- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Plex is starting to enforce its new rules, which prevent users from remotely accessing a personal media server without a subscription fee.
If anyone needs it: https://jellyfin.org/
You must log in or # to comment.
Welcome to JF
(looks up from his floaty chair in his Jellyfin pool while sipping his fruity bittorrent cocktail) C’MON IN FOLKS THE WATER’S FINE!
(sits in his Lamborghini Plex while a beautiful blonde gives him a handy) I’m fine, mate. Maybe later.
Tbf Plex lifetime is often on sale and relatively cheap. For me Plex is a paid Software the free part was always more of a demo.
🥾👅
I’ve never used jellyfin, but do they also host proxy servers? AFAIK plex does and its costing them money, hence the need for paywalling this. You can still use tailscale and reverse proxy to allow remote streaming
Jellyfin does not host anything. With this change free Plex users behind a reverse proxy (or VPN) and Jellyfin users behind a reverse proxy (or VPN) work the same for remote access.
The only difference is that Plex no longer provides expensive services for free, while Jellyfin never provided them.
This is my understanding and I’m surprised with the negative reaction. I think jellyfin is the better alternative being FOSS but this is not the reason.
You can still use tailscale and reverse proxy to allow remote streaming
I used to use Plex and when I discovered there was paid remote streaming function - that goes through their servers - my reactions were “Haha, no”* and checking whether my existing WireGuard setup would do it instead.
Whaddya know, remote streaming using Plex and PlexAmp at no cost.
*Not because I begrudge them recouping costs, but because it’s designed that way to justify charging for it, gives them whatever information they want from my viewing, and it’s not self-hosting if there’s any third party cloud/account component to it.
can’t wait for this to start. then maybe I won’t have to hear about it from the jellyfin shills every week.
But then how will you know how much they love the smell of their own farts?
Don’t worry, they’ll still let you know.
Imagine, you software get massively used for piracy, and then you decide to ask for licence for the use of thir software, host on server you do not control. I suspect this will not be result they expected
Bought a lifetime Plex pass a few years ago so this doesn’t affect me. It’s honestly worth the cost especially over time.
I also bought a lifetime Plex pass a few years ago, but I’ve migrated to Jellyfin because Plex is no longer a trustworthy project.
Same. That’s for me a red flag that a company took the enshittification path and things will get progressively worse.
Plus I would rather support an open source project that benefits the whole community than a greedy company who is trying to milk their customers.
Anybody still using Plex kind of deserves what they get at this point. They’ve been announcing these anti-consumer “features” for a while now.
People don’t deserve to be mistreated but it is surprising that folks haven’t abandoned it if they’re so actively anti consumer.
Agree to disagree. When they actively and willingly go for the product that’s screwing them over.
Do you think that applies to you as well? That you deserve bad things to happen to you because of your consumer choices?
The alternatives are not as easy use
I kind of understand why someone would honestly. Jellyfin subtitles are still a hot mess for a lot of formats unfortunately. Also, while plex has tried really hard to ruin their UI, I’ve still had more trouble explaining where to find things in Jellyfin. And if you’re sharing your collection with friends or family members there’s a lot more technical stuff involved.
So I can see why the balance might still tip toward paying plex still for some people.
Luckily I bought a lifetime license ages ago before the first price hike so this doesn’t affect me yet. So I’m just riding out the decline, running them in parallel until plex completely breaks. slowly transitioning the family as they get annoyed with broken features. Plexamp is quickly taking care of that 😅
Two years ago, when I found out that you need damn subscription, to watch YOUR stuff with transcoding on your device in local network, from your local server - I complained on reddit and a lot of people was disagree with me for harsh position.
They_got_what they_focking_deserve.png
Pure rent seeking. It’s not the only example. So many products have artificial defects deliberately added by the manufacturer so that they can then charge you to disable the defect.
Years ago now, they pushed an offer for lifetime subscription onto my server. I clicked it, went through to their website and bought it, paid, the subscription activated and worked.
The next day they emailed to say actually i wasn’t eligible for the offer, they cancelled it and refunded me and said it would actually cost $30 more.
