[hddherman]

If true, then this will probably reignite discussions around Plex requiring that you authenticate with their servers when using the service to view content that you're hosting on your own hardware.

If anyone is curious, then alternatives like Jellyfin exist. It's a bit different and may not have all the features you need, but it works quite well in my experience.

[smileybarry]

Plex doesn't require account linking IIRC, it's heavily suggested but you can just access Plex locally without an account.[1]

But otherwise I've switched to Infuse[2] since then, it indexes sources reliably on its own (no manual editing though) and saves the entire need for a server if you use it with some cloud storage. Basically replaced my Plex server, with the added bonus of out-of-home streaming without needing high upload. The major disadvantage is that it's Apple-only.

1: https://support.plex.tv/articles/207538527-do-i-need-a-plex-... 2: https://firecore.com/infuse

[koheripbal]

This is not correct. I've tried the LAN no-login settings and it does not work for many devices (Roku/smart tv/phones). They also fail if you're not on the same subnet as Plex.

For this infuriating reason, moving off of Plex is on my to-do list.

[arrakeen]

yup--the weekend my internet went out was a real eye-opener and a number of things in my house got the axe including plex. i use kodi now and while its UX is nowhere near as good as plex, at least it works with a LAN-only connection

[smileybarry]

Oh definitely, once you connect it to an account it nearly refuses to work locally. I tried to set up a cloud-based Plex instance once and I connected it too early, breaking it because UPNP/port forwarding didn't work (yet) and local access was auto-disabled. Even enabled it only half-worked.

[jjcon]

Interesting - I don’t have any issues accessing my server without internet, the default for me seems to be run local and then via internet.

[_boffin_]

I’m currently not logging in while using plex. Just providing that datapoint

edit:

You can also do this: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200890058-authentication-fo...

[jjeaff]

It is very client device dependent. And I found that when my internet went out, most devices would not work. But after several hours and some restarts it finally started working on some devices. I think this was because of some dns caching issues.

[colechristensen]

Are there alternatives with smart tv apps?

[0xC0ncord]

Jellyfin has an official app for Roku but I am not sure about other platforms like webOS.

[eljimmy]

It appears it does exist: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-webos

[Zhyl]

No app for webOS (although emby exists). You can, of course, use the Web player over your local network.

[MikusR]

Just released on Official store. https://jellyfin.org/posts/webos-july2022/

[rudemaniac]

But full functionality on Roku is really lacking. They really have not put too much into the Roku client and made the Amazon client way better.

[yots]

Emby is close, it missed some video features last I checked but it may be good enough for you.

[SamuelAdams]

I recently tried this on my setup, two Roku clients and a plex server. Despite my best efforts I could not get subtitles to work unless I had an account signed in with the preferred subtitle options configured for the account.

Being hard of hearing, subtitles are a big deal. I wonder if this is an ADA violation?

[smileybarry]

It'll probably get answered with "Oops, this is an app bug and it's best if you log in anyway!"

What if you change the global accessibility settings to prefer subtitles? (Or just set SDH/CC somewhere in system settings) I know on Google/Android TV and Apple TV it default-enables subtitles in some apps.

[drexlspivey]

With infuse plus cloud storage any transcoding happens locally though which is a problem with weaker devices

[smileybarry]

That's true, but I hate transcoding anyway so I just get HEVC when possible and play natively on Apple TV and co. (not casting).

[reaperducer]

Since you have an AppleTV, what is the advantage to you of using Plex instead of just an iTunes instance with Home Sharing turned on? Do you have non-Apple devices you're trying to stream to, or something else?

I tried Plex years ago, and it wasn't to my liking because it was philosophically like Windows (Load the filename up with show information and constantly ping the internet for matches) instead of macOS (Metadata where it belongs — with the file).

I'm considering adding a Sony phone to my household, so now that Plex is in the news, this reminded me to check it out again.

[jmuguy]

Well are you pirating stuff? I've been using Plex for years now and so its mostly just what I know but when I first started using it the main things it did were a) handle codec issues (transcoding on the fly when needed) b) pulling metadata and images for movies and shows based on title and year in the file name. C) allow remote users (friends, family, etc) access to your library via the app, which works out to being very similar to a regular streaming service from their perspective. Basically nothing else did that and so it had a big leg up over XBMC and other apps folks used back then.

If you're purchasing everything through iTunes (do people still purchase stuff through whatever is "iTunes" now? I guess I don't know that either) I assume its handling transcoding/different device playback and delivering all the metadata for you.

Also once Plex pulls metadata down you're right that it doesn't store it with the file but AFAIK its not constantly hitting the net to pull that info down - it keeps a local cache.

I will say at this point - I wouldn't bother switching to Plex and look for an alternative like Infuse. The company is clearly under pressure to monetize beyond the Plexpass subscription you can buy. They've been steadily adding crap no one wants and automatically jamming it into the home screen of the app where you then have to go turn it off. Its just a matter of time before they cross a line somewhere and people jump ship. When that happens I imagine some of the open source alternatives (Jellyfin) will see a huge influx of development. I haven't switched just because I don't want to be hassled with figuring out a new system.

