Why is Plex hated? Whats the alternative?

[BaidDSB]

I was just watching todayls LTT and in one of the videos linus said Plex is hated. Why is that?

 

im in the process of getting my first NAS [Synology 920+] and getting Plex for media streaming.

 

Why is Plex hated? Whats the alternative?

 

I want to stream stuff to my and my parents' phones and on my TVs [THROUGH chromecast]

[goatedpenguin]

the app in general is pretty unstable especially when it comes to networking, an alternatives would be something like Kodi which is open source and fully customizable and allows users to organize their libraries. Kodi also allows users to access their media remotely, and is free to use.

[Blue4130]

8 minutes ago, BaidDSB said:

I was just watching todayls LTT and in one of the videos linus said Plex is hated. Why is that?

 

im in the process of getting my first NAS [Synology 920+] and getting Plex for media streaming.

 

Why is Plex hated? Whats the alternative?

 

I want to stream stuff to my and my parents' phones and on my TVs [THROUGH chromecast]

Hated? It's not universally hated. There are plenty of people that are pleased with it.

 

Jellyfin is one popular free alternative.

[lewdicrous]

9 minutes ago, BaidDSB said:

Whats the alternative?

Kodi, Emby, Jellyfin, etc.

10 minutes ago, BaidDSB said:

[THROUGH chromecast]

Not 100% sure if they all support chromecast, don't have it.

[FloRolf]

I just setup plex as well and if you like subtitles then run and get something else. 

[BiotechBen]

40 minutes ago, swabro said:

the app in general is pretty unstable especially when it comes to networking

Can vouch for that, this is the 4th time in the past month that my media server has just disappeared. 

Though I may be calling my ISP and taking them up on a free service call due to "network abnormalities and repeated service failures"

The web interface works perfectly, the apps for all my devices are inexplicably broken.

 

Update:

Plex updated and cleared all connection settings, had to redo manual connections for all devices.....

[BobVonBob]

That video was a fully sponsored video from Plex right after they had a high profile data breach. It's not hard to see why it was unpopular.

[Needfuldoer]

Plex uses centralized authentication and locks some features (most notably hardware-accelerated video encoding) behind a paywall.

[Senzelian]

Been a plex user for a little over a year now and I'm very happy with it. I mostly use it for music streaming and that works great. Plexamp (their music app) is simply really well put together.

[SupaKomputa]

Why use plex when you have free alternative.

Try Kodi and Jellyfin

[Avocado Diaboli]

24 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

Why use plex when you have free alternative.

Try Kodi and Jellyfin

Because at the time of me trying them out, not a single free app and server combo managed to give me music streaming from my NAS to my phone that manages to remember the position of the song I'm currently at when I stop playing music, close the app, open it up later on and resume playing when I want to resume listening. They also for some reason don't seem to cache any music you've added to your current playlist, so if you drive into a tunnel or parking garage, or anywhere else where you have no reception, the music just stops after the current song. Plexamp does this with no issues whatsoever. And yes, it matters to me if I can resume in the middle of a song because I got music that goes way beyond your standard 4 minute pop song:

 

 

Besides, Plex is the app with the least number of pain points. Free and open-source software has this general problem of being designed not by people with UI/UX design experience, but by programmers. They don't care if their software is awkward to use.

[SupaKomputa]

8 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

They don't care if their software is awkward to use.

haha true.

[Needfuldoer]

1 hour ago, SupaKomputa said:

Why use plex when you have free alternative.

Try Kodi and Jellyfin

Because I want to use my media server as a DVR, and the freebies make you jump through a bunch of hoops to get guide data working.

 

I'm at a point in my life where I don't mind paying a little for something that "just works" if it means I save a lot of time and effort.

[divito]

I understand some of the reasons people might dislike Plex, or the "direction they're heading." However, a lot of the arguments are user error/misunderstanding, or open source dogma.

Having tried all the alternatives, Plex is the most polished and useable, and I much prefer their interface over the others. Plex also has more app availability, where the alternatives either don't have apps for certain TVs or PS4, etc..., or they require some kind of workaround to get them somewhat functional.

 

Outside of QoL features I'd like, I have rarely had issues with Plex and anything that has happened is probably more on my network setup than Plex. 

I'm now also at the point where I'm at over 8TB of content, and dealing with setting up libraries and making sure everything is proper is kind of daunting.

