I bought Plex pass years ago for £79. The new price of $749.99 is INSANE.
No wonder all the cool people are using Jellyfin.
Roon did this and it made me stop using Roon.
Home assistant +music assistant is better now, and has fully replaced that for free.
Goodbye, shit companies.
Hey guess what software I don’t need to use
You’ll retain your existing lifetime pass, fwiw. This is just price gouging new customers.
I like jellyfin
Plex works just fine without a subscription. What is the subscription even for?
If you host a server and have a lifetime pass, you’ll be able to share your collection with anyone. It will allow hardware encoding so less lag on your users end. You can also locally download content on your devices to watch offline.
So no useful features for me.
I don’t want to share my media with anyone and see no reason to stream from outside my house, it’s not like I can take my home cinema with me. Also, why would you want to re-encode and lower the quality?
Well in your case you don’t need the subscription at all, apart from some minor things the subscription won’t do anything for you.
But I do all the things you’re not doing. I share my server with dozens of friends/family so I need remote streaming. I can watch shows on my own server no matter where I am (at work or when visiting relatives, or even on the phone on the train). And if you streaming on the phone or with bad internet in general it might sometimes be a good idea to reduce quality to save bandwidth.
I really would like to use Jellyfin, but the remote access is quite useful to me personally. My immediate family lives far away and they can access my library remotely quite easily. They just want to watch their requested shows and don’t need 4k HDR 7.2 surround sound for their cooking shows.
I guess I could set up tailscale or some other vpn access to my network but I don’t feel like explaining that to parents and siblings. Even my partner, who lives with me, has little patience for all things electronic. They’re an Apple user and I’m aware enough not to constantly pester them with my ideals and preferences. Plex works on our Apple TV and is easy so it’s the best solution right now. Am I in the minority? Probably, but different strokes for different folks.
TLDR: Jellyfin is awesome, but Plex currently makes more sense for my needs.
I guess I could set up tailscale or some other vpn access to my network but I don’t feel like explaining that to parents and siblings.
Just set up VPN between your router and their router, no need to explain anything.
Yeah, that’s a potential solution, but then my sister’s starting college soon so she’d need to VPN into one of the networks when she’s not at home; which brings us back to square one.
Then there’s whenever they’re not home and want to watch something on their phone or laptop.
Jellyfin is quite easy to use remotely (prerequisite: purchased domain (easy), tunnel VPN (complex) or public static IP (not always an option)). I confess I use Emby as I bought premium for it once I learned how much it suits me, and the UI is much nicer and rounded – although I didn’t need to pay in order to do most of what I wanted. I can say that my friends access the library with a one time login and minimal friction, but I’m also not going to preach further - sometimes it’s better not to fuck with a working system, and I respect your choice
Similarly, I have a Plex lifetime license.
I think my biggest hurdle for Jellyfin is setting up a VPS for all my self hosted services. Currently I use Cloudflare Tunnels, which is easy but I’d like to get away from it because Cloudflare and it doesn’t allow for streaming services to run on it.
I’ll spin up Jellyfin and see how Swiftfin is on the Apple TV. If I feel it has minimal friction I’ll try and make the jump.
With regards to spreading the good word of self hosting, I’ve had the best luck just offering good services to those around me. Spliit, HomeAssistant, and Immich have been easy to get my partner to use. Then I just happen to say “oh yeah, this is running on my server btw”. The holy grail would be to convince my friends to use Fluxer or something instead of Discord.
Downloads for Offline Viewing (jellyfin has this for free) and Remote Access (stream videos while outside of your home network, you can just use tailwind with jellyfin for free)
What is this ‘offline’ thing I keep hearing about?
You can download episodes/movies to your device for offline playback. Not groundbreaking, you could just copy the files to your device manually, but if you do it via the plex app it will sync your watch progress once you connect again.
You can also use it to bulk-download shows from other people’s libraries.
Why would I need to copy the files to my media player when it can just stream from my NAS directly, regardless of internet connection.
