One reason: It’s not FOSS, and because of that, the Capitalist profit motive will always push the creators/owners towards enshitification.
The same forces act upon FOSS too, but the difference is that FOSS has structural immunity built into it. If the software enshitifies, it can be forked and maintained by a community that values software freedom.
We’ve seen it happen time and again. Terraform, CentOS, RHEL, The Xen Hypervisor, etc. When companies try to take freedom away from FOSS, they fail, because their users and maintainers are empowered by FOSS licenses (especially restrictive ones like the GPL) and can fight back.
With proprietary software, the users are powerless, only the owners have control.
Don’t trust promises, good intentions, or corporate slogans. Trust free software and the open ecosystems they thrive in.
PS, Jellyfin is amazing ❤️
I just need Jellyfin to fix their subtitles issues on Apple TV and I’ll be all set. Swiftfin needs some work yet, though I’m told the fix is in the pipeline for release soon^™ (probably by Q1 next year?).
Goodness, how am I supposed to store and stream more entertainment than I could watch in a lifetime now?
Business. It’s business. Business has inescapable behaviors that manifest anytime it touches anything. It trades user experience for profit seeking. It’s not even complex. Profit always comes at the cost of product value and the purpose of business if profit. It always is, it always will be.
Meh, I went into plex settings on the server and just turned off all the bloat. Its all on one page. Not a big deal.
Stremio + Torrentio FTW
I’m going to call it like I saw it, a very long time ago.
<rant>
You have a product that is basically purpose built to make data hoarding and piracy practical, yet it requires a login with a central service. I don’t care what justification anyone thinks makes that worthwhile or even a good compromise. Signaling to any corporate entity that you’re in possession of such a thing is a bad idea to begin with. They shouldn’t even know you exist. That information, along with anything else you do with the product is compromising to you and can be sold for money if aggregated with everyone else’s data.
If you find this rant out of place in our modern world, I’d like to point to the concept of shifting baselines. This didn’t used to be normal and nothing short of greed continues the behavior. The technology before this ran/runs without anyone knowing. Consider VLC, or XBMC.
I never felt comfortable with Plex, glad I’ve got JellyFin.
Indeed. Seems every week Plex takes some action to enshitify their service more and more.
Plex has been off limits to me for along time. Just the fact they want to require auth with their central service for something I use for reasons rights holders would love to sue me into third world poverty over (muh Linux ISOs) is enough reason.
Them demanding that auth hook into the server makes me uneasy about what sort of metatdata they are currently, or could exfiltrate later on, should they want to or be demanded to.
Whole thing stinks of willingly being part of a honeypot.
I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this. But no, it’s just “4 ways in which Plex now sucks” which we all know already.
Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?
Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?
We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.
Plex is a private company…
I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this.
- Greed… do you really need 3 more?
Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?
Plex is a private company wanting money… Jellyfin is a voluteer-drive effort
Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?
Enshitification happens to privately develop products due to <checks notes> greed… Jellyfin is not a private company pushing a product for profit
We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.
Back to “greed”
As predicted, a one-dimensional answer.
Let’s say they want more money: they do have a healthy software subscriptions business. How can they get more by becoming the world’s tiniest streaming service? And won’t that cannibalize their subscriptions business as the experience gets shittier and shittier?
Some actual “whys” within this would be things like (made up, but for example)
-
the subscriptions business is dying - less than 1% of users ever buy a pass and efforts to increase that failed for (another reason here)
-
streaming services are dumping cash into viewer acquisition because a war is on for dominance in that space and Pled is capitalizing on that
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Plex has high overlap with gamers and are making good money on midroll gaming ads during these streams
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Plex has legal concerns about facilitating piracy - this is the real reason why sync is shit and they killed watch together. They are desperately trying to pivot out of their old business before they get sued - OR all this streaming nonsense gives them a kind of fig leaf over that somehow
See, issues can be complex and interesting. Just calling them greedy is neither. How is this the greedy play, even?
-
I prefer open source, but if I’m buying proprietary software, let’s do it fairly and sustainably. Don’t charge me a 1-time fee and then enshittify what I bought because your business model isn’t working. On the other hand, don’t charge me multiple times for the same software with a subscription. The most fair arrangement to both of us is to sell perpetual licenses for a specific version and then charge me for major updates. If your newer versions introduce massive improvements, then I might give you more money. It’s also fair to do free upgrades for a period of time and then charge for major upgrades. Finally, don’t force me to use your software always online and if you must have an activation process, provide a way to activate from a different machine by uploading an activation file or whatever.
Capitalism.
Yeah, only one reason. It’s always capitalism.
Enshitification has entered the chat
Not in this case. “Getting shitty” and “enshittification” are different.
Nobody talking about Emby?
Why not? I haven’t used it yet but it seems great too.
Emby is closed source and costs money to have access to all features. I’d recommend Jellyfin because it’s a free and open source fork of Emby with almost the exact same functionality.
Interesting, thanks.
What about Emby Theater?
It looks non-free as well
There’s only one reason, money.
But it’s at least four $1.
I use Plex for audiobooks and TV shows primarily.
The fact that you can’t (or at least can’t easily) scan library files from Plexamp is utterly insane to me. Especially after they made audio libraries completely unavailable on the regular Plex app.
I’ll probably switch to Audiobookshelf or something else down the line.
You can scan from plexdash.
+1 for audiobookshelf, after using tools like Plex for a long time I was honestly shocked by how much more user friendly it felt. And it’s a one man team! The only significant demerit is that the IOS app is stuck in test flight limbo, so you have to find another player. Though most do that already I think.
Stopped using Plex and moved to jellyfin around 12 months ago and have never looked back
I have both but Jellyfin is not good with duplicates. Having several versions of movies in different languages just puts multiple copies of the movies in Jellyfin, with no distinction between them until you click into the details. Plex does this well with “Play version”.
But Plex is worse for other reasons, on my LG TV. It’s painfully slow and doesn’t play the correct audio track that I select.
An mkv with multiple audio tracks would save you some storage space.
Yes, however sometimes it’s easier to manage language and subtitles in a single file if space is not an issue and you often are wanting a different version. Might also have pre-burned subtitles, for which you’ll need a separate video stream anyway.
This too, yes. 🎯
Not if I want/need to seed both versions. Then it’s a third version I need to keep on disk for a few weeks, instead of just two. Believe me, I’ve had this idea too, and have remuxed several movies to save space. 👍
Fair enough, I’m mostly ripping my own discs so being a good torrent citizen isn’t always top of mind.
🫡🏴☠️
Same brother
