[HN Gopher] Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff
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Plex lays off more than 20 percent of its staff
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-06-28 20:57 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| onychomys wrote:
| It's going to be extremely annoying if Plex goes out of business.
| undersuit wrote:
| I just renewed my year.
| bberenberg wrote:
| Jellyfin is a good alternative
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Does Jellyfin have user friendly clients for iOS, Android,
| Roku, AppleTV and various SmartTVs?
| DANmode wrote:
| Does it perchance have a plugin for replacing Plex's "search
| various streaming services at once" feature?
| bberenberg wrote:
| Not sure, I don't have this use case.
| alexalx666 wrote:
| Do you use paid features of Plex and if yes, which ones? Im
| using Plex daily to stream shows stored on a SSD connected to
| Windows laptop. I think I would not miss on any paid features
| they provide. Initially when I decided to try to watch less
| mindless tv stuff, I thought there will be a plethora of
| solutions for home streaming but it turned out that the only
| one that actually works is Plex
| scktt wrote:
| hardware en/decoding for sure. im not sure if it is still the
| case, but prior to pruchasing the liftime account playing
| back media remotely from a phone/tablet was limited to 10
| minutes. i have 3 kids, and we regularly take long drives. 10
| mins would not cut it. i also share my content with family,
| which again i think is harder without a subscription.
| flutas wrote:
| The only premium feature I'm using is hardware encoding
| personally.
| katbyte wrote:
| emby and jellyfin work just great
|
| and jellyfin is free & OSS
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Jellyfin is nice. It doesn't work great though. I've had
| and have way too many issues with it.
|
| I run it next to Plex to keep an eye on how it develops. I
| still have issues with pretty much all clients, from losing
| server connection information, to jankiness on changing
| users, or subtitles just not rendering properly, crazy high
| CPU usage for certain transcodes, etc.
|
| Plex just works most of the time. Clients are better (even
| though the thing about them pushing crappy streaming and
| live tv stuff bothers me a little), subtitles mostly just
| work, rendering is ok and most video formats work well on
| most clients, and so on.
|
| I want to like Jellyfin. I have high hopes that one day it
| will be great and I won't want Plex anymore. That day is
| not here yet.
| pojzon wrote:
| > crazy high CPU usage for certain transcodes
|
| The reason I stopped using it for hosting my collection
| on a PI.
|
| Overall decided its just easier to have a public NAS
| accessible from anywhere.
|
| No point to open stuff in a browser when you can simply
| open a video from another side of the world like a
| regular local video on my laptop.
|
| So much better an easier.
| katbyte wrote:
| emby is a great alternative that allows more control with easy
| local accounts and no ad supported content
|
| jellyfin is also great but lacks apps on some devices and is a
| 100% free OSS alternative
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| I have been a paying supporter of Emby for a while now, and I
| feel like I bet on the wrong horse. Development is quite
| slow. It feels like only a skeleton crew is working on it
| compared to Jellyfin.
|
| Neither Emby or Plex are perfect, but Plex seems to handle
| transcoding better. Emby still has the advantage over
| Jellyfin of a native Samsung Tizen app, even though Samsung
| TVs are slow as shit and it's a horrible experience.
| stiq wrote:
| yea - I have a fair number of friends and family who have
| access to my server. they're gonna be super bummed if it turns
| off
| fluxem wrote:
| Plex has a tough business model. It's hard to make money from
| the pirates.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't know the percentage, but an _enormous_ number of Plex
| users aren 't pirates.
| thfuran wrote:
| What else do people even use Plex for?
| LASR wrote:
| Maybe Linux ISOs encoded as lossy video.
| thfuran wrote:
| I heard there's a hidden message from Linus if you play
| Jaunty Jackalope backwards.
| piperswe wrote:
| My Plex server hosts rips of my (quite large) DVD/Blu-
| ray/UHD Blu-ray movie and digital/CD music collections.
| koolba wrote:
| It's easy if you're selling them hardware. Even pirates are
| fine with paying for something you can actually touch.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| From my nieve point of view, I think, they made a mistake with
| the $100 lifetime fee (was that about a decade ago!). I paid that
| and have been using it since, and have never made another payment
| since.
| prepend wrote:
| I use Plex every day and haven't paid them anything. But I only
| use it as an app (relaxing xbmc and kodi) and don't use any of
| their services.
|
| I would probably pay $5-10 as a one time fee, but xbmc was an
| open source project so I'd never pay $100 or any recurring fee.
|
| I just need a player for my local media. That's not a recurring
| revenue source. That's buy software once.
| waselighis wrote:
| Exactly. Even if the software is never updated with any new
| features or changes, it still requires constant maintenance to
| fix bugs, patch security vulnerabilities, support new hardware,
| and OS updates. It costs money to maintain software, and a
| lifetime license isn't going to pay for a lifetime of updates.
