I use Plex for it’s original purpose… Storing and managing my owned content … as a lifetime plex pass owner I would prefer feature enhancements like:
Native Audiobook support w/ it’s own metadata agent- no brainer, many people have posted here requesting this feature over the years…
ePub/mobi/PDF Document Library type support - like calibre, but Plex server version
yawn
Point 1: Anyone who I’ve spoken with either uses Plex for hosting their own content, or they simply don’t know how (or don’t invest the time) to setup it up properly - it’s laughable to me that Plex is attempting to position themselves as a streaming service.
Point 2: Adding movie rentals has got to be the last thing core Plex users want.
Point 3: A public server update hasn’t been released in over a month, yikes!
Weird that they think this is what their customers want. I expect very few takers, considering the point of Plex is to stream content you already own instead of renting content or paying monthly for streaming services.
I fully expect a passive aggressive comment on this post defending these unwanted features!
I dont want any of those things you listed so hopefully plex doesnt add them… Id rather be able to keep playing my media using the best UI there is, and if plex needs to have rentals to do it, fine by me, I wont use it, but if they keep integrating features like oh you can see this item on xyz service or any of your “shared” servers even better, maybe you have a low quality version and you have netflix and its higher quality or maybe its on your friends server but you also have netflix so it will stream better, sounds win win to me.
Got it. So your ■■■■■ and complain that you’re cheap and pirate your media and then cry because they can’t add new features because your 70$ one time payment entitles you to what? Why not go support Jellyfin or any one of the other companies, we won’t care. Again what plex is doing hasn’t impacted me at all lol. I have severs and shares with multiple other people some of the features they have in the discovery like being able to see what service/servers an item is on is very useful. They need to bring it to all library screens and they said they are working on it according to the FR. So this would show if you have the same media item in a diff library or on any of your services or any of your shares.
I also get free access to a bunch of services from other things I’m already paying for like Apple, Amazon, T-Mobile. I think those 3 alone give me Hulu, appletv, Netflix, prime, peacock, mlb. Maybe you live somewhere else. I don’t know.
lol who is this we? Do you work for plex? Isn’t it fun calling people you don’t know on the internet names?!
I’m definitely exploring Jellyfin as a potential alternative. I am in the US - here I believe in ownership & I gladly pay for valuable products and services. Yes, I also paid full price for my plex pass ($120) and most of my content is from owned DVDs that I converted via Handbrake!
I am happy to pay 1 time fees (with the occasional subscription - as needed.) Unfortunately, increased subscription costs are a result of SaaS based companies and services passing down their monthly cost to end users. But there’s no denying that even if you pay for all these various streaming services there’s something to be said about having all your media in an easily accessible and centralized location.
I absolutely hate having to check 4-5 apps to watch something specific, so I do see how some people may find value in adding their subscription to plex and using their search feature! I personally turn it off.
While there’s nothing wrong with the occasional rant and I even might enjoy a good troll…
Let’s curb the temperature in this thread down and stop the name calling (goes to everyone on the conversation)
That’s not really a fair assessment. I personally am at 60TB of Movies Music and TV and my sources are all 4K UHD/blu-ray, DVD, CDs or hi-res downloads for music (legally obtained).
And a lifetime license does grant a user certain privileges and rights (the entire purpose of a lifetime license) so why shouldn’t a user expect his lifetime license to provide value over time? That’s a dangerous line to walk if you think companies shouldn’t have an obligation to users who purchase a lifetime license.
They have 0 obligations to you lol. It’s a licensed software that’s free. You gain very few extra features and I think only 1 is server related and that being the hardware decode which I’d think most people don’t really need if they are hosting internal and have proper setups. Even with remote sharing it’s rare I see someone transcode especially basic 1080p files, it’s no longer 2008 most people have > 100MB. Plex could come out with v2 and drop the lifetime rules for it and you could still run the 1x and would be perfectly fine.
No they do have an obligation to make the features you purchased work properly. By purchasing a lifetime license you are still purchasing a product.
