Plex is now enforcing remote play restrictions on TVs

www.howtogeek.com /plex-is-now-enforcing-remote-play-restrictions-on-tvs/

Plex has confirmed that it will require a Remote Watch Pass or Plex Pass for remote streaming on its TV apps. The change is going into effect for the Roku app first, followed by all other TV apps and third-party clients in 2026.
Earlier this year, Plex increased its pricing for Plex Pass and stopped supporting all options for free remote streaming in the Plex apps, such as adding a custom server connection in the app settings. The company said at the time, "The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature." That's also when Plex introduced the Remote Watch Pass as a less expensive way to enable remote streaming again.
Plex is now rolling out the remote watch changes to its Roku TV app. If you have Plex Pass, or the owner of the server you're streaming from has Plex Pass, you don't need to do anything. Otherwise, if you are streaming on a different network from the server's home network, you need Plex Pass or Remote Watch Pass.

125 comments

Oh fuck off, dipshits. You chose this route despite the community that built you.
- If Plex was 100% paid there a would be zero complaints.
  
  I don't think that's it.
  There were complaints when Netflix started enforcing password sharing rules.
  I think the main driver of complaints is "you promised the thing I'm paying for would be X, and now you're changing the deal."
  
  The issue, as always, is that Plex started to put free existing features behind a paywall to squeeze more money out of their client base instead of adding something and charging for it.
  VC money came in and now the VC wants to cash in on the investment.
  
  In that case, I think no one would've used Plex in the first place. But yeah, I think it should be that way ideally.
Switched to Jellyfin after more than a decade with Plex. Prettey.. prettey.. pretty good.
- Love me some Jellyfin. I was yesterday days old when I finally read some documentation and learned that my metadata issues were because I was using a mixed library type for kids shoes and movies, and that they strongly discourage it because of the unreliable metadata it causes. Split kids movies and shows apart and now that works flawlessly, still, I feel like I’d prefer they could be combined on a single library for a kids’ browsing
  
  Why do you have a library of kiss's shoes?
- I can recommend a local Wireguard server for this. I have one port on my router open for Wireguard and all of my devices can connect to it remotely.
  Once connected, they can see all the devices on my local network, including my local jellyfin server. It works pretty painlessly and you don't need to open any jellyfin ports to the world.
  
  That's how it works with Tailscale as well. Tailscale creates Wireguard tunnels underneath between the different devices. There's also an open-source self-hostable Tailscale control plane.
- Same, and I haven’t missed any of the streaming services I used to have. It’s amazing.
- Do you give friends and family access to your library? If so, how?
  
  There's a few ways, but it's similar to hosting anything yourself. You could, if you're not too bothered by it, just forward the port that jellyfin is using. You do this in your routers settings and you can see/change the port in jellyfins settings. Then you give your friends the device that's hosting jellyfin's ip address and they type it in when logging into the app. That's simple and quick and not secure at all. But it's really one of those things that 99 times out of 100 it's fine.
  You can use something like tailscale to connect your friends devices to your network, I didn't do it so I don't really know the details, but you'd need it installed on all of their clients. This is (probably) the most secure way but it's a pain in the butt for users, compared to other ways. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/networking/tailscale/
  I ended up using nginx as a reverse proxy, and bought a domain name so I could just tell people "go into jellyfin wherever you want and type in domain.com, then pick the profile I made you." I was really new to this nginx thing when I did it, so I don't have a deep understanding of why it's better than just forwarding the port but it is.
This makes me glad I went with Jellyfin for my home server
- Me too buddy, me too. Not gonna lie it took quite a lot of effort to get everything setup and stuff but reading news like this now gives me a cozy warm feeling
  
  I’m curious on what more setup you’ve done? Mine has been pretty easy, but I haven’t done too much other than just watch stuff
Fuuuuuck plex
For the past like 5-7 years I’ve said consistently that the second plex took VC money the writing was on the wall and that they would eventually and consistently take actions hostile towards their consumers and doing what they can to both move to SaaS and alienate lifetime pass users as well as distance themselves from their core purpose of sharing collections of pirated media hidden behind the thinly veneered “for tobacco use only” bullshit of “actually you can just rip your own physical media”
Every time I post, whether it’s banning the ability to serve on hetzner, putting ads all over the app and starting to collect data, increasing monetization, etc and talk about how it’s inherently going to continue getting worse plex users inevitably come out of the woodwork to be like “well this is overblown, plex is so good it’s worth getting fucked, jellyfin is slightly harder since it’s not backed by 40 million dollars of devil money that demands endless growth until the product is ruined”
As long as those people who are willing to get walked all over exist, that demand a slightly easier existence over one that serves them, every product and service will continue to get worse and worse while a small group of people get fat off of endless subscriptions
- Reposting something from r/Plex because the mods are bitch-babies with minimal changes:
  If you pay money for something, you do not own it. It is not entirely yours.
  You pay, that shit's proprietary, you didnt make it, you can't see the insides. Why would any self respecting sociopath give you something without including a backdoor, data logging/tracking, and a string to pull it back?
  You steal something, or download more anonymously, it isn't immediately connected to you, it may not have the backdoors activated, and you probably cut that string when you acquired it. You might even have to fuck around in the guts and modify shit so it can't be remotely bricked tracked etc.
  Applies to physical goods up to and including housing too. The state wants me out, I'm out. Can happen for a lot of reasons, and no amount of obedience or investment keeps you 100% safe. In a squat, ive already defended myself, proven their power, at least what they're willing to exercise, cannot dislodge me. The place is truly mine.
  You buy from the company store, you don't own shit.
Cue all the users with lifetime passes not seeing that this is slowly becoming a problem...
- Abandoning streaming services only to become a serf of another commercial subscription service seems like such a bizarre move that I really don't understand how Plex users even exist.
  