[sof006]

I recently moved to Plex and i've found the interface and overall experience pretty great, metadata is generally more accurate and it looks a lot better over other services like Emby or Jellyfin.

[Konrni]

11 hours ago, Senzelian said:

Been a plex user for a little over a year now and I'm very happy with it. I mostly use it for music streaming and that works great. Plexamp (their music app) is simply really well put together.

It would have been nice if they integrated it in there existing app, didn't know plexamp existed until now. The google app is btw from a different dev, so seems skatchy even if it is linked from plex.tv

 

9 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

Because I want to use my media server as a DVR, and the freebies make you jump through a bunch of hoops to get guide data working.

 

I'm at a point in my life where I don't mind paying a little for something that "just works" if it means I save a lot of time and effort.

If you have it running, congratulations. I never get it to work on anything other than windows.

 

 

--

Most of the time i use the (samsung) tv app i curse at it. If you start something it starts usualy perfectly, but shit hits the fan if you touch the remote again. Had a stream stopped working only bc i rewinded 5sek. If you change audio/subs it a good 30% chance you get endless buffering afterwards. If it stops most of the time i need to restart the app.

 

The meta agent is nice and i mostly don't have a problem with this. But i do think they should add a native anime media library and focus more on library users and not on streaming as this it what did made them big. A usefull tool to "painlessly" stream from a multi TB content collection.

 

 

So for new people i would recommend to test there usecase on Kodi, Emby, Jellyfin, ... first and try plex to compare it.

But in my opinion plex is not the go to media server anymore and it looks like Plex will go even more into streaming service users. So if one wants a (offline) media library one should look at software for this.

If i didn't have a larger media library with some custom metadata and an plexpass i would try a switch. But with these conditions plex still needs to get worse, so maybe in 2 yrs.

Try reading a bit in the plex forum or just look at there website to get a feeling in which direction it will go.

(Just my personal opinion btw.)

[divito]

2 hours ago, Konrni said:

Most of the time i use the (samsung) tv app i curse at it. If you start something it starts usualy perfectly, but shit hits the fan if you touch the remote again. Had a stream stopped working only bc i rewinded 5sek. If you change audio/subs it a good 30% chance you get endless buffering afterwards. If it stops most of the time i need to restart the app.

Having a Samsung TV previously, I could never isolate whether it was Plex having issues with their Samsung app, or the Samsung processing power itself, because while there were issues with Plex, there were issues in other apps as well. 

As to your other issues, perhaps that's a Plex setting that's causing issues? I don't always play in the settings since everything works mostly at default, but I have 25+ anime series and always need to change audio from English to Japanese and subtitles, etc.. and don't really experience issues. The only time I do is usually on the PS4 app, but it runs wirelessly and seems finicky in general. My PC and Android app never seem to have issues with such a thing.

[ewitte]

Never had major issues with plex.  Maybe when I was recording from my cablecard years ago but that was the least problematic software I used (or Kodi?).  I liked windows media center while it was supported but it got worse and worse over time.  Eventually I just paid the 10/mo for the cable box.

[We Didnt_t start_the_fire]

16 hours ago, BaidDSB said:

I was just watching todayls LTT and in one of the videos linus said Plex is hated. Why is that?

 

im in the process of getting my first NAS [Synology 920+] and getting Plex for media streaming.

 

Why is Plex hated? Whats the alternative?

 

I want to stream stuff to my and my parents' phones and on my TVs [THROUGH chromecast]

I actually like more Plex to Kodi, more refined and easier to use. I use a custom software, while it is not mine and available to public and have a English version but underlining it it is a Chinese software, actually most chinese player do support DLNA but none does it so well. I am not putting the name here bc of the either righty or prejudice of privacy. Only thing is some of the ad/promotion that only pop up when auto upgrading or you click the little promotion/sign in button is not translated and redirect you to chinese site or Alibaba. Dunno if it can be loaded onto TV or consoles, I have a pc for media center, use plex on xbox/ps5/shield/appletv. Though DLNA on Kodi or Plex is slow, Plex is a bit better though still slow. Another thing I do actually like of my custom player is it can local stream videos to your phone and can play part. file. Fast scrubbing forward and back too, did a test and Win media the 3 versions, and VLC is slower. 