Well if you don’t leave the house I’m sure that’s fine. Some people use it to watch stuff when they’re away, or if they have a job that lets them play something while they work.
I do leave the house but I generally don’t bring my home cinema with me.
I sure do when I’m on a flight.
I used it when I travel abroad and want to watch something, like when you’re on a plane or train with shitty internet or roaming charges.
It has centralised features like proprietary user sharing (which is neat but still), arbitrary limits like device limits, the ability to transcode using your server’s hardware, and other stuff that Emby/Jellyfin users have as standard. So we generally see the restrictions as taking power and ownership away from our own media/hardware.
And any cool premium Plex features like merging multiple servers into one UI get adopted and ported into Emby/Jellyfin pretty damn quickly
Monthly rates remain unchanged. The sales of lifetime passes at this point was pretty rare anyway.
I see this as nothing more than an opportunity for those hate and don’t use plex to complain over something that doesn’t affect them.
But I suppose there’s nothing strange here about people complaining about a valuable paid service when a far inferior alternative is free.
I don’t even know what plex is but my god your comment smacks of brandbrained cope
What a nasty and horrible attitude.
Admitting your ignorance before making an ignorant comment does not imbue honor or value to it.
It will be a pleasure to block you
You know someone is cool when they take the time to tell you that they’re blocking you.
I might remind you that something doesn’t have to effect you to complain about it, it’s called empathy
Complaining about something that affects practically nobody isn’t empathy; It’s simply, ignorantly, screaming into the dark. Especially when that empathy is so selectively one-sided.
That said, empathy is a good thing, and I do not wish to discourage it. I certainly value empathy far more than either plex or jellyfin
Can I have the number of your copium dealer?
It’s so nice when people just say “block me“
LMAO, dude’s acting like he’s the only one having the ability to block people and like it would seriously affect me. I mean it’s a nice feature but why do you have to tell people, just do it qwq
Puritanical worldview
Feels like you’re maybe blowing this out of proportion just a little
Isn’t jellyfin full of security vulnerabilities? (Not to defend Plex, just a thought. This is why I don’t have a video streaming server at all.)
You can avoid most security issues (with any sort of server) by not exposing it publicly. Use a VPN like Tailscale to connect remotely. If you share the server with friends or family, share it with them over Tailscale and use an ACL to configure which services they can access on your server.
things you shouldnt need to do…
It’s a good practice to NOT expose services to the internet unless it’s really needed. If they’re only for your use, then the entire world doesn’t need access. This isn’t specific to Jellyfin.
All software has the potential to have security issues.
thats, like, your opinion man. frankly slapping a VPN on top of everything else doesnt improve your security posture unless you have the skills to manage that system on top of everything, including ongoing validation that its configuration is restricting what you want it to.
a robust authn/authz at the application layer is what secures your environment. VPNs are just slapping a wall around your network that is trivially penetrated by the browsers (and their extensions) within your network.
stop spouting dogma seriously doesnt make you look intelligent. personally the only reason I bother with a VPN is so I can leverage my local networks dns to access services anywhere. its not for security.
If a service is publicly accessible, anyone can access it. Even if it’s secured, there can be security issues in the auth layer of the app, improperly secured endpoints, etc.
If a service is only available over VPN, nobody can access it unless they’re on the VPN. The service isn’t visible over the public internet and other people won’t even know it exists. You can require two factor auth to connect to the VPN.
I’m not sure why you seem to think that a private network isn’t more secure than a public network. There’s a reason why practically every company requires people working remotely to connect to a VPN to access company resources.
If a service is publicly accessible, anyone can access it.
false.
Even if it’s secured, there can be security issues in the auth layer of the app, improperly secured endpoints, etc.
true, fun fact a VPN is also an application with an auth layer. dun dun dun!
If a service is only available over VPN, nobody can access it unless they’re on the VPN.
which is basically anyone soon as a browser is in the mix. which it is.
I’m not sure why you seem to think that a private network isn’t more secure than a public network.
because I’ve done network hardening and know that they are only as secure as the devices and people that are a part of that network. it has nothing to do w/ private vs public and everything to do with what you do while within that network.
