Comment by MSFT_Edging
9 days ago
Even when you want to pay for things, the companies will find ways to extract more money from you.
Plex lifetime pass is now over $700 dollars
My dashcam that used to let me use the app to locally pull down videos now requires an account to view the files on my camera that is putting out it's own password protected wifi network, just so the company can harvest more data and track me easier. This device cost several hundred dollars.
Streaming services introduce ads anyway and increase the cost.
You used to be able to buy complete functional software like Microsoft Office and the Adobe suite.
All this is because companies cannot be statically profitable unless they're entirely privately owned. All companies need to constantly increase profit, which means even if you're happy to pay for something, eventually the company will squeeze you hard enough that you no longer want to pay for it anymore.
Plex is just a nice UI and a DB wrapping lots of open source libraries and tools, you could replace it with a few days of AI assisted coding.
I run both Plex and Jellyfin. The joy of Plex is I can log in on my work machine to listen to my music without having to install and client-side software, running personal VPNs, worrying about the security merit of the Jellyfin log in screen on a public facing service running on my home server, etc.
On my home network? Jellyfin all day except for random encoding issues.
You can replace Plex with all its features and polish in a couple of days with AI?..
Or just use Jellyfin
I use both.