this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.

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[–] [email protected] 92 points 2 days ago (18 children)

Hellooooo jellyfin!

Only use open source software

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I already pay for plex pass but I'm going to start looking into jelly fin out of principle. I will not support the enshitification of a service I use and this is how it starts. Soon they will have tiered subscriptions and then the cheap one will be taken away and the cheapest paid one will be stuffed with ads then all tiers will be stuffed with ads then they will jack up prices again or charge more for sharing with family or block it all together to force your family to get their own sub and the circle of enshitification will be complete.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I don't really have a problem with this. I paid for a lifetime quite a long time ago. Right now I only use Plex for plexamp and everything else is on jellyfin.

Is finamp at a point that it can replace plexamp yet?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

I've been enjoying Finamp, there's a big update on the way which is accessible if you opt in for the beta. On PC, I'm using Feishin while waiting for the Audioling, which is a rewrite of Feishin.

But I've been enjoying the combination of Finamp and Feishin a lot.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 days ago (7 children)

Can’t say I have a huge issue with this - Plex isn’t FOSS and the infrastructure to make this happen isn’t free. Other options are available if you don’t want to pay the fee.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

So then Photoprism is going to lock my photos and ask my mom for money to see them?

Its selfhosting, not freehosting for yet another asshole company.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 days ago (1 children)

They seem to be getting a lot of hate for this, but Plex is not FOSS... They have the roots but they currently have like 100 paid employees and are trying to make a business out of it. They have to do something to make money to pay people every month. My $75 10 years ago isn't going to do much for that... The fact that they've made it this far without folding is impressive.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (9 children)

Why would you expect this to NOT be paid? It requires them to be running servers to stream the media through, I wouldn't expect this to be a free feature.

I dislike Plex for several reasons, but asking for payment for stuff that costs them money is completely justified.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago

Wait a moment. I always thought that Plex’s servers only facilitate authentication (to verify your account) and discovery (to help your device find your server). They do not handle the actual media data. And if there is no Direct Remote Access, Relay usage is capped at 1 minute per day for free users. This looks like a cash grab to me.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It doesn't require Plex servers, though. I do this on jellyfin for free.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

How do you do this on Jellyfin? The only ways I'm familiar with is to expose Jellyfin to the internet or access it through Tailscale, would love to hear alternatives.

Edit: From the replies I think that either I don't understand how this feature works or many people here don't, so I'll give an overview of my understanding and explain why this is different from anything you can do on Jellyfin and what's the closest you can come.

You are running Plex-home in your house, Plex-home connects to Plex-server hosted by Plex and establishes a reverse connection that's only accessible by Plex-server, i.e. you can't access your Plex-home outside of your house. When you login on Plex you're logging in to Plex-server and if you're in the same network as Plex-home you get redirected to form a direct connection with it, if not (and for me Plex keeps failing this verification) you connect to Plex-server and every request you make gets forwarded to Plex-home and when you ask for media it gets routed through Plex-server. This is very different from exposing Plex-home directly to the internet, in order for someone online to access your Plex-home they need to have taken control of Plex-server and then they're limited by the API between those two (whichight be different from the Plex-home API) to try to escalate into your machine.

With Jellyfin there's no server side component, you access Jellyfin directly every time, so in order to access Jellyfin outside of your house it needs to be accessible for everyone. The closest you can come up with is using a third party authentication server, for example by having a VPS running Authentik/Authelia/etc and hosting Jellyfin behind that authentication. This gets you a similar level of security because someone would need to compromise your Auth and then your Jellyfin to get into your server. However I'm not sure Jellyfin clients would know how to handle a third party authentication service, and would probably just crap their pants and prevent you from logging in. You could still access it in a browser, but not on native clients like the one on your TV or Fire Stick.

If you don't have this VPS with authentication you're exposing Jellyfin directly to the internet, which means that any flaw in Jellyfin security immediately compromises your home server. And while I don't expect there to be many big or obvious flaws, there's a reason why stuff like Authelia or Authentik exists, and besides the convenience of a SSO they exist because proper authentication is hard and has many pitfalls, and they offer security in the knowledge that their main focus is authentication, whereas on most other services authentication is just one of the features they offer so it might not be as secure.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (11 children)

My home connection is behind cgnat so I got a free VPS from oracle (provides a public ip address), install caddy on VPS, install tailscale on VPS and router, expose routes from LAN to tailscale network.

Now you can use caddy to expose, for example, a docker container (jellyfin) at 192.168.1.100 to subdomain.exampledomain.com with ssl cert provided by caddy.

VPS also requires some other stuff like ddclient and fail2ban.

I pieced this all together myself... it's doable if you spend some time reading.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (6 children)

It's not that hard to get a reverse proxy up, get a free DDNS, and a SSL certificate from let's encrypt.

https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2020-08-21-introducing-swag

This is a pretty solid one stop shop for handling all reverse proxy with SSL certificate generation and renewal for jellyfin and other applications like sonarr, radarr, transmission, ombi and lists of others that are pretty much drag and drop configuration files if you're not mucking with the application's default ports.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

That exposes Jellyfin to the internet, so it's my option 1.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Well this is a good reason to finish my migration to Jellyfin I think.

I only use remote streaming a couple times per year, so paying for plex pass just for that seems a bit silly. Their online-only account auth is also super annoying if the internet is down.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I use Jellyfin and VPN into my home network to stream on the go.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago
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