Plex: Another good project bites the dust

Oh yeah, I am so done with plex. I logged in to my plex server last night, and drilled down to my personal media, which lives on my NAS box in my basement. I was going to take a friend's advice and start my Babylon 5 rewatch, so I picked The Gathering. The first thing I noticed was that some Torri Spelling movie called Awake to Danger, that I don't own showed up in my list of movies. So I clicked on The Gathering, only to get a pop-up with what, I suppose, plex thinks is a clever message:

Charming. So the plex people want to charge me $20 a year (no doubt an introductory cost, only for the first year) to watch my own movies just so I can use their shitty web interface? It feels akin to cooking a meal, then having a restaurant send you a bill for the food you just prepared. The company behind plex fall pretty much dead center into the definition of "enshitification." This is nearly on the same level of behavior as adobe threatening to sue customers for continuing to use the copies of Photoshop that they purchased (for hundreds of dollars) in the past instead of getting on the subscription program.

They first started circling the drain for me in 2024, when the cable company took our cable down for upgrades. I figured that I had the plex server, I had the media locally, we could still watch TV. Yeah, not so much. They had, at some point, moved the "watch my own media without a login" feature behind the paywall. This really annoyed me...Enough so that I tried to stand jellyfin up in a different jail. However, it turns out it doesn't play nicely with FreeBSD.

I actually went to the plex website last night, and looked at their plans. They do indeed claim to have a free option, which has you downloading a tarball of the plex media server -- the same version that is installed on my jail at the moment. So why does it keep prompting me to pay them money? Just for gits and shiggles, I even looked through the configuration of plex on the jail. There was nothing in the config that stood out to me. And I honestly believe that their end goal is to get every plex user onto their subscription program, in the hopes that most of them will forget about it, which seems to have become it's own revenue stream in and of itself. People forget that they have a subscription to this service, and open a new one with a different email address, and before you know it, you have 20 different subscriptions, likely to 15 services, and all of them are raising prices 2-3x per year.

I have seen similar behavior from these charities that ask for donations. They will ask for $19 a month to support St. Jude, Feed the Children, Shriners, Tunnels2Towers, etc. But I actually kept count of the ads over the course of one evening, and if you had gotten on all of the donation programs, it would have been over $300 a month.

Back to plex, however, this latest development, having to pay to watch any of my media through plex on the local LAN? Not happening. I have disconnected the NFS mount from my plex jail and am shutting it down, and closing my account. When they start digging their hands into my pockets to allow me to watch *my own media, at that point, I'm out.

At this point, it is not worth the aggravation of trying to figure out which whatsis needs to be tuned. I can't even get the the plex app to install on any of my rokus on the local network. Nope. Not worth it. plex is now dead to me.

After all, mplayer, vlc and jellyfin are free. So plex fades into my rear-view mirror.