Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff • Hacker News Board

Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff

#101

Post by kyriakos » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 3:46 AM UTC

alexalx666 wrote: post #6

onychomys wrote: post #2

It's going to be extremely annoying if Plex goes out of business.

Do you use paid features of Plex and if yes, which ones? Im using Plex daily to stream shows stored on a SSD connected to Windows laptop. I think I would not miss on any paid features they provide. Initially when I decided to try to watch less mindless tv stuff, I thought there will be a plethora of solutions for home streaming but it turned out that the only one that actually works is Plex

Skip intro feature is only available on paid version and works really well.

Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff

#102

Post by starttoaster » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 3:56 AM UTC

bubblethink wrote: post #97

starttoaster wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plex uses a fork of ffmpeg that they iterate on and presumably cherry pick changes over from upstream ffmpeg, as well as add their own changes on top of. They also contribute back to upstream ffmpeg when they find a bug or optimization for ffmpeg. But working from their fork allows them to iterate at their own internal cadence. > Given enough bandwidth and reasonable latency, you expect the experience to mirror youtu…

The difference is LAN v/s internet. Doing anything on LAN is a solved problem for pretty much all software. The experience deteriorates severely once you access over the internet. I continue to use plex behind nginx on a rented server, but the experience is nothing to write home about.

There is some confusion about how accessing Plex outside your LAN works. There's direct server communication and then indirect through Plex's servers. You need to check your server configuration to determine which you're using, because a misconfiguration means you're accessing through one of Plex's relays which is going to be massively degraded performance. I still believe this to be a configuration issue, because things don't just magically get worse because you left your LAN. More information on that here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200931138-troubleshooting-r...

Your ISP's allowed upload speed also becomes a factor once you leave your LAN, and in America, most people's upload speeds are much slower.

The hardware of your server, the hardware of your client, the supported codecs of your client, your WAN upload speed, your client's download speed all become factors here. And another thing YouTube does is re-encode videos that are uploaded to commonly supported types to allow for quick and direct playback on client devices. Most people just take whatever movie they downloaded from ThePirateBay and act shocked when they need to transcode the video.

Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff

#103

Post by antisthenes » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 4:00 AM UTC

Until this news, I honestly thought Plex was an open-source project ran by 1 or 2 people.

What's their actual business model to support presumably ~100 person staff? That's not a huge amount of money but not peanuts either.

Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff

#104

Post by austhrow743 » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 4:20 AM UTC

mk_stjames wrote: post #77

I used Plex briefly right after it came out from the roots of XBMC. The reason was, at that time, if you wanted to play something off a computer on your TV, better have a long DVI cable and a headphone-to-RCA cable and hookup your laptop and screen mirror, or better set up a PC sitting next to your TV and have a media server running. That option felt cool and useful so I did that, between like 2009 and 2012 ish. Now?…

Never occurred to me that people would use Plex for local media.

Afaik its main use is for seedboxes. Torrenting on a server. You set up Plex and Prowlarr, then you have your own streaming service with all of the content on streaming services put together plus everything out on dvd, bluray, etc.

I don't think Plex would be getting much financial support from them, not because they're not willing to pay* but because having purchased the lifetime licence seems to be fairly widespread from what ive seen.

*Check out plans on seedbox providers. Most are more expensive than streaming services. Then you've got people who dont want to/can't manage the above paying for access to remote Plex libraries, much like they would a streaming service. There's plenty of people pirating for the better experience who are willing to pay a premium for it.

Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff

#105

Post by bubblethink » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 6:40 AM UTC

starttoaster wrote: post #102

bubblethink wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is LAN v/s internet. Doing anything on LAN is a solved problem for pretty much all software. The experience deteriorates severely once you access over the internet. I continue to use plex behind nginx on a rented server, but the experience is nothing to write home about.

There is some confusion about how accessing Plex outside your LAN works. There's direct server communication and then indirect through Plex's servers. You need to check your server configuration to determine which you're using, because a misconfiguration means you're accessing through one of Plex's relays which is going to be massively degraded performance. I still believe this to be a configuration issue, because th…

I rent a gigabit server and have a gigabit connection at home; the client is a shield tv that running android. Videos are h264 and audio is either AC3 or occasionally flac. In other words, all pretty bog standard stuff that doesn't even need transcoding except for bitrate, but my connection is fast enough to not need that. It's not a bandwidth, latency, or HW specs issue. The streams work fine when they work, even with blu ray remuxes at 20+GB per movie. There are just too many annoyances and it's mostly a software issue on the plex side. A lot of times, plex will just show a spinning wheel, not resume, and take really long to seek. I do run plex behind nginx, so it is still possible that there is some config issue, but I doubt it.

Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff

#106

Post by thfuran » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 8:39 AM UTC

malermeister wrote: post #88

thfuran wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you're not allowed to break the encryption to copy it to hdd.

I am in my jurisdiction. [0] You might not be in yours, but that doesn't make me a pirate. [0] https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...

That looks similar to how it is in the US. But here it's not the copying that's disallowed, it's the breaking of the encryption to enable you to get a useful copy. So unencrypted but copyrighted material can be copied, but encrypted copyrighted material cannot. And blu-rays are all encrypted.

Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff

#107

Post by senectus1 » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 10:11 AM UTC

Brajeshwar wrote: post #20

From 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.

They wouldn't have got my $100 had they only gone subscription.

I loathe the subscription model.

Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff

#108

Post by ElCapitanMarkla » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 10:25 AM UTC

primax wrote: post #80

ElCapitanMarkla wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The others all lack the apps, Plex is a native app on my TV, Playstation, Phone etc, and it just works. I always found the other solutions to have pretty clunky client options outside of PC browser

Jellyfin native on fire stick and Android tv is far superior to Plex, given they started screwing up their apps to make people subscribe

Interesting, I’ll have to check it out. There was a young guy making some really good progress on an Apple TV app but I‘be forgotten what it was called

Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff

#109

Post by nerdjon » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 10:35 AM UTC

aarontees wrote: post #50

nerdjon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me Jellyfin server just works and is great. But the Apple TV experience is not really great with the official (still work in progress) or the one that is often recommended but I can't remember the name for at the moment. As great as the server is, I feel like the apps are where Plex has Jellyfin beat.

That’s why I choose to use Infuse as my Apple TV client. Plus it does local transcoding, taking that load off your server.

I have tried Infuse but it seems to have issues with large libraries.

Often not updating when I add something or just missing half my library.

Re: Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff

#110

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 » Thu, Jun 29, 2023, 12:28 PM UTC

josteink wrote: post #13

While 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…

Media ownership, whether we like it or not, is trending down. If media ownership is trending down then the number of potential Plex customers is trending down. It is imperative that they offer some sort of streaming on the side.