We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
Yes. You’ll have to set up a reverse proxy, I use nginx, and get yourself domain, I use duck DNS, and get a SSL certificate from let’s encrypt if your wanting to steam to something like a Chromecast or Roku.
It’s not all that hard honestly and there’s a good guide here for general home media, including both Plex and jellyfin
https://www.simplehomelab.com/docker-media-server-2024/
No, you don’t need a RP.
You can and should set it up though as it’s a very good convenient feature.
But you can expose Jellyfin directly.
Here’s the thing though, for the average plex user (myself included) you’ve already used too many acronyms and words I don’t understand. Plex serves a purpose for a lot of people, people who are even willing to pay for it to be easy.
Kind of reminds me of Netflix before anyone else did streaming. They had so much stuff I stopped sailing.
Yep. Imo now with Plex you are paying for a much simpler and accessible setup. Seems fair enough to me. Lemmy FOSS or die users (every else in this thread seemingly) are not the target audience of Plex but they sure love to complain about it.
Assuming you know them well enough, can’t you just give your IP address to folks and forward the port on your router?
Or just use tailscale. Much easier.
You can, but the reason you use a reverse proxy, isn’t revealing your IP or something, it’s that without it, the traffic is unencrypted.
As in, log in details and the contents of media streams are sent fully readable by any network node on the way.
Yes
Well that sucks.
Yeah, welcome to the easy, fast, cheap conundrum.
If you’re willing to do a bit of learning and asking the community for help if you get a little stuck, you’ve got a free solution, if not, which is perfectly okay mind you, then Plex is your solution and you have to decide how much you’re willing to pay.
And honestly, of you’re going down the home media route with friend and family, you’re going to want to set up sonarr, radarr, ombi, transmission with VPN anyways.
I’m going to be going the free solution route, been trying to find a cheap laptop to turn into my server right now. Do you mind if I reach out about it or do you know of any good instances?
Yeah, I have a docker compose yaml script you can baseline of off and help walk you through with my lessons learned.
Just put it behind tailscale and use the IP. Doing this for a two years now with weekly anime watch togethers with my friends. Not elegant but enough.