There’s a reason why practically every company requires people working remotely to connect to a VPN to access company resources.
uh huh. heard of lemmings? appeals to authority? etc, etc, etc. thats you right now. federal agencies guidelines regarding VPNs search terms for you: Federal Zero Trust Strategy (notably via OMB Memo M-22-09). Individuals like yourself are literally the reason they had to release these updated guidelines. because people kept quoting out of date security practices from their old guidelines as ‘good enough for the feds must be best practices’
like i said you dont know what you’re talking about. historical foot note: when the federal agency updated their recommendations regarding VPNs they were criticized by security experts for taking so fucking long to finally remove the misguided position that VPNs improve security that you hold.
here is a relevant snippet for everyone:
Regardless of the approach selected, agencies must move away from the practice of maintaining a broad enterprise-wide network that allows enhanced visibility or access to many distinct applications and enterprise functions. Accordingly, agencies should choose their zero trust approach early enough to permit them to align that approach with their plans for IT investment
Literally use ‘authn/authz’ and dont rely on VPNs for ACL. Here is another gem from that memo for today’s lucky 10,000:
Agencies must remove password policies that require special characters and regular password rotation from all systems
and yet companies still put that nonsense into their security policies.
I never said anything about using the VPN as an ACL. All I said was to only expose the service over the VPN. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the app doesn’t have authentication or authorization.
I’m also only talking about residential use cases, where it’s a common practice (when not using a VPN) to just expose everything via port forwarding. Businesses aren’t setting up Jellyfin on their servers.
true, fun fact a VPN is also an application with an auth layer. dun dun dun!
Sure, but someone would have to first get on the VPN, and then find vulnerable apps once on the internal network, as opposed to just scanning the internet for public-facing vulnerable systems. Wireguard (and thus Tailscale) doesn’t respond to port scans at all - it only responds to packets that are signed with a known key.
Admittedly, networking and network security isn’t my specialty so I’m absolutely sure you’ve got more knowledge in this area.
The VPN isn’t “on top of” anything, it’s instead of everything.
except its not. VPNs provide no real protection for a network. its literally undercut by any network connection that reaches beyond the wall it provides.
VPNs are a routing simplification and privacy measure not a security measure. idiots try and use them as a security layer thinking they’re safer.
Eh, that’s too much hassle just for streaming video. I’ll use good old torrents downloaded directly to my computer.
It’s not really a hassle though. It’s just a one time setup. Tailscale can stay connected all the time, since by default only Tailscale IPs are routed via it (so it won’t affect LAN or internet access)
If you want less hassle then use a Debrid service like Premiumize or Real-Debrid.
And plex is entirely secure?
What was it again with security and closed source vs OSS?Is the plex relay for remote access really secure?
Or has just nobody bothered checking it?And plex is entirely secure?
I never said that. I don’t run a media server at all because every streaming software has its own flaws.
You can’t throw shade on Jellyfin, leave plex out of the discussion and then claim to run neither and essentially not caring…
Why participate at all with this argument??Yeah I should’ve probably emphasised that Plex isn’t free of security vulnerabilities either, but I didn’t because I never even considered running it on my server, given the insane price.
Why participate with this argument? I was hoping to be proven wrong on the claim that jellyfin is insecure.
It’s impossible to prove a negative, that there are no vulnerabilities.
I was hoping to be proven wrong on the claim that jellyfin is insecure.
The constant argument being parotted (IMO a bit extra overblown) that you can read files by knowing the file path and being able to access the stream urls without authentication.
So if I know
/data/media/movie/A Super Secret Movie [2026](not unlikely due to assumed default paths with docker installations)
and
https://jellyfin.example.local/
I can supposedly guess that the URL ishttps://jellyfin.example.local/video/source=?1029rifos0xomsoc93and access the stream.Is it an issue? Yes, you are bypassing active authentication
What is the actual security problem? You can be ddosed by being streames to death? Oh no, what will I do /sIf anyone else can give a more grave exampe why it’s worse than the above example: Please do. I don’t see the issue besides bypassing authentication.
