Honest question, because I know multiple people who are not looking to jump ship since they already have the Plex Pass.
Ease of use for my users across multiple platforms with minimal tech knowledge on their end. I’m sharing my library with ranges from 12yo to 70. I need it to “just work” and it does that perfectly.
Same here. Plex just works for my folks with 0 tech literacy. I may try Jellyfin in the future, but I have a few friends that primarily access Plex via Playstation 4/5, and I know there’s no support there yet.
Yeah, lacking the client is not good. https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/2751/playstation-5-support
Couldn’t upvote this harder. Tried Jellyfin for 5 mins and was super confused why I couldn’t find sharing options. After googling and reading about reverse proxies and buying domains and shit I said fuck it and uninstalled
Yes. Same.
Totally understandable, however basic tailscale version is free and you can just have that installed on all of the connected devices as a “reverse proxy”. You then use the ip adress from the server or main computer with the files and connect to its tailscale provided ip adress after turning it on and as long as you have port 8096 open on the server computer (http:/with your adress here:8096) you can connect to the server through the jellyfin app on the device you’ve installed it on.
Yeah, I think you lost them after the first paragraph. 😉
I am tinkering constantly with my home setup, but I am lacking the time to set up everything to my liking.
So I am using neither Plex or Jellyfin, I am using Kodi and have a Webdav share available for when I am away on holiday. 😬😁
But then I am only sharing with my closest family in my home network. Somehow it seems everyone is providing a streaming service for half the neighborhood and the remote family (or possibly a polycule with the drama associated, IIRC).
I never fully understood this argument as you would have to do that anyways with plex unless you’re using their proxy which would just artificially rate limit all of your users. But I do realize that jellyfin doesn’t have an email invite system in place which really is my biggest issue
What’s the “that” that you’d have to do anyway with Plex? I had to do nothing of the sort. I asky friends and family to make a Plex account and ask what email address they used. Then I give that email access to my library
This.
I’ve never understood this stance. You do you, but if I’m offering to host stuff for friends or family for free, they can at least learn to operate that thing on their end.
Edited to add, wow I did not expect this to be such a hot take. Fuck me I guess lol.
What do they need to even learn? How to login using the username you gave them?
Surely you haven’t exposed your Jellyfin to the open net, since even the devs admit that that is a terrible idea
Got a link for the dev recommendation? I hadn’t heard about that
My Jellyfin is exposed to the open net and it’s completely fine, but users don’t need to know any technical details about that. They just need to know how to login.
Theres a reason everyone uses a VPN to allow remote streaming for their Jellyfin. The things as open as a barns door, so you should not just open it to the public. Like I said, even the devs say not to do that, its just not secure enough
You’re just spreading fud. Jellyfin devs actually have documentation on how to expose it to the net. Why would they do that if it were unsafe?https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/networking/
I’ve been using it this way for a couple years now and we are good. Never used Plex. I’m using only Jellyfin. So, I’ll pass on your advice. Thanks.
According to your own link that you totally read : “Note that opening a port gives full access to that port to the next higher Network. Opening a port directly to the Internet is therefore insecure and not recommended.” and “forwarding its Ports directly to the internet (not recommended!)”
It seems to depend on how you are granting access and have configured the server… if they have to setup VPN access in order to access Jellyfin, as opposed to logging into plex website.
No, that doesn’t change anything about what I said really.
To me, if I’m hosting something for my friends and family, they can put in the effort to learn how to use it. Period. Whether that’s as simple as logging in through a browser, installing an app, or using a VPN. They can learn, or they can pay for Netflix (as an example, since we’re discussing a media server originally).
Did you try Jellyfin? I’ve had success with Jellyfin once I’ve been the one setting up the TV app, etc. It did just work, because users found it very simple in comparison to Plex. If anything, they like how Plex shows more things beyond the collection.
I’ve been the one setting up the TV app, etc.
That is exactly the issue. I can’t personally set up the app for all my users. Most of them are not in my household.
Me either, but I don’t expect them to setup any sort of app themself (including Plex).
That’s his point though, he does expect them to be able to set up themselves, and apparently Plex is good for that.
Yes, in my case I personally had to setup both clients (Plex and Jellyfin) for the family members myself.
And right back to https://lemmy.cafe/comment/17371392
Ah, the answer to that… I configured the server beforehand and installed it at their house as a gift, so I have persistent SSH access over VPN and can administer it remotely at will within tmux. Has worked for several years.
Had to find it, but there is a new tvOS app that looks very nice: Moonfin
Lifetime subscriber when it was like $75 bux
Setup and runs on my NAS (unRAID) Uses a small GPU to transcode as needed Shared only with non technical family members
Has worked as is for YEARS.
