Well I already have jellyfin running in a container, just have to figure out how to get mum’s TV to work with it I guess
<edit> log in on a local IP and not the network name and it’s working again. but I’ll be moving to jellyfin from now
I got the Plex lifetime pass over 10 years ago for pretty cheap and Plex has served me well over the years. But it’s just so damn bloated now and the biggest recent change to their android app is atrocious. The app is so laggy and slow now. And downloading movies to watch locally on a tablet is just painful.
So I decided to start experimenting with Jellyfin this month and I am blown away at how fast and snappy everything is. It still isn’t as refined as Plex but there’s something to be said about privacy and using FOSS apps.
I’ll be using Jellyfin going forward now.
I’m glad I really only use it for music, but the fire TV app works decently well. Better than the fucking Netflix app, at least.
Longtime lifetime Plex Pass holder here.
FOSS is important. Having control over how you use your own hardware and files is important.
But even if none of that mattered, once I actually used Jellyfin for a few days the snappy bloat-free feel of it won me over. Switching between Plex and Jellyfin felt like switching between windows and linux.
Very new to using Jellyfin but I also feel the difference in loading and such. Feels so much cleaner! Already uninstalled Plex :)
what is FOSS
I’ve also got lifetime plex pass. I might take more of an interest in Jellyfin if there was an easy way to transfer all of my server settings, playlists, metadata, etc. over. But it just seems like such a hastle to make the switch and I really don’t have any big issues with plex aside from needing to change the settings so they don’t sell my data.
FOSS is free and open source software. And the word “free” does a lot of heavy lifting there because it refers to much more than it typically not costing anything. It means that you have the freedom to do what you want with your stuff, basically. You (or others on your behalf) can see the source code for what the software is doing, and you can even change and improve it.
You’ll see the word “libre” thrown around in this context too, for that reason. For many people the liberty side of free matters a lot more than the no-cost side. But they do go hand in hand, because not needing to protect a revenue stream makes it a lot easier to not enshittify software. You’ll see names like LibreOffice and FLOSS instead of FOSS.
So it’s basically the whole Linux world that is very well represented on Lemmy and the fediverse. :)
Sent using FOSS Voyager web client …in FOSS browser LibreWolf (a fork of FireFox) …on FOSS operating system Linux.
I use Mint btw.
(This is an inside joke for the other Linux people – a play off of “I use Arch btw” where Arch Linux is a hardcore distro where you kind of build your operating system piece by piece, but with excellent documentation. Valve switched SteamOS to be based on Arch a while back)
I have a lot of custom artwork, covers, etc. How easy did that data migrate? I’ve got 6,500 movies
I can’t imagine moving over would be difficult. Just point Jellyfin to the same folder containing your content. When I first setup my home lab, I was going to use Plex, but I could not get it to recognize media. The naming format wasn’t right or something. Jellyfin just worked immediately
man, I’ve manually setup tons of huge playlists, and entered in a hell of a lot of TV show information by hand so episodes play in an order I like. Getting that working in plex probably constitutes days of work. I don’t want to even think about re-doing that in jelly fin. If there were a way to automate the process though, I’d probably be more interested.
Plex recently switched the remote watch thing to be behind a paywall. If your PC/App was also on the same local network it would probably work.
Leaving Plex and switching to Jellyfin would work even better.
Genuinely Plex has become so obtrusive about NEW FEATURES, NOW WE HAVE THIS, USE THIS THUS WAY!!! and then also my libraries have somehow become even slower to load. I’ve been using jellyfin way more often
Imo Plex is worth the lifetime pass if you get it on sale.
All the comments saying Jellyfin is better always puzzle me. I’ve given it like three chances now and each time it feels just as buggy as the last. And that doesn’t even consider the fact that you’ll need more steps to expose it to the Internet for remote viewing or the fact that there’s literally a list of unaddressed security holes https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
So don’t expose it to the internet - which should be the default stance for anything.
