PieFedPlex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April
www.plex.tv/blog/important-2025-plex-updates/
We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
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zdangerPeople remote streaming won't be charged as long as the owner of the server has an active Plex Pass subscription
For users who have an active Plex Pass subscription, remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media Server, after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge—not even a mobile activation fee.
veeeGood news for those 10 people
I betting most people who are sharing their media have Plex Pass to take advantage of hardware transcoding
I'd like to see something about HDR transcoding in the roadmap. I regularly get bitten by not supporting the exact HDR settings of media in my library ( looking at you apple tv originals)
Well, time for me to start giving more attention to my jellyfin server that is running side by side with Plex… let the enshitification begin!
HaessTl;Dr
- Plex pass price increase (6.99/mo, 69.99/yr)
- Non-LAN streaming from a personal Plex server will require either server owner or user to have Plex pass or the new "remote watch" subscription tier
- No more $5 mobile unlock fee to watch in the mobile app, but now there will be a $2/mo "remote watch" subscription tier that unlocks remote streaming mentioned above
I'm glad this won't affect Plex pass (lifetime for over a decade in my case) users who are sharing their server with non-paying friends, but I also hope this entices more development in Jellyfin. If Plex decided to make it so that my non-paying friends can't stream easily from my paid for Plex server, I need jellyfin to be a good alternative, and it currently doesn't appeal to any of the friends I share with so something like that would probably get my friends to switch back to paid streaming.
Jellyfin took a little setup, but it works great for me. Down side is I don't currently know of a good way to access the media from outside my network. Maybe a RTFM issue I haven't dealt with yet since I run both.
I just set up traefik for both Plex and jellyfin - the config is almost identical. Unfortunately none of my friends choose to use Jellyfin, probably because the official apps don't look as nice. I would use it but certain files just don't play for some reason and I haven't had the time to investigate. Plus I'm still waiting for Findroid on android TV to be in a working state.
You mention about 3 different issues, but files not playing is definitely a config/file issue, not a Jellyfin issue. I've thrown at it pretty much any standard format and it plays it fine. Any specific format and/or codec you're trying to play? For instance AV1 files play just fine on Jellyfin, but if the hardware doesn't support hardware decoding (which is the case foe my Nvidia Shield) it won't play well at all.
Regarding Jellyfin's themes, not saying no to some improvements, but what stops you(or others) from using it?
I personally use Jellyfin for multiple hours a day (as do friends and family, with zero complaints), almost every day and it plays my media on literally any platform (including remotely), but I don't find myself looking at Jellyfin per se for any large amount of that time - It's easy to navigate which from a UX perspective generally trumps looks when it comes to these things. I like how it looks as it's functional and easy to get to the media you want whilst showing all the nice metadata (images, sinopses, etc). What's missing?
Nothing is missing per se, but mysteriously 100% of my friends prefer the Plex UI. I'd have to ask them why. I find the jellyfin UI a little bare but serviceable, my only real complaint is the mysterious transcoder errors.
And I'm sure it is just a misconfiguration! The problem is I hardly changed any settings from stock, aside from enabling hardware transcoding for Intel quick sync. I have an Intel Nuc10i7FNK that has a comet lake i7-10710U so based on the table on Wikipedia which lists which generations of quick sync support what codecs, I set Jellyfin's hardware acceleration to QSV with QSV device set to blank (it works and I can see the activity using the Intel quick sync top command - I forget what the command is but I verified it when I set it up so it seems it's auto detecting it fine), and enabled H264, HEVC, Mpeg2, VC1, VP8, VP9, HEVC 10bit, and VP9 10 bit. Leaving 12 bit and all of AV1 deselected which seems to match what isn't available for decode according to the Wikipedia article. I left low power HW encoder off and enabled VPP with gain 28 and contrast gain 1, regular tone mapping disabled, tone mapping algorithm the default of bt.2390 and all the other settings left on default.
I know jellyfin is working on auto detecting the hardware acceleration settings so I don't hold it against them at all. I should also mention that the file that wouldn't play before plays fine now, so it doesn't seem like there's a specific file that causes issues but an intermittent issue that causes transcoder errors. The file that wouldn't play before is just 8bit HEVC with aac2.0 and English srt subs.
I welcome any tips you have - one issue I have when looking for help with Jellyfin is that people see users asking for help as a challenge to "prove them wrong", which is frustrating (and ironically sometimes how people approach proselytizing the fediverse). I genuinely want Jellyfin to be good and to use it, which is why I keep an updated jellyfin container running along side my Plex container, I have basically every jellyfin app installed on all my devices so I can keep up with their development, and I donate to developers of those apps even though they aren't complete enough to use in the case of Findroid. I would have already opened an issue for jellyfin web if it was easy to reproduce, but like I said I haven't had much time to troubleshoot between job and working on the arrstack so this is all the details I have right now.
I'm assuming you're just running bare-metal, in which case no GPU passthrough would be needed.
From what you've mentioned, everything seems about right so not much more to say - But on the UI department I do agree most apps could use some polish.
I'd really recommend you try to replicate, get the logs, and forward them either to the Jellyfin Forums or their troubleshooting Matrix room (or both!), as people are generally quite helpful.
Best of luck!
Thanks, it'll be earlier to iron out issues when I get watch history syncing working so I can spend more time using it to reproduce the the edge cases I get.
joelfromausWe are also making changes to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service (ToS). In this revised policy, we provide more detail about the data we collect and why, how we may use it, and how we may share/sell it. For anyone that created a Plex account before March 20, 2025, there is no change. At a later date we will ask for your consent to these additional uses.
Incredibly concerning. I’ve been using Plex for years due to its ease of use but I’ll definitely be spinning up a Jellyfin instance and seeing if I can get the same/similar functionality from it.
Because I know at least one person will comment about how great Jellyfin is; do you know whether there’s a WebOS client for Jellyfin?
Yes, I use jellyfin on an oldish LG TV with jellyfin app on webos.
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Been using Jellyfin to share media with family and friends, locally and remotely, for a couple years.
Very happy and can recommend.
blitzen
Lettuce eat lettuceYet again, FOSS showing why it's always the way to go vs proprietary tech. So glad I started my self-hosting journey with Jellyfin!
metaStaticThey would charge you to watch your own DVDs if they could
kratoz29.... A fee for adding content to each media, capped libraries? What is next?
Let's brainstorm guys ;D
cujoJust gonna... Drop this here...
In my experience Jellyfin doesn't find or handle subtitles nearly as well, and I can't watch modern movies without subtitles.
I have never had an issue with subtitles on Jellyfin, and my wife has turned our household into an always-on subtitles household. Are you making use of the Open Subtitles plugin?
UlrichThe reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature.
What "resources" do you need, exactly, to allow my friends to stream from my server?
Developers to keep things up to date and secure. Which I wouldn't mind paying for, but instead they spend it all on making Plex a social media that emails your friends a list of shows you watch? I can tell you right now that other than "watch together" no one is using the Plex social features on purpose
borariPretty sure they’re also sunsetting watch together lol
Just to make it clear to any other people reading this, Jellyfin has Group Sync where you can create groups with participants and syncplay media.
nimbledaemonLMAO that's like 90% of the reason I went with plex in the first place. Just switched over to Jellyfin this weekend. Pretty seamless.
Pika
SyunIt's pleasantly surprising that they aren't deep sixing the lifetime pass.
Yet.
Was a little worried from the headline that it was being moved to another subscription tier.
I've owned a Plex Pass Lifetime subscription since it's basically been available. I've honestly forgotten Remote Streaming was a free service at this point.
I'm probably gonna set up Jellyfin this weekend. Any tips for a first timer?
If setting up official docker container looks hard, check out linuxserver.io's docker container for Jellyfin. Even HWA is very easy.
AppoxoTake it slow.
Don't ditch Plex just yet but slowly transition the move.
Test it with your usual browser. If playback doesnt work, test with another browser or the phone app.
Set up docker.
I ran an installation on Linux and on Windows for a few years but having it running from docker using external drives for library is a game changer.
Always up to date. User files and settings Safed on a seperate folder so you can transfer it to a different os any time.
Fantastic.
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Just use the arrs correctly and there will be no issue except for weird stuff.
MaggiWuerzeNot an option everywhere outside the states. I mostly have to do that by hand
How so?
I am outside of the states and have absolutely no issues with recognition. Not for TV, movie nor anime.
And it's usually available on tmdb or tvdb.
Should have clarified. It's not an option if you want to use it to get content that is not in english. For german content for example, you need access to german private trackers which you only get with a good torrenting record in addition to catching the exceedingly rare opportunities to get an invite.
野麦さんLol, OK Plex, cya.
They're honestly lucky I was willing to pay the $2.99 or whatever it was to be able to access MY server, using MY internet and cell data, to access MY media files from MY phone. Plenty fair a price for a nice app, might've paid a few bucks more but they can screw off trying to charge a monthly fee for... nothing in particular in my usage case.
Literally just set up Jellyfin w/ Tailscale which took all of 10 minutes and works just as well. GG no re 🖕
I really don't see how anyone in their hierarchy thought this was a good idea.
There are at least 3 other competitors that moreorless work better than plex already does, without even having a subscription.
I'm amazed they decided to go this route, especially when migrating is as simple as uninstall plex, install competitor of choice(like jellyfin), and then just specify media locations.
the only real annoying part is remaking user accounts and losing watch progress/history, but there is usually a migration tool for that
The key difference is client app support for various platforms. Jellyfin is far behind Plex on that front, and I say this as a user and advocate for Jellyfin. That’s a huge hurdle for migrating even just family and friends users.
I haven't actually experienced this. I use my JF server on my roku, my Samsung tv (ok that was a pain because you have to side load it which requires a PC for TizenOs), all my families systems, and my tablet. The only systems I've found that seem to lack support of a jellyfin app is my ps5 and my xbox. It's either been on native or been able to be side loaded on every smart tv I've used, and every mobile device has had an app in the app store allowing me to use it. I don't understand the people saying there are no clients for it.
Sure, every use case is different, and I didn’t say there’s “no clients for it”, just that, objectively, there’s a gap in client support for Jellyfin in the context of migrating from Plex.
The gap also exists in maturity of available clients. In my case on tvOS/iOS, I’m using a third party client (Infuse) because Swiftfin is beta software and Jellyfin for iOS is a web view. I would have better feature coverage on Plex, if I could stomach that.
I deleted Plex from my barely functional home server.
I'll give Jellyfin a try. I just want to be able to access my music away from home
CosmicTurtle0Use Finamp for offline Music from Jellyfin
I prefer Symfonium
As in, symfonium.app? If so, seems questionable, given its proprietary nature and unavailability outside the play store. Although, the feature set is interesting.
Edit: yeeeah, no
From their FAQ:
licences checks requires a call to the verification server from time to time
The license is tied to your Google account
I've never paid even 1 cent to watch something online. Never paid for porn either.
I'm not about to start
I want to switch to jellyfin, I selfhost but I don't want to open a port directly to my server. I don't understand how everyone else figures this out and I'm apparently an idiot.
Also do people expect all who use my server to start a VPN each time? What if they leave it on and their other streaming services are using my bandwidth.
I don't understand and I have looked it up but I don't see a consensus.
I just use Tailscale when remote streaming.
From their docs:
By default, Tailscale acts as an overlay network: it only routes traffic between devices running Tailscale, but doesn't touch your public internet traffic, such as when you visit Google or Twitter. The overlay network configuration is ideal for most people who need secure communication between sensitive devices (such as company servers or home computers), but don't need extra layers of encryption or latency for their public internet connection.
Opening a port isn't really bad if you have your firewall configured properly. You will have to open a port either way with jellyfin or wireguard. If you have a TLS/SSL certificate then just doing jellyfin is fine (but have good passwords since it's public facing), otherwise a VPN like wireguard will handle encryption for you.
As for managing traffic on the VPN you can follow this advice: https://serverfault.com/questions/1075973/wireguard-how-to-only-tunnel-some-of-the-traffic
Basically setup your firewall to stop extra traffic on your end, and change accessible IPs in wireguard to your service(s) so the peer knows not to talk on that interface for unrelated things.
Pup Biruyou can do a thing called UDP hole punching for NAT traversal, buuuuuut afaik these days a lot of consumer routers consider it a security risk and attempt to block it
Still don’t get why people use Plex over Jellyfin
In my own house, or just myself. Jellyfin is fine. I haven't spent as much time on it though compared to Plex.
Plex has its own user auth, I don't need to manage that. My friends and family don't have to hit me up for password resets.
It has apps on pretty much every device.
Users can just log in. They don't need to know what server to type in.
TIL that jellyfin doesn't support an actual password reset. I've never had to actually try. That's somewhat disappointing.
Yer it's clear people who go on about not understanding either have small circles of users, or don't actually support people...
You aren't getting Pop and Nan to understand how to troubleshoot or setup Jellyfin access on their old TV compared to just throwing in a Chromecast or fire stick and having Plex auto logon with an account you setup for them if the couldn't. Makes life a ton easier, even at the cost of other liberties.
They just want to watch Zulu or Are you being Served again, nothing more.
Just gonna drop this link here for anyone who's interested in a 3rd party Jellyfin user management application. This fixes the issues related to inviting users and allowing them to reset their own passwords. Would obviously prefer all of this built into jellyfin, but solutions do exist for those determined enough.
I am a lifetime Plex Pass User... I am not affected by their BS... Yet (watch together is going though).
you are, though. your personal information (like usage data) is going through them
No no, they promised they don't do that nasty stuff, I gotta believe them.
Dave.Inertia, mostly.
Of course Plex then takes advantage of that with the slow erosion of the free edition.
I will make the switch once they revoke my lifetime pass, but in the meantime I'm really hoping that Jellyfin gets a face lift. I've tested Jellyfin a good bit and it mostly has feature parity for everything I care about, but it's UI is objectively uglier than Plex's
PerogiBoiIt syncs all movie covers and metadata automatically. When I used jellyfin last, this was a struggle.
It's only an issue if the files aren't properly named. If you're using *arr this won't be an issue. E.g. "Title (Year) - TMBD/TVDB ID" works flawlessly.
That’s good to hear. I’ve got an arr setup so this is promising whenever plex becomes unusable to me.
m-p{3}I paid Plex Pass Lifetime for peanuts (maybe $50 or $75) a decade ago, not using it would mean wasting that so yeah..
It's a lot easier to setup and get non-techy family to join. Setting up Jellyfin is easy until you want access outside your LAN. Setting up TLS or a VPN is a hassle I don't want unless there is no other option. Plex has features I (and my family) use that jellyfin doesn't support by default yet. Last I checked syncing of files for offline viewing in the official app wasn't very good yet. Plex has a bunch of ad supported live streams baked in that aren't too bad. There is a "How It's Made" channel, a Mythbusters channel, and Top Gear channel. PlexAmp isn't perfect, but it's better than any of the Jellyfin options I've seen.
For me?
- Remote Play (I've never been able to get it to consistently work on every device with Jellyfin)
- PlexAmp is awesome
- LiveTV
- IPTV
- Way better clients
- Numerous small little issues.
black0utThere's FinAmp for jellyfin. There's also support for LiveTV and I wouldn't be surprised if there was at least a plugin for IPTV.
LiveTV refers to a PlutoTV like service for Plex. There are a lot of amazing channels, but the big gain for me is having broadcast news networks.
FinAmp really isnt up to PlexAmp yet. PlexAmps "guestdj" mode is really awesome and it still doesn't have a Carplay App which kills it right there for me.
because it’s actually usable?
TrashboatI didn’t realize my setup wasn’t usable. What does plex offer that makes the usability so much better? I considered plex for my newish setup but if anything, all the privacy controversies and charging for features was more unusable to me than anything I’ve noticed with Jellyfin
Client Support is way better, Hardware transcoding is more reliable and easier to set up (as in you don't have to in Plex), UI/UX is better (if you can live with removing Plex' stuff once from your homescreen), that also means the settings, which I find convoluted in Jellyfin. The media matching is way worse and I won't go through thousands of folder to rename them just because Jellyfin only accepts one singular way to name things
since the last time I checked (could be they've made progress since then):
- subtitle auto sync
- smart collections
- way better support for downloads, particularly transcoded ones
- skip intro and credits
- better UI (this one is subjective but I did find annoying little bugs often)
- I've found that it takes way longer to update & scan larger libraries
- overall disparity between clients on different platforms (in my case, webos, firetv and iOS).
in short it's a lot of tiny little things that make my overall experience just annoying.
bad take, jellyfin is great.
bad take, people are allows to have opinions that aren’t yours
KrustyI'm actually using Jellyfin but I hate the fact that there's no easy way to install a client on Samsung TVs (Tizen OS) :(
kroldenSoon(tm) it'll be on the store. Having to build and push to tizen is the absolute worst part of jellyfin (if you have to) otherwise there's clients for every platform - even LG's webOS.
There's also finamp for music specific playback, so jellyfin can pretty much do everything
Is there an easy way on any smart tv? I've got a Sony, it's been a pain for some things but I haven't tried jellyfin or emby on it yet.
Sony is AndroidTV, so just install Plex from Playstore? Or Jellyfin if you meant that
There is a alpha client and instructions available here:
https://smartdigihere.com/jellyfin-on-samsung-smart-tv/
However as stated further down the article, it's easier to just use a web browser and access your jellyfin server that way. Login, bookmark the URL (don't forget to include the port) and then hit full screen.
Note: You may need to tweak (server side) your transcoding and subtitle settings.
You could try emby? Seems to have a Samsung tv app according to their docs https://emby.media/emby-for-samsung-smart-tv.html
That is so sad. I was just reconfigured my hone server with plex last weekend. Seems like it's time to switch to jellyfin now. Luckily didn't finish the configuration.
I bought a lifetime pass a decade ago. This doesn't affect me, right? Not that it makes me want to stay.
SkunkNo it doesn’t change anything for lifetime pass.
Maybe it will in a few years, but not today.
if it's anything like our guaranteed 'price for life' internet from the phone company here--it lasts as long as they want it to.
(which, for our internet, was less than two years)
Charging for remote access is dumb as they are not being the one hosting the contents nor relaying them (if you have it properly set up).
If they want to charge for it they should have inbuilt tunnels to solve CGNAT (like their relay but not stupidly capped).
Madbrad200Plex has been on a downward spiral for awhile now. This will really kill the service for a lot of people, wonder if Plex sharing will be a thing of the past and people switch to jellyfin sharing
I think most people that host a server already had the lifetime license so this won't affect them
terraborraThe “Remote playback with a Remote Watch Pass subscription” just sounds like IPTV with extra steps. I’m kind of ok with them requiring Plex Pass for remote streaming for the server owner, but then I have lifetime so it doesn’t affect me. Might feel differently I was having to pay.
Unruffled [they/them]It also means they will now have official payment info to tie everyones identity to their Plex server. So if the cops come-a-knocking they'll be fully able to comply with information requests.
AmbiguousPropsI mean, that's always kinda been the case. Plex uses their own infrastructure to do remote streaming, and that requires that they know your IP address, and therefore your ISP. I don't think this really changes much in regard to cops. If that's your concern, definitely don't use Plex.
