Plex’s price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin
https://www.androidauthority.com/plex-price-hikes-get-jellyfin-3663600/Open linkView original on feddit.org747
Comments335https://www.androidauthority.com/plex-price-hikes-get-jellyfin-3663600/Open linkView original on feddit.org
It's not really about cost for me. Accounts in control of someone else and increased fees to use my own hardware can take a long walk off a short pier.
If only people applied these principles to all software....
I started selfhosting just because throwing cash on subscriptions at big corpos is not feasible since subs are increasing on a year-on-year basis. To my mind, if I’m going to self-host to yet again pay sub prices defeats the sole purpose of selfhosting.
That money you can pocket and invest in your own hardware for spare parts, upgrades & the like
You could also consider donating it to the projects you are hosting. Because developing that software still takes a lot of labour and these devs really need it
I was a big supporter of PLEX for a lot of years but I don't want all the streaming options and ads and crap it was giving me. All I want is a solid media server application and Plex was no longer it.
JellyFin has been fantastic. I'll never go back
I got Plex set up for my media server literally the day before they hiked the prices. I was weary about the $150 lifetime and couldn't afford the new price when they changed it so I went to jellyfin.
Turns out jellyfin was everything I wanted and free. Bought 5 years worth of unlimited hosting and a domain name for less than a month of Plex and now I'm well on my way to a pirate media empire.
Just wish I had anyone other than my spouse to share if with... Or that I could figure out fucking MusicBrainz...
Hey I’m just learning about Jellyfin and have one question that maybe you have a take on.
How do we know that Jellyfin isn’t just one step behind Plex on the enshittification scale? Is it structurally different somehow? Open source or something?
There was a time when Plex was the bees knees and everyone loved it, and now they’re putting th screws to us. Why should we believe another group won’t do the same?
Jellyfin is FOSS. Taking a single step towards the Plex route will be going against the ethos of Jellyfin as a whole. It is community owned - rather than private, and if there are unethical practice's involved, then people can and will jump ship forking the whole project at nearly 1:1 scale.
Because of the way jellyfin is built and the underlying philosophy. It can't enshitify that easily as Plex - it will need a massive community effort to change it.
It is also useful to read on the history of jellyfin as it does highlight some useful pointers.
Also, Plex controls the login/authentication through their portal, and can also receive data back from your host regarding the content being shared/watched.
Jellyfin is 100% locally configured accounts
Jellyfin itself is Emby. Emby was owned by a company and it enshittified at the speed of light, and that's when Jellyfin was born (by forking the last open source version of Emby).
That's all correct, but.. we aren't absolutely in the clear. JF could absolutely be forked, DB changes enacted, security added, but you also need all those client devs to come along.
It's not quite like most Foss where a couple people could jump in and do a better job, JF has a LOT of moving parts supported by a number of individuals.
Everyone else has the real details, but from my very amateur perspective thee big part is that it's not connected anywhere else and it's open source. I have to have an account with Plex to use Plex, so no matter what I do I always have to have there permission to get in the building. Jellyfin runs on my own box and stores its files in that box. I even know the exact directory my account is in. If they decide to push an update that doesn't jive with me, I just won't update my machine. If it goes off the rails at any point, there's at least thousands of jellyfin users that actually know what they're doing and we'll have a new jellyfin with black jack and hookers in less than a fortnight.
In the time it took you to write this comment you could have gone to the Jellyfin website and read the first 12 words on the page:
I’m never going to apologize for asking questions on Reddit or Lemmy. This is a place for talking to people. In the time it took you to chastise me you could have stuck your thumb up your ass 17 times.
Meanwhile, I got a perfectly good answer from someone else. Thanks for nothing.
I think it just shows you actually don't care. I think some of the things you asked could be interesting if you had done any of your own reading first and had some context, but what you did instead was ask us to tell you what to think.
You can go do that on Reddit, or do you think that's where you are now?
My bad I use 3rd party app clients for both Reddit and Lemmy and they look much alike.
It makes no difference though, because Lemmy is a place for talking to people too.
When you already know the answer it’s very easy to “ackshually” someone and tell them just how they could have googled it in a second.
But when you don’t know what you don’t know, it’s not so simple. For example: when my question is “how do we know Jellyfin will not eventually go down the path of enshittification as well?” It doesn’t occur to me to just start reading their homepage and see if I stumble into an answer. Excuuuuuuuse me.
Anyway…
But, my friend, it is in the article. We're not hanging out chatting and the idea of Jellyfin came up. We're in a discussion about the article. You showed up to the book club and asked us to tell you about the book because you didn't read it.
Gatekeeping lemmy. Classy.
Nah I was making fun of them for initially saying they wouldn't apologize for asking questions on Reddit, when on Lemmy lmao
I quite like that people ask simple questions like this. Sure, it could have been looked up really quickly, but it adds to the overall thread here. People reading this with no prior knowledge can browse through the comments and absorb more information.
As in you set it up outside your home server for only that? What's the hard drive capacity there? Can you share a link to this offer?
I may not be using the right lingo, I mean I bought a domain set up a tunneling service so that I don't have have to struggle with keeping it online or teaching the family to use VPNs and stuff. I just give them my website, tell them the account info, and it works on the jellyfin app.
Several years ago I was looking to set up a media server and initially grabbed Plex because I'd heard so much good about it at the time. The moment it asked me to create an account with Plex during setup and I discovered this wasn't optional I immediately uninstalled it.
I remain baffled that anyone was okay with needing an externally managed account in order to use software running entirely on their own hardware, let alone the litany of additional enshittification that has happened since.
Their centralized login and services offer some pretty good upsides, that is, before the company started enshittifying the hell out of us.
Anyone you want to share your stuff with, they make an account, They see your server and your content. There are no ip's, no ports, no configuration.
They handle a limited quality proxy, you're users behind CGNat? They can still watch your content. Don't want to open your firewall up? It still works for limited quality.
They cache TheMovieDB, being good neighbors.
They cache EPG, making live tvguide data work for people with tuners.
They provide you with a credible SSL. Your traffic is opaque to your ISP and your network.
They provide you with 2FA.
That said:
That would be fine for an optional account if you want this features and the tradeoff that comes with it. Making it mandatory is bad.
I fully agree that what they did is openly bad. Just that it's not for nothing.
When plex initially exploded in popularity, the alternatives required like manual xml config, constant babying the database, and generally barely worked.
Plex had apps on all the devices from wii to your phone and just worked. There was also lots of promises of privacy, you owning your data, segregating accounts to coordinating direct access, etc etc. It was almost a no brainer because there was no alternative that could deliver that experience.
Now is very different. The vibes at plex are very different, the world is a lot more hostile to privacy, and there are open source alternatives that get very close to the same experience.
So for a lot of people, yeah, plex doesn't make sense anymore.
Yeah if I were starting now I'd be looking at jellyfin. But I paid the lifetime plex pass, and inertia/laziness what it is, so I haven't found a reason to actually switch yet.
I thought the same until I was bored one saturday afternoon and set up jellyfin as something to do. I haven't taken my ples server offline only because I don't want to help my users switch.
Same. I'm kinda half migrated running both but plex is convenient and (for me) still free.
Neat idea, they don't interfere with each other. Run both so that when plex finally fucks us over, we just stop using it.
