I tried testing a movie from my home server in plex through firefox and repeatedly got this message, even after reloading.
I knew that they had paywalled the apps on mobile and streaming from outside the network but now they have also blocked watching your own movies through your own hardware.
I do get the point that making software should be able to sustain people but I dont see the move of plex as a fair thing to do. Yes, they have made great software but taking your home server hostage feels like the wrong move.
Even a pop up that says “we need you to donate please” would have been fine. make it pop up before every movie, play donation ads before any movie but straight up disabling the app is kinda cruel.
Anyway, i have switched to jellyfin and it is insanely good. please give it a try. you can run it alongside plex with not issues (at least i had none) and compare the two.
In any case, good luck. Let me know if you need help.
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Jellyfin is great, but in defense of Plex, they announced that remote streaming would require one of the two parties to have a Plex pass was coming back in March so I don’t know if it’s fair to say they are holding anything hostage.
I started down the Jellyfin path after they made that announcement. It’s super easy to install, and in many ways the UI is nicer than Plex. But I ran into challenges getting my server safely accessible for users outside my LAN. And I haven’t had the time to look into that further.
Would be great if there was a clean, easy way to set up the webserver portion so it’s as easy to share content entirely as Plex. But I get they are a volunteer project with a lot on their plate.
But I ran into challenges getting my server safely accessible for users outside my LAN
FWIW:
- vps + domain (optional?)
- connect vps to home server with wireguard (eg Tailscale)
- reverse proxy on the VPS forwarding to jellyfin (eg Caddy)
Obviously not as trivial or seamless as Plex. Also I wouldn’t try to complicate this setup by using docker for everything. But once its up you can basically host whatever you want on the WAN from your LAN.
I have had great success with tailscale in this regard.
The same tailscale that announced last week that they are going to start charging?
Took a quick look at the free tier,
- 3 users
- 100 devices
- Basically all tailscale features
That seems pretty reasonable to me. Main account and two accounts to share. With just friends and family, I doubt most people will reach the 100 device limit.
Creating a tailnet using a custom domain is considered for business use.
Well, that sucks for me. I was planning on using my domain name.
custom domain
From what I gather, this refers to the email address you sign up with.
If you use something like a non-gmail email address when signing up, it starts you off on the business plan with a trial (which you can instantly change to free). (Note: they’re gonna change this auto-detection thing with shared domains soon due to a security hole.)
I believe you can still use a custom domain (instead of the randomised *.ts.net provided one) with DNS lookups in your tailnet, on the personal (free) plan.
I’m willing to recommend Tailscale because I run headscale and it does basically everything a selfhoster needs. When the free version is passable, it’s harder to enshitify the commercial version.
Every non-Free Software will betray you eventually. It’s only a matter of time.
I just wonder if plex will ever sell the list of movies and IP address of everyone. Many people have the ARRs to auto download, even stuff still in theaters. What good is a VPN when plex knows your email and IP.
Honestly, I’d be rather shocked if this wasn’t already the case.
Moreover they probably have a database of everything you’ve ever watched and your IP and email address, just waiting to be leaked to the internet through sale or ransom.
well, except WinRAR
I thought free software was when you were the product and non-free software actually supported developers.
Or do you mean non-OSS?
“Free Software” is a defined term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
Free as in freedom, not as in free beer.
I thought we switched to libre for that definition and since then used free only as in free beer.
Libre (from French) is sometimes used to solve the ambiguity of the word free in the English language, but it sounds kinda awkward in English and there’s certainly no consensus that this should be the official replacement, or that the term free even needs replacement.
Furthermore, the FSF who originally came up with the idea of “free software” still exists and is still called the Free Software Foundation, though Stallman uses both terms interchangeably.
This is the reason I didn’t go with Plex when I was setting up my server.
Old news, but time for Jellyfin. I made the switch a couple months ago. Some minor teething issues, but better, IMO, especially now as my family all have LDAP users and that just works.
I made the switch a few months back as well. Have you had the issue where"Recently Added" just straight up doesn’t work? It’s about 50/50 for me whether my new downloads show up there or not, and if they do, it’s usually inserted somewhere down the list between other things I added months ago. Not sure if there’s a workaround, but it’s my #1 complaint with Jellyfin. Otherwise, it’s been great.
How is your underlying file system set up?
It’s an Unraid share on a local NAS, and the array is formatted as xfs.