I installed Jellyfin that same day, it was pretty buggy back then but was definitely the right decision.
They deliver a working piece of software to you. They employ people to maintain it and add new features. They ask a price for this work.
How is this rent seeking?
Lies. Local streaming never required a plex pass. Its for remote streaming only, but keep pushing that false narrative.
Welcoming the incoming dowvotes for correcting your comment just like the many similar comments and posts I’ve seen on Reddit, but this is purely a configuration issue.
Transcoding on local network is allowed without a subscription. If you are running your own DNS server (like pihole or unbound) you need to configure an internal “plex.direct” record. You also need to uncheck an option to “treat your WAN IP as internal” option which corrects double NAT issues.
I have yet to see a need to move away from Plex. I paid for the cheap lifetime sub over a decade ago at this point and everyone I invite to my server has no complaints and has not had to pay Plex a dime. I don’t use their plex.tv proxy, I direct connect to my own IP and leave their remote proxy option off in the server and everything works great.
I will check out Jellyfin at some point if Plex makes things more difficult in time, but for now these articles are literally just rage bait in the homelab ecosystem. They enacted this back in April of 2025 already!
Any recommendations for Linux distros for a Jellyfin server?
I have my jellyfin container running in podman on Alpine Linux.
Yunohost
Debian and Ubuntu have the most docs and guides If you know what you’re doing nixos or ucore would be pretty unbreakable Paid for product I love Unraid
Trash guides is pretty good for getting started https://trash-guides.info/
I set mine up with Debian and Swizzin community edition.
Good luck setting up remote streaming with Jellyfin.
Already did ages ago
Sir, this is a /c/selfhosted.
Why not? It depends on your situation, but if you have a static IP or a dyndns service, you can just open a port to your Jellyfin and reach it from anywhere.
You can also stick a reverse proxy in front of it, if you want to feel safer.
or use tail scale / headscale
Yes, but that’s not always doable, e.g. on LG TV’s.
while not technically allowed by cloudflare TOS for the free plan, it’s possible to host jellyfin under a cloudflare tunnel
You can “proxy” tailscale networks, you’d need 1 device per household with tailscale running and accepting/advertising routes. Not sure if tailscale IP addressing works in that case though, and just doing it via private IP can get problematic with same network range in the household
That works. I did it with a LG tv: Have a server advertising the routes with tailscale and in your tv when you configure the connection select that server as gateway and that’s it.
That’s smart. Thanks.
Any old Raspberry Pi on your network can forward a port from LAN to the Jellyfin server on Tailscale somewhere. Single iptables masquerade command should do the trick. Or if you happen to have a good router with owrt support you can run Tailscale there too.
I’d strongly recommend reverse proxy, some sort of security like crowd sec or fail2ban and sperate auth (authelia, aithentik) in front of anything you’re opening to the internet. Just opening services directly up to the internet is choice I’d politely describe as brave.
How do you manage a separate auth (I imagine HTTP auth) with app clients?
“Good luck setting up remote streaming with free Plex.”
Yes, Jellyfin does not forward ports for you. Same as free Plex. With this change both are the same difficulty to set up for free, the only difference is with Plex there’s a shortcut: Buy Plex.
I don’t think simply forwarding the port actually works with free Plex anymore. I think if the server has a different public IP from the client it asks you to pay, even if you’re connecting to the server over LAN.Edit: That doesn’t appear to be true. I’m not entirely sure how Plex is checking whether you’re trying to stream remotely. In my case at least it works if I connect to my server using the LAN IP, but not if I use DNS (even though it resolves to the same IP). Maybe I’m missing something to allow it to work using the hostname.
Interesting, maybe they check whether it’s a domain/remote IP on the client side to prevent usage of a reverse proxy.
I checked the logs and it said it was assuming a remote connection because there was an unknown hostname in the headers (I forget the exact wording). It was because the hostname I was using didn’t match the hostname configured in the server’s OS (one I set up on my local DNS server).
I ultimately want to ditch Plex, but as an existing lifetime member, it currently handles everything so smoothly for my users that I don’t see enough benefits in switching. Particularly on the music streaming side (PlexAmp), I think the experience is the most polished one I’ve seen.
