Recommendation please, as I move away from Plex

General Discussions
1

Plex has been great over the years. It is my top recommended solution for the problem today’s Plex solves. By far the absolute best thing I’ve found at any price.

Sadly it is time I move on to some other solution. The problem isn’t Plex it’s me. I only need Plex for what I originally needed. Store and organize my personal photos, home videos, movies, and music. Yes, it still does that, but not with the convenience I expect for my personal time and money I spend maintaining its software and hardware running it.

The crux of the problem is I almost never use Plex… at all… unless my internet goes out. Plex is there to play Star Wars or Back to the Future for me when I can’t access Netflix or other streaming services. Yes, I’ve set it up so I can access it without the internet. But over time, it seems that Plex (speculation) in an effort to keep me connected to its latest features finds its way back to preferring the internet as a necessity. There may be those who insist that no so such logic exists in Plex, but some mechanism makes it happen. After it does, if the internet goes out, I can’t get into my local Plex server without the internet, until I enable the feature to allow access without the internet. But I need internet access to enable that feature. I expect to use my XBOX controller select the Plex app instead of Netflix, and play a movie from my personal library just as though it were Netflix. If I have to fire even one more neuron to make Plex work, I go get the disk from the other room instead, because when I go to watch TV, the day has already defeated me. I’ll just have to fix what went wrong with Plex another day.

You probably read some anger in that, but I don’t intend it. That anger isn’t there. I want you to read that, I’m exhausted if I actually submit to watching TV.

I have loved Plex over the years. But Plex is changing in a way that “in practice” is making it unsuitable for my use case. For everyone else, Plex is keeping itself relevant and changing with the times. Otherwise, it will disappear as Blockbuster did in the past. If that happened, Plex wouldn’t be here for all of you Millennials. And it probably wouldn’t have the features you expect.

So to the Plex teams, Good job! I mean really It has been great. And keep it going. Your future looks great!

To those who are still reading this… what’s out there that fits the use case I described above?

2

Emby and Jellyfin. Neither require the 'Net to use locally.

3

Thank you, charliemurphy, a Plex Pass customer. I am encouraged because you have answered my plea.

To all other Plex users reading this reply. Please comment as well, even if you have no recommendation. Let me say, there are no others on this planet I would trust to give a good and honest answer to my question than you. I really need your help dealing with this question I have posed to you. Let me explain.

I’m probably overly emotional, with grief, because I’m so attached to Plex. It started in 1989, when my father and I both shared a common interest. We both collect VCR tapes of movies, and later DVDs then Blue-Ray. But I digress. Back to 1989. We both wanted to put our movies into a computer and play them from our TV. This idea, is common today, but in 1989 no one heard of it. There was no world wide web at the time, and certainly no streaming internet services. We both spent obscene amounts of money towards this goal, and personal hours trying to get this done. It seemed at the time that anyone we asked could not understand what we were talking about, but they were ready to sell us their product whether or not it was an exact solution. If it seamed on the path to success, we spent our time and money. We almost never found a solution, that is until Plex arrived in the world. We were very excited and happy. I barely can speak what happened next. Let’s just say, my father caught Covid and it didn’t end well.

Back to you, the reader of this reply. I trust no one more than you, the community of Plex users, to help me find another solution.

4

Really sorry about the loss of your father.
For some more detail, Emby was open-source and decided to switch to closed source. Jellyfin is an open-source fork of where they left off and they continued to develop from there. I often run Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin servers on the same box and it’s fine. If I were you, I’d start with Jellyfin to see if that satisfies all my needs.
And I agree, hosting your own media digitally is very cool.