I’m currently looking at how I want my FreeNAS to handle media and well, Plex is one of the first things that comes up when doing so. I just installed the PMS package and wanted to login to the admin thingy and the first thing it asks is like ‘Hey, what about dat plex account? Have one? Want one? C’mon, do it! Make dat Plex account! It’s good and stuff.’
So I clicked ‘What’s this?’ … because straight up no is something it doesn’t offer … thanks. And then got
So I clicked that away and accepted my pleb limitations.
The next thing I got was a popup for plex pass … it literally had a popup animation.
At this point I’m thinking that I don’t want to use this.
So my question is: What is your experience with Plex? Or what is your alternative solution?
For someone like me, who likes open source, who doesn’t need his media on the go, who really just wants a hassle-free LAN media server thing, is Plex still the way to go or is there other stuff that I should look into?
For Plex, I just made a free throwaway account and used it for the initial login for Plex. After that it doesn’t really bug you. If you want to access Plex outside your LAN without using a VLAN, then you’d need to use a Plexpass. The rest of the Plexpass stuff imo doesn’t matter. You can set network ranges in the settings once into plex and just let all your local LANs connect and view the content without any kind of signin by adding their subnets in the settings
Alright long time Plex User and Plex pass member here.
So the stuff you miss out on is:
Auto sync (IE download stuff automatically to phones tablets, useful for TV shows and podcasts when you phone is offline a lot.
Tidal integration if you have an account their music and your music is one and the same.
DVR and live TV channel guide functionality. There are other solution like myth if you need it.
Being able to connect your Plex server to a cloud storage provider.
The big one, is streaming outside of your LAN the easy button way. But if you are decent at networking you can get around that.
Next you have to ask yourself do you even need plex? It way more than a media player. It is a server that will fling media to multiple devices. And if you have a device that is picky about file types Plex will on the fly transcode it so the device can play it.
If you only are connecting a laptop/desktop to your media this is overkill and Kodi will better suit you. Just connect via SMB or NFS and have Kodi scan the media.
But, if you have multiple TVs/streaming boxes, phones, tablets and PCs all connected it makes your life easier. Also there are Plex plugins for Kodi so you can use it as a client.
I got lifetime Plex plasd when it was still in beta around 2008-9ish for like $60. The current price is a little steep but still cheaper than other solutions.
Yeah, Plex seems actually complete overkill for me.
While looking around I found this one which sounds super basic and should have low requirements. Doesn’t do transcoding or anything I guess but I might try it out.
I’ll also give emby a shot. It seems to be not open source though. Was there a change or something?
Yeah, that looks all pretty dead. Just found that myself.
Also found this:
Emby’s source code is mostly open with some closed-source components as of August 2017, releases of the software published via the Emby website are however proprietary and cannot be replicated from source due to the build scripts also being proprietary. As of version 3.5.3 Emby has been relicensed and is now closed-source, while open source components will be moved to plugins.
@Diffident Becose most people dont know how to open a port, Plex mostly just works.
A big thing is also keeping your seen status no matter where you access from, I have started using Trakt for this so that i may keep it across apps.
But the trakt apps for plex and emby are not great for multiple users.>
The Emby one is messy and the Plex one is just plain bad.
Emby is also way better at finding subtitles and by default it uses hashing to find the correct subtitles.
It can also extract Subtitles on the fly, Sending them along with the movie as a text file. While plex requires you to transcode the video to burn it in.
And Emby has a the less we know the better policy, While Plex is getting pretty corporate :<
Even if you turn off your data collection on your end, Whoever watches would need to do the same.
Emby does not require you to have an emby online account to use their apps. Simply point the app at the adress and port.
And if the owner of the Emby server has premium All the users of that server gets the premium benefits.
As far as I can tell, you can’t do it from the server settings. But you can do it for devices that support the playback of the original format by enabling “Direct Stream/Play” and selecting the original quality:
I have used plex now for 2 years and if you are lucky and don’t need to stray from the defaults it mostly works. But there is nothing it does you couldn’t do yourself. And many of its premium features are rough. It’s builtin version of comskip is useless since it doesn’t let you customize it per channel or per show so you have to roll your own anyway. Based on the amount of complaint on their forums, support for tv tuners other than the internal haupaugges are poor. Although now taht they allow you to disable transcoding while recording, I have not had any problems.
After two years, it’s convenient enough for vanilla use to be worth it. But if I would not recommend using it if you need to customize its out of the box behavior.
I use it, haven’t paid for it and none of the premium features seem like a draw. If I ever want to watch the media on my mobile, I can do so via the browser and it bypasses the premium requirement of the app altogether.
It automatically matches films, fills in metadata, grabs movie posters, actor headshots, finds related films, groups by actor/director/genre/etc…
Plex does quite a nice job imo.
I can access it remotely via the web without issue, there’s a setting for that. Only some advanced features like speed limiting requires a Pass, but you could likely control that directly from your router using QoS settings I imagine.
You won’t get autodiscovery without logging in, but you can still manually add your home IP and port and connect that way. DDNS helps.
I use Plex, and have a lifetime Plex Pass, and think it’s great software. I share media with my friends and family, my nephews watch kids’ movies on my Plex all the time. But it isn’t open-source and you are connecting to an external service, so if that makes you uncomfortable you should probably skip it.
Emby isn’t really open-source anymore. What you want there is Jellyfin.
The problem with Jellyfin (and Emby, for that matter) is that it lacks the absolutely pervasive number of apps that Plex develops and supports. Not just Roku and FireTV but everything, Smart TVs, Apple TV, iOS and Android of course, AndroidTV, even Sonos. No matter what your friends/family have, there’s a Plex app they can run.
Regarding the desktop Plex client’s 10 foot UI, they are backpedaling on that due to massive negative feedback and plan to support the old Plex Media Player’s 10 foot UI until the new desktop client also supports 10 foot usage.
I’ve been using Plex for a few years now. Just the web interface, though. I never got a Plex Pass as I never found the features it provided useful. I have never been bothered or nagged to get one beyond the initial prompt. I’ve never connected to Plex using a phone. I almost exclusively use a PC connected to a TV, then bring the web interface up in Firefox. Occasionally I’ll use a Roku or my laptop.
I’m interested in what they plan on doing in the future. With the dropping of “HTPC” desktop support, does that mean the web client too? I might experiment with Emby, see how that is. I may be needing to setup something for my parents and siblings in the future, and they would exclusively use a Roku, so it either Plex or Emby for them.
I know there’s been an undertone of people not trusting Plex as they have grown, and I feel that somewhat myself. We just don’t know what data they collect, and what they do with it.
I wish there was a completely FOSS alternative that was on exactly like Plex, but I haven’t come across one yet.
I’ve been a plex user for years now and haven’t had a single negative experience regarding their free accounts. They once offered me a one time lifetime membership to their plex pass for a big discount and I jumped on it.
You really don’t need a plex pass but it is nice to be able to sync to my phone for plane trips and such once in a while. Its mostly a convenience thing but never necessary.
The Plex interface makes for a nice experience for the whole family on any device they use it on. I can post family videos, music everything in one place. Web, AppleTV, phones, etc. Looks like a professional paid service on many platforms.
Jellyfin is FOSS and basically what you want. The support for clients is getting better as well. I’ve been hanging out with the devs on their matrix server for the past few days and it is a good bunch of people as well.
Jellyfin is a fork of emby back before emby went closed source. It is important to note that emby has been doing lots of things to play dirty and prevent Jellyfin from succeeding but they are still going strong. If you have any wants/needs after installing you can talk to directly so that things can be fixed.