Saik0I mean, that’s always kinda been the case. Plex uses their own infrastructure to do remote streaming
Only if you don't configure your server properly. Then you use their infrastructure to punch a connection through.
I'm not sure what you mean.
You don't need to use their infrastructure for remote streaming. If you forward the port properly and setup your server properly. You can actually outright disable the remote streaming through them by unchecking the relay option in settings...
does this mean the server will need Plex pass or each user individually?
Edit:
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CURRENT PLEX PASS HOLDERS:
For users who have an active Plex Pass subscription, remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media Server, after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge—not even a mobile activation fee. More on that later in this update.
RedDogI found this elsewhere and it seems to clear up the issue, for me at least:
The new “Remote Watch Pass” is primarily for users who stream from servers owned by individuals without a Plex Pass. For example, if your friend runs a Plex server but doesn’t subscribe to Plex Pass, their remote users will need a Remote Watch Pass to continue streaming after the changes take effect. Because you have a Plex Pass, your remote users will continue to be able to stream from your server remotely without needing to purchase the remote access pass.
And just found this from the FAQ on the announcement page:
I do not have a Plex Pass, but stream remotely from a Plex Media Server:
To stream remotely starting on April 29, 2025, you will need a Remote Watch Pass or Plex Pass subscription on your account or the admin of the Plex Media Server from which you stream will need a Plex Pass subscription on their account.
I guess the whole idea of this move is to force self-hosters to pay for a Plex pass. But it's a funny demographic to try to strongarm into a subscription. Most tech savvy self-hosters won't think twice about spinning up a Jellyfin instance instead, especially given that it's FOSS. And for those folks with a lifetime Plex pass this makes no difference.,
Yeah but anyone who is seriously using Plex already paid for one so I don't get the outrage
Dito. The price increase for lifetime is hard and surely made so to push people into the recurring instead. But as a Plex Pass holder this won't drive me to Jellyfin
You should however give jellyfin a shot as it has a bunch of cool features and is way more extensible than Plex.
Plex is still more polished but ive found there are a bunch of plugins for jellyfin that are really cool
I have a Jellyfin instance running in parallel to check out its progress, but its just not there yet for me.
What do you mean with extensible? The plugin 'shop'?
https://github.com/awesome-jellyfin/awesome-jellyfin
I really like the intro detector edl creator, tube archivist metadata provider, subtitle extract, and playback reporting plugins
Also you can customize the CSS for your server that extends to all clients using the jf webapp. Plex will never have that
Self hosters do it to absorb the burden and avoid playing subscriptions. I don't pay for Netflix because I don't want to have the monthly fee (among other things), I host Plex myself and deal with all the server and library maintenance. If I have to pay a subscription to self host it's a step backwards lol.
I bought the lifetime back in 2013 so I have no complaints, but the month to month is a rip off.
I was planning to switch to Jellyfin but having to sideload the app in my Samsung TV is a headache for me. But guess I will be doing exactly that now.
If you really don't want to deal with sideloading, Jellyfin can be accessed through an add on in Kodi (assuming Kodi is easily installable on the TV)
WeAreAllOneDeleted by moderator
If you were going to get the lifetime pass before the price increase then I'd say to still go for it. Personal opinion
My brother doesn't have Plex pass but I do, so he will still be able to watch stuff from my library for free.
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And if you buy the lifetime now, you might actually get it on sale. Just create an account and wait a few days, usually you get a sale offer
If you are worried about opening port 443 on your local firewall I suggest trying to get a cheap vps with decent bandwidth and hosting a reverse proxy on it that points back to your local jellyfin over a tunnel.
Ive been doing it for a few months now and finally got all my family off of Plex.
randomasideDoes anyone have any helpful guides on setting up jellyfin with a certificate so they can privately host it while also keeping it secure and up to date? I think if using docker it would make sense to use compose and configure traeffic proxy and use let's encrypt for certificates.
Plex takes care of this for you with their cert and authentication systems. I feel like if user management and secure authentication is easy to set up then that is the primary reason to leave Plex.
If I can just hand out accounts to anyone whom I would like to access my instance with ease then my family members could easily access it.
If one was to host from the home, using something like tailscale to host it online with forwarding a port would also be ideal.
Look into a thing called Caddy. It can do a few things but it makes certificates super easy.
You will likely need to buy a domain tho. They can be cheap if you don't care what its called.
Cool. I was just looking to see if someone had a guide because I'm trying to understand the pitfalls of doing it this way and I'm curious if anyone else has opened up Jellyfin to the world.
Does anyone have any helpful guides on setting up jellyfin with a certificate so they can privately host it while also keeping it secure and up to date?
You can expose jellyfin via a reverse_proxy like caddy2, godoxy, ssl-proxy, or you can use something like lego to directly manage your certificates without the proxy. Lego is great because it works with dozens of dns providers, even cloudflare.
jlow (he/him)And so it begins ...
For me it began since they announced they are killing the watch together feature... For other people it started a long time ago.
ZebrasRcoolSo I've currently got a yearly Plex Pass, because I didn't want to get locked into Plex or feel any pressure to stay if they went down the dunny, but have been putting off migrating to JellyFin. For anybody who has, how did you find the process?
My media isn't named the most sensibly. I just keep whatever name it came with for the most part. I also liked how Plex just handled the authentication and remote streaming for me - at no stage did I have to open up a port on my router, setup a reverse proxy, etc. Can I migrate my watch history?
I'm fairly new to this. Any migration advice or thoughts would be appreciated!
E: only me, though I stream things externally while out of the house fairly regularly. I'm tech literate enough to follow a readme and read docs, but that's about it. I don't need to worry about other, less tech savvy, users streaming my library
I switched to jellyfish last year. Though I didn't try to get watch history over. Jellyfin should handle your file structure very similarly to Plex, so if what you have now works, it should work on jellyfin.
If it's only you and you're only using phones and laptops outside, then you can just skip reverse proxy and all that and just VPN into your system. Wireguard, tailscale, or zerotier are good options with simple easy setups.
I think you should just give jellyfin a try. You can run it at the same time as Plex, so you can just play around with it and see how you like it.
Thanks rusty for the helpful answer! I'm going to have a look at downloading it and setting it up later tonight. I've heard a lot of good things about tailscale, so I might look for some newbie tailscale guides. When it comes to that kinda stuff, my biggest worry is that I might miss a step or not set it up right and then I've ended up exposing everything to the unfiltered internet and then my PC ends up in a botnet
From what the site says it's just putting more stuff behind a paywall due to rising costs. That paywall is a subscription or the lifetime pass from what I can tell.
Since I got the lifetime pass a while back and host my own server, my brother should still be able to watch stuff in my library from his house. I also travel a lot so I'm going to be pissed if that's not the case.
When I chose to use Plex initially it just fit better with what I needed. I can change to something else if I need to but it sounds like my lifetime pass means not much is going to change for me.
1984I use kodi... Not sure why jellyfin would be better. But sure, I cant stream to other devices than my tv.
Perhaps you can merge Jellyfin and Kodi, I know you can use your Plex Server with Kodi.
I thought it was pretty commonplace for people to just set up a vpn on their router and act like they're on their own network. I guess I'm an idiot, but I'm actually surprised people were paying for this in the first place.
Anyone have a good audiobook app to use with emby? I’ve completely switched all my video to emby but still have plex for plexamp with my audiobooks
Not emby related but for audiobooks, it doesn't get better than audiobookshelf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification?wprov=sfla1
Now is a good time to try Jellyfin
Probably foolish to believe but i havent switched to jellyfin because im worried its not as secure as plex. plex also has a convienent app on most tvs phones and streaming boxes. Am i giving up on any of these when switching?
If it's not as secure, then using a VPN is a great way to make sure everything works securely.
I do this. Personally I have no need to expose my network to devices I don’t own, so I just have a WireGuard instance that serves as my gateway. If your needs differ- such as exposing things on your network to friends with their own devices, setting up a gateway of some sort may be more appropriate.
This is not enshittification. They are making this pay feature because it costs them to maintain it and keep it from becoming shit. They've been extremely upset front on how they are going about it and why. If you think Jellyfin is better, that's fine but don't act like a service feature costing money instead of being free is somehow making it shittier. People need to get paid for their work. Especially on high demand features that require a lot of upkeep.
I dont agree that streaming files between my own devices is much of a service feature, especially since transcoding is done locally. That's the feature, previously free, now being paywalled. That's the first part of enshitification, however justified it may appear to be.
Jellyfin does this entirely self-hosted, for free, and is open-source.
Plex has lots of cool features but they are paywalling the wrong one here IMO
cobysevIMPORTANT NOTE FOR CURRENT PLEX PASS HOLDERS:
For users who have an active Plex Pass subscription, remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media Server, after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge—not even a mobile activation fee.
If you're already paying for a Plex Pass subscription, or have the Lifetime Plex Pass, this change won't affect anything. You'll continue streaming Plex remotely and any friends/family who have access to your server will still get to stream it remotely as well.
The cost of the Lifetime Plex Pass is more than doubling in price at the end of April, so if you don't want to pay for a monthly/annual subscription, buy it now while it's only $120. I bought it several years ago and it's more than paid for itself over the years.
I bought it several years ago and it's more than paid for itself over the years.
Same, who takes a monthly subscription when you can have a lifetime license? If there was no lifetime I won’t be using plex because !fucksubscriptions@lemmy.world, but when they offer a one time payment license it is just as any software license.
Well, any software license from before the subscription era.
If there was no lifetime I won’t be using plex because !fucksubscriptions@lemmy.world
100%. I'm very anti-subscription, which is why I'm using Plex. I recently dropped subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+.
I only maintained them because I was sharing with family members who couldn't afford their own subscriptions, but those companies have decided to limit sharing, so they're gone now.
Now I share my Plex server instead. Still free for my friends and family, and I'm in control of the content now. No more favorite shows or movies disappearing because a license ran out or something.
I'm dreading the eventual enshittification of Plex, but as long as it's still functional for my needs, I'll keep using it.
Others like Jellyfin or Emby weren't as functional or user friendly as Plex for me, so I'm hoping Plex holds out for a while longer.
Life time subscriptions are just like pre-ordering games. You're paying ahead of time for features that may not get developed and your concerns are no longer valid since you have no leverage to leave.
They have your money. Why should they cater to you?
And because you paid for a lifetime subscription, you're likely to keep using them due to the sunk cost.
Dozzi92I paid sometime approaching 10 years ago at this point, like $75. I honestly feel like I got my money's worth at this point. And I'm not sure this is a sunk cost scenario, maybe not yet, because I still get all the features impaid for out of the gate. I'm willing to adjust my perspective if (and realistically when) Plex starts taking things away from me. But I will not borrow trouble, I have a functioning interface that works well, and I'll continue to abuse it with my creatively procured media.
CouldbealeotardI bought a lifetime pass a while ago, and I've already gotten my money's worth. Plex is great, but there's nothing stopping me from moving to jellyfin if I'm not longer happy with Plex. Given that jellyfin is free, and you can run it side by side with Plex, there's no sunk cost. The fact of the matter is Plex is a better product than jellyfin for many things.
I don't agree with that analogy because games are a set price. If you pre-order, you're paying the same one-time price, but you don't get a chance to learn about the product before it releases.
Plex has a subscription service. Whether you pay the subscription fee or buy a lifetime pass, you're getting the same product that is already available for free. You can test it out, decide if you like it, then if you want advanced features, pay the extra cost for it.
True, it could turn to shit later. But a one-time payment is far cheaper than paying monthly or annually forever. I'm saving money AND getting access to the same product.
As I said in another comment in this thread, my Lifetime Plex Pass has already paid for itself. I would've paid more for a subscription by now if I had gone that route. And it has all the features I currently want, so I'm pretty happy with my purchase.
Never used it. Started with Kodi and moved to Jellyfin when I learned of it forking from Emby.
Would this affect self hosters?
I thought that was already true
https://jellyfin.org/
Alas my TV (LG WebOS 2) doesn't have an application for Jellyfin, or I'd have switched years ago :-(
Is there an emby app available or Kodi? The base of Jellyfin should work in either. Plug and play as far as I'm aware with maybe some issues for certain versions.
any recommendations to get it to work remotely? the good thing about plex was it was easy to set up, but the quality was medicore.
I just figured it out. You have to open the port on your router
That works but is pretty insecure as you have nothing protecting your server outside of a basic password.
I'm pleading full ignorance here. Because I opened the port for JF, doesn't that mean the only thing exposed would be my jellyfin? I thought having the rest of my ports closed would not allow access to the rest of my system?
I used a Cloudflare tunnel for security (no open ports) but that's for people with limited tech ability mostly. Everyone else I've got connected with a tailscale node.
Careful with that I think it’s against their TOS to do that due to the large volumes of data video streaming takes.
It used to be against their TOS. They removed the language over a year ago last I saw.
That’s good to know.
Yeah don't use a cloudflare tunnel for that, it'll get you banned.
I'm in the process of moving houses at the moment. But I've already got a nice PC put together to host a mess of services. Should be "fun" LOL
Alright, so I have had Jellyfin installed for years now, but my primary issue is that most devices myself or my users use lack official, readily-available clients. For example, the Samsung TV app is a developer mode install. Last I looked, nobody has put a build into the store.
I really want to use Jellyfin, but I feel like my users simply can't. I'm interested in others' experiences here that could help.
I've never had an issue with the apps. It's on my Chromecast and my android phone, and I typically stream to the TV from my phone.
My only issue is that they require a real cert (which is good tbh) and I am having trouble getting letsencrypt working due to my isp blocking port 80 and me dragging my feet getting DNS working
Let's Encrypt supports DNS verification, if you have access to update the zone file. It makes automation harder, but there are scripts to do the DNS update for the verification.
@bamboo @Chocrates "acme.sh" is pretty much the easiest solution for that.
github.com/acmesh-official/acm #letsencrypt
Yeah that's what I'm doing next. My domain name/DNS provider doesn't let me do it though so i have to self host DNS first. Turned into quite a rabbit hole, and would have just worked if I could just get traffic on port 80!
@Chocrates acme.sh has a manual option...that way it should work with your current provider
The only major pain point I had with Jellyfin was getting it on my Samsung TV yes. It is absolutely not a good recommendation for people with Samsungs unless they're willing to get their hands very dirty. Now, once I got the app side loaded on there, it works perfectly well, but the process sucked ass.
I mean, except for Tizen OS isn't most available? You can find the client for Android, Android TV, Windows, Linux (Flatpak), macos, apple ios, and more.
https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients/
I give all my friends the choice between Plex and jellyfin (I run both containers side by side pointed to the same media folders) and they all invariably choose Plex. I think it has a lot to do with the jellyfin UI, and I think an overhaul like jellyfin-vue or something that looks like findroid needs to happen in order for jellyfin to really appeal to regular people.
Yeah, I've written some custom css to get some better wrapping of libraries and such.
There's also the community themes worth looking into.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/css-customization/#community-themes
Damn, all this time using JF and I never thought of theming it.
While I use it on a SFF PC I have a couple of users that access my server via a couple of CCwGTV Chromecasts I handed them and so, unable to test since I don't have one to hand but can you / does it theme the UI on the Chromecast too?
Cheers!
I was just able to download it on every TV I have
So, no, then.
Ah, if you're allergic to flatpaks and can't convince your distribution to include it in their repository then you can always build it yourself - https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-media-player
Or just use their web based client with a browser of your choice. :)
Flatpaks aren't the worst, at least it's not a snap only
What do people have against flatpaks? I like them.
Part of it is that Ubuntu/Canonical so aggressively pushed Snaps which became a huge culture war. So you have people who hate the idea of those style of packages because they hate Snap AND people who hate flatpak because they are Team Ubuntu for some reason.
And the other aspect is that it is incredibly space inefficient (by the very nature of bundling in dependencies) and is prone to "weirdness" when it comes to file system permissions and the like. And many software projects kind of went all in on them because it provides a single(-ish) target to build for rather than having a debian and an arch and a redhad and a...
No idea what Flatpak is, much? Jellyfin is open-source. If your distro isn't providing you a .deb or tarball to your liking, that's not on the Jellyfin project.
Why would you ever bother to use either option when you can just access it via the WebUI on Firefox?
Because that basically requires transcoding for modern codecs. H265? Transcode. Subtitles? Transcode. The JF client on the same hardware can usually direct play.
Don't ask me? I'll ftp before I'll WebUI like so, but for online viewing, I'll take streaming please. My kids, wife, and mother-in-law find that a million times more convenient.
Meanwhile, there's a dude in these comments hating on the notion that Jellyfin's app will download the Raw file for offline viewing purposes. Please, do not ask me to pretend to care what is going on in that person's head. In my world, using VLC to play my files is a perk. Gimme that yummy 2x or slow-mo as I see fit, please.
Just use the god damn browser
A Chromecast TV device might fill your gap. There is a jellyfin android TV build in the app store and it works with every TV. Just costs about 50 dollarydoos
Similar price for a lifetime Plex pass (until end of April)... just saying...
True and while they are both enshitifying their services. Somehow in this one area Google seems to be going slower. And making slightly less bonehead moves
I had the same experience with my parents. They have a Samsung TV and the Jellyfin experience was awful.
I ended up getting them a little N100 mini pc and installed Bazzite and the Jellyfin app from Flathub. You can configure it so it knows it’s on a TV, and responds to keyboard controls. I got them a remote from a company called Pepper Jobs that gives keyboard input and now they have a great experience with it. Even my mom, who’s a big technophobe, loves it.
My dad also has an LG TV in his workshop that doesn’t have a working Jellyfin app (cause it’s ten years old), and he uses the Jellyfin app for his Xbox on that one.
So the flatpak version of Jellyfin works for you? I cant get it to play more then one thing. hitting the play button just does nothing.
Yeah. I had to go into the settings and change some setting to get it to work with keyboard input.
Just played a bunch of episodes on Fedora KDE (Flatpak from flathub, Jellyfin client v.1.11.1, Jellyfin server v.10.10.6) without any trouble.
Are you by chance using Wayland?
yep!
There's a jellyfish app on Xbox?
Yep. My dad said it’s working great for him.
Don’t ever connect a “smart” tv to the internet. It’s only going to become shit and steal your data.
Raspberry Pi, old pc or any kind of other external player will always be better for connectivity and control.
I agree, but having looked down this road, finding a quality external player that users will understand and is inexpensive is ... not easy.
I like my Shield TV: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/shield-tv/
I did need to install a custom launcher on it when the standard AndroidTV launcher added ads.
True, but there's not much one can do about others' stubbornness. I've been using cheap Android boxes with Kodi or the JF client installed. They make sense to my non-techie family. Dedicated boxes are better (something that can run CoreELEC, OpenELEC) but those are harder to find.
An old pc running Linux mint and kodi is my current setup in the living room.
If you’re an Apple user the AppleTV is exactly this. It’s probably Apple’s most fairly priced computing device.
Roku does it well enough. not perfectly but it's still not as shit as my Google tv
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/roku-says-unpopular-autoplay-ads-are-just-a-test/
hmm that's concerning. we really need a roku/chromecast equivalent that isnt some proprietary mess (home assistant is finally getting into those with voice assistant units)
I mean that literally appletv. Barely costs more than a Roku and is vastly better than every other device on the market.