That’s one of the ones we know about. Consider the ones that might exist that haven’t been found yet.
I’m still using it because I already have a lifetime license. I’m just using it for music and local TV though (I use the DVR feature to record the local news and a few other shows).
I think Jellyfin has some music apps, but last I checked they’re still not as good as Plexamp.
Navidrome and symfonium(paid) have been amazing to me for the last year. I’ll never go back.
who is this for?
those unicorn users who make 150k++ a year and pirate all their media and then wanna share it with their friends that they don’t have?
I don’t think there is an actual target for this price. But I bet my left testicle it’s to push for subscription passes instead of a single purchase.
Edit: fuck it, take the right one as well
Wouldn’t they hurt use Jellyfin? Lol The only “value” that Plex seems to have to offer these days are the weird tv services things they keep trying to push
I know someone with a Plex who won’t switch to Jellyfin because it’s too complicated, but now is looking for other platforms. I hate to tell them… they’re all complicated.
It’s been a while since I used Plex, but is it really that much less complicated than Jellyfin? When I switched, it seemed like roughly the same amount of complication, but that was a long time ago.
No lol. The basic setup is: you point it to your libraries, it does the rest. Just like Plex.
Connecting remotely is maybe slightly trickier since you have to open it up to the internet, or just run tailscale.
To be fair there are plenty of users who rip their own media. But sentiment stands
Sure if plenty means less then 10. Most people just stream from one of the providers.
travelling salesmen who pirate all their media??
Even now - at the peak point of the Memory/SSD price bubble - about 1/3 of that lifetime pass buys you enough dedicated hardware to do it yourself for at least the next decade, probably more.
Imma use the lifetime pass forever lol. Shits wild.
You know that even if you paid that ridiculous amount, it still wouldn’t be the last time they try to get money out of you, either.
After 16 years of having a lifetime pass (and nearly 20 years of administering multiple Plex servers), I know this to be false. And, unless you have one yourself, you could not possibly know. Especially because, with a lifetime pass, there’s no other way that could possibly ask for money from a user. It’s literally impossible.
But, if I’m wrong, show proof of your lifetime pass, and the solicitous emails you received subsequently. I know you can’t.
If you’re going to speak from such obvious ignorance, it should be easy to admit when you’re wrong
Most Lemmy users, however, never find such a thing so easy…
I think it’s more that they’re implying the company is likely to get worse in the future and start trying shit, not ehat they’ve already experienced. The price now being nearly 10x what it once was is a pretty big red flag, after all.
I won’t argue with your cynicism, but increasing the price on something that almost nobody ever purchased anyway really isn’t a red flag at all
Especially when all other costs remain unchanged
If Plex starts some crazy Fuckery, I’ll be right on board with you.
Have lifetime Plex Pass. Here’s them trying to get money from me:
I don’t see any of that. Because I didn’t go looking for it.
As another decade-long lifetime Plex pass holder and watching the generally downward spiral of Plex development, I’m right there with you. I don’t agree with a lot of the direction they’re going in, but they have never once tried to upsell me after getting the lifetime pass.
The system works, it’s a lot easier/more available for viewers than JellyFin, and until those things change I don’t see much reason to get out the pitchforks. However if they do, mine’s ready.
I have been following the development of Jellyfin for years. I’ve deployed a couple of servers just for testing with my users. I am very, very, very interested in the development and future development of Jellyfin. I’ve even contributed money to the project.
But I’ve been a Plex user for nearly 20 years. I administer multiple servers with more than a couple of dozen users, and I can say this: Plex offers users a far superior experience compared to Jellyfin.
That said— I fully support support the Jellyfin project in creating an open source replacement for Plex. I really do. And I’ll switch to it as soon as it’s good enough to meet my needs and the needs of my users.
But that’s gonna be a few years from now. Plex didn’t get as awesome as it is immediately. It took 20 years to get there. Jellyfin isn’t gonna get there overnight. I closely track it progress, and as soon as I can switch to it, I will.