[reaperducer]

Not pirating or buying from iTunes. I rip my own media — CDs, DVDs, blu-rays, and records — which means I don't have to worry about a million distant codecs. From your description, it sounds like that's the only benefit of using something like Plex.

[smileybarry]

The Apple TV was the last purchase a few months ago, and my main PC is Windows. I used iTunes as a media library years ago but Home Sharing never worked well for me, it regularly just didn't work (Bonjour for Windows' fault) or it lagged.

Ironically I like Plex & Infuse for the reason you hate them, I just give them files whose metadata is just their filename and they can match them to what they really are. No need to keep all the data in media container tags, and a thumbnail/poster that will be pixelated in a few years because something will scale it wrong.

Sony is a valid option given their love for DLNA but I just never really liked the tech. Hell, I have statically-reserved IPs & DNS-registered names for everything in my home.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot -- the main reason I moved off Plex (and would hate iTunes Home Sharing) is I don't leave my PC on. I switch it off daily and don't like to treat it like a server, and to keep using Plex would require setting up a NAS or something (I had my collection on a local SSD for a while).

[sokoloff]

For me, the primary issue is that the Apple TV isn't good enough to be the most-commonly-used device driving the display. FireTV (4K version) wins the battle for the living room display (and it's not even close, with TiVo being 2nd and Apple TV a pretty distant 3rd).

To some extent, it's self-reinforcing. Once the FireTV gets a lead, all it has to do to maintain/extend that lead is reasonably support playback of whatever new format/source and Plex works great on it. If FireTV supported TV as well as TiVo does, it might end up with 100% of the living room display share.

(I also have Plex sharing to devices outside the house, but that's a <1% use case, mostly when it's us traveling somewhere and the kids wanting to watch something that's on Plex.)

[smileybarry]

Fair, I used Android TV (picked a TV with a decent chipset) before, and it played what I wanted well. The reason I got an Apple TV was because I loved Infuse on iOS, wanted some (easier) AirPods integration and found out all the apps I use are dramatically better on tvOS. Plus Android TV was starting to really annoy me with bugs and slowdowns.

I'm not in the US or mainland Europe so Fire and TiVo devices aren't really available or working well here, half their apps would just be blank.

[Sytten]

People on HN always complain about this. But the reality is that the one time payment you (maybe) gave for Plex is not enough to make a viable company. So they have to offer complementary products and for that you need an online account.

Normal people also want to have features like remote streaming, subtitles fetching, familly sharing, etc which are hard to do without centralized accounts. Not even mentionning securing your paid features which you have to do to survive. And that customer doesn't care about the login as long as it is up.

I don't anything plex could do to please this particular demand would ever be enough so for me they do well to ignore it since removing that would effectively kill their business.

[koheripbal]

I run a lot of self-hosted software services, many of which have their own internal account system and auth. None of the features you mentioned require 3rd party cloud based auth.

I did pay for Plex prior to the cloud auth change, so for me it's a bait and switch, but my concerns are much more about privacy.

One day Plex will be bought by a large media company, and my (and my kids') viewing data and library catalogue data will be owned by MGM, Disney, Fox, etc...

[zexodus]

Perhaps the most important thing about Jellyfin is that it's open source. I really wish the project received a little bit more love.

[wallmountedtv]

I also want to bring into light that Jellyfin is not very secure either [1], its sadly not in a great place to replace Plex still.

1: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415

[nijave]

To be fair to the Jellyfin team, it seems they inherited a lot of tech debt from Emby which they've spent the last 2 years chipping away at.

It might not be in a great place now, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a reflection of the product

[nicoco]

Most of these issues require a malicious user, right? I think none of them really are a problem for a friends-and-family instance (as long as they don't get their creds stolen obv). For a single-user usage, none of these really are issues, are they?

[deadbunny]

As long as you're not opening JF up to the internet none of these are a real issue, so you're fine with a single person/house/network with trusted users.

[cipherboy]

The middle of the list had a media disclosure without any auth via the image API.

That would mean running a publicly accessible instance would be ill advised if you can about the privacy of what you host. Plex on the other hand somewhat encourages publicly accessible instances, so you can listen/watch while not at home.

(The caveat being, certain plugins disclose media to Plex but arguably that's a first or second party not some rando on the internet scraping stuff)

[unixhero]

Driveby scans happen all the time. Mass scan take 15 minutes to scan the entire internet, for instance.

[geerlingguy]

I've been running it for the past year and besides the occasional odd bug with media discovery, it's run great for me and my family for all our movies and TV a shows.

[JeremyNT]

Yes, it's shocking to me how many people are (apparently) willing to trust a closed source / SaaS product like Plex for this kind of thing.

Jellyfin may not be perfect but surely it's good enough for most use cases.

