when are they going to completely drop the lifetime license? they must at some point right?
I paid a lifetime thing for a medication app, to help me keep on track of my meds. It was free for x number of drugs but then they wanted me to pay for more. A few months ago I got notified that my “life time” access was going to become a subscription so I said nope, no thanks, nada and uninstalled the app and set up HA alerts that remind me. Finding out I could do that was such a freeing feeling, I set up reminders to do a whole bunch of things and they remind me on my watch.
Jellyfin is nice that even a noob like me can struggle a bit but get it working. :)
Now guide your parents through installing Jellyfin on their TV so they can connect to your instance.
That’s why people get Plex.
It’s really pretty similar either way. Install the app, put in login details. Jf just has an additional login detail of your URL. Yes, that’s slightly harder. No, it’s not a big deal
What’s the hurdle?
Input server, input credentials, no?
And then for extra credit, try doing it on whatever shitty “smart” TV OS that their TV uses…
Shitty? Man even try installing on Samsung.
No no, preconfigure some fire sticks and then mail them out. At least we have quick connect for when logged out.
I’m still learning what I need to do in order to get up and running on the internet, but I think my plan for my dad to connect to my Jellyfin is to build him a Raspberry Pi and just hand it to him.
It’s exactly the same steps for both Plex and Jellyfin. There’s just one additional field when you login, which is your server address. That’s it.
I’d say Jellyfin is even easier than Plex, because when you create an account it’s nice and clean, while Plex pushes you to see their own ad-riddled content. Cleaning up a new Plex profile takes time and it’s annoying.
Don’t use either, what’s the usecase of these apps?
Streaming your Linux ISO’s to any device, from anywhere.
Sharing your home media with extended family and friends and they share theirs with you in a Netflix like TV application
Easy streaming of media that you own to (mostly) any device. That’s for jellyfin anyways.
I’ve been self hosting for about 2 years now. I never gave Plex a thought. I immediately went with Jellyfin and setup tailscale for remote access and its been awesome. We have our phones and tvs with android boxes all connected. Only we use Wholphin on the android boxes bc its better but extremely happy with the Jellyfin/Tailscale setup.
Plex is a series C for-profit company and is 100% beholden to its investors who expect a handsome return on investment; the enshittification & price hikes are literally guaranteed to continue. Existing users can, and should expect to be squeezed for profits until they have nothing left to give
Strange, I haven’t paid another cent since I paid like AUD$50 for the lifetime pass well over a decade ago.
You can’t say their service hasn’t gotten worse though :)
I paid $75 USD, but they took my plugins, (pour one out for youtube on plex for my DanTDM obsessed kid back in the day) made my interface hard to navigate, try constantly to shove their own content down my (and my users) throats. Hey, remember when you used to have that sync feature that kept you up to date with a selection of titles, then you could use the client on your phone to serve to other phones even offline, god that was awesome with kids on vacation.
made my interface hard to navigate
How? What is hard to navigate in Plex?
try constantly to shove their own content down my (and my users) throats.
I assume you don’t know you can customize your home screen and menus? You can only have your own content showing if you want.
You can’t say their service hasn’t gotten worse though :)
I absolutely can. It has only improved since I’ve been using it, which is from the very start.
How? What is hard to navigate in Plex?
That last ui update was a open abomination and every plex forum out there was all over it, you can’t hide that by saying nuhhahhhh
Since you’re so enamored with plex and I’m quite versed on it, Let’s talk about the horrors of plex
They are collecting data on your and your friends, what you’re watching and what media you have. If the country or state you live and ever decide to go after pirates, they will absolutely hand that data over to whatever state wants it for a song.
Using plex is selling your self and your family out.
They have consistently removed features that people loved and used to focus on delivering you ad content and enshittifying the average experience until they pay. And how much are you paying to watch your own content? What other services could you be spending that on?
I assume you don’t know you can customize your home screen and menus? You can only have your own content showing if you want.
I assume you’re either shill for the company or an outright PR plant, that last ui change was pushed to put their content first. that’s BS. I had my stuff customized, I disabled their crap, they undid it again. My family had to have me go and dig through those tiny top menus on roku to find my own shares. The average person watching my stuff complained to me that i put ads in my stuff. that’s not by fucking accident, it’s a business decision to give me and mine worse content so they can make an extra buck off me. Every change they make is company first, every requrest we make is forums for user helpful change is years old.
The whole company is absolutely horrible and selfish.
I absolutely can. It has only improved since I’ve been using it, which is from the very start.
How about give me examples instead of just shilling. The people here are owed the truth, not your company first attitude.
Literally all of that is lies lol
The second you start calling people shills you’re just admitting defeat.
Troll, PR company or just Sycophant , either way you’re BLOCKED BABY byes
There are two ways to increase profits:
- Charge more for the same services
- Remove services or features from paid subscriptions
Plex has done 2 a few times now.