The Plex user interface is super cluttered with stuff that isn’t your media by default. I hate it.
For now
We’ll see.
I’m not immune to changing my tune. But only with good reason. And this isn’t it
How about when they “accidentally” sent that email to all your users saying that they NEED to buy Plex Pass to continue to use remote streaming? Or when they had that “bug” in the app shortly after that, where remote streaming would give an error message saying that need to buy Plex Pass to stream your content?
Maybe they don’t solicit from you, but they use dark tactics to trick your users, and that’s not acceptable in my opinion.
Show me these emails. I never received them.
Show me proof of your accusations, or stop making them.
You should have gotten it on May 1 2025, subject line “Remote streaming changes you need to know”. I got it and I wasn’t even using Plex any more, let alone with other users.
This isn’t proof. This is bullshit, pretending to be proof, and fooling only the most stupid people. But, at least, you already admit that you lied about what it said can’t you even keep your lies straight?
I asked for proof, not the “word“ of some angry and highly biased Internet rando
That’s like Donald Trump claiming he passed all of those mental health exams just because he said so
Provide proof, or stop making these absurd arguments
That did happen, lots of confusion with the users. Don’t know why you are calling those other people liars.
I didn’t call anyone a liar. You just said that.
But I do find it odd so many people claiming something happened, yet nobody can provide a shred of evidence
I think you’ve lost track of who you’re replying to.
Tried it once, it’s features and quality were so lacking I stuck with Jellyfin. I’d charge Plex $4999.99 monthly to let their software stay in my devices.
I tried Plex once, before I knew about jellyfin. I just wanted an open-source self-hostable media server with my own media.
When I tried it, after installing Plex, I was presented with a login for a Plex hosted account. Iirc that was optional and I skipped it, after that came the nags for Plex pass. Piss off. That’s exactly the opposite of what I wanted out of something like jellyfin.
When I first used Plex, it didn’t even have accounts. I don’t even understand what the account is for.
Oh yeah and apparently you can’t stream remotely without a subscription either? If it were a feature they had to spend time on I’d still not want to use it, but I’d understand at least.
From the application’s point of view, there is no difference between internet and intranet access. I just saw that downloading the media you already own, using your own infrastructure, requires an even more expensive subscription.
How tf did people stick around with this shit for so long.
Remote streaming costs money because relay servers cost money. You don’t get worldwide nat traversal without a vpn or wide attack surface for free
The same reason most foss projects are barren. Plex focuses on ease of use and giving people what they want. Users mostly don’t care about the sub. It’s easy to use and works.
Meanwhile jellyfin doesn’t have a remote first interface that isn’t absolute dog shit and I need to set up a reverse proxy and potentially idp to get the ability for my family to log in.
This shit isn’t hard. The answer to the community is, make the product better, and start bundling shit in. But I’m sure I’ve already offended some nerd who thinks this is all just so easy and requires no work to tell me I just need to learn Linux better. And that putting in a reverse proxy by default will make maintenance a pain and I just have to put portainer and LE to fix it.
The shit y’all are bitching about is the problem.
Most FOSS projects are barren? Huh
I’m here to say it’s all very easy and requires no work.
Seriously, you literally just install Jellyfin (or run it in Docker), set up nginx with certbot and make a port forward on your router. Zero maintenance at all.
Any LLM can give you a complete step-by-step guide that takes 10 minutes to follow if you don’t know what you’re doing.
I cannot understate how bad of an idea it is to expose something to the Internet when you don’t know what you’re doing.
Jellyfin is not designed to be exposed directly. They have a number of outstanding security issues. You should really use a VPN to access your local network instead.
I expose plenty of services. I like to live life dangerously 😎
ADHD linux zealots will argue anything, no matter how stupid, if you dare hold any comparison to a commercial product. It’s literally built into their ADHD brains need to argue and be right.
They will sit there and argue insane shit and pretend like most people have a desktop sitting in their living room much less setting up an entire *arr stack with reverse proxy. And then scream at you when you say that sounds like work I don’t have to do for less than a hamburger meal.
