Text:
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners. This data is used to deliver personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Your consent applies to all devices on which you have Plex installed. You can withdraw your consent at any time in Account Settings or using this page.
Soure: https://www.plex.tv/vendors/ (Might have to clear cache)
Can also read about the changes here: https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/
You must log in or # to comment.
I don’t know why everyone in the selfhosting community still even mentions Plex or uses it.
It’s closed source, not free; Jellyfin is a no brainer yet people still go to Plex??
The sunken cost of buying a plexpass on sale for 39 dollars 15 years ago.
I bought a Plex pass for 90 or something. I officially dropped Plex about 4 months ago now. For 90 bucks I got something like 8 years out of it. I’ll call that a win, I don’t feel like I wasted my money, I don’t feel like I overpayed. Just moving on now.
Same.
Yeah great perspective. I think we all need to have this perspective more as many tech companies will randomly change their minds on their products.
Kind of like how I got free photo backup on my first two pixels. It was a nice feature, I’m sad it’s gone, but it’s fine.
Did they really kill off free photo backup? That’s so incredibly shitty, they even compressed them!
Did they really kill off free photo backup? That’s so incredibly shitty, they even compressed them!
Yeah it was over after pixel 3 or a little before iirc! Although to me it was obvious they would eventually kill it off because that’s soooo much storage. It was just a trick to get people bought into Google photos (which is a great service but much too expensive for me and now basically totally replaced by Immich)
damn I’ve been out of the loop on that one for a while! Agreed, I set up Immich and it’s pretty much a drop-in replacement now
How has immich been compared to photoprism? My issue with immich is that new releases kept breaking things. Has it finally stabilized? Lts are super important to me as I don’t want to spend every weekend reconfiguring services for my family.
I’m new to self hosting and I’ve only used it for about a month. During the last month all updates have been stable for me! But according to their roadmap they plan to do their official “stable” release a little later this year, so you could wait until then?
Also I’m running it in docker so that might help
Forgot to mention- can’t compare to photo prism as I’ve never used it!
Plex is easier to run on older NAS systems, but yeah - that was me :) but i switched to jellyfin, finally
I stuck with Emby for way too long for this reason. I spent $50 in 2017. Gotta get my money’s worth no matter how broken their app was.
Hence the term “sunk cost fallacy”.
Jellyfin is hardly a no-brainer. I set it up out of curiosity a few weeks ago and my first question was how do I give access to my friends and family. So I searched, and all of the results were talking about setting up a VPN or a reverse proxy or whatever. Man, I just want to tell my mom “install this app on your tv and log in”, which is exactly what Plex does.
I get that Plex is enshittifying, but pretending Jellyfin is a drop-in replacement is delusional.
Jellyfin is a no-brainer. Publishing services on the Internet is complex.
deleted by creator
Yeah, but then you’re not self-hosting, you’re paying or using their free services to manage that for you.
deleted by creator
Yup. And letting them collect data on what goes through their service is the cost.
deleted by creator
Happens with most services.
I’m sure that one boutique website you shopped on had buried in the T&C that they can sell your data.
Very few people care. So no, for most it is not really a no brainer. It’s more effort and work pretty much everywhere. Try to use jellyfin on the Xbox client and tell me that isn’t trash.
If they adhered to somewhat modern security principles for their Backend I wouldn’t mind hosting it behind a reverse proxy. But since large parts of the API is unauthorized and unprotected, I wont.
And I do not plan on supporting family and friends in setting up vpns on all of their devices
Seconded it’s not a no-brainer. I spent days trying to get it set up with Docker on two different computers and three different distros. It wouldn’t install, if it did install it had errors, if it would even open at all with anything other than a black screen. Hours trying to search how to fix it. I gave up and installed it as a standalone app on a common distro. Not as convenient, but FML it finally worked. Really felt like I wasted my time. Personally, this is the exact bullshit linux fanatics completely ignore when they insist on how great linux is vs whatever. I’ve got a shitload of patience, willpower and modest skill to try to get something like this working, but 99% of the population doesn’t. That’s why linux will stay on the back burner. And if it ever becomes just as easy as Windows…guess what? You’ll have many of the same problem as Windows.
I’ve definitely pulled my hair out with docker too. Banged my head against the wall for a couple days before finally giving up.
I’m not ridiculously tech savvy, but I’ve tinkered with Linux since I was young, daily drive it on my laptop. I’m not afraid of the command line, and I’m smart enough to search for help and guides when I need it.
But something about docker just breaks my brain. Maybe I’m too old and there’s too much abstract thought required, I don’t know. But I can’t figure it out.
IMO it was my hardware on the first tries. Not sure what your problem was, but after digging around I found something that loosely indicated that my hardware was too old or something - it didn’t play well with the onboard graphics or similar. But the second hardware set I tried it on was far newer, and after all the installation was complete I got a black screen. Every time. No matter which guide I used, no matter what dependencies I thought might be missing or whatever I tried to get it working. A hair pulling experience indeed.
I just want to tell my mom “install this app on your tv and log in”
I mean, if I didn’t know better, I’d start to suspect that the large multimedia corporations building walled gardens of apps in closed Smart TV ecosystems don’t really want you to be able to easily tell your mom how to watch shit for free. I mean they’ll let you, if you really insist on having that app available, but someone will have to pay THEM money instead first (and probably let them spy on you). That’s their racket.
