> Plex was great until they forced the Plex Pass on us

They did what now? I've been using Plex on my home server and all of my mobile and TV devices and I haven't had it "forced" on me at all. Everything works great. Typically. Until I have to restart FireTV every few days because it stops playing audio from Plex for some odd reason.

Kodi all the way. IIRC, Plex is based on XBMC (now Kodi) but made proprietary. There's no need to sacrifice your freedom when Kodi exists and works very well.

Plex is very usable without the Plex Pass.

Agree. My Vizio TV has a plex app, but i can't use it without plexpass.

I gave up and now running kodi on raspberrypi

Full discourage, I work for plex on plex media player and smart tv platforms,

we removed the plex pass requirement for smart TVs a few days ago, they are all free to all users. But as someone that works with smart TVs many hours a day, I would stay with rpi, it's a much much better platform, can direct play more formats without need for transcoding and in general more stable.

Before I could access my media server with the iPhone app. Then all of a sudden I was forced to register for a Plex Pass to be able do this. For me at least, that made the whole app unusable.

Yeah there's nothing about Plex or any apps that requires a Plex Pass. When an app for a new platform is in beta it is put behind the Pass, but that's it.

the mobile apps are free as remote or for $4-5 or so you can unlock the ability to play and sync media without a plex pass like before.

You can play on iDevices without a subscription, but you can't sync.

For iOS, they actually require Plex Pass for syncing, which is kinda a shame as I, the server owner have it, but why should my users have to subscribe?

They don't. I have a plex pass and the people that use my server that don't have it can sync fine.

Sorry you missed out on the $75 lifetime license. It was worth every penny and will continue to be because I will be using Plex for many, many years to come.

Totally agree that the $75 lifetime was so worth it and glad I jumped on that when it was available. Personally, I think the current asking price of $149 is still way, way worth it for what Plex Pass provides.

The lifetime license is now doubled: MONTHLY $4.99 YEARLY $39.99 LIFETIME $149.99.

Well, they are a company now and maintaining a half dozen apps isn't cheap. The alternative to a modest subscription would be ads; I prefer the subscription.

For anyone that is curious, I just discovered that Emby used to be MediaBrowser. A better name, but as someone who only checks in on these things infrequently I was very confused to discover "Kodi" and "Emby", only to realise I already knew them under different names.

Am I missing something? Emby appears to have the exact same business plan with Emby Premiere.

Yup. I paid for the Android application and was excited to use it on my Xbox One. But nope.

Just running some Amazon Fire TVs with XBMC/Kody at home, all hooked into my NAS. Next step is going to be building a shared SQL database so all the media positions are lined up.

Are Emby and Kodi a combo ? I thought they were basically the same thing.

I am using Emby as a central media server. Emby takes care of the hosting and indexing of the material. Then I have multiple Kodi clients that consume the contents from Emby.

Does it sync your playback across devices and allow you to sync items for offline viewing? That's the main reason I paid for PlexPass, but would switch back to a complete open source option if it does that.

Although I also enjoy the ability to share my server with family and keep a separate kid-friendly profile for my daughter.