I can’t offer you a lifetime license and take your money, then say “screw you I don’t have any obligations to make what you paid for work”. That’s false advertising at least and could be considered fraud at worst.
Very different experience from someone who uses Plex free. Quite a few of these features are very important to have.
Except I didn’t purchase a Plex V1 lifetime license. I purchased a Plex Pass lifetime license. So whatever gets added to Plex Pass in the future, ALL Plex Pass users will have access to that (subscription or lifetime users).
This notion of companies not being obligated to provide working software is ridiculous. Most countries have laws against such things like deceptive practices.
And yet them blocking hetzner access and all the EU folks suing, how that working out? Pretty sure the ToS states otherwise maybe take a look. Im well aware what plex pass offers, its very little for 99% of people.
You should also figure out what lifetime means it can very well be v1 vs v2 are two different prodcuts you might not like it but its very much valid.
There have been numerous posts about how plex is breaking the law and this and that is illegal in my country blah blah blah… Im still waiting for any action to be taken, seems like “lifetime” isnt even mentioned in the ToS so pretty sure there is no guarantee to anything lol Plex could also end the Plex Pass program thus ending the lifetime.
There is also no reason why plex cant in v 1.5 remove the plex pass and tie it to a new monetization, you would still get beta and other stuff, remember if they can add they can remove and no one says it thas to be for all versions of server in perpetuity as you would all want to believe. I would argue adding things like the skip intros/credits violates my agreement of my lifetime agreement, its devaluing my existing agreement.
I understand what you’re saying. Infuse for Apple TV does lifetime subscriptions this way. But they word it properly (V5 V6 etc). I can almost assure you the way Plex Pass Lifetime is worded, they would have very little wiggle room to change Plex Pass to a V1-V2 kind of situation.
Sirius XM tried to pull something similar and lost a class action lawsuit when they tried to revoke peoples lifetime subscriptions in 2021. https://www.lifetimesiriusxmsettlement.com/
The Hetzner situation is a bit of a grey area. Those users may not have been using the service as intended in the TOS so a bit more complicated.
Lifetime license to Plex Pass means whatever features are added to Plex Pass in the future, are available to the users who have a subscription or lifetime license. Now they could offer a different tier like “Plex Premium” or something but again that could be seen as them breaching the lifetime license agreement. Filmora software tried to do something similar, and they had to honor the lifetime license even though they tried not to. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy1HiWGchMg
I paid $75 for my lifetime plex pass back in 2018. What did I get for that? I got many features I take advantage of and I got the ability to not pay $5 a month for it forever. So far I’ve saved well over $200 in fees for that one time $75 investment. That’s ALL I expected to get for that $75 and I got it. Did I think there was some expectation that all the features I want would be included because I paid them $75 over five years ago? Nope. Do I want Audio book support. Sure, but I have prologue and that has worked fine for my needs. Do I want PDF support? Do I want to read a book on my TV? Not really. I don’t care if they do that or not.
Does it bother me that Plex is offering lots of things that help them monitize the platform and help ensure that it will be around forever? Not one bit. I don’t rent movies and since I turned all the online available content off I haven’t had to deal with anything I don’t want to see. Plex, for me, is doing everything I want it to do. If it NEVER got better it would be perfectly fine. Everything I want it to do it does. YMMV.
Finally, I don’t care how often they release things past Beta. Taking you time is what Beta is for. You send it out. People find bugs. You rinse and repeat until the Beta folks don’t see bugs then it is released to the public. If that takes three months, so be it. If you have a plex pass you can (I believe) download the beta releases if you want to. Knock yourself out. Just don’t complain if there are bugs. Software releases isn’t a quantity trumps quality kind of thing.
You don’t sound normal. All the people paid 125$ and expect feature to constantly be added. Why else did they pay money?!? I bought a lotto ticket I guess I’m expected to get the max prize, right.