The reason Plex can do it is because they do make money, doing shitty stuff like this to their users, so they can use that money to open these doors into SmartTV-land. The root of the problem is that your SmartTV itself (and your mom’s) is a locked down proprietary piece of shit, designed exclusively for shoving all proprietary content these media companies develop down your throat, and there are few convenient workarounds that are available to us, because of course they make workarounds as inconvenient as possible.
Unless you’re willing to ditch everything proprietary and insist on open technology for everything, which is hard on its own, you’re going to end up with a janky mix of proprietary and open systems that always require some compromises, because the proprietary stuff forces us to compromise. It’s literally a “this is why we can’t have nice things” situation.
Or… You know… Jellyfin could make it so I don’t have to setup elaborate VPN schemes and have every user install that on every one of their devices. For example they could fix their security issues to make it safer to expose JF through a reverse proxy, bug they refuse to not break client compatibility
I’m not a hardcore tech person and this is exactly the issue for me as well.
I want to be able to stream my music collection when I’m away from home without having to get an associate’s degree in networking.
Tailscale makes this easy if you are the only user.
I’ll look into Tailscale then. I’m guessing there’s something funky about adding additional users. I would eventually like to add one or two other people.
deleted by creator
I think the free tier lets you have three users. I ended up going with headscale so that could be wrong.
Jellyfin is a fully self hosted drop in. That means it’s up to the server operator to handle everything. You would still tell your mom to just install the Jellyfin app on her TV with the one additional step in your server address which you would tell her.
But yes, you as the operator have to do some extra things like implementating a reverse proxy and if hosting out of your home make necessary network configuration changes to accommodate this access.
You as server operator also have to check what device your mom has and point her to what app download, because Jellyfin doesn’t have an app for everything
True though that’s less server operator and more “just being helpful to your mom”. That said it seems nowadays that a Jellyfin app is available on most devices/ecosystems (or maybe I just don’t have experience with enough devices to have an accurate idea).
Since you need to self-host Jellyfin, then you are responsible for making the service public.
“install this app on your tv and log in”, which is exactly what Plex does
Yes, but that person has to create an account. Everyone has to create an account. With Plex. Some people I know immediately say no, others are annoyed that plex would try and shake them down for money.
If you configure Jellyfin, all that goes away. THEN they can simply download the app and login.
I make the account for them. Then I log in as them and set it up so they only see my server. Then I send them the credentials and have them login
There is one thing I want from jellyfin. It is to be able to login from their Android app to watch or set something to record without jumping through a bunch of hoops.
and all of the results were talking about setting up a VPN or a reverse proxy or whatever. Man, I just want to tell my mom “install this app on your tv and log in”,
This is why I use Yunohost. It makes all of that just a “click buttons” affair. Then you can tell your Mom the same thing. Only the domain is yours so Jellyfin can’t hold it over your head.
Does it work on a smart tv or roku or whatever?
Yeah they have apps on all the platforms.
All of these, plus more unofficial ones: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/
So I searched, and all of the results were talking about setting up a VPN or a reverse proxy or whatever.
The best thing is, you can’t use a reverse proxy with it, it doesn’t even support it.
Odd, since my Jellyfin sits behind a reverse proxy.
Oh, right, it was basic auth (behind a reverse proxy, or even in general) that Jellyfin doesn’t support and isn’t planned to support IIRC.
Here is a GitHub issue where they said they don’t plan on supporting it: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-android/issues/123
I don’t even know what a reverse proxy is
“still even mentions plex”
I’ve been using plex for a LONG time, and bought a lifetime plexpass 12 years ago. I’m pretty sure I haven’t started a thread on Lemmy regarding Plex, but I’m sure I’m not alone as a LONG TIME user. Plex just works for me and cost me $75 in 2013. Right now I’ve got no pressing reason to switch.
If they remove my plexpass features, or start showing me ads / making my user experience worse, then I’ll probably look to change, and won’t participate in these awful ‘plex’ posts.
P.S. we should encourage as much new content on Lemmy as possible if you ask me.
Same with me, 12 years, about $70, and it still works just as well as ever. I turn off any new features I don’t want, my friends and family can still stream from me for free since I have plex pass already, and it’s easy to share without having to pass around my IP address.
Same. I bought the lifetime pass on sale many years ago, my setup is still working fine without me having to have touched it for at least the past 3 years outside of applying an update from time to time. I don’t stream their free shows or movies and have those setup so that they don’t even show up as an option on my tv.
Do I wish it was still the same company it was a decade ago? Of course… but so far they haven’t impacted my experience to the point that I feel the need to replace it with something else. The second that happens I will be spinning up Jellyfin.
Plex was the reason why I learned Docker + watchtower, so that I wouldn’t have to worry about updates (work smarter not harder). Now I have like 35 containers and am comfortable with docker. 🐳
Yep, exactly, when they screw me I’ll leave
Another longtime user here. If you haven’t already, you might want to disable autoupdates on all your devices. The “new experience” is not without its controversies.
Yeah, first thing I did after testing the new app. Still don’t know why they feel the need to push this out so aggressively instead of letting it run in parallel until its ready
deleted by creator
I don’t mean to diminish your comment, but I just went through the setup process for both Plex and jellyfin (moving to new hardware) and there was no significant difference between the setups.
