I have my fathers Sonos soundbar and a pair of speakers at home that I bought for him as Christmas gifts years ago. I still can't believe they knowingly released an app that bricked older devices.
I have to try and get them working again. The only solution I've heard of is to get an old version of the Sonos app APK, a dedicated old single purpose Android phone to acts as a bridge between your speakers and phone and connect that way.
I have 2012 Sonos hardware. You can still get the original Sonos S1 controller, which works with old stuff. It's pretty annoying that all the new stuff is S2 (and that app is better supported), but it's not as hard as you're describing it. You can get it off Google Play and just use it.
The quality of the software, and the fact that it isn't really updated, is another thing, but the actual software availability is there.
Alabama, US and Bavaria, Germany also have a similar GDP per capita. You would simply be insane to think Alabama was in any way wealthier than Bavaria. This isn't me having a go at the US, this is me having a go at GDP.
Bavaria is one of the wealthiest regions in Germany and Alabama is one of the poorest US states. So it's not really a great comparison.
Also GDP per capita doesn't have that much to do with "wealth". It's a good proxy for income though. So I'm not sure what you are claiming here exactly.
> You would simply be insane to think Alabama was in any way wealthier than Bavaria.
Is it accurate? Europe has a fairly low standard of living compared to America, but their totalitarian governments are quite effective at silencing all dissent.
Yes, life in Bavaria, working in manufacturing, is nothing but miserable oppression. Horrible 35 hour work week. Wretched 6 weeks of vacation. Ruinously expensive 500 EUR/month daycare. The prospect of having to pay a couple hundred Euros per semester when my child reaches university.
The good wine is now 8 EUR/bottle.
Suffering and deprivation.
Do not come here, I beg of you. Save yourself.
I had to use extraordinary means to get this message out.
It's very interesting to see Plex users slowly turn against the platform primarily due to costs being imposed. Plex has better client software than Jellyfin but the 'proprietary vs open source' debate for NAS/video streaming software seems to be reversing. Jellyfin is catching up to Plex and in a few years despite Plex having a first mover advantage here -- I expect it to surpass Plex in monthly active users.
It's about more than just costs. Plex started out as a home media server (a direct port of XBMC/Kodi in fact), but over time due to its success the creators decided they wanted to turn it into Netflix instead. So using Plex to stream your own media to your own local or remote devices is being made harder with every update.
This was the point that made a bunch of people (me included) absolutely furious with Plex. Like I gladly pay for services and donate to open source projects. But it hits differently to pay for my very own hardware being used.
What is the difference between paying for plex to stream your own video from yourown hardware and paying to use microsoft word to write your own letter which also runs on your own hardware?
As a more serious response - The last time I purchased MS office (decade+ ago) I paid once for a product license I could use forever. That felt fair - I buy a tool, I use it.
Plex had that payment model and got a lot less pushback from the community - but this whole "we're a SaaS now!" thing is just not going to fly.
I just don't trust the company anymore, and Jellyfin is absolutely great.
Accurate. I'd pay for Plex if I was supporting the development of software designed for watching your personal media collection. Genuinely I considered it not long ago, until I found out that they'd shifted away from caring about local media.
There's so much media that it can't support though. It could've been managing and sharing ebooks, and karaoke. Hell, audio's a complete shitshow... ever tried to load comedy albums into Plex? It's pretty fucking sure that the only recommendation that makes sense for Steve Martin is his late-life banjo albums (which, don't get me wrong, I like, but still). Even classical music is completely screwed up, because of it's band/performer-centric preconceptions. Jazz is a total dumpster fire.
Images are worse still, I know anyone serious about personal photos probably uses Lightroom, but damn. There aren't any rips harsh enough to describe Plex's image support.
And really, it would've been nice if we could share game roms for emulation (with high-score support and remote game-saves).
I paid for Plex, but then they broke the the downloading features from the server to the Android client, and never repaired it to work reliably.
Meanwhile most of their updates were about streaming support, and then they started cramming their streaming service into it, and pushing it, and I just got sick of all of that. Eventually I just switched to jellyfin. It is far from perfect. The music player isn't as good as plex's, there is no download feature. But at least it hasn't turned on me yet.