If you like being told you can stream remotely and then later have the feature yanked and slapped behind a paywall, then by all means use Plex.
I bought a lifetime license on day 1 iirc. I wanted to support the software that was so good and better than everything else at the time. I have had zero features yanked.
I want to stream remotely, share my library, and watch on any device I come across, so I’ll use Plex.
That’s all well and good for you, but they pulled many rugs out from under free users. This is arguably bad, depending on who you ask, but they most certainly did flat out lie about, which is the core issue.
There’s no “rug pulling” for free users. Expecting a service run by a for-profit company to keep everything free forever is naive and just plain dumb.
This is arguably bad, depending on who you ask, but they most certainly did flat out lie about, which is the core issue.
What did they lie about exactly?
Plex still costs the same to me. Lifetime pass means no price hike, and it “just works.”
I’ve finally switched to Jellyfin, even though I have a lifetime Plex pass. It isn’t really a downgrade. I think I ran into more bugs on Plex. Using Jellyfin is like switching from Windows to Linux, on a smaller scale. Plex was always trying to sell you something, get you to use the other features, etc, whereas Jellyfin just gets out of my way and lets me watch media.
it just means the costs to you are less visible, you are still the product you have paid to pretend that you are not the product.
But when you want to give access to others outside of your network they need to subscribe to a plan to get a watch pass. That’s the main issue a lot of people are facing.
Not if you’ve got a lifetime license, which anyone running a Plex server should already have.
Also if you want to give access to your jellyfin server to people, well you’re shit out of luck basically. You’re out of luck if you want to even watch jellyfin on most devices that aren’t a pc or android device.
But tailscale gets around that by creating a secure external tunnel that allows others to connect to your inside from anywhere in the world?
Tailscale isn’t on 99.99% of TVs and devices that people want to stream videos to, and asking people to connect to your VPN whenever they want to stream video is a no-go. Anyone suggesting it is has never actually done tech support for regular people.
Not quite, I’m a software engineer that was literally a support technician before this role and I’m the go-to tech support person for my friends. Most of the complexity is on the hosts end ~ https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel
I’m a software engineer as well, and it’s not the complexity that is the challenge - it’s the fact that most tvs can’t run VPNs, and having people have to connect to your vpn to stream media just means they will never stream your media.
Can’t you just open the URL in a web browser tho?
The person you replied to has a lifetime-license, so no need for the clients to have a separate plan. Edit: Only thing where a separate license is needed afaik is the Download/Offline Watching feature. This will not work if a plex license owner adds a new User. Old/Existing Users can still use the download function. Here Plex made a change i think around 2 years ago.
Sure but Jellyfin just works too so thats cool, it took me like 5mn to switch our devices and the fact I could stream anything instantly on any of them without warning or whatever was immediately a breath of fresh air
I literally pay the same for Nebula, which is decidedly not my own media. Paying a subscription for your own media playback is so stupid.
ITT
I run both concurrently, but Plex has had a rash of outages recently that led to it and any services relying on it completely useless. It’s insane that an online service outage would cause me to be unable to stream media locally, so yeah Jellyfin has been all but essential, recently.
That’s a big red flag for privacy imo
Oh, I generally couldn’t agree more. In this specific case it was actually their authentication service that was down, but it meant if you use multiple accounts with Plex or have a pin on your singular account that you were essentially locked out. But I agree it’s a bad look to have remote dependencies at all.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
I’ll be sticking to Plex until it is reasonably safe to expose JF.
You shouldn’t be exposing any self-hosted service to the public Internet, unless you’re willing to also monitor for potential breaches.
You should really not be exposing jellyfin OR plex to the open Internet. It’s just asking for trouble.
that’s literally the feature of Plex…
Have you even read the issues and understood them?
Yes, those should be fixed, but unless you are worried about someone hijacking a video stream when you use a generic media path, there is not that much to worry about.
All (raw) image endpoints in ImageByNameController, ImageController & RemoteImageController are unauthenticated
- This allows probing on whether a specific image exists on the server by guessing item id’s (which can be done without too much trouble, as item ids are based on filepath and filename information) and then checking on what content (movies, series etc) exist on a given server, without having an account.
If only my TV had a Jellyfin app, I could switch, but alas it doesn’t. Got to use Plex if I want to watch stuff from any home streaming thingy. That said, it’s free to do that, at least.
I just don’t have the money or time to buy an external box and fiddle with it to get it running these days either, otherwise I’d build a modern version of the XBMC server I used to have in days gone by :-(
This is one of the most beneficial reasons to even run Plex; it’s ubiquitous. I can access it from nearly everywhere with a simple TV alone, and also provide access to family without having to run tech support for them or requiring any additional investments on their part.
Fiddle with birthday are plug and play. What TV?