Maybe this wasn’t the case a few years ago, but jellyfin is just a setup, point to libraries, and enable hardware accel.
deleted by creator
Yep. My son lives in another city and uses my jellyfin server. Actually since yesterday, because Plex stopped allowing him to watch remotely.
deleted by creator
Sorry, I meant “Plex took away free remote streaming”.
You’re being really, really snippy. Either have a coffee or take a breather, but calling strangers liars is way offside.
I’m not lying, I can show you my Fw config. My son called me yesterday saying he couldn’t watch Plex, something about the Plex pass. I just changed the Fw rule DST nat mangle port and told him to use jellyfin. The user is local, so that’s dead easy. Done in 10 minutes.
And yes, most users don’t have this kind of experience, granted. But Plex comes with its own stupidities, like in 2020 when my wife had to pay $5 for the Plex app so she could access our library. Or the exercise of sharing libraries if you don’t have a Plex pass, which is a real pain.
But that wasn’t my point. I was trying to relay that jellyfin isn’t as buggy and difficult as a lot of self hosters claim.
deleted by creator
I don’t mean to add fuel to the fire with Gentry or anything but I can speak towards my experience with jellyfin here. When I started with jellyfin I didn’t know a lot about networking or even self hosting, I pretty much jumped in blind. Although it’s fair to say I am not new to technical concepts/troubleshooting so my experience is definitely going to be smoother than a non technical user.
For context I am using truenas scale to host jellyfin and I was able to install it, configure it, and get my library going on the first try and it was definitely under 20 minutes. Once I decided I wanted remote access to my library it wasn’t super crazy to figure out tail scale (maybe 30 minutes?) and have that available too. It might not have been under an hour total but coming from almost nothing as a newer user I didn’t really experience a lot of turbulence.
I just changed the Fw rule DST nat mangle port and told him to use jellyfin.
Are you also a fellow MikroTik/RouterOS user?
My Jellyfin tunnels via traefik and cloudflared. However, the normal Android app somehow can’t login, but streamyfin works like a charm. I always had issues with plex, because it relied on their own service. But jellyfin now simply works, pretty nifty
deleted by creator
I mean, if they don’t want to learn, there is always netflix, prime, Disney +.
Or stay with plex, no shade.
Or you take an afternoon and build something cool like this.
deleted by creator
what? It’s not like everyone needs to run jellyfin at home. the only thing you need to use is the jellyfin webapp, which I don’t understand how is it more complicated than netflix or any other similar service. you log in, pick a movie and hit play. that’s it.
deleted by creator
Have you set up jellyfish at your home, given access to a friend outside of your network who could not setup Jellyfin themselves, and successfully got them playing on their TV, table tablet, and/or phone? Have you been able to set them up without them having to call you every week?
Yes. It’s very easy. It might not have used to be easy but it is for the last couple of years. Dead simple. About a dozen people use my Jellyfin server across TV’s, phones, tablets, laptops. None of them are what I would call techies. It’s as simple for them as Netflix.
If you have not set up a VPN for accessing your Jellyfin, I would suggest looking into the myriad of security issues the Jellyfin Backend has. Jellyfin has no business being accessible from the public internet
Plex never worked outside my network so I’m not worried about that on Jellyfin
Jellyfin is basically as easy to use as plex within the same network. I’ve set up both dueing the past 6 months. The only big difference is that Jellyfin is much more of a pain to work through port forwarding.
deleted by creator
I would switch in a heartbeat if Jellyfin didn’t… kinda suck, honestly.
But the difference in usability is enough that it’s just not an option.
For the record, I updated Plex today and I haven’t seen a notification like this anywhere, although that text snippet does match their privacy policy ad data opt-in settings blurb that has been in place for a while. I may need a bit more context here.
Only issues I’ve had with Jellyfin are reduced flexibility in naming/organizing files and inability (for me at least) to detect personal media.
i manage all files and metadata outside of jellyfin/kodi using mediaelch… it scrapes, renames and sets up all the local metadata files for ingestion perfectly into both my media services.
I’ll say that not having to do that is a major postiive. One of the UX things that bounced me off of jellyfin was ending up with a reconfigured library. The correct UX choice is for the software to adapt to your preexisting library, not having to rebuild it all with a different set of information files and naming conventions.
That is a BIG deal when you have a big library. Also why I hate Calibre. Screw Calibre.
There is that. Remote access is a pain to set up and maintain, and I had some significant performance issues with library scraping, too. The interface is also kind of a mess, particularly if you want to bolt on more than just a video library.
@BrianTheeBiscuiteer @MudMan might I suggest FileBot - just a few bucks but it curates your schtuff and can rename, sort and collate everything in Jellyfin form automagically using imdb and other dbs.
So integrate it in Jellyfin.
I don’t want five additional pieces of software to fix Jellyfin’s shortcomings, I want it to work.
Mind you, there are still edge cases in Plex, and the renaming dance can still be annoying, but still, it’s one thing to have classic Doctor Who DVDs be an alien artifact no software can process and another to have to install additional software to masticate things for Jellyfin on a task that is fundamental to the thing it’s supposed to be doing.
Also, I don’t want my stuff to be curated and renamed. My library is fine as it is. Part of the annoyance is for software to insist on moving crap around. I know what I have, where I have it and it’s all rationally named. It’s on the software to parse it.
To be clear, I think you’re being friendly and useful, it’s just that I’m frustrated by the pattern of helpful users and additional software creating this cluster of self-connected software spaghetti to address UX faults that are fundamental but OSS devs like to ignore indefinitely.
