- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Plex has announced a massive price increase on the service’s Lifetime Plex Pass. On July 1, the lifetime subscription option will go from $249.99 to $749.99, an increase of 200%. The price hike will only apply to new subscribers, with no changes to monthly or annual subscription pricing.
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A gentle reminder that Jellyfin exists to those thinking of alternatives.
For free (FOSS), and is way better than Plex
If you use it weekly it shouldn’t be free to you, certainly if you use it more frequently than that. Give money to the projects you depend on or they will disappear.
You find a place on jellyfin.org where they take donations? I was looking last night and only found a link where you could contribute your time.
If you click through some of the options on this page: https://jellyfin.org/contribute/
It links to a donation option here: https://opencollective.com/jellyfin
Thanks!
If you ignore the mostly horrendous UI, the security problems, the worse transcoding performance, the harder setup, the difficulty to access it remotely in a safe way,… Yeah sure, way better
The ui can be improved with community addons like moonfin but i agree it would be nice if they improved these out of the box
I couldn’t care less about the client design, since you have free choice there. If only the devs could be arsed to fix the issues that prevent me from just putting it behind a reverse proxy. If I could let people use it without exposing what is essentially an open door or forcing them to install a vpn, I would probably do that and slowly ween off Plex
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Lol, what an insane take. EVERY project that exposes an API is responsible for securing that. Its not rocket science, its server software 101.
Being free is not an excuse, especially when there are perfectly valid migration strategies, that don’t force them to abandon legacy clients.
Fans like you are the reason they get away with disregarding their basic responsibility
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How are other projects going to handle using the Jellyfin app to log into Jellyfin? I don’t understand this. I see sentiments like this pretending Jellyfin is perfect like they don’t understand why people use Plex. I want to give my mom a URL that she can login to (or even better she gives me a code) after she downloads an app. What is the point of Jellyfin itself not handling this? It’s pointless. If I’m going to have a half baked server app, I might as well just use Kodi. They can be as stubborn as they want with this but people need these very basic things. I’d actually donate money to the project if they didn’t stubbornly REFUSE to do the main thing every Plex user wants. Other projects don’t need to do this. The Jellyfin developers need to. I first tried Jellyfin 6 years ago and this is STILL an issue and so I just stay on Plex because I’ve already got lifetime. I WANT to move to Jellyfin but I need to give normies access to my stuff and apparently that’s a wontfix for them?? I can host all this shit myself. I just need it all built in and for the apps to support it. I don’t think anyone is crazy to want this right?
You just give those people the name of the app your recommend (Jellyfin, Moonfin etc) and give them the URL and their username, then they create a password.
It’s not that difficult for most and if it is you help them once with it.
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Plex doesn't have hardware transcoding unless you pay almost 800 euro
I, and I assume everyone on this forum who has one, paid around 50-100€ for their lifetime pass. My hardware encoding works great and doesn’t need me to tell it about each and ever codec in existence and how to handle each one.
The new price is insane, but that was not the topic of this thread.
You are right,. that is fair. You can also pay 230 euro currently for it.
A gentle reminder that Jellyin more or less requires you to set up a reverse proxy and a secure VPN to use it outside of your home.
Why would you not do that anyway?
Because if I’m watching locally I dont need them, and if I’m watching remotely Plex already offers secure remote viewing 'out of the box`. They give every user an SSL certificate and a public accessible URL at app.plex.tv. They also handle secure user authentication. The new price is stupid, but Jellyfin is not a 1:1 replacement.
I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of the $74.99 I paid for Plex Pass Lifetime several years ago. If they ever get rid of my Plex Pass and try to say “Lifetime didn’t actually mean Lifetime”, I’ll be gone.
We’ve seen other companies pull this move by saying “lifetime” only applies to X version.
Except when I bought my lifetime it meant lifetime for the SERVICE, not the app…
Did it. I don’t remember it saying that. And I bought it around the same time as you since I paid the same price.
I like to think I got my money out of mine as well, even though I only used it for like a year or two before switching to jellyfin.
Never used Plex. Jellyfin has always met my needs, so I never bothered to try it.
Plex has been around quite a while longer than JF. Before JF, the only way to really have a “self-hosted Netflix” was with Plex, so there are a lot of us who built our long-standing media setups around that.
That said, I have a JF instance running and matched almost 1:1 with Plex specifically for this situation, so I’m going to start pivoting everyone to that as I wind Plex down.
Meh, I’ve used dlna with PS2 over 20 years ago. Not exactly the same, but for my needs essentially the same.
That’s an interesting method. I actually have a PS2 myself, running PSBBN. Maybe I’ll try that out.