Networking is a big aspect. I have almost 40 friends on plex, about 10 of them actively use my library. I also have access to 8 other plex servers in my circle. And I can put all the "latest added episodes" up on my homescreen with a few clicks.
With jellyfin I'd have to have at least 8 different accounts on 8 different instances.
And while the social aspect isn't great, I found a few interesting people by looking at plex reviews of recently airing shows. Or just finding people through "friends of friends".
There is a lot of things to be gained by having a central account and a connection beyond just very selective accounts on your own server, it really shouldn't be that baffling.
Plex is a really nice app. And the people who really like it justify in their head the need for the external account. Some will twist up into a froth arguing the need for it.
I think some people may get too emotional over such matters. But if it works for them, carry on my frothy friends.
Truth is, 99% of people really don't care.
You clearly don’t understand why Plex requires an account then. Hint: it’s for the features that make it the most popular and best self hosted media server software on the market.
I've had so many instances of free to use, lifetime licenses, and purchased software that have turned into subscription services that I refuse to install anything that requires an account unless it can't be avoided. The fact that Plex required an account be created to view my own local content years before they started charging for use made it obvious subscription fees were coming.
Jellyfin works great. Combined with Wireguard it works great anywhere.
My only hitch making the switch to Jellyfin is that a couple of my TVs just don't have a jellyfin app whatsoever. I wish they did, I can't stand all the changes Plex has made over the last few years specifically.
Spin up pihole and just look at the data coming to your “smart” TV’s even when you are not using them. Then consider the data they must be sending home, the only thing “smart” TVs are good at is watching you watch them (or not watching them). I would highly recommend getting a pi or media computer for your TV’s.
I do not think I can stress this enough smart TV’s are not smart for you they are smart for whoever made the TV. Manufactures sell TV’s at a loss now because they get more by selling you.
I have an Nvidia Shield stick that's android based and one day Google started pushing live Taco Bell ads to it on the ambient Home Screen. That was the last day pi-hole ever let it phone home.
Agreed. Watching the queries on the pi-hole dashboard has been eye-opening.
Been looking at this for years, Fam is absolutely refusing to use a keyboard in the living room. They'll watch on their phones first. I can't find a clear, easy solution to run a quality remote on a SFF pc. It's like the decades old mediacenter hole that never gets filled.
I had a pi 5 that I was going to use as my set top box and install the media centre OS on it, Jeff Geerling shows how you can do it with a pi 5, but it got damaged when my place flooded and insurance does its thing to screw you over and I never got around to testing it.
Thanks for that, flirc might be worth my time to look.
I need some of those codecs to perform better, but I can probably stand up a more agile box than a Pi.
They do not sell TVs at a loss lol.
Retailers don't, but those $300 60" TVs cost manufacturers more than that in parts and shipping. They are 100% making up for it in LTV from your data, that's why some are trying to make it impossible not to use them when not connected to the internet.
They don't.
nice argument you place there. meet my blocklist
Wait, you're that same guy just shilling for plex aren't you?
Oh my, go check that post history people, they're either a PR plant or just trolling
lol someone saw my profile bio and got upset because it describes them XD
Look at an major TV manufactures books and the TV part is a loss, the income they get from the TV is selling you to advertisers.
I'd love to see your source for this. I won't hold my breathe because it's simply not true.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/01/16/people-think-roku-makes-money-selling-streaming-st/
https://www.lg.com/global/newsroom/news/media-entertainment-solution/lg-smart-tvs-get-a-new-acr-solution-legacy-technology-replaced-by-lg-ads-solutions/
https://www.mensjournal.com/entertainment/tech-smart-tv-screenshots-acr-tracking-privacy-lg-samsung
https://jamestown.org/connected-smart-tv-security-risks/
https://taurusx.com/resource/480275.html
For a peer-reviewed (means scientific) article here is https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565251327885
I guess Sony does not, but they allow Amazon and/or Google onto the TV and if you think they are not getting money from you that way I have some nice ocean side property to sell you here in Saskatchewan.
None of these links even remotely say they sell their TVs at a loss.
Roku shouldn’t even be anywhere near this conversation if you were serious. They probably sell a dozen TVs a year. They’re all about streaming boxes which is a different story altogether.
You said to look at their books, yet didn’t provide anything to back that up.
I am waiting on your apology or rebuttal!
I am still waiting for you to provide evidence. Your last attempt was woeful and nothing of the sort.
A cheap device like an Onn (~$20) would solve that, probably without requiring the device have Internet access once set up.
Researching now. I figured there were things out there like that but didn't know they were so inexpensive. Thanks for the suggestion!
couldn't you also do a little raspberry pi setup? little more work but a lot more control.
I'd love to! Those things are expensive now though. My old Pi is running my Pi-Hole now. If they were affordable, I'd buy a whole ass pallet of them for all the projects I want to do.
Yes the whole poop load of them would be great to get, I have so many projects I would like to do with them.
Are they Samsung TVs?
They are, at least the one that's given me the most trouble is.
I think Jellyfin already released to Tizen OS, although not all model supports it https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-tizen/issues/222#issuecomment-3831638580
If you want to try, it should be possible to install it yourself instead of waiting it to be available in Tizen app store
Yeah, my TV doesn't have Tizen as far as I know. I found that jellyfin-tizen app and tried manually installing it but my TV is about 8 years old now.
Not that I want to defend Plex which is definitely enshittifying, but I don't think most people are buying Plex to stream their own media. They're doing it so other people can stream their media. Not wanting to buy a domain and set up port forwarding or a reverse proxy or whatever doesn't seem unreasonable to me. My grandparents are never going to use Tailscale, and even if they did, I don't think there are any Tailscale smart TV apps.
Disclosure: I run Plex and Jellyfin (and Navidrome) in parallel, and bought a lifetime pass years ago.
Yeah, I have been learning more and just got oauth working last week. I found Plex a little after blockbuster went under and I had over a thousand movies and a few full TV shows. I have tried jellyfin but the lack of apps has been the issue for me. But as Plex does more of this it will get more and more worthless.
and they went to a subscription model, in part, so they could get their 'cut' from plex shares.
100% right on for me. It took me years, YEARS, to get my mother to where she would check if USB peripherals were plugged in before asking me to come over and find out why it was broken. Even the occasional slight complications with Plex get her to where she doesn't use it for months unless I fix it for her. Jellyfin just ain't happening with her.
Plex is a series C for-profit company and is 100% beholden to its investors who expect a handsome return on investment; the enshittification & price hikes are literally guaranteed to continue. Existing users can, and should expect to be squeezed for profits until they have nothing left to give
Strange, I haven’t paid another cent since I paid like AUD$50 for the lifetime pass well over a decade ago.
You can't say their service hasn't gotten worse though :)
I paid $75 USD, but they took my plugins, (pour one out for youtube on plex for my DanTDM obsessed kid back in the day) made my interface hard to navigate, try constantly to shove their own content down my (and my users) throats. Hey, remember when you used to have that sync feature that kept you up to date with a selection of titles, then you could use the client on your phone to serve to other phones even offline, god that was awesome with kids on vacation.
How? What is hard to navigate in Plex?
I assume you don't know you can customize your home screen and menus? You can only have your own content showing if you want.