There should be a library type called “Home videos and photos” for that.
I probably made a small mistake in setting that up but I tried making the dedicated “home movies” folder and it wouldn’t show my videos.
I’ll switch to jellyfin as soon as it works nearly as well.
But for the moment it’s missing a lot of features compared to Plex.
Because this is the selfhosted community, not the FOSS community. There is some overlap, but they are different. There are many reasons to not use Plex, it not being free and open source are not among them.
I have Plex running alongside Jellyfin.
When transcoding video, Plex uses an extra 5 watts of power. Jellyfin uses an extra 55 watts.
Jellyfin also has security holes for accessing videos via URL without being authenticated.
I don’t feel like Jellyfin is ready for being exposed to the internet.
I host a Plex server for close to 70 friends and family members, from multiple parts of the world. I have over 60TBs of movies, tv shows, anime, anime movies, and flac music, and everyone can connect directly to my server via my reverse proxy and my public IPs. This works on their phones, their tvs, their tablets and PCs. I have people of all ages using my server, from very young kids to very old grandparents of friends. I have friends who share their accounts with their families, meaning I probably have already hit 100+ people using my server. Everyone is able to request whatever they want through overseerr with their Plex account, and everything shows up pretty instantly as soon as it is found and downloaded. It works almost flawlessly, whether locally or remotely, from anywhere in the world. I myself don’t even reside in the same home that my Plex server resides. I paid for my lifetime pass over 10 years ago.
Can you guarantee that I can move over to jellyfin and that every single person currently using my Plex server will continue having the same level of experience and quality of life that they’re having with my Plex server currently? Because if you can’t, you just answered your own question. Sometimes we self host things for ourselves and we can deal with some pains, but sometimes we require something that works for more people than just us, and that’s when we have to make compromises. Plex is not perfect, and is actively becoming enshittified, but I can’t simply dump it and replace it with something very much meant for local or single person use rather than actively serving tens to hundreds of people off a server built with OTC components.
Can I guarantee? There are no guarantees in self hosting. By this logic you can never move away from Plex. There’s always unknowns. There’s always new issues to trip over. Plex is hardly without it’s own warts, but because they’re ‘known’ to you and your users nothing else will ever be able to measure up.
It’s a logical fallacy and a trap.
I set up Jellyfin basically overnight when the Plex pass changes occurred. Reverse proxies are trivial, as are docker containers, don’t let the anecdotes about things being hard or VPN being needed intimidate you.
There were absolutely bumps in the road. I had to make users for each person and email them customized sign-up links. Yes, that kinda sucked, but that’s the price for running and controlling the authentication yourself instead of though a 3rd party service that can and absolutely will eventually use that data to snoop.
Most of the time, once sent the link the users were fine, 9/10 of my users had no further issues and quickly adapted. For the last 1/10, I had to trouble shoot a few things and eventually ended up recommending a different device to connect with (it was an old TV with a really old version of Plex for TVs, they ended up buying a $40 Google TV device from Walmart and got set up that way).
The whole time I was running both Plex and Jellyfin so the migration process could happen at my speed.
My point is this: no, it wasn’t painless to switch. Yes, some tech support was required. Yes, the user who was getting hundreds of dollars (annually) of streaming services effectively for free had to shell out a paltry sum to upgrade and actually enjoys their experience much more now. No, that didn’t make it impossible or not worth doing.
I’m not saying what’s best for you and your users, and I’m absolutely not guaranteeing you’ll have no issues beyond these, but I hope you understand your hands aren’t actually tied, you’re just boxing yourself in.
It’s not fair to characterize jellyfin as being unable to scale, and it’s just downright wrong to cast it as being built “for one single local user”.
Jellyfin has great support for setups that include numerous users. The entire dashboard is basically designed around this concept of an admin keeping track of dozens upon dozens of users.
You seem like you have many reservations about specific functions in Jellyfin, but you were vague in explaining thrm - what specific things are you worried about?
That’s just the nature of service migration; of course for people like you who are very dependent on it, it’s not a no-brainer, but for anyone who wants to start hosting one of the two, yes it will be.
In your case yes Plex is more appropriate but at the same time the clock is ticking for Plex if they continue on this route…
Probably because it works well, and has working clients on everything at this point. For some, a one-time fee was worth it when it was cheaper.
Sharing is also easier, as your friends just sign up to a plex account and you share your library with them. No need to send them an ip address and port, or fqdn that you have to maintain if your isp changes your ip address. It has its benefits, tbh, and the core sharing features still work for streaming. All the extra crap you can just turn off.
That why I think its still popular.
There’s no jellyfin app on my TV.
It’s already setup, and a lack of motivation/time/energy/urgency to make the change…
My TV doesn’t have a Jellyfin app, only a Plex app. I’m not buying a new TV just to use my preferred media server, sadly :-(
You can cast jellyfin to any receiver. I use a Chromecast.
Hearing people think they need an app just to use their TV as a TV is painful.
This is why you shouldn’t use the built-in TV OS. Use an Apple TV, Nvidia Shield, fire stick if you’re fine with ads, a tiny NUC would work, maybe a raspberry Pi although idk about that one.
Because it works. Call me in a few years when movies, TV shows, dvr recordings, live TV (with free, built-in guide support), and working picture support shows up. Oh, commercial removal too (again, built-in, just check a box). A not-shit setup process would be nice, too.