There’s a great project called WatchState that allows you to sync show progress between JF and Plex. Highly recommend it for while you’re switching over.
The company’s blog post also described a number of improvements they plan to make
After you pay: “oops, we won’t”
As a lifetime owner, the number of features they’ve deprecated is probably the worst part.
- Photo support (luckily Immich came along)
- Tidal integration (no idea if that was Plex or Tidal’s decision)
- Plugins (god forbid anyone add the functionality they keep removing)
It’s close between that and the last app overhaul that removed a bunch of functionality.
I wish jellyfin and the apps could ship with something like wireguard setup by default so people that use the jellyfin apps could instantly watch media outside their house without learning what wireguard/tailscale is
The fact that’s needed at all is the problem. Developers need to stop making monolithic structures that have access to everything ever and putting it on the user to maintain to maintain a VPN network for security.
There’s no reason I should not be able to just use an nginx reverse proxy for remote access to my jellyfin and have that be safe. It should at worst give people a copy of my media if there’s a security issue.
Personally I went out of my way to make this be the case, i have my instance locked into an unprivileged lxc whitelist only on syscalls which took a while to figure out the minimum needed for function but I got there. The host System is using the hardened kernel from Upstream and a series of sysctl lockdowns for example P Trace is not allowed even if you are the root user.
So I do indeed just nginx reverse proxy my instant because the worst case scenario even if they got complete shell access to the system they would be locked into an unprivileged container that had no access to any files other than my media files but the fact that I have to go to this level is already ridiculous
It should at worst give people a copy of my media if there’s a security issue.
that’s not the worst possibility. the worst possibility is an RCE into your server.
Personally I went out of my way to make this be the case, i have my instance locked into an unprivileged lxc whitelist only on syscalls which took a while to figure out the minimum needed for function but
that’s a pretty exotic setup. Exciting, but for most people learning to manage a VPN is easier
It should at worst give people a copy of my media if there’s a security issue.
that’s not the worst possibility. the worst possibility is an RCE into your server.
Personally I went out of my way to make this be the case, i have my instance locked into an unprivileged lxc whitelist only on syscalls which took a while to figure out the minimum needed for function but
that’s a pretty exotic setup. Exciting, but for most people learning to manage a VPN is easier
I am aware that an rce is the worst possibility I’m saying it shouldn’t be. The web portion is already its own isolated binary that you have to install but it’s designed with seemingly very little attention to security.
To the point that jellyfin has already had several major RCE and despite having full support for running over the web with http developers are basically just like you should not be using this without a VPN which is overall a pretty pathetic stance for a media server
Recently nginx had an RCE, so if your web server interface has an RCE, it doesn’t matter if jellyfin code is top-notch, if you happen to use a proxy with RCE in front of it. Wireguard has never had an RCE and I’m relatively certain it never will, because I believe you must be in possession of some keys to go very deep in the wireguard code, which in itself is not very large piece of code.
But yes, in principle I agree that we should code securely instead of depending on VPN to solve it for us, unfortunately it’s not the reality today. Memory safe programming languages help, but don’t completely protect against logic errors. VPN is general is pretty good for defence-in-depth.
The nginx rce relied an a series of requirements that affect almost nobody. You had to be using a very specific module and processing a specific type of data reverse proxy was not affected.
But regardless I get your point that anything can have an RCE. However as you say at the end in principle that does not mean you should just give up and expect external projects to handle your security. VPN is a great way to access your services and it is good defense and depth, but for the sake of being a successful project to the masses? It’s basically a dead end Road
but for the sake of being a successful project to the masses? It’s basically a dead end Road
I think that’s why we should still have requirements against software we run (although as some funnily say, we are free to get a refund), but not pretend that the software is more secure than it is known to be. sad that we need a VPN for security, but it is what it is.
I don’t know how could we get our devs to be more attentive to security.
it is pathetic indeed, but I think much fewer projects admit it than how many should
there are a lot of us still on Plex that hadn’t reached the threshold of issues vs effort that would motivate us to migrate to something like jellyfin.
looks like we’ve arrived.
I already have a lifetime Plex pass so this isn’t an issue for me. 6 months from now when Plex decides my lifetime pass has a new expiry, then I’ll be motivated.
this exactly. I got a lifetime pass in the before times (pre-pandemic) back when they were $100 bucks ish, but I know it’s only a matter of time before they come for us grandfathered-in fools.
I have the lifetime pass, bought it for like $80 many moons ago.
looks like we’ve arrived.
Agreed, this is the tipping point. This is where we will see Plex start to abandon the lifetime pass in favor of “imaginary money line go up forever” subscriptions.