I absolutely can. It has only improved since I've been using it, which is from the very start.
That last ui update was a open abomination and every plex forum out there was all over it, you can't hide that by saying nuhhahhhh
Since you're so enamored with plex and I'm quite versed on it, Let's talk about the horrors of plex
They are collecting data on your and your friends, what you're watching and what media you have. If the country or state you live and ever decide to go after pirates, they will absolutely hand that data over to whatever state wants it for a song.
Using plex is selling your self and your family out.
They have consistently removed features that people loved and used to focus on delivering you ad content and enshittifying the average experience until they pay. And how much are you paying to watch your own content? What other services could you be spending that on?
I assume you're either shill for the company or an outright PR plant, that last ui change was pushed to put their content first. that's BS. I had my stuff customized, I disabled their crap, they undid it again. My family had to have me go and dig through those tiny top menus on roku to find my own shares. The average person watching my stuff complained to me that i put ads in my stuff. that's not by fucking accident, it's a business decision to give me and mine worse content so they can make an extra buck off me. Every change they make is company first, every requrest we make is forums for user helpful change is years old.
The whole company is absolutely horrible and selfish.
How about give me examples instead of just shilling. The people here are owed the truth, not your company first attitude.
Literally all of that is lies lol
The second you start calling people shills you’re just admitting defeat.
Troll, PR company or just Sycophant , either way you're BLOCKED BABY byes
There are two ways to increase profits:
Plex has done 2 a few times now.
If you like being told you can stream remotely and then later have the feature yanked and slapped behind a paywall, then by all means use Plex.
I bought a lifetime license on day 1 iirc. I wanted to support the software that was so good and better than everything else at the time. I have had zero features yanked.
I want to stream remotely, share my library, and watch on any device I come across, so I'll use Plex.
That's all well and good for you, but they pulled many rugs out from under free users. This is arguably bad, depending on who you ask, but they most certainly did flat out lie about, which is the core issue.
There's no "rug pulling" for free users. Expecting a service run by a for-profit company to keep everything free forever is naive and just plain dumb.
What did they lie about exactly?
My opinion: Plex has made it clear that they want your money. They don't want you to host your own media and be happy with that. They want you to pay a subscription.
The whole Plex Pass Lifetime subscription is kind of a trap. You might be getting away with paying once currently, but let's be honest: That means that they have taken your money once. And a some time in the future, a MBA dude will notice that they have a lot of non-paying heavy users (meaning: users who have paid several years ago, which is not relevant for the revenue goals of the current quarter) - and they will try to get you to pay again and again. You might be okay with that, but if you don't want to get hassled, you need to switch to something else.
I don't understand this argument.
I paid once many years ago. I've never been asked to pay again. Why would I switch before they make a change?
In the meantime, jellyfin is getting better and better. Plex will probably be dead to me at some point, and when that happens, I'll hop over.
Yeah, this is it. When they ask me for more money, or when they demand I host on their servers, I will adios. Until then, I paid $75 one time and the service does exactly what I want it to do, and it's ezpz for a basic individual myself.
I think the most likely scenario is the company goes under because they didn't have enough money, and then folks will come here and complain about that. Maybe I'll be one of them, but I'll try to remember I paid $75 more than 10 years ago, and so I think I've more than gotten my money's worth.
Currently, they've been content to get more money out of you without asking you, so you're right so far, but only if you consider your advertising details and personal information to be valueless.
They're expanding data collection and showing more ads as a matter of course for years now. When they can no longer get money from other companies because of you, they'll switch to nickel and diming you.
I find that it helps to think of transactions in a more reductive way, like bartering + money. I am trading X amount of money, Y amount if privacy, and Z amount of hassle for whatever service or product. Even though Y and Z are hard to quantify, they are real things with real value, so not considering them at all is surely worse for me, and what they're counting on.
I have found that nearly every mainstream online service I might be interested in presents a negative value proposition when calculated like I described, but everyone values their privacy and time differently, so your mileage will, of course, vary.
Yeah, that's really overthinking things. I host my movies and shows, I watch them from wherever. I feel like I'm not going to spend more time analyzing it, because my usage of the app is literally finding my movie and watching it, or putting it on for my kids. If my junk email gets more junk emails, so be it. I personally lost the privacy battle a million years ago, although I guess I do my best by not having Facebook or Instagram or anything of that ilk. I do exist, and so I'm fucked anyway, but I'm not going to spend energy that somehow doesn't get me a meaningful return on that energy spent.
It may be applying more thought to it than you are willing to do, or be regarding things you don't consider important or valuable, but very many people value those things and find them worthy of consideration.
To "overthink" something is to expend more time and energy making a decision than can be objectively gained from making the "best" decision vs. the others. Your decision to not consider the non-monetary costs is your own and your prerogative, but it has no bearing on the objective value of your personal privacy.
You've decided not to participate in the privacy battle and so have lost much of it without a fight, which is understandable. Its a hard, thankless battle without end against powerful foes, requiring vigilance and continually gaining knowledge. I think it is fair not to fault people for giving up, but passively encouraging others to give up, too, is working for the enemy you've surrendered to.
Its OK to let people choose their own priorities and pick their own battles, especially if it isn't hurting anyone and entirely within their own lives like this issue is. People fighting for causes that you aren't fighting for, but still benefit from, is a public good. Someone defending their own privacy is done for their own good, but helps you, too. See "do not track", adblockers, the EFF, and countless other consumer protections as examples.
I appreciate you putting it this way. There IS a battle happening to be sure.
Unfortunately, it feels like the battle that's being fought is between former Plex users and current (continuing) Plex users. It's frustrating as a continuing Plex user to feel like we are making all of the Jellyfin users angry just by existing. Some of us feel like explaining why our choice is rational, but that is often met with more hostility.
My hope is that we all (as self-hosters) can recognize that we all have different priorities and those priorities will lead to different choices. It's not wrong to leave Plex for something else. It's also not wrong to keep using Plex if it suits your needs.
(to be clear, I'm not at all implying that you were being hostile. This is just a general impression I get from several self-hosting communities when it comes to Plex versus other options)
My sister refers to this phenomenon often; "making perfect the enemy of good". I'd like to see the same things as you, though it seems that infighting among the like-minded must be a common human psychological trait. That would explain the tons of barely differentiated Catholic denominations and the hundreds of Linux distributions.
It helps me to think of it in terms of academic debate. We may vigorously disagree on sometimes trivial points, but we continue to all advance in the same direction in spite of those disagreements.
Plus you can easily run them side by side. I setup jellyfin a while back when Plex used to charge users for streaming on mobile but now they don't if the server owner has a Plex pass.
For me Plex is still a lot simpler to manage if you have a lot of users, and if users have their own servers they share with you
I did that for a bit, but there was a noticeable increase in power usage on my server for something I'm not using.
Power usage? Both systems should be doing basically nothing unless they're re-indexing - which is generally done on-demand. I can understand using up a bit of memory for the basic service and an imperceptible amount of CPU time, but why would it be using more power?
They became dead to me much sooner then you. Once they knew what I was watching I left.
Same brought mine almost 8 years ago, and have never had to pay them a cent more.
Overall not a bad investment.
And plex just looks nicer and offers a better experience.