The internet was (mistakenly and intentionally) built without security - that doesn’t mean we should just accept that, but instead build everything with our own security.
Numerous mesh VPN solutions exist: Hamachi has been around since at leas 2006. NeoRouter since at least 2012. Then we have Wireguard and Tailscale, and others.
Business build their own tunnels between locations, using routers/gateways with that capability. Consumer routers from Linksys could do this in 2006.
Thwres zero excuse for running anything exposed to the internet.
In closing NO SOFTWARE is free of bugs. With Plex you get to pay for those bugs and still have software that depends on a connection even though you’re hosting and viewing your own media, locally.
You wanna denigrate Jellyfin, at least be honest about the pros/cons between the different solutions.
So don’t expose it to the internet
No
Thwres zero excuse for running anything exposed to the internet.
…except this entire thread is based on a use case for it
With Plex you get to pay for those bugs and still have software that depends on a connection even though you’re hosting and viewing your own media, locally.
You’re condescending dude. I wouldn’t be using Plex if I didn’t understand like 37 things you’re implying I don’t understand here. I paid for it once, it was a good value for me, and I find it pretty weird that you apparently want to admonish me for that. If you want to use jellyfin have at it. I found it buggy to the point of barely being usable. Just sharing that experience and I don’t need anyone to agree with that.
The problems with Plex are not technical. The problems from Plex are that they take away features and change the terms of use to the detriment of the user. Given plex’s pricing changes over the last year, I would be concerned that your lifetime pass be affected by some policy change.
Yes, they changed the free featureset, and afaik those changes were fair. Providing a tunnel for remote streaming for free doesn’t seem like a good business plan. I mean, yeah they could always back out of the promise of what a lifetime pass is, and if they do I will find a new solution and hope they’re sued for it.
If they do back out of their lifetime commitment, I suspect that would drive some other similar apps to get better. Maybe I would even learn to live with jellyfin as it currently exists in that situation. But so far I don’t see a reason to, and that would almost have been true if I never paid for plex.
Fair enough.
I’m speaking from both sides here, having used Plex for years and now jellyfin:
Don’t tie technical competence of a product with its monetary cost. They are not necessarily equivalent.
Don’t expose stuff to the internet
Are you advocating for an self hosting to only exist locally? Or are you advocating for hosting everything on corporate servers?
Don’t expose things to the internet
That goes for corporate settings as well as personal stuff. You almost certainly do not need your self hosted services to be publicly accessible by bots. Anything on the internet gets pounded.
… You just literally said hosting shouldn’t exist. You are using the Internet right now.
Also pretty weird to keep phrasing this as a command, discounting an entire class of use cases to be invalid because bad actors exist?
…except this entire thread is based on a use case for it
Except it’s not. OP is trying to watch stuff on his own network.
Then they aren’t doing it correctly, or lying. That is an included/free feature. They advertise it that way and other users ITT say it works. I’ve no reason to doubt them.
From one of the Jellyfin devs in the issue you linked, posted in April this year:
Now, let’s address this clearly once and for all. What is possible is unauthenticated streaming. Each item in a Jellyfin library has a UUID generated which is based on a checksum of the file path. So, theoretically, if someone knows your exact media paths, they could calculate the item IDs, and then use that ItemID to initiate an unauthenticated stream of the media. As far as we know this has never actually been seen in the wild. This does not affect anything else - all other configuration/management endpoints are behind user authentication. Is this suboptimal? Yes. Is this a massive red-flag security risk that actively exposes your data to the Internet? No.
At this point, this over-4-year-old issue has gotten posted to HackerNews more than enough times and gotten quite enough unhelpful peanut-gallery comments like those above… We are limiting this issue to Jellyfin collaborators only at this point. Most of the big items are already tracked elsewhere (specifically, unauth playback) or have already been fixed. And many other options are now open to us in a post-10.11 landscape now that we have a proper library database ready.
