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.
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.
But what infrastructure does this feature require? I’m direct connecting to my own personal server with perhaps credential handling and a handshake handled by Plex servers to connect. None of the media is passing through their servers - or it shouldn’t be if it is.
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In a nutshell, if your app isn’t able to make a direct connection to your Plex Media Server when you’re away from home, we can act as sort of a middle man and “relay” the stream from your server to your app. To accomplish this, your Plex Media Server establishes a secure connection to one of our Relay servers. Your app then also connects securely to the same Relay server and accesses the stream from your Plex Media Server. (In technical terms, the content is tunneled through.)
So, your Plex Media Server basically “relays” the media stream through our server so that your app can access it since the app can’t connect with your server directly.
Source: https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-server-through-relay/
It’s not a requirement to stream and it’s sort of dumb they are lumping this relay service as a part of the remote streaming. Remote streaming should be allowed for free - if you are not a subscriber. The relay should just be a paid service, which makes sense. But if it’s a direct connection to my server, it should be free.
That being said, I understand how Plex may have built some technical debt into this relay system. It might be hard for them to decouple the relay from the remote streaming. What they should have done is:
We are removing the relay service as a free service, but you can still do remote streaming with a direct connection.
And they should have built their architecture in a way that’s easy to decouple the two services.
Thanks for that - I wasn’t aware of the relay service, but completely agree that this is what they should be charging for and not the remote play feature in its entirety. I’ll probably drag it out for a while by refusing to update the app and server… Might be able to make it work with Tailscale as others have suggested.
In the past I’ve paid for a month or two when I wanted to download to my devices remotely (and I think that’s the singular feature that I’ve ever cared about in the Plex pass). But to take features away and then try and charge me for them is a bridge too far, I can’t support that bad behavior.
I paid for the lifetime membership ~6 years ago so I’m going to stick with it. Plus I just use it for my own home. It’s not like I’m serving a bunch of other clients. But I’ll switch to Jellyfin if the lifetime membership ever gets taken away.
I considered it when they warned about the increase and offered it at $75, but I just didn’t have the money to spend back then. Felt pretty stupid for not doing it, but I don’t even know what paid features they offer, and I’m clearly not missing them.
99% of my usage is at home as well, so this is unlikely to affect me - until that random 1% anyhow.
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Fuck this. What the absolute fuck lmao they just decided to kneecap their entire business model.
I was even going to get a lifetime subscription later this year when they usually put the price down. Not anymore
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?
Jellyfin needs to partner with someone people can pay a very low and reasonable and/or one-time fee to enable remote streaming without the fuss of setting up either dangerous port-forwarding or the complexity of reverse proxies (paying for a domain-name, the set-up itself including certificates, keeping it updated for security purposes).
And no a VPN is not a solution, the difficulty for non-technical users in setting up a VPN (if it’s even possible, on smart-tvs it’s almost always not, and I don’t think devices like AppleTV and other streaming boxes often support them) is too high and it’s an unwanted annoyance even for technical users.
I’m not talking about streaming video’s through someone else’s servers or using their bandwidth. I’m talking about the connection phase of clients and servers where Plex acts like an enhanced dynamic DNS service with authentication. They have an agent on the local media server which sends to the remote web service of the third party the IP address, the port configured for use, the account or server name, etc. When a client tries to connect they go to this remote web service with the servername/username info, the web service authenticates them then gives them the current IP address and any other information necessary. It then sends some data to the local Jellyfin server about the connecting client to enable that connection and then the local media Jellyfin server and the client talk directly and stream directly.
Importantly the cost of running this authentication and IP address tracking scheme would be minimal per Jellyfin server. You could charge $5/year for up to 20 unique remote clients and come out ahead with a slight profit which could be put back into Jellyfin development and things like their own hosting costs for code, etc. Even better if they offer lifetime for this at $60-$80 they’d get a decent chunk of cash up-front to use for development (with reasonable use restrictions per account so someone hosting stuff in Hetzner or whatever and serving 300 people with 400 devices will need to pay more because they’re clearly doing this for profit and can afford to throw some more money at Jellyfin).