I’ve tried jf three times now across as many years, and it’s still got that ‘Linux developer feel’ of a tool where the devs got what they need the most mostly-working, and just don’t give a fuck about anything else - or a decent UI. No, blue boxes on a black background is not a decent UI. It wasn’t when W8 launched, and it’s not now. And when W8 is winning the competition, you’ve already lost.
Feature parity or the argument is moot.
I completely agree. I thought Plex would be fast in the collective rearview mirror as soon as they started forcing connections to their servers, pay-walling, etc. I also had issues with the database corrupting and causing huge slowdowns. I spent days trying and failing to preserve my ratings, watch data, etc.
In the end, I switched to a much simpler setup of an NFS/CIFS share accessed by Kodi on my Nvidia Shield TV. If Kodi chokes (happened once since 2017), I can just wipe the app and/or reinstall and then import the local metadata (XML or NFO IIRC). That takes about five minutes. It just works. Kodi also gives me access to the IAGL, so that’s a huge plus.
Jellyfins UI being only mouse based is garbage. Using it on Xbox for instance is terrible. Using it outside of the house is also a pain in the ass.
Can’t access remote unless u setup port forwarding, NAT rule etc etc. Too much work with jelly bin, plus it looks like 1990s UI created by illegal IPTV distributors
The point for me is, that I have an acient synology NAS (ds214play) which acts as my media server. There is a community made plex package which I can install easily. As far as I have seen, there is no way to install jellyfin on this NAS, as it doesn’t support docker
I don’t know why people use dishwashers. It’s in the kitchen. A lawn mower is a no brainer, yet people still use dishwashers??
It might be because of security.
I don’t use either service. Do they serve the same purpose?
Here’s why I still use Plex: for me Jellyfin hasn’t been easy to work the way I want it to. I mostly access my media on an Nvidia Shield, and the Jellyfin Android TV app just refuses to play certain videos; I can play them if I use VLC as an external player, but not within the app itself. The more pressing issue is that Jellyfin just refuses to play 5.1 audio, and downmixes everything to stereo. I have other issues, but these are the ones that prevent me from using it.
For me Plex just works.
Relevant XKCD: https://www.xkcd.com/743/
Every day of my life trying to explain to friends they need to quit using spoon fed software. Sigh.
And spoonfed news, food…
I think we can make an exception for soup and ice-cream, no?
NO SOUP FOR YOU! NEXT!
Haha totally, I should have said processed food, it’s the most marketed.
We could also say ultra processed news now that I think about it: statistical data -> random blog article misinterprets the charts -> tweet w people not reading the sources -> screenshot goes around on facebook -> LLM regurgitates it -> TV news anchor says it with a straight face
You forgot the step of “presidential candidate quotes the Facebook post in a presidential debate”
Exactly why on so many things it’s like… even when it looks like they are getting it, they don’t get it. Kind of like watching bluesky rising right now. Unless I’m majorly missing something here. It looks like it’s kind of open and kind of federated…
Except in a form that no one can feasibly create their own node. One change in leadership or goals of leadership away, and it can turn into the same neo nazi trash that people are joining it to get away from.
spoon fed software
That’s a new one. I like it.
This hit so hard I wanna puke diamonds. Damn.
America always does what’s right, after they’ve tried everything else. - Someone
Jellyfin is the way. Costs nothing other than the hardware needed and nobody is selling anything about you.
Our personal streaming library with Jellyfin is bigger than any public service and we can add to it from VHS, DVD, Blueray, though extra equipment was required for the VHS/Blueray.
It’s also available anywhere we go and we can set up separate accounts for different family members. There’s even a phone app.
But not Fire tablets (kids profile) or Samsung TV or many others that Plex currently supports.
JellyFin android phone app’s UI is a little weird at times, but does work pretty well for me.
…
What I would adore from any app would be an easy way to upload specific content and metadata via SFTP or to blob storage and accessible with auth (basic, token, or cloud) to more easily share it with friends/family/myself without having to host the whole damn library on the Internet or share my home Internet at inconvenient times.
Client-side encryption would be a great addition to that (eg. password required, that adds a key to the key ring). And of course native support in the JellyFin/other apps for this. It could even be made to work with a JS & WASM player.
deleted by creator
on the tablet it should work fine in the browser. maybe that would also work on the TV, that’s exactly what most TV apps do anyway.
feels so much more illegal than just streaming for yourself tho
I mean you are literally hosting pirated content for anyone to see, is it denial or is it really less illegal? Yall mention multiple user accounts, if ppl pay you in any way you are now a bootlegger?
content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners
That is a honey pot rights holders will be falling over themselves to pay Plex for access to once they hear about it.
Been telling anyone that would listen that they need to get out of Plex since they implemented that first iteration of trying to require you to sign into your own self hosted server with a Plex.tv account. They were telegraphing what direction they were going in with that kind of user hostile move.
Lots of responses about how it was easy to get around so no big deal (or worse that they liked it for some coping mechanism reason) and that nothing else was as easy and feature rich as Plex so it was worth it.
Well now a few years down the road from that they are now going to use that beach head on everyone’s Plex server they can to collect what is being watched and sell it to the highest bidder.