  Wow, could you get any more condescending? We bought a product (10+ years ago in my case) and it still works great. Why would I switch to an inferior service, just because the FREE version of the product I already bought got worse?
  This has no impact on anyone that actually paid for Plex.
  With this move the free version of Plex got downgraded, to now have feature parity with Jellyfin. Meaning a VPN is required if you want to access your media on the go
  
  I bought a lifetime pass for 100 bucks about 10 years ago, and have had 10 years of not having to give a shit about these announcements. I've saved well over 100 bucks on streaming services in that time. Worth it 1000%.
- What do you mean?
  To me the problem would be modifying the lifetime pass or simply removing it (for new customers) in favor of a fucking subscription only.
  
  I would be very surprised if they don't go there eventually, and I'd even bet they'll try at some point to force lifetime pass owners to switch to subscription
  If you ever think you've found a corpo that can be trusted, no you haven't
- I have a lifetime pass and switched to Jellyfin years ago. Plex shoving their streaming content down my throat while putting my local libraries in the most tedious spots to access in the menus was a very quick turn off.
- I literally only ever open these threads for the cope.
Switched my users to Jellyfin this spring when Plex first announced this move, pretty seamless transition.
I actually prefer Jellyfin and it's UI compared to the new one Plex rolled out on Roku, what a mess that is to navigate now.
gestures towards Jellyfin
This baby can fit so many free features!
I'm sticking with plex personally. I have a lifetime plex pass already so no one else needs a pass to stream from my server. Aka, this changes nothing for me or my users.
- This is total "fuck you, got mine" energy. You're part of the problem. As somebody else who owns a Plex pass, I'm done with their bullshit. I downloaded Plex as a way to serve my content to my devices. These morons lost their way a while ago and became a dump, and clearly it's not getting any better.
  Hopefully this latest big-brain move of theirs drives more users off their shit platform to one that's better.
  But you have a Plex pass, so I'm sure it won't affect you when the money disappears and the company folds lol.
  
  I mean, if you already have a lifetime pass, it's not like you're giving them anymore money or supporting them from here on out. Not sure how that's "fuck you, got mine." Who exactly is being fucked here? It would make more sense if Plex had a limited number of passes that people hoarded early on like boomers with property. In this case the financial side of things is already a done deal, and doesn't somehow deprive others of a resource.
  
  See, I don't understand that at all from you. How have they lost their way exactly? Th9jga that you can turn off in settings piss9ng you off? Are you unable to stream your content with your plex pass that you already own? Can others not stream from you? Does your content Metadata not scrape properly? Explain you comment because it seems like you're part of the problem hating them for the sake of hating them. Getting "on the train" of hate as it were.
- for now. I feel like it's only a matter of time before they say those lifetime passes are expired, or that the product has changes so much it's not valid, etc. they've proven they don't really care about the user base anymore, it's all about the money for them now unfortunately.
Bye, bye Plex!
What a shocking chapter of "Plex and the Quest for Investiblity!"
I regret buying a Plex pass years ago when the project was still pretty good. I wanted to support the devs, but now I hope that they continue to develop this shit app so they don't move on to ruin things like Jellyfin.
I was wondering how long before they dropped that other shoe.
I bought Plexpass when it was $70. Got my money out of it. The centralized login, ssl, caching and proxy are probably worth paying something for.
That said, I've mostly walked away from them over privacy concerns and an utter refusal to add community-requested features while removing actively used features.
Great, so the free Plex now was downgraded to feature parity with Jellyfin
- I'm what way? You can remote stream on Jellyfin for zero dollars.
  
  So Plex has downgraded to [insert the word below feature parity] with Jellyfin.
  
  Yes, but you should use a reverse proxy for anything open to the internet. If you use a reverse proxy (without passing X-Forwarded-...), Plex and Jellyfin should have feature parity with this change.
  
