- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- plex@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- plex@lemmy.ml
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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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?
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?
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!
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.
" 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
You wonder? What else is going to happen, it now stays the same forever? Just a question of when.
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.
I guess that’s something.
Gonna be a long slow explanation to my family and friends how to switch to jellyfin. Hopefully there’s an app ecosystem there as well. I was lucky to get a lifetime pass way back in 2009 when I did some work for them. It’s very different now.
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).
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 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.
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!
Yeah. I had to go into the settings and change some setting to get it to work with keyboard input.
There’s a jellyfish app on Xbox?
Yep. My dad said it’s working great for him.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I run ffmpeg on my phone. Alternately, I could shrink the file on my server and then download it without much trouble. You’re in a vanishingly small subset of users who know enough to care about file-size and know what can be done about it, but can’t be bothered to do it themselves.
This is a huge problem. The blueray remux might be 80 gigs. Most children’s devices will already be filled with other crap.
I run ffmpeg on my phone. Alternately, I could shrink the file on my server and then download it without much trouble. You’re in a vanishingly small subset of users who know enough to care about file-size and know what can be done about it, but can’t be bothered to do it themselves.
I was avoiding suggesting getting more storage, but it sounds like in your case, keeping a 720p x265 version of each file(~1gb per movie) on-hand would cost you nothing.
Your kids will be ok without the 4K60 version of Paw Patrol.
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.
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.
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
I was just able to download it on every PC I have
Linux (Flatpak)
So, no, then.
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.
I use Findroid for its great UI but also its ability to download and watch offline. It’s a better experience and I was surprised Jellyfin Android didn’t support it.
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…
Ah, I see. I’ve not tried Snaps, been avoiding Ubuntu because of Canonical’s weirdly corporate angle. Once they baked in Amazon into Ubuntu I was out.
I like the bundling of deps. Sure it’s inefficient, but it runs, and storage comes cheap nowadays anyway.
A lot of flatpaks early on wouldn’t survive a major point release upgrade or worst case would hold on to dependencies and the user would end up with an unbootable mess after an upgrade.
I haven’t seen that recently though.
However I regularly run appimages on my fedora silverblue system so take what I say with a grain of salt.
The space inefficiency is definitely there.
I find that clients, such as Jellyfin, Moonlight and Signal, works just fine as flatpaks but with those three apps my /var/lib/flatpak/ lands on 6.4GB.
When I temporarily had Discord installed it grew to 6.7GB, so the inefficiency is frontloaded and lessens the more of them you use.
Just use the god damn browser
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.
If you’re an Apple user the AppleTV is exactly this. It’s probably Apple’s most fairly priced computing device.
I mean that literally appletv. Barely costs more than a Roku and is vastly better than every other device on the market.
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.
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.
Roku does it well enough. not perfectly but it’s still not as shit as my Google tv
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)
$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.
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
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 can speak from my experience with an Apple TV, the application “Infuse” works amazing with a jellyfin server. Though the application is essentially $1 month subscription, but works across all your apple devices, if you have any. I think it’s worth it.
Additionally, the official app for Android TV worked pretty well when I last tried it on an Nvidia Shield
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.
https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh #letsencryptYeah 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
I run an Android TV box on my Smart TV, because I don’t trust them on the internet.
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.
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
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
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’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-proxyHandling users with forgotten passwords is, sadly, a manual chore for the administrator.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/users/adding-managing-users#profileYou 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?
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_proxyIn 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.
I just port forward right now, so Plex’s system is basically an overpowered dynamic dns. I guess my next option is to self host a dynamic dns on a numbered xyz domain (yk the $1/yr ones)
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.
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.
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
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
As a result I imagine more users will look at other offerings such as Jellyfin.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin
https://jellyfin.org/They too put a whole lot behind their subscription though
https://emby.media/support/articles/Premiere-Feature-Matrix.htmlI 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
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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!
I also recommend audio bookshelf but am using ShelfPlayer on iOS
And what about just plain music? Is Jellyfin or Audiobookshelf better suited for that?
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.
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’m not pirating a bunch of shows just to pay Plex for the privilege of watching it.
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 here except we’ve also started living somewhere with managed internet and we don’t have the ability for port forwarding or upnp anymore. Plex relay is the only reason I can still stream to my phone or my family and jellyfin has no equivalent.
This is incredibly common in smaller countries that are double natting inside their ISPs. This used to be very common in the US before the FCC blocked apartments from contracting with ISPs. Unfortunately for many of us this is coming back rapidly since the current FCC has reversed that rule and landlords can force you on a specific ISP and equipment again.
I can go way out of my way to make this work anyway with a lot of router on a stick style garbage out to a cloud host somewhere and retrain my entire family to connect a jellyfin app to my server or I can keep using plex and not work that hard
You can use Cloudflare Tunnel as well.
Which starts at $20/mo. Meanwhile I bought plex pass lifetime for $50 over 12 years ago. Even with the new pricing monthly plex pass is cheaper than cloudflare tunnel
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.
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.
If you don’t like the price there’s always jellyfin.
Got to say that I have been very happy with it.
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
What did you pay for exactly?
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!
Hellooooo jellyfin!
Only use open source software