Boy am I glad I just switched to Jellyfin
I joined Plex after I already needed to have a login to plex.tv to be able to stream. I understand that that already was problematic, but Plex was leagues ahead of its competition in terms of ease of adding users, as well as polish. You must be forgetting how awful Jellyfin was in comparison, even just 5 years ago. I’ve been keeping up on Jellyfin and it’s amazing how far they’ve come. Now Jellyfin has great theme options, a simple-to-install skip intro/outro plugin, an app option with built-in jellyseerr integration, decent collections support (still needs some work here on feature parity with Plex, but it’s on the way) and with Wizarr, onboarding new users is as easy as sending an invite link, just like Plex. All this came in the last 5 years, and were pretty much requirements for my use cases.
Sure you can say that I’m picky, but Plex really was the best option until like, this year. I started to accept the need to switch when they added the social media aspect to it. They completely ignored what their users actually wanted. Since then, they’ve been making worse and worse decisions, which is crazy because now more than ever their competition has reached their level. Hell, by pushing all their users away, Plex is only going to accelerate the development on Jellyfin.
Seeing the replies in this thread it kinda makes me wonder what Plex actually has to do for these zealots to quit using their platform.
Like do they literally have to steal naked pictures of you and pass them around the office? Like wtf.
It is as if it is a general rule at this point that centralization breeds corruption. No matter how many statements people make early on in social engagements, centralization leads them to screw people depending on these systems. When making long term commitment to anything, check if it is centralized or how easy it is to unshackle yourself from it.
Welcome to the enshittification phase of the economy. Everything will be enshittified, even the economy itself.
Me eating 🍿 and reading the comments of Plex users arguing with Jellyfin users, while myself being a user of Kodi which has it’s own problems…
Kodi and mythtv for me. I feel like I am the slowpoke meme.
Kodi ain’t a self host tool, nor a server though but it is a great player, and I happily use the big 3, Kodi, Stremio and Plex (I’d add Cloud Stream as a runner up).
Right. Personally I don’t stream and only access my library from my TV at home. So Kodi is all I need for now. Though I’d like to try Jellyfin one day when I don’t have so much other stuff to do. I actually don’t know what exactly I’m missing out on.
I haven’t set up Kodi, but I would assume the go-to here would be a
minidlna,samba, ornfsserver w/ Kodi providing the FE.
Removed by mod
Library scans and picking up added/removed media, kill me. I love kodi, but how such a basic function can be so squirrely I’ll never understand. Maybe it’s just a quirk with NFS back ends.
I let Radarr and Sonarr handle that (including creating NFO metadata and fanart files), Kodi now only parses/syncs that local data.
This change was a huge improvement for me, though I am using SMB and not NFS. (But I assume NFS would be more robust than SMB.)
Same here regarding *arrs handling the data movement/layout and nfo files. I even have the “Connect” sections for each set to trigger rescans, but it seems especially for files that get replaced by a more optimal version, a duplicate is left over in kodi alongside the new one which only goes away when you try and play it. I tried switching to a dedicated mysql instance for shits and giggles, no effect. Some day I’ll actually dig in the logs.
I use the Kodi plugin for Jellyfin
I have absolutely no experience with Jellyfin, what does the Kodi plugin do?
Or do you mean you have the Jellyfin addon installed in Kodi, so you can accsess Jellyfin from within Kodi?
I can access my Jellyfin library just like it was native kodi
deleted by creator
This is specifically related to watching their free content. You can opt out of the sale & sharing of said data, which is used to play you targeted ads when watching their free content. I am not a big fan, but this is the typical “free” TV spiel. Was there something that changed recently or is it just being recognized now?
Meanwhile, poor Jellyfin just quietly doing the job.
Can someone clue me in on the reason why anyone would prefer Plex instead of Jellyfin?
There are a LOT of pros and cons.
Pros:
- Developed by a professional, multi-disciplined full-time team with some security oversight.
- Hosted caching of The Movie DB for faster lookups
- Provision of SSL communication to and from your server without any special setup
- FREE EPG data caching
- Centralized server management from the web
- Low-speed relay for those stuck behind CGNAT.
- A REALLY solid mobile audio*** player (sorry, but plexamp beats the pants off the JF alternatives)
- Centralized Login for your friends and family with email-based password reset
- 2FA already set up
- A nice reflector gauge to see if your* ports are open and what your limits are
- Great client support on a LOT of devices
- Search is fast out of the box, even with extensive collections
- Their clients tend to do a better job supporting all the decoding features on every player
- Very reasonable Tuner support (but somewhat ugly) **
Cons:
- Not free
- Not Open
- They have a lot of your historical data and will eventually sell it when they sell the company. This is not going to be optional. That data is worth a lot and they likely already have enough EULA rights to sell it to whoever asks. Imagine if the MPAA gets in on the fun.
- Their security history is quite dicey
- The lifetime membership will eventually be enshitified as it’s not economically sound in the long run
- They constantly change the terms of the agreement.
- They constantly remove features people are using
- They constantly push to share data between users
- They constantly push Ads
- They are making previously free features pay.
- Their investors are starving, which makes them a liability.
- Their clients are generally slower.
edit: * a word ** forgot to shout out for the tuner support *** replaced media with audio for clarity
I am a die-hard Jellyfin user, but I still haven’t found a proper way to index and stream my music library with it. As far as i know, Plex is still better at that.
Navidrome and Airsonic advanced provide a better music experience than jellyfin for me anyway and both are free.
I dropped my library in, Jellyfin indexed it and streamed first try. What didn’t work for you?
Not the user you replied to, but for me, the issue I’ve been running into is with featured albums or albums with album artist metadata info filled out {image}.