Jellyfin's Android app does let you download files but having to do music tracks one by one isn't very useful.
Finamp is the app to use for proper offline playback/sync of music from your Jellyfin server. Go for the beta version, it's far ahead of stable and works well.
It's still poor after the new design. If I downloaded N episodes for M shows, it shows me N*M episodes all at once. No way to say "Hey, filter this list to just episodes of show M, Season K".
It's not just that. It was great for all of us with large media archives, but every "big" release is making things better for those who don't run their media libraries at expense of those who do.
Syncing (a paid feature) was broken for years. It might download video, it might fail. You will find out on the plane.
When internet goes down, Plex becomes weird...my home network still works just fine.
Library navigation follows netflix pattern, but netflix pattern is to let me browse for hours without finding anything.
Not to pile on, but the reason we're pissed at Plex is because they did a classic rug-pull: advertise to nerds like us who own our servers + media, then slowly make deals with publishers, requiring them to police _my_ content. Then start adding subscriptions and limiting how I can share (again) _my_ content - what are they offering me anymore?
The irony is they won't have a customer base from my mom/dad. Why in god's green earth would a layperson pay for Plex when they can get streaming bundles? I just don't get it. And that's why I got rid of my ~10 year plex instance and replaced it with Jellyfin in maybe ~1 day.
For me it wasn't even about cost, it was the fact that logging into my self-hosted Plex server required an auth flow that went to Plex's servers for some reason.
'For some reason'? You mean for the sharing library and streaming services and all the other features that require identification to even use ...?
People like you are why I hate these plex discussions, because motivations and reasoning for functionality are quite clear and obvious but I have to play a game where I have to to discern whether comments like this are just being intentionally obtuse, or are genuinely unaware of what architecture and scale of services they provide, or are aware and are simply opine-ing about functionality you dont like ("bloated").
Jellyfin is a cool alternative to plex, keyword alternative. Its kind of a joke that all the capability it provides is even 30% matched by these other clients but what people are doing unconsciously is just admitting they dont know what they want out of a media server or HTPC. If your needs are met by providing an NFS share and using a vanilla media player to handle buffering, then I dont even see why you're in threads like this.
Also a strange technical ineptitude / fake "blindness" is accepted around here while talking about plex for some reason. Plex offered a free 5mbps reverse tunnel service that allowed you to use THEIR SERVERS to stream to others in a secure and anonymous way if you were unable to open ports. This is the functionality they put behind a paygate, the functionality that had a cost they were floating for free... youve never been restricted from sharing your media to yourself internally or externally, but I still have to pretend that comments from supposedly tech minded people who intentionally misrepresent reality are worth respecting. It really makes browsing ANY jellyfin thread unpleasant.
Can you please refrain from personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? and also please avoid denunciatory rhetoric? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You obviously know a lot about this, and your comment contains fine information, but unfortunately the negative elements do more harm than the fine ones do good.
> You mean for the sharing library and streaming services and all the other features that require identification to even use
Plex is for streaming my media from my server to my clients. I know a decent number of people who use (or used) Plex and I don’t think any of them would ever use it to access streaming services.
I have no problem with charging for functionality that needs their servers, or introducing streaming. But the way their authentication, “services”, and streaming features hae been shoved in our faces in the UI over time feels like a rug pull to those of us who paid for something else.
Your response is both unnecessarily aggressive and plainly wrong.
Yes, Plex _should_ work without an internet gateway. Why? Because it’s a client/server media application; it transcodes media to clients/players over the network.
Plex used to work like this. Actually, it was exclusively unauthenticated. Then early 10s they added optional auth, and eventually allowed you to reserve “server names”, and finally enforced with for running their server. But you can still use a client without auth today. Just read their docs: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200890058-authentication-fo...
> 'For some reason'? You mean for the sharing library and streaming services and all the other features that require identification to even use ...?
All I wanted to do was self host a Plex server and access it from devices on my intranet using Infuse. Why should I have to bounce to a third party server to do that?