$20 Walmart Onn 4k. Degoogle it if you want or just slap smarttube and jellyfin/plex on it.
Pi running Kodi/libreelec
Facebook made one. They attached a gorgeous voice-controlled video-chat-on-tv setup to it, and released it just as they lost all consumer trust.
Then they decided it wasn't selling.
So they killed it instead of open-sourcing it
just saying.
While I agree with you 100% and every tv in my home is under this mantra I get where the parent comment is coming from. Family members and friends visiting have asked about access to my Jellyfin library and they aren’t necessarily keen on buying additional hardware, aren’t willing to educate themselves on setting up options that would be objectively better for connectivity, privacy, control, etc.
They just want an app in their TVs app store. It’s convenient and easy. I disagree with them but I don’t blame them. It’s human nature to go for the option that results in expending the least amount of effort. But then they don’t get my sweet Jellyfin library. If you cant run the client or kodi then I can’t help you, sorry.
Remember when programming a VCR was a stand-up comedy joke?
Yes and I also remember when there were stupid things like early universal remotes that had big timers on them to circumvent the internal programming needs (but then you had to program the remote and sync it)
Managing your own AV equipment has always been a pain in the ass.
You can access Jellyfin through a browser, too. Is that an option for the Samsung TV?
I've got a Samsung TV and am nearly a complete Luddite (in the colloquial sense).
I managed to install the Jellyfin app on my TV just by following the step by step instructions on a website
I run an Android TV box on my Smart TV, because I don't trust them on the internet.
I use Jellyfin client on my new Samsung TV via a Google TV dongle (ONN tv, $25 at Walmart). Seems to work well.
My only complaint is the stream volume has been very low after a recent update. Downsampling helps but seems like it shouldn' t be necessary.
I love Jellyfin, but I always find something that I have a problem with when trying it, for example it has weak searching, tagging, and TV show identification compared to Plex.
I tried using it even as recent as yesterday for some searching and tagging, but it's searching, tagging, and even TV show identification has problems and is weak in comparison to Plex. I couldn't mass-tag certain videos which was annoying for me, I had to do it one-by-one and it ended up taking a long time, that was frustrating. Also, tags don't show up in searches anymore because it hurts performance apparently. With that said, maybe Plex has the same limitation, but it doesn't mean that Jellyfin has to. They are open-source, and they can be better than Plex, and in many ways they already are, but I keep running into pain points with how I want to use it, and it does feel a bit unfortunate. With that said, I'm a developer too, so I know it's not always that simple. It's just in some ways it feels less "complete" than Plex.
I'm still really pleased with Jellyfin though, and especially the future potential of it.
Https://emby.media
They even have Android app. I mean, a server app.
Anyway, they still seem to paywall some things.
Yeah.
Jellyfin is spectacular for LAN usage on two computers. Once you start using devices (because, you know, that is what people tend to plug into their TVs...) or going on travel, it rapidly becomes apparent that it just isn't a competitor.
Hell, a quick google suggests jellyfin STILL doesn't have caching of media for offline viewing. Plex's works maybe 40% of the time but... 40% is still higher than 0%.
I have a lifetime pass for Plex and encourage anyone who even kind of cares to get one next time it is on sale (or shortly before the scheduled price hike). I have tried Jellyfin a few times over the years and... it is basically exactly what I hate with FOSS "alternatives". It isn't an alternative in the slightest but people insist on talking it up because they want it to be and that just makes people less willing to try genuinely good alternatives.
To put it bluntly, Plex is an "offline netflix" as it were. Jellyfin is a much better version of smbstation and all the other stuff we used to stream porn to our playstations back in the day.
Jellyfin allows you to download whatever you want to your local device. But in a world of streaming, it seems to be a much smaller usecase. I take my tablet camping with me all the time, download some shows via Jellyfin and watch via Jellyfin. Maybe you're using the term "caching" differently from the use case, but if local files is what you're after, it absolutely does it. Just click download in a couple of different locations.
Yeah, I don't know what that dude's on about. My kids download stuff from jellyfin to their tablets all the time for road trips.
Did they? Or is that still the old hack of "just download the raw file. Your tablet is just a computer"?
Because I didn't see it advertised on the main web page and a quick google got me to https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin/discussions/364 which is open and abandoned tickets for the ios apps.
https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-offline-downloads?pid=16373#pid16373 suggests it is also in the same boat for android. You can find workarounds but they aren't using jellyfin.
Which is "fine". I watched WAY too many movies over the years with VLC on a laptop. But... why are we using a shim to treat a library as a streaming service in that case? Which gets back to Jellyfin just not actually being a Plex alternative for the majority of users.
As I was curious, Findroid gives you an android client that allows offline mode and downloading/playing/removing movies from the client.
Seems Infuse Pro (paid) version also has support for it if you're an iPhone user.
edit: I see the discussion regarding filesizes and I believe that Findroid is downloading the raw file in the background, so for those that wish for smaller transcoded versions in the cache it isn't a solution. I don't own any apple devices so can't tell how Infuse handles it.
You might be right, it might play in an external player. I don't recall that or didn't notice. We're a few months from the last camping season. If it does play in an external player, seems like an inconvenience vs a dealbreaker, but I get it. We all have our things. I would argue that it's maybe a big deal for you and not a majority of users. Maybe a small but focused minority.
Oh no! Please GOD, anything but tHe rAw fIlE!!
Seriously though, wtf did I just read? That can't possibly be your real stance, can it?
Half of my collection is DTS HD MA or TrueHD and many have HDR. Offline caching with transcoding is an essential feature if we want jellyfin to pull ahead. Berating people who are pointing out areas of improvement is not a winning strategy.
This is a huge problem. The blueray remux might be 80 gigs. Most children’s devices will already be filled with other crap.
Huh? I used jellyfin just fine in the hospital on public WiFi on my ancient busted iPad air [some number].
The only thing I did was install pivpn and upload my VPN profile file to Google drive so I can remote into my network. I legit never even had to set anything up it just worked, didn't even need to know the IP of the server because my locally run DNS server (and failing that, the basic hostname based DNSMasq in the router) took care of everything.
I don't even have any reverse proxy or firewall because I still pretend to value my sanity and my time, nor did I expose it to the internet either, thanks to almighty NAT.
Didn't have to do any caching or anything crazy like that, no idea what you're talking about, but I think there's an option to download the files right through jellyfin.
I watched star trek TAS while having fun with opioids and it was a great time.
That's nice.
That doesn't work if you are on an airplane (unless you want to spend the entire flight downloading one episode). Or if you just don't want to deal with hotel wifi. Or if you just don't want to expose your internal home network at all.
Which is the point and why this is one of those big features of plex that there are so many tickets and requests to get into jellyfin et al. Because yes, you can just copy files from your NAS to your phone's internal storage (assuming you don't care about transcoding and the like)... at which point there isn't much use to a metadata oriented media server/service.
Or you can just set up Plex to always download the next 10 episodes of whatever show you are watching when it has network access. I mean... that probably won't work (see: 40%) but when it does, it is awesome. Which is the "it just works" functionality.
Which gets back to the issue where, because it is FOSS, it is the greatest thing ever and anyone asking for anything else is wrong and stupid. Which is a shame because if the Jellyfin devs could actually get the "download the next N episodes" functionality to reliably work (even at 80-90%) it would be a killer app. And, for what it is worth, I have liked the devs a lot when I interacted with them in the past. But the users and evangelists are just... what we can see in this thread.
You can just download the episodes though? Like right in Jellyfin:
No you do not need to do any of that.
You can download in Jellyfin also, like in the screenshot above.
I mean, you are asking for things that are already in the app, you tell me if that's stupid or not. I'm just trying to help.
I'd never call anyone even trying to use these self-hosted alternatives stupid.
Is there some reason you can't do this manually? I actually can't think of any app with this feature, not even Netflix way back not Spotify.
As someone who has attempted to switch to Jellyfin a few times now, I have to agree. Its a great project and my switch would have been successful if it was only me using it. But between my parents streaming remotely and my kids, its not even remotely close to what Plex offers currently.
Before now I was on the sunk cost fallacy of not wanting to teach my extended family how to use Jellyfin instead of plex but after this I'm already mid-way through setting up a Jellyfin docker container on my server and I only found out an hour ago
I've been testing out jellyfin for the last couple months but it doesn't really fill the void of this specific feature that's being locked behind a pay wall. If anyone has good recommendations for securely and reliably hosting jellyfin behind SSL and auth with email password resets where I don't have to worry about it as much as Plex.
I use jellyfin locally but for a handful of remote clients I have I may well block off their access they're not going to be able to figure out my hand spun services and wall of text.
I would go for a reverse proxy to get ssl running.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/networking/#running-jellyfin-behind-a-reverse-proxy
Handling users with forgotten passwords is, sadly, a manual chore for the administrator.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/users/adding-managing-users#profile
You can connect Jellyfin to an SSO provider. It still needs work, and client support is lacking. Ideally I think it maybe should be built in rather than a plug-in (would definitely encourage more client support). But it exists.
https://github.com/9p4/jellyfin-plugin-sso
Feature request for oidc/sso:
https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/230/support-for-oidc-oauth-sso
As it stands, you could enable both the SSO and LDAP plugins, and let users do password resets entirely through your auth provider.
Basically, this is all stuff that comes with Plex out-of-the-box, but you sort of have to glue it together yourself with Jellyfin, and it's not yet in an ideal state. Plex is much much easier to configure. I wouldn't allow yourself to believe that Plex doing all this for you will make you totally secure through -- there's been multiple incidents with their auth, and IIRC the LastPass attacker pivoted from a weak Plex install. Just food for thought.
Ah, that's good to know!
My jellyfin server is only available over vpn (and locally) so I haven't much looked into beefing up the security on the jellyfin server itself.
If I reverse proxy does the video stream itself travel via the proxy too?
In case this helps as a reference point, I use a $5 digital ocean droplet as my Plex and Jellyfin reverse proxy and it seems to handle the traffic of 3-5 simultaneous streams just fine. I use Haproxy in tcp mode (so no http interpreting, just passing packets) in an attempt to keep the CPU load minimal and just make it a pure I/O task.
i'm fairly familiar with reverse proxies and how to set them up, but I'm mostly worried about the monthly bandwidth limits here. especially with hetzner's recently lowered limits. since I have a life time plex pass i might be able to hold off from switching until I figure something else out, at least.
Gotcha, I've never actually considered the bandwidth limits. It looks like digitalocean includes 1TB per month and I used 242GB last month. If I ever get close to the limit I will just spin up another droplet. I don't think I would even need to load balance unless the first one is struggling since the bandwidth allowance across all droplets is pooled together.
If you aren't already using a reverse proxy, then do you currently just port forward or use the Plex relay? The only reason I use one is because of CGNAT. Before I moved to a place with only CGNAT I port forwarded for both Plex and Jellyfin.
Yeah, the reverse proxy will need to be able to handle the network bandwidth of your video stream too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy
Forget the Auth, use VPN profiles as access controls. Give them to trusted folks and you're gold.
Dumb question but should there be VPNs operating on both ends, server and client? Or just the client because I'm guessing the server might change the connection address.
A VPN Server on the server or home network (look into PiVPN for instance), and a VPN Client on clients (look at openvpn for instance).
Good luck and let me know if you have any further questions - I'm more than happy to answer!
Authentik + jellyfin SSO plugin?
I haven't tried it out personally, but I use authentik, for that you can just create a password policy, then add a new stage for identification (just make sure to add the email field), and an email stage, then create a flow.
More work on your end than paying someone else obviously.
Jellyfin is still way behind Plex in general performance but I keep a VM of it running and updated, for when the day comes that Plex is absolutely worthless.
Which at this rate, is, well, we're getting there.
Jellyfin depends on proprietary Microsoft .NET, even on Linux.
It's still better than Plex and Emby, which are fully proprietary, and have no source code. But I will stick with sshfs with kodi, and nginx plus mpv for now.
Except, it isn't, .NET Core is an open source framework by the .NET Foundation
@Smash @Limonene Right, it *was* proprietary. Which is why adoption of it by free software devs is so slow. Ubuntu only got dotnet packages in the past few years! (RIP @vorlon )
Hellooooo jellyfin!
Only use open source software
Jellyfin + Tailscale, the perfect combination.
What does tailscale add to jellyfin?
The ability to watch from anywhere.
Install on the Jellyfin server and share that server (or just the IP with the Jellyfin port) with whoever you want. Now they have access to Jellyfin and Jellyfin only.
That's how I set stuff up for friends and family.
I don't have a static IP adress, so I use Tailscale to connect remotely to my Jellyfin server (located at home).
Ah gotcha
Jellyfin is figgin Great 😃👍
They do not have chromecast support. (Atleat the last time i checked) Thats a deal breaker for me, would love to use it.
.... I'm using Chromecast and Google TV, though Chromecast isn't very good, really, and Google TV stared showing commercials every now and then since a while ago, so that too will be on its way out.
But yeah, they're supported
I run Jellyfin on Chromecast with Google TV every day, it works super well.
Unless you mean casting from your phone, then I don't know.
I will check it out!
IIRC it has it. Not if you're behind VPN or a tunnel. Only over HTTPS.
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Yes, it does introduce insecurity, so not for everyone. I have it behind a domain on cloudflare (let's encrypt cert) with nginx reverse proxy
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Yes, it took me a long time to figure it out. Which is why Plex feels comfortable charging for it
Hmm i need to revisit it again. Thanks!
I just confirmed it has it. You need to be on the same subnet, which is why VPN won't work. But then everything shows up as castable
As a result I imagine more users will look at other offerings such as Jellyfin.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin
https://jellyfin.org/
This might be what it takes to at least get me to install it.
Do they live well together with the same shared media library?
Also, are there audiobook clients for Jellyfin?
Of you use docker plex and jellyfin arent gonna be messing with your media unless you delete/modify them within the respective clients (but then again thats what *arr is for)
I found audiobooks to be kind of awkward on jellyfin. I'm now running Audiobookshelf for all my audiobooks, radio shows and podcasts. Together with the Lissen app on Android, it works very nicely!
And what about just plain music? Is Jellyfin or Audiobookshelf better suited for that?
For music, I selfhost navidrome. Works nicely with the Tempo app on android, or Feishin on desktop.
I also recommend audio bookshelf but am using ShelfPlayer on iOS
I've heard rumors that they do play well together, but that's people running it in docker with a "read-only" flag set for the content folder, with metadata saved in the config folder
I've used the Jellyfin app to listen to audio books, but for my purposes, it's easier to run the separate client/server Audiobookshelf.
I've had Plex and Emby (what Jellyfin was forked from) running alongside one a other for years now on Windows with zero issues. They shouldn't have any effect on one another.
Makes sense. I’m fully dockerized so I’ve got that going for me
I'm fully Dockerized (well, uhh... Podmanized) and I'm dual-wielding Plex and Jellyfin. Runs smoothly and both only have read to the content. All management of the media is handled by the *arr stack anyway. I even set up a volume for Plex to throw conversions into that Jellyfin can't see. I'm currently personally using Jellyfin and I'm waiting for Jellyfin to be good enough (or Plex bad enough...) for the users I share with to switch over.
I can definitely recommend that setup.
My Jellyfin and Plex containers were able to use the same locations for media.
I installed Plex before learning I'd have to pay for any of the functionality I was looking for. Installed Jellyfin and used the Plex folders lol
I've had Jellyfin and Plex running using the same media directory for a couple years now. I think I had to make a couple small changes for things like seasons of a TV show to show up correctly, but nothing incredibly difficult. Definitely worth setting up and playing with periodically so when you do finally get sick of Plex, you're ready to just switch.
Only thing I use Plex for exclusively now is when I'm flying, Plex has the Netflix style download option and Jellyfin just downloads the video file. I like Plex's way better just from personal preference.
I haven't used Plex myself but Jellyfin doesn't create any kind of meta files in the library folders. If that is true for Plex as well then I don't see why it would be a problem to point them at the same shared library.
My experience is that both Plex and Jellyfin pointed at the same media files causes no issues.
Plex stores its metadata in a special folder, and I’ve got the *arr stack managing the actual media files, so I think I can run them in parallel.
Looks like I’ve got a project for the weekend! Jebediah’s just gonna have to wait to go to Jool.
I didn't enjoy using Jellyfin for audiobooks, on my android I use the Jellyfin client to download the book I wanna listen to and then I use AudioAnchor for listening to it.
Https://emby.media
They too put a whole lot behind their subscription though
https://emby.media/support/articles/Premiere-Feature-Matrix.html
I bought a lifetime sub, now I don't have to pay anything
FUCK Emby! What they did was worse than what Plex is doing even now
Another user said that was because users were modifying the code to avoid supporting the project?
I got a lifetime subscription relatively inexpensive and haven't had trouble
Who said that? I did a search in the thread and no Ody said anything about that that I saw
https://lemmy.world/comment/15803065
So the issue is kind of similar to bitwarden; how to protect the premium bits when having an open source core?
They just didn't handle it as gracefully.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/04/bitwarden_gpls_password_manager/
Here's the history regarding emby if you're curious:
https://github.com/nvllsvm/emby-unlocked
https://web.archive.org/web/20190327090553/https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/49862-source-code-license/#entry483544
https://web.archive.org/web/20181225073326/https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby/issues/3075#issuecomment-408600161
What did they do?
Basically, slammed the source code door shut after making promissory statements like "Don't worry, we'll always be open source" for years. With little/no notice they relicensed everything and pivoted to a closed source paywall model.
No discussion with the community or contributors, no alternatives explored, no polls or surveys. Just woke up one day to a "Sorry, but we're going closed source because moneyyyy" blog post
Jellyfin was born right after, forked out of vengeance.
In retrospect we should have seen it coming when they would do odd little things, like keeping the build scripts closed source n crap, but eh hindsight and all that lol
If you don't like the price there's always jellyfin.
Got to say that I have been very happy with it.
Yeah I switched 2-3 years ago because so many features were paywalled and on jellyfin I can at least use plugins
I switched when I had an internet outage and couldn’t log into Plex locally to watch my own media. Very happy with Jellyfin since then.
Jellyfin is just so much better, imo. Much cleaner, less stuff that I don’t actually need.
I'm a plex pass lifetime owner, but I don’t regret switching to Jellyfin one bit.
Does Jellyfin do remote streaming?
If you can set it up? Yup.
Behind CGNAT? Maybe you need to set up a relay or something to circumvent it.
Yes. You'll have to set up a reverse proxy, I use nginx, and get yourself domain, I use duck DNS, and get a SSL certificate from let's encrypt if your wanting to steam to something like a Chromecast or Roku.
It's not all that hard honestly and there's a good guide here for general home media, including both Plex and jellyfin
https://www.simplehomelab.com/docker-media-server-2024/
Assuming you know them well enough, can't you just give your IP address to folks and forward the port on your router?
Yes
Or just use tailscale. Much easier.
You can, but the reason you use a reverse proxy, isn't revealing your IP or something, it's that without it, the traffic is unencrypted.
As in, log in details and the contents of media streams are sent fully readable by any network node on the way.