Hmm, shared how? NFS?
I’m actually not 100% sure how to answer that. It’s just a “share” configured through the Unraid UI, being accessed by a docker container running on the same machine (binhex’s Jellyfin image.) I think that the “share” in this context is essentially just a mount point, but it’s also (optionally) exposed as an SMB share externally.
Ahh OK, a Docker bind. 3 things to check:
-
That you added the folders in that weird way Unraod requires, see: https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-solved-jellyfin-not-detecting-media-in-unraid (this probably isn’t it, but worth checking)
-
Make sure for newly added, Jellyfin is configured for Date File Scanned into Library, vs the Created Date on the file
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Ensure the Arrs aren’t set to change the date on file import. By default they modify created/modified dates to be the release date, which can put things in an unexpected order.
Thank you! I checked #3 and it’s not that. I haven’t found the setting for #2 yet, but I just wanted to say I really appreciate your help.
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I’ve never been a Plex user. Always been with Jellyfin. I’ve heard that plexamp is a killer app but finamp has always been sufficient for my pretty basic needs. But I have a question for you (meant in good faith). You say,
I do get the point that making software should be able to sustain people but I dont see the move of plex as a fair thing to do. Yes, they have made great software but taking your home server hostage feels like the wrong move.
If Plex needs a sustainable business model, asking for donations isn’t enough. So what is the move for them? What do they do to both fulfill their need for a sustainable business and also not upset their userbase? (I’m not defending Plex or this move of taking your server hostage, in any way.)
I’m genuinely curious how, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, they should have played this or at a minimum, made better moves than they did.
Very glad you’re with jellyfin btw. You can check out some cool plugins at awesome-jellyfin.
From my view, a sustainable business model is very different from the way things are done lately. I built and managed multiple successful businesses and making them sustainable is doable without fucking over your customers.
They could absolutely have done a lot better things to gain more income. The important base question here is “how much do they need?” Because software does not have huge ongoing costs but massive initial costs and lower sustaining costs. Of course, large changes or complete makeorvers will be intense but they are not needed in every company.
Once that is clear, they could have started with better public relations, engaging people about the need for a specific sum or recurring revenue. They could have gamified it by selling badges, additional functions, tiers, restrictions on new installations, etc. But they didnt. They chose to paywall existing functions. one. After. The. Other.
Dick move.
So yeah, building a business is no joke but thats not for me.
Saying software does not have huge ongoing costs shows you’ve never worked on any huge software system. My works ongoing costs for hosting/scaling/storing data are millions of dollars a year.
You’re both right and wrong.
Its like saying “saying a company is easy to run shows you have never run an huge company.”
Both are false dychotomies. The amount of hosting costs, manpower, etc does not come from the project but how it is set up.
If you have to run servers for a software at all determines the cost for hosting for example. Same for every other aspect.
Linux is a huge software project I’m working on. Yet the cost of it is a joke compared to its size. It has way more users than plex.
So what is the move for them?
Plex has a two-pronged VOD service. They have ad-supported “live television” and they have content to rent.
I don’t know if that’s enough to sustain them but I don’t really care. I’ve been a PlexPass owner for over ten years. I have only asked that they resolve bugs and made requests for things like proper organization of classical music (which they’ve explicitly stated they will not consider).
You do bring to light something I hadn’t considered; that they see Plex as a business model. From my perspective, I want to buy a fully developed product with the expectation of bug fixes and security patches etc over time. I genuinely can not think of a single thing the developers have added to the service that I’ve used in the past ten years.
So, what kind of business model charges money to do things that don’t have an apparent impact on the user experience?
Plex has been one of my most used applications in the past decade. However, it has its limitations and they are actively imposing more limitations on the experience in favor of “a sustainable business model”.
The issue is that their sustainable business model is interrupting the users’ sustained use of a platform they’ve already paid for. I’ve had to go through all of my devices and disable all auto-updates to ensure I do not get the “New Plex Experience”.
What we should be asking is why “selling a product” is no longer a business model.
What we should be asking is why “selling a product” is no longer a business model.
Because they’re not selling a product, they’re selling an ongoing service. They run the relay servers, and those cost money every month.
I bought a media management and consumption platform running on my own server using my own clients. For what reason do I need a relay service to watch content in my house on my server?
What media management and consumption platform did you buy?
