As part of Plex's 'pro' week, they're offering 40% off the first year of a Premium Plex Pass (new subscribers only).
Offer expires 06:59 UTC Saturday, September 27.
It's still a bit pricey at $66, but might be a good option for someone interested in Premium, but not wanting to purchase a lifetime pass just yet (or waiting for a lifetime discount code).
Just to beat the commenters, yes, Jellyfin is a great alternative that people should consider.
It’s an alternative. But not a great one. The clients are especially 💩
Infuse + Jellyfin is absolute peak if you’re an AppleTV /iOS user.
I keep giving Infuse + Plex a go. But always end up going back to the native Plex app.
Vidhub is a good alternative to Infuse as well. Not quite as good but improving quickly and was like $10 for lifetime last i checked.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vidhub-video-library-player/id…
@stratbargain: Glad Infuse is getting some competition. I've never liked the devs of Infuse. So many basic (and obvious) feature requests are ignored or promised but take years to come.
Like jumping to a letter in the library. It took years for that features to be added and when it finally was it's still flakey in my experience.
When people complain they carry on like they're an opensource project run by volunteers. If they're expecting people to pay rather expensive subscriptions, people have a right to expect decent ongoing support.
Absolutely! Self-hosting is the way.
For my use case, Plex is still the easiest to navigate for the family. Whilst this isn't the deal, I bought the lifetime pass on sale a few years ago, and do not regret it at all.
Each time I set up Jellyfin to give it another try, I'm always finding something a little janky about it. Last time it was the memory usage almost capping out my 8gb server (presumably some memory leak somewhere), before that it was missing library files of shows I watched the night before. The clients are not really all that great either, and Infuse - while it's the best - costs money, something I try to avoid when I'm selfhosting.
I fully support the development work going on with Jellyfin, and I think they're doing some great stuff, but it's just not for me. I'll give it another go at Christmas
Yep. I hope Jellyfin gets there eventually. But I've been hoping for that for years. Always feels half finished.
Highly recommend the lifetime pass!
So annoyed I didn't get before it shot up to $360. No way I'm paying that….
It's that much now? Holy hell… Glad I got it for $60~ back in the day.
Though one trick is to log in… Add it to the cart, then close the tab. Often they will do the whole "you left something in your cart" discount via email in a few days.
You must have got on board early… I bought in June 2019 and it was $132AUD then.
Plex is going to price themselves out of the market at this rate. The service relies on people providing all their own hardware and content, there's only so much people are willing to shell out for convenience.
The service relies on people providing all their own hardware and content
Plex is clearly moving away from this being their primary focus.
@PainToad: With Stremio and the like yes but for stalwarts like us who actually like controlling what we consume (and the bad part of managing it), it will always be attractive.
With Torbox and Stremio I now use Plex for a highly curated library of film, and then my music which is quite esoteric. Spotify and the like can't compare, both in library and player options/mixes/playlists.
Must say I'm not a fan of all the Tubi crap that's on there so just turn it off.
My only real negative to Plex is that the lyrics system for music is server-based and does not read metadata from your files. So they have to know your music (I get a lot of misses) and you have to request it each time you play the song. No way to override it.
@PainToad: I think Plex is TRYING to move away from that, but it's what the vast, vast majority of their users actually want it for. I've had Plex pass for years and don't think I've ever watched anything from Plex's own content.
@theredkrawler: Agree, also got it for $132 2019. Been worth it though. Especially now with faster upload speed from the other day. No more transcoding for remote play
Every time I see someone rave about the lifetime pass, it usually ends up being that they bought it ages ago and on sale 🫠
No doubt it has been worth it for them, but it's definitely terrible value now.
IF only Stremio had better interface and parental options like Plex, then I could forego self-streaming. Until then, I've had Plexpass Lifetime since (just checked) 2016. Wow.
Jellyfin is close but harder for the fam to use.
I think I got it for ~$70 on sale from $160 back then, which I thought was heaps at the time. Absolutely no regrets!
I've been using plex for years, and while it definitely has its downsides, it feels like the best option for most people for self hosting media. There are other options like emby and jellyfin, and while I've not tried emby before, I've been keeping an eye on jellyfin every so often, since a free, open source version of plex would be amazing if it worked just as well.