[We Didnt_t start_the_fire]

11 minutes ago, We Didnt_t start_the_fire said:

I actually like more Plex to Kodi, more refined and easier to use. I use a custom software, while it is not mine and available to public and have a English version but underlining it it is a Chinese software, actually most chinese player do support DLNA but none does it so well. I am not putting the name here bc of the either righty or prejudice of privacy. Only thing is some of the ad/promotion that only pop up when auto upgrading or you click the little promotion/sign in button is not translated and redirect you to chinese site or Alibaba. Dunno if it can be loaded onto TV or consoles, I have a pc for media center, use plex on xbox/ps5/shield/appletv. Though DLNA on Kodi or Plex is slow, Plex is a bit better though still slow. Another thing I do actually like of my custom player is it can local stream videos to your phone and can play part. file. Fast scrubbing forward and back too, did a test and Win media the 3 versions, and VLC is slower. If you can, what I find is that Chinese software tend to run better and have way better features, brazilian software too(portuguese)if you can set it to english setting as the majority of them will have english version. Want to mention Korean and Japnaese software aren't bad as well, I tested them and they where great. Abit of sidenote, I do prefer Japanese take on streaming site like yt as well as Chinese one, Niconico and BiliBili. Amazing for anime fans and Kawaii.There some others lesser know. As for S.K it is more similar to YT

 

[Sirchacha]

Question, if I paid for the lifetime pass for Plex years ago is it worth it to switch to jellyfin? I set up a server and tooled around on the app and wasn't super impressed with the UI, at least on Android tv. Is there ways to make it more netflixy?

[Hakarune]

I'm not a fan of plex. Used it when it first came out and dealt with all the BS for a long time and ditched. I use Jellyfin and Kodi now that Emby went the way of Plex. There's all Streama that I've been meaning to try actually. 

[divito]

On 1/4/2023 at 5:45 PM, Sirchacha said:

Question, if I paid for the lifetime pass for Plex years ago is it worth it to switch to jellyfin?

If you paid for it years ago, and don't really take advantage of utilizing Plex, there's not much stopping you from switching to Jellyfin. Although, if you didn't like Plex's UI, I'm not sure Jellyfin will impress you either.

 

On 1/4/2023 at 5:45 PM, Sirchacha said:

Is there ways to make it more netflixy?

I'm not sure what you mean by Netflixy; the default configuration is pretty close to Netflix already. And the Recommended tab highlights recently added or recently released similar to Netflix showcasing new arrivals, and the Discover feature shows trending movies on the services you input.



The Android app isn't much different than the above web UI. 

[ragengauge]

Just saw this same video.  I'm heavily invested whit plex, having started about 4 years ago.  Before that, I kinda just found the "free" websites floating around.  Before that, I paid for Netflix.  Ironically, having resubbed to Netflix in like 2018 or so, I was highly disappointed with their library, and seeing some shows I was watching move from Netflix at that time, I got tired of it, cancelled my subscription, and started buying hard drives.  So I mean, maybe I'm a bit biased, and it does have it's bugs and issues from time to time, but I love the UI generally, and I was super happy they offered a relatively reasonable one time payment for plex pass (I very much use hardware encoding and watch from my phone).  Sure, it's not perfect.  Free movies and tv stuff coming on is a minor annoyance, but I just remove it from my pinned sources, which isn't difficult, and, frankly, I'm glad for the longevity it will bring.  I will say, the tv apps can be iffy, but I think that's more the smart TV's lower specs than the app itself.

[Xyn]

I run Jellyfin, Emby, and Plex side by side pointed at the same media library for the sake of comparison (and because running one of them barely takes any CPU or RAM on my NAS so there seemed to be no downside, more on that in a bit). Having them pointed at the same media library works mostly fine, as if you name your movies like The Movie DB expects and name your TV shows like The TV DB expects, scanning basically just works. There are differences though. Each of the services has its pros and cons, and the weight of those depends largely on how you would use them.

 

As to the topic at hand, Plex is hated because there are bugs that have been outstanding for literal years and instead of fixing them, they're developing and pushing Plex TV. Plex also becomes completely nonfunctional in the event of an internet outage unless you have preemptively given certain IP addresses on your network exemptions from authentication, which is a massive security hole as anyone who knows what they're doing can use those devices to have carte blanche access to your Plex server and delete your media or whatever else they want.

 

Personally, I have a number of grievances with Plex aside from the above.