Threads like this are why people don’t use open source. It sounds like a reality-denying anti-intellectual one-size-fits-all cult in here. This is also like half the threads about Linux. Just armies of tech bros who couldn’t put themselves in someone else’s shoes if their life literally depended on it.
If people choose not to use software that’s open source because of the way people talk on some thread… were they intellectually thinking about their own best interests? It’s like no longer enjoying a show because some fans did something cringe - anything popular enough will have weirdos (from someone’s perspective).
As was stated on the first post you made about this, it’s a dns or nat reflection issue.
Plex sees you accessing it through your external IP address, and not through your lan IP.
I had a similar problem, and had to roll back some nat changes I made, and now it’s working fine again.
Meanwhile, free remote streaming works fine if you have a proper VPN setup. I just tested it, and was able to stream to my phone, through the Plex app, over my tailscale VPN, and I do not have Plex pass on the server or on my phone…
This sounds like a whole lot of convoluted bullshit to use Plex locally and “looking local” through VPN solutions when you could just roll a Jellyfin instance and do things a more straightforward way…
In this thread:
- An OP that doesn’t understand how their network is working
- People rushing to suggest a solution that they fawn over because it’s open source. I have yet to see anyone recommend Emby.
- “Tailscale will solve all your problems!” Great - how do I make that work on an LG TV that’s 100 miles away?
- Open source has high immunity to devs making changes at the expense of the user for their benefit because anti-features can be removed. Recommending another proprietary alternative here would be like saying they aught to leave an abusive partner but then recommend someone with the same red flags.
3 - An OpenWRT router with Wireguard connecting to another router 1000 miles away will do the trick.
Great; how do I get my Mother to do that over the phone?
It’s not a cake walk, but I’ve something similar for a friend who can barely turn on his PC.
The OpenWRT router was fully configured before shipping it to him and the existing router’s needed Wireguard port was opened by me using the Comcast Android app. All he had to do was connect his TV to a new wifi network. That wasn’t easy, but he ultimately succeeded.
Ok, so you didn’t walk someone through it; you shipped them something preconfigured.
That’s not going to scale as I share out my server.
That’s not going to scale…
How many mothers do you have?
If #3 is your use case, then yeah, pony up the fees. Or learn to code I guess.
So, like every other jellyfin fanboy, no real actual answer.
Welp, i killed mine yesterday as it wouldnt let me stream while offline. Modem died so no Internet for me. Why do i have everything local if it dosent work while offline…
Are you saying that you’re on your home network with your Plex server and it won’t let you play your media without paying? That’s not true if so. You must be outside the network.
.
I’ve had that happen to me with plex, it was probably 100% my fault because I specifically changed things during the setup of the docker file, but apparently Plex can’t figure out that is local if it’s running inside docker with non-host network, it probably only accepts local connections from the docker network, and I was never able to make it treat my actual home network as local.
Under Settings > Network there is a configuration item exactly for this. I’m running host network, but you can add the docker networks here as well.
LAN networks is only available for plex pass users
It all starts to make sense then. I need to set Jellyfin up soon. It’s only a matter of time before they come after the “Lifetime” purchasers like myself. I bought it over a decade ago at this point.
the actual problem here is that OPs network is not configured correctly and that Plex detects that the physical local client is actually accessing the server from a totally other network.
Fairly common when you use docker to run Plex and have the container run in bridge mode. This will put the container in the docker network that will then be different to your local network.
Plex determines if a stream is local or remote based on the network so when your container is in bridge mode, the physical local client will be a remote connection because of the different networks.
And since remote streaming requires Plex pass since end of April, you will see this.
I don’t have that configuration:
As someone else mentioned, this is only available to PlexPass users. Sorry for the confusion! I bought my lifetime sub over a decade ago at this point and forget about these inconsistencies that used to just be part of the product.
Therefore it’s literally impossible for me to watch my media locally, way to go Plex.
Are you running in docker? Change from bridged mode to host mode on your container which should resolve this.
Yes I am, but I don’t want to give full control of my network drive to a closed source application because it paywalled me out of being able to access my media on my local network. It’s ridiculous that I have to do that. It breaks ECI, and is a security risk. And yeah, it’s a bit paranoid, but the fact that they can fix it with a simple config and put that behind a paywall is VERY worrisome, so I now need to pay if I want to isolate Plex from the host where it’s running.
