Plex can be amazing, but the core user community has absolutely no idea what the heck the Plex devs are doing these days. I've almost never seen such a disconnect between product development and key user community. /r/plex is basically full of posts complaining about long-standing requests, bugs, and broken features that are just simply ignore, followed by posts of "plex just released new feature literally nobody is asking for or wants, wtf?"
Most of the WTF feature releases are rolled back or deprecated within a few releases. So the community tends to be right on with what Plex should be doing. There's a lot of pigheadedness on the engineering side it looks like.
I also agree the lifetime pass was a bad business move. I think a better model would have been something like "pay $45, get every release in this major version, new major versions come out approximately every year" or with an alternate tier that would be "use plex, pay $35 per year, get all the updates". It would have smoothed out revenue and focused development on paying customer demands.
>I also agree the lifetime pass was a bad business move.
As someone with a lifetime PlexPass, I also think it's a terrible move. I'm starting to regret signing up with a company that allows that sort of purchase. It underlies all of the problems I have with Plex.
Lifetime membership sounds great, but it changes the nature of my relationship with Plex. If I pay a subscription I'm a customer; I use their services but I pay more in a subscription than I cost them, everyone is happy with the arrangement. But while I'm coasting off of my $79 Lifetime Plex Pass that I bought years ago I'm not a customer, I don't represent a revenue stream, I represent a growing cost.
I've paid for them to provide a service, but I've also incentivized them to change the service in a way that I use it less, because me using the service costs them money. That dynamic explains the problems I have with Plex. It explains why they're seemingly incapable (unwilling) to fix long standing bugs, and it explains the development of features that their base doesn't want (because Live TV, rental, and gaming represent new markets with new potential subscribers)
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.
It's commodity software. It's hard to justify a recurring subscription for something like this. It targets advanced users. If they can set up plex, they can set up alternatives too. And plex does not invest much in improving the core product. I don't remember it as being any better than it was 5-10 years ago. It still has rough edges. Skipping title/end credits is a nice feature though.
There have been huge improvements to the transcoder over the past couple of years. I think on-demand subtitles was also a relatively new feature which is huge over having to download them yourself and finding out the subtitle track sucked and having to delete that one and download a different one, and then woops that subtitle track was the same as the first, have to do it a third time.
It’s stable and it performs well and it works on all my devices with hardly any fuss. It works better than the HBO app.
I’m not saying you’re wrong or your issues are invalid, but I do think it is stable and capable, and they’ve done a lot of work to make it easy to use. A glance at the logs and you’ll see everything it’s doing to make it go smoothly. And it’s much better at this than it used to be.
>If they can set up plex, they can set up alternatives too.
I resorted to Plex after I couldn't get anything else working acceptably. I need my powerful media server to push out content that my anemic clients can support. The Raspberry Pis prefer 720p, the Intel Compute Stick is limited by it's Wireless bandwidth, the PS4 is hobbled by Sony Entertainment's desire to sell me their media.
OH and even though I didn't set anything up I was able to watch my shows when I was camping at the Seminoe Reservoir, WY two weeks ago on my phone. A pleasant surprise after the mosquitoes chased me into my tent.
Skipping title and end credits should be configurable and automatic per show. This half measure is almost as bad as nothing at all. If I enjoyed having the remote in my hand constantly I’d have a cable subscription instead.
Agreed, having a bunch of lifetime customers without a source of recurring revenue also incentivizes telemetry, selling user data, etc. Jellyfin is also a strong enough competitor that many lifetime accounts would switch if new fees appear.
I'm afraid that unraid will run into similar problems eventually.
I’m a lifetime subscriber that recently moved which brought down my media server. It will probably be another 3 months until it’s back up…if Plex screwed their lifetime subscribers by trying to get more money out of us…I’d cancel my service and zealously criticize them for the duration of my previous subscription
Exactly. Even if the software is never updated with any new features or changes, it still requires constant maintenance to fix bugs, patch security vulnerabilities, support new hardware, and OS updates. It costs money to maintain software, and a lifetime license isn't going to pay for a lifetime of updates.
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 in the “it just works” department, but if it does, I have no doubt what’s going to replace my Plex instance.
Being open-source it will hopefully not pushed to weird commercial ventures and use-cases not actually wanted by its users.
Plex "just works" until it doesn't. The further away from the desktop you get the less reliable Plex becomes. In the browser it's flawless. On smartphone and tablet native apps I get maybe a one to five percent rate of not being able to see the server despite the fact I'm logged into it on the same device's browser. On embedded devices like smart TVs and streaming sticks Plex is a stinking pile of shit of an app. It's laggy, it crashes incessantly when you do something like skip forward after skipping back, and it constantly fails to see the server running on the same LAN as the device. This happens across android TV, Roku, Chromestick, and Firestick. It happens across different locations, routers, and ISPs. Plex is high on my list of "things I use because there isn't anything better but I still hope their developers stub their little toe every day of their lives".
