Full disclosure, I’m pretty new to selfhosting myself, and I haven’t written a guide like this before, but hopefully this scatterbrained writeup is enough for someone out there lmao
This is just what works for me and how I set it up. Always open to ideas for improvement as well.
Bought a 200€ lifetime abonnement and my daughter have to pay to use Plex on her phone even when using my 200€ paid Plex server. They lost me when they asked the user of a paid subscritpion pay. Fuck it.
Must be a misunderstanding. Paid server; users do not need a subscription.
Ho they need it when using the application on android even if you have a lifetime server subscription. They may have reverted, but I was contacted by all my familly one week. They were asking why I wanted to make them pay to access my mediacenter and some told me to ask them directly if I needed money for some components.
Some even paid thinking the money went to me and I needed it for something.
I had an hard time understand the trouble since it was mentioned now where on the website of Plex that now user have to pay the application to access my paid server.
I took this as first signs of enshitification and left.
Plex joined google on my black list now.
Based on your comments, it sounds like maybe English isn’t your first language (no shade; your English is miles better than my any-other-language). But that, coupled with a Plex announcement that could’ve been written more clearly, it almost most certainly was a misunderstanding.
To be clear, when Plex removed their fully-free model, the only thing required was at least one paid subscription in the chain. Your lifetime paid server qualified, and no one else would’ve needed to pay. They haven’t reverted to this, this was how it was when they removed the fully-free model. I agree, Plex does carry some responsibility in making sure it was crystal clear. I wonder if they would’ve refunded your users that paid unnecessarily if you’d asked?
That Plex has continued to enshittify is without question. I just don’t think their paid model is the most egregious example of it.
Ha, thanks for the explanation, this explain that. It was a shit storm and on android when you opened the app ypu would be greeted by a popup asking to subscribe.
I seen that on the tablet and went full open source without looking back.
Yeah that not my first language, thanks for the understanding.
It was a bit of a shitstorm even in the English world. Plex definitely could’ve written the requirements more clearly.
I’m glad a full open-source stack works for you; I wish I could. There’s a few of my Plex users who just couldn’t make the jump to something like Jellyfin (and I’m unwilling to be their tech support), and honestly for me PlexAmp is so good as to make the problems of Plex overall be worth it.
Take care, friend.
I went for gelli as an android client for jellyfin, work great buy no chrome cast. I think my daughter use some thing like jellyamp which can chrome cast.
I use https://docs.wizarr.dev/ for on boarding user, it helped reduce the need of support. For the worst in tech I Boughy them a HDMI key. Set everything and sent it to them. They just had to connect to their WiFi… Which was pretty hard for some. Buy painless for me, they have childs to do tech support.