Given the recent news about Plex soon charging for remote access, I wanted to finish up my switch to Jellyfin.
What tools/methods have you all used to migrate watch history to Jellyfin?
I have a few family members in there, and would like to get everything switched over without resetting their watch history.
I’m still confused. Plex isn’t hosting any of my files, so why would remote users downloading them cost Plex anything? If they Direct Stream, there’s no transcoding involved. And if transcoding is involved, and I am not paying for Plex Pass, doesn’t that just happen directly on my server? I don’t see any reason why Plex is charging for my server doing work. Bizarre.
They aren’t charging users to cover their costs to stream your data from your server. It’s to help them with their developper costs. Transcoding is something your server does and it’s only unlocked with Plex Pass so if you don’t have that, you can’t use it anyway. I have only 4k movies so if I want to watch them at any resolution smaller than 4k, I need transcoding which was the primary reason I got the pass. They can also proxy your connection in case you have issues connecting directly so they are somewhat using their own resources for that. They offer a great service at a very low price, much lower than Netflix and it’s much better. Everyone that connects to my plex server love the experience so it’s well worth it for me. If it’s not worth it for you, that’s cool. Use something like JF and then deal with a lack of device support and any other issues that come with JF. I hear it’s a also a great service but I also hear there are more issues with JF than Plex so I’m happy with Plex.
So, my users transcode just fine without Plex Pass. I believe. You are referring to enabling hardware accelerated transcoding, which is a Plex Pass feature. You don’t need Plex Pass to do basic transcoding. That’s a free feature.
As for the proxied connection, I believe. You are referring to Relay. Thats such a low quality that its recommended to disable it and that’s the first thing I do on my PMS.
I believe Infuse (for the ATV4K) will be a decent workaround in the meantime, since it seems to allow remote play from Plex servers without charging, and plays stuff better than the default Plex app anyway, fwiw (like Atmos content).
You could be right about the CPU transcode vs. GPU transcode. It was a long time ago when I setup my Plex but I do recall having performance issues with CPU transcoding. Either way it’s a valid point.
I had to use relay only once at a Hotel and it was decent enough but the TV they had was pretty lame so I couldn’t tell how bad Relay was vs. the TV quality. Either way I got to watch what I wanted without commercials.
Never heard of ATV4K but I’ll check it out. Thanks.