Am I the only one who wants Plex to just be Plex, i.e. a media server for what I have stored locally? All of these new features make me think Plex is going in the direction of a cloud-only service and may drop local storage support down the line.
I'm with you. I have trouble seeing the actual use case for the stuff mentioned in the OP.
My primary use for Plex is for viewing on my home TV, through my Roku. All of that streaming content is already available directly on my Roku, so I'm not getting anything new by Plex subsuming it into their interface.
Secondarily, I may occasionally use Plex on my phone to access some media stored at home. But that's all I'm doing - looking for my own media. I don't see myself using it for streamed content. I mean, if I'm stuck in a hotel room or something, they all have news on the room TVs.
There definitely has been a shift over the last couple years. My guess is that VC money has changed priorities. I fondly recall all the blog posts by Elan at the start of the project and purchased a lifetime PlexPass early on. Now all I see mentioned is CEO Keith Valory.
I'm definitely concerned about privacy changes that have been made recently (and then changed back?).
AFAIK, Kodi is still client-based, and doesn't have the nice server component that Plex does. It's nice to have a single server handling transcoding, media management, etc. etc, and allowing the clients to be thin.
How "nice" do you want it to be? Kodi can be told to act as a UPnP server, and any UPnP client should then be able to pick up on it.
Kodi also has an optional web interface, which is primarily used to act as a remote, but I've found it can also be a thin client receiver--any media within the library can be streamed to the browser tab.
I take a slightly different approach: I netboot diskless clients with OpenELEC[0] and share my media library via a read only NFS share. It works great, since its hard to find any device (thin or not) that doesn't have enough horsepower to decode media locally.
This can be combined with a UPnP approach if there are also non-dedicated devices that need to access media.
I am running the plex client on dumb devices like tv's. That gives me a nice UI, sync of watched locations and automatic transcoding of content that the client cannot play natively.
I'd love to use Kodi with my Windows SMB shares - and I certainly can - but Amazon stubbornly hides the icon on the Fire TV interface. The added steps of going into `settings > applications > manage applications > kodi > launch` is just too much.
I want Plex to be more than that (if all I wanted was playing local files I'd use Kodi) but I agree that this news stuff is very... meh. It also feels like a giant rabbit hole (oh, you're going to use "advanced AI" to personalise? Lovely) to go down with very little to show in return.
That said, I've been using the DVR features Plex has been adding recently and they're getting to be fantastic. For those of us lucky enough to have TV service and hardware compatible with it, it's great. But it needs more work, and I'd rather they focus on that than a weird, half-baked news thing. Emby is quickly catching up with Plex's core competencies, so they need to keep moving.
That would be incredibly worrisome. Literally the only reason I have Plex is so that I can rip my DVD/Blu-Ray collection to my NAS so that I can play it without having to retrieve the actual physical media from storage. Now that they've disabled local authentication support and you have to go through their site, I'm looking for alternatives. That really sucks too because I bought a PlexPass thinking that they knew who their core audience is. It turns out they have no idea who that audience is...
A lot of tech companies pride themselves in having a bunch of engineers on staff, so they have to stay relevant by adding bloatware and redesigning every 15 months.
I'm a Plex user, but let's not be naive. They are a business and a cloud-based subscription model is way more profitable than giving away software for free to let people stream from a local server.
You can't blame them for making logical decisions for the health of the business (even if they negatively impact you).
I would agree with you except they already get my money; I'm a Plex Pass subscriber and have been for several years. I understand them wanting to monetize the platform further, but don't do it by collecting telemetry, especially viewing habits, and potentially selling it to anyone with deep pockets (I get that their privacy policy as of now says they don't, but privacy policies tend to change once enough valuable data is siphoned).
I've been feeling that way for a while and whenever they send out surveys express my opposition to it.
They do seem to be working more with NAS OEMs to get Plex up and running on their devices seamlessly. And their recent support for Network based TV tuners is an interesting move.