And to be clear, the devices using Infuse didn't have to do that, but accessing the dashboard (for admin) did require an external hop. There's no reason IMO for that to be necessary.
> All I wanted to do was self host a Plex server and access it from devices on my intranet using Infuse. Why should I have to bounce to a third party server to do that?
Cool, a real discussion. Plex has the weakness of requiring a first time online auth because they didnt implement a local ldap/oauth/sso pathway. After that point, Settings > Network > "List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth", use a generous netmask. Entirely local after that point if desired.
You're being a bit obtuse here yourself. The original premise of Plex was to stream your own media on your own network. I was a very early user of it, before these additional "features" that were pushed more by the Plex team than by user demand were added. They made it so you had to hack the xml config file to be able to use it in the traditional no login way, that was a pretty hostile move in my opinion and was the first eyebrow raiser for me. They also made it so you had to have a paid account to use any of the mobile clients in a clear monetization move there is no technical reason why you can't open your plex server to the internet and connect a mobile app that way, that's what jellyfin allows. I worked around this for a while by connecting to my home network on a VPN and just using chrome mobile to stream but it was less than ideal, obviously. Yes then they offered the proxying service with dynamic TLS cert generation as another paid for service, I remember it, but having never had a plex account let alone a paid one it was no interest to me. Do you work for Plex? Because your post reads like you do, especially the attitude of people not knowing what features they want and needing Plex to tell (sell) them.
Agree with others it's not solely about cost. For me it was about the very clear monetization drive Plex started doing years ago, while remaining nominally free to use for your own media. At some point, and I've already switched off it so maybe it's already happened, they will monetize tracking/meta data about what is in your own collection.
I never even looked into Plex, I don't want to run proprietary software I have to pay for on my own computer to serve my own music. I've only ever used Jellyfin and it works more or less ok for my use cases.
I have a lifetime subscription to Plex. I hate everything they've been doing over the past few years. They're completely ignoring their existing users in the quest for growth.
* Social sharing stuff that shows what you watch to others by default.
* Adding their streaming services and other paid services.
* Changing the UI layout to hide self hosted content, promote paid services, with poor UX for changing it back.
* Ignoring bugs that have been known and unfixed for years.
* Ignoring user feedback, doubling down on their poor decisions.
Are they that terrible, or is it the market and those of us with our own media are becoming more of the minority? I do question, at times, the amount of effort I put in to curating and backing up and maintaining our media.
I too have a lifetime subscription, I don't mind a lot of what they do, but it feels like our media has become less centric, they want to stream pluto.tv channels and stuff like that.
The biggest thing I dislike was how I had a single app to all my media and then they blew that up and I need multiple apps. It's not that big of a hassle; I just wish I had more heads up to when it was going to happen. And while I'm not aware of them having any music-streaming media, the music app ever only streams my own media and feels like it might be on life support. Maybe music streaming is "done" but it feels kind of neglected.
> Are they that terrible, or is it the market and those of us with our own media are becoming more of the minority?
That's what I was implying with saying "existing users." It seems they're caring less about their self-hosted core userbase and trying to expand to other types of users.
I've never paid Plex a dime because I don't need any of the paid features. But its usability gets worse with every update, which is an underappreciated reason to want off the platform.
Totally. I'm not into politics and basically all I want is a local streamer and I'm running Plex (on an old HP EliteDesk NUC) but... I already tried Jellyfin (and trial was successful with a few movies), so I'll very likely be switching my entire setup from Plex to Jellyfin soon.
We run a plex server and I hate it. Hiding "timer" functionality (turn off in x minutes) behind a paywall feels like a shit move to me as a parent for whom this is a pretty basic functionality.
Sure obviously you're right. I think it's shitty of them because I learned about it after already setting up everything because I thought this was basic functionality. My bad.
So it would be more like Ferrari giving me the car for free, and then after a while when it starts raining I find out the windshield wipers are behind a paywall. Sure that would also be my fault, technically but it's also a shit company for doing that.