Here's the thing though, for the average plex user (myself included) you've already used too many acronyms and words I don't understand. Plex serves a purpose for a lot of people, people who are even willing to pay for it to be easy.
Kind of reminds me of Netflix before anyone else did streaming. They had so much stuff I stopped sailing.
Yep. Imo now with Plex you are paying for a much simpler and accessible setup. Seems fair enough to me. Lemmy FOSS or die users (every else in this thread seemingly) are not the target audience of Plex but they sure love to complain about it.
I try to use Foss but only when it's a lateral move. I tried Linux mint. It came close but there were so many little things that just didn't make sense to me as someone who used windows for the last 25 years. Do I want to use Windows 11? No, especially with everything they've been doing to it. But in terms of usability, the sacrifices that I make by using Windows 11 outweigh the extra work, frustration, and time spent trying to figure out Linux (tried 3 different distros too).
I have 3 little kids, a full time job and aging parents. I don't have hours every day to try and make stuff work.
No, you don't need a RP.
You can and should set it up though as it's a very good convenient feature.
But you can expose Jellyfin directly.
Well that sucks.
Just put it behind tailscale and use the IP. Doing this for a two years now with weekly anime watch togethers with my friends. Not elegant but enough.
Yeah, welcome to the easy, fast, cheap conundrum.
If you're willing to do a bit of learning and asking the community for help if you get a little stuck, you've got a free solution, if not, which is perfectly okay mind you, then Plex is your solution and you have to decide how much you're willing to pay.
And honestly, of you're going down the home media route with friend and family, you're going to want to set up sonarr, radarr, ombi, transmission with VPN anyways.
I'm going to be going the free solution route, been trying to find a cheap laptop to turn into my server right now. Do you mind if I reach out about it or do you know of any good instances?
Yeah, I have a docker compose yaml script you can baseline of off and help walk you through with my lessons learned.
With the caviat that you have tailscale enabled on both devices. This prevents it from being used on a roku outside your home but you could access it remotely from your computer/phone/tablet.
It is significantly harder than Plex, currently. There are improvements happening all the time though.
You very much can create an external port and access anywhere without any of this. No tailscale needed but I'd recommend one knows what they are doing...
Hmmm, i use a Synology NAS with Jellyfin installed and my family can use their Roku TVs without issue. I didn't realize Synology made a difference there
I do this too but it only works on my home network not remotely.
It totally depends on how you expose it to the outside world. If it's exposed just like it is, it works fine with every device. If you put an authentication before it (e.g. Authelia), it can only be accessed by browsers from outside the network. That being said, it's not recommended to expose Jellyfin directly, because there are a ton of security flaws. Best practice is to use a VPN
Weird.
If I nslookup my jellyfin URL it responds with an IP in my local IP range...
And it works both outside with a 2FA page and inside without...
Well I'm a Luddite so I'm probably exposing myself to miners or something
Better than exposing yourself to minors
Huh? I'm streaming from my Jellyfin just fine when I'm on the go, with no tailscale or other VPN set up
It was significantly harder to set up remote access for Jellyfin than Plex 6 months ago. I ha ent attempted since. With Plex there was literally no set up, it just works. Until it just works without having to do any extra work, Jellyfin will struggle with adoption.
I have both running, and thatd a big difference to me. Also I prefer the way Plex detects intros and credits for skipping and their detection for captions. Once that's all sorted Jellyfin wins in every field.
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Yes, it streams pretty well, it has some UX issues, but it will let you get off plex as it stands right now with most of your needs covered.
It works, but isn't nearly as user friendly.
Yes. I use mine daily and it works great
You should ditch Roku amyway considering the posts I have seen here on lemmy.
So glad i switched to jellyfin half a year ago
Same. My wife also just asked me to get a bunch of audio books too...so looks like I have to set up that now
I would recommend audiobookshelf for the audiobooks, especially if you have your stuff running in docker. It seemed to me like the solutions to force Plex or jellyfin to do books were a bit more hacky than I wanted.
Dude, I'm blown away by how easy AudioBookShelf was to set up. I was going to go with Jellyfin for audiobooks too since I already had my libraries set up, but I wanted to try an alternative just to see. So easy, I was up and running in under 10 minutes! Thanks for the recommendation!
The default Jellyfin client isn't great for audiobooks.
For Apple iOS you might wanna look at https://github.com/LeoKlaus/plappa
For Android I would look at https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf
Personally I just download the audiobooks from Jellyfin and play it in https://f-droid.org/packages/com.prangesoftwaresolutions.audioanchor/
I run audiobookshelf and it's amazing!
Thank you
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/i-threw-away-audibles-app-and-now-i-self-host-my-audiobooks/
Check out this arstechnica article on AudioBookshelf. Should cover most of what you need to get started.
I've been meaning to set up a homeserver with plex recently but will defnitely go for jellyfin now that I read this thread.
This is the best ad campaign Jellyfin could have asked for.
I have a lifetime plex pass so this does not really affect me but I expect the trend of degrading experience to continue. I would have switched to Jellyfin a long time ago but I am dreading contacting everyone I share with and getting them migrated.
Same boat here. I chose Plex because the apps were everywhere. Smart TV's, phones, web...
I can switch, no problem. I don't want to have to teach my parents a new app. OMFG!
This is also true of Jellyfin, though. I have apps on my Windows PC, my Android phone, multiple Nvidia Shield boxes on my TVs, plus the web interface if I need it.
I switched over from Plex several years ago, and while it takes a bit more time to configure, compatibility for clients seems just as good for Jellyfin as it is for Plex.
Most importantly, Jellyfin is strictly client/server, no "cloud" bullshit and no remote account is required; I don't want Plex phoning home with a list of the media on my file server.
Jellyfin certainly took off. Great for them. It just wasn't polished or an option when I set things up way back then.
its actually the sole reason why i ended up paying for plex myself. its not because on ME that i ended up using plex, its moreso everyone else that I want to give my server access to with the least amount of hurdles that made me ultimately go that route.
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You can use Cloudflare Tunnel as well.
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Everything I see online says it’s free.
I’ve also used it recently and did not pay for it.
It's against CloudFlare ToS to use CF tunnels for media streaming like this. You can risk it ig but I have important stuff like domain registrations on CloudFlare so I'm personally not willing to risk getting banned.
I have not used it for streaming, but you’re right. I purposely do not proxy my media traffic for this reason, utilizing their other solutions.
I already pay for plex pass but I'm going to start looking into jelly fin out of principle. I will not support the enshitification of a service I use and this is how it starts. Soon they will have tiered subscriptions and then the cheap one will be taken away and the cheapest paid one will be stuffed with ads then all tiers will be stuffed with ads then they will jack up prices again or charge more for sharing with family or block it all together to force your family to get their own sub and the circle of enshitification will be complete.
I run both on the same media sources. Works great. Some movies even seem to buffer quicker via Jellyfin than Plex
Good to know. Being able to run both at the same time will probably help ease the transition.
I main Jellyfin now. I still have Plex for one device that has no Jellyfin client available. But indeed they run side by side sharing the same media.
Worth doing as Plex will keep getting shitter
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tailscale changed the computing experience for me in everything I do. Amazing networking solution. I also use zerotier but find myself on tailscale more due to how many devices they offer.
How do you set up HTTPS? I would like to encrypt the communication between my tailscale devices and my homeserver. Is it just a matter of using Let's Encrypt with Nginx?
This might be a dumb question, but could I access my Jellyfin through an external VPN like Proton?
I have it set up in my raspberry to download Linux ISOs and run Jellyfin
If you mean that you are using Proton VPN on your Raspberry Pi to mask your downloading traffic, then no that same VPN will not help you access services like Jellyfin on your home network while you are remote.
Instead you'll want to use something like Tailscale (or Wireguard). You run it as a service on your home network and it then becomes your own VPN that you (or others) can use to connect to your home network when you are remote.
You could run Wireguard on the same RaspberryPi that you use for downloading but I would recommend against it assuming that you're running Proton VPN right on the host itself (and not inside a container).
Ahh I see, you helped me understand thz other comment. Thanks a lot!
Not in the way you’re probably thinking, no. The VPN (like Proton) will be isolating devices from each other. This is by design, so you don’t end up in situations like different customers seeing each other on the network.
Your router might be able to act as a VPN host. This would allow you to connect to your home network from anywhere, and use it just like you would use a service like Proton. And if your home network is set to allow devices to see each other, then you could see your Jellyfin server. See if your router can run Tailscale or can act as a WireGuard (or OpenVPN) host. Tailscale will be the most straightforward approach, but not everything can run it. Worst case scenario, you could just run Tailscale directly on your Jellyfin server.
The big issue with requiring a VPN is that it makes remote access on some devices difficult or damned near impossible. For instance, good luck getting a smart TV to run Tailscale. Tailscale will be fine for things like phones, laptops, or tablets. But if you have a smart TV you want to remote view things on, you may need to consider a reverse proxy instead. And a reverse proxy is such a rabbit hole that it would deserve its own post.
I see thank you.
But if I want to keep my Proton VPN connection active, I don't think what you're describing is doable.
That would mean being connected to two vpns at once wouldn't it?
EDIT : i get it now, if I configure it on the router, I won't have to connect to two vpns on the same device
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Because running it on your router gives you access to the entire network of devices, not just the Jellyfin server.
Well, looks like my decision to stick with Kodi and never bother with Plex is about to pay dividends.
NAS + Tailscale + Kodi is the easiest to setup for me. Works really good.
Kodi and Plex do different things, both of them organize your media and give you a pretty interface to access it, but Kodi is a program running locally and Plex is a webservice that you can access remotely. Jellyfin is the open source program that does the same thing as Plex, i.e. a media server manager that can be accessed remotely through a web interface.
The equivalent to Plex is Jellyfin I think, Plex can be used as a media server for Kodi.
I used Kodi for years (back before and during the XMBC - > Kodi shift) before moving to Plex, it was great (a pain for a good config, but once your clients have remote access and use a shared database its insane how good it can be) but Plex was touted for so long I figured I'd give it a try when I saw a good sale. I've been using it for the past 8 years or so but may go back to Kodi or Jellyfin.
Another company fucked by executives.
Why do people use this when Jellyfin exists?
Because of the Wife Factor. Getting people to convert requires getting past a lot of social inertia. It requires you to first convince them that the convenience of streaming services isn’t actually worth paying for. Then it requires an elegant onboarding experience. Lastly, Plex simply makes remote access easy. Sure, you could fiddle with reverse proxies for Jellyfin. But that’s easy to mess up. Instead, it’s much smoother to simply sign into Plex.
I can talk my tech-illiterate “My google chrome desktop icon got moved, and now I don’t know how to check my email” mother-in-law through Plex’s sign-up process over the phone. In fact, I did. It’s familiar enough that anyone who has signed up for a streaming service can figure it out. I can’t do that with Jellyfin, because their eyes glaze over as soon as you start talking about custom server URLs or IP addresses. Hell, my MIL’s TV doesn’t even have a native Jellyfin app available on the App Store. If I wanted to install it for her, I would need to sideload it.
Jellyfin does a lot of things right. But by design, the setup process will never be as elegant as Plex’s, because that elegant system requires a centralized server to actually handle it. And centralized servers are exactly what Jellyfin was built to rebel against.
To be clear, I run both concurrently; Jellyfin for myself, and Plex for friends/family. I got the lifetime Plex Pass license a decade ago, and it has more than paid for itself since then. But it sounds like a bunch of my friends and family may end up switching to Jellyfin if they don’t want to deal with the PlexPass subscription.
100% agree with the reverse proxy set up, it's not hard but it is intimidating at first and just fyi, reverse proxy set up is a ton easier if you're using swag with the drag, drop, run for a ton of apps including SSL certificate renewal.
https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2020-08-21-introducing-swag
With that reverse proxy and SSL set up, no problems with the wife test or parent test and jellyfin for me at least.
Setting jellyfin up is for the technically inclined, i'll agree there, but once deployed I don't really see where Plex fundamentally excels over Jellyfin when it comes to "the wife factor"?
You open the app, app shows library, you click on desired media item, desired media item plays.
What am i missing?
Some movies just refused to play for me. Subtitles for certain releases just straight up wouldn't load on my lg TV, and then instead of nice picture subtitles I got shitty looking ones.
Idk... I ran it in docker and just assumed it'd all work but it doesn't.
Also, I really like that plex stores you're watched state on their server. I lost a jellyfin db once and had to remember what shows I was watching. There's not a good sync to cloud or something feature for that... Yet another container and solution I have to stand up aside from my media
It's the setup which doesn't pass the "wife" test. The more setup friction, the lower the likelihood that average users will bother. It requires a very easy setup experience to retain the average user. Even us technical people have limited time in the day. If I get a similar experience out of both Plex and Jellyfin, I'm going with the software which is easier to set up. Most of us are at that point in our lives where we'll pay for convenience.
So lazyness is the real answer. ;)
This is fair enough, to be sure, but logically I continue to have problems with it when looking solely at the wife factor.
My wife sets nothing up, that's my area of expertise. My wife's a user. This is true for Jellyfin but also things like our home automation that she very much enjoys but has no clue to how I made work on a technical level. She just taps things in the Home Assistant app as desired and things happen.
I would also argue setting up Jellyfin, though more a complex proposition as Plex, is a lot easier then setting up things like an *arr strack or ripping the media you eventually play back with it.
Plex does very little in a vacuum so despite it being easier to set up, it would be equally unlikely she ever would.
It never occurred to me that when people talk about “wife factor”, they mean setup. I also thought they just meant use.
My wife uses Jellyfin and complains about it less than Netflix or Prime.
My wife is an iPhone and Mac user and asks me to set all her Apple stuff up. I get asked to fix things all the time.
Apparently neither Apple or Jellyfin have sufficient “wife factor” if we include setup.
The app isn't available on as many platforms. The original comment claimed the TV their MIL uses doesn't have a Jellyfin app and would require side loading. I would argue that's a pretty big barrier for most people.
So far I've had no problems using jellyfin on basicly anything that exists in my house which includes a Apple TV, Xbox SX and a Xiaomi TV Box S.
But I can see there's probably no Tizen app for things like Samsung TV's.
https://github.com/Georift/install-jellyfin-tizen
Samsung is being a bit of a dick apparently.
As surprise to absolutely no-one.
Me buying a Samsung panel with tizen on it one of my bigger regrettable purchases in my home theater life.
I think its a great idea to run the two concurrently. I didn’t see the point but given how plex is evolving i think its time to start getting familiar with jellyfin.
I took a dive into linux and jellyfin and im too stupid for it.
Wireguard so you are always seen as being on the local network. This bit of assholery is easily defeated.
Or morally better than breaking TOS, use a FOOS alternative like Jellyfin.
Nothing morally wrong with working around a artificial limitation.
I keep a Jellyfin instance running as a hedge. Here's the thing with Plex (and actually a lot of companies set up similarly): those "lifetime" memberships are a trap. Think about it: Plex gets your money ONCE but they have ongoing expenses. Sooner or later, they'll have spent every single cent made by a lifetime membership unless they either get more folks OR squeeze everyone a bit more.
Once they started adding their own shows and making strange UI decisions, I could sense the end was coming. A move like this brings it up fast. Jellyfin is not nearly as good as Plex in a lot of ways, but it's really Open Source.
Anyway, a lot of rambling, but in short: when there is a "lifetime" subscription, watch out!
Pcloud will probably go this way.
Yes, it’s one thing to offer a lifetime subscription early on to get a large cash infusion and reward early adopters, but it’s a big red flag if they don’t get rid of the lifetime subscription eventually. What will happen is one by one, the people that use the service the most will switch to lifetime and your cash flow will dwindle. Eventually the only people left on the month to month are the casual users who don’t use it very often and will leave as soon as a price increase happens.
This is my exact concern.
If I pay for the lifetime pass now, what's to stop them from restricting even more features behind new types of subscriptions and paywalls. "We're adding back the 'Watch Together' feature but it requires a Platinum Plex subscription and will not be a part of Plex Lifetime Pass users."
Seems kind of inevitable honestly.
I've been waiting for this moment for like 8+ years though. I'll just switch when it becomes more obvious.
I don't think they necessarily have to get rid of it, it's just that you can't support a company ALONE from a one time infusion.
I’ve been using Plex many years. I abandoned it about 1-2 years ago when they began their enshittification journey. Now I see they are continuing to double down on being assholes.
They do not need any more resources to allow people to use what already exists. Most people run their own servers, and, they track all that by the way. Hence why people moved away from it.
Don’t give them your money. Let them rot. They fucked their user base who built them.
This always baffled me when I had a friend who showed me his Plex server years ago.
So you're using a service which makes it easy for you to host and access everything wherever you are, pulls in all the metadata for shows and movies and you're not worried about them tracking all of that?
When I finally set my own up I used Jellyfin from the start, I prefer as little tracking as possible but thats just me
What do you do to access jellyfin wherever?
Tailscale/headscale if you don't want just it exposed
I moved on to jellyfin after I found out the hard way Plex servers need to authenticate for use. I'm sure by now there are ways to set up offline authentication but I already didn't like the idea of paying monthly to stream my own content from my own machine. It just didn't make sence to me. Jellyfin isn't perfect, or as flashy as Plex, but it works, looks fine, and its free, not counting a much deserved donation to the devs .
Plex Media Server- Settings : Network : List of IP Addresses and Networks that are allowed with Auth : 192.168.4.0/24, e.g.
I stopped using Plex shortly after they started forcing logging in with your online Plex account to connect to LAN only based server. The writing was on the wall all those years ago.
Who wants to be locked out of their media when the internet is offline, completely defeated the point of self hosting local infrastructure
Jellyfin, while lacking a bit when I first migrated, has continued improved over the years and it has been joyful to use.
Plus Jellyfin supported hardware transcoding before Plex did, which was a gripe I had with Plex at the time.
I stream from my server remotely and share with Family without hassle.
I dunno where Plex is trying to go, glad I bailed long ago
Not here to defend Plex' enshittification but you can still use Plex offline just fine. I had 0 issues yesterday when I had no internet all day.
I'll probably get the details wrong but my understanding is that when you sign in, you get an authorization token. That token is valid for some period of time, let's say 48 hours. You can use that cached token but let's say it's on your phone and not your TV. Maybe you haven't used Plex on the TV this week. Want to use your TV, out of luck. Want to use a different local account, out of luck. Want to use Plex longer than the token is good for, out of luck.
Wow, I had no clue it worked like that. That's actually really bad.
Yeah, so I have local accounts for my family, but only the last person signed in can get back in if the Internet goes down. We still have temporary access to most of the media, but it sucks.
Yeah, my lifetime Jellyfin subscription wasn’t quite that much, thankfully. 😆
I just want to make sure I read this correctly. It says that if you're a Plex plass holder already that remote streaming changes won't affect your service. This means that if I have the lifetime subscription and host my own server than users whom have not payed for Plex pass can continue to access this server without issue correct?
Yeah. The day they start making something subscription that isn't included in the lifetime pass is the day they get their office burned down by a lot of angry people.
Correct
Thanks
@Tinks @randomaside what i don't understand is, what processing/compute are they using on their end? My server is transcoding it and I'm connecting directly to it.
