Text:
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners. This data is used to deliver personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Your consent applies to all devices on which you have Plex installed. You can withdraw your consent at any time in Account Settings or using this page.
Soure: https://www.plex.tv/vendors/ (Might have to clear cache)
Can also read about the changes here: https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/
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I don’t know why everyone in the selfhosting community still even mentions Plex or uses it.
It’s closed source, not free; Jellyfin is a no brainer yet people still go to Plex??
The sunken cost of buying a plexpass on sale for 39 dollars 15 years ago.
Jellyfin is hardly a no-brainer. I set it up out of curiosity a few weeks ago and my first question was how do I give access to my friends and family. So I searched, and all of the results were talking about setting up a VPN or a reverse proxy or whatever. Man, I just want to tell my mom “install this app on your tv and log in”, which is exactly what Plex does.
I get that Plex is enshittifying, but pretending Jellyfin is a drop-in replacement is delusional.
I just want to tell my mom “install this app on your tv and log in”
I mean, if I didn’t know better, I’d start to suspect that the large multimedia corporations building walled gardens of apps in closed Smart TV ecosystems don’t really want you to be able to easily tell your mom how to watch shit for free. I mean they’ll let you, if you really insist on having that app available, but someone will have to pay THEM money instead first (and probably let them spy on you). That’s their racket.
The reason Plex can do it is because they do make money, doing shitty stuff like this to their users, so they can use that money to open these doors into SmartTV-land. The root of the problem is that your SmartTV itself (and your mom’s) is a locked down proprietary piece of shit, designed exclusively for shoving all proprietary content these media companies develop down your throat, and there are few convenient workarounds that are available to us, because of course they make workarounds as inconvenient as possible.
Unless you’re willing to ditch everything proprietary and insist on open technology for everything, which is hard on its own, you’re going to end up with a janky mix of proprietary and open systems that always require some compromises, because the proprietary stuff forces us to compromise. It’s literally a “this is why we can’t have nice things” situation.
Or… You know… Jellyfin could make it so I don’t have to setup elaborate VPN schemes and have every user install that on every one of their devices. For example they could fix their security issues to make it safer to expose JF through a reverse proxy, bug they refuse to not break client compatibility
My TV doesn’t have a Jellyfin app, only a Plex app. I’m not buying a new TV just to use my preferred media server, sadly :-(
“still even mentions plex”
I’ve been using plex for a LONG time, and bought a lifetime plexpass 12 years ago. I’m pretty sure I haven’t started a thread on Lemmy regarding Plex, but I’m sure I’m not alone as a LONG TIME user. Plex just works for me and cost me $75 in 2013. Right now I’ve got no pressing reason to switch.
If they remove my plexpass features, or start showing me ads / making my user experience worse, then I’ll probably look to change, and won’t participate in these awful ‘plex’ posts.
P.S. we should encourage as much new content on Lemmy as possible if you ask me.
Same with me, 12 years, about $70, and it still works just as well as ever. I turn off any new features I don’t want, my friends and family can still stream from me for free since I have plex pass already, and it’s easy to share without having to pass around my IP address.
Same. I bought the lifetime pass on sale many years ago, my setup is still working fine without me having to have touched it for at least the past 3 years outside of applying an update from time to time. I don’t stream their free shows or movies and have those setup so that they don’t even show up as an option on my tv.
Do I wish it was still the same company it was a decade ago? Of course… but so far they haven’t impacted my experience to the point that I feel the need to replace it with something else. The second that happens I will be spinning up Jellyfin.
Plex was the reason why I learned Docker + watchtower, so that I wouldn’t have to worry about updates (work smarter not harder). Now I have like 35 containers and am comfortable with docker. 🐳
I would switch in a heartbeat if Jellyfin didn’t… kinda suck, honestly.
But the difference in usability is enough that it’s just not an option.
For the record, I updated Plex today and I haven’t seen a notification like this anywhere, although that text snippet does match their privacy policy ad data opt-in settings blurb that has been in place for a while. I may need a bit more context here.
I host a Plex server for close to 70 friends and family members, from multiple parts of the world. I have over 60TBs of movies, tv shows, anime, anime movies, and flac music, and everyone can connect directly to my server via my reverse proxy and my public IPs. This works on their phones, their tvs, their tablets and PCs. I have people of all ages using my server, from very young kids to very old grandparents of friends. I have friends who share their accounts with their families, meaning I probably have already hit 100+ people using my server. Everyone is able to request whatever they want through overseerr with their Plex account, and everything shows up pretty instantly as soon as it is found and downloaded. It works almost flawlessly, whether locally or remotely, from anywhere in the world. I myself don’t even reside in the same home that my Plex server resides. I paid for my lifetime pass over 10 years ago.
Can you guarantee that I can move over to jellyfin and that every single person currently using my Plex server will continue having the same level of experience and quality of life that they’re having with my Plex server currently? Because if you can’t, you just answered your own question. Sometimes we self host things for ourselves and we can deal with some pains, but sometimes we require something that works for more people than just us, and that’s when we have to make compromises. Plex is not perfect, and is actively becoming enshittified, but I can’t simply dump it and replace it with something very much meant for local or single person use rather than actively serving tens to hundreds of people off a server built with OTC components.
Relevant XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/743/
Meanwhile, poor Jellyfin just quietly doing the job.
content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners
That is a honey pot rights holders will be falling over themselves to pay Plex for access to once they hear about it.
Been telling anyone that would listen that they need to get out of Plex since they implemented that first iteration of trying to require you to sign into your own self hosted server with a Plex.tv account. They were telegraphing what direction they were going in with that kind of user hostile move.
Lots of responses about how it was easy to get around so no big deal (or worse that they liked it for some coping mechanism reason) and that nothing else was as easy and feature rich as Plex so it was worth it.
Well now a few years down the road from that they are now going to use that beach head on everyone’s Plex server they can to collect what is being watched and sell it to the highest bidder.
Me eating 🍿 and reading the comments of Plex users arguing with Jellyfin users, while myself being a user of Kodi which has it’s own problems…
Can someone clue me in on the reason why anyone would prefer Plex instead of Jellyfin?
There are a LOT of pros and cons.
Pros:
- Developed by a professional, multi-disciplined full-time team with some security oversight.
- Hosted caching of The Movie DB for faster lookups
- Provision of SSL communication to and from your server without any special setup
- FREE EPG data caching
- Centralized server management from the web
- Low-speed relay for those stuck behind CGNAT.
- A REALLY solid mobile audio*** player (sorry, but plexamp beats the pants off the JF alternatives)
- Centralized Login for your friends and family with email-based password reset
- 2FA already set up
- A nice reflector gauge to see if your* ports are open and what your limits are
- Great client support on a LOT of devices
- Search is fast out of the box, even with extensive collections
- Their clients tend to do a better job supporting all the decoding features on every player
- Very reasonable Tuner support (but somewhat ugly) **
Cons:
- Not free
- Not Open
- They have a lot of your historical data and will eventually sell it when they sell the company. This is not going to be optional. That data is worth a lot and they likely already have enough EULA rights to sell it to whoever asks. Imagine if the MPAA gets in on the fun.
- Their security history is quite dicey
- The lifetime membership will eventually be enshitified as it’s not economically sound in the long run
- They constantly change the terms of the agreement.
- They constantly remove features people are using
- They constantly push to share data between users
- They constantly push Ads
- They are making previously free features pay.
- Their investors are starving, which makes them a liability.
- Their clients are generally slower.
edit: * a word ** forgot to shout out for the tuner support *** replaced media with audio for clarity