Can you not just set your TV to turn off after X hours ? In the EU this is actually a legal requirement that they can do this. (for 'energy saving')
Many TV's also have an explicit sleep timer. Yes this doesn't resolve plex issue but could solve the issue in the meantime. Or go old school and plug an actual electric timer in the socket and cut power to the TV after X minutes/hours
I also want to shout out to Emby, which is almost identical to Jellyfin. It seems a bit more polished, and works very well. I've been using it for over 2 years. It does have a paid tier and nags me to upgrade for 10s on my TV, but that doesn't bother me. I have it running in a freebsd jail and it's been rock solid.
Disco Elysium seems to have revived the point and click genre. People are getting nostalgic for the GameCube with the new 'GabeCube' and with Dawn of War IV and Medieval III being announced there seems to be a renaissance of RTS games happening.
For all the bad news percolating in the world at the moment these are some of the good notes I choose to dwell on.
I wish Ron Gilbert well in contributing to this epsilon in the gaming world.
Disco Elysium has been out for several years now and nothing else like it has yet been released. So I wouldn't say it's revived anything, just that it's proved that it's still possible to do something amazing in the genre.
I like to say Disco Elysium is one of my top five books I've ever read.
Well, he did. He made Monkey Island 5 and he was part of the Kickstarter wave which I think is what truly revived the nostalgia for older games (first by being tangentially involved with Broken Age, and later by making Thimbleweed Park).
I think the headline, and to some extend the article is wildly misleading. Ron Gilbert have never limited himself to Adventure games. After he left LucasArts, he made educational games and was a producer for Total Annihilation. He also made Death Spank and The Cave.
Disco Elysium is truly a wonderful game for adventure/rpg fans. I have a small fraction of the time I had as a younger man to play games so I have to be very selective with my choices and Disco Elysium has taken up a large portion of that time for the past few months.
>rest assured there will be no available hands to keep the status page updated
That's not how status pages if implemented correctly work. The real reason status pages aren't updated is SLAs. If you agree on a contract to have 99.99% uptime your status page better reflect that or it invalidates many contracts. This is why AWS also lies about it's uptime and status page.
These services rarely experience outages according their own figures but rather 'degraded performance' or some other language that talks around the issue rather than acknowledging it.
It's like when buying a house you need an independent surveyor not the one offered by the developer/seller to check for problems with foundations or rotting timber.
SLA’s usually just give you a small credit for the exact period of the incident, which is arymetric to the impact. We always have to negotiate for termination rights for failing to meet SLA standards but, in reality, we never exercise them.
Reality is that in an incident, everyone is focused on fixing issue, not updating status pages; automated checks fail or have false positives often too. :/
Yep, every SLA I've ever seen only offers credit. The idea that providers are incentivized to fudge uptime % due to SLAs makes no sense to me. Reputation and marketing maybe, but not SLAs.
The compensation is peanuts. $137 off a $10,000 bill for 10 hours of downtime, or 98.68% uptime in a month, is well within the profit margins.
This is weird - at this level contracts are supposed to be rock solid so why wouldn't they require accurate status reporting? That's trivial to implement, and you can even require to have it on a neutral third-party like UptimeRobot and be done with it.
I'm sure there are gray areas in such contracts but something being down or not is pretty black and white.
> something being down or not is pretty black and white
This is so obviously not true that I'm not sure if you're even being serious.
Is the control panel being inaccessible for one region "down"? Is their DNS "down" if the edit API doesn't work, but existing records still get resolved? Is their reverse proxy service "down" if it's still proxying fine, just not caching assets?
I understand there are nuances here, and I may be oversimplifying, but if part of the contract effectively says "You must act as a proxy for npmjs.com" yet the site has been returning 500 Cloudflare errors across all regions several times within a few weeks while still reporting a shining 99.99% uptime, something doesn't quite add up. Still, I'm aware I don't know much about these agreements, and I'm assuming the people involved aren't idiots and have already considered all of this.
> I'm sure there are gray areas in such contracts but something being down or not is pretty black and white.