If it changes I'll consider migrating but for the moment Plex had done right by thier lifetime pass members
That hasn't been my experience. They unilaterally changed their TOS repeatedly after I was already subscribed to a lifetime agreement. Even if they made the terms better, that's still bogus, as contracts of adhesion are ethically dubious in general. This is economics, not Calvinball.
Charging for certain services is one thing. That's not what drove the last Plex exosdus.
Most people take umbrage at Plex offering features for free, saying they'll never be paid features, and then removing them as options for free accounts and effectively paywalling them.
That's pretty much where I'm at too.
Both Jellyfin and Plex are pretty great currently, I prefer Plex slightly, but if Plex becomes worse then I'll likely make the switch over to Jellyfin. I've liked Jellyfin for years but Plex has still been my main app.
I have both of them installed anyway.
Plex is less confusing to use if you want to share your library, but thankfully I don't have any concerns about that because I'm selfish with my media and just have it set up for my own personal use.
*when Plex becomes worse
I am not aware of any company that has reversed course on enshittification once it has begun, so Plex seems certain to follow that path. I would consider at least being prepared.
That's fair, I did use the wrong word there.
It happens when they're punished for it in the market. Microsoft finally realized they're bleeding Windows and Xbox users, so they've got major initiatives to improve both. Unity tried to make the worst business pivot I've ever heard of, and their customers were very clearly and vocally jumping ship in response, so they undid that pivot. Plex's only competition is an alternative that doesn't have a business model, so if they bleed enough users to Jellyfin, they'll either reverse course or stop just shy of some threshold where people leave Plex; or their business will die, which is also an option on the table.
Those are called "trial balloons". They announce a feature they know will be wildly unpopular to gauge the severity of the backlash, then temporarily reverse course while running a massive public outreach campaign to draw as much attention as possible to their feel-good response to the public: "we hear you and respect your opinions", etc.
Then, when the buzz dies down, they re-implement those same things slowly and quietly. In some of your examples, their responses are literally nothing more than words in print; no actual actions have been taken that align with their announcements.
Unity somewhat fits that description, but it was definitely net negative for their business, and with how long it took them to walk back from it, I don't think they had any plans to walk back before the backlash. Microsoft has been slowly making Windows worse for a long, long time; it wasn't something they did all at once and then issued a "we hear you". They are legitimately scared of losing their market dominance right now.
I'll reserve judgment on Microsoft's motives until I see them take even a single action, not statement, in a positive direction. Right now, they seem to just be putting a fake moustache on Copilot, calling it something else, and then claiming they're rolling back frivolous Copilot integrations.
I'm in this same boat. Right now jellyfin just isn't close enough.
I was at a buddies house last week, he uses jellyfin. We were having weird decoding issues, pink/purple flashes that looked like HDMI desync.
Resetting/reseating etc etc anything on the TV did nothing. Had to restart his server then it was magically fine 🤔
I'm fine dealing with that kind of stuff occasionally, but my family is not capable.
This is exactly my strategy. My Lifetime Plex Pass paid for itself years ago. As soon as Jellyfin makes it easy to share my library with friends and family, I'll move
I'm reminded of a few things. Enpass giving away Pro subscriptions, then years later on adding a higher tier, Premium. Nova's Prime will apparently become just one tier of many premium tiers for the app. Podcast Addict adding another subscription on top of the premium IAP.
This kind of shit happens all the time, and Plex could do it. Good thing I'm already with Jellyfin.
I have paid for lifetime years ago and I’m still using it. They may introduce new features and try to entice me to pay for them, but so far no one is trying to cut me off from what I paid for
Isn’t that kinda exactly what the OP was saying with their comment about MBAs realising they have non-paying users?
I don’t run Plex so I don’t know, but from your comment it sounds like the Plex Pass isn’t “all past, present and future premium features”?
Or were you theorising about a future where they do ask you to pay more?
I’m not missing any features I got when I paid for it (I believe they’ve added some), so no complaints from me.
Just wait that “lifetime” package will end and they will say we need your money every month now, sooner rather than later.
I think I’ve already heard that a few years ago.
They will release Plex-a-rama or Plex 2.0, stop providing security patches for 1.0, proxy routing, tmdb caching, epg caching, and add ads to your experience. They will then require the people connecting to you to have subs.
They were hoping to sell out and buy an island by now. Eventually, it will change hands or go public. Your features will be stripped as necessary to keep making money. Look at what happened to PlayOn's lifetime subscription.
It's already lasted WAY longer than anyone expected.
I went from paying SchedulesDirect $25/yr to hack an EPG into a series of dead & dying DVR software platforms (SageTV, WMC, etc).... To just doing the one-time Plex lifetime sub for $70ish.
It has more than paid for itself at this point... If they reneg an make it expensive someday in the future, maybe then I'll reconsider Jellyfin.
To me this means they know they don't have a viable business model. It's possible they took on a lot of debt years ago, and now they have to enshittify to pay it back. I paid for the lifetime membership years ago, and I would say I've more than gotten my money's worth and I'm mostly still happy with Plex, but I would drop them in a heartbeat if jellyfin was a viable alternative.
People don't like to admit it, but jellyfin doesn't have feature parity yet. I think they could solve a lot of the issues if they went the federation route, but until then, it's just easier for my family and friends to each have 1 plex account instead of N jellyfin accounts. Not to mention the jellyfin vulnerabilities that prevent me from considering hosting it openly.
Could you maybe elaborate on the feature parity? What is missing? I also don't get the info about N jellyfin accounts, as in separate jellyfin account per each different jellyfin server?
Why would you host it openly rather than in a VPN like Tailscale or whatever wire guard is?
I keep trying jellyfin out every few months, but so far keep hitting enough friction that I can't reliably make the switch.
Yes, if me and 5 of my friends have jellyfin servers, we all need accounts on each other's servers. I then need to juggle accounts to access their content.
Jellyswarrm is a reverse proxy plugin I could run to mask the problem for myself, but it's not a solution for mom who may have access to my server, and one other friend's server that I don't know.
The correct solution is federated accounts, but the devs have already stated that they don't want to do that.
Then friends and family have to be on my VPN to stream anything.
In fairness to Plex, I bought a Lifetime subscription during a Black Friday deal over a decade ago and it's still serving me well to this day.
I have jellyfin set up ready to go but Plex has the UX down at this point. I'll keep using it whilst my lifetime subscription remains valid.
Same here, JF is on reserve but I'll be sad if I ever need to switch. Ever since they fixed downloads I have 0 major complaints. Plex just works, and it works very well for my and my family's needs. I am perfectly happy paying once for software that I use every single day.
God I hate their last UX change. It's like they specifically designed the roku client to hide your own content and favor theirs, used to be one click into my library and everything was there.
You were right to switch whether the price increased or not.
I have a pretty old lifetime Plex pass that I got on sale.
I'm still 100% a Jellyfin convert. Keeping my Plex server while trying out Jellyfin myself lasted even less time than my Windows partition after I had linux installed.
Projects like Plex, they started out from the open source community, had free contributions, and then monetized. People are bastardizing open source.
Imo anyone who stayed with Plex after they required you to create an account is insane, especially considering there have always been good alternatives.
This exactly.
