Playing devil's advocate, I understand one point of pressure: Plex doesn’t want to be perceived as a “piracy app.”

See: Kodi. https://kodi.expert/kodi-news/mpaa-warns-increasing-kodi-abuse-poses-greater-video-piracy-risk/

To be blunt, that’s a huge chunk of their userbase. And they run the risk of being legally pounded to dust once that image takes hold.

So how do they avoid that? Add a bunch of other stuff, for plausible deniability. And it seems to have worked, as the anti-piracy gods haven’t singled them out like they have past software projects.

To be clear, I'm not excusing Plex. But I can sympathize.

Jellyfin is great :D

3 Things stop from using jellyfin 100% of the time.

1. TV tuner is janky and loading a guide for local channels is garbage. I like watching the morning local news and jellyfin just does not cut it.

2. I want sub accounts. They used to have something similar but took it out for security reasons. I want to log all my TVs into one account but then have each user select their profile. So I can easily have a restricted profile for say kids then another for my parents then one for me then one for SO under the same roof. It will track each persons watched profile so when someone watches ahead it doesn't mess with someone else's.

3. On the same note, controller/ HTPC remote configs feel janky. I know its there but its not a smooth and easy as Plex. This goes along with above for anyone who says just make another account. You try entering half decent passwords with small HTPC remotes or controllers. Every time you go to watch TV.

If they could fix these things I would ditch Plex all the way. But as it stands I use Plex for my TV and jellyfin for my phones, tablets, PC.

One reason: It's not FOSS, and because of that, the Capitalist profit motive will always push the creators/owners towards enshitification.

The same forces act upon FOSS too, but the difference is that FOSS has structural immunity built into it. If the software enshitifies, it can be forked and maintained by a community that values software freedom.

We've seen it happen time and again. Terraform, CentOS, RHEL, The Xen Hypervisor, etc. When companies try to take freedom away from FOSS, they fail, because their users and maintainers are empowered by FOSS licenses (especially restrictive ones like the GPL) and can fight back.

With proprietary software, the users are powerless, only the owners have control.

Don't trust promises, good intentions, or corporate slogans. Trust free software and the open ecosystems they thrive in.

PS, Jellyfin is amazing ❤️

The writing was on the wall when they started getting American VC money.

American VC culture is anthenema to truly user focused products.

Sure, you can disable a lot of features from the home page, but even the remaining bits push you toward Plex’s ecosystem with things like recommendations. And I’ve even seen people complaining about needing to re-disable promotional content after updates. It’s simply a shady business.

Edit: It's just occurred to me that he might literally be referring to the Recommended tab on your home page - which you only have to interact with by choice.

If anyone would care to tell me where I'm being pushed towards Plex's ecosystem I'd love to understand what the flying fuck he's talkin about. The only thing I could find that could generously be called part of the Plex "ecosystem" are the social features. Does it give more "ads" if you have a free account or something? Also I've had a server for 15 years and I've never had to re-do my customization from an update.

I'm going to call it like I saw it, a very long time ago.

You have a product that is basically purpose built to make data hoarding and piracy practical, yet it requires a login with a central service. I don't care what justification anyone thinks makes that worthwhile or even a good compromise. Signaling to any corporate entity that you're in possession of such a thing is a bad idea to begin with. They shouldn't even know you exist. That information, along with anything else you do with the product is compromising to you and can be sold for money if aggregated with everyone else's data.

If you find this rant out of place in our modern world, I'd like to point to the concept of shifting baselines. This didn't used to be normal and nothing short of greed continues the behavior. The technology before this ran/runs without anyone knowing. Consider VLC, or XBMC.

Not for me. Before Plex I was browsing folders on my TV and I actually had to organize everything, plus find and download matching subtitles. It sucked so much.

I got into self hosting because of Plex and ran it on a 2015 Shield (both the server and the player) for ~8 years. Just moved the server to another machine this year. Still happy premium user.

If jellyfin was easier to use and had the same options as Plex, id switch over. But I'll keep my Plex lifetime pass as long as I can until they make all lifetime passes null in the next 2 years and make us all pay monthly.

laughs in Jellyfin

Moved to Stremio + A debrid service. I’m good.

I never felt comfortable with Plex, glad I've got JellyFin.

Meh, I went into plex settings on the server and just turned off all the bloat. Its all on one page. Not a big deal.

Capitalism.

it is proprietary software behind a paywall... need i say more?

Plex has been off limits to me for along time. Just the fact they want to require auth with their central service for something I use for reasons rights holders would love to sue me into third world poverty over (muh Linux ISOs) is enough reason.

Them demanding that auth hook into the server makes me uneasy about what sort of metatdata they are currently, or could exfiltrate later on, should they want to or be demanded to.

Whole thing stinks of willingly being part of a honeypot.