That only addresses one of several items.
Feel free to go read the multiple writeups from the maintainers that go over each one, we don’t need to copy them all here into the comments for you.
But it’s FOSS, compared to Plex. And it also does not ask for money for anything.
You can also add more security yourself if you want to. Not by coding new stuff into jellyfin, but by adding some sort of auth BEFORE jellyfin.
Setting up auth before Jellyfin breaks clients. This is not an option. Edit: Unless you meant VPN like Tailscale, but then you’d have to install Tailscale too, which I don’t want to explain to others.
Tailscale needs you to explicitly add your device to the tailnet, so it’s some form of authentication.
Also, why don’t you want to explain tailscale? It’s really simple.
Good luck installing Tailscale on my friends’ LG webOS TVs.
And making sure Tailscale auto launches on a FireTV stick is a pita too. Telling them to open Tailscale on each start is not an option.
Yes, but it’s always the one people come back too.
They mention the other issues are either being tracked elsewhere or already solved.
At the end of the day, it’s a community project, done by primarily volunteers, who is not making any money doing this. No VC funding to hire developers to take care of these issues.
I understand there’s an explanation for it. Doesn’t make these things not things to consider when choosing one’s solution
I used Plex for privacy reasons. I stopped using Plex for privacy reasons.
Fellow jellyfin user 😍
For a perfect pairing, Jellyfin + Tailscale.
Oh, this is so true. I set it up and now can watch things anywhere. Even my kids who live 6 hours away can just jump on and watch that stuff. Jellyfin is what plex wanted to be, like 10+ years ago. I remember how stupid it was when they first started charging people to watch their own local media, it was funny at first because it was only on iphones that you had to pay. Then it was everywhere. They will continue to take features away until you pay.
Can you do it from someone’s roku TV easily? Im worried about having too much networking trouble getting my mom’s TV hooked up to my jellyfin but don’t really want to open a port to the raw internet.
its pretty fucking easy to use jellyfin on any device after you have it set up. most platforms have it in their app store.
There are a bunch of awesome jellyfin clients as well
That’s what freedom looks like ;) choice!
foss is such a beautiful thing
its pretty fucking easy to use jellyfin on any device
Not easy enough for the majority of my Plex servers users to figure out on their own. I would love to switch away from Plex, but until the clients become as idiot proof as Plex I have to keep using it. Luckily I bought a lifetime plex pass a long time ago for GPU transcoding
i feel as if the initial setup is a lot more of a learning curve than connecting a client. getting your home server accessible over wan(?) is probably one of the hardest parts if thats what you mean though
Setting up the server to be externally accessible was easy to me since I have lots of experience hosting stuff both from home and from VPSs. Although not as easy as with Plex of course, which will even automatically forward the ports for you if you have Upnp enabled in your router.
It’s the clients that are the issue. They are not as easy to use for less technologically inclined people, my dad already struggled with the switch from Netflix to Plex. And for many of my users there isn’t even a Jellyfin app available, like for older Samsung smart TVs for example
I host a plex server with at 90TB library for my family and friends, which are about 50 users atm. Jellyfin just isn’t idiot-proof enough that it can replace Plex for me, I don’t want to play tech support for all the users that can’t get the client working on their devices
Jellyfin.
That is all.
And this is why I’m setting up Jellyfin. I paid for a lifetime Plex pass a while ago, and I would have been happy to toss them some more money if they had just stuck to the core service (like Nabu Casa/Home Assistant - absolutely worth $7/mo), but nooooooooooooooo Plex decided to spin up their own streaming servers and go down that path instead.
I smell an IPO coming soon.
It was a pain to get up and running, but now that it is i actually prefer it. OSS aside there are things I like, like editions/versions are all kind of merged, more customization of the appearance, more performant. I’m pretty happy. Granted it was months of reorganizing my media for it.
I would go with jellyfin, but my stupid old Samsung TV has tizen and can’t find a way to install it.
