Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

markcerqueira

I tried Jellyfin after some frustration with Plex and found it an inferior relative to Plex so I'm still on Plex. Lifetime Plex Pass is the solution here for now given Plex has not clawed back any features and in fact has added features to the pass.

BowBun

I switched to Jellyfin and also don't regret it. I agree the quality is lower, BUT that sacrifice in this case was worth it given Plex's shitty track record. If any of y'all are interested in helping the Jellyfin project, that would be dope!

ibizaman

More than the price, the privacy concerns and previous outrages justify using Jellyfin IMO.

thot_experiment

I've stopped paying for software outside of games almost entirely. SaaS is a universally terrible UX and it's impossible to actually purchase software anymore. Especially with local LLMs around to smooth out all the rough edges when it comes to FOSS life is good. The experience of never waking up to having something be worse off than it was before is sublime. I worry I over-index on my desire for control but it's just so so nice to have my tools work every day and never break, and never change under me and just always do the thing they are supposed to do.

amazingamazing

Every time I hear of people complaining about paying for software I wonder what people on here do for a living. Is everyone on here getting paid for developing software that’s free?

hamandcheese

I do not want to be in a business relationship with a company for a trivial amount of money, be it $29.99/yr or $69.99/yr or $249.99 lifetime. None of that is real money. You have no leverage, you do not own your own destiny. Complaining about the price hike is missing the whole point - Plex does not care about any individual customer, and that's the real problem (and the problem with just about every B2C business).

mehrshad

Plex started out great for us Boxee users left in the cold, but the writing was on the wall when they started offering rentals. Product development has hit a wall in the last two years. While its UI isn't as intricate, Infuse does a fantastic job of transcoding higher bitrate 1080 content over LAN and WAN, where Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby just stutter. The Plex AppleTV app hasn't received material updates in what seems like years - they haven't even rolled out the Liquid Glass effect like Infuse has. I would abandon Plex completely, but I still haven't found a capable app to remotely stream the 2.5TB of music on my Synology. Their recent price hike a few months ago converted me from a $5/mo Plex Pass customer to a $120 lifetime customer. I sense a new product tier in the works that us lifetime customers won't have access to without shelling out more.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r

As expected and as is usual I’ve read through another very salty justification for using Jellyfin that is based on anger or idealism. I rarely if ever see anyone making the argument that Jellyfin is actually materially better usability-wise. it’s always, “Plex is going down the shitter, you’ll see!”. OK then, if Jellyfin becomes better, then i’ll switch. isn’t the point that I own the media, so i can switch to whatever i want, whenever i want? Which to me is, when Jellyfin is better for my use-case. So many people act like this is like placing a bet on your favourite sports team. Like If one piece of software eventually gets bad then it was never worth using at all. We’re all going to die, eventually, so by that logic neither Plex nor Jellyfin would be worth using.

4rt

not sure if i'm retarded, but there's not a single mention of xbmc

mvanbaak

The article misses a couple points: - sharing. With plex this is easy using plex accounts - 3rd party integrations. There’s a whole ecosystem around plex. - a lot of things that are built in into plex are either not available in jellyfin or are offered as (no longer maintained) plugins - clients are far from the quality one needs

fuckinpuppers

I want to like jellyfin or any other option, it is disappointing people still have too many complaints, so I know it’s still not worth the time. Ultimately Plex is just fancy wrapper on ffmpeg and some media index/scraper, library management, and then native device apps. It’s crazy that something like jellyfin still hasn’t improved well enough.

HeyMeco

Jellyfin is so much ahead when it comes to hardware acceleration on different platforms that it is actually sad to see how Plex has not made any improvements in years

K3UL

To me it proves I was right to get the lifetime pass many years ago