybody still using Plex kind of deserves what they get at this point. They've been announcing these anti-consumer "features" for a while now.

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  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    People don’t deserve to be mistreated but it is surprising that folks haven’t abandoned it if they’re so actively anti consumer.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago

    I kind of understand why someone would honestly. Jellyfin subtitles are still a hot mess for a lot of formats unfortunately. Also, while plex has tried really hard to ruin their UI, I've still had more trouble explaining where to find things in Jellyfin. And if you're sharing your collection with friends or family members there's a lot more technical stuff involved.

    So I can see why the balance might still tip toward paying plex still for some people.

    Luckily I bought a lifetime license ages ago before the first price hike so this doesn't affect me yet. So I'm just riding out the decline, running them in parallel until plex completely breaks. slowly transitioning the family as they get annoyed with broken features. Plexamp is quickly taking care of that 😅

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  • [+] 15 points 11 months ago* (5 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Pure rent seeking. It's not the only example. So many products have artificial defects deliberately added by the manufacturer so that they can then charge you to disable the defect.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    Years ago now, they pushed an offer for lifetime subscription onto my server. I clicked it, went through to their website and bought it, paid, the subscription activated and worked.

    The next day they emailed to say actually i wasn't eligible for the offer, they cancelled it and refunded me and said it would actually cost $30 more.

    I installed Jellyfin that same day, it was pretty buggy back then but was definitely the right decision.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago* (1 child)

    Welcoming the incoming dowvotes for correcting your comment just like the many similar comments and posts I've seen on Reddit, but this is purely a configuration issue.

    Transcoding on local network is allowed without a subscription. If you are running your own DNS server (like pihole or unbound) you need to configure an internal "plex.direct" record. You also need to uncheck an option to "treat your WAN IP as internal" option which corrects double NAT issues.

    I have yet to see a need to move away from Plex. I paid for the cheap lifetime sub over a decade ago at this point and everyone I invite to my server has no complaints and has not had to pay Plex a dime. I don't use their plex.tv proxy, I direct connect to my own IP and leave their remote proxy option off in the server and everything works great.

    I will check out Jellyfin at some point if Plex makes things more difficult in time, but for now these articles are literally just rage bait in the homelab ecosystem. They enacted this back in April of 2025 already!

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    I never checked to see what was actually in the logs but when i was running Plex, it constantly tried to send a lot of log data to its masters. That alone was enough to budge me up and get Jellyfin. Jellyfin isn't as polished but it works perfectly fine for me.

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