You need to setup a developer account so you can install apps from local sources
I had a similar issue where I wanted to use my Xbox Series X to play Jellyfin but there was no client available. I ended up switching from Plex to Emby. I tested it for a month and then bought a lifetime pass, I’m quite happy with it. The client definitely isn’t as polished as Plex’s clients are but they allow me to do everything I want with much more control. I especially like the plugin system, being able to create my own persistent 24/7 faux tv channels is A++
I use an nVidia Shield for it. There’s probably cheaper ones, but you tend to get what you pay for, and I’ve got a few 4KBR remuxes that even that struggles on.
Is this an okd systen now, how does it hold up? Is it lacking anywhere?
You could plug in a firestick or something similar as jellyfin has an android app.
Get an Onn streaming device from Walmart for ~$30
I don’t live in USA.
sigh
This is why I switched to Jellyfin and recommend everyone to switch to Jellyfin
Because OP doesn’t know what he’s doing? Or because you like opening your server to the internet without any authentication?
How about… Neither.
I don’t think OP doesn’t know, but I feel like its been said multiple times here, so maybe op either missed it or has a use case where he still wants to use Plex.
I have a Jellyfin server and I don’t need to expose it to the internet. Look at all the posts and comments here about setting up a reverse proxy and to securely expose your server to the internet. But you can also just keep your server locked behind your firewall and only access your network using a self hosted VPN.
Op doesn’t know what he’s doing, otherwise we wouldn’t have this thread.
JellyFin can’t be securely exposed to the internet.
VPN go burrr
Not sure if you understand what a VPN is?
Ok buddy, go bother other kids now. I obviously know what a VPN is. But you don’t like Jellyfin so keep using whatever you are using and I’ll keep using whatever I’m using.
You obviously don’t though lol. Using a VPN is not exposing it to the internet - it’s a private network. It’s even in the name!
The most annoying thing about Jellyfin is that there’s no way to consolidate all of your servers under a single interface.
With Plex, I have a huge library made up of all my friends’ libraries.
Jellyfin’s local download function suuuuuucks by comparison. Lifetime Plex pass has been worth it.
I know Plex is a business that has to make money, but if I hadn’t bought a lifetime pass for $50 a decade ago, I’d have dropped them at this point.
Same. Lifetime pass. That money is gone, and I use jellyfin nowadays. My photo collection will be stored on ente soon. Still no idea where to host my music library.
I setup music with Clementine, and output analog via the jack. Surely there must be better way… But it was easy & I can choose songs to play from cellphone.
For your photo collection I’d also suggest Immich.
I paid too, but consider that you basically paid $5 per year for 10 years and I’d say that good. You don’t need to feel guilty if you decide to leave, you got your money’s worth.
(And I mean, I have a sneaky suspicion they’re coming for the lifetime users sooner or later)
Yeah, for sure. They can’t survive if people just paid 50 $ ten years ago. They’re going to restrict the service for lifetime users sooner or later.
Same here. I have no complaints about the service and it’s easy for my tech illiterate family and friends, but I’ll switch as soon as they try to charge pass owners for new features.
“Try our new Plex Pass Lifetime* Plus!”
*Valid for the lifetime of the product†.
†2 years
I know it’s fashionable to shit on Plex here, but OP either has his server misconfigured or is just trying to stir the pot:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202526943-plex-free-vs-paid/
Free to Use: Video (movies & TV) streaming of personal content on the same local network as the Plex Media Server
Yes, but they’re still sending emails to people even when it doesn’t apply. I had a Plex pass and still all of my users received emails and freaked out. They’re trying to trick people into thinking they need to pay, that’s the asshole move here.
except not via mobile devices. you have to pay for the app to work.
Right, the $2 is to use the relay service, which costs Plex bandwidth. They can’t just do it free for everyone forever, bandwidth costs money.
