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Comment by bubblethink | Hacker News Reader

It's commodity software. It's hard to justify a recurring subscription for something like this. It targets advanced users. If they can set up plex, they can set up alternatives too. And plex does not invest much in improving the core product. I don't remember it as being any better than it was 5-10 years ago. It still has rough edges. Skipping title/end credits is a nice feature though.

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There have been huge improvements to the transcoder over the past couple of years. I think on-demand subtitles was also a relatively new feature which is huge over having to download them yourself and finding out the subtitle track sucked and having to delete that one and download a different one, and then woops that subtitle track was the same as the first, have to do it a third time.

Isn't the transcoder just ffmpeg ? From as far back as I can remember, plex does not work well over an internet link. It will play a stream, but as soon as you try to seek, skip, resume, etc. it throws its hands up. Given enough bandwidth and reasonable latency, you expect the experience to mirror youtube or netflix, but plex is not even close.

Plex uses a fork of ffmpeg that they iterate on and presumably cherry pick changes over from upstream ffmpeg, as well as add their own changes on top of. They also contribute back to upstream ffmpeg when they find a bug or optimization for ffmpeg. But working from their fork allows them to iterate at their own internal cadence.

> Given enough bandwidth and reasonable latency, you expect the experience to mirror youtube or netflix, but plex is not even close.

The funny thing about people is that they say things like this without considering that their own setups are to blame. YouTube is ran by servers outside of your control with content delivery mechanisms caching popular videos in a datacenter SSD near you. I run my Plex server on a relatively old Intel NUC in a docker container with the storage mounted over NFS from a 4 year old Synology NAS. I'm typing this message with another window open on my Plex server which I had skipping around a video with near instant playback when I move the play head (even outside of the reported buffered zones.)

The difference is LAN v/s internet. Doing anything on LAN is a solved problem for pretty much all software. The experience deteriorates severely once you access over the internet. I continue to use plex behind nginx on a rented server, but the experience is nothing to write home about.

There is some confusion about how accessing Plex outside your LAN works. There's direct server communication and then indirect through Plex's servers. You need to check your server configuration to determine which you're using, because a misconfiguration means you're accessing through one of Plex's relays which is going to be massively degraded performance. I still believe this to be a configuration issue, because things don't just magically get worse because you left your LAN. More information on that here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200931138-troubleshooting-r...

Your ISP's allowed upload speed also becomes a factor once you leave your LAN, and in America, most people's upload speeds are much slower.

The hardware of your server, the hardware of your client, the supported codecs of your client, your WAN upload speed, your client's download speed all become factors here. And another thing YouTube does is re-encode videos that are uploaded to commonly supported types to allow for quick and direct playback on client devices. Most people just take whatever movie they downloaded from ThePirateBay and act shocked when they need to transcode the video.

I rent a gigabit server and have a gigabit connection at home; the client is a shield tv that running android. Videos are h264 and audio is either AC3 or occasionally flac. In other words, all pretty bog standard stuff that doesn't even need transcoding except for bitrate, but my connection is fast enough to not need that. It's not a bandwidth, latency, or HW specs issue. The streams work fine when they work, even with blu ray remuxes at 20+GB per movie. There are just too many annoyances and it's mostly a software issue on the plex side. A lot of times, plex will just show a spinning wheel, not resume, and take really long to seek. I do run plex behind nginx, so it is still possible that there is some config issue, but I doubt it.

Check out the server remote access settings some time and make sure direct access is available, like I mentioned above. But I’m willing to just digress as we have apparently wildly different experiences.

The issue you mentioned is why I can’t use the Plex client for playback. I use Infuse which handles seeking fine so clearly it’s not an unsolvable problem. Crazy Plex hasn’t addressed it.

It’s stable and it performs well and it works on all my devices with hardly any fuss. It works better than the HBO app.

I’m not saying you’re wrong or your issues are invalid, but I do think it is stable and capable, and they’ve done a lot of work to make it easy to use. A glance at the logs and you’ll see everything it’s doing to make it go smoothly. And it’s much better at this than it used to be.

>If they can set up plex, they can set up alternatives too.

I resorted to Plex after I couldn't get anything else working acceptably. I need my powerful media server to push out content that my anemic clients can support. The Raspberry Pis prefer 720p, the Intel Compute Stick is limited by it's Wireless bandwidth, the PS4 is hobbled by Sony Entertainment's desire to sell me their media.

OH and even though I didn't set anything up I was able to watch my shows when I was camping at the Seminoe Reservoir, WY two weeks ago on my phone. A pleasant surprise after the mosquitoes chased me into my tent.

Skipping title and end credits should be configurable and automatic per show. This half measure is almost as bad as nothing at all. If I enjoyed having the remote in my hand constantly I’d have a cable subscription instead.

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