So, the question is, am I looking for something to replace a working free (prepaid) solution I have? That answer is nope.
Having non-technical family on board is priceless tbh.
Yeah, my mom uses it. My mom. I have to remove search bars from her chrome like it’s 2005.
This is my POV. It already works perfectly, is prepaid, and is accessible to my nontechnical users. Switching would be a major pain for a worse experience.
Also, Plexamp.
Someday in the future no doubt Plex will enshittify for lifetime users such that it will justify a change, but that hasn’t happened.
+1 to all of this. I paid for it when it was $90 lifetime, before either Jellyfin was popular before I heard of it, who knows. It works fine. No reason to put extra effort into replacing something that I have no problems or qualms with.
I tried Jellyfin once about a year ago and it was… OK I guess? Certainly nowhere near as polished as the rabid fan base would have me believe, and there was something in my library that it flat out refused to play.
If I didn’t already have a lifetime Plex Pass, and it was just me hosting my own media for a user count of one, then sure, I’d use it. But none of those things are true. I need something that “just works” and Plex fits that bill.
Like most people here, I bought a lifetime pass when it was $75 and it’s paid for itself over and over again in the time since. I honestly think I’ve had more than $750 worth of value from my purchase. Sure they’ve made some odd decisions recently, but until they start actively taking away functionality or rescind existing lifetime subs then I will continue to use it.
Meanwhile, not to belittle you personally, but the fact that every thread that mentions Plex in any way, good or bad, is guaranteed to be dominated by people circle-jerking over their beloved Jellyfin has put me completely off the project, to the point that I’ve had to add the word to my blocklist. Obviously that’s not working too well or I wouldn’t have seen this post!
Yea, Jellyfin might be good tech but the fans are insufferable
Tbh I just fanboy any FOSS company like that
Problem is access outside your home for family and friends.
There are serious security gaps that make it a non starter to expose to the internet.
I’ve been using Jellyfin ever since they forked out of Emby, and honestly, it’s the biggest complaint that I have. It is incredibly difficult to make it available to friends and family who are on various devices, networks, so on and so forth.
Whereas Plex “just works.”
Wait what? I have been sharing my jellyfin using a cloudflare tunnel to the endpoint.
Could you elaborate on the security gaps? How can I oen-test myself to see if I’m vulnerable
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415 nothing too serious, but here you go
Why not use a zero trust VPN like netbird? It is fully open source.
You can create a reverse proxy that requires a password to get through to jellyfin. I think there is a limit of like 5 for this though (unless you pay or self host).
Because clients would probably fail if there’s an authentication layer on front that they’re not expecting.
What security gaps in particular? I did have to reverse proxy to get it to https, are there additional security issues?
Exposed endpoints that have no authentication and various other things like that.
It’s application level security issues.
If there is an older collation here https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
thanks; for anyone looking, the issues have been split out at the bottom, none of them are addressed as of this writing. I don’t know that I feel like they are that serious (most of them allow you to play things if you know an ID), but they are the kind of thing you’d see in a project where there are bigger security issues.
WhatI’ve noticed is that people who prioritize privacy and just want to watch their downloads on their tv usually use jellyfin and people who prioritize ux slickness and want to run an IPTV service for their friends and family usually use plex.
It’s not a matter of privacy vs UX. I actually think Plex has ruined their UX. But if you have friends and family, some are tech-illiterate, some have their own media servers, and you all want to share with each other quickly and easily, Plex is the only viable option. Same if it’s just you, but you travel a lot, and want to watch something from your home server without lugging around a device that has access to your VPN and a screen/hdmi-out.
Jellyfin is really only viable if it’s just you on your own network.
Lifetime Pass holder here. Used to run Jellyfin alongside Plex. Had crashing issues and had to shut Jellyfin down for quite a bit. Came back after a while and started Jellyfin from scratch. None of my users ever chose Jellyfin over Plex.
- The UI is slower (at least on Windows), clunkier, and uglier. Hopefully this gets fixed in the upcoming big update they have planned for the desktop client. Their Roku app is actually on par with Plex’s though.
- The admin dashboard is confusing and in my opinion awful.
- Downloaded content is not viewable within the app on Android. This is the complaint I’ve heard the most from my user who made a significant effort to switch. Ironically, after the New Experience update this became less of an issue since Plex ruined downloads.
- Plexamp’s UI, radios, and sonic similarity feature were, last I checked, unmatched by a long-shot. I use my music library heavily. If I make the switch fully away from Plex, I’ll probably opt for something more specialized like Navidrome.