But there are dozens of people in this very thread who if I am understanding correctly are willing to offer the same service for free to prove their point that Plex is evil.
They charge for remote access whether it’s through their relay service or not, and you can’t opt out of fallback to their relay service.
If you connect with the IP address it doesn’t charge you. You can use ZeroTier to connect from anywhere.
That’s not quite the same - that gives you the appearance of being a local device, which is enough to fool the restriction.
Their policy and technology enforcement is to charge for remote access, not relaying.
Can you give me an example of remote direct access that would be blocked? You can use nginx to forward your public IP to your Plex and it’s fine, you can forward ports directly on your router and connect to your public IP, you can use a VPN to connect from a different network; what are they limiting? It’s the same hurdle you have to overcome with Jellyfin. Relays are convenient, but they also cost money.
Yes, however using the relay is not a prerequisite to being required to pay for a Plex subscription. That is what he is trying to say.
I can run Plex on the open internet and not use their relay at all, however if the IP of the viewer is not an interal IP on the same subnet as Plex (I assume the same subnet is required) then you’ll be greeted with the Plex paywall.
You are absolutely correct that it costs money to run a relay, but the relay has nothing to directly do with the paywall.
That isn’t how it used to work.
Why would they care what subnet the request is coming from? That’s wack.
I have always connected via a FQDN, for some reason last night it decided to shit it’s self. Resolved by accessing via local IP, then the FQDN worked again
I’ll shit on Plex as much as anyone, but I wouldn’t rule out some kind of DNS nonsense here.
Think they worked out that using the IP instead of the hostname solved it.
It means the same specific subnet. If you have multiple subnets (one for wired, one for wireless for example) it will also trigger that limitation unless you go in and manually tell it hey these are local.
I don’t have the link(s) on hand but there’s a Tizen build of Jellyfin for Samsung TVs. It runs rather slow on my old tube so I wouldn’t recommend it outside of a last resort. It’s actually smoother for me to just open the app on the TV and then remote control it from a browser/app on another device (my Steam Deck is my homelab universal remote). But you can use the Tizen dev tools or a simpler docker container to push it to the TV.
For my folks I got a cheap Walmart brand Android box (Onn 4k Plus). I installed Jellyfin from the app store then black hole’d the thing because I’m wary of cheap Android apps and their history of supply chain attacks. It’s much more responsive and also leaves me with the option of installing additional stuff like Smart Tubes, Retro Arch and whatnot.
Sorry to hit you with a random question, but since I’m in a similar situation: are you using Tailscale to remote stream to your parents, or how do you get that working seamlessly with Jellyfin?
Unfortunately I can’t help in that regard. I keep everything local/unexposed so my solution for them was just running Jellyfin at their place. I was already
rsyncing some stuff to a NAS I set up for them (and vice versa), as off-site backup. Since the files were already there it made the most sense to just give them their own instance.Not the guy, but I use a domain I bought from cloudflare with a cloudflare tunnel on my network. Not as secure as a VPN like tailscale, but doesn’t require setting up a VPN for my friends and family’s TVs so they can connect to the server while keeping my actual IP hidden and without needing to do any port forwarding.
This is a helpful. This sounds like a way, even if I’m still in the “hmmm, yes, I recognize some of those words” stage. Maybe I’ll look for a detailed guide.
I admit, though, the details of how to do this are pretty hard to imagine for me - networking and tunneling seems very technical. Before I can jump off the Plex enshittification train, I just want a way to share my media with tech-illiterate family without complex setup on their end.
Yes, I’m a technical person, but not a web developer and so this was all new to me until very recently. Good luck!
The way I think of the cloudflare tunnel is very similar to a VPN into your system from outside, but for web application traffic specifically.
Ah the weekly “Plex should be entirely free even though it’s commercial software!”
