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 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.
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.
Yeah that was definitely a fad. I still dont mind trading and buying cs skins once in a while but it is in no way a real money maker.
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.
Agreeed
I mean, it’s good now.
I guess there’s a question about good for what, but what it does it does pretty well.
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.
Well, enjoy your downgrade to jellyfin.
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.
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.
Ah ok, thanks.
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…
I never tried Plex. Just went with Jellyfin, so don’t know what I’m missing. Jellyfin works fine though.
Can you access it remotely?
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.
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.
Rug pull IMO. Just use kodi
Plex is great. If you have ever supported the company by buying a lifetime pass nothing has ever been “rug pulled”.
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.
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.
It was never good, imo.
Just another way to overcomplicate things so losers can fit in with losers.