Plex has the annoying habit of stalling indefinitely for me. I don't know what it's doing. I believe it's transcoding so that it can "burn" in the subtitles, but I have no clue.
I've mostly given up on it. I use sshfs and mpv when sitting at a desktop, which actually does work flawlessly.
I find that using the Plex native app on my TV works great, a near perfect success rate. Meanwhile chromecasting Plex to a TV works quite poorly and has frequent problems.
Plex never worked for me. The autotagging was frequently wrong, their version of libass has been years out of date FOR years (did they ever update it since the mid-00’s VLC version?), and it kept trying to lossily transcode videos that it couldn’t handle (such as WMV7) and failing hard when it didn’t. I’ve replaced it with VLC+SMB and am way happier.
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.
I love open source. Jellyfin looks great, and Embey as well. But Plex "just works". I happily paid for a lifetime and would love to see more development. One of my most used services to watch home videos, listen to audiobooks, and stream my dvd collection.
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
I run both Plex and Jellyfin on my server. Plex is a little more polished but I don't see how they can sustain a business. Mainly use Plex but Jellyfin is not far behind and good enough if Plex goes belly up.
I guess, if folks Plex keeps bowing their heads to investors, and not really focus on the values which they started the company with, things may end up going south for them in the coming months.
It's so interesting to hear this one, I interviewed with them because I had some random linked in notification, I use their product, I wanted to be a part of it and I worked on a similar proprietary platform with live tv. Loved that work.
From the job spec, I was maybe over qualified but it was Plex, it's sitting in my NAS, remote servers phone and tablets, purchased multiple time from their odd monetary system with iOS.
It's a great product I was happy to get behind. The interview process was non-existent. One person spoke to me high level, maybe 20 mins, I imagined an intro to the interview process, I was happy in my job to not worry, I wasn't looking, it was plex in a random linkedin email, after a week I get a call.
"Everything great, we are excited etc etc, when would be good to talk to some of our 'engineers' ?"
Organised for 15 days ahead as I knew there was a release coming (a release for who I worked for) earlier so wanted to be fresh.
12 days passed with no feedback.
I email the whole CC of email to confirm.
No response. To this day. :)
Flaky. Amazing product but bad business choices.
I really do feel bad for the employees in this case because if they're even half of me, they wanted to do some good work.
Edit: Clarity context - And grammar.
I would like to point out too, within those 5 years they could have changed. Hired better (seems not)
To be honest, it sounds like a contingency recruiter found you, made sure you were interested, and then pitched you to a hiring manager. The hiring manager maybe didn't want to deal with the recruiter for one reason or another. I get cold recruiter spam on a daily basis...
You might blame the recruiter instead of the company, in that case.
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
hardware en/decoding for sure. im not sure if it is still the case, but prior to pruchasing the liftime account playing back media remotely from a phone/tablet was limited to 10 minutes. i have 3 kids, and we regularly take long drives. 10 mins would not cut it. i also share my content with family, which again i think is harder without a subscription.
A lot of "pirates" don't pirate movies and music because they don't want to pay for them, they do it because they want to own them and want an actually good and respectful user experience.
The biggest Plex users I know don't really pirate anyway. They mainly buy DVDs/Blu-Rays and rip them for use on Plex.
I pirate because a lot of content is not available in my country. I pay for all the services that are available to me. Plex serves me well for the ones I can't buy and I bought a lifetime subscription last year. If they asked for money for future updates I'd probably pay if the amount was reasonable.
I have been a paying supporter of Emby for a while now, and I feel like I bet on the wrong horse. Development is quite slow. It feels like only a skeleton crew is working on it compared to Jellyfin.
Neither Emby or Plex are perfect, but Plex seems to handle transcoding better. Emby still has the advantage over Jellyfin of a native Samsung Tizen app, even though Samsung TVs are slow as shit and it's a horrible experience.
IMO they should have focused on building paid addons. Their life-time license thing is well worth it, but it's bad for building a sustainable business around. Hell, I'd pay extra for a nice mobile music client. I'd pay extra for a better Python API. I'd pay extra for access to high-quality metadata, etc.
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.
Different people have different usage of features, where some features are worse or non-existent on Jellyfin.
You’d be correct to argue that just because something is arguably better in some ways does not mean that it’s alternative doesn’t work. But people are not good at expressing themselves.
I need to give Jellyfin a fair shake again. One thing I like about Plex is watching content off of my server, and then without logging out, switching to watching content on a friend’s server, on client devices like my smart TV.
Try comparing the Jellyfin and Plex apps on Xbox, i'd like to switch to only running Jellyfin but the 3rd party device support isn't good enough. Hopefully it'll improve
Anecdotes is not data, though. For me Plex “just works” but I’m careful not to dismiss the many comments I’m reading here about people that do have problems.
Readit News
Most of the WTF feature releases are rolled back or deprecated within a few releases. So the community tends to be right on with what Plex should be doing. There's a lot of pigheadedness on the engineering side it looks like.