• No matter what I do, I can't get Plex to use TheTVDB names for episodes on TV shows, which is infuriating. It always uses TheMovieDB names, so the episodes aren't titled right, even though I've explicitly selected TheTVDB episode order in library settings etc.
• Plex's UI during playback just seems generally more tedious and annoying. For instance, if you want to change audio track or subtitle track on Emby and Jellyfin, it's two clicks on each: click the audio or subtitle button, click your track. On Plex, you have to drill into a hamburger menu, then go to audio or subtitles, then select your track, and I may even be omitting steps.
• Plex is comparatively a resource hog. All the services will spin up your drives and tax your CPU while scanning your library, but Plex takes far longer because it does "deep media analysis" and manually scans through every file to detect intros and end credits. Yesterday, I renamed all my movies and all my TV show folders to put {tmdb-xxxxx} for movies and {tvdb-xxxxx} in TV show folders, which for all three services will basically make it perfectly match so it doesn't mix up say, Black Lagoon with the Black Lagoon OVAs and download the wrong thumbnail. After running, I told each service to re-scan and replace all metadata. Emby and Jellyfin both were done with this process in 5 or 10 minutes. Plex kept my CPU at 90% and my hard drives spinning all day to detect intros and credits again. As I type this, Plex has my CPU at 15% and my hard drives spinning doing "DeepMediaAnalysis" on every file. This is extremely annoying.
• Even after the above change to put the IDs in there, some of my shows still show up with black empty boxes in Plex and I have to manually match them / manually pick the art. Emby and Jellyfin are both flawless in that regard in my experience.
• Plex does not support seasonal Extras. They will support Extras for the show itself, but not extras for each season, so when you buy the Blu-Ray boxset for a show and each season has its own Extras, you either have to dump them all under the show itself or accept that they'll show up under the seasons in Emby and Jellyfin but not Plex.
• Plex has to be a special snowflake in regards to multiple versions. If you have say the Theatrical and Director's Cut of a movie, in Emby and Jellyfin you can just do - Theatrical / - Director's Cut at the end of the filename and you'll get a dropdown where you can select the version in the UI. For Plex, you have to do {edition - Theatrical} / {edition - Director's Cut} at the end of the filename.

That said, the other services aren't without their problems too. For Emby:

• I've had a few specific playback issues using the Windows client while playback has been flawless on my TV / Nvidia Shield Pro. This wouldn't be a big deal for most people as most people don't watch on Windows. I did report these to Emby and they are supposedly looking into it.
• Logging in on your TV is a pain. There was an option to not require login on LAN for a particular user, but this was removed, and there's no "Quick Connect" equivalent where you can login on your computer and put in the OTP your TV shows, I think you have to actually enter the password with your remote, which is really annoying if you use a password manager to randomly generate long complex passwords like I do.
• Extras are treated as "Specials" and artificially inflate episode counts. For example, if the Blu-Rays contain an interview with the director or something and you put it in the interviews folder, it will show up both under the season or show or wherever you put it as an extra, but also in the Specials season, and it will add 1 to the episode total. I find this annoying.
• You can't seem to just click a Play button on the thumbnail for a movie or show itself in the interface, but have to click on it, then you'll get to the screen with all the info and the play button is there.

For Jellyfin:

• When you have multiple editions of a movie, like Theatrical and Director's Cut, changing the version doesn't update the movie's runtime. In Emby, and presumably Plex (I don't know, because I'm not putting that {edition - Theatrical} crap in my filenames to check), it does.
• Jellyfin has by far the least amount of clients of the three.
• Jellyfin is missing features the other two have, like intro skipping and skipping to the next episode when the credits start (though the Next button works fine for that).

 

I find myself using Jellyfin most of the time, because while it is missing features, it has what I need it to have, and the other two services both have a number of things that annoy me, while the thing about the movie editions is the only thing in Jellyfin that's annoyed me.

 

But things will differ from user to user. For example, in the Jellyfin video LTT did, Jellyfin not supporting converted mobile downloads (e.g., if you have a 4K movie and you go to download it to your phone, you can only download the full fat file, whereas Emby and Plex will allow you to have it encode a 4 Mbps version or whatever and you download that after it's done). This was a deal breaker for Linus, even though he complained that this feature is spotty and doesn't work a lot of the time in Plex. But for me, I don't ever watch any media on my phone or tablet and if I'm outside the house I would rather just read a book on my tablet, so I couldn't care less about that.