Its been a minute so I dont have the specific cause I was focused on. This problem was more prevalent in EDM tracks
https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/5fa246a8-22bc-4bfc-90f5-d9ff04b768a8.jpeg
I don’t think jellyfin does any tagging for you. Pretty sure you can edit it, but it’s not automatic. I use lidarr and mp3tag for that. Maybe musicbrainz picard on a rare occasion, if I’ve got a bunch of files that need to be identified first.
Not OP, I’ve kinda had a middle of the road experience with it.
I run JF and Plex on the same shares.
I dropped 10k tracks on it and a bunch of audiobooks, my stuff is 100% tagged.
I use tailscale to get to the server because here’s no Nat Holepunching going on.
I try to use it as much possible for audio, but some days, I just give in and use plexamp (like a guilty pleasure)
cons:
- It has issues with displaying some of the songs, they’re tagged right but you just can’t find some of it. They’re all Discogs coded, so there’s not even a lot of extra characters.
- It doesn’t always remember where in a book I am,
- It has no idea about collections of book files.
- Search is very slow, (yes there is a plugin for this, yes it’s complicated enough I haven’t tried it yet)
- Scrolling a large list is stupid low, it should just stream everything text into ram and bring thumbs in on demand
- Finamp: Finamp is barely a wrapper for the JF engine to the point that they can’t implement effects or crossfade without the feature being added in JF first. But JF is just using a ready-to-go library to play music, so changes to JF require upstream library updates. Audio development feels stagnant.
- Finamp scrolling loads one letter at a time. Scroll to Z? you get to wait, A…B…C…D…E…F…G…H…I…J…K…L…M…N…O…P…Q…R…T…U…V…W…X…Y…Z, no skipsies. It literally takes me a couple of minutes to go to songs that start with Z.
- Plugin installs are complicated and poorly documented, and compatibility with versions is dicey
- Finamp: If you lose the network in the middle of a song, you can soft-lock the app.
- Finamp: occasionally crashes if left for a long play session on my late-model Android phone.
- No options to cast.
- No listening through a NAT without port forwarding (which is dicey without a security team)
- No 2FA
- Finamp?: Shuffle is too random, you can get the same song to play twice in a couple of minutes. it needs to pull at least a couple of hours of list and shuffle that, rather than random play.
pros:
- It’s free
- It works good enough-ish for a daily car ride.
- It has some form of limited home-grown fail2ban
- The developers are super nice people.
- I exported my Plex playlists and used some Python to turn them into m3u lists, which worked fine. (Would be a cool feature to import from Plex)
- Playlist and Shuffle work mostly fine.
Can this edit the metadata in bulk? I’ll have to give it another shot. I’m pretty sure the album artist was the the problem, and I couldnt just delete that bit.
I dropped my music library into Jellyfin just as an extra. I’ve built up quite a collection over the years of CDs and always rip and tag them as I acquire new CDs, so while the collection is a little messy it’s sizable and mostly correctly tagged
Jellyfin’s music playback has been buggy but getting better with updates. At the current rate of improvement it’ll probably be really good in a 2-4 years, but right now it’s kinda meh. It exists but it’s buggy enough that I don’t use it much
I’ve recently had really good luck with Finamp on Android at least. With the recent support of time lyrics in Jellyfin and Finamp’s redesign I’ve been using that to stream my Flac audio files. Works quite well with separate collections as well. Though, to this day I still have to force close it more times than I like to get the UI to refresh after closing it. Plexamp was tough to lose when I swapped many years ago, but the third party space has slowly been closing that gap over the years.
I think it mostly comes down to sharing stuff with others.
There’s a lot of stuff in Jellyfin you wouldn’t want to expose to the internet.
No idea if Jellyfin even has a client for my dad’s shonky old 4K TV, but I certainly wouldn’t be able to set up Wireguard or anything on it.
I wouldn’t expose Plex to the internet either
Years ago, I tried out Jellyfin (Emby at the time) and it couldn’t do chromecasting with subtitles (probably fixed by now, this was a long time ago). Since I wanted to watch anime, I bought a Plex lifetime subscription instead, and I’m too lazy to switch.
It can Chromecast these days
The lack of a PS5 app makes Jellyfin useless to me. We have a dumb TV with no casting ability so the PlayStation is our media box.
People commonly cite more polished clients and clients available on obscure platforms like legacy smart TVs and such
They’re going to sell the data to movie companies so they can find out what is being pirated
I fuckin guarantee it.
Trakt did the same thing I bet
End user management.
Essentially, accounts and passwords are not my problem.
Because Jellyfin et al are all still very much “open source projects” in terms of UI/UX and it is still “missing” so many features.
For me? The big reasons why I just use plex boil down to:
- Maybe 80% of the time, I can cache an episode or a movie locally on my tablet when I am going on travel. This is great if I am doing a rewatch of something or don’t super care about The Experience and just want to watch the next few episodes of a show in the evening. With Plex, this is trivial. With SOME of the third party jellyfin apps, this can be sort of worked around but then becomes a hassle to sync watch statistics (which episodes were watched or even where I left off because a buddy wanted to go out for drinks).
- Remote watching is similarly a mess. Plex has pretty okay-good systems to treat my home server as a “cloud” resource with a single forwarded port. While even that is very questionable security wise, Jellyfin is still “figure it out yourself”. Which can be done with setting up a vpn or using Tailscale but adds additional complexities.