Indirect Playback goes through them first. Also, they host DynDNS for the Plex media server to make accessing it remotely from apps easier.
The second thing is a joke to host and requires no resources. The first one can be a significant resource usage item.
Historically, that's how they usually rolled out features requiring a Plexpass - It usually depended on the server owner owning Plexpass. This move, however, makes me think they'll probably change that for shared to others via E-mail.
I'm not pirating a bunch of shows just to pay Plex for the privilege of watching it.
Also remember to give them your credit card, name and address for the privilege of pirating the content.
Even better, it's now a nice database of who companies and governments can go after when they want or need to!
It always has been.. just now they want you to pay.
lmao me either
Jellyfin ftw
Time to move to Jellyfin for the rest of their users?
Well this is a good reason to finish my migration to Jellyfin I think.
I only use remote streaming a couple times per year, so paying for plex pass just for that seems a bit silly. Their online-only account auth is also super annoying if the internet is down.
I use Jellyfin and VPN into my home network to stream on the go.
This is the way
Join us
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I run both on my unraid NAS. I use plex for streaming to my phone over cell data. I use jellyfin for streaming to my laptops and TV.
Plex tends to break every once and a while though. Not often, but it happens enough that I'm replacing it with just having my music on a DAP that is synced with Syncthing.
I also use the comic viewer function of jellyfin.
Same. I'm not switching to Jellyfin yet either - mostly because of my boomer parents - but this is getting close to the tipping point for me
As a plex pass lifetime user, this doesn't change anything for me.
I am, however, blown away that the price went from $75 CDN to $350 CDN over the last 10 years!! That's just insane!
They have sales, and it's not really worth paying the "MSRP" price. My wife got Plex Pass for $80 back in 2023, and I got it late last year for $90.
I'm not sure where you're getting that from, the article literally states the price hasn't changed in 10 years, and still hasn't, but it finally will on the 29th of April.
This tracks with my experience as it's probably been 10 years since I bought the lifetime pass and here in the UK it's often on sale for basically the same price (about £75 if I recall).
Well, it was $75 CDN when i bought in 2012, it's $150-170 CDN now, and going up to $249 USD which converts to $358 CDN, so I'm assumong they'll round down to $350 or up to $360 CDN.
The conversion from USD to CDN kills it for us sadly. It's just such a huge jump this time. More than double on this bump.
Canada can just become the 51st state and solve that /s
Cheaper plex subscription at the cost of healthcare and taking orders from a moron. Can’t say no to a great deal!
The bestestest deal even!
I can understand new features being behind a fee, but this is putting old, old capabilities behind a paywall. Hmmm...
This with a recent decision to remove watch together sort of eliminates the whole reason I would have tried Plex so many years ago.
I'm a fan of Plex (it's worked for me) and understand the Jellyfin crowd too. I'm worried about who is calling the shots at the moment. They aren't aligning with their users.
Old capabilities that don't even work as well as free alternatives because AMD transcoding support has been """experimental""" for years.
I am a Trakt user, was an Evernote user and I am (thankfully) a Plex Pass user...
What service are we missing that has done the same? We should make a list if there is not one already.
I'm surprised by the resistance to Jellyfin in this thread. If you are using Plex, you're already savvy enough to use bittorrent and probably the *arrs. If you can configure that stuff, Jellyfin is absolutely something you can handle. If you like Docker, there's good projects out there. If you're like me and you don't understand Docker, use Swizzin community edition. If you can install Ubuntu or Debian, and run the Swizzin script, you're in business.
The big thing for me with plex is user management. I am absolutely knowledgeable enough to set up jellyfin, but i dont want to deal with user management. Plex makes it easy, i tell them to make their own account and i just share my library. i dont have to reset passwords, they can do that themselves. However, it’s getting to the point where i will probably just switch to jellyfin and deal with it because of how bad plex is getting.
I'm only sharing access with a few friends and family, so I don't find it cumbersome. Usually I make their account using the Jellyfin app on my phone. I do sympathize with not wanting to do support, which is the main reason I don't even ask for help with the hosting costs. I don't want to feel any obligation.
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I just setup jellyfin and it totally is the same. Install. Point it to a media folder. Setup port forwarding.
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That ease of outside LAN access poses a big risk tho. Plex can and eventually probably will share, be forced to share, get hacked etc Those cloud accounts imply the possibility of very detailed reports about who's streaming what, when, where, from which source...
But let's be honest - it really is not complicated. That was a one minute configuration in my router.
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Ok, that is a totally different use case than mine. I'm one of those guys browsing a selfhosting community on the fediverse and I only want to stream my own stuff to my mobile and provide my wife with audiobooks. If you're providing a bigger group of people with streaming services, who are not tech savvy, another software might be the better solution. But that doesn't mean that Jellyfin is bad - it's just another use case with different requirements
One minute for you and me, but that sort of thing just isn't feasible for many even if they have someone walking them through it over the phone.
Me too. Docker isn't hard if you use a compose file. It's easy to read syntax.
Linux server.io has great documentation for their images.
I have Jellyfin and Plex running from the same virtual machine pointing at the same media. If it wasn't for the one crappy TV I have in my house with no Jellyfin client, Plex would be gone.
This is giving me "yaml isn't hard to use if you use a compose file!" It is, actually. It's easy for you because you understand the technology. The vast majority of people do not.
Of course. But if you managed to setup Plex then you've already shown you have willing to learn...
I think I represent a huge portion of Plex users; I am tech savvy enough to follow a simple walkthrough on YouTube to get my server setup. But the arrs, jellyfin, and docker both look like graduate level chemistry to me.
Plex has been around for ages and they have put money into making things easier for users like me to understand with events such as Pro Week and directly paying content creators to dumb things down for me.
I've got to admit that I've never used Plex (I'm a cantankerous open software fanatic), but how do you get your media on there? You're hosting your own server so presumably you're downloading the media somehow. Are you doing it manually? If so, you can do the same with Jellyfin. Is it automated with some tool built into Plex?
I'm ripping it with makemkv, actually. I have a fairly large blu ray collection that is slowly going onto my DAS.
It's quite easy without docker to get lots of it running with a dietpi install. Runs on rpi and alike, but also on any "normal" old low end pc. Just select jellyfin, arrs, ... It handles it all for you, no need to learn Docker (I know people will argue about the advantages of docker, which are valid points, but ease of installation is more important to many people). The only difficulty remains the streaming outside your own LAN (because it's risky). VPN, tailscale, ... there's options but it always keeps on feeling risky to open up outside LAN. Local setup for jellyfin can be really really easy tho, if it's just for yourself and you mostly watch at home anyway... And in some jellyfin compatible app like Finamp and Streamyfin you can just download a few music albums, episodes or movies to your phone before you travel...
So I have a lifetime Plex pass, but my friend (who is remote) does not. Does this change mean they have the have a Plex pass to connect to my device remotely?
Edit: thanks for the info! After I posted I continued reading and realized that question was already answered! Appreciate the help!
From what I saw, they will be able to remotely stream from your PMS (if you don’t have Plex Pass) for a fee of $2/month or $20/year.
From reading the article, sounds like you're situation won't change.
No. You're good.
If I didn't already have my lifetime pass, I'd use Jellyfin as my primary media server platform instead of Plex.
One of these days though, I'm sure Plex will make a mistake serious enough that it impacts me, and I'll end up switching to Jellyfin as my main media server platform.
I'm in the exact same boat. I have a Jellyfin server configured and ready to go whenever something happens to really piss me off. This nearly was it until I saw that my lifetime Plex pass I bought 10 years ago will make it still be free for my family.
How stupid do they think we are?
Wait, why do you say this? I’m no Plex shill, this is disappointing news to hear and is the strongest push toward Jellyfin I’ve had yet. But they’re certainly a business with employees they need to pay, and their app has an objectively large feature set that needs to be maintained. Their employees deserve raises and benefits, and if costs are rising at the grocery store, they’re probably rising for businesses too. Why are we stupid to believe their financial burden is growing?
Here, I fixed it:
Very, apparently.
They use UPnP and NAT-PMP[1] to have clients directly stream the media from users' own self-hosted servers. It costs them almost nothing in bandwidth to do that.
To be fair, they didn't say that they needed more resources for remote streaming
Fair enough, although that actually has worse optics IMO. It goes from "this costs us money, so pay us" to "we need money, so we're creating an artificial reason for you to pay us"
Oh yeah, I am in no way arguing in favour of it
I dumped Plex years ago even though I paid for it. Too many issues with it. Constantly losing movie folders, unable to stream to the device I wanted to watch on, wrong codec, wrong sound, etc, etc. I gave up. I’m sure it worked fine for most, but it got to be a pain. Switched to Jellyfin and a DDNS address and have had zero problems since. And it’s free.
With Plex every time I try to sync new content I put in the folders it says I'm unauthorized and have to close the server and reopen it.
Haven't bothered to trouble shoot it yet as it's annoying but not annoying enough.
I feel like it’s just a matter of time, until they pull the rug from under lifetime subs.
But in any case, this is probably it for me. I’m not completely happy with jellyfin performance on my server, but the price hike puts me outside of what i’m willing to spend for this service. I already host it myself, and i can tunnel it myself too, if i ever decide to run it outside of my home network
I absolutely love that Emby is such a third thought that they don’t even get a mention anymore. They fucked their loyal users over so much that they don’t even get mentioned anymore. Can’t wait for plex to suffer the same fate
I almost exclusively used both through Android with Chromecast, and I must say, I've had way more trouble with Emby than Plex.
Also on smart TVs, the Plex apps just have way fewer issues in my experience.
Yes, I used to respond ever plex user try emby/jellyfin, not really knowing the difference
Looked into it and, it's going to turn out like plex again! Fuck them! Jellyfin all the way.
This always ends up happenning when you choose non copyleft software
Unless Jellyfin becomes more plug and play Plex will be fine. I like Jellyfin but there is a reason Plex is still around. People are willing to pay for how user friendly it is. Every time I've reinstalled Plex it just works with no issues. I can literally set it up at a friend's house once and never have an issue ever.
With jellyfin Its just never been that experience.
Yeah jellyfin just isn't as good. After having issues on LG webos where captions won't load for like 5 minutes and dealing with that for like 2 years I gave up and went back to plex.
I do like how jellyfin can stream av1
💯
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Ease of setup was how I just got one techie friend and two non-techie gamer friends to set up Plex servers and we had libraries shared to each other within 15-30 minutes. I don't want to think about explaining VPNs and SSL to them for the alternatives.
Man, my Jellyfin subscription just rose in price too.
/s
The audacity of this company to increase prices when:
A) downloads are locked behind the paywall but havent worked in years (probably close to a decade at this point)
B) they focus all the development time on bringing bullshit to the platform (live tv, rentals, other streaming app searches, etc)
Requiring a subscription for remote access is actually fucking insane, they don't have any bandwidth costs associated with that other than authentication so ???
This will drive people to Jellyfin, and watch how fast Plex drops into irrelevance when all the selfhosters move away. Plex is (now was) the #1 thing to that both myself and others in this community would recommend to someone looking to get into selfhosting. ¯\(ツ)/¯ not anymore, wonder how much the revenue will drop?
Final thought: there's also a fair chance (I'd rate it at almost 70%) that they presented this to us because they knew it would piss people off. Then, in a week or so, they will post a "we're sorry, is this better?" with the changes they're ACTUALLY going to make. A ploy to make us blindly agree to whatever they want because "at least it's better than what they wanted originally" 🙄🙄
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Ehhh i don't think that justifies having people pay to stream, i doubt a lot of people even ever used that functionality and yeah they could have just pay walled it if it was that much of a problem.
I've said it for years that Plex is shit because of their license and the fact that you have no control everyone said no it's fine it's my media fucking look at it now
Yeah exactly. I tried to set it up once, installed it on a NAS box, and it starts talking about me making a cloud account. Why do I need a cloud account to log into my own hardware on my own network?
I do not want the cloud
I do not need the cloud
I will say it very loud
No cloud, no cloud, no cloud.
But apparently it's set up so the only way to log into your own locally hosted software on your own locally hosted hardware is with an external cloud account.
To that I said no thank you and uninstalled it.
" When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge"
So as a plex pass holder it shouldn't affect any of my (current?) users? Am I reading this right?
edit: Seems I'm good.
I had my pitchfork out and ticket to Jellyfinville in-hand. I read the blog post and saw this myself. I'm wondering if it's a matter of time before they want to screw over my family though
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A big part of the appeal with Plex is that you can run a server and friends can sign up for a FREE account and stream remotely. When you take this away, you're going to just kneecap the whole offering. This is such an arrogant move from Plex: they are thinking that when this change goes live they will get a flood of subscriptions. The more likely outcome is they will get a few subscriptions and a lot more angry and frustrated people that walk away.
Friends can still stream for free, as long as the server is paying for plex pass. That was my main concern, too, but they make a point of stating it directly in the release.
Why would anyone even used Plex since we have jellyfin?
Plexamp is (or at least was) pretty awesome. It requires plex and plex pass for its full features. Jellyfin doesn't have anything remotely comparable (though you could always just run Lyrion).
Was does it do better than say 'Symfonium'?
Disclaimer: Plexamp used to be great, but it's stagnated badly. It was a good reason to buy plex pass at one point, though I don't think it's worth it now.
I'm not familiar with Symfonium, but the major defining thing with plexamp is the DJ features for exploring your local music library.
Unfortunately, some months back Tidal support was removed from Plexamp and that was kind of a deal breaker because now it's only local library, and its "killer app" feature was using the DJ mixes in conjunction with Tidal to do real time mixes with your local and streaming music together.
I've switched to using Lyrion instead, along with the Blissmix and "Don't Stop the Music" plugins with LastFM support. It integrates with Tidal, Deezer, or Qobuz (and I think Spotify, but not sure, I only use hifi streaming services). They work similarly, and in some ways better because you have full control over Blissmix's functionality for chroma, timbre, tempo, album and track repeats, and more. Also, Lyrion can stream directly over DLNA to a client, whereas Plexamp was just Airplay/Bluetooth/Google Cast (I have Apple stuff, but Airplay is terrible quality).
It's sad, but plexamp is just my "local download" player now on my phone for when I'm driving, since it downconverts flac to Opus at higher quality than MP3 and at smaller sizes.
I highly recommend trying out Lyrion. I've used nearly everything for music in the past, including even having a year of Roon, but Lyrion has replaced pretty much everything.
That's what Symfonium can do:
And has these sources:
Your app sounds interesting though.
What I quite like about Symfonium is how much configuration freedom it gives you.
Might check yours out as well.
Holy shit. I can have mega as a back end and I dont even need to store the files on my server?!?
Have you tried Symfonium? I liked Plexamp too, but I think Symfonium is even better, and it's compatible with just about any music server.
See my previous comment, I'm 100% on board with Lyrion server and client these days.
I only use Plexamp now for local music when I'm driving.
Been looking for a Plexamp alternative for a minute, I’ll check this out. Appreciate the recommendation.
It was there first and you can share it with friends more easily. For Plex you just register with the central server and share your username with your friends or w/e. Jellyfin has nothing like that.
And now, that feature costs $240. Suddenly, jumping through hoops to configure Jellyfin's external SSO plugin becomes a lot more rewarding.
For working subtitles
Jellyfin subtitles now work flawlessly and you can finally select colors compatible with HDR.
Migrated to Jellyfin a few months ago and I haven't looked back.
the PS4/PS5 app was one of my deciding factors when I used it
I’m inferring from the language of the post that OP is against this policy change, but I’m not sure I follow the argument. Why is it problematic that Plex is asking for money?
Not OP but nobody likes price hikes and locking once-free features behind a paywall without adding anything to the features is pretty wack
Dammit, my friend just said he would give me access to his file server, all I have to do is install Plex. Presumably this announcement means that will become impossible without a subscription.
All it means is you can’t go through their servers. If you setup a different way to access your network (VPN) it’ll still work.
I think most people probably have a lifetime plex pass for their plex server, or they are using alternative servers.
Lifetime pass grants licenses to all clients, at least it used to unless this changes that.
My server has many users and nobody has paid anything aside from my original buy of $120 in 2019. So far that comes out to about $1.67/mo for unlimited users and unlimited updates.
I'm not saying I really like the updates though. I think they should have remained slim, but someone is trying to make more and more money by branching out into bullshit beyond private media serving. All that trash should be separate products that are divorced from the private media server / client product.
All this being said, check out Jellyfin, little reason to use plex over it for private media but it has some limitations if you need subtitles or cannot relocate file structures.
If they have Plex pass then it's still fine.
Mmmmmaybe.
A lot of what they paywall depends on if the server runner's account is a Plexpass holder. You might have to pay a one time fee for the app depending on what platform you choose.
Then again, there's different ways of sharing your server, they might be keen on only including Plexpass for the Plex Home users and then paywall the E-mail shared users.
Subscriptions are a non-starter for me
I've paid for the lifetime subscription for Plex...Still only using Jellyfin
I can justify a one time purchase, but never recurring payments.
Can't wait to see a 40 minutes rant on LTT where he will feel betrayed and teach everyone how to use jellyfin
Huh, I was somewhat excited about the elimination of the playback limit for mobile apps (we are in 2025 ffs!) and then re-read that this will be only applicable for the subpar preview version once it is released... Which doesn't fucking has the watch together feature lmao.
The only good news in a nutshell is that I am still a Plex Pass Lifetime User, so in a nutshell I don't get good news lol.
On one hand, it looks like this only applies to streaming from a remote server where neither the server owner or the user has Plex pass, so lifetime holders or committed server operators with a subscription can continue to provide access to all our non paying friends. It isn't explicit whether non-paying users people who port forward / do reverse proxying themselves are affected but it sounds like they are, which is utter BS since direct connections hardly cost Plex anything.
It is however nice that they're trading this for getting rid of the mobile unlock BS - it was always awkward explaining to friends that they could watch anywhere except on their phone unless they paid $5.
On the other hand, one notable side effect is that all non-lan streaming will now be associated with a paying server owner or a paying user, which makes it impossible to use Plex to share pirated media without a user on either end giving up PII / payment information. I have a gut feeling that this is an extension of the previous piracy crackdown on OVH(?) hosted servers meant to ensure they have the identity of all users who may be engaged in selling access.
Overall, yeah another reason to move to JF. I paid for lifetime more than a decade ago so I'm going to keep using Plex until my non-paying friends start to have issues, but I really hope this pushes more investment into JF apps. I really need a good android TV app that supports server transcoding (IIUC findroid's beta TV builds are direct stream only).
Just saying...
I don't really have a problem with this. I paid for a lifetime quite a long time ago. Right now I only use Plex for plexamp and everything else is on jellyfin.
Is finamp at a point that it can replace plexamp yet?
I've been enjoying Finamp, there's a big update on the way which is accessible if you opt in for the beta.
On PC, I'm using Feishin while waiting for the Audioling, which is a rewrite of Feishin.
But I've been enjoying the combination of Finamp and Feishin a lot.
Yeah, they're even doing a revamp. Even though I still prefer navidrome.