I looked into setting Plex up a few years ago. It installed, and then starts talking about making a cloud account. I don't want to talk to a cloud I just want to organize my own shit on my own network. Why does that need a cloud?
I uninstalled it. Everything I've seen since, and I mean EVERYthing, tells me I dodged a bullet. Not once have I read an article that makes me wish I'd continued the install.
One thing is the price, a whole another thing is the cluttered UI with too many features. I just want play a movie/tv series. Switched to Jellyfin and not looking back.
Just hope Jelly doesnt suffer the same fate. 🙂
I heard Jellyfin is doubling prices next year
Its ok. Send me a DM and I can give you a 75% off discount code
😀
Jellyfin was created by just such a move and nobody talks about Emby any more.
I keep wondering what happened to Emby as well. Back when I started this it was only Plex and Emby and I picked Emby and brought the lifetime pass for like $100. Still use it today and works great. I tried using jellyfin a year ago just to see what the fuss was about and to also create another service to handle my 4k content locally and I wasn't a fan of the UI as much as Emby (Emby isn't the best either). I also had weird issues playing some stuff and gave up on it. I'll stick with my Emby and Navidrome setup, they don't track me or need more money outside the occasional donations I will throw them since I'm sure they don't make much.
Jellyfin is just a newer fork of Emby. The codebase used to be the same.
If Jelly suck, Jelly fork.
Jelly works well for me. Simple, intuitive, hw encoding works great. Responsive app. I had Plex installed on a Phillips TV. It got slower and slower.
But I do understand Plex. They have a business case and need to earn money. Sadly the UI got more and.more confusing.
I've been running a Jelly server for 2 years now on a used desktop I bought for cheap. It's just been good and zero effort since setting everything up.
I've been using Jellyfin for about 4 months as a home media server on an old laptop I installed Debian on and... I have nothing to add to the conversation, I just wanted to brag about that because it works really well and I was afraid I would fuck it up.
Anyway, Plex no good.
I had Plex long enough to try to watch a movie from outside my house and realize I had to pay to do it. Luckily swapping to Jellyfin on unraid was just uninstalling Plex and using the same folders
You can get around this by extending your network with a VPN. I know that's an extra config, but a lot of people who are setting up home labs are already doing this anyway.
How does jellyfin offer remote streaming without a VPN?
It has User accounts and have people access with a login through port forwarding. myIPaddress:8383 effectively, which directs to my movie NAS
I tried to do a VPN with Tailscale and just couldn't wrap my head around it.
So, it sounds like it doesn't offer a remote streaming service like Plex then. You just publicly expose or use a VPN like you can with Plex.
Plex still costs the same to me. Lifetime pass means no price hike, and it "just works."
I've finally switched to Jellyfin, even though I have a lifetime Plex pass. It isn't really a downgrade. I think I ran into more bugs on Plex. Using Jellyfin is like switching from Windows to Linux, on a smaller scale. Plex was always trying to sell you something, get you to use the other features, etc, whereas Jellyfin just gets out of my way and lets me watch media.
it just means the costs to you are less visible, you are still the product you have paid to pretend that you are not the product.
Sure but Jellyfin just works too so thats cool, it took me like 5mn to switch our devices and the fact I could stream anything instantly on any of them without warning or whatever was immediately a breath of fresh air
Unless you want to stream remotely of course.
But when you want to give access to others outside of your network they need to subscribe to a plan to get a watch pass. That's the main issue a lot of people are facing.
The person you replied to has a lifetime-license, so no need for the clients to have a separate plan. Edit: Only thing where a separate license is needed afaik is the Download/Offline Watching feature. This will not work if a plex license owner adds a new User. Old/Existing Users can still use the download function. Here Plex made a change i think around 2 years ago.
Not if you’ve got a lifetime license, which anyone running a Plex server should already have.
Also if you want to give access to your jellyfin server to people, well you’re shit out of luck basically. You’re out of luck if you want to even watch jellyfin on most devices that aren’t a pc or android device.
But tailscale gets around that by creating a secure external tunnel that allows others to connect to your inside from anywhere in the world?
Tailscale isn't on 99.99% of TVs and devices that people want to stream videos to, and asking people to connect to your VPN whenever they want to stream video is a no-go. Anyone suggesting it is has never actually done tech support for regular people.
Not quite, I'm a software engineer that was literally a support technician before this role and I'm the go-to tech support person for my friends. Most of the complexity is on the hosts end ~ https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel
I’m a software engineer as well, and it’s not the complexity that is the challenge - it’s the fact that most tvs can’t run VPNs, and having people have to connect to your vpn to stream media just means they will never stream your media.
Can't you just open the URL in a web browser tho?
I never understood why you would pay to do things that you can do for free
I give money to LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Armbian, the Wikipedia, and so on. I don't have to, but it shows my appreciation, and maybe helps them do more in some small way.
I dont have a problem with donations, thats different from "you must pay me to use my thing". As donations is an opt in, I would do that. Paying to host my own content on my own server is taking the piss
Purchasing is an opt in too. I use both but paid for a Plex lifetime pass almost 10 years ago. It was easier to set up remote access. Setting up a server was new to me at the time so anything I could find that made it easier was worth it. I also bought an unRAID lifetime pass for the same reason (among other reasons).
I've been on a lifetime Plex subscription for the last 15 years. The only nothing preventing me from switching to Jellyfin (I have it running in parallel) is giving elderly family members, who live in 3 other countries than me, access.
If I were to start today though, I would not even consider Plex though, but momentum is a bitch.
I used plex for over a year before spending 80€ on a lifetime supscription. So it was a okay proposition for me, espacially as jellyfin still misses features plex had back then.
I switched to jellyfin after plex broke my setup with some verification change. Still missing some features, but atleast i dont have to deal with entshitification.
Two reasons:
because "free" often means there is an ulterior motive for providing the service (see: search)
because developers need to eat, and servers cost money. Paying for goods and services helps keep them from collapsing under their own weight.
Big for profit businesses are generally bad, but small dev teams transparent about their costs just trying to live comfortably? They can have my money.
Maybe this is true for some cases, but it's not for jellyfin. It's simply open source and free like tons of other utilities people work on for the fun of it. If it were closed source maybe you'd be right.
Agree on number 2 though.
Because paid versions are often better and for many people those improvements are worth it.
Because the free version usually isn't as good.
Jelly fin, as of a year ago, was still using a mouse cursor for remote use. It was a dumpster fire compared to Plex. And that's before you have to include hosting a reverse fucking proxy to share.
You want me to go through the full list of shit that's been broken on my steam deck? A device that should be polished and ready to the consumer? Do you think shit like steak decks are as polished and easy to use as a switch?
It's not hard to figure out if you drop the biases that come with most foss community members.
My steam deck can play more Nintendo games than my switch.
hosting a proxy server is part of self hosting, so I would to that anyway. asking me to pay for that is not going to fly
I pay for a lot of things that I don't have to, for many reasons. Paying for piracy tho, that's something I'm sort of unwilling to do.
Some people will pay for a vpn, for exactly that purpose. And it’s worth it because you don’t have to use 30 different streaming services and 30 different apps to find what you want to watch. And it’s all hosted in the same format.
And that's not even mentioning usenet.. Paying for piracy in many cases can just be overall better
Do people still use Usenet?