Fiddle with birthday?
Yeah I don’t get it either… autocorrect?
I assume it’s autocorrect, but I legitimately have no idea what they intended to put.
Same here. This is gonna bug me all day….
Chromecast of something similar is an option?
At some point that TV plex app will stop working, just fyi. And you can get a 4k google tv box for about $25 at walmart, yes I realize that $25 is $25 you didn’t have to spend previously, just pointing out this argument doesn’t really make sense if you actually want to use jellyfin.
It’s not really about cost for me. Accounts in control of someone else and increased fees to use my own hardware can take a long walk off a short pier.
If only people applied these principles to all software…
Last time I compared the Plex handled finding and using subtitles so much more user friendly than Jellyfin.
Especially on the Jellyfin TV version it’s a fucking nightmare. I had to switch to kodi just to get subs working.
Someone doesn’t know how to configure bazarr…
Maybe someone doesn’t even use the arr stack.
Maybe they should.
Just to get subtitles in any language as nicely as with Plex? Get out.
I get subtitles for all the languages I want automatically so I don’t know if it works as “nicely” as plex, but it does work.
I’m not a plex user but I’m butthurt because you’re being insufferable. Realize that not everyone is like you. You cannot apply your experience or tendencies to everyone. Sometimes, things are just too complicated for people to figure out.
Not having to configure a separate utility is part of the user-friendliness
I think having distinctly separate utilities for each part of makes the whole thing work is better. But hey, what do I know? If only been running jellyfin + arr stack for 6 users without them ever complaining for over a year.
If you prefer paying a monthly bill instead of spending an afternoon configuring some services, you do you.
You grossly overestimate the number of people who are both willing and able to deploy, secure, manage, and maintain this kind of infrastructure. You may not find any value in offloading these responsibilities to a service provider operated by trained professionals, but your outright refusal to acknowledge that other people might is nothing short of callous.
Dude, my “infrastructure” is an old desktop pc with truenas and arr stack + jellyfin apps. I haven’t done anything more than update the apps every now and then for over a year. I think you’re exaggerating how much effort it actually requires. Not to mention that this is all for a setup that manages requesting, downloading and sorting the media as well.
If you just want to view what you already have, you can simply install jellyfin server in the pc where your videos are, point the libraries to the correct folder and that’s it. To use it simply download the app on your device. If you want to get fancy you can install a plugin to use as the subtitle provider. To use outside your house just install tailscale. Doing all of that would take like 2 hours, tops.
Oh and there’s nothing to secure if you don’t expose it to the internet directly.
If you want to be lazy and pay a subscription, go ahead. I don’t think it’s worth what they’re asking.
Many people who have plex set up struggled to even do that. For them to then have to install multiple applications that don’t automatically work with default settings out of the box is asking too much for a not insignificant portion of plex users. Not everyone knows how to do proper self hosting. Not everyone can figure it out.
Not that I want to defend Plex which is definitely enshittifying, but I don’t think most people are buying Plex to stream their own media. They’re doing it so other people can stream their media. Not wanting to buy a domain and set up port forwarding or a reverse proxy or whatever doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. My grandparents are never going to use Tailscale, and even if they did, I don’t think there are any Tailscale smart TV apps.
Disclosure: I run Plex and Jellyfin (and Navidrome) in parallel, and bought a lifetime pass years ago.
Yeah, I have been learning more and just got oauth working last week. I found Plex a little after blockbuster went under and I had over a thousand movies and a few full TV shows. I have tried jellyfin but the lack of apps has been the issue for me. But as Plex does more of this it will get more and more worthless.
They’re doing it so other people can stream their media
and they went to a subscription model, in part, so they could get their ‘cut’ from plex shares.
I find it wild that Plex even got so popular among PC users and not just people who only had a phone and a roku. There have always been better options for PC; the best being built right into the god damn OS so you don’t even need other software.
What is this “better option” you speak off?
Literally just using a shared network folder and SSHing into it from outside the network, or just opening the folder if you’re on the network.
Want the folder to have big icons? There’s a setting for that.
Uhm … do you know what plex actually is?
https://www.plex.tv/personal-media-server/
Unless there’s another app with the same name that also happens to be used for media sharing?
Where can I view the show/episode description and metadata in the shared folder? Where are my playlist? Where does it safe my watch progress. How can I filter my collection by genre or other advanced options, like available audio languages? Where does it suggest related show? Where is the API to auto sync my watch history to list sites?
Seriously, if you think a shared folder in the windows explorer can remotely compare to what plex does I have to assume you have never used or even seen the plex interface before.
Literally all that is handled by the media viewer you use to actually watch the videos. I recommend VLC. You seriously put up with ads just for all that basic as fuck shit?
As we say in Germany: “Wenn man keine Ahnung hat, einfach mal die Fresse halten”.
