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?
Plex is great. If you have ever supported the company by buying a lifetime pass nothing has ever been “rug pulled”.
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.
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.
Ive had my gripes with them over the years but they’ve always had the most feature rich and mostly polished system. I did use Emby (what Jellyfin spawned from) for a few years when Plex was struggling with EAC3 audio and have lifetime passes for both but always come back to Plex.
I won’t defend their recent restrictions on free accounts and additions of features nobody wants, but if you already have a lifetime pass its still the best option IMO.
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 never tried Plex. Just went with Jellyfin, so don’t know what I’m missing. Jellyfin works fine though.
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.
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.
How long ago? Because it looks the MBAs are in charge now.
Soo it was the c suite that wanted it to go the way of netflix?
As always is
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.
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.
I don’t think it’s weird but I’ve been called weird a few times for doing it.
Having a media-center PC is highly underrated.
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.
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.
Rug pull IMO. Just use kodi
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