If anyone's curious, I did a trial for jellyfin a while ago to compare how it holds up against plex to see whether it was worth swapping over or not. For reference, while I'm pretty tech savvy (I have HA, plex and a couple of other similar things self hosted and running), it's more on the software and coding side of things; I have a couple of docker things running that I've followed instructions for, but I can't set up anything major or know a lot about networking stuff. Maybe some of my issues could be fixed with more knowledge, but I'll talk about that later too.
So, one thing I love about plex is its ease of use. I self host, but also share my server with about half a dozen family and friends, some of whom aren't hugely tech savvy. For plex, they sign in, see my server and they can choose whatever movie/tv show they want. With jellyfin, you have to connect remotely using an IP address - I did the trail with one of my more tech savvy friends, but that day for some reason my IP changed a few times. Every time he wanted to watch something, he had to contact me first to ask for my IP, which could get annoying when you have a lot of people wanting to watch your server. Also trying to teach mum about IP addresses seems like a nightmare!
Secondly is my library. These days I have all my media named as {media name}{year}, but when I started, I didn't have the year in the title. With plex, even though I didn't have the year in the title, out of the 500ish movies I had at the time, I had maybe 1-2 times when plex misidentified my media and I needed to manually fix it. When I booted up jellyfin to test it, it found all 500 movies, but about 150-160 of them were mismatched; some were minor mismatches, but some were the entirely wrong movies and year and not even a movie I have in my library.
Lastly, when I looked at it, plex had a lot more client support. When I started streaming, one of my users had a PS4 and no smart TV, so there would be no way for them to watch my media. Sure, as time goes on, people tend to have smart TVs now, so they could at least use the browser version of jellyfin, but it's not a guarantee. With plex though, whether people have an old chromecast/gaming console on a non-smart TV or a client with a native app, plex has a lot more coverage.
Now, given all that, I'm sure there are ways that are out of my knowledge that might fix these issues - for the IP I'm sure there'd be a way to make it static so my remote users wouldn't have to ask me for my IP multiple times per day. I'm sure that if I had done my naming correctly, jellyfin wouldn't have had so many mismatches. And I'm sure there's more jellyfin clients that are being made and more user friendly ways to access it on devices without a native app. But with plex, it just works. You download the native app, log into your account and you see my server and media there ready to go. However, jellyfin has a lot of downsides for those points. That said, if you're someone who enjoys tinkering with things, or if you're just wanting a media server for yourself and don't want to share access with friends, jellyfin might be worth checking out. But for everyone else, I think plex might be the way
While I've heard of it in passing, I don't use kodi - what exactly is it? Would this be a new front end for my plex server on the TV if I wanted to install it?
Hmm Kodi is bit of a shit show… but probably has the biggest community. I've used it since way back on the original Xbox, which I believe it was originally created for (as XBMC) and tried it again a few times.
It's got plug-ins for probably anything and everything, which is a double edged sword.
The setup can be painful, and there is sooooo much chaff to sort through.
That said, I think it's hardware compatibilituy is unmatched…?
Exactly. You use Plex as the library, and Kodi as the front end UI. As long as you have a working plex library, you then just setup kodi to access it. In fact if you start watching something on kodi, you can stop the playback, go to a plex client and start watching it exactly where you left off. It is seamless. All the settings are stored in the plex library.
The benefit of using Kodi is that you can tailor how the UI looks/feels with a number of different 'skins', and there a number of different settings that you won't get with plex (especially if you are using a non PC app e.g. TV, android, appletv etc).
It takes a bit of work to set it up (full instructions on the site I linked), but for me it was well worth it. I use it on my TCL C855 tv (Kodi app). Works brilliantly.
:)
@starionx: I mean, apart from having a customisable front end UI, that just sounds like plex with extra steps? Like, plex can pause playback on one client and resume on another at the same place, so I'm not sure what I'm missing about it? Also I had a quick look at Kodi skins and they seemed ok, but nothing groundbreaking to me - I know it's used a lot but I think I'm happy enough with the plex UI to leave it as it for now
Their software is getting worse, but their software security is getting better: only 1 data breach, and 1 day zero vulnerability this year.
Will jump ship when jellyfin has a Samsung TV client (that doesnt require side loading).
Will jump ship when jellyfin has a Samsung TV client (that doesnt require side loading).
Plex being preinstalled (or at least easily installable) on TVs has to be the number 1 reason it's still so popular.
I have Jellyfin running side by side with Plex which feed from the same content, but everyone just uses Plex because its easier… even if they have to pay for the privilige. No one can be arsed trying to work out how to side load which is completely fair enough.
any lifetime pass deals?
Jellyfin is a great alternative that people should consider