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Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

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11–20 of 97 posts

Re: Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

#11
I've stopped paying for software outside of games almost entirely. SaaS is a universally terrible UX and it's impossible to actually purchase software anymore. Especially with local LLMs around to smooth out all the rough edges when it comes to FOSS life is good. The experience of never waking up to having something be worse off than it was before is sublime.

I worry I over-index on my desire for control but it's just so so nice to have my tools work every day and never break, and never change under me and just always do the thing they are supposed to do.

Re: Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

#12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing Plex does better is media detection. Like you can plop all your shows in a folder and it still will make sense of it. Jellyfin insists on a very specific directory structure and file naming. It’s very frustrating if you only want to watch a show and not interested in maintaining a perfect library.

They both insist on their own systems and both are wrong.

It's astounding how much every single system out there fights and fights and fights against showing you your directories, as they are.

I started but didn't finish a Rygel + local-search (nee Tracker) plugin to try to finally get that. I wish the upnp media services were better. I keep telling myself I'll build a nice client/controller... Some day.

Re: Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

#13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing Plex does better is media detection. Like you can plop all your shows in a folder and it still will make sense of it. Jellyfin insists on a very specific directory structure and file naming. It’s very frustrating if you only want to watch a show and not interested in maintaining a perfect library.

They both insist on their own systems and both are wrong.

Is there anything around that does _not_ force a management system? I really just want a thing that primarily just tracks if I've seen a particular file, secondarily maybe let me control playback from a different device. Actually figuring out what media those files map to is a distant third.

Re: Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

#15
I do not want to be in a business relationship with a company for a trivial amount of money, be it $29.99/yr or $69.99/yr or $249.99 lifetime. None of that is real money. You have no leverage, you do not own your own destiny. Complaining about the price hike is missing the whole point - Plex does not care about any individual customer, and that's the real problem (and the problem with just about every B2C business).

Re: Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

#16
Plex started out great for us Boxee users left in the cold, but the writing was on the wall when they started offering rentals. Product development has hit a wall in the last two years. While its UI isn't as intricate, Infuse does a fantastic job of transcoding higher bitrate 1080 content over LAN and WAN, where Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby just stutter. The Plex AppleTV app hasn't received material updates in what seems like years - they haven't even rolled out the Liquid Glass effect like Infuse has.

I would abandon Plex completely, but I still haven't found a capable app to remotely stream the 2.5TB of music on my Synology. Their recent price hike a few months ago converted me from a $5/mo Plex Pass customer to a $120 lifetime customer. I sense a new product tier in the works that us lifetime customers won't have access to without shelling out more.

Re: Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

#17

I tried Jellyfin after some frustration with Plex and found it an inferior relative to Plex so I'm still on Plex. Lifetime Plex Pass is the solution here for now given Plex has not clawed back any features and in fact has added features to the pass.

Yesterday, I went to try to cast music from the Plex app to the Vizio Smartcast SP70 I had just bought (awesome speaker, weighs 900 lbs and is as wide as my closet door)... but you can't do music on the Plex phone app. Like, wtf, when did this happen? So, now I need to try to install the older Plex app on my phone with Sideloadly, because Plex is more interested in streaming shit to me and trying to be Netflix or Par…

three paragraphs of complaining all because you didn’t look this up? because if you did, you would’ve seen that Plex has a separate, dedicated app for listening to music. If your complaint is that “it should be in the same app!” then that’s just an absurdly silly thing to have gotten yourself worked up about.

Re: Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

#18

Plex started out great for us Boxee users left in the cold, but the writing was on the wall when they started offering rentals. Product development has hit a wall in the last two years. While its UI isn't as intricate, Infuse does a fantastic job of transcoding higher bitrate 1080 content over LAN and WAN, where Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby just stutter. The Plex AppleTV app hasn't received material updates in what seems…

[deleted]

Re: Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went straight to Jellyfin and I find it awesome. I wonder what exactly am I missing.

One thing Plex does better is media detection. Like you can plop all your shows in a folder and it still will make sense of it. Jellyfin insists on a very specific directory structure and file naming. It’s very frustrating if you only want to watch a show and not interested in maintaining a perfect library.

Funny, I found no issues with it.

Maybe the way I organized my library intuitively sort of matched Jellyfin's expectations?

Re: Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

#20
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing Plex does better is media detection. Like you can plop all your shows in a folder and it still will make sense of it. Jellyfin insists on a very specific directory structure and file naming. It’s very frustrating if you only want to watch a show and not interested in maintaining a perfect library.

They both insist on their own systems and both are wrong.

As far as I can tell plex only wants separate folders for different kinds of media and file names that give at least some clue to what it is. Plex is much more lax.
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