Why not run both? That’s what I do, then if Plex is an issue for someone I can make them a Jellyfin account
I haven’t. I bought lifetime Plex Pass something like 15 years ago. A price change doesn’t effect me. It’s all their shitty updates and removing of features that makes me keep an eye on Jellyfin. I already have a sync setup for my watch status and a couple of my main users. Jellyfins apps are still worse.
I never thought those leopards would eat MY face.
are they insane?
From a purely profit-oriented perspective, no. They’re setting up a pretext to eliminate the lifetime license plan due to a lack of interest. No sane person would pay that kind of lump sum for the service (and the insane ones will bring in triple the revenue), so they’ll claim that there is no market for it. After that, they’re free to crank up the periodic subscription prices.
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by profiteering opportunism.
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by profiteering opportunism.
Does this already have a name? If not, can we call it “Riccitiello’s Law”?
it’s their own product, who are they pretending to fool?
Stakeholders. Journalists. The market. The ignorant public. They’re constructing a narrative to shield themselves and minimize the hit to their reputation when they stop offering lifetime license plans. The announcement won’t look nearly as damning if it contains a reference to the falling number of new lifetime customers, even if it omits the context of why that number has been falling.
So they are “shielding” themselves from a reputation drop by making an incredibly naked attempt and pushing the price to the roof so nobody wants it?
I mean, come on… if they had increased it $20 by $20 until nobody wants it, I would buy your hypothesis, but this is like pooping on my Director’s desk while he is in the office to get fired
How is this less blatant than just announcing they are cancelling life time subscriptions? or even better, just removing the option without any announcement?
They wanna gentle into it somewhat because they know there are many server managing people on the line already, doubting going jellyfin but scared of the hassle of transferring users, incompatibility (or too difficult for user) with some users devices.
They wanna move fast because money line needs to go up, boss said.
So currently, tripling lifetime prices seems to be the middle way for them. After a while monthly and yearly prices will rise too (but slower than tripling).
Not really. Their plan for a while now is to convert all to subscriptions and this is just their latest salvo. Next up is getting rid of it completely due to “no demand” and then kicking existing lifetime accounts to some static version that won’t be supported.
then why not just do that? who are they pretending to fool?
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Yes.
I got this on Black Friday many years ago for ~70 and despite the pass I am slowly moving over to Jellyfin. I really don’t see how they came up with this valuation, seems like a last money squeeze before abandoning ship.
Everything changed when they signed that A24 deal, and its not even the good movies, its the shitty also-rans. They want revenue now.
I wish them luck, but it seems despite all the data collection they failed to understand who their customers are. Idgaf about their content, I block and remove it where I can. Instead now we have content that will not convince anyone to cancel their Netflix or HBO to move to them and I have a home server that barely runs anymore because the software is so bloated.
they must be tired of running that company.
Is the whole world right now like me at the very end of a SimCity 3000 game, when it’s time to just turn on all the catastrophies?
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Just to say: MythTv is still a thing…
Ahh, memories. The start of my Linux journey nearly 20 years ago
Isn’t that 300%
With the original price as $250, a 100% increase would be adding the entire value to itself once (i.e doubling) taking us to $500.
A 200% increase is adding the $250 to the original two times for a total of $750.
So calling it a “200% increase” is correct.
It is true to say that “$750 is 300% of $250” or that “The price has tripled” - both correct, but the increase is only 200% because increase doesn’t include the original as part of the value.
This makes perfect sense, thank you
TBH—and I’m not a native English speaker—I think it’s a bit ambiguously phrased. “Increase by 200%” would be more clear.
Fine. Forget about it.
Jellyfin isn’t great, but it sure doesn’t have this problem.
My old kodi setup just works, year after year, and will work 10 years from now too…
I used jellyfin but prefer plex and since I use it locally its free and better than jellyfin. If plex ever charges for local use hello jellyfin!
Wrong comment
Jellyfin is boring but Im not knocking it since it’s open source and could replace my plex in the future.
Do you never leave the house for any period of time where you might want to bring some of your media?
In short; do you never travel?
Plex charges for downloading your own media through your own local network onto your own local devices.
I’m not talking about remote streaming. I’m not talking about downloading media while you’re already out of the house. Nothing about local downloads to local devices should require Plex’s servers, so it should come at no cost to them, which makes it a pure cash grab.
So yes, Plex does charge for local use :)
There are only like 4 movies I want to watch when I’m away from home and they are stored on my laptop. I had plex setup for outside use but didnt use it that much and figured when I did I was only interested in 4 movies. Step brothers - The greatest beer run - the big Lebowski - master and commander! I get em straight from the source Im home at the time why would i use the download feature??
