I remember being excited when it first came out, but then as we know capitalism happened and ruined it. Im all jellyfin now. But was plex originally starting out to be a good thing or was it just to trick us into being locked into their service after we all got on it?
Well, enjoy your downgrade to jellyfin.
It was really good in the past but their business model was unsustainable, so they put in more and more bullshit. Parts of it are still better than Jellyfin like cross-platform support and some of their clients like the music player.
their business model was unsustainable,
So stop development, problem solved. Seriously, that’s all anyone wanted. Just keep selling the mobile app, people will keep buying it. Update it once a year and don’t change anything else. They probably could have continued to run everything with one or two developers.
It kills me that they took something good and turned it to shit rather than letting it be.
That would have indeed been a better solution but I guess they didn’t want to let people go? No idea.
A different solution would have been to release Plex 2.0 with significant improvements that people actually want and charge for that again.
Yeah plex was awesome when it was just a fork of XBMC but it’s just another story of someone taking an open source project and privatising it to enshitify it.
You’re describing the product life cycle of most Internet things.
Oh I well know. That’s why im slowly going as open source as possible for everything.
Plex used to be good. If you wanted an easy way to share content with folks who didn’t want to be weird and hook their computer up to their TV it was the only game in town.
Most things used to be good until upper management thinks they know best. Look at steam, once gaben is gone it’ll be ran by an ex ubisoft exec paying himself 5 million dollar bonuses and restricting/stealing your games back (I realize we dont own any games we buy on steam).
I mean, they built a whole NFT marketplace into it under Gaben.
You could argue that the next guy (if any) would be worse at making money from Steam than he is, I suppose.
Although admittedly their NFT marketplace went the same way all others did. I remember at the time people were shilling that stuff my go-to response to tell them why it’d fail was that Steam tried it and it all trended to zero.
This is the only way I use my TV. I have no interest in live programming. I am a Kodi user.
Me too but that sorta breaks down when you have non-technical people in the house and/or more than one TV.
be weird and hook their computer up to their TV
What’s weird about that? It’s just a monitor with built-in speakers. Seems weird to me to spend the extra money on those when the TV is already there.
Having a media-center PC is highly underrated.
I don’t think it’s weird but I’ve been called weird a few times for doing it.
In the beginning it was quite good. And innovative, but as aged, it went from a local app, like jellyfin, to a centralized one. Their api server crashed once and plex was absolutely useless. Later, they started feeling pressure from the big rights holders and started to pivot to a media hub, and away from pirated content.
I jumped ship shortly after the api server crash, if I couldn’t use a local app to watch local content on my network, I didn’t want anything to do with it.
I have a lifetime sub to plex and haven’t spun it up in over 6 years.
I missed out on a lifetime pass when it was on sale for $25. I told myself I would pick it up next time it went on sale for that price, but then it never went below $50. Now I’m kinda thankful that it didn’t.
Likewise. Lifetime pass, but I’ll never touch their product again. They really dicked over a lot of people to please corporate threats. Now it’s just an enshittified dumpster fire to me.
I never tried Plex. Just went with Jellyfin, so don’t know what I’m missing. Jellyfin works fine though.
Plex has been around for a while, long before “capitalism happened” as you put it. At the time it spawned a whole lot of different alternatives, it also triggered how we interact with our media libraries. I recall having to set-up my own server and client before I could start to import and manage my own media. That wasn’t trivial, least of which caused by needing to rip DVD without the high speed access to internet acting as a source.
I contracted at plex for 6 months. The employees really care. The developers were very concerned with making the absolute best media server possible. The QA team was doing crazy stuff to try to keep everything working.
Soo it was the c suite that wanted it to go the way of netflix?
As always is
How long ago? Because it looks the MBAs are in charge now.
Plex is still fine for me. I have Apple stuff (Mac, iPhone, Apple TV) so my options are basically Plex and Infuse, and Infuse is fine, but expensive to own. Or you pay $10 a year which is more than fair, I suppose. But Infuse can’t be used outside your network, and it doesn’t sync show progress with Plex. Used entirely on its own without Plex is how it’s meant to be used (as a server and client as opposed to client to a Plex server, though that way works too, albeit with weird limitations). But Infuse still can’t be streamed outside your network.
Jellyfin exists on Apple stuff but it’s not very good. The server seems fine, but the client takes a lot more to set up and it’s not as straightforward as Plex. And you have to jump through more hoops to use it outside your network.
That seems odd cause jellyfin on linux is dead simple. You’d think apple would also be.
I mean, it’s good now.
I guess there’s a question about good for what, but what it does it does pretty well.
I use Plex - but almost exclusively for music streaming through PlexAmp, very little in the way of TV/movies.
What’s so bad about it? It works well for me, but if Jellyfin is much better I might investigate.
Privacy concerns and the fact that they now make you pay to access your own media remotely.
Good question to start a circle jerk. 👍
It was already mediocre, but it’s gotten worse as they have enshittified
Plex is still good, I’ve been running it for a decade. It was incredible when I started using it and they’ve added improvements I wanted in that time. I’m not too arsed about some of the recent additions, but I’ve never not been able to disable something that I didn’t want
Jellyfin is good too, and I’d probably pick it if I was starting a new server today, but I’ve yet to actually experience anything negative from Plex, and still feel like I got value for money.
Possibly big caveat: I got a lifetime Plex pass ages ago, I’ve not paid attention to what they’re charging in a long time.
Bought lifetime membership 11/12 years ago. Never had a problem. I need a VPN with dedicated IP to deal with the double NAT from my ISP, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