  In the sense, that you need a VPN for both
I tried setting up Jellyfin a while ago, but ran into a lot of difficulties with TV show matching. Plex is a lot better at grabbing a pack of loosely organized files and understanding episode structure without renaming or moving files, which is great for continuing to seed files that are in the library.
I haven’t seen anyone discuss this, so maybe I’m doing something wrong? If not, this is the one major blocker that I have before rolling it out Jellyfin as an alternative to the people I’ve shared my plex server with.
Really want that in place because the writing seems to be on the wall (in flashing neon) about the direction Plex is going
- Plex is a lot better at grabbing a pack of loosely organized files and understanding episode structure without renaming or moving files, which is great for continuing to seed files that are in the library.
  You may want to look into the arr suite. Sonarr for managing TV show downloads, Radarr for managing movie downloads, Jellyseerr for managing media requests, Prowlarr for managing torrent/usenet indexers (search engines), Cleanuparr for automatic download management, and Huntarr for automatic downloads.
  I haven’t seen anyone discuss this, so maybe I’m doing something wrong?
  The go-to these days is to use hardlinks, which will allow you to have the files show up in two places at once. Sort of like a shortcut, but it actually shows the true file instead of simply pointing to a different file location. One stays in your torrent’s location for seeding, and a second hardlink is created in your media folder, with proper naming structure for Plex/Jellyfin to find. The arr suite automates that process. It tracks your downloads, and automatically creates Plex/Jellyfin file names in the corresponding library folders when the download is completed.
  It’s the best in every sense:
  You can continue seeding.
  You don’t need to keep multiple copies of the same file, because the hardlink in your library folder is pointing to the same file as the torrent. So it doesn’t take up twice as much space on your drive.
  You get proper naming conventions for your media discovery.
  You don’t need to manually manage your library.
  The big downside to hardlinks is that they can’t be used across drives or partitions. The hardlink can only point to a file on the same drive. So if your torrent download folder is on a different drive than your library folders, you can’t use hardlinks.
  
  Not necessarily the same drive but the same pool. I have a ZFS pool with 6 drives and can use hardlinks just fine.
- I ended up using tiny media manager to move and rename all of my files. Fixes that issue.
- It took me awhile to figure out the correct setup to get Sonarr, qbittorrent, and Jellyfin all to play nicely together, but once you get it figured out, it transparently addresses the problems of folder structure and allowing you to keep seeding content.
  I had the same issue as you, initially, where I had to do a ton of library maintenance in Jellyfin. But since using Sonarr to monitor and import media from torrents to a structured media library, Jellyfin has been pretty hands-off
- Well if you want to continue with torrents, use Sonarr configured to torrent and configure it to move files by linking instead of moving
  But I would HIGHLY recommend you switch to usenet for your source. You do have to have one or a couple cheap (talking 9-20$ a YEAR) indexer subscriptions and a subscription to a usenet provider itself (7-30$/month) but it's SO much faster, easier and you don't need to worry about seeding.
- I have the same problem. There is a Lemmy community for Jellyfin. Maybe we need to ask there. I run both right now. Plex and Jellyfin. I use Jellyfin whenever I can but still have plex for that issue
- I think it's a common practice to keep the original file in the torrent folder and create a hard link with proper naming in the media folder.
- if the hard links everyone else is mentionining aren't feasible for you, take a look at tvnamer. I've found it works quite well for scanning and renaming files, it even supports custom renaming pattern and you can pass it a tvdb series id if it doesn't automatically detect your series.
  I use it cause all my torrenting is done on a different machine, and those files get transferred over to my server. so the arr suite isn't the best solution for me
- I got around that by being a bad pirate. If I've watched it, chances are I'm nuking it in a few days from my download drive to make room for something else.
I always thought less of people whenever they mentioned plex.
- Why? Plex was one of the original self hosted streaming platforms and for a long time was pretty much the only option. We have more options now, and those still on Plex, I imagine, are because they don't have the time or capacity to perform a migration. So they stick with what they've got until it breaks.
  Maybe this will be the one that breaks it.
  I was a Plex holdout until 3 months ago. I wanted off Plex for the last 2 years but just never had the time.
  For those waiting, don't be like me, it's easier than you think.
  
  I switched to Jellyfin about 4 years ago, no regrets. If I'm traveling I tunnel into my home server and watch whatever I want. As most of us, I started in Plex because back then I was with Synology (cheapest NAS they had back then). The moment I moved to building and maintaining my own server, I tried JF, liked it from day one, learned to deal with the caveats and fix them (took me a while), and have been on it since then.
  
  What was the migration like? I've been looking to get off Plex for a while now but like you say, haven't had the time nor the energy.
  Is it as simple as just installing it and pointing it at my NAS?
  
  It makes more sense to just use free streaming sites or save videos to a storage drive.
  Plex, like framework, seemed like corporate shite that wannabe nerds fell for to fit in with other wannabes.
Argh that was so useful in hotels. I'd take a little roku stick and poof.

125 comments