- Manually setting the edition of a movie is so much easier on Plex, and for someone who likes to have multiple editions, it’s less confusing for the user to see each edition individually labelled in the library than selecting the movie and being expected to know which file name they should pick. Not every file is named to Jellyfin’s standards because that would make them harder to add to my torrent client, and some don’t have their editions in the file name at all and I just have them hand-labelled in Plex based on run time.
- I’m still trying to setup my DVR in Jellyfin and can’t get it to work. Plex works fine, Jellyfin just won’t. It’s a moot point at the moment, but once I do get it to work, unless things have changed over the years, the channel guide is a whole other set of challenges.
I’m willing to deal with this personally simply because Plex creates just as much, if not more of a headache for me as an administrator and the bloat is ridiculous, but not a single one of my users has switched, and I don’t blame them. They don’t have to deal with the administrative difficulties, so there’s no benefit to them except being able to download files to their system instead of just in the app, which none of them care about. If nobody is going to use it, my focus ends up being on Plex anyway. I have been pushing Jellyfin for a year and a half. None of my friends or family want to use it unless Plex borks something, and even then they want Plex back.
Jellyfin just isn’t on par with Plex, no matter how much I wish it was. It’s death by a thousand cuts on both the user and administrative ends. It would be one thing if I were a free user or actively paying for Plex, but as a Lifetime Pass holder, I just can’t justify it yet.
For music enthusiasts plexamp is also basically unbeatable. I welcome the day open source catches up.
It’s a small piece in your observation but I’ve been on the hunt for an android client for jellyfin with downloads that are… usable. Fladder has been so far the only one where this seemed to work okay-ish (it’s still slow, and I noticed it doesn’t detect if the device supports Dolby vision to force transcoding). But still, if your one user is still trying… maybe it helps them a lil.
I would recommend Symfonium for muaic listening.
It has an insane feature set (and it can support both Plex and Jellyfin librariesOne of my killer features of it are rolling cache. And you can decide how big and how it behaves to cache songs
I use Jellyfin to listen music at best on desktop at work through the browser
Can you explain rolling cache? I’m pretty sure plexamp does this, but maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re referring to.
My phone UI is german so I translated it with google. Text should be accurate enough
It’s essentially like Spotify does it (probably)
Should something be unclear, give me a heads up :)
Gotcha… Yes, Plexamp does this as well:
Probably inspired by it.
It’s a neat feature :)
Nothing in the self hosted space is taken seriously on windows. There’s a reason for that. Jellyfin on Linux is fine. I’m a fucking smooth brain and if I can do it, a crack enhanced autistic monkey can do it.
Plexamp is better. I will give you that. There’s nothing outright bad about jellyfins take on music. Apps like Discrete make it quite nice, but plexamp just satisfies that out-of-box itch.
Lifetime pass, it still works well so why would I switch?
Same here, but I am also maintaining jellyfin alongside it. In case Plex decides that “lifetime” means something other than what I expected it to mean. I’ve long ago gotten my $80 of usage out of it.
Jellyfin is… ok. It works, it works consistently, and it is consistently almost great. But I provide “cable replacement” and “streaming supplement” services to family that doesn’t live in the same house, and will all likely break a box that managed a VPN.
Given the above, we’ll ride out Plex until they go nuts. Hopefully jellyfin will be polished enough for child use by then.
Why would you bother “maintaining” jellyfin when you don’t use it? Just install it if you ever move away from Plex. Seems like work for nothing.
I already own a lifetime Plex pass, so I have no reason to stop using it. They are high thinking that anyone will pay $750 for lifetime. I paid under $100 but frankly I would have paid more, I use it every day. I’m glad that the devs there were able to get paid and provide for their families while making Plex. Plex works incredibly well for me and my family, I will use it for as long as I am able to.
I struggle to understand why JF users seem to want Plex users to convert so badly. I used JF for a while but things are great on Plex. If I thought JF was better I would switch and my metadata is well prepared for the day I need to.
Yeah, pretty much this. I have very little reason to switch, as the price increase doesn’t affect me at all.
Plus, there are enough known Jellyfin exploits that I’m not comfortable having it on the internet. The vulnerabilities are exploitable even with a reverse proxy. And I enjoy being able to share my libraries with friends and family. I have a few friends who run Plex servers of their own, and having their shared libraries show up in a single unified home page is nice. That wouldn’t be possible if I had to get all of them set up with a local VPN connection first.
Luckily, the two happily run side-by-side. So there’s literally no good reason to ditch Plex if you already have the lifetime pass.
