A lot of the casual users probably use the power users servers to stream from. I wouldn’t be surprised if most Plex users do not host their own content.
We might have not invested much, but we happily paid when Plex needed it at the beginning, when there were no VC involved yet.
So excuse me if I feel we have the right at least to express our disappointment.
That said, as I mentioned in the other thread, I acknowledge we are not anymore interesting users from a business point of view. I even suggested to charge us for a premium product despite our lifetime pass.
I believe this to be an accurate statement. I have 10 users, give or take, that do not run servers of their own. They consume from my server, and not a single one pays a dime for anything. I, however… am a lifetime subscriber.
So… I wonder who’s more important to them? The 90% nonpaying users, or the 10% I fall into. (using my own numbers, obviously, but I can’t be that much different than the rest of you)
I guess we will have to disagree about that. My only basis is that I personally know about 70 Plex users and the only one that has an HTPC is me and I do not use mine but maybe once every month or so and then it is almost always just to verify that it still works. Several times I have thought about retasking it but the need has not been great.
I think 1 out of 70 is a small percentage but those 70 may not be representative of overall Plex users. I actually think that regular Plex HTPC users are less than 1 out of 1000 Plex overall users but, since Plex does not reveal those numbers, I really cannot back it up but I suspect there is no way for anyone to back up any other claim either.
Neither. The only important ones are those who have a recurring subscription.
Lifetime passes are a way to quickly raise money when needed but the revenue stream for Plex from those of us who chose the lifetime pass ended pretty much as soon as we hit the Pay button. 75 or 150$ doesn’t make a difference.
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Seriously! You know they don’t write the hardware drivers right?
Yeah, I get much better audio/video quality overall! The upscaling on the SHIELD isn’t quite as good, but it’s good enough. Getting 4K HDR is really good (my TV is a light cannon, gets up to about 1800 nits), and the extra audio passthrough for HD audio that I couldn’t get on my Mac Mini. PMP only tone maps HDR to SDR, so being able to get true HDR has been quite a game changer. I have a mix of DVD, Blu-Ray, 4K HDR Blu Ray, and DVR recordings that I watch.
But that does not mean they do not have major support problems because of all the different configurations. When Plex does not behave correctly on someone’s Whoisit HTPC hith a Whatisit video card and a Somethingwierd audio card the user expects Plex to be able to fix it or at least say what’s wrong. The HTPC world is rapidly becoming obsolete and Plex knows it. It is much more complex than they need to handle.
While I agree that a properly tuned and maintained HTPC might be able to produce slightly better picture and sound that most other client devices it is just not worth the effort for most users or for Plex.
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Thank you for you obsolescence lesson, I am sure you will feel exactly the same when Plex Media Server goes the same way…because streaming is the future. Soon after that I am sure the “big boys” will start putting the squeeze on the use of plex at all as they steer users to their platforms with under priced hardware.
Its opinions like yours that completely miss the point about an HTPC. Its not JUST a plex player as it is capable of so much more like playing services that are not supported on this or that box as well as being a plex server, a games machine, a home automation controller, or pretty much anything else I choose to put on it.
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Your argument strongly supports the end of PMS far more than it does the end of PMP.
Given that PMS requires a much higher level of support, a higher level of maintenance and a smaller customer segment.
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You can turn off the server updates. Just get your system working the way you like it now with PMP, and then turn off the updates. That way you won’t run into this issue.
Oh, I see. Good thing there are no disabilities that affect a person’s ability to use their voice.
Loss of keyboard control isn’t just an accessibility issue, it’s a basic UX design issue – there’s a reason that keyboard shortcuts exist (or would you argue that using the mouse to copy/paste from the app menu is a better and more pleasing experience?).
Except they’re not dropping support for HTPCs, but just dropping support for their PC app to be used in an HT environment. They’re still going to spend time/money on maintaining a desktop app, but are just cutting some features. Features that they’re ALREADY SPENDING TIME DEVELOPING for the other clients! The UNO UI has to be navigable by remote because that’s all you get on streaming boxes. It already has to scale to different screen sizes/densities because it works on mobile.
There is no audio pass-through with the new app.
Don’t forget to vote people.
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I think that’s why they’re killing the HTPC clients honestly. There’s not a single device out there with the same flexibility. It made it too easy to just rip a disk and stream it full fat direct play to your home theater. Can’t have that now, can we - there’s no corporate interest there.
Once they took investors the project was screwed.
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Just for perspective: Without investors, it’s very possible (likely?) that Plex wouldn’t exist at its current level of development, at the minimum.
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The vast majority of bs they waste resources on is totally unnecessary. How much money got blown on tidal? On podcasts and webshows? On VR? Those are all absolutely, completely useless. Plex rammed them into the product, while pulling the plug on something that their early backers love. All I heard when they were putting in that bs was oh stop it, you can still use it the way you want to they aren’t taking anything away! And yet here we are.
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Job done.
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There is also one other reason to use a HTPC: in my HTPC I’m having an high-end NVIDIA card that can render my SD movies far better than any streaming device.
Bottom line: even nowadays with BluRay and 4k I still have a lot of old SD content that I’d like to be displayed as beautifully as anyhow possible. While my Apple TV is great for watching HD content, it really, really, really sucks at playing SD.
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Which is surprising as they both use the fantastic MPV player. With all that said I’m a huge fan of HTPC’s in general.