Yes, quite a lot do. It is just a faster, more secure, and more reliable experience compared to torrenting
Is there like a quick guide for this?
You don't pay for a VPN, HDDs, Usenet, etc?
No VPN because where I live it's unnecessary, I pay for HDDs but you would with Plex as well, aside from that I use my server for other stuff as well, and I don't use Usenet, so yeah.
How is the headline ragebait? Ragebait is the cynical production of content to increase clicks and engagement. The author clearly actually is that passionate about FOSS self-hosting over paid gatekeepers like Plex, and the tone of the article is adequately reflected in the headline.
An opinion author stating a strong opinion in the headline isn't automatically "ragebait" just because you personally aren't as passionate. And I say that as someone who isn't as passionate as the author.
If I was starting new today I'd go for Jellyfin but my family is all set up for Plex now and I'm not going through that painful process again :D
Yep. I have a lifetime sub to Plex anyway, and I don't want to deal with the pain of giving my in-laws access
Completely reasonable. And ud probably use Plex still if I didnt loose my watch status.
there are tools to keep jellyfin and plex watch status in sync, which is nice if you use both
I run both concurrently, but Plex has had a rash of outages recently that led to it and any services relying on it completely useless. It's insane that an online service outage would cause me to be unable to stream media locally, so yeah Jellyfin has been all but essential, recently.
That's a big red flag for privacy imo
Oh, I generally couldn't agree more. In this specific case it was actually their authentication service that was down, but it meant if you use multiple accounts with Plex or have a pin on your singular account that you were essentially locked out. But I agree it's a bad look to have remote dependencies at all.
Last time I compared the Plex handled finding and using subtitles so much more user friendly than Jellyfin.
Especially on the Jellyfin TV version it's a fucking nightmare. I had to switch to kodi just to get subs working.
Which TV version? If you're on Android, give Wholphin a try, it works way better than the standard app.
Someone doesn't know how to configure bazarr...
Not having to configure a separate utility is part of the user-friendliness
I think having distinctly separate utilities for each part of makes the whole thing work is better. But hey, what do I know? If only been running jellyfin + arr stack for 6 users without them ever complaining for over a year.
If you prefer paying a monthly bill instead of spending an afternoon configuring some services, you do you.
You grossly overestimate the number of people who are both willing and able to deploy, secure, manage, and maintain this kind of infrastructure. You may not find any value in offloading these responsibilities to a service provider operated by trained professionals, but your outright refusal to acknowledge that other people might is nothing short of callous.
Dude, my "infrastructure" is an old desktop pc with truenas and arr stack + jellyfin apps. I haven't done anything more than update the apps every now and then for over a year. I think you're exaggerating how much effort it actually requires. Not to mention that this is all for a setup that manages requesting, downloading and sorting the media as well.
If you just want to view what you already have, you can simply install jellyfin server in the pc where your videos are, point the libraries to the correct folder and that's it. To use it simply download the app on your device. If you want to get fancy you can install a plugin to use as the subtitle provider. To use outside your house just install tailscale. Doing all of that would take like 2 hours, tops.
Oh and there's nothing to secure if you don't expose it to the internet directly.
If you want to be lazy and pay a subscription, go ahead. I don't think it's worth what they're asking.
Many people who have plex set up struggled to even do that. For them to then have to install multiple applications that don't automatically work with default settings out of the box is asking too much for a not insignificant portion of plex users. Not everyone knows how to do proper self hosting. Not everyone can figure it out.
"They" don't have to do that. They can just install the jellyfin server .exe in their computer and point it to their libraries, that's it. As time goes on they couls slowly start adding plugins or learning how more advanced features work. But hey, if you want to pay a thirs party to access your own media, go ahead. We all make mistakes in life xD
Maybe someone doesn’t even use the arr stack.
Maybe they should.
Just to get subtitles in any language as nicely as with Plex? Get out.
I get subtitles for all the languages I want automatically so I don't know if it works as "nicely" as plex, but it does work.
EDIT: Damn, you plex users are butthurt af xd
I'm not a plex user but I'm butthurt because you're being insufferable. Realize that not everyone is like you. You cannot apply your experience or tendencies to everyone. Sometimes, things are just too complicated for people to figure out.
If you tell me you don't have time, sure. Been there, done that. However, "too complicated"? Nah. I'm also not trying to convert people to Jellyfin users. Use what you want to. Doesn't mean that I can't think you're making the wrong choice. I'm as free to think and say what I want as you are.
I literally pay the same for Nebula, which is decidedly not my own media. Paying a subscription for your own media playback is so stupid.
I've been self hosting for about 2 years now. I never gave Plex a thought. I immediately went with Jellyfin and setup tailscale for remote access and its been awesome. We have our phones and tvs with android boxes all connected. Only we use Wholphin on the android boxes bc its better but extremely happy with the Jellyfin/Tailscale setup.
Oh god,I have to pay $3 to use someone else's code to stream my stolen media 🤣
Not just code but infrastructure as well.
Plex makes it possible to stream remotely even if you're behind double NAT, firewalls and whatnot blocking a simple port forwarding approach. they do that through proxy servers that need to handle a lot of bandwidth, even with the limited streams...
I wouldn't have an objection to paying them for that.
I did object them to them trying to charge me to stream from my server to my TV in the same house without touching any of Plex's infrastructure at all, because their license-check is too dumb to understand some of us use things like "subnets". (I objected even more that their "support" teams are evidently staffed by obnoxious jerks trained only to say "give us money".)
Fortunately I found the switch to Jellyfin incredibly easy, and so far it's actually been more reliable than Plex ever was.
I’m as guilty as the next guy, but it’s nearly never our “own” media.
It is though. Property doesn't know who it belongs to like crap you steal in a video game, all flagged red when you try to sell it at a potion shop. Owning the information on your computer is as natural as owning the bugs that are eating your mouldy mint plant.
I have accidentally observed a reflection of a Disney movie in the reflective windows from a house i do not live and saved that information trough my retinas into my brain.
Who needs to go to jail in this situation? I who now possesses illegal information in my mind, or the careless home owner who flashed their copy onto me?
Pie in the sky techno babble with zero meaning. How the fuck did this comment get up votes?
Cake in the ground capitalism-babble
It reads like the monkeys writing Shakespeare; put together like a sentence but god knows what it means.
That's the fun part of Plex: they're a commercial company that earns money by facilitating piracy. I wonder when they'll be investigated or sued by the RIAA
They're not facilitating anything other than media organization and playback. What you're suggesting is akin to Ford being investigated for 'facilitating bank robbery' because some robbers used a Mustang as a getaway vehicle.
Probably falls under same case law with Sony's VCRs being able to record cable TV way back when https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc. Though this predates use of internet for streaming/piracy/etc, supresupreme court could interpret differently now
Maybe that’s not the most popular content on my Plex config but all my fishing session recordings are on it and those belong to me :)
In this community I’d assume it nearly always is …
Plex stopped being useful to me in 2019. At the time I had only about 300 movies and the same number of TV episodes. The database kept getting corrupt, causing long load times of video info pages, or perpetual spinning progress indicator. After fixing the database (and losing all watch metadata each time) three times in one year, I moved to a plain file share served from the NAS with Kodi running on my Nvidia Shield.