I struggle to understand why JF users seem to want Plex users to convert so badly. I used JF for a while but things are great on Plex.
See no further as wenn Windows does something bad and Linux users come in like locusts.
The difference is that Windows shittiness affects everyone using Wndows. This shittiness from Plex is (currently) only affecting people that are mostly new to the platform.
And those that havent bitten the bullet for the license
I like Plex.
When I bought my Plex lifetime pass I saw it as an investment. So far, it’s paid off handsomely.
I’m still getting great experiences, able to access it from anywhere in the world, on basically any device, seamlessly and simply.
I get it that the jellyfin community is really excited about their thing - I just am not.
I’ve run jellyfin, it was kind of cool I guess, but there was nothing compelling about it. So I uninstalled it. What is jellyfin’s “must have” feature, anyway?
I wouldn’t go out and build a new car when I’m perfectly happy with my 10-year old sedan. If you’re expecting me to go through that just because the new ones cost more than I spent years ago, you’re insane. I wouldn’t go and re paint my house just because the old company now charges new customers more for their paint.
I paid for it, it works well. There’s no reason (except all the FUD I keep seeing on lemmy,) to even think about dismantling and recreating it with something new.
Keep building your dream tool Jellyfin people - Godspeed, but your community should target acquiring net-new users instead of trying to scare and poach happy users away from what they already have.
Plex has clients for every single device there is. I arrive to some 2018 smart tv in a holiday cottage and the absolutely dreadful, measly App Store, now long abandoned, has a plex client.
Also I have a very old life time pass so current pricing means nothing to me.
I paid for it ages ago on a deal, and it currently suits my needs. It runs as a docker container and it just works. It’s easy enough for my elderly mom to use remotely and I’ve ripped my entire movie collection for her to watch. I also like the live tv that’s included with the pass.
I would switch in a heartbeat if it wasn’t doing what I need, but so far I have no complaints, it works well for my family’s needs.
Have lifetime already. No reason to jump. Generally it just works.
No need to have another project while Plex still works fine.
Same. Got it cheap. Untill they break lifetime. Why bail? I’m not compromising my own experience because someone else was too cheap, lazy or slow.
Is it messed up what they are doing? Yeah. But that’s not my fault. Nor is someone missing out on the very clear signposts about what was going to happen. I’m not sacrificing my user experience and investment to justify someone else’s missed opportunity or vendetta.
I got started with jellyfin and never used Plex but there’s a bunch of rough edges:
- No apps on several smart tv/streaming stick stores, Vizio has an app for plex but not jellyfin so I would need to buy a new streaming device. Yes smart tvs spy on you but the alternatives people recommend either spy on you just as much or are expensive (Nvidia shield) and most of them still require side loading so it’s a major obstacle for sharing with anyone else.
- Casting from the mobile app won’t play at full resolution, you can get around this by using VLC as your player and casting from that but that causes it to frequently lose watch progress. Also stopping casting or playing the next episode doesn’t work properly with VLC and you need to rapidly mash “back” to get into the jellyfin app again and queue up a new episode.
- The current release of Jellyfin desktop won’t play audio for iptv streams, this is fixed in the dev branch but I have yet to find a build without other critical bugs so I’ll likely need to wait for the next release which currently has no target date.
- The browser version has spotty controller support that stops working constantly. When it does work it lacks any way to access context menus to mark shows as watched etc. If you’re using a flatpak browser to run it on steam deck or whatever, you’ll have codec and passthrough issues (Chrome is the only flatpak with decent codec support).
- Others have mentioned the security issues which you can bypass by putting authentik or something in front of it but then you can only share with people using browser.
What about exposing through Pangolin tunnel, Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale Funnel approach? Would that allow proper client access?
Same problem regarding security because if you leave it up to jellyfin to do auth you are betting on the wrong horse. With pangolin auth in front of it you have the same problem as before. Clients can’t handle the additional auth.
Or am I misunderstanding the concept of tunnels wrong? I am using pangolin as a reverse proxy with nice VPN management included. How do you the tail scale style “connect this client to this network that has the jellyfin server on it” thingy?
I already paid when it was cheap. I’ll stay and get my full dollars worth and then some. I paid for it, I’ll use it. When it is unusable I’ll bail. Anything else is stupid.
I paid for it, I’ll use it. When it is unusable I’ll bail. Anything else is stupid.
What you are saying is called sunk cost fallacy. A notoriously common stupid way of thinking.
The logical way to think of this is: You already paid for Plex so both are free for you. Since both are free, just pick the better one.