So basically.. this is a blatant cash grab, and a nearly 200% one depending on the level of service you pay/paid for. Wonder how long it will be before the lifetime pass is discontinued and everyone gets forcibly moved over to a monthly subscription model
Every service is doing this as expenses and interest rates go up. Its the driving force of enshittification. All the VCs want internet startups to finally turn a profit.
Can’t say I have a huge issue with this - Plex isn’t FOSS and the infrastructure to make this happen isn’t free. Other options are available if you don’t want to pay the fee.
But what infrastructure does this feature require? I'm direct connecting to my own personal server with perhaps credential handling and a handshake handled by Plex servers to connect. None of the media is passing through their servers - or it shouldn't be if it is.
Source: https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-server-through-relay/
It's not a requirement to stream and it's sort of dumb they are lumping this relay service as a part of the remote streaming. Remote streaming should be allowed for free - if you are not a subscriber. The relay should just be a paid service, which makes sense. But if it's a direct connection to my server, it should be free.
That being said, I understand how Plex may have built some technical debt into this relay system. It might be hard for them to decouple the relay from the remote streaming. What they should have done is:
And they should have built their architecture in a way that's easy to decouple the two services.
Thanks for that - I wasn't aware of the relay service, but completely agree that this is what they should be charging for and not the remote play feature in its entirety. I'll probably drag it out for a while by refusing to update the app and server... Might be able to make it work with Tailscale as others have suggested.
In the past I've paid for a month or two when I wanted to download to my devices remotely (and I think that's the singular feature that I've ever cared about in the Plex pass). But to take features away and then try and charge me for them is a bridge too far, I can't support that bad behavior.
I paid for the lifetime membership ~6 years ago so I'm going to stick with it. Plus I just use it for my own home. It's not like I'm serving a bunch of other clients. But I'll switch to Jellyfin if the lifetime membership ever gets taken away.
I considered it when they warned about the increase and offered it at $75, but I just didn't have the money to spend back then. Felt pretty stupid for not doing it, but I don't even know what paid features they offer, and I'm clearly not missing them.
99% of my usage is at home as well, so this is unlikely to affect me - until that random 1% anyhow.
As someone looking to get into self hosting and was researching plex. What’s been the experience like using jellyfish with non techy people? This is mainly something I want to set up for my parents
As a techie I hate this answer but it's hard to beat a Roku with Plex from an ease of use standpoint. My 70+ year old parents have no problem navigating it.
Uh, my parents are over 80, and I have jellyfin set up on their firestick. They have no problem using it. It's just an app they open like anything else.
Yeah, this is the unfortunate truth. Jellyfin’s setup will never be as simple as Plex, purely because the simple setup requires a centralized server to coordinate things. And Jellyfin is built specifically to rebel against centralization. Plex is easy because the company has servers set up specifically to handle the remote access handshake.
Jellyfin is very versatile but a bit clunky. I have it set up for my parents on their Roku and it works well enough for them. I set it up for other family members on their WebOS TV but they don't really use it. I used to use it with Roku as well, but had issues with some captions, Dolby Atmos and HDR. I finally broke down and got an Nvidia shield, which fixed all my problems since the developers focus on Android TV the most. I also have Plex, and it is easier to set up, looks more polished, but is less versatile.
Plex has pretty bad DV "support" as an example. AFAIK it will only play back dolby vision profiles that have the HDR10 compatibility mode or whatever. Any time I get an older DV file I have to play it through some Android TV app.
Any Kodi users here?
I've been using Kodi to pull movies from my NAS for years.
I gotta be honest, when I look at the problem pragmatically, it'll be a lot easier to pay $20 a year than to switch to jellyfin and get all my users to figure out how to install clients and make it work for them.
I'm already at the point in my life where my primary concern is making things work smoothly, and if I need to throw money at something to make it work smoothly, the choice is a no brainer. (At least for some values of "money")
Jellyfin works in the browser just like Plex.
And for now you can do that, but that's not the first, and not the last update trying to prevent people selling access to their server.
It definitely has some issues for ease of use. For example Jellyfin for some reason will not find the server on my network in any of the client apps, and typing in a URL by hand with a TV remote is not fun.
I use a firestick since it has app support
Yeah that's not the issue, it's just their auto-discovery not working on my network.
Yeah, but jellyfin's clients apps are all pretty bad. And I say this as a jellyfin user.
I have fewer issues with the jellyfin app on my TV than I do with literally any of the streaming apps on the same television. My only gripe with jellyfin is there's no PS5 app.
The TV app for my LG is just a webview of the webpage and works great; but on my android devices FinDroid has problems with decoding the video, and the official app kinda sucks, and on my apple devices swiftfin works ok, but sometimes doesn't load the videos and has to be manually relaunched. Dunno about other streaming apps since I never used them, but for me jellyfin's clients are very unreliable.
If you're not selling access, why should you care? You are providing a service to your users and if they want to stream from you, they will figure out how to do this
That was my thought...
"Somehow they got the Plex app installed..."
Jellyfin somehow works on freaking Roku, even, and WELL. Just give the URL to connect to, they pick a profile, and boom, "Netflix who?".
(Also, unlike Netflix, it's not BOMBARDING my PiHole with a gazillion telemetry requests per freaking second holy crap NF calm down. It's a treat when I have something I want to watch on my Jellyfin drives lol.)
Well my users are my family and close friends, so I just do care about them... Some of them use a smart TV app to access Plex, which is pretty convenient as it doesn't even require additional devices or remote controls.
The fact is, as the family tech guy I spend a lot of my effort trying to make tech as easy to use for everyone as possible. And more than anything else, making things intuitive and simple is what eliminates the most amount of hassle for me.
All these comments mentioning jellyfish and I haven’t see a single mention of emby. Is it considered bad or something? Because I switched over to it and I am liking it a lot better than plex so far
I believe emby went proprietary, and jellyfin is the fork that stayed open source. Naturally Lemmy prefers the FOSS one 😅
Yup, that's why I was on NextCloud, why I avoid MongoDB like the plague, and why I'm here on Lemmy (I justified Reddit because of their open API).
So yeah, that tracks.
Ironically Plex users cling to their solution like it's life or death without considering the other side.
Just like when someone mentions that Windows has it's place too and sometimes Linux isnt the be all and end all of all OS.
The hyprocrisy of some users here...
The problem with Jellyfin is that it's not a viable alternative for people hosting a Plex server for their family and friends. If you are the only 8ne using your server it's fine, but Jellyfin doesn't have working apps for every platform, and the ones that have a Jellyfin client available are not nearly as user friendly.
You tell me Android TV (on a google chromecast) is not user friendly?
Same for Android? (Can't speak for iOS. Not using that)
Bro, even my mother uses it and she uses a single browser tab for research and struggled to understand why a password manager is more advantageous than a piece of paper. Meaning she isnt a tech wiz beyond common sense.
Now playback is another story. Jellyfin still is a bit struggling playing back all files consistently out of the box that's true.
Some playback quirks like waiting for the transcode buffering on a black screen is usual for me but users expect feedback that something is happening.
OK, do you want me to tell 50 users of my Plex server that they can no longer use their shitty 10 year old smart TV to watch my movie library, and instead have to pay money buy a chromecast dongle, and then get a completely different UI and lose all their view progress on TV series? They'd just go back to paying for Netflix.
And yes, I have users that struggle even with the Plex app. My father can't figure out how to use his dumb-phone to call a contact, and is only able to accept incoming calls. It took months to teach him how to use the Plex app, switching him to a different one will take just as long
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby, so they share much of their codebase.
Emby subscription costs a lot even if you just want to use it on a home server. It can work without subscription but will display a warning before playback. Jellyfin is free.
Yeah the warning is definitely annoying and especially the ten second counter on it pisses me off. But honestly I would much rather see an unskippable ad for the premium version of the program I am currently using and enjoying than an unskippable ad for literally anything else
My problem with it, it's like WinRAR trial. I know I will never subscribe. Developers know I will never subscribe. They lost me as a potential customer when they refused to revise their pricing model. I switched to Jellyfin and will not go back to Emby. Guess a lot of people did the same, so I can say it's their own fault.
I use Emby with the lifetime premier (their 'premium' version).
Works great, but honestly I would just point people to Jellyfin unless Emby provides something specific you need. I just use it because it's what I've had for years.
I greatly prefer Emby to Jellyfin.
If you're leaving Plex because it's subscribeware, Emby is also subscribeware.
Its quite annoying how licensing is tied to devices. I can't even sign in after reinstalling my OS.
Interesting. Thanks for the warning I’ll make note of this one
I like Emby a lot. It's my backup for Plex. I even give them money as development isn't free (frequently)
They seem to be getting a lot of hate for this, but Plex is not FOSS... They have the roots but they currently have like 100 paid employees and are trying to make a business out of it. They have to do something to make money to pay people every month. My $75 10 years ago isn't going to do much for that... The fact that they've made it this far without folding is impressive.
Yep, it's something that more people need to consider to keep their free (as in the source code is not a prisoner) software going
It looks like jellyfin costs ~$500/MONTH just for their hosting fees: https://opencollective.com/jellyfin
If everyone using jellyfin contributed $1/month, I bet that would be covered
(No, I'm not affiliated with them)
What a load of BS.
Glad I bought the Plex Pass like 13 years ago. While I understand everyone seems to think everything should be free, I'm sure your boss wishes you worked for free too, but the world doesn't work that way.
I'm OK supporting products I use , and Plex is an example of this for me. It was a well spend $75 in 2013
I fucking hope to god they don't go full enshittification and decide to revoke the lifetime licenses.
Nah they'll just release Plex2
Right ya at some point there will be a PlexPass Pro lol
Even with Plex pass they were really pushing their paid content. Much happier with Jellyfin, and it was very easy to switch.
What paid content? I have a Plex lifetime pass and I can't recall ever being asked to pay for anything? I can remember them dumping free TV channels in there at some point, but I simply switched that off and it's not come back.
Hmm, it's been a while, maybe I'm misremembering. There were definitely some categories of Plex content not from my library that kept reappearing on the home page of my server, despite trying to get rid of them a few times. Maybe they weren't actually paid, I just assumed they'd only be pushing something if it was going to bring them more revenue.
The other thing that made me want to jump ship extremely fast was when they started sharing your recently watched items with other users, without asking.
I keep expecting something, the lifetime pass has more/less paid for itself.
That being said, they do still offer the lifetime pass, so clearly they see it as worth it.
Jellyfin
Nah. Cool that you think that, though. The moment they started charging for what was a free service, they lost me. I have gigabit internet. The only reason i used their service to begin with was ease of use.
Hot take but maybe everything doesn't need to be an infinitely expanding business. Just imagine for a second that it's fine for something to just break even, pay for the few mainteners salaries and not expand the business at all ever. I know that I just uttered the cardinal evil under capitalism but fucking seriously. The primary userbase of plex is pirates. The whole incentive is not having to pay for a streaming service. Charging money for it is just torpedoing your entire userbase. The entire appeal of Plex was it not charging money.
I don’t know when or how, but it seems in my lifetime we went from that. Having corporations that just did something well and left it at that to this idiotic grow or die mentality that seems to be fueled by investor ROI.
So, you've got option. You can just roll your own, or go to jellyfin.
I'm one of the first people to complain about the incessant need to grow 20% a year to appease shareholders and how unsustainable that is. But I also realize as I said, stuff cost money and "just breaking even" will also grow in cost every year with everything else, so... Even in that perfect world you were describing, there would be an increase in cost applied to that project.
Much like I am sure you expect at the very least a cost of living raise each year. I'm also guessing you're glad your paycheck to bills ratio isn't what it was 20y ago. (or I can say, that for me that is true). I'm pretty happy my discretionary money is more now than it was then. I bet those developers also want that same thing.
Yah and I still bought a plexpass and then left Plex. Do I care no I got my money worth. Software costs money how would they continue to developed it if not getting paid?
Apparently a hot take as evidenced the downvotes on my other comments here, but by adding things people want instead of taking away things people already have and charging more for it.
They don't even have the excuse that they need to pay for the bandwidth costs of relaying video from servers to clients. Video is streamed directly from the user's self-hosted server, using UPnP or NAT-PMP to make the server accessible from outside the local network.
just for ref, I'm not downvoting you. They do offer some things that cost them dev/money/time. And some of those things are pain points on Jellyfin.
They give you SSL and dynamic DNS style stuff behind the scenes. They give you a remote service that tells you if you're remotely visible. They cache the tvdb and manage some subscriptions for EPG and do a pretty good job partnering with (and presumably caching) open subtitles.
None of that makes up for their rug-pulling bullshit.
You used to be able to download shit to your phone then become a local server so other people on your local network could watch off your device.
You used to be able to run 3rd party plugins improving libraries and storing off youtube meta
They're scrapping watch together
They're scrapping free remote
They're spiraling the drain... But I won't miss them, I'll miss what they once were.
They also offer free tunneling for people that can't port-forward because they are locked behind cgnat. To be fair, the tunneling is limited to potato quality 2mbps bitrate, but that is a significant cost to them still
If you want free, there are alternatives. Plex is a business, with employees. Plex pass is their business model.
I think locking remote play is entirely enshitification however, but I get it. Plex model has them provide authentication and relay services. They are now trying to push their own streaming services which I expect is a real money sink.
I actually jumped ship a while back. I agree that Plex is a business and they do deserve to get paid for development and infrastructure costs, but it's the blatant enshitification that I have a big issue with.
They chose to lock a previously-free feature behind a paywall for everybody and asked for even more money to get it back. The less shitty alternative would have been to ask only the users who needed to use the relays to purchase a Plex Pass. Or, if they wanted to make it seem like a positive thing, they could have made the new subscription into an "enhanced quality" remote streaming experience that enabled higher bitrates over relays.
They gave their users the middle finger by picking the most transparently greedy option that they could get away with justifying.
Your view unfortunately doesn't show you how shitty the unpaid experience has become. XBMC used to be a good product. Since becoming Plex, now we have:
If this were clear from the outset , no one would be upset. But pulling back features Plex at one time promised "forever" (remote streaming), is complete rug-pull bullshit.
You can enjoy that warm and fuzzy reverse-fomo feeling now, but you should know that they'll start limiting your paid experience eventually.
Xbmc didn't become plex. It's still alive and kicking but rebranded to Kodi (mostly because it had little to do with xbox anymore) ages ago.
Yes, you're right, I forgot about the forking.
What do you mean by this?
Not OP
If you want to use your video card to transcode, you have to be paid.
Ah okay. When I used Plex it had hardware acceleration. But I'd been a Plex Pass lifetime pass user for years so forgot the distinction between that and non pass. Thanks
what? all of these work on plex for me:
-server hardware accel transcoding (are you talking about something else?)
-HDR playback works fine for me...
-I can download just fine from a browser or the plex app, when remote
Same here. I don't like some of the recent decisions, but I remember the time I looked at the value and thought "yeah, this is working, valuable, and I can get behind it", and bought the lifetime pass.
And I used the hell out of it! I don't regret supporting the developers at all.
But features like plugins disappear, rolled to in-house teams. They work better, but cost more to maintain.
It's ambitious, and gives developers plenty of work, but I feel the new redesign bit more than they can chew and overran budgets. They may be trying to balance budgets.
Hot take here but not wrong
No, it's still wrong.
We have ways to do NAT traversal and hole punching on consumer routers. Failing that, UPnP and port forwarding exist. Or, god forbid, IPv6.
In the rare case that literally none of those are an option, they would have to use TURN to relay between an intermediary. That is a reasonable case to ask the user to pay for their bandwidth usage, but they don't have to be greedy fuckers by making everyone pay for it.
This is enshittification and corporate greed. Nothing more, nothing less.
Reading about NAT Traversal and all that nonsense makes me want to start out my own ISP and we just configure things to be good because the corporate assholes clearly haven't. Imagine how much better things could be if hosting stuff from your home internet connection was just a thing you could do with no drama
If anything is to blame for that, it's the lack of momentum behind IPv6. We're out of IPv4, so NAT is inevitable, and IPv6 doesn't have enough inertia for single-stack to be viable (certainly wouldn't be described as "no drama" at least).
The fact that people still try to do bullshit like Nat on IPv6 is completely crazy. It's like they've never heard of the idea of a stateful firewall and just want to recreate bad old patterns again, combine with the fact that many internet service providers still don't allow you to host anything from your home connection. We need to fix all of that of an IPv6 first Network. Ipv4 is several layers of exhausted by now so it should be considered deprecated but for some reason isn't
A big part of IPv4's persistence I think is that people insist that IPv6 is complicated, but then refuse to learn it or think outside their IPv4-brain. It's just different enough that it's easier to stay in v4, even if it requires a million hackjob fixes to keep around.
They make a product. It's not just the cost of infrastructure.
They have developers and other employees
And this isn't a new feature they're adding. Remote streaming was already implemented and generally available to users.
I don't discount there being a cost in maintaining code over time, but it's not as though they have to spend any significant employee time on improving it. They already support UPnP and NAT-PMP to have the clients connect directly to the self-hosted servers.
It would be nice if they added NAT hole punching on top of that, but it's evidently good enough to work as-is in its current form. If they're not even running relays to support more tricky networks (which the linked support article has no mention of), keeping this feature free costs them literally nothing extra.
Yeah, this doesn't seem like that big of a deal for most people here. They kept the price down as long as possible. I spent $119 just before the 'rona hit and I think it's been well worth it.
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I looked at and look at it as an investment. 13 years ago it could have been a good decision or a bad one.
The idea behind a lifetime membership is a means to spark fund raising, and I thought then "I use this a lot, it works for me I'm gonna pay for it".
Lots of businesses have and do exist without a subscription model. I'm fond of the Paprika Recipe Manager, for example, which asks a one-time payment for each major version. All commercial software worked this way in the 80s.
I wonder how much money Plex still makes through their lifetime purchases. Is it that they were struggling and then made bad business decisions with the aim on increasing revenue (ad supported video on demand)? Or was it the other way around?
In the 80s new systems usually came with new OSs, which required porting software it. Thus a lifetime license was practically limited.
I wouldn't be as opposed to a subscription model if it was cheaper and they focused on their actual core product, not all the other fluff around. 5€/m is a bit much given they don't pay for my bandwidth. And if they didn't store my media info, history etc...
I have no idea how well it works in reality, but I can imagine the Lifetime Pass being a good business model for them: only the most enthusiastic user will pay for 3 years up front (lifetime currently costs 3x the yearly). So when they get a Lifetime pass they're getting 3 years paid up front and an evangelist who will probably tell their friends about Plex. If that Lifetime subscriber gets even one person to sign up for a yearly sub who otherwise wouldn't have, then Plex came out ahead.
Did you notice what you said there each major version. Plex has been rolling releases for years. Maybe they should have done Plex 1 2 etc. yes software has been that way forever but you would pay for a version and then a year later pay for another one. Now people expect to pay once and get upgrades forever.
Because they're called "lifetime passes" voluntarily offered by the company. It seems weird to act like people are being entitled about this or that their $75-$120 one-time payment is meaningless compared to someone who's only paid $5 or worse using it for free.
Sure, I'm not saying Plex has to do a single-payment model. Just that it's a think that's been done successfully (and for longer than Plex has existed). Everyone's pushing subscription models so hard that it's easy to think "this is the only possible way that anything can work".