Plex is entirely free and completely local, but only if you don’t use the features that make it so convenient (the relay server they offer, authentication and authorization, etc). Things I’m pretty sure jellyfin doesn’t provide at all. If people spent half the time reading as they do trying to convince people to get angry at optional features then maybe we wouldn’t have so many posts like this.
Jellyfin does offer authentication and authorization. Relay can be done via nginx iirc?
Having to set up a reverse proxy is basically a non-starter for most people, while I’ve talked extremely non-technical people into running Plex since it just works out of the box.
The authentication is lacking 2fa and has a half hearted attempt at fail2ban
If you try to properly implement either of those, the standard device clients won’t work anymore.
Plex provides default SSL.
The relay is actually a bit more useful.
You can be on a carrier grade NAT with no real external IP.
It’s more akin to running a VPS somewhere and SSH tunneling your home server through it.
They also cache* the entirety of the TVDB and EPG Services.
I’m not sore about most of this with jellyfin, and I am trying to primarily use it, but I really miss some of the features. But realistically, adding 2FA to the clients would be a huge benefit. trying to replace 2FA with wish.com fail2ban feels particularly dirty.
You can run the OIDC version and use SSO and implement MFA on the IdP. I use Keycloak for SSO w/ MFA and users sign into my Jellyfin via Keycloak. Just disable username/password auth and leave it SSO only.
The only benefit Plex really has is the relaying, but I was able to sync watch with 3 people basically as far across North America as you can get from me and it worked without issue so…
That’s fine for browser-based watching, literally no one in my group watches via the browser. Even on android it’d be a fight. Grandma’s not going to go on to a browser to auth her session.
The clients need to support it. If it were just backend, I’d fork it myself.
Neither do I - I use either my phone, or my smart TV, or my fire stick. SSO works fine there, or you can use the QR based session transfer to SSO on your phone and then “sign in on another device” or whatever by scanning the QR your other device is showing. I think they call it quick connect or something.
It does what you want.
And if you think Grandma can’t figure out scanning a QR code, Grandma is also not gonna figure out MFA lol.
Relaying gigabytes of traffic per user costs serious money. Rely on them to do it, and they are either going to charge you or are just waiting to charge you when their VCs come knocking.
Except they’re spamming to users that they need this subscription even when they host locally or already have a membership.
I bought a plex lifetime pass for $100 over a decade ago and I never see ads like this. I only occasionally get the notice for plex pro week and stuff like that.
I also bought Plex lifetime pass also for $100 and I am getting ads like this.
How is Plex used if you aren’t using it to stream your self hosted media? I remember seeing channels and such before. Is all the official stuff licensed content? I can’t imagine their offering is very competitive.
They’ve added commercial supported live channels like many other free services but yeah, it’s lacking compared to others. Pluto.tv is my go-to if I want to throw something on at a family members house or something like that. Owned by the networks, reasonably short ads, completely free. Too bad they didn’t figure that out 10 years ago lol.
99.9% of the use mine has seen for the past several years has been to stream to my living room TV in the same house. But regardless, what point are you making? It’s commercial software. And btw the $85 I paid years ago to use it forever was more than worth it to me.
it’s commercial software
digital cancer
Here’s a controversial and complex stance, but you may be able to understand it eventually:
Don’t buy it.
I am a proponent of FOSS too but that doesn’t mean anything built for profit is shitty, let alone “cancer”.
Hey, you paid for them to spy on your media, give them their money’s worth.
God I hate humans
I do too. They tend to speak from the heart but the second something is inconvenient, they’re cool with relaxing their morals.
I’m not trying to make a point, I’m just curious how many this impacts and so on. I imagine it will go down similar to Netflix account sharing crackdown; generally viewed unfavourably, but will convert enough users to pay for it to be worth it.
Gotcha. We’ll see, I guess.
Also the weekly intentionally misunderstanding how Plex pass/Plex remote pass works in order to complain:
Free to Use: Video (movies & TV) streaming of personal content on the same local network as the Plex Media Server
Can you get around that bs with a VPN?