[gadders]

I like Jellyfin, but I need the Samsung client to be finished first. At least it looks like it has been started: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-tizen

[seanw444]

The build steps were a nightmare. That's mostly the fault of Samsung, but it was still very off-putting. Unless I was doing something wrong. It took me a couple full nights after work to finally get it done and on the TV, trying to set up Samsung's developer tools on multiple different machines. I dread having to do it again.

[gadders]

Does it work OK? Was it worth the effort?

[seanw444]

Yeah it's been working perfectly for me ever since I set it up last fall (maybe it was winter, can't remember). At least half a year. I'd say it's worth the effort, but the process still sucks.

One of the things I remember making it real difficult was that the UI of Samsung's dev tools app assumes you have the default light theme in GTK (or whatever widget toolkit they're using), and since I had a different dark theme, I couldn't see any of the icons.

So then I switched to one of my devices that were running Ubuntu 20.04 with Gnome, where the app would not launch due to something about "pixbuf". Side note - I'd had that particular error so many times in Ubuntu with various apps that it's the sole reason I eventually learned Arch (and tiling window managers), and haven't looked back since.

I finally managed to get it to launch and work correctly on Xubuntu running on my girlfriend's very, very old laptop that takes about 8 minutes to boot to full speed. So save yourself the headache, and run the Samsung dev tools app on an unmolested Linux installation, with no special theming, that is not vanilla Ubuntu.

[gadders]

I would if I had one. I'm windows-only currently. I guess I could spin up a VM but then I have networking issues...

Thanks for the feedback.

[shaunpud]

Has an app for the fire stick too which works really well

[encryptluks2]

They have done a great job, but ultimately I believe a tool like Go or Rust would work much better and the XML metadata format while standard is not very good. Would be nice to see YAML or even JSON. Kodi is my go to for the most part, but I will have to say Jellyfin is definitely more polished. It downloaded the transparent logo for the movie I was watching and displayed it so nicely when I started a movie. I remember Plex offering music themes when you were browsing a collection.. I wonder if Jellyfin does something similar already.

[moffkalast]

Kodi's pretty good too, and doesn't insist on showing unrelated online content you don't care about like Plex seems to.

[jaimex2]

Kodis always been the better option if you're remotely technical.

[Arainach]

I ran Kodi for years, but "always"?

* Kodi only works on my local network. It requires exposing my file shares on whatever VLAN my Kodi devices are on.

* Kodi is a pain to configure. To point it at the aforementioned file shares, I need to copy an XML configuration file, and getting this onto every device is a chicken and egg problem.

* Kodi requires each client to scan and sync the entire library at its CPU and bandwidth limits. My Plex server automatically scans and indexes my media.

* Plex allows me to access my content at the office, while travelling, and to share with friends

* Kodi doesn't transcode, requiring all of my client devices to have enough power and bandwidth to do so locally. Plex makes it much simpler to (for instance) stream a 4k video to a low power device

I know enough to have ran Kodi for years and intentionally switched to Plex full time

[jaimex2]

I don't think you fall into the remotely technical category group.

Kodi can do all those things but you wouldn't as it has much better options to achieve the same result.

[moffkalast]

> Plex allows me to access my content at the office, while travelling, and to share with friends

Bold of you to trust an opaque corporation with access to your network and the data they can log through that. I wouldn't even trust Synology with their account quick access thing, as seamless as they claim it to be.

I don't really see remote access being secure without it being a self hosted VPN.

[Arainach]

My employer can see the data patterns, and I'm struggling to understand why I should care. My media library is entirely legit (I have a crate of 100-disc spindles in the closet) and if they really want to know what movies and music I have, so what? They could see anything I do on Spotify or YouTube as easily, and seeing me stream a bunch of incoming data will throw off far fewer red flags than plugging in an external drive with media files.

If they asked, I'd show them exactly what's up. They haven't, so they don't seem to mind.

It's not full access to my network, it's access to a carefully curated set of media files transcoded through a service. There are no tax returns, no resumes, no porn. Just FLAC, MP3, and MKV.

[bombcar]

Xbox Media Center for LIFE

[gadders]

I just use Universal Media Server now and the built in media-browser on my Samsung TV. It's a bit janky but it works.

I've tried using Plex before and while the UI is nice, they don't seem to be able to write a video transcoder that doesn't have massive stuttering in it.

[rograndom]

It's using ffmpeg. It's limited by the CPU/GPU on the server. You can adjust the options to have it encode faster or higher quality.

[gadders]

Yeah, I'm it's solvable if dug under the covers and spent hours tweaking and running between the PC in the study and the TV in the living room, but Universal Media Server just works.

[BeetleB]

> If anyone is curious, then alternatives like Jellyfin exist. It's a bit different and may not have all the features you need, but it works quite well in my experience.

Jellyfin's DVR service is horrible compared to Plex. Practically unusable. And DVR is the reason I pay for Plex.

[tmm1]

Check out Channels DVR