Until Jellyfin offers something that JUST WORKS like that it’s not going to be a replacement for Plex, whatever other improvements they offer to users it’s still a burden for the server runner to set up remote streaming in a way that isn’t either incredibly dangerous (port forwarding) OR either involves paying money to third parties AND/OR the trouble of running your own reverse proxy and/or involves walking users through complicated set-up process for each device that you have to repeat if you change anything major like your domain name when using a VPN.
So glad i switched to jellyfin half a year ago
Same. My wife also just asked me to get a bunch of audio books too…so looks like I have to set up that now
I would recommend audiobookshelf for the audiobooks, especially if you have your stuff running in docker. It seemed to me like the solutions to force Plex or jellyfin to do books were a bit more hacky than I wanted.
The default Jellyfin client isn’t great for audiobooks.
For Apple iOS you might wanna look at https://github.com/LeoKlaus/plappa
For Android I would look at https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf
Personally I just download the audiobooks from Jellyfin and play it in https://f-droid.org/packages/com.prangesoftwaresolutions.audioanchor/Thank you
I run audiobookshelf and it’s amazing!
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/i-threw-away-audibles-app-and-now-i-self-host-my-audiobooks/
Check out this arstechnica article on AudioBookshelf. Should cover most of what you need to get started.
I’ve been meaning to set up a homeserver with plex recently but will defnitely go for jellyfin now that I read this thread.
As a result I imagine more users will look at other offerings such as Jellyfin.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin
https://jellyfin.org/This might be what it takes to at least get me to install it.
Do they live well together with the same shared media library?
Also, are there audiobook clients for Jellyfin?
I’ve heard rumors that they do play well together, but that’s people running it in docker with a “read-only” flag set for the content folder, with metadata saved in the config folder
I’ve used the Jellyfin app to listen to audio books, but for my purposes, it’s easier to run the separate client/server Audiobookshelf.
Makes sense. I’m fully dockerized so I’ve got that going for me
I found audiobooks to be kind of awkward on jellyfin. I’m now running Audiobookshelf for all my audiobooks, radio shows and podcasts. Together with the Lissen app on Android, it works very nicely!
And what about just plain music? Is Jellyfin or Audiobookshelf better suited for that?
For music, I selfhost navidrome. Works nicely with the Tempo app on android, or Feishin on desktop.
My Jellyfin and Plex containers were able to use the same locations for media.
I haven’t used Plex myself but Jellyfin doesn’t create any kind of meta files in the library folders. If that is true for Plex as well then I don’t see why it would be a problem to point them at the same shared library.
Plex stores its metadata in a special folder, and I’ve got the *arr stack managing the actual media files, so I think I can run them in parallel.
Looks like I’ve got a project for the weekend! Jebediah’s just gonna have to wait to go to Jool.
My experience is that both Plex and Jellyfin pointed at the same media files causes no issues.
I’ve had Jellyfin and Plex running using the same media directory for a couple years now. I think I had to make a couple small changes for things like seasons of a TV show to show up correctly, but nothing incredibly difficult. Definitely worth setting up and playing with periodically so when you do finally get sick of Plex, you’re ready to just switch.
Only thing I use Plex for exclusively now is when I’m flying, Plex has the Netflix style download option and Jellyfin just downloads the video file. I like Plex’s way better just from personal preference.
I didn’t enjoy using Jellyfin for audiobooks, on my android I use the Jellyfin client to download the book I wanna listen to and then I use AudioAnchor for listening to it.
Of you use docker plex and jellyfin arent gonna be messing with your media unless you delete/modify them within the respective clients (but then again thats what *arr is for)
They too put a whole lot behind their subscription though
https://emby.media/support/articles/Premiere-Feature-Matrix.htmlI bought a lifetime sub, now I don’t have to pay anything
FUCK Emby! What they did was worse than what Plex is doing even now
What did they do?