- Plenty of other “quirks” along similar lines
My personal opinion? For something that only “tech savvy” people are using more or less locally, Jellyfin is fine. For something that “just works”? There is no competition with Plex. And considering how many of the Jellyfin workarounds end up being “just download a copy of the file locally and watch it in VLC”… why would I use Jellyfin at all in that case when I could otherwise just mount a samba share or use Kodi (that is the latest incarnation of XBMC or whatever the samba share frontend we all used to watch porn on our playstations was, right?).
To be clear. I check in on Jellyfin probably every other year at this point? I WANT an alternative to Plex. But… Jellyfin ain’t it.
I feel exactly the same as you, but i’d like to add a number 4 point: Plex has an offical app for every system/SO
TV apps.
Jellyfin is not as easy as Plex to use. Many of us are not that technically advanced
If you are advanced enough to run a docker image with Plex, you can do the same with Jellyfin
What is a docker? Plex is just a few clicks.
My first time fucking around with Plex did NOT include docker. I googled what docker was like 9 times over the course of stupid few months cause I just didnt understand it. Now I do, and I run it via a docker stack but very very few beginners are gonna go for docker.
Then how did you use Plex? Did you even RTFM?
You don’t even have to use docker for Jellyfin, you can install the server as a regular program
I went to the Jellyfin landing page, went to the install instructions, copy pasted and ran literally one command, opened it in a browser, made my local account, clicked a button to point it at my media folders and then I was done.
What isn’t easy?
I use samba (file sharing) and vlc.
It just works and has a native app for basically everything.
User sharing without opening my Plex server to the public internet. For Jellyfin I would have to become a VPN provider and allow people into my private network to share it safely, since you wouldn’t want to have Jellyfin available to the internet with their stance on security
Because Plex used to be good but new it’s just pure enshitification.
Can I ask why nobody recommends Emby? I’ve been using it for years with zero issues. The only thing I can think of is that Jellyfin exists and is free. Emby is sort of a middleground between Plex and Jellyfin; it has a paid license (lifetime option exists), but it’s closer to Jellyfin than Plex on the whole.
Emby rugpulled their users, that’s why jellyfin exists at all.
Do you mind elaborating on that? It sounds like I got in on Emby after the rugpull. It works fine for me and I use it without the Connect (online account) feature.
For one, they moved from open source to closed source without notice.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181212104719/https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby/issues/3479
Thanks for the info. I’m sure it’ll also be useful to others reading the comments.
This sucks because, functionally-wise I have zero issues with Emby. But morally, this bothers me a lot. I thought it was going to just be because of the license (I think I paid $99 around Christmas a few years ago for a Lifetime license).
Guess I’ll be switching to Jellyfin then and donating to the project. If I paid for Emby, there’s no reason I can’t donate to a free, open-source project being developed and maintained by volunteers.
Found a good one ☝️
Seeing the person chewing out folks for calling for a fork is pretty funny in hindsight. They aren’t wrong, but now they’re the recorded naysayer in a pivotal moment for a major open source project. It’s like anyone who said Open Office shouldn’t be forked when Open Office was purchased by Oracle. Now Open Office is abandonware with only functionally useless commits and multiple unpatched security issues and Libre Office has completely replaced it
I’ve tried Jellyfin and the Live TV / tuner interface sucked so bad I didn’t want to bother with it any further. Maybe I could have found plugins or some shit to make it more usable but I’ve had a lifetime Plex pass for almost a decade and it still works great
Yes, they’ve made a number of decisions that truly suck in that time but it’s still better than the experience I had with Jellyfin or Emby, even recently.
It works pretty well for me personally. What was the problem?
The guide (or lack thereof) and UX was severely lacking.
Have you used a tuner on Plex?
I’ve been a Plex user. Honestly it was mostly because I chose Plex years ago before a lot of the recent controversy. Plex always seemed like it had a nicer interface, though I never really gave Jellyfin a try. As of late, Plex has started to add a lot of bloat to their interface, so at this point Jellyfin’s UI might actually be a pro.
“enshittification wont happen to my software of choice”
hahahaha… those ppl with discord, iphones, windows,plex…they wont learn.
I’ve had a lifetime plex pass for several years. Once I tried Jellyfin a few months ago it was all over. My “I’ll run both just in case” period lasted a week or two.
The downside is that Jellyfin will take more setup on your end, especially if you want to let other people connect securely to your server.
The upside is performance and responsiveness. Once I started using it I decided Plex had to go, even if I have to drive to each family member’s house to fix their shit. It was like moving between Linux and Windows, as far as one being designed to work and the other being designed to satisfy dozens of corporate KPIs.
Fortunately the setup for the end user is just as simple once your server is good to go. They just need URL, login, and password.
And since it’s all open source, there’s some fun diversity in clients. I use Finamp specifically for music, and there are audiobook focused ones.
Aww come on guys, my JF boner can only handle so much /s
Seriously though, why did they even give you the option to disagree, you know they’re just going to force it 3-6 months.
Just downloaded Jellyfin! Been a Plex user for years. Noticed they’ve stated to add a lot of crap to the Plex interface. I just want to stream my media library. I’m a little disappointed that Jellyfin doesn’t have a native Apple TV app, but SenPlayer looks really nice and their price model is a one time fee. So no subscriptions!
best bet for your home theater PC is STILL old computer parts with high capacity storage
