this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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I knew I should have turned off auto-update ugh (media.piefed.world)
submitted 4 days ago by cm0002@piefed.world to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Ok, you’re gonna have to unpack that one for me! Plex was always messing things up with transcoding, and I hate the Jellyfin UI and always had trouble getting it working and keeping it working.

[–] cm0002@piefed.world 18 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Here's a comment I wrote on it about a year ago

Tldr; they are an early example of open source enshittification before enshittification was even coined (iirc)

This is going to go back quite a ways, and much of my knowledge is old at this point so some details might be off.

~15 years ago Plex as we know it started out as an OSX fork of the 0G Xbox homebrew software XBMC (Later renamed Kodi (For those who don't know, XBMC was XBox Media Center and would turn the 0g Xbox into the cheapest Home Theater PC you could get at the time, man those were the days lol))

Plex was only briefly open source and then was quickly closed when they incorporated a year or so after they had something functional. They never made any promises about not charging or being open source or anything, so that's why I'm generally fine with Plex

Sometime around 2012ish Emby came along as THE open source alternative to Plex and things were good. MOST of it was supposed to stay open source as was promised. From the beginning they kept build scripts n such closed source, probably should have caught on them, but heh ya know hindsight and all that.

Then around 2014/5 they took it all closed source, relicensed it and introduced their paywall including locking away already existing features. This is what pissed me and many others off and this is when and why Jellyfin split off promising to be truly fully open source forever. (There was a ton of drama about it at the time, but it looks like Embys Q&A thing a bit back doesn't even bother to mention it, imagine that lol)

I don't have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself, but the way they went about it...yea. fuck em

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Fair. And I agree with your stance. But I don’t feel like setting something else up again, especially if it’s a thing that has caused me problems in the past, like Jellyfin. I miss XBMC.

[–] fatcat@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Kodi (formerly XBMC) is still there as far as I've seen. So if you liked XBMC give it a try maybe.

[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I'm loving my Kodi setup. But see other comments for caveats.

[–] blitzen@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

How was Plex messing up transcoding?

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It kept trying to transcode things when I just wanted direct uncompressed streaming

[–] blitzen@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Likely a codec issue with your client player. The client couldn’t play the file (either video or audio) natively, so the server transcoded the file so it could.

Transcoding is a feature. I understand why you would rather it direct stream, but you’ve got to make sure the client can play the file natively.

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It’s an AppleTv 4k. It shouldn’t have had a problem, and it works fine with Emby.

[–] blitzen@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

You’re right, it shouldn’t have a problem. I know subtitles can sometimes force transcoding.