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?
IDK I use Stremio instead. I love it’s simple, Netflix-like interface. And the fact that you can directly stream torrents from within the app. (did Plex ever get anything like that?) Just pick something and watch.
I’ve used plex a lot. I prefer it to jellyfin in regards to media mgmt. But them paywalling a non paid feature really pissed me off and definitely felt like a rug pull. All the assholes with lifetime Plexpasses will gloat because they don’t feel any of the changes. But yeah, feels pretty shitty. I only used plex for my own self hosted content. Never cared about any of the streaming they offered outside of that.
Idk man, Plex has A LOT of features that Jellyfin does not. I tried Jellyfin fin for a bit but for me plex really is perfect
has the term rug pull changed its meaning or something? I think Plex did a regular technology capitalism: build the product and get a user base, and then ruin it by trying to turn a profit with it later. good for them, I guess. I don’t use it
This is enshitification
I still love it and use it everyday. The Plexamp app is fantastic and solved my music issues with limited space on my phone. The apps work great.
I tried to setup jellyfin twice, but it’s just too much work to get it to function, and Plex took me 5 minutes.
Plex is still the most feature rich and easiest to set up, both for admins and users.
I do not want to expose Jellyfin ports to the internet, nor teach and troubleshoot an extra service like Tailscale for friends and family. I send a Plex invite, they download the app (available on pretty much every device) and we’re done.
Projects like Kometa and some Tautulli integrations let you customize and organize your Plex media in ways just not possible in Jellyfin yet (to my knowledge). For example, I hate spoilers in TV shows, and I have all episode thumbnails automatically blurred and episode summaries censored. I don’t like how Jellyfin handles collections, while Kometa is simply fantastic for letting me automate collection maintenance for any criteria I can think of.
I am currently running both, mostly to keep an eye on Jellyfin’s progress, but it’s hard to argue that Plex is a more polished and streamlined experience.
I have Plex pass and feel I’ve got more than my money’s worth. I don’t feel like anything has been “rug pulled” from under me and I’ve yet to see any features I paid for get removed. I am not a fan of the recent “trending with friends” fiasco and I wouldn’t hesitate to use Jellyfin more if the features were there, but right now it’s just not there yet.
After I set up my server and paid for the hardware, after my vpn, and after I paid for my Usenet subscription, and yeah, after I paid for lifetime Plex. I’m money ahead. Easily.
I have no Netflix, Hulu, apple, Amazon. All of it. ,that’s a monthly sub for each. That’s satellite tv money each month!
It’s not a rug pull. I got my money’s worth. And I’m late to the game. God forbid you are an early bird and have been living the high life for years and years! It’s not a rug pull at all.
If the whole thing folded tomorrow, I’m still money ahead and a few steps away from adopting jellyfin. How the fuck is that a rug pull? It did what I wanted and has done it well. And when or if it fails, I move on. That’s more resiliency than 99 percent of the other services I have used. And a better service and platform to boot!
Rug pull? seriously?
I have mine on reverse proxy
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.
It is entirely unfair to call such an old, well developed and we’ll supported piece of free software a rug pull. Many features remain free too…
It was always going to be a rug pull, they basically took XBMC and ffmpeg, made a “cloud” based front end for it and started asking people for money.
At no point was it anything other then an attempt to cash in on pirates. At some point I guess they realized all those “lifetime” subscription purchases would dry up and they started Partnering with or buying up other streaming content so they could at least pretend to be offering something else but that can only get them so far financially.
It might have been short sighted rather then an intentional rug pull, but obviously running a service like Plex requires an constant stream of funding, and when your loyalist users are the ones who paid a relativly small lump sum early on, it gets harder and harder to keep revenue coming in from new users and monthly subscribers.
Yeah the problem with Plex is that it’s initial user base was just people who wanted to stream their pirated content, and the problem with that is that these people are also unlikely to pay for a monthly subscription when open source free alternative exists. Their best bet is to become a sort of new Netflix by getting rights to stream from multiple studios, people are tired of having to subscribe to multiple streaming websites and dealing with some of their janky interfaces and most of these services don’t allow local storage of episodes and movies which would significantly improve the quality of their content, if Plex could offer secure local storage and streaming of content from multiple sources I would pay a monthly subscription for it. The only alternative that provides this somewhat is Prime Video letting you purchase access to non Amazon content, but I don’t want anything to do with Amazon.
I think it is still pretty great, if you are a Plex lifetime pass user.
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 was great in
20012004 when I had videos on my Macintosh and I wanted to play them using thePS2PS3 hooked up to the television.20 years is a long time for a rug pull. I think they just found themselves more excited about money after a while.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