Is it? Say you've got some big geographically distributed service doing some billions of requests per day with a background error rate of 0.0001%, what's your threshold for saying whether the service is up or down? Your error rate might go to 0.0002% because a particular customer has an issue so that customer would say it's down for them, but for all your other customers it would be working as normal.
> something being down or not is pretty black and white
it really isn't. We often have degraded performance for a portion of customers, or just down for customers of a small part of the service. It has basically never happened that our service is 100% down.
Are the contracts so easy to bypass? Who signs a contract with an SLA knowing the service provider will just lie about the availability? Is the client supposed to sue the provider any time there is an SLA breach?
Anyone who doesn't have any choice financially or gnostically. Same reason why people pay Netflix despite the low quality of most of their shows and the constant termination of tv series after 1 season. Same reason why people put up with Meta not caring about moderating or harmful content. The power dynamics resemble a monopoly
Most of services are not really critical but customers want to have 99.999% on the paper.
Most of the time people will just get by and ignore even full day of downtime as minor inconvenience. Loss of revenue for the day - well you most likely will have to eat that, because going to court and having lawyers fighting over it most likely will cost you as much as just forgetting about it.
If your company goes bankrupt because AWS/Cloudflare/GCP/Azure is down for a day or two - guess what - you won't have money to sue them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and most likely will have bunch of more pressing problems on your hand.
The company that is trying to cancel its contract early needs to prove the SLA was violated, which is very easy of the company providing the service also provides a page that says their SLA was violated. Otherwise it's much harder to prove.
I was subscribing to these guys purely to support the EU tech scene. So I was on Pro for about 2 years while using ChatGPT and Claude.
Went to actually use it, got a message saying that I missed a payment 8 months previously and thus wasn't allowed to use Pro despite having paid for Pro for the previous 8 months. The lady I contacted in support simply told me to pay the outstanding balance. You would think if you missed a payment it would relate to simply that month that was missed not all subsequent months.
Utterly ridiculous that one missed payment can justify not providing the service (otherwise paid for in full) at all.
Basically if you find yourself in this situation you're actually better of deleting the account and resigning up again under a different email.
We really need to get our shit together in the EU on this sort of stuff, I was a paying customer purely out of sympathy but that sympathy dried up pretty quick with hostile customer service.
I'm not sure I understand you correctly, but it seems you had a subscription missed one payment some time ago, but now expect that your subscription works because the missed month was in the past and "you paid for this month"?
This sounds like the you expect your subscription to work as an on-demand service? It seems quite obvious that to be able to use a service you would need to be up to date on your payments, that would be no different in any other subscription/lease/rental agreement? Now Mistral might certainly look back at their records and see that you actually didn't use their service at all for the last few month and waive the missed payment. And that could be good customer service, but they might not even have record that you didn't use it, or at least those records would not be available to the billing department?
>This sounds like the you expect your subscription to work as an on-demand service?
That's exactly what it is.
>I'm not sure I understand you correctly,
I understand perfectly well, I don't agree with that approach is the issue.
If I paid for 11/12 months I should get 11/12 months subscription not 1/12 months. They happily just took a years subscription and provided nothing in return. Even if I fixed the outstanding balance they would have provided 2/12 months of service at a cost of 12/12 months of payment.
My critique is more levelled at Mistral and not specifically what they've just released so it could be that some see what I have to say as off topic.
Also a lot of Europeans are upset at US tech dominance. It's a position we've roped ourselves in to so any commentary that criticises an EU tech success story is seen as being unnecessarily negative.
However I do mean it as a warning to others, I got burned even with good intentions.
When Andromeda and the Milky Way collide there will be no planets or solar systems that collide from either system. A fascinating fact in in own right, it's simply due to the scale of the galaxies and that they are mostly composed of empty space.
Unless we find the means to manipulate our own star or the orbit of Earth we most likely will not be around at that time. The sun's increased luminosity will boil us way earlier.
I have to try and get them working again. The only solution I've heard of is to get an old version of the Sonos app APK, a dedicated old single purpose Android phone to acts as a bridge between your speakers and phone and connect that way.
Stay away from Sonos.
reply