Every non-Free Software will betray you eventually. It's only a matter of time.

Jellyfin is great, but in defense of Plex, they announced that remote streaming would require one of the two parties to have a Plex pass was coming back in March so I don't know if it's fair to say they are holding anything hostage.

Welp, i killed mine yesterday as it wouldnt let me stream while offline. Modem died so no Internet for me. Why do i have everything local if it dosent work while offline...

Old news, but time for Jellyfin. I made the switch a couple months ago. Some minor teething issues, but better, IMO, especially now as my family all have LDAP users and that just works.

Why anyone still uses Plex for new setups is beyond me.

In this thread:

1. An OP that doesn’t understand how their network is working
2. People rushing to suggest a solution that they fawn over because it’s open source. I have yet to see anyone recommend Emby.
3. “Tailscale will solve all your problems!” Great - how do I make that work on an LG TV that’s 100 miles away?

Someone else already said it and you've already swapped but I'll say it in detail:

when setting the server connection up you selected "ServerName (long string of numbers)" and not "ServerName (your IP - SECURE)"

this routes your connection through the Plex servers and makes it not a local connection anymore. this is extremely easy to do and forget you've done because it barely impacts performance

Are you saying that you’re on your home network with your Plex server and it won’t let you play your media without paying? That’s not true if so. You must be outside the network.

Plex has paywalled my server!

Skill issue tbh.

Plex has pay walled FREE servers streaming to FREE clients only.

If you have a plex watch pass (for client) you're good and can stream from any server. If you have a plex pass (for server) any one can stream from your server. But you have to have one or the other.

What about switching to Jellyfin?

Access via IP address and not the name. I've been having to do it that way for several days now, too.

Edit to add: It's due to a change I made in my OpnSense setup. I restored a ZFS snapshot and it's working again as it should.

Remote, yes, they announced you need Plex pass one side or the other for it to work.

Local, no, that shouldn't happen. Your device isn't reaching your Plex server locally.

To work around the remote issue, you can VPN to your local network.

But you're better off in the long haul with Jellyfin as you're doing now.

It's pretty rare that a company starts taking away free features and doesn't end up fucking payers in the end.

The biggest bar to Jellyfin is TV clients, the second biggest is security.

TV clients can be fixed with a one-time purchase of a $20 android TV stick. If viewing your familys ARR content isn't worth $20 you probably don't need to do it anyway.

Security for remote streaming is a harder thing to handle. Most people are capable of port forwarding, But just hanging a smallish public project out there in the open is always a dicey proposition. It honestly needs real fail2ban, probably SSL, 2FA and password complexity requirements.

We could probably make a jellyfin helper container to handle some of this. Walk people through Let's Encrypt, dynDNS, port forwarding tests, add fail2ban with a firewall, maybe even slap suricata in it.

We need to convince the project to add 2FA and password complexity requirements.

I don't know guys what do you think is it crazy? does it make sense? Would anybody actually use it?

As was stated on the first post you made about this, it's a dns or nat reflection issue.

Plex sees you accessing it through your external IP address, and not through your lan IP.

I had a similar problem, and had to roll back some nat changes I made, and now it's working fine again.

Meanwhile, free remote streaming works fine if you have a proper VPN setup. I just tested it, and was able to stream to my phone, through the Plex app, over my tailscale VPN, and I do not have Plex pass on the server or on my phone...