You are aware that this isn’t a lifelong commitment, right? A Plex license doesn’t make using it mandatory. In fact, had you read a bit further, you’d have seen that it’s no commitment at all, and I’m still running and maintaining a Jellyfin server simultaneously, reverse proxy and all. Not just as a fallback, but also for the things it still does better.

I migrated my household use to Plex, though, because this evil “closed source for profit app” offers an on-device user experience that is as good, if not better, than that of a commercial streaming services. This makes the rest of the household use it happily, instead of seeing it as an inferior alternative.

Jellyfin’s user experience is simply not there yet, not even close. Its clients, if available at all for the system in question, are (mostly) functional, but certainly not fun.

I had the money to spend on the evil “closed source for profit app” and it made my family’s life a little better for it - are you sure that trying to shame me for that was the right reaction?

Plex killed their official plugin repository, but plugins are, technically, still supported. There just isn’t much life left in that ecosystem after Plex strangled it.

Ironically, it’s probably Jellyfin’s thriving plugin-ecosystem that’s holding back its clients - since anything with a native UI can’t really be used with any plugin that extends the UI feature set and vice versa.

Oh, and all “workarounds” that I know of for “offline” Plex involve essentially disabling user auth for certain IPs - which is insane. Plex simply doesn’t support local auth, it’s not an offline-capable solution. That (and some other restrictions) is why I’m still running and maintaining Jellyfin as a fallback.

Jellyfin requires a reverse proxy or similar to be reachable from outside the network, once that’s set up, the usability gap between the two becomes a lot smaller. And Jellyfin does, still, have some benefits over Plex - first and foremost: it doesn’t require an active Internet connection and an “ok” from a central server to fully function - it also has fewer restrictions when it comes to sharing content and a better plugin ecosystem.

Again, I think both are highly capable servers and I’m running both in parallel, even after migrating most of my personal use to Plex.

It’s the clients where it all falls down, sadly. Jellyfin’s are, even after all these years, clunky, ugly and unpleasant. The choice of supported devices and systems is also quite limited. This is where Plex shines: they have a, generally excellent, client for pretty much everything you would ever want to play your media on.

Do you mean hardware encoding, because that’s what’s paywalled in Plex.

I personally migrated from a Jellyfin ecosystem to a Plex with Lifetime Pass one when building my current server - while both are highly capable media servers, Plex has, by far, the better clients.

Geeze, what an obvious sales pitch.

Try The Secret of Money Island instead, it’s much better than Loom. 😉

They’re pushing their proprietary “Metal” API, which is iOS and MacOS compatible. Just Apple being Apple.

MacOS is a good middle ground but not one I would personally use outside of a work machine.

I fail to see how it’s a “middle ground” between the drawbacks you mentioned before.

When it comes to gaming, Mac OS is the absolute bottom of the barrel, compatibility is utterly atrocious. With Apple’s insistence not to allow Vulkan drivers, they pulled the rug out of any leaps Mac OS could have made in that regard (like Linux did).

Apple also pulled the plug on any server capabilities Mac OS once had.

So, when it comes to gaming or server use, Mac OS would be my absolute last choice, not a middle ground.

Software choice is limited, but software quality is generally high and for some professions, the choice is flawless: when it comes to content creation, Apple’s ecosystem is hard to beat.

The Epson Eco-Tank printers are probably one of the most infuriatingly mislabeled products ever, though. They come with self-destruct timers.

If their software counter device that their excess ink sponge pad is full (which can happen rather quickly depending on printing behavior and the amount of cleaning cycles), they turn themselves into e-waste. Epson considers the sponge non-serviceable and the only official solution is to buy an entirely new printer with a clean sponge. Absolutely nothing Eco about that.

There are (paid!) counter reset hacks available now, though.

So, yeah, fuck Epson, but for very different reasons than op is listing.

Made good printers. They were one of the last bastions of sanity, but last year that one fell, too:

As far as I know, they finally pushed firmware updates to block 3rd party toner to most of their printers - which is pretty evil, given that most people purchased Brother devices exactly to avoid that kind of bullshit and nobody expected it from them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

That said, I love my Brother DCP-9022CDW. It has been an indestructible workhorse, eats any toner I want and lets me reset the counter and keep printing another 2000 pages on an “empty” toner. Heck, I’ve had third party toner that I could reset three times before actually running out. That latest firmware update will stay far away from it, though.

And as for “no FOMO”, that’s just straight up, uncomplicatedly untrue.

Most predatory in-game shops create FOMO by offering exclusive items for short time windows only. Or they offer massive, often personalized, timed discounts on overpriced items. Or they offer expensive purchases of previously timed exclusive in-game items.

I’d argue that it’s not impossible to run a “no FOMO” cosmetics shop, but it probably wouldn’t be very profitable. No idea how Inkbound’s shop worked, though - I never played the game.

Betteridge’s law of headlines has rarely been more applicable than in this case: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” 

I’m writing this comment via Boost for Lemmy.

Kbin is federated, so - why not use one of the many Lemmy apps?

They used to be the biggest publisher on Stadia as well and they couldn’t have handled Stadia’s shutdown any better than they did:

Even though Stadia refunded all purchases, Ubisoft still granted each owner of their titles on Stadia the full, non-plus-ultra-deluxe PC version of each of those game on their launcher. Automatically, for free, and without talking much about it.

Frankly, I want X to lose big time.

As someone with “founder” status in both services, Stadia’s user experience was far better. It also had the best latency with its direct connect controllers.

While GeForce Now made some steps towards mitigation and cooperation, with 2FA it’s often still a mess of tediously logging into PC launchers before finally being able to play. And because the hardware changes every time, this repeats before every session.

GFN’s library of compatible games is still stupidly limited, yet has all remaining competitors beat by a wide margin. And it has by far the most powerful hardware.

Both of those things probably make it the best streaming service right now, and outweigh the shortcomings. But “good” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

That’s weird, doesn’t it usually take seven?

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/thering/images/1/1e/Samara_Morgan.v1.webp/revision/latest?cb=20221030003832

Are you seriously suggesting running a Plex server on the Steam Deck in addition to the Plex media player? Because last I checked, the Plex media player can play (I think) but not index them. I’m a happy Plex user with lifetime Plex pass, but that’s just stupid.

Kodi is a solid standalone solution for exactly what OP is asking, with controller support. Kodi wouldn’t be my first choice for networked media playback, but it’s brilliant for exactly OP’s use case. And it really isn’t laggy unless you overload it with plugins.

OP is talking about local content! Attached to the dock. Plex App is not the right solution for that. Kodi is probably their best choice.

I mean, this is Lemmy, we’re barely interacting here.