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.
Switched to Jellyfin after more than a decade with Plex. Prettey… prettey… pretty good.
Do you give friends and family access to your library? If so, how?
There’s a few ways, but it’s similar to hosting anything yourself. You could, if you’re not too bothered by it, just forward the port that jellyfin is using. You do this in your routers settings and you can see/change the port in jellyfins settings. Then you give your friends the device that’s hosting jellyfin’s ip address and they type it in when logging into the app. That’s simple and quick and not secure at all. But it’s really one of those things that 99 times out of 100 it’s fine.
You can use something like tailscale to connect your friends devices to your network, I didn’t do it so I don’t really know the details, but you’d need it installed on all of their clients. This is (probably) the most secure way but it’s a pain in the butt for users, compared to other ways. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/networking/tailscale/
I ended up using nginx as a reverse proxy, and bought a domain name so I could just tell people “go into jellyfin wherever you want and type in domain.com, then pick the profile I made you.” I was really new to this nginx thing when I did it, so I don’t have a deep understanding of why it’s better than just forwarding the port but it is.
So on Plex I just input my friend’s email address
I can recommend a local Wireguard server for this. I have one port on my router open for Wireguard and all of my devices can connect to it remotely.
Once connected, they can see all the devices on my local network, including my local jellyfin server. It works pretty painlessly and you don’t need to open any jellyfin ports to the world.
Sure except for tv boxes.
Haven’t personally the need to connect tv boxes remotely- all of my mobile devices are handheld, so cell phone, laptop, steamdeck etc, all of which have pretty seamless wireguard clients, but I don’t see a reason why it wouldn’t work with the correct Wireguard client installed on a tv box. The only issue might be really old android versions.
Enable the Funnel feature on your Tailscale.
The bandwidth is not enough for big media files, at least that’s what I’ve discovered.
I don’t see why a router couldn’t be configured to make that work.
That’s how it works with Tailscale as well. Tailscale creates Wireguard tunnels underneath between the different devices. There’s also an open-source self-hostable Tailscale control plane.
Love me some Jellyfin. I was yesterday days old when I finally read some documentation and learned that my metadata issues were because I was using a mixed library type for kids shoes and movies, and that they strongly discourage it because of the unreliable metadata it causes. Split kids movies and shows apart and now that works flawlessly, still, I feel like I’d prefer they could be combined on a single library for a kids’ browsing
Why do you have a library of kiss’s shoes?
Who is kiss?
A band.
No, my dogs give me kiss.
Same, and I haven’t missed any of the streaming services I used to have. It’s amazing.
Do you remote stream (off your server network)? If so, how’s the experience?
I do. No issues.
Do you reverse proxy, Tailscale, etc to authenticate or circumvent the need for a secure connection? Every time I come close to planning a switch, that part paralyzes me, it feels so unintuitive.
I do use both a reverse proxy and Tailscale. All services are proxied. All services except for Jellyfin are accessed only via Tailscale. Jellyfin is publicly available. I’ve obscured it a bit by setting up long, randomly generated DNS name. The proxy would only forward traffic to Jellyfin if the request comes from that exact DNS name. Bots would have to know this name for the proxy to entertain their attempts at all. Then every user has long, randomly-generated password. I prefer to only use it behind Tailscale but some of my family needs direct access. Also Chromecast.
I get that some users need a DNS name, but for Chromecast (unless you’re talking about the original one that does not actually have apps) you can use Tailscale just like in any android device.
Hm, I thought Chromecast needs HTTPS and internet-visible endpoint.
Yup. Shame the new version is unusable for me. Hopefully they fix the bugs.
Oh? I haven’t upgraded yet. 😄
Its a major rewrite, which is bringing a lot of problems like library scans that last dozens of hours, massive CPU use on idle, broken playback, and much much more