Plex has confirmed that it will require a Remote Watch Pass or Plex Pass for remote streaming on its TV apps. The change is going into effect for the Roku app first, followed by all other TV apps and third-party clients in 2026.
Earlier this year, Plex increased its pricing for Plex Pass and stopped supporting all options for free remote streaming in the Plex apps, such as adding a custom server connection in the app settings. The company said at the time, “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.” That’s also when Plex introduced the Remote Watch Pass as a less expensive way to enable remote streaming again.
Plex is now rolling out the remote watch changes to its Roku TV app. If you have Plex Pass, or the owner of the server you’re streaming from has Plex Pass, you don’t need to do anything. Otherwise, if you are streaming on a different network from the server’s home network, you need Plex Pass or Remote Watch Pass.
Oh fuck off, dipshits. You chose this route despite the community that built you.
They make more money off of FAST then they do self hosting own media. Of course they are going to care less and less about the self hosters.
If Plex was 100% paid there a would be zero complaints.
In that case, I think no one would’ve used Plex in the first place. But yeah, I think it should be that way ideally.
This makes me glad I went with Jellyfin for my home server
Cue all the users with lifetime passes not seeing that this is slowly becoming a problem…
Abandoning streaming services only to become a serf of another commercial subscription service seems like such a bizarre move that I really don’t understand how Plex users even exist.
I have a lifetime pass and stopped using it. I got my money’s worth over the years. No regrets.
Same. I finally switched over to jellyfin recently as it was low down on a long list of stuff I want to do, let alone need to do. I feel like I got my worth and if things mess up with jellyfin, I’ve got a temporary backup option to spin up without having to give a single penny more. Fingers crossed, no more of my data either seeing as it’s all uninstalled.
Switched my users to Jellyfin this spring when Plex first announced this move, pretty seamless transition.
I actually prefer Jellyfin and it’s UI compared to the new one Plex rolled out on Roku, what a mess that is to navigate now.
Fuuuuuck plex
For the past like 5-7 years I’ve said consistently that the second plex took VC money the writing was on the wall and that they would eventually and consistently take actions hostile towards their consumers and doing what they can to both move to SaaS and alienate lifetime pass users as well as distance themselves from their core purpose of sharing collections of pirated media hidden behind the thinly veneered “for tobacco use only” bullshit of “actually you can just rip your own physical media”
Every time I post, whether it’s banning the ability to serve on hetzner, putting ads all over the app and starting to collect data, increasing monetization, etc and talk about how it’s inherently going to continue getting worse plex users inevitably come out of the woodwork to be like “well this is overblown, plex is so good it’s worth getting fucked, jellyfin is slightly harder since it’s not backed by 40 million dollars of devil money that demands endless growth until the product is ruined”
As long as those people who are willing to get walked all over exist, that demand a slightly easier existence over one that serves them, every product and service will continue to get worse and worse while a small group of people get fat off of endless subscriptions
Reposting something from r/Plex because the mods are bitch-babies with minimal changes:
If you pay money for something, you do not own it. It is not entirely yours.
You pay, that shit’s proprietary, you didnt make it, you can’t see the insides. Why would any self respecting sociopath give you something without including a backdoor, data logging/tracking, and a string to pull it back?
You steal something, or download more anonymously, it isn’t immediately connected to you, it may not have the backdoors activated, and you probably cut that string when you acquired it. You might even have to fuck around in the guts and modify shit so it can’t be remotely bricked tracked etc.
Applies to physical goods up to and including housing too. The state wants me out, I’m out. Can happen for a lot of reasons, and no amount of obedience or investment keeps you 100% safe. In a squat, ive already defended myself, proven their power, at least what they’re willing to exercise, cannot dislodge me. The place is truly mine.
You buy from the company store, you don’t own shit.
Unfortunately Jellyfin still has issues, I was trying the latest version earlier, a movie I was watching started skipping on jellyfin, worked fine on Plex. I also looked at moving over watching stuff with friends to jellyfin, we tried the syncplay feature, it kept stuttering and stopping (auto match was off, as default), and we just gave up after a minute or two and just went back to Plex.
I want to like jellyfin, and the latest releases have improved a lot of the performance issues I used to have, but man is it hard to love moving to it. Sure foss and there’s lots of cool plugins, but everything else has just been a worse experience for me.
Yeah, like I said, you have to do some work with FOSS.
Check logs, reach out to support forums, etc.
Alternatively have something that is more likely to “just work” at the cost of data collection and profiling and increasingly restrictive software licensing designed to drive you towards service delivery license models (eg monthly payments), at a minimum
is plex more mature? Yes of course, it has had injections of over 40 million dollars of devil money plus whatever they’ve raised from you. Jellyfin would likely catch up significantly with such funding, but remember that such funding always comes with obligations that compromise the product and fuck over the community that actually cares about usability and core features (see: Reddit, MySpace, Facebook, amazon, Google and every Google product, Netflix, etc etc etc etc etc)
I tried setting up Jellyfin a while ago, but ran into a lot of difficulties with TV show matching. Plex is a lot better at grabbing a pack of loosely organized files and understanding episode structure without renaming or moving files, which is great for continuing to seed files that are in the library.
