I've used Plex for years (for free) and, while I'd love it to be free forever with no caveats, I think that making remote streaming a paid feature is ultimately a good decision. They need income to keep the lights on, and I'd rather pay for the service I'm getting than receive a "free" service that comes with invasive advertising or at the cost of privacy.<p>That said, I have noticed Plex pushing paid content and just because I haven't noticed my privacy being compromised doesn't mean I'm in the clear, so if other people have insight I'd be interested to hear about it before I commit to a subscription.
My father-in-law convinced me to move over to jellyfin last month, and I'm honestly feeling really good about it. It has some quirks that a long time Plex user might find irksome, but it just _works_. The winning point for me was that there is no analytics. The sign in is local. Plex is still super cool, but I feel like Jellyfin is closing the gap!
One important note:<p>> Does this affect content from music and photo libraries?<p>> The announced changes for remote streaming of personal content from a Plex Media Server apply only to movie/TV/video media. This does not affect music or photo streaming to our dedicated Plexamp and Plex Photos apps.<p>If I'm reading right, users like me who primarily use it for music and audiobooks (via the Prologue app) are not affected.
Lifetime Plex Pass subscriber, here.<p>This is a boneheaded move on their part. They didn't <i>have</i> to create this extraneous infrastructure of data analytics and web proxies for sign-ins, they could have just stuck with a competent media server platform that was lean and mean. I bought a Plex Pass because I wanted to support ongoing development, and my household members gladly paid the mobile activation charges because Plex provided a really great experience all told - and competitors (like Jellyfin) simply weren't comparable in features or stability to Plex at the time.<p>Fast forward to today, and I'm honestly considering migrating to Jellyfin despite being a lifetime Plex Pass subscriber. Seeing the odd article about them disabling accounts of larger library sharers (like those sharing with a large family or terabytes of streams a month) already gave me pause enough to setup Wireguard to try and hide remote streaming metrics, but these changes really make me want to get off Plex wholesale. Between its database corruption on migrations, its overly-aggressive content scanners overriding curated file metadata and embedded artwork for whatever AI slop it prefers from elsewhere, and the container explicitly stating it relies on file locking for its database (and therefore not widely compatible with shared filesystems, <i>which is a key point of using containers and container orchestration</i>), I'm honestly kind of done babysitting a piece of software that used to be fire-and-forget.<p>These changes mean I'll be spending even more time onboarding or troubleshooting other users of the library, which limits my enjoyment of it. Good software shouldn't require constant maintenance and support, and Plex is not - in my subjective opinion - good software anymore.