Basically, slammed the source code door shut after making promissory statements like “Don’t worry, we’ll always be open source” for years. With little/no notice they relicensed everything and pivoted to a closed source paywall model.
No discussion with the community or contributors, no alternatives explored, no polls or surveys. Just woke up one day to a “Sorry, but we’re going closed source because moneyyyy” blog post
Jellyfin was born right after, forked out of vengeance.
In retrospect we should have seen it coming when they would do odd little things, like keeping the build scripts closed source n crap, but eh hindsight and all that lol
Another user said that was because users were modifying the code to avoid supporting the project? I got a lifetime subscription relatively inexpensive and haven’t had trouble
Who said that? I did a search in the thread and no Ody said anything about that that I saw
So the issue is kind of similar to bitwarden; how to protect the premium bits when having an open source core?
They just didn’t handle it as gracefully.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/04/bitwarden_gpls_password_manager/Here’s the history regarding emby if you’re curious:
https://github.com/nvllsvm/emby-unlocked
I’ve said it for years that Plex is shit because of their license and the fact that you have no control everyone said no it’s fine it’s my media fucking look at it now
Why do people use this when Jellyfin exists?
Well that’s disappointing
Emby is a one time purchase for a lifetime subscription and I don’t regret it for one second. It’s open source and free, but some features are locked behind purchase. Worth every penny, in my opinion.
Isn’t enby closed source? Thats why Jellfyfin was created.
As far as I know emby is a jellyfin fork that I think they took closed source? I also went the emby route after getting annoyed at how much Plex was pushing their own content. Emby felt more polished to me than jellyfin, I get that there is some community resentment over some of their decisions but so far I haven’t had any regrets and have more control than with Plex.
Not JUST closed source, the project owner slammed the source shut with no discussion with the community and little notice nor did they even bother to consider any alternatives whatsoever
They went about it in the shittiest most unforgivable way possible for an open source project.
I don’t like it, but it’s a pragmatic decision.
Hosting for a simple website can be as little as a few bucks a month. That’s easy for any project to absorb, even if they are open-source with no one pulling a paycheque.
Streaming requires high-performance, high-bandwidth machines that cost anywhere from several dozen dollars to several hundred dollars a month. You build a resilient high-availability network, and you could easily be looking at several tens of thousands of dollars a month.
That isn’t easy to absorb, even for a for-profit company with clearly-defined revenue streams.
Some people want everything for free, but free doesn’t pay the bills.
Full disclosure: I don’t use the streaming feature. I prefer to grab actual copies to drop onto my NAS. I also don’t share to friends and family, as I am the only one I know of who uses Plex.
On one hand, it looks like this only applies to streaming from a remote server where neither the server owner or the user has Plex pass, so lifetime holders or committed server operators with a subscription can continue to provide access to all our non paying friends. It isn’t explicit whether non-paying users people who port forward / do reverse proxying themselves are affected but it sounds like they are, which is utter BS since direct connections hardly cost Plex anything.
It is however nice that they’re trading this for getting rid of the mobile unlock BS - it was always awkward explaining to friends that they could watch anywhere except on their phone unless they paid $5.
On the other hand, one notable side effect is that all non-lan streaming will now be associated with a paying server owner or a paying user, which makes it impossible to use Plex to share pirated media without a user on either end giving up PII / payment information. I have a gut feeling that this is an extension of the previous piracy crackdown on OVH(?) hosted servers meant to ensure they have the identity of all users who may be engaged in selling access.
Overall, yeah another reason to move to JF. I paid for lifetime more than a decade ago so I’m going to keep using Plex until my non-paying friends start to have issues, but I really hope this pushes more investment into JF apps. I really need a good android TV app that supports server transcoding (IIUC findroid’s beta TV builds are direct stream only).
“A subscription”
Its the same Plex pass subscription for people who don’t want to read a clickbait article.
Hypothetically, if I have tailscale setup, would that be a viable workaround since everything looks local on my tailnet?
100%. This is just due to the cost of hitting their servers in case you can’t reach your network