I wouldn’t call it “stupid way of thinking”. That sounds almost offensive, while it’s just a common fallacy that affects most humans.
It was just a reaction to the “anything else is stupid” statement paired with the fallacy. I wouldn’t use that phrasing otherwise.
notoriously common stupid way of thinking
Why are you being rude to somebody you’re trying to convince to put in extra effort to switch services?
You’re right, but I don’t care if they switch honestly. I used that wording because of the “anything else is stupid” statement, which just irked me when paired with the obvious fallacy.
You thinking it’s an “obvious fallacy” is what should be irking you, cause you’re wrong lol
That’s not a sunk cost fallacy at all. I’m not playing catch up, I’m already ahead.
I am thinking about it logically. Plex is the superior experience, and considering I’ve already gotten my money’s worth out of it, they are both free. So why would I use the service that works less well for my use case?
If the user experience continues to degrade, when it finally gets to jellyfin level, I’ll switch.
Perfectly logical, no fallacies here.
The part I quoted is the fallacy. You wrote you will stop using it when it is unusable, not when it is inferior to Jellyfin. Maybe you were thinking something different, but we can’t read your mind. We can only read what you wrote. And what you wrote is a sunk cost fallacy.
It’s ok bud. You misattributed the sunk cost fallacy. It happens. I’ve done it before too… No worries.
A sunk cost fallacy requires a continued investment in a lost cause. I financially have contributed no extra to Plex after my initial investment. I’ve nothing to lose now. No sunk cost. Is time or effort a sunk cost? Possibly? But I already invested that time and effort. My maintenance is also zero, same as my future financial investment. Switching to jellyfin increases my cost in time and effort that I already invested in Plex. Why bail unless necessary? It’s illogical.
The difference between unusable and inferior was never the cusp of this argument to begin with. The distinction of “unusable” vs “inferior” can clearly be acertained by the context of my first full reply. Interestingly enough, your reubuttle is a textbook use of the informal fallacy known as “moving the goalposts”
One again, it’s all good. Don’t worry. My point that Plex is still superior for my use case and I have the incentive to continue using it, still stands. Your use of the sunk cost falacy is disproven on the merit of, that’s not a real example of sunk cost, and also using additional fallacies to defend your position render your point invalid.
I rest my case.
Sunk cost fallacy does not require continued investment. No idea where you got that from. It just requires considering a sunk cost in your decision making.
The difference between unusable and inferior was never the cusp of this argument to begin with.
Literally quoted the inferior part in my original response and specifically mentioned you should just consider both on their merit without considering the sunk cost:
The logical way to think of this is: You already paid for Plex so both are free for you. Since both are free, just pick the better one.
Never said you should switch. Just because you seems to lack reading comprehension skills and misread my comment does not mean I am moving the goalpost. You are using a straw man argument: pretending I argued something I didn’t and debunking that nonexistent argument instead of my real argument.
One valid complaint is that I did ignore switching costs in my shortened explanation. This is a mistake on my part, though it does not affect whether your statement as written is a fallacy. It is.
No, it’s not the sunk cost fallacy lol
Not sure if you’re trolling or you just had a massive brain-fart 🤔 Happens sometimes. Maybe think about it a little more.
The sunk cost fallacy is when you keep sinking more money into something because of how much you have already sunk into it. It doesn’t apply when you simply make a one-off purchase and then don’t ever spend another cent.
no. What you describe is just one form of the fallacy. Sunk cost fallacy in general is when you include a sunk cost in your decision making process at all.
No, what I described is the sunk cost fallacy. You misunderstood it.
No I didn’t.
I use both, I have had my plex running since the lifetime pass could be had for 40 bucks on sale.
I still use plex because it Just Works™️ for my family members. But, the day when they suddenly unprompted blasted all family (and me) with emails about what everyone else watched this week, I decided I would never use it again myself. I also told my family that the next time that stupid ass plex database gets corrupted, I’m not restoring it and they’ll have to join me on jellyfin.
I started using Jellyfin for myself, and I absolutely love it. And settings up my own preferences for transcoding, and things like that giving me full control is fantastic. But jellyfin has issues for multi users imo, sure I can manually make accounts for people and all that. But just the idea of having to input a url for the server in an app is already way past the convenience threshold for a lot.
Also most of the exposed jellyfin endpoints are entirely unprotected, and there’s no native MFA.
Authentik is your friend fam. Might take a minute or two to get it spun up the way you want, but then you can support using a single IdP (that you control) for all your hosted stuff (except Plex). If you want MFA you’ll have to set it up differently than I, I just use an LDAP lookup but it works great.
