"your friends"

dude my friends don't charge me for shit

Once you invite an MBA in you can never uninvite them…

Jellyfin. Tailscale. Bob's your uncle.

Playon, Evernote, Lastpass, there have been plenty of examples.

Whenever a company starts charging for previously free features, it's time to GTFO, even if you're on their pay side.

I've got lifetime Plexpass, but I can read the writing on the wall. It's only a matter of time before they enshittify my product or stop providing updates. They'll sunset Plex and start Plex+ or some shit, give em a year or so.

Get your Jellyfin installed and working, they can work beside each other. Tailscale if it's just you, reverse proxy if you have the fam on in.

What was the appeal of Plex anyway?

ITT:

YES JELLYFIN! Thank you Plex for enshitifying!

Exhibit #46,853 for why freeware will inevitably fall out from under your feet and why you should exclusively use FOSS wherever possible.

EDIT: Here's Jellyfin's 'How to Contribute' page.

So as long as the server owner has Plex pass everyone's still able to stream from the server?

I'm done with Plex - They won't get my recommendations. My holdoff buying PlexPass were the little bugs that always mattered - Pausing for more than a few minutes HARD locked up the stream, the stream had to re-init to load subtitles, and then the MAJOR issue with "What files is Plex NOT seeing" and other indexing issues. I paid for my Android app, happily. But now, telling me I can't stream my own media, after paying for the app? Y'all can F right off with that. I'll be finally setting up Jellyfin ASAP.

Wonder how long those 2.99 a month figures will last. I give it a year before there's no seperate remote streaming package and the only remaining one is >10$. The main appeal of Plex was not paying. It's used by pirates. The goal is content for free. It's no longer free. I don't care at all if random people can use my Plex server. If they are unwilling to adapt to a new platform, then I guess they'll resubscribe to Netflix. Most of them never unsubscribed from Netflix to begin with.

This was the end for me. Used Plex for almost a decade. I'm off to Jellyfin. It's actually almost no change whatsoever to integrate it into my home setup.

Friendship ended with plex, jellyfin is new best friend.

It seems like multiple things are being conflated here and I'm not sure what the reality is because I've never used Plex.

Some people claim this has something to do with Plex needing to pay for NAT traversal infrastructure. Okay, that seems sort of silly but at least there's the excuse that their servers are involved in the streaming somehow.

But their wording is very broad, just calling it "remote streaming." That led me to this article on the Plex support website, which walks people through setting up port forwarding in order to enable "remote streaming"! So that excuse doesn't really seem to hold water. What exactly is being paid for here then? How do they define what "local streaming" is?

I got the same email.

I haven't had plex installed for over 7 years, and I've NEVER used the shared libraries feature.

We noticed that you’ve accessed libraries from friends and family in the past

They've apparently noticed activity that's never occurred.

Your users are getting that because they have a plex account that they use to stream. They might stream from just you, but they could stream from any other shared server they're connect to. That's why they get this email.

If you have a plex pass and are a server owner, they can ignore this and keep streaming from you for free.

If they try to stream from a server owner who does not have plex pass, it won't work unless the user themselves have a plex watch pass, which let's them stream from any server that doesn't have plex pass.

Since you have plex pass, your users won't be impacted at all.

I am very fortunate in that before Plex I found and used ps3 media server/universal media server. Because of that, it always felt odd paying just to stream my own content on my own hardware. I am certainly not against paying developers, but Plex always felt like paying for another service, not donating to an awesome Dev cause I love what they do. Another reason I stopped using Plex, I couldn't get anyone but myself to give a dam and use Plex, (suddenly, when NETFLIX gets The Last Air Bender, NOW my sibling wants to binge watch it. 🙁). Jellyfin has served me just fine so far, it fucks up only in the same situation plex did, when I try watching with someone else.

LOL, aren't there at least a half dozen open source alternatives for Plex?

That was announced 2 months ago?