While I’ve tried the alternatives, I always seem to come back to good old Plex, but as the years have gone by, the pressure to pay has increased. I managed to resist, but recently, out of pure frustration, I put down for a month of premium Plex, and there’s no going back.
The day Plex suddenly broke on my own LAN
I’d been using Plex happily for years, and one morning when I wanted to watch something over breakfast, I got an error message telling me that remote streaming was now a paid feature. This confused me because I don’t generally use remote streaming, and I was on my local network. Checking the web, it seemed that Plex was indeed putting up a paywall for this feature, but that local streaming was still free. This error had revealed a network configuration issue that I later resolved, but I didn’t have time to do it right then.
The reluctant decision to pay for a single month
If this was just about me, I would’ve just moved on and fixed the issue later. The thing is that the other people in my home use my Plex server every day. Which is why I reluctantly paid for a single month of the premium service, kicking the can down the road by 30 days.
Swiping my card solved the technical issue immediately, and I could wait until I had the time to adjust my mesh network settings to play nice with local streaming, but it also meant I got to try the paid version of Plex for a whole month.
I Turned My Windows 11 PC Into a Streaming Hub With Plex, and You Can Too
Plex promises to turn your PC into a streaming hub. I tested it on Windows 11 and here’s what I found.
Discovering the premium features I’d been ignoring
One of the biggest features that (controversially) sits behind the Plex paywall is hardware transcoding. This is where a special video encoding chip built into your computer can handle the work of converting, for example, a high-resolution video to a lower-resolution one because there’s not enough bandwidth.
I use an old Core i3 mini PC that I picked up refurbished for $75 as my Plex server. Now, I have never worried too much about transcoding because just about all the devices I use as Plex clients are more than powerful enough to handle a direct stream. I also have 200Mbps of network traffic set aside on my LAN for my Plex server, so local streaming is no issue.
However, now that I’m paying for remote streaming, transcoding actually makes sense, because if I’m away, and I want to access my media library, I can’t guarantee there will be enough bandwidth to handle a 4K stream, or even justify that high resolution on a tablet or phone screen. Yes, you can leave Plex to create alternate versions of videos overnight or in the background, but that has a storage penalty.
But you know, I can still take or leave hardware accelerated transcoding. The actual features I can now no longer live without are more mundane. Having intros and credits be skippable is something I missed from other streaming services. The ablility monitor my Plex server in real time from a dashboard is also useful, and I can see analytics about what everyone is watching.
I’ve also started buying and ripping music CDs and use Plex Amp, which means I have access to premium features like automatic lyrics.
Realizing Plex Pass actually solves long-standing annoyances
Does it feel good that Plex puts these genuinely useful features behind a paywall. No, it’s obviously meant to entice or frustrate you into whipping out your credit card. I’ve tried Plex alternatives like Jellyfin and I simply like Plex more, so if that’s going to be my solution then I don’t want to step down to the degraded version of the service. I’ve even offset the cost by canceling subscriptions to things that I never really use, so it hasn’t impacted my budget.
So now I’m facing that same decision many other Plex users do—should I go for a lifetime Plex Pass? Currently, it costs about $70 for a year of Plex Pass and $250 for a lifetime. That’s recouped in just 3.5 years at current prices, and I’m sad I didn’t just get it when it was on a deep discount or when a lifetime pass was still $120, and I was so busy with work that I didn’t even see the recent Black Friday deal!
I think the most logical thing to do is wait for the next annual lifetime pass special to roll around, and if there is no such discount in the next year, I’ll probably pull the trigger at full price. In the meantime, I’ll also be on the lookout for a free or once-off alternative that gives me all the things I like about Plex Pass, but I’m not holding my breath.