I haven’t seen anyone discuss this, so maybe I’m doing something wrong? If not, this is the one major blocker that I have before rolling it out Jellyfin as an alternative to the people I’ve shared my plex server with.
Really want that in place because the writing seems to be on the wall (in flashing neon) about the direction Plex is going
Plex is a lot better at grabbing a pack of loosely organized files and understanding episode structure without renaming or moving files, which is great for continuing to seed files that are in the library.
You may want to look into the *arr suite. Sonarr for managing TV show downloads, Radarr for managing movie downloads, Jellyseerr for managing media requests, Prowlarr for managing torrent/usenet indexers (search engines), Cleanuparr for automatic download management, and Huntarr for automatic downloads.
I haven’t seen anyone discuss this, so maybe I’m doing something wrong?
The go-to these days is to use hardlinks, which will allow you to have the files show up in two places at once. Sort of like a shortcut, but it actually shows the true file instead of simply pointing to a different file location. One stays in your torrent’s location for seeding, and a second hardlink is created in your media folder, with proper naming structure for Plex/Jellyfin to find. The *arr suite automates that process. It tracks your downloads, and automatically creates Plex/Jellyfin file names in the corresponding library folders when the download is completed.
It’s the best in every sense:
- You can continue seeding.
- You don’t need to keep multiple copies of the same file, because the hardlink in your library folder is pointing to the same file as the torrent. So it doesn’t take up twice as much space on your drive.
- You get proper naming conventions for your media discovery.
- You don’t need to manually manage your library.
The big downside to hardlinks is that they can’t be used across drives or partitions. The hardlink can only point to a file on the same drive. So if your torrent download folder is on a different drive than your library folders, you can’t use hardlinks.
Not necessarily the same drive but the same pool. I have a ZFS pool with 6 drives and can use hardlinks just fine.
Yeah, I guess I should have been more clear. Hardlinks also work for things like RAID drives. But if your PC has a C:/ and D:/ drive, you can’t hardlink across the two.
I ended up using tiny media manager to move and rename all of my files. Fixes that issue.
It took me awhile to figure out the correct setup to get Sonarr, qbittorrent, and Jellyfin all to play nicely together, but once you get it figured out, it transparently addresses the problems of folder structure and allowing you to keep seeding content.
I had the same issue as you, initially, where I had to do a ton of library maintenance in Jellyfin. But since using Sonarr to monitor and import media from torrents to a structured media library, Jellyfin has been pretty hands-off
Well if you want to continue with torrents, use Sonarr configured to torrent and configure it to move files by linking instead of moving
But I would HIGHLY recommend you switch to usenet for your source. You do have to have one or a couple cheap (talking 9-20$ a YEAR) indexer subscriptions and a subscription to a usenet provider itself (7-30$/month) but it’s SO much faster, easier and you don’t need to worry about seeding.
I think it’s a common practice to keep the original file in the torrent folder and create a hard link with proper naming in the media folder.
I got around that by being a bad pirate. If I’ve watched it, chances are I’m nuking it in a few days from my download drive to make room for something else.
I was wondering how long before they dropped that other shoe.
I bought Plexpass when it was $70. Got my money out of it. The centralized login, ssl, caching and proxy are probably worth paying something for.
That said, I’ve mostly walked away from them over privacy concerns and an utter refusal to add community-requested features while removing actively used features.
Argh that was so useful in hotels. I’d take a little roku stick and poof.
I was wondering how long before they dropped that other shoe.
I bought Plexpass when it was $70. Got my money out of it. The centralized login, ssl, caching and proxy are probably worth paying something for.
That said, I’ve mostly walked away from them over privacy concerns and an utter refusal to add community-requested features while removing actively used features.
This makes me glad I went with Jellyfin for my home server
I always thought less of people whenever they mentioned plex.
Why? Plex was one of the original self hosted streaming platforms and for a long time was pretty much the only option. We have more options now, and those still on Plex, I imagine, are because they don’t have the time or capacity to perform a migration. So they stick with what they’ve got until it breaks.
Maybe this will be the one that breaks it.
I was a Plex holdout until 3 months ago. I wanted off Plex for the last 2 years but just never had the time.
For those waiting, don’t be like me, it’s easier than you think.
I switched to Jellyfin about 4 years ago, no regrets. If I’m traveling I tunnel into my home server and watch whatever I want. As most of us, I started in Plex because back then I was with Synology (cheapest NAS they had back then). The moment I moved to building and maintaining my own server, I tried JF, liked it from day one, learned to deal with the caveats and fix them (took me a while), and have been on it since then.
What was the migration like? I’ve been looking to get off Plex for a while now but like you say, haven’t had the time nor the energy.
Is it as simple as just installing it and pointing it at my NAS?
Same I put off and might still be on it if I didn’t loose my watch history. I figured if I was starting over might as well be with FOSS.
It makes more sense to just use free streaming sites or save videos to a storage drive.
Plex, like framework, seemed like corporate shite that wannabe nerds fell for to fit in with other wannabes.
Obvious troll account.