The cloud integration works pretty well and I've used my 1TB of O365 OneDrive storage to host somethings in the cloud. The biggest problem I have is that some of my content has to be transcoded for the client and Plex doesn't do a very good job telling me what so I'm hesitant to throw it all up there. Otherwise the idea is sound and I'd use it to avoid consuming my ISP allotted bandwidth (fu comcast) when streaming remotely.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they offered a STB or SmartTV that ran the Plex Client exclusively.
I was a paid subscriber, and loved using it. But they kept adding features (photos, social features) and at some point in time I found myself unable to log in from iOS.
I think I spent 3 separate evenings trying to figure that out, but never was able to log in and use it whenever I needed to. Eventually I was not able to even log into Plex via the web server (the other place I used it) so I am not a Plex subscriber.
Do one thing and do it well and people give you money. But fail to do the original single purpose you set out to solve for people and they'll move on.
Does serviio provide any kind of organization or custom interface? After plex suddenly quick working on my media server, I started using miniDLNA/readymedia to stream things to my roku, but the organization and interface of "Roku Media Center" leaves a lot to be desired.
Serviio does have some metadata-oriented categorization, but beyond that I only use it to represent a bunch of subdirectories. While I've seen some usability quirks, I don't know whether that's a Serviio thing or a 10-years-old TV/PS3 DLNA implementation thing. I did notice that minidlna was pretty bare-bones in what it presented to the client (server!).
Kodi's pretty OK. Runs well on a FireTV if you want a cheap device that supports h.265 at 1080p. Interface still kinda terrible, but better with a real remote. Can use phone to control it if you want, though less convenient to do that on FireTV than dedicated box, since it may be killed when idle.
If you want something more DIY for H.265 (HEVC) support, the "Intel Compute Sticks" also all support HEVC decoding in hardware
I'm using the lowest end model (2GB memory, 32GB disk) and it absolutely flies with Kodi. Attach a gigabit USB 3.0 NIC and it loads files almost instantly over a Samba share
Is that the one that's only $37 on the Intel site? 2015 model, 1.33Ghz Atom? If so, damn, I made a mistake. I didn't know there were any x86 devices that cheap that'd handle 1080p h.265.
I lost faith in Plex when I upgraded my server about a year ago and after testing, etc, I deleted the old container (run it in docker). I didn't find out until a few days later that FF/REW was broken. At that point I didn't have the old release around. Went to the forum and found I wasn't the only one. Problem was, they had just moved to 1.0 and they removed all previous versions from their servers. I begged to get an older one, and after a week or two I got it from another forum user. During that 2 weeks, though, FF/REW was broken on my Roku.
Yeah, now I download the .deb and build my container from a local .deb file, rather than downloading in the container. It was stupid, but I had grabbed the container build script from someone and didn't think about it until it was too late.
I'm still on a pre-1.0 release, and when the Roku client doesn't work anymore, I'll switch to Emby, or whatever is free and hot at the time.
Agree, plex doesn't test well enough before release. I've found a good strategy is to wait at least 3 months after a release to upgrade, and then only after checking the plex forums that the new version is working well on your OS.
I've been using Emby only for a few months now and love it. I was considering switching to Plex (for its probably better looking interface) but the comments here have convinced me against it.
Plex News. It’s the perfect complement to your media library — video news from some of the most trusted sources on the planet,
I always get nervous when companies start talking up the credibility of news outlets. To me, it indicates a lack critical thinking especially when the very next image on the page has logos from CNN (of "reading wikileaks is illegal if you're not a media outlet" fame) and TheBlaze (of Glenn Beck fame).
I suppose you could write it off as marketing fluff, but.. still. That little nagging feeling. So long as they give me the ability to ban specific sources from ever showing up in my feed, fine, otherwise this will just be another feature that has to be ignored to avoid consuming propaganda.
With Plex Pass you're paying for access to features that typically require Plex to maintain a server and so some sort of processing.
This is content provided by a third party. Plex clearly didn't want to negotiate with each provider, figure out a pay structure, then pass those costs along to Plex Pass subscribers for a feature they may or may not want to use.
Personally I see no value it in and don't plan to use it. I'd be upset if they demanded I pay more for that.