In seven years, Kodi's local DB has never corrupted. I now have 900+ movies and 2500 TV episodes. I can handle any file type, any video CODEC, can play thousands of games from the internet game library. The DB can be easily backed up and imported into a new install if needed.
And the best part? I didn't pay anyone to access any of the media I own, and no corpo gets access to my library or watch history.
Forget Plex.
I have a Jellyfin server as backup, but its clients are shit for anything that uses subtitles. I bought plex pass years back for $80 on sale, can't complain, but I'm never going to wholly rely on something closed source that requires online credentials.
Jellyfin is nice that even a noob like me can struggle a bit but get it working. :)
Now guide your parents through installing Jellyfin on their TV so they can connect to your instance.
That’s why people get Plex.
It's exactly the same steps for both Plex and Jellyfin. There's just one additional field when you login, which is your server address. That's it.
I'd say Jellyfin is even easier than Plex, because when you create an account it's nice and clean, while Plex pushes you to see their own ad-riddled content. Cleaning up a new Plex profile takes time and it's annoying.
What's the hurdle?
Input server, input credentials, no?
Yeah exactly. It's just one additional thing you have to write. That's it
And then for extra credit, try doing it on whatever shitty "smart" TV OS that their TV uses...
Shitty? Man even try installing on Samsung.
No no, preconfigure some fire sticks and then mail them out. At least we have quick connect for when logged out.
I'm still learning what I need to do in order to get up and running on the internet, but I think my plan for my dad to connect to my Jellyfin is to build him a Raspberry Pi and just hand it to him.
It's really pretty similar either way. Install the app, put in login details. Jf just has an additional login detail of your URL. Yes, that's slightly harder. No, it's not a big deal
I've never used Plex, but I have my own server at Hetzner with large drives and I love my Jellyfin server. I use it every day for shows, movies, and tons of music at home, in the metro, and walking around town and traveling. I've never had a problem with it. Honestly, it's fantastic.
I can’t comment on Plex vs JellyFin, but it’s an interesting perspective that $3/mon for remote access is too much
I use another piece of opensource software, where I consider that a plus. It takes the headache and security issues off my hands, while I can support the developers with a small contribution for an optional feature
Plex may also be harvesting your data. When I used it years ago it was already trying to send logs back home, blocked by the firewall.
jellyfin just runs and looks better, too
I paid a lifetime thing for a medication app, to help me keep on track of my meds. It was free for x number of drugs but then they wanted me to pay for more. A few months ago I got notified that my “life time” access was going to become a subscription so I said nope, no thanks, nada and uninstalled the app and set up HA alerts that remind me. Finding out I could do that was such a freeing feeling, I set up reminders to do a whole bunch of things and they remind me on my watch.
I have been using Jellyfin for over a year, brilliant thing. Makes it very easy to stream my media; I have one client catered to music, and the main one for movies/TV shows.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
[Thread #283 for this comm, first seen 11th May 2026, 12:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Good bot :)
And first I’ve seen on lemmy!
Very good bot. Having an easy on ramp for new people is so important.
If only my TV had a Jellyfin app, I could switch, but alas it doesn't. Got to use Plex if I want to watch stuff from any home streaming thingy. That said, it's free to do that, at least.
I just don't have the money or time to buy an external box and fiddle with it to get it running these days either, otherwise I'd build a modern version of the XBMC server I used to have in days gone by :-(
This is one of the most beneficial reasons to even run Plex; it's ubiquitous. I can access it from nearly everywhere with a simple TV alone, and also provide access to family without having to run tech support for them or requiring any additional investments on their part.
Chromecast of something similar is an option?
At some point that TV plex app will stop working, just fyi. And you can get a 4k google tv box for about $25 at walmart, yes I realize that $25 is $25 you didn't have to spend previously, just pointing out this argument doesn't really make sense if you actually want to use jellyfin.
Fiddle with birthday are plug and play. What TV?
Fiddle with birthday?
Yeah I don’t get it either… autocorrect?
I assume it's autocorrect, but I legitimately have no idea what they intended to put.
Same here. This is gonna bug me all day….
when making a media server i first went for plex. but when i heard it costs money to view my own files in 4k i had to use jellyfin instead
I run Jellyfin for myself and Plex for others. The Jellyfin android tv app almost pushed me back to Plex, but Wholpin works quite well.
+1 for Wholphin, it's so good! I wish it was the default app.
I run both side by side and I'm very thankful that Plex exists. Jellyfin is my backup app and would be very painful to get setup in my families houses.
I saw the writing on the wall when they kept pushing me for needing an account on their servers. Glad i left.
If I could get Jellyfin to work remotely I would never use Plex again quite happily. I pay £4 a month and my in laws have to pay £2 a month for remote access, it's starting to add up for content I download and host on my storage.
"But my parents can't use a VPN!!"
Was that line in the sand drawn before or after footing the bill, installing a media server, and an entire arr stack?
Their house is right there, bro.
Seems 80% of readers don't care ....
It's been a year or two since I gave up on Jellyfin, so maybe it's better now... But the Android TV client was rough, rough, rough when I tried using it.
If you watched Live TV, the transcode buffer would just keep going and fill your entire disk over the course of a few days after you shut down the client and stopped watching.
It was a coin toss whether you'd actually be able to stream any given movie. If you had media with more than 6 audio channels, and also needed to transcode (because you live in the U.S. and don't have unlimited upload bandwidth).... playback would just die right around the 5-10Mbps range. I spent a weekend on the forums chasing down the exact scenarios that caused this one, someone had a Pull Request that fixed it in a matter of hours (by mimicking the transcode logicr of the official desktop client)... and the dev told them to kick rocks
Try with Wholphin. It's a great Android TV app for Jellyfin. Way better than the "real" one.
ITT
Tailscale isn't exactly free. It requires a lot more knowledge, configuration, maintenance, etc, than Plex alone.
Sure, many self-hosters have the ability to figure it out and the proper networking and/or server hardware to implement it. But many Plex users aren't really self-hosters in that sense. Hosting a local media server that deals with all of the networking stuff for you is much easier than maintaining a tailscale or similar setup on top of the media server stuff. I mean for me, if I hadn't gotten a lifetime Plex Pass early on for cheap, I probably would have put more effort into my Jellyfin setup. But Plex mostly just works and I have other bigger priorities. I hate the functionality they've removed that makes things more difficult than it should be, or I wouldn't be switching, but it's not all that bad. So if I didn't have the expertise and hardware already, I could see it being worth the money to stick with it.
Tailscale is as simplified as it gets and it doesn't require any knowledge, configuration or maintenance. The fact that you can use it for free makes me wary, but you can't deny how simple it is to use. Just log in with your account in all of the devices you want to access jellyfin on and voila. It's as if they were in the same lan.
I think their idea behind it is to convince relatively tech savvy people how great it works (it does) so they talk about it in their relatively tech savvy professional role at small and medium companies.
And at some point they will either start charging money for the small time user, or it will turn to shit, or both. You just know it will happen, the question is when not if. It isn't free, it's corporate.