It’s easy bro, just learn docker, get it set up so that services boot at launch, and I’m sure nothing will never break or need to be updated again.
yup people forget about convenience. its why I’ve been building retrovibed for the last year. that *arr + plex/jellyfin + vpn + reverse proxy nonsense is insane. yes you can do it… but seriously who the fuck wants to manage that many moving parts.
You are absolutely right about all of that, I did it exactly like that, had ChatGPT tell me what to do and done. I am not an IT person, but I still like messing with tech. But that’s more than 95% of people are willing to do, and that’s why people use plex. Takes literally a minute to set up and it just runs. That’s why people choose Apple. Simple and easy, little to no maintenance. That doesn’t make it a great product, but an accessible one, and that’s what counts for most people
Meme material.
This shit isn’t hard
Well it certainly would be hard for me, as I don’t know anything about the UX needed for these features, and very little about networking in general, and probably close to zero about the networking concepts required to make something like you describe work.
But it sounds like you know a lot, jellyfin is a project that is 100% volunteer developed. Maybe you could contribute your expertise either via code or by providing a concrete action plan to the jellyfin team?
Be the change you want to see and all that.
This is peak Linux nerd shit.
No. I payed $200 and Plex is better. My needs have been perfectly met for the past 10l5 years and foreseeable future.
Second, fuck off with this attitude. I came here answering a question how, ‘ohhhh it’s so fucking complicated why normies might want to pay’ with 2 concrete use cases and you immediately go off with that nerd bullshit that I need to contribute more.
I had 3 prs hit main in Apache last week. Fuck off, your nerd shit isn’t helping adoption asshole.
Bro flexes Apache contributions and still can’t paste 10 lines to make a reverse proxy
No my time is just more valuable to me and I have money 🤷♂️
Love offending the nerds with no familyies hunched over a desk all day 🤣
Tipster is that you?
Good old case of “mad cuz bad”
It really, honestly, is super easy to get going. All you need is a folder with your media and a compose file you can find in plenty of tutorials.
The thing we Linux nerds often forget, I think, is that we know what we’re doing (most of us at least I hope), and regular people don’t.
I can read a simple compose file and pretty quickly notice if there’s something off.
If you wanted to do that, you’d first have to read up on containers and compose and all that stuff. You can, of course, just grab a compose file and run it, but that’s generally not a great idea if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Haven’t used it myself, but wouldn’t something like Tailscale solve the remote access limitation?
It does, but the limitation just doesn’t make any sense.
Much like USA Mobile carriers treating hotspot data differently than the phone’s own data, under the ancient premise that phones use less data than PCs - something that hasn’t been true for well over a decade.
If the owner of the Plex server has lifetime and other users that don’t have Plex pass at all and want to watch it remotely, they just need to be part of your home.
They don’t even need to be a part of your home. The server owner just needs to have a Plex Pass. None of my users are in my home group and can still stream remotely since I got a Lifetime pass back when they were, I think, $99.
My breaking point was to pay for transcoding.
Paid for the android app which allowed HWA but then I wanted to watch it on my chromecast TV. Welp gotta pay or bust.
So I bust, went through the early adopter pain (early 11th gen Intel Xe gpu, no actual knowledge of linux or docker, little experience with linux and docker) and set it up.
Working great since then.
Currently restreaming japanese IPTV with jellyfin via an m3u stream at work (and through a mobile VPN router)
Not the most stable stream but sufficient
Oooh. Can you give some more details about how you did that? I have a Japanese friend coming to visit for about 2 months and she might want to watch TV during the day.
I do wonder if this is a last ditch effort cash grab before they go under or a “we really thought we’d be acquired by now so now we have to plan ahead” move.
I imagine most of their revenue comes from the ad supported “channels” they provide, which non-technical people are tricked into using since they have a technical friend or relative who set them up with Plex 10 years ago. With the Fox acquisition of Roku, the merging of Tubi and Roku Channel would be huge and probably cause Plex to lose streaming licenses of certain properties which will end up as lower revenue.