| cosentiyes wrote:
| Agreed, having a bunch of lifetime customers without a source
| of recurring revenue also incentivizes telemetry, selling user
| data, etc. Jellyfin is also a strong enough competitor that
| many lifetime accounts would switch if new fees appear.
|
| I'm afraid that unraid will run into similar problems
| eventually.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I'm a lifetime subscriber and if they chose to charge monthly
| I'd pay it. I've gotten a _lot_ of value from Plex.
| bubblethink wrote:
| It's commodity software. It's hard to justify a recurring
| subscription for something like this. It targets advanced
| users. If they can set up plex, they can set up alternatives
| too. And plex does not invest much in improving the core
| product. I don't remember it as being any better than it was
| 5-10 years ago. It still has rough edges. Skipping title/end
| credits is a nice feature though.
| josteink wrote:
| While that sounds bad, I must admit Plex has been chasing "the
| wrong things" compared to what I want a Plex instance for.
|
| I have streaming services for content I want to rent. I don't
| need Plex for that.
|
| I use Plex because it's currently the best way to stream and
| organise content I own and have curated. But they've completed
| ignored that use-case for 5+ years now. It's frustrating.
|
| Jellyfin is still not quite there in the "it just works"
| department, but if it does, I have no doubt what's going to
| replace my Plex instance.
|
| Being open-source it will hopefully not pushed to weird
| commercial ventures and use-cases not actually wanted by its
| users.
| pinko wrote:
| Agree completely on all counts.
| causality0 wrote:
| Plex "just works" until it doesn't. The further away from the
| desktop you get the less reliable Plex becomes. In the browser
| it's flawless. On smartphone and tablet native apps I get maybe
| a one to five percent rate of not being able to see the server
| despite the fact I'm logged into it on the same device's
| browser. On embedded devices like smart TVs and streaming
| sticks Plex is a stinking pile of shit of an app. It's laggy,
| it crashes incessantly when you do something like skip forward
| after skipping back, and it constantly fails to see the server
| running on the same LAN as the device. This happens across
| android TV, Roku, Chromestick, and Firestick. It happens across
| different locations, routers, and ISPs. Plex is high on my list
| of "things I use because there isn't anything better but I
| still hope their developers stub their little toe every day of
| their lives".
| prepend wrote:
| I run Plex on an appletv with the server running on a
| synology. It's ok. The subtitles don't work unless I switch
| off and on for each show.
|
| Anything over 1080p gets too laggy and it doesn't buffer.
|
| But I like enough to just download stuff in 720 and watch at
| that resolution.
| deckard1 wrote:
| Plex has the annoying habit of stalling indefinitely for me.
| I don't know what it's doing. I believe it's transcoding so
| that it can "burn" in the subtitles, but I have no clue.
|
| I've mostly given up on it. I use sshfs and mpv when sitting
| at a desktop, which actually does work flawlessly.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Plex never worked for me. The autotagging was frequently wrong,
| their version of libass has been years out of date FOR years
| (did they ever update it since the mid-00's VLC version?), and
| it kept trying to lossily transcode videos that it couldn't
| handle (such as WMV7) and failing hard when it didn't. I've
| replaced it with VLC+SMB and am way happier.
| codeslave13 wrote:
| Apps are the main driver. If there isnt a very strong client
| ecosystem it will always be niche. I run jellyfin side by side
| just waiting for a good tvos client
| arrakeen wrote:
| i JUST bought a lifetime pass two days ago... i'm really not
| pleased to read this news
| khasan222 wrote:
| Plex really just needs to host instances of their servers at
| something reasonable that I can upload easily to. Add a torrent
| client for good measure. Just make stream boxes.
| [deleted]
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Plex is explicitly trying to move away from being associated
| with piracy, so that won't ever happen.
|
| But what you're looking for already exists - search for
| "seedbox" on Reddit.
| samschooler wrote:
| I love open source. Jellyfin looks great, and Embey as well. But
| Plex "just works". I happily paid for a lifetime and would love
| to see more development. One of my most used services to watch
| home videos, listen to audiobooks, and stream my dvd collection.
| ElCapitanMarkla wrote:
| The others all lack the apps, Plex is a native app on my TV,
| Playstation, Phone etc, and it just works. I always found the
| other solutions to have pretty clunky client options outside of
| PC browser
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| I primarily use Jellyfin through the app on my Roku stick.
| Works pretty great for me and my family.
|
| I also have an old Android phone hooked up to old stereo
| system, and use the "Gelli" app for music playback. Also
| solid.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| I don't get all the comments of people saying that JellyFin
| doesn't "just work".
|
| I replaced Plex with it a year or so ago and it has just worked
| since then, without any issue or any particular setup required.
| nerdjon wrote:
| For me Jellyfin server just works and is great.
|
| But the Apple TV experience is not really great with the
| official (still work in progress) or the one that is often
| recommended but I can't remember the name for at the moment.
|
| As great as the server is, I feel like the apps are where Plex
| has Jellyfin beat.
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(page generated 2023-06-28 23:01 UTC)