I also agree the lifetime pass was a bad business move. I think a better model would have been something like "pay $45, get every release in this major version, new major versions come out approximately every year" or with an alternate tier that would be "use plex, pay $35 per year, get all the updates". It would have smoothed out revenue and focused development on paying customer demands.
As someone with a lifetime PlexPass, I also think it's a terrible move. I'm starting to regret signing up with a company that allows that sort of purchase. It underlies all of the problems I have with Plex.
Lifetime membership sounds great, but it changes the nature of my relationship with Plex. If I pay a subscription I'm a customer; I use their services but I pay more in a subscription than I cost them, everyone is happy with the arrangement. But while I'm coasting off of my $79 Lifetime Plex Pass that I bought years ago I'm not a customer, I don't represent a revenue stream, I represent a growing cost.
I've paid for them to provide a service, but I've also incentivized them to change the service in a way that I use it less, because me using the service costs them money. That dynamic explains the problems I have with Plex. It explains why they're seemingly incapable (unwilling) to fix long standing bugs, and it explains the development of features that their base doesn't want (because Live TV, rental, and gaming represent new markets with new potential subscribers)
I’m not saying you’re wrong or your issues are invalid, but I do think it is stable and capable, and they’ve done a lot of work to make it easy to use. A glance at the logs and you’ll see everything it’s doing to make it go smoothly. And it’s much better at this than it used to be.
I resorted to Plex after I couldn't get anything else working acceptably. I need my powerful media server to push out content that my anemic clients can support. The Raspberry Pis prefer 720p, the Intel Compute Stick is limited by it's Wireless bandwidth, the PS4 is hobbled by Sony Entertainment's desire to sell me their media.
OH and even though I didn't set anything up I was able to watch my shows when I was camping at the Seminoe Reservoir, WY two weeks ago on my phone. A pleasant surprise after the mosquitoes chased me into my tent.
I'm afraid that unraid will run into similar problems eventually.
I would probably pay $5-10 as a one time fee, but xbmc was an open source project so I’d never pay $100 or any recurring fee.
I just need a player for my local media. That’s not a recurring revenue source. That’s buy software once.
I loathe the subscription model.
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 in the “it just works” department, but if it does, I have no doubt what’s going to replace my Plex instance.
Being open-source it will hopefully not pushed to weird commercial ventures and use-cases not actually wanted by its users.
I've mostly given up on it. I use sshfs and mpv when sitting at a desktop, which actually does work flawlessly.
Anything over 1080p gets too laggy and it doesn’t buffer.
But I like enough to just download stuff in 720 and watch at that resolution.
I also have an old Android phone hooked up to old stereo system, and use the "Gelli" app for music playback. Also solid.
It's so interesting to hear this one, I interviewed with them because I had some random linked in notification, I use their product, I wanted to be a part of it and I worked on a similar proprietary platform with live tv. Loved that work.
From the job spec, I was maybe over qualified but it was Plex, it's sitting in my NAS, remote servers phone and tablets, purchased multiple time from their odd monetary system with iOS.
It's a great product I was happy to get behind. The interview process was non-existent. One person spoke to me high level, maybe 20 mins, I imagined an intro to the interview process, I was happy in my job to not worry, I wasn't looking, it was plex in a random linkedin email, after a week I get a call.
"Everything great, we are excited etc etc, when would be good to talk to some of our 'engineers' ?"
Organised for 15 days ahead as I knew there was a release coming (a release for who I worked for) earlier so wanted to be fresh.
12 days passed with no feedback. I email the whole CC of email to confirm.
No response. To this day. :)
Flaky. Amazing product but bad business choices. I really do feel bad for the employees in this case because if they're even half of me, they wanted to do some good work.
Edit: Clarity context - And grammar.
I would like to point out too, within those 5 years they could have changed. Hired better (seems not)
You might blame the recruiter instead of the company, in that case.
Ah you're right, I should have pointed out that the call was from someone else. It was someone 'internal' this time.
But yes you're absolutely right and this isn't a dig at recruiters, they're usually harder working than me.
and jellyfin is free & OSS
Sure there are other ways to do it, but Plex just makes it easy, so I paid
The biggest Plex users I know don't really pirate anyway. They mainly buy DVDs/Blu-Rays and rip them for use on Plex.
jellyfin is also great but lacks apps on some devices and is a 100% free OSS alternative
Neither Emby or Plex are perfect, but Plex seems to handle transcoding better. Emby still has the advantage over Jellyfin of a native Samsung Tizen app, even though Samsung TVs are slow as shit and it's a horrible experience.
I replaced Plex with it a year or so ago and it has just worked since then, without any issue or any particular setup required.
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.
You’d be correct to argue that just because something is arguably better in some ways does not mean that it’s alternative doesn’t work. But people are not good at expressing themselves.
I need to give Jellyfin a fair shake again. One thing I like about Plex is watching content off of my server, and then without logging out, switching to watching content on a friend’s server, on client devices like my smart TV.