Honestly it is kind of wild that they have a cap on how many devices you can use at all. They store so little it’s wild. The thing that makes it really worth being a service is the relay network they handle and the fact that you can support the team building awesome features into the client. That being said headscale is a thing and if you wanna demystify it then you should take a look at that project. The tailscale docs have tons of info about how they operate under the hood too.
My problem in the first place is that due to my ISP 's limitations, I can't run wireguard. If I could run it, I would do that instead of using headscale.
I skipped tailscale, so feel free to ignore me, but Netbird has been excellent and has no limitations I'm aware of.
I mean, most people dont really understand what a reverse proxy is doing, and with dynamic IP addresses and other complications that residential customers often can't control, it can be a challenge to configure properly. Not to mention if you want to use Jellyfin on a device that travels between home and outside you need to either modify the domain or IP Address each time you enter or leave the home Otherwise you just end up routimg all the traffic over the internet and back losing the advantage of LAN speeds and sucking down your ISP traffic quotas. Or you need to configure something much more robust like a local DNS server to properly route traffic to the LAN IP address instead of your WAN IP address. That might not be an issue if you're lucky enough to have an IPv6 block of addresses from your ISP and assign one to your server, but at least in the US most ISPs still use IPv4 with workarounds like 6rd for a single dynamic external IPv6 address with all of the same issues of the dynamic IPv4 addresses. Anyway, for most users hosting a Plex server is simple (unless they have double NAT kinds of issues) compared to setting up everything correctly to TailScale.
Uhm, no? I just use the lan IP for my jellyfin server at all times. The only difference between being phisically in the same place and outside is that I enable tailscale when I'm outside. I'm telling you, this is far simpler than you're making it out to be.
Yeah so I've set up remote access to two different homes, one where the router was facing the internet directly, and that was easy, setting up a reverse proxy is not for the average user, but neither is other stuff involved in this sort of system.
Then at another place, where the router was behind cgnat and therefore could not perform its own nat, I set up a wireguard connection to a VPS that itself hosted the reverse proxy... Homemade tailscale, sorta. That was a bit complicated, I don't think most people have the patience for that.
Yeah cgnat is such a stupid thing. Why can't we get IPv6 already and avoid all of the headaches of NAT and dynamic IP addresses and such. None of that stuff should be so complicated in a residential environment.
Companies would manage to fuck that up somehow
You just made those words up.
/s
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
I’ll be sticking to Plex until it is reasonably safe to expose JF.
Have you even read the issues and understood them?
Yes, those should be fixed, but unless you are worried about someone hijacking a video stream when you use a generic media path, there is not that much to worry about.
All (raw) image endpoints in ImageByNameController, ImageController & RemoteImageController are unauthenticated
As I said, when you know the exact path of a media item on the server then you can check if the item exists.
If you choose a none standard filepath its not an issue.
Should that be fixed yes.
Whats the scenario? A law firm could brute force check all media items on open jellyfin servers? Highly illegal to exploit something like this in a lot of jurisdiction. And would also not proof the existence of the media on the server, just a file named like it.
Mitigation? Just add another random letter in the docker-compose mount path.
You shouldn't be exposing any self-hosted service to the public Internet, unless you're willing to also monitor for potential breaches.
You should really not be exposing jellyfin OR plex to the open Internet. It's just asking for trouble.
that's literally the feature of Plex....
Don't use either, what's the usecase of these apps?
Streaming your Linux ISO’s to any device, from anywhere.
Easy streaming of media that you own to (mostly) any device. That's for jellyfin anyways.
Sharing your home media with extended family and friends and they share theirs with you in a Netflix like TV application
I find it wild that Plex even got so popular among PC users and not just people who only had a phone and a roku. There have always been better options for PC; the best being built right into the god damn OS so you don't even need other software.
What is this "better option" you speak off?
Literally just using a shared network folder and SSHing into it from outside the network, or just opening the folder if you're on the network.
Want the folder to have big icons? There's a setting for that.
Uhm ... do you know what plex actually is?
https://www.plex.tv/personal-media-server/
Unless there's another app with the same name that also happens to be used for media sharing?
Where can I view the show/episode description and metadata in the shared folder? Where are my playlist? Where does it safe my watch progress. How can I filter my collection by genre or other advanced options, like available audio languages? Where does it suggest related show? Where is the API to auto sync my watch history to list sites?
Seriously, if you think a shared folder in the windows explorer can remotely compare to what plex does I have to assume you have never used or even seen the plex interface before.
Literally all that (except getting recommendations) is handled by the media viewer you use to actually watch the videos. I recommend VLC. You seriously put up with ads just for all that basic as fuck shit?
As we say in Germany: "Wenn man keine Ahnung hat, einfach mal die Fresse halten".
KOLANAKI
plex is just simple to setup and share with multiple people while they share their library with you as well, plus you dont have to manage their accounts, passwords, or setup any networking on their end
You just can’t securely watch anything from your jellyfin server remotely, or let others stream from your server.
The 20+ people who stream from my Plex server have never paid a cent because I have a Plex lifetime pass. In terms of value it’s one of the best purchases I’ve ever made.
Tried Jellyfin, lacked critical functionality, got Plex, was amazed and got a lifetime pass and never worried about it again
Critical functionality like what? I just switched to Jellyfin and hardly noticed a difference aside from a few different bugs.
It's a perennial thing with Jellyfin that it doesn't have the app / remote access support Plex provides. By itself it's a fully functional network media server, but by design it doesn't have the ability to reverse tunnel and it doesn't have the corporate infrastructure that gets it's app onto devices.
Yes you can set up wireguard / VPN access. Yes there are workarounds that can get Jellyfin streaming to most devices.
None of that matters when trying to talk someone on the phone through connecting to your server through the internet.
Plex is an account, it looks like a streaming service, it requires zero knowledge. I'm fairly certain some of my relatives have no idea it's streaming from a server in my basement. Jellyfin they have to trust you enough to setup separate other apps / configuration and have the patience / attention span / ability to follow directions to do so.
Reverse proxy to jellyfin looks identical to a normal streaming service from a user's perspective.
It's been a decade. That should be in JF by now.
Reverse proxy doesn't fix their unprotected endpoints. It doesn't give their clients 2fa, it doesn't make their search work reasonably well or their music client be able to preload the next song.
They're kind of stuck in a rut and are down to basic maintenance for releases
Jellyfin has plugins fro both LDAPand OIDC, though IIRC the OIDC one isn't great.
Remote play…..
Library sharing…,,
Apps on everything….
You can do all that on JF. Apps are def available on most things.
If you really wanted to try to complain about it, you should complain about security, search speed and subtitle support.
Remote play you can't unless you want to open your network up to the internet, which is a terrible idea, and even then most TVs and devices don't have a JellyFin app.
That's absolutely wrong. You can remote proxy the same way they do, sure to the edge. you can open just the port and sandbox the container. There are ways.
Almost every streaming device outside of TV's are covered and many tv's already support it. Every roku and android tv support it, along with most samsungs.
Tell me, are you guys getting paid by a plex PR firm or something, you all feel lots of ways about things with very little information and tons of white lies.
Out of curiosity, what "critical functionality" was it lacking?
My media player is an ancient Chromecast 4k Ultra (yes, I hate google, but I also hate buying new things) and I can't cast from Jellyfin.
Ohh! ohh! I have a wishlist!