I answered that. You pay a ONE TIME fee to not have to spend monthly fees. If you expect you will use the product long enough, you end up saving money. Kind of basic math. I expect new features to be included in the money I spent but you get that even if you don’t pay for anything. The product is FREE. Do I expect the ability to demand specific features be added? Not any more than I can demand that Microsoft allow me to set a default for insert row to be DOWN instead of RIGHT. All I expect are what I said. The additional features offered at the time I bought the pass and the ability to not have to pay a monthly fee forever.
You don’t sound normal from multi post. If I buy a Coke I expect it and not a bag of chips as well just a coke.
I would like Plex to work and not crash. if they have issue with anything say fixing code/ patching ( or staff) communication letting us know what is going on good or bad is good. as it is communication. also I do not want constant feature ( other might but not me and bet most) I would like then to improve their process make it run better as tech/code/ new external feature ( say a process to stream better, making up for a point) but I am not looking for anything different Thant what I originally purchased 4+ years ago.
and again yes, they might not have made a good choice of lifetime membership but there are things they can do to try and make more revenue like a bar at the bottom om for an add on homepage.
and you know there are somer lotto tickets where you can choose a small amount for life and not a lump sum.
I couldn’t agree more, but I’d really prefer it not to get worse. The only thing that I can actually remember is removing Plug-ins (there’s now no way to import/export playlists or share them with friends, for example).
Like you said – as long as it keeps doing what I paid for it to do (allow me to access my media anywhere in the world when I travel for work, and share videos with my elderly parents) then I am THRILLED with my ROI on the Plex Pass.
I just hope it continues to do the things we need it to do. With folks like @dane22 and @ChuckPa doing what they do, I have confidence it will.
Just wanted to pop in and give a huge thank you to Chuck for all the hours he spent helping me fix my DB corruption that happened at some point between 1.26 and 1.32. He saved me 9 years of custom metadata by helping me rebuild 90% of my DB. I get better “customer support” for a one-time purchase I made however many years ago than I received from vendors we pay thousands of dollars a month to license at work.
So yeah, when I see threads like this I can’t help but sigh a little. Plex hasn’t always been perfect, but there’s a reason we’re all here and not using the alternatives. It’s a damn good piece of software, and damn cheap/free.
And where does buying a lifetime pass entitle you to updates and new features or them honoring it from multi versions? Your “payout” of lotto tickets can also be paid lump sump instead, the “lifetime” ones are also not a lifetime it’s more like 20-30yr you should read the fine print. So again you bought a version of a product 4 years ago for a lifetime and you think it entitles you to new stuff it doesn’t. It entitles you to what they had then lol. Also people have referenced other software but them choosing to rehonor it because of bad PR doesn’t not equate law. If plex came out with v2 and stopped lifetime on it it’s perfectly fine as long as you can keep using v1. Also if I buy a Coke and Coke comes out with a new Coke now what. Do you go ask for a refund? There are many products with lifetime warranty’s that you’ll never get fixed because the parts no longer exist it’s past the lifetime of said product.
Absolutely agree! Tried Emby and Jellyfin and it’s just not the same. And that is also why I think threads like this exist as well. People don’t want to see something they love and use daily go away or change from what it’s great at.
Remember when they announced Plex would no longer be available on HTPCs? They reversed the decision after the backlash from users but it literally came out of nowhere and after years and months of saying they were working on the new Plex Home Theatre app.
So that’s why I think threads like this are useful. To let the devs know that “hey we want you guys to be profitable and around forever, but we also want you to keep the products and features we use daily working properly and expand features that are beneficial to users and not just investors”.
Shoutout to Chuck as well he’s an awesome help around the forums and a kind soul indeed
I have to agree with you 100%. For software that costs next to nothing, I have had amazing support when I actually needed it. There was a problem when dealing with large amounts of music files (over 500,000) and it killed the scanner back in the day. The engineers worked with me for several weeks with me testing version after version sending logs back and forth and they nailed it. @dane22 and @ChuckPa are both great.