You're right the guy who paid $5 once for a month of Plex Pass is way more valuable than the one who paid $75 (or $120 full price). The only people more valuable to the company than the $5 guy are the ones who use the app for free.
What did you pay for exactly?
What are you asking? I bought a lifetime subscription to Plex pass.
OK, but why is it a for profit company in the first place?
And why does open source Software like xz, ffmpeg, etc still work without being for profit?
Fucking liberal.
They don't. Most people get paid by companies to work on that stuff.
For example red hat pays for a lot of OS development.
You know nothing very proudly
Jellyfin FTW!
This sucks ass. I'm a lifetime Plex Pass holder, so this doesn't affect me yet, but who's to say they won't fuck over lifetime users sooner rather than later?
Honestly, this made me consider setting up Jellyfin. What the fuck?
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Anyone know if they're referring to Plex "Home" users or anyone you've granted access to here? I used to just hand out my credentials with my admin account pass code protected but now I make people create their own accounts and just grant them access.
If you have plex pass lifetime already, your family can still streams fully from your server. Nothing changes here.
Why do you need to explain to your family and friends how to switch to Jellyfin, if you have a lifetime pass and therefore aren't impacted at all by this announcement?
If the server you are stealing movies from has a pass you still don't need to pay
They could have worded this better
Bro what
Would Tailscale/ZeroTier work as a workaround for this or do you think Plex would also put that behind a paywall?
Tailscale would definitely work for this as long as you use your home network as an exit node
Well that's the beginning of the end for them.
I'm about half-way off the platform already (and I'm a lifetime subscriber)
The only thing I go back for is Roku use (better app), PlexAmp (better app) and offline viewing. I don't have to go off JF for those, but it's a lot better on Plex.
But it's not so much better than I can't protest.
I used Plexamp before and found the switch to Finamp pretty painless. Can't speak for other music apps though.
Finamp lets you listen to music and add songs to a playlist.
I'm missing the crossfade tracks option massively.
I'm missing the AI DJ's, but i could let them go in the name of privacy.
I kinda miss the visualization.
I really miss Plex's free SSL, server locator and user management.
How to kill a service speedrun any%
They think they have enough users locked in to just pay over setting up another server. They might.
Lol jellyfin
If only jellyfin had an app on Tizen, I'd be all aboard.
It's not super easy, but you can install it on tizen tvs by enabling developer mode. I was able to follow this walk-through to get it on a new TV for my relatives.
https://github.com/Georift/install-jellyfin-tizen
Since their TV was newer, I had to do extra steps to create a custom certificate.
The whole process took a while, but it's doable.
Thanks for the info! How is your experience with using the app? Is it buggy? Does it need frequent updates?
I've only personally used the tizen app a couple times, but my relatives have used it a bunch with no reported issues. I have not had to update it yet, but it's only been a few months. Definitely not frequent updates. My jellyfin server has had one update since then, but even the server updates aren't coming in on a weekly basis, so I don't expect their client will break anytime soon.
Firestick has a built in app which is how I open it on my tv
Does this "tizen" not have a web browser?
It has, but browsing using tv remote is a nightmare
I used to use Plex, then one day my internet was down and since Plex couldn't phone home, it wouldn't let me log in to watch media ON MY LAN.
So yeah it's inherently broken. That's before you even consider the licensing.
Depending on setup this can be true with Jellyfin, too. I have a domain registered, use dynamic DNS, and have Traefik direct a subdomain to my Jellyfin server. My mobile clients are configured using that. My local clients use the local static IP.
If my internet goes down, my mobile clients can’t connect, even on the LAN.
i'm not sure why it would do this, i've never had any issues with watching plex while the internet is down (in fact that was one of my original uses for it, to have movies and tv in a building without internet). I don't have it turned on but I do know you can go into server settings -> network and set a list of IPs/subnets that can access without any authorization at all. That lets you use plex without even having a plex account afaik.
This is provably what I would have needed. But since I couldn't log in, I couldn't do anything.
It has to do with the app used. I think it will work with web player and maybe the windows app, but it won't work on Android/iOS.
oh okay, interesting. well, you could always use the web browser on your phone/ipad i guess. not a great experience but i know for a fact that plex works on ios in chrome at the very least.
I can watch it without Internet
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I memba when it was primarily for LAN playback and you didn’t have to login to anything to use it on your LAN
Plex still offers that option, it's just buried in the settings.
I was worrying about this change because my Plex server provides free streaming for several of my friends and family and I didn't want them to have to start paying for it. The whole point was to get them away from Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc.
But this sounds like, since I'm already a Plex Pass subscriber, my remote viewers will still be able to access my stuff for free. Do I have that right? Because if so, this change is just business as usual for me.
I really need to stop being lazy and swap to Jellyfin....
Plex borking itself a year ago for me is the best thing that could've happened. Long live jellyfin
sometimes good software is worth paying for
Yup, that's why people who can afford it should do ate to the jellyfin project
Big facts. Even the FOSS software, I buy the premium or donate a bit to it. It only feels right. I couldn't imagine making something millions of people count on and not throw them SOMETHING. Especially when its such a good experience.
Yes. I have a lifetime Plex pass, and I donated to Jellyfin as well. Looking forward to the day I can uninstall Plex and no longer worry about them potentially giving my data to Media companies so they can sue for piracy
Judging by the rest of the thread I'm going to get downvoted for this, but what the hell:
I'm sure I'll switch to Jellyfin eventually but I tried it out a few weeks ago to see what all the hype was about and it just... wasn't great. It was difficult to setup, with way too many overly-complicated settings, and then it refused to play one of the two test files I tried. Like it or not there's a reason that Plex is the dominant player in the game, and a large part of that reason is that it verges on plug-and-play for simplicity of both setup and use.
Yes, it sucks that they're removing remote streaming for free users, but I imagine there's a significant chunk of users who don't know or care how to properly open their server up to the world and are relying on the Plex proxies for their streams (which happens entirely in the background), and those aren't going to be cheap to run. Maybe putting them behind a paywall will provide the resources to make them faster.
I did buy a lifetime pass last time they announced a price hike; it's honestly paid for itself many times over, and I've been encouraging other users I know to do the same before this next one, because yes, it is a significant hike this time around. That said, while I wouldn't pay monthly for it, I do still feel like the lifetime pass is tremendous value for such a polished product. It's a shame they've had to do it at all, but I don't begrudge them for it.
I'm not really sure here - I just did the setup and you literally paste one command into your terminal. There you'll find the Jellyfin IP and port, visit it in a browser and you'll get a simple wizard which guides you into setting up your libraries. Which also is not complicated, you just select a folder where your stuff is?
Libraries were simple enough, sure, but have you delved into the full settings? Trying to figure out the correct settings for QuickSync hardware acceleration was a mission in and of itself and there's very little guidance on what any of the options mean or do. I don't have the container running right now or I'd provide examples, but In Plex it's a single checkbox.
I'm sure Jellyfin will get there and it's a cool project, but it's fairly obvious that it's written by hobbyists, for hobbyists. Meanwhile Plex excels at just working straight out of the box.
As a Jellyfin-fanboy: you are right. Plex is easier to deal with out of the box.
Anything else would not make any sense for a paid service.
I'd say though, if you dedicate the time to set it up correctly, it is an equally good solution and it's free.
If time is a factor in your life, then there is no shame in paying for something that just works. It's why I have a Synology NAS and not a self-built Unraid or OMV server.
I have a lifetime Plex account but have not used it in two years. I use Jellyfin. Obviously opinions vary.
At home, I have FireTV and Roku devices. I stream remotely to iPhones and tablets using Twingate.
That seems like the obvious place to put a subscription that won’t get people upset. Or maybe it’s in the presentation.
When HomeAssistant started a subscription, they renewed their commitment to opensource, added new remote features with obvious costs under subscription while still letting you do it yourself, plus made it clear this funded continued opensource development. I happily pay this and haven’t been disappointed. Did Plex fumble a similar opportunity?
That's how I'm feeling about all these "TImE FoR evErYoNE tO swITCh To JElLyfiN" comments. You mean the program that also doesn't support this functionality out of the box?
Exactly. I'd love to use jellyfin, but it's just not feasible
This is what people don't realize. If you want something good, you have to pay people for their time and talent. Free products that are free because of ideology are just exploitation with extra steps.
That's a good reason for people to take the money they would have spent buying a proprietary solution and instead donate that money to an open source project. For me it's not always about the cost, but what I get out of it. I'd rather the money go to the community and better it.
The problem is people don't put their money where their mouth is. Even less in the scale needed to produce a product of the quality te average person expects. You see this again and again. It's very nice to think it works, but it doesn't. A random guy saying "actchually I donated 1 Monero" doesn't mean a project is financially sustainable.
You're right. Unfortunately, open-source has proven time and time again to be unsustainable and burn maintainers out
If it costs them money to run it, it makes sense?
Yeah this seems fine; if they're proxying the stream through their server it's using their bandwidth which costs them money. It doesn't make sense for them to not charge for it.
Why are they proxying the stream through their server though
They typically don't. They do proxy it if there is something preventing a direct connection, but the proxy bandwidth is super limited and results in pretty terrible playback quality.
They aren't, all their server does is handle the login authentication afaik, and then streaming happens directly from the server to the user.
They do actually provide a relay server if your personal server isn't entirely accessible for whatever reason (for example I recently added a new NIC on my server which changed the IP and broke my port forwarding and my users were still able to watch my media via the relay). It is limited to low res quality but it is something they're offering.
If you're not on the same local network as the server and it's not configured to be accessible from the general internet, you need some sort of proxy to access it.
Not necessarily. Tailscale uses their own servers in order to do the negotiation, but once the connections are opened on both ends you should be directly connected to each other. All without port forwarding or any config on your end.
https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works
Huh that's really interesting, you're right, and I learned a lot of new stuff about networking that I didn't know before.
Right, but IIRC anyone can go on the plex.tv website and use shared servers due to the "proxy"
The self-hosted servers use UPnP and NAT-PMP to automatically forward the port used for media streaming.
How else would it work?
Directly to the clients from the already self-hosted server, exactly like all the other media hosting software does. Lmao.
When I stream from my plex server it's a direct connection between my device and the server. The only time it proxies through plex is if your server isn't directly accessible, like ports are blocked or not forwarded properly.
Port forwarding, tailscale...
... Nebula...
So I have a lifetime pass. But my family members have their own accounts. Will they be able to watch from their house to my server now or will they need to pay? Cause if that’s so guess I’m switching to jellyfin and teaching them how to work it.
Everyone using your server should be fine.
Yea, no change for lifetime pass holders. Anyone connecting in remotely can still stream like normal.
I still remember sticking files on an apache server and openly sharing that with friends. Not had a need to do that lately but I can always start doing it again if necessary.
Universal media server works for me. I run it headless on a small instance. Streams my movies and music just fine.
Hypothetically, if I have tailscale setup, would that be a viable workaround since everything looks local on my tailnet?
100%. This is just due to the cost of hitting their servers in case you can't reach your network
remote streaming rarely works for me so I won't be losing anything.
And that’s why open source is best.
If you want to keep using plex and remote it’s important to you, they usually have pretty good deals on pass from time to time.
I don’t regret my lifetime pass - I still feel like it’s a pretty solid app and service all things considered- but if I didn’t have the pass already I would be a bit pissed as well ngl.
I still use Plex because they offer the product I bought, an easy way to stream content on my devices. Others have technical or philosophical issues, which I totally understand. Plex is the easiest option for my situation as of now. It is working great for me and my family.
Nothing lasts forever so it's good to realistic about the future. If I start having technical issues, it's Jellyfin. If Plex doubles down on subscriptions, it's Jellyfin.
If you're like me, a lifetime Plex Pass holder, I would experiment with Nginx Reverse Proxy now so you understand how it works. I have Overseerr running through a reverse proxy now.
I think it's a matter of when, not if, Plex will make a business decision that pushes me off their platform. It's a company focused on profit and that's fine. And it would be good to be prepared for the future.
"A subscription"
Its the same Plex pass subscription for people who don't want to read a clickbait article.
That is not really covering the topic for everyone, this only covers the article for ppl who are paying already for the pass.
Not seeing how this is clickbait. The title sums it up on point.
"a subscription" is ambiguous as to whether it's being locked behind the existing Plex Pass or some new/additional subscription model. The title could have more accurately stated that remote streaming is becoming a Plex Pass feature. As is, Plex Pass users (many of whom bought the lifetime pass years ago,) can't tell from the title whether this is a new subscription cost or if they're completely unaffected.
"Clickbait" might be a little harsh, but I get where they're coming from.
I can see where they are comming from, but i do not understand it.
Remote streaming was free and is now only available via a subscription or the lifetime pass. So it is locked behind a subscription. Ofc it is more nuanced, but the title expresses really cleanly what the topic is.
Everything is clickbait, everything and everyone sucks, etc. To a large number of people here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickbait
Title is not really deceptive or misleading.
I agree.
they could have very easily put "plex pass" in the title, or "paid feature". It's clickbait because it's clearly intentionally designed to be misleading so you have to click on the article to find the actual information.
How is it misleading? Plex Pass is a subscription? It would be confusing to many people if it said "Plex pass" instead of "Subscription" as not everyone would necessarily even know what that is. Subscription is very clear.
I think the disconnect here is a lot of people buy the "lifetime" Plex Pass, which is a one-time cost and not a subscription. Saying "X feature will be locked behind a subscription" implies some new pricing model and leaves users who paid a one-time cost years ago wondering if it's time to look for an alternative or if they're completely unaffected.
Something like that yes
Why would you expect this to NOT be paid? It requires them to be running servers to stream the media through, I wouldn't expect this to be a free feature.
I dislike Plex for several reasons, but asking for payment for stuff that costs them money is completely justified.
Wait a moment. I always thought that Plex’s servers only facilitate authentication (to verify your account) and discovery (to help your device find your server). They do not handle the actual media data. And if there is no Direct Remote Access, Relay usage is capped at 1 minute per day for free users. This looks like a cash grab to me.
It doesn't require Plex servers, though. I do this on jellyfin for free.
How do you do this on Jellyfin? The only ways I'm familiar with is to expose Jellyfin to the internet or access it through Tailscale, would love to hear alternatives.
Edit: From the replies I think that either I don't understand how this feature works or many people here don't, so I'll give an overview of my understanding and explain why this is different from anything you can do on Jellyfin and what's the closest you can come.
You are running Plex-home in your house, Plex-home connects to Plex-server hosted by Plex and establishes a reverse connection that's only accessible by Plex-server, i.e. you can't access your Plex-home outside of your house. When you login on Plex you're logging in to Plex-server and if you're in the same network as Plex-home you get redirected to form a direct connection with it, if not (and for me Plex keeps failing this verification) you connect to Plex-server and every request you make gets forwarded to Plex-home and when you ask for media it gets routed through Plex-server. This is very different from exposing Plex-home directly to the internet, in order for someone online to access your Plex-home they need to have taken control of Plex-server and then they're limited by the API between those two (whichight be different from the Plex-home API) to try to escalate into your machine.
With Jellyfin there's no server side component, you access Jellyfin directly every time, so in order to access Jellyfin outside of your house it needs to be accessible for everyone. The closest you can come up with is using a third party authentication server, for example by having a VPS running Authentik/Authelia/etc and hosting Jellyfin behind that authentication. This gets you a similar level of security because someone would need to compromise your Auth and then your Jellyfin to get into your server. However I'm not sure Jellyfin clients would know how to handle a third party authentication service, and would probably just crap their pants and prevent you from logging in. You could still access it in a browser, but not on native clients like the one on your TV or Fire Stick.
If you don't have this VPS with authentication you're exposing Jellyfin directly to the internet, which means that any flaw in Jellyfin security immediately compromises your home server. And while I don't expect there to be many big or obvious flaws, there's a reason why stuff like Authelia or Authentik exists, and besides the convenience of a SSO they exist because proper authentication is hard and has many pitfalls, and they offer security in the knowledge that their main focus is authentication, whereas on most other services authentication is just one of the features they offer so it might not be as secure.
My home connection is behind cgnat so I got a free VPS from oracle (provides a public ip address), install caddy on VPS, install tailscale on VPS and router, expose routes from LAN to tailscale network.
Now you can use caddy to expose, for example, a docker container (jellyfin) at 192.168.1.100 to subdomain.exampledomain.com with ssl cert provided by caddy.
VPS also requires some other stuff like ddclient and fail2ban.
I pieced this all together myself... it's doable if you spend some time reading.
That exposes Jellyfin to the internet
Yes exactly. What do you think plex is doing?
Using a relay server to separate online from home connection
Reverse proxy
That exposes Jellyfin to the internet, so it's my option 1.
Nope.
It's not that hard to get a reverse proxy up, get a free DDNS, and a SSL certificate from let's encrypt.
https://www.linuxserver.io/blog/2020-08-21-introducing-swag
This is a pretty solid one stop shop for handling all reverse proxy with SSL certificate generation and renewal for jellyfin and other applications like sonarr, radarr, transmission, ombi and lists of others that are pretty much drag and drop configuration files if you're not mucking with the application's default ports.
That exposes Jellyfin to the internet, so it's not the same feature
And somehow you think that Plex isn't exposing your server to the Internet for streaming while not on your local network?
Okay there Mr. Madison.
It's not, not directly at least, and that's what everyone is ignoring here. You probably understand the value on Authelia/Authentik but you're failing to see that the Plex relay server is taking that same mantle here, so even if someone managed to compromise the relay server it's still not on your home server, whereas exposing jellyfin directly to the internet only requires one service to be compromised.
My dude if you are connecting from outside your local network you are "exposed" to the Internet in some way. What magic are you thinking Plex is doing? Is someone hand deliverying the packets via USPS?
Plex runs relay servers where your Plex server will connect to the relay and your player will also connect to the relay, making both ends of the connection egress type as far as routing and access control goes. https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-server-through-relay/
It's optional and likely not everyone uses it, but this provides a way for Plex to do remote streaming without the Plex server being reachable directly from the internet.
Separately, it costs money for Plex to run.
In some way is different from directly, on Plex you're behind a relay server so it's akin to being behind a VPS running Authentik/Authelia in front of the service on your home. Compromising the relay server does not necessarily compromises your home server, so it's not direct like putting Jellyfin on a reverse Proxy would be.
Why is this getting upvoted? Plex isn't running a server. You are. Your computer and your media files are quite literally "the server" that is serving the files to you remotely. Plex is at best doing authentication.
For remote streaming they do, here are their docs on it https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-server-through-relay/
From that documentation:
Because he’s right. You can’t access your own server remotely without plex’s infrastructure (provided you don’t just set up that infrastructure yourself). You don’t need to open ports or anything. Your server reaches out to plex server, which creates an entry point to your network. Your stream is then either routed through their servers or possibly setup as P2P stream.
I can't back this up but I highly doubt that the media is played through Plex' server.
Its not. It is setting up a secure route from the client to the server. That is quite literally not a server. No one thinks Tailscale is a Server service. That's essentially all they are doing but just handling adding the clients automatically when they authenticate.
