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.
They’re doing it so other people can stream their media
and they went to a subscription model, in part, so they could get their ‘cut’ from plex shares.
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.
Never had any subtitle trouble on Roku or shield
That’s great if you have a Roku or Shield. I don’t. I’ve owned both in the past and don’t want either because they’re both an absolute mess of advertising. I currently have an Apple TV and an Android tablet. Jellyfin is okay on Android (and I emphasize okay and not amazing or great), but the Apple TV is may main viewing device and Swiftfin is the best option and still miles behind Plex.
Particularly because on Apple TV with Plex you can override built in subs with the closed caption styles, meaning literally all subs that aren’t explicitly burned into the image can be made consistent and easy to read. Haven’t seen that feature anywhere else, including on the Shield TV/Pro (I used to own one, got rid of it when Android TV updated to the ad-riddled version it is today). It’s a really amazing feature IMO to be able to have full control of subtitle font, size, style, color, outline, and spacing, no matter what you’re watching.
Plex prices are expensive just to access your own media.
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?
It reads like the monkeys writing Shakespeare; put together like a sentence but god knows what it means.
Cake in the ground capitalism-babble
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.
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 …
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
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. 🙂
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.
I heard Jellyfin is doubling prices next year
Its ok. Send me a DM and I can give you a 75% off discount code
😀
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.
Plex prices are expensive just to access your own media. Tailscale can do it for free.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
You absolutely can watch from Jellyfin remotely and securly, but it does take a little setup of infrastructure. I will say Plex did a very good job at making that piece super easy and pretty much just a ‘flip a switch’ action to setup.
but it does take a little setup of infrastructure.
Understatement of the century lol.
Even if you do all of what @rumba@lemmy.zip wrote below, getting your friends and family access is another big hurdle because most likely their devices they use won’t have JellyFin support.
had disagree, getting friends and family on your jellyfin isn’t that hard. There are jellyfin clients out there for most devices
You just can’t securely watch anything from your jellyfin server remotely
Lol, what?
Try get your grandparents to stream your jellyfin server on their TV. Try explaining tailscale or a vpn to them.
Don’t have to. My parents (who are grandparents) use my Jellyfin server just fine.
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.
Buy a Lifetime Plex pass.
Projects like Plex, they started out from the open source community, had free contributions, and then monetized. People are bastardizing open source.
The reason Plex is as popular as it is is because of their infrastructure and software that lets users stream video and music remotely on any device at the press of a button. That costs money to build and maintain.
Really? Because folders on a hard drive and the OS’s networking does all that… what am I missing?
Remote streaming securely and easily is what you’re missing.
It certainly doesn’t cost what they’re charging. They have a cache, a relay and an auth service. I’ll grant them some more allowance for an active security team. They’ve wasted manyears on features nobody wants and have eliminated any feature that costs them any amount of money to maintain if they can’t make money off it. (sync, client serve, yada yada)
It certainly doesn’t cost what they’re charging.
That’s how services and products work. If they sold their product at cost, they’d go bankrupt. They’re actually charging peanuts for the service they provide.
Their entire infrastructure required to do that proxy and caching is at most 10k a month. Thats a couple thousand users.
What you’re actually paying for is their research and development of all that add ridden content they’re trying to shove down your throat. Then selling your data, and selling you and your watchers ads.
That’s some really expensive peanuts you’re suggesting
Really? Cuz Jellyfin literally does the same thing and doesn’t cost money.
Jellyfin does not handle NAT punching automatically to point that a non technical user can install an app on their TV, see one or more libraries, and connect to my server across the Internet. This is the biggest problem that Plex solves compared to Jellyfin. I can’t expect my parents to install Tailscale or make any changes to their network.
That being said I use Jellyfin. I just don’t share it with my friends.
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JellyFin does not do the same thing. JellyFin doesn’t securely allow users anywhere in the world on any network to stream your media.
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.
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.
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.
Plex may also be harvesting your data.
You mean to say “Plex is harvesting your data.”
I like to not legally commit myself
$3/mon is $36 a year. That adds up - most people have to work several hours to earn that money.
Tried Jellyfin, lacked critical functionality, got Plex, was amazed and got a lifetime pass and never worried about it again
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.
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.
Remote play you can’t unless you want to open your network up to the internet,
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.
and even then most TVs and devices don’t have a JellyFin app.
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.
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.
