Preparing for the Plexpocalypse

As of 29 April 2025, Plex will remove the ability to remotely stream media from your Plex server, for users without a PlexPass or a Remote Watch pass subscription from Plex.

What does this mean for you?

If you're already a PlexPass user, nothing changes, all is well, go back to bed.

If you're not a PlexPass user, while it's not clear yet exactly what the fallout will be, it's likely that any ElfHosted users without a PlexPass / Remote Watch pass subscription, will be unable to stream or share their media from Plex at all.

What are your options?

Plan A - Buy a PlexPass (before May)

The most obvious answer is.. if you value the Plex experience, you should buy a PlexPass subscription from Plex.

This (according to Plex) ensures that your remote streaming won't be interrupted at all by the coming changes. A PlexPass also enables advanced features such as hardware transcoding, chapter / intro / outro detection and skipping, advanced dashboard features, PlexAmp features and more.

The price for the PlexPass lifetime subscription is set to more-than-double from 1 May, so if you're not there yet, but you're intending to go "all in" on Plex, you'd want to make a lifetime purchase before May 2025.

Plan B - Switch to Jellyfin

If you're not intending to give a cent to Plex, you should start working out a migration strategy.. The least costly option would be to switch your subscription over the the equivalent Jellyfin bundle, but be aware that you'll be jumping ship from a highly mature, polished, well-funded ecosystem into the "wild west" of volunteer-built, open-source streaming, so don't expect parity of features or polish. Some users may be quite comfortable with Jellyfin, even preferring its interface, and some users (or their non-technical friends and family) may not! (Emby is a viable middle-ground, but you also have to pay a subscription fee to unlock hardware transcoding)

Plan C - Employ the workaround

A third option - here in the secret ElfLab, we've been working on a possible workaround to hopefully bypass the upcoming restrictions. It works by deploying a proxy server in front of your Plex server, and routing all your traffic through that, so that your remote traffic "appears" to be locally-sourced, and continues to stream like you're used to.

There's a catch here - we won't know if this workaround works, until after the April 29th Plexpocalypse. Initial testing seems to indicate that it will, since the Plex dashboard for a "workarounded" user now shows all their actively streaming sessions as originating in Germany, and streaming sessions show zero remote or local bandwidth usage (since the traffic is all internal to the Plex pod itself)

The workaround is, of course, completely unwarranteed and unrefundable - it's simply an attempt to accommodate edge cases who, for whatever reason, may not want a formal Plex Pass / Remote Watch subscription. It may break (or be broken by Plex) at any time, and it's only minimally tested against a few apps in the huge Plex app ecosystem.

You can activate the workaround on your own Plex instance by adding this product to your subscription.