That's just not correct. Mate. It's setting up a secure route from the client to your Plex server. It's essentially doing what Tailscale does but just handling the client setup automatically via their Plex authentication. They are authenticating the connection and setting up the route from the client to the server. They are not handling petabytes of data people are streaming. The ISPs are doing that.
Ok sure, they aren’t routing, just using P2P like I mentioned. It’s still not possible to access remotely without using plex services. This is what you are paying for. If you don’t want to pay for their auto-config remote streaming it’s easy enough to do it yourself.
I never got the appeal of plex. I've been using Serviio back in the day and it was free, open source and did what I needed it to, which is play a video on tv, that's it.
Plex wanted me to purchase subscription years ago and I couldn't for the life of me figure it out how to set it up for free.
I've been using stremio for a few years now but i think it's closing in on the EOL as well, so i might go back to serviio and kodi one of these days. Just need a good NAS that could run a streaming server as well. Don't want to keep my gaming rig on at all times just to watch movies.
If you are currently a Plex user i highly suggest at least putting together an exit strategy. I am in the process of it but it's rough. In fact, i think Plex might be the last thing i replace with a FOSS solution.
Jellyfin needs to partner with someone people can pay a very low and reasonable and/or one-time fee to enable remote streaming without the fuss of setting up either dangerous port-forwarding or the complexity of reverse proxies (paying for a domain-name, the set-up itself including certificates, keeping it updated for security purposes).
And no a VPN is not a solution, the difficulty for non-technical users in setting up a VPN (if it's even possible, on smart-tvs it's almost always not, and I don't think devices like AppleTV and other streaming boxes often support them) is too high and it's an unwanted annoyance even for technical users.
I'm not talking about streaming video's through someone else's servers or using their bandwidth. I'm talking about the connection phase of clients and servers where Plex acts like an enhanced dynamic DNS service with authentication. They have an agent on the local media server which sends to the remote web service of the third party the IP address, the port configured for use, the account or server name, etc. When a client tries to connect they go to this remote web service with the servername/username info, the web service authenticates them then gives them the current IP address and any other information necessary. It then sends some data to the local Jellyfin server about the connecting client to enable that connection and then the local media Jellyfin server and the client talk directly and stream directly.
Importantly the cost of running this authentication and IP address tracking scheme would be minimal per Jellyfin server. You could charge $5/year for up to 20 unique remote clients and come out ahead with a slight profit which could be put back into Jellyfin development and things like their own hosting costs for code, etc. Even better if they offer lifetime for this at $60-$80 they'd get a decent chunk of cash up-front to use for development (with reasonable use restrictions per account so someone hosting stuff in Hetzner or whatever and serving 300 people with 400 devices will need to pay more because they're clearly doing this for profit and can afford to throw some more money at Jellyfin).
Until Jellyfin offers something that JUST WORKS like that it's not going to be a replacement for Plex, whatever other improvements they offer to users it's still a burden for the server runner to set up remote streaming in a way that isn't either incredibly dangerous (port forwarding) OR either involves paying money to third parties AND/OR the trouble of running your own reverse proxy and/or involves walking users through complicated set-up process for each device that you have to repeat if you change anything major like your domain name when using a VPN.
Umm AppleTV has a Tailscale app and it's dead simple to set up, so I would argue that it is a solution.
That's what I do. Jellyfin + Tailscale + Apple TV box. It works like a charm.
Authelia maybe?
Interesting project. Thanks for the link and I do appreciate it and could see some very good uses for that but it's not quite what I meant.
Unfortunately as it notes it works as a companion for reverse proxies so it doesn't solve the big hurdle there which is handling secure and working flow (specifically ingress) of Jellyfin traffic into a network as a turn-key solution. All this does is change the authorization mechanism but my users don't have an issue with writing down passwords and emails. Still leaves the burden of:
* choosing and setting up the reverse proxy,
* certificates for that,
* paying for a domain so I can properly use certificates for encryption,
* making sure that works,
* chore of updating the reverse proxy, refreshing certs (and it breaking if we forget or the process fails), etc
Which is a hassle and a half for technically proficient users and the point that most other people would give up.
By contrast with Plex how many steps are there?
1) Install (going to skip media library setup as Jellyfin requires that too so it's assumed)
2) Set up any port settings, open any relevant ports on firewall, enable remote access in setting with a tickbox
3) Set up users
4) Done, it now works and doesn't need to be touched. It will handle connecting clients directly to the server. Users just need to install Plex client, login to their account and they have access.
By contrast this still requires the hoster set up a reverse proxy (major hassle if done securely with certificates as well as an expense for a domain which works out to probably $5 a year), to then have their users point their jellyfin at a domain-name (possibly a hard to remember one as majesticstuffbox[.]xyz is a lot cheaper than the dot com/org/net equivalents or a shorter domain that's more to the point), auth and so on. It's many, many, many more steps and software and configurations and chances for the hosting party to mess something up.
My point was I and many others would rather take the $5 we'd spend a year on a domain name and pay it for this kind of turn-key solution for ourselves and our users even if provided by a third party but that were Jellyfin to integrate this as an option it could provide some revenue for them and get the kinds of people who don't want to mess with reverse proxies and certificates into their ecosystem and off Plex.
I don’t like it, but it’s a pragmatic decision.
Hosting for a simple website can be as little as a few bucks a month. That’s easy for any project to absorb, even if they are open-source with no one pulling a paycheque.
Streaming requires high-performance, high-bandwidth machines that cost anywhere from several dozen dollars to several hundred dollars a month. You build a resilient high-availability network, and you could easily be looking at several tens of thousands of dollars a month.
That isn’t easy to absorb, even for a for-profit company with clearly-defined revenue streams.
Some people want everything for free, but free doesn’t pay the bills.
Full disclosure: I don’t use the streaming feature. I prefer to grab actual copies to drop onto my NAS. I also don’t share to friends and family, as I am the only one I know of who uses Plex.
The thing that's going to be locked behind the subscription is your ability to watch those files on your NAS through Plex when you're not in the same network as the Plex server. That's streaming.
If you only use Plex while at home, you will indeed be unaffected
Are you under the impression that Plex uploads the movie files to their servers and then transcodes them there, or something?
And the hard work happens on your own hardware. All Plex's servers are doing is acting as a signaling server, but no media or routed through Plex's servers.
It depends on if you use the "relay" feature. If your server is accessible from the outside it shouldn't be using this though.
First thing I disable.
Plex actually does have streaming services. The ones we've never asked for. And live tv.
But the blog post from Plex was specifically talking about charging for remotely accessing your own files. So your point is irrelevant to the discussion.
How is it irrelevant? Plex offers a bunch of services that cost them money that we don't use, so they jacked up prices for streaming our own data.
It's irrelevant because even Plex themselves made no mention of their in-house streaming stuff. The discussion is about being charged to view your videos, hosted on your own self-hosted server, viewed on your own device.
I disagree. Sometimes you need to look at the situation as a whole in order to understand the motivation.
All those resources and costs are borne by the person hosting the video, NOT Plex.
they need none of that stuff. It's your own pc that handles the heavy stuff. From their end, the only point is to allow you to stream videos from behind one or more NATs
That high performance, high bandwidth streaming machine is in my house, not Plex's, though. I already pay for the maintenence, power and the bandwidth of that machine, not Plex.
So then Photoprism is going to lock my photos and ask my mom for money to see them?
Its selfhosting, not freehosting for yet another asshole company.
Glad I went Emby.
same, my lifetime license is paying off right about now tbh
Well that's disappointing
I'm seeing a lot of negativity but I think they offer a great service and deserve to be paid for their work. I bought a lifetime pass many years ago and I almost feel guilty how much value I have received over that time.
You need an internet connection to connect to a offline LAN Plex server... Just so unessessery, otherwise it doesn't find your server (I was quite confused on that one, when that started happening)
Plus having to pay for multiple user accounts, all just seemed like it was heading towards user extortion.
It also lacked hardware transcoding at that point in time, which isn't a huge issue, but did make it harder to run if you had a client that didn't support a specific codec.
While jellyfin requires zero internet to be functional and login, supported hardware transcoding before plex and has multiple user accounts usage out of the box, at zero cost.
One does not need an internet connection for offline use. Check this if you're having issues.
One does not need to pay for multiple user accounts. As per this update, they are actually removing the one-time fee for non family member mobile apps. Now it's all free, provided the server owner has a Plex Pass.
Plex has been supporting hardware transcoding since 2017.
To be clear, I'm not saying Jellyfin is bad. I think it's great to have competition and I understand plenty of people like it.
Lol, I'm the server owner, so I am expected to pay to allow multiple accounts. Which is my exact complaint.
I had issue with offline usage, and found, with time, it only got worse. My lan clients eventually stopped showing my server unless I logged into my Plex account first.
Maybe things changed since, my experience, Plex became overly dependant on a connection to their servers.
To little to late, I've since moved to Jellyfin, which solved my frustrations.
I have no interest in moving back to Plex.
Plex also uses token based login that expires after 48hours, if you don't have an active internet connection
A quick look, it seems hardware transcoding is locked behind Plex pass...
Not true.
If you say so, but my clients started refusing to locate my Lan server, but worked fine once I logged into my Plex account. I've never struggled since moving to jellyfin. No chance I'll ever go back to Plex
I might be a problem if you are logged out of your plex account while offline. But I didn't have to login for years on either of my clients.
You can also give special access to local IP addresses on LAN to ignore authentication. But yeah, that's a bit hidden in the settings.
ur getting what u paid for, why the guilt
I feel like I'm getting more than what I paid for. I understand it was a legal contractual exchange. I'm merely commenting on the value I've received relative to what I paid. Especially given the continued improvements over time.
Fuck this. What the absolute fuck lmao they just decided to kneecap their entire business model.
I was even going to get a lifetime subscription later this year when they usually put the price down. Not anymore
Well that fuckin sucks dick.
If this is enough to push you away from Plex but you’ve tried Jellyfin and it didn’t quite do it for you, try https://emby.media/
It is the software Jellyfin is forked from and bridges the gap between the freedom of Jellyfin and the polished look and function of Plex.
I went from Emby to Jellyfin as they started their enshittification journey. I don't really notice it being less polished.
I’m not aware of any enshittification with Emby, unless you know something I don’t. Emby sort of “just works” which is why it’s a more direct replacement to Plex than Jellyfin is.
As for Jellyfin, I check in on it every now and then and they’ve made a lot of progress but the features and polish aren’t there. I hear good things about the Jellyfin web component, butif you want a good experience with Jellyfin apps on mobile or whatever TVOS you’re running, you have to use third party apps because the official ones are still woefully barebones. I still hear a lot of griping about issues with subtitles, and HEVC playback.
Did Jellyfin ever even figure out proper Intro Skip? That was a big pain point for me for the longest time, as the only way to accomplish it was a third party plugin and the only option was to skip all intros, you didn’t get a button. I remember reading somewhere they added some kind of framework that would allow proper intro skipping going forward, but that the official function was not ready.
With version 10.10 they integrated chapter markers into Jellyfin. You still need a plugin to generate the intro timings, but any client I tried has support for skipping with a button.
Well that’s good news, that means they’re close at least.
I’ve just reinstalled the latest version of Jellyfin and installed the Media Segments Provider, and tested every client available for it and none of them appear to have a skip intro button implemented.
Most clients have it disables by default and you'll still have to install the intro skipper plugin.
The media segments feature has been released as of 10.10.0 and it still needs a plugin. Still feels a bit clunky but works already on my Android TV box. I guess there will be more polish in future versions, now that the groundwork is done.
Do you know how to get intro skipping to work? I’ve reinstalled the latest version of Jellyfin for testing and have the Media Segments Provider plugin installed, but there still seems to be no intro skipping button on any clients. People in this thread keep telling me it exists but outside of this thread there appears to be no evidence it exists.
It's been a while since that I set this up, so take this with a grain of salt. I have these two plugins installed:
I'm honestly not sure if I even need both - maybe the Chapter Segments Provider is unnecessary, even though it's official and newer. I don't understand exactly how it works from the docs.
However, Intro Skipper gives you a new scheduled task named "Detect and Analyze Media Segments". Use this to extract metadata about media segments from your library.
Now that the server knows about some media segments you need a client that can handle them. I've had success with the Android TV App (check the settings) and the Web interface should support them too.
I didn't need to configure anything aside from that, as far as I can remember.
Yeah I heard about that. That is good news as it means hopefully Jellyfin can start closing the gap on feature parity with Emby.
The thing about people leaving Plex is that things being “clunky” is a nonstarter. The value of Plex was how everything just worked. You could give a link and credentials to your boomer mom and she’d be good to go. That’s why I still recommend Emby to these people as it’s still the best way to achieve that without paying for Plex. Here’s to hoping Jellyfin can reach that point soon.
How is the general perception of emby?
They're closed source and US based.
They're not just closed source, they started as the open source project response to Plex. It was promised that they would be open source forever. They lied, slammed the source door shut a few years later and pivoted to a paywall.
There was no discussion with the community or contributors, no alternatives explored, no surveys or polls.
Just a "Sorry we're going closed source" blog post, Jellyfin was forked from them in vengeance.
Well now I'll like Jellyfin even harder
Emby remains in the position Plex used to, pre-enshittification. They’re closed source and have a PlexPass style license, but if you miss the value you got with old-Plex, Emby fills that spot.
For context, Emby used to be open sourced but offered the Emby Premiere subscription for some added features, and the open source half allowed people to just bypass the paywall, so they closed sourced it. Jellyfin is a Fork of Emby pre-closed sourcing.
You should not be recommending them at all for any reason for that. I was there and saw the shit that went down over it.
Emby should be considered a no-go for all purposes.
Oh no I’d absolutely recommend it for anybody switching from Plex. Anybody who liked Plex and the state it was in pre-enshittification will obviously have no qualms with a proprietary solution. If FOSS is your end goal then you’d have a better argument, but Plex refugees are for obvious reasons not a part of that demographic.
Emby is a great product that “Just works” in the same way Plex used to and for that purpose it is head and shoulders above Jellyfin even if it doesn’t have the benefit of being FOSS.
I have had both a Plex and Emby lifetime subscription since around 2018 and relied on Emby for quite a while during Plexs shenanigans 5-6 years ago but still think Plex and Jellyfin are the only true options. Emby is just an amalgamation of the worst qualities of Plex and Jellyfin. It "just works" as a media player in the same way that VLC "just works" but doesn't offer a whole lot outside of that especially nothing that these other two don't offer. Plex is the "polished but expensive and limited" solution and Jellyfin is the "free, some work required, and open" solution.
Emby offers a more robust, polished experience than Jellyfin and it’s just not even close, I’m sorry. You can get sort of close with some third party Jellyfin clients but then you’re split up between multiple apps that look and operate with different design languages depending on whether you’re watching media, managing your server, or listening to music, etc.
With Emby, I get very polished, functional, good looking apps on mobile and Android TV. I can use the Emby IOS app to manage my Emby server,
watch TV, Movies, and listen to my music collection. It looks great and works great with no fiddling or plugins needed for basic functionality like intro skip that Jellyfin still does not support without the help of plugins in the year of our lord 2025.
On the Jellyfin side however you have the official Jellyfin app which is just an uglier and more dated looking version of the Emby app, and it can’t play any of my music collection. StreamyFin is much nicer looking than the official app, but you can’t manage your server or play music so you still need the official app also. It also lists your music playlists as libraries, though it can’t play music so you’re just given errors. Now if I want to actually play my music I need a THIRD app, Finamp, which can actually play my music library but it struggles with metadata and needed hours of fiddling to get all the metadata right, but at the end of the day it’s just a fuck ugly knockoff of the music section of the official Emby app.
So the comparison between Jellyfin and Emby for me is, do I want one iOS app that just works, looks great, and functions great? Or do I want three separate apps, 2/3 of which look a college students very first app they threw together in a single weekend, and still end up with less functionality than Emby? Emby being the obvious winner here.
I would love to switch over to Jellyfin but it still just has so far to go before I could consider it a viable competitor to Emby or Plex. Unless Free and Open Source is your ultimate goal, at the expense of both form and function.
That's just putting them on another enshitification train that just happens to be a couple stops back, but is still moving along.
How they went about going closed source was unforgivable and also means they will absolutely have no qualms implementing crappy enshitification type decisions in the future
Emby’s enshittification train isn’t a couple stops back, there’s currently no evidence it exists. Simply having an Emby Premiere license is not enshittification for the same reason it wasn’t for Plex. Even in Plex’s most beloved golden age they had the PlexPass. That is not now nor was it ever an issue. Not every software existence has to be FOSS to provide any value. Emby went closed source and Jellyfin got to pick up the torch from that point on. That is a perfectly reasonable resolution as thats how things are supposed to work, that’s a good thing. Do you see Plex being forked into an open source version? No you don’t.
Absolutely not, fuck Emby with a branding iron, they're far shittier than Plex's decisions.
At least Plex started out as a for-profit company and has never misrepresented themselves as anything but. Unlike Emby.
Nah, as far as I’m aware Emby hasn’t started their own streaming service and pivoted away from their self-hosted oriented position, or shoving a bunch of bloat into their server software. They haven’t shoehorned a bunch of unwanted social features into it either. If you were fine paying for Plex five years ago, you’ll be fine with Emby.
Yea because like I said, they're on an enshittification train on the same track just some stops behind, except they started with far worse decisions
It sounds like they haven’t even made their first stop, nor do they even have the train yet. And it seems like none of those bad decisions have even been made yet.
I guess you could predict that one day they will start their enshittification journey, but that day is not today.
So it looks like the server will need plex pass in order to stream to users, or the user can pay about $2/mo to stream from servers without plex pass. I feel like this is fine, doesn't really come across as greedy or egregious.
I've set up plex, overseer, sonaar, and radaar in such a way that my family and friends can request and watch videos on my server. I use plex because it's the easiest for my less than tech savvy family to use, as it's just an app on their TV.
I have never paid a cent for Plex while Plex has allowed me and my family to save hundreds in subscription fees, so I'm feeling rather ambivalent about this new requirement for me to get plex pass in order to stream to the small horde of people I serve. I was considering getting plex pass to unlock hardware acceleration for transcoding anyway.
I've considered Jellyfin, but plex has a ton of features that allow for scripting that keeps me from having to manually do maintenance. Not to mention how hard it would be to get people like my father to use Jellyfin on his TV, last I checked there isn't even TV app available for most platforms.
Seems reasonable. I'm a lifetime Plex pass holder, so it won't affect me or the one person I let access my server lol
Yet.
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Isn't enby closed source? Thats why Jellfyfin was created.
Not JUST closed source, the project owner slammed the source shut with no discussion with the community and little notice nor did they even bother to consider any alternatives whatsoever
They went about it in the shittiest most unforgivable way possible for an open source project.
As far as I know emby is a jellyfin fork that I think they took closed source? I also went the emby route after getting annoyed at how much Plex was pushing their own content. Emby felt more polished to me than jellyfin, I get that there is some community resentment over some of their decisions but so far I haven't had any regrets and have more control than with Plex.
Jellyfin was forked from Emby years ago when Emby went closed source I believe on the 4.0 update.
How is that any different from Plex? Other than presumably a worse experience.