Plex really just needs to host instances of their servers at something reasonable that I can upload easily to. Add a torrent client for good measure. Just make stream boxes.
Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff
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Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff
#22From my nieve point of view, I think, they made a mistake with the $100 lifetime fee (was that about a decade ago!). I paid that and have been using it since, and have never made another payment since.
Agreed, having a bunch of lifetime customers without a source of recurring revenue also incentivizes telemetry, selling user data, etc. Jellyfin is also a strong enough competitor that many lifetime accounts would switch if new fees appear.
I'm afraid that unraid will run into similar problems eventually.
Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff
#23Plex really just needs to host instances of their servers at something reasonable that I can upload easily to. Add a torrent client for good measure. Just make stream boxes.
Plex is explicitly trying to move away from being associated with piracy, so that won’t ever happen.
But what you’re looking for already exists - search for “seedbox” on Reddit.
Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff
#24While that sounds bad, I must admit Plex has been chasing “the wrong things” compared to what I want a Plex instance for. I have streaming services for content I want to rent. I don’t need Plex for that. I use Plex because it’s currently the best way to stream and organise content I own and have curated. But they’ve completed ignored that use-case for 5+ years now. It’s frustrating. Jellyfin is still not quite there…
Plex "just works" until it doesn't. The further away from the desktop you get the less reliable Plex becomes. In the browser it's flawless. On smartphone and tablet native apps I get maybe a one to five percent rate of not being able to see the server despite the fact I'm logged into it on the same device's browser. On embedded devices like smart TVs and streaming sticks Plex is a stinking pile of shit of an app. It's laggy, it crashes incessantly when you do something like skip forward after skipping back, and it constantly fails to see the server running on the same LAN as the device. This happens across android TV, Roku, Chromestick, and Firestick. It happens across different locations, routers, and ISPs. Plex is high on my list of "things I use because there isn't anything better but I still hope their developers stub their little toe every day of their lives".
Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff
#25From my nieve point of view, I think, they made a mistake with the $100 lifetime fee (was that about a decade ago!). I paid that and have been using it since, and have never made another payment since.
I'm a lifetime subscriber and if they chose to charge monthly I'd pay it. I've gotten a lot of value from Plex.
Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff
#26While that sounds bad, I must admit Plex has been chasing “the wrong things” compared to what I want a Plex instance for. I have streaming services for content I want to rent. I don’t need Plex for that. I use Plex because it’s currently the best way to stream and organise content I own and have curated. But they’ve completed ignored that use-case for 5+ years now. It’s frustrating. Jellyfin is still not quite there…
Plex never worked for me. The autotagging was frequently wrong, their version of libass has been years out of date FOR years (did they ever update it since the mid-00’s VLC version?), and it kept trying to lossily transcode videos that it couldn’t handle (such as WMV7) and failing hard when it didn’t. I’ve replaced it with VLC+SMB and am way happier.
Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff
#27I don't get all the comments of people saying that JellyFin doesn't "just work".
I replaced Plex with it a year or so ago and it has just worked since then, without any issue or any particular setup required.
Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff
#28While that sounds bad, I must admit Plex has been chasing “the wrong things” compared to what I want a Plex instance for. I have streaming services for content I want to rent. I don’t need Plex for that. I use Plex because it’s currently the best way to stream and organise content I own and have curated. But they’ve completed ignored that use-case for 5+ years now. It’s frustrating. Jellyfin is still not quite there…
Agree completely on all counts.
Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff
#29It's going to be extremely annoying if Plex goes out of business.
emby is a great alternative that allows more control with easy local accounts and no ad supported content jellyfin is also great but lacks apps on some devices and is a 100% free OSS alternative
I have been a paying supporter of Emby for a while now, and I feel like I bet on the wrong horse. Development is quite slow. It feels like only a skeleton crew is working on it compared to Jellyfin.
Neither Emby or Plex are perfect, but Plex seems to handle transcoding better. Emby still has the advantage over Jellyfin of a native Samsung Tizen app, even though Samsung TVs are slow as shit and it's a horrible experience.
Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff
#30From my nieve point of view, I think, they made a mistake with the $100 lifetime fee (was that about a decade ago!). I paid that and have been using it since, and have never made another payment since.
I use Plex every day and haven’t paid them anything. But I only use it as an app (relaxing xbmc and kodi) and don’t use any of their services.
I would probably pay $5-10 as a one time fee, but xbmc was an open source project so I’d never pay $100 or any recurring fee.
I just need a player for my local media. That’s not a recurring revenue source. That’s buy software once.