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.
Unfortunately Jellyfin still has issues, I was trying the latest version earlier, a movie I was watching started skipping on jellyfin, worked fine on Plex. I also looked at moving over watching stuff with friends to jellyfin, we tried the syncplay feature, it kept stuttering and stopping (auto match was off, as default), and we just gave up after a minute or two and just went back to Plex.
I want to like jellyfin, and the latest releases have improved a lot of the performance issues I used to have, but man is it hard to love moving to it. Sure foss and there’s lots of cool plugins, but everything else has just been a worse experience for me.
Yeah, like I said, you have to do some work with FOSS.
Check logs, reach out to support forums, etc.
Alternatively have something that is more likely to “just work” at the cost of data collection and profiling and increasingly restrictive software licensing designed to drive you towards service delivery license models (eg monthly payments), at a minimum
is plex more mature? Yes of course, it has had injections of over 40 million dollars of devil money plus whatever they’ve raised from you. Jellyfin would likely catch up significantly with such funding, but remember that such funding always comes with obligations that compromise the product and fuck over the community that actually cares about usability and core features (see: Reddit, MySpace, Facebook, amazon, Google and every Google product, Netflix, etc etc etc etc etc)