My hope is that by the time the lifetime Plex Pass experience has become enshittified, Jellyfin will be more ready than it is today, and I’ll make a switch then.
I ran Jellyfin and plex for a while, using Jellyfin instead of plex at every oppurtunity. Then Jellyfin broke, I couldn’t figure out how to fix it in an evening, and I just went back to using Plex, which had continued working. It isn’t great, sure, but it’s fine. I think Jellyfin would need to be Immich levels of cool, or plex would actually need to be unusable for me to switch.
I’m in the same boat, I have a Plex pass, I have my reverse proxy setup, Plex just works ™ and when it stops, Jellyfin is already installed and ready to go.
Can I avoid updating to a version to avoid this enforcement?
Years ago I decided to go with Emby over Plex only because at the time plex didnt support kodi integration and I enjoyed using that at the time for my front-end user experience. Within 6 months they started supporting it and I was upset since I did want to go with plex. Lately I feel like I made the perfect decision. It’s gotta be close to 10 years now and I paid one $100 lifetime fee for Emby and still use it everyday along with some family and friends I gave access to. Also gotta remember I dont believe jellyfin was even an option at that time. I tried it not to long ago and although it was fine, I actually think I liked emby a little more.
As for the remote access, how do they block it? Do they not allow you to setup your own remote connection that does not involve plex? Thats how I do it, I do not use emby connect to make it easier to go through them I just setup my own domain, use ddns, and configure the ports I want exposed and thats it. If plex doesnt allow that then thats already crazy, if they do and even thats now blocked then thats even crazier.
Emby may be simpler, and i heard about plex having a music AI feature that I was actually jealous of, but overall it just works and not paying anything in forever will always be my preferred method over awful monthly subscriptions anyday.
I bought the Emby lifetime license about 2 years ago when the plex remote streaming stuff first started getting talked about. It coincided with my server refresh so it ended up working out. I have been really happy with Emby so far.
One thing to note is that music streaming on remote devices is WAY better on plex, Emby behaves more like a mapped network drive running over the internet to a local music player that then forgets your position on pause or when you move away from the remote app/device whereas Plex is actually functional as a modern music player. I keep a local copy of my music library on my phone anyways and okay through Gonemad so it is a non-issue for me but Emby should work better than it does in that case.
Plex also allows/provides “live” tv (with ads) which can be nice if you are into that, and there is the “free” streaming library too which Emby doesn’t offer. I’ll keep plex around for those features but non-of my stuff is/will be hosted on Plex.
Yeah, as a big music fan I have always been disappointed in Embys music functionality. I followed the discussions around this on there site and I was a bit disappointed by the response. They were getting the same feedback around how bad it is and it should be revamped or even have a dedicated app just for music and they just dismissed it basically saying we’ll it can be something we may do later on but dont hold your breath and that they believe it works fine the way it is and dont agree it will help.
Luckily I really didnt care to use it for music anyway. I already had a Subsonic (now Navidrome) server for that. It would have been nice for a few things, but ultimately it was fine. The cool part is the android app Symfonium is the best music app I have ever used and it connects to all the servers to pull data. I obviously still use navidrome, but I could just pull from emby as well with it.
Plex centralizes authentication at plex.tv
When a user wants to connect to a ‘private’ plex server, they must first sign into their plex.tv account, which then provides the auth token needed to login to the users server (even if both the client and server are on the same lan)
With this system, Plex can monitor and control every single connection to every plex server; limiting access to whatever they want. Even your own local content.
Yeah hell to the naww. They’re also probably tracking all your viewing habits and monetizing that data, they’d be foolish not to with that kind of access.
Dam thats what I thought. Emby has something similar but doesnt force you to use it so I don’t.
Emby has what they call ‘Emby Connect’ which is entirely optional and is basically a glorified DNS service.
It doesn’t proxy connections, it just passes on the hostname to the client. The server is still required to setup port forwarding or other routing like tailscale or a proxy on a vps.
Emby Connect will let you sign into your local server using your emby.media credentials, but unlike Plex it’s completely optional and only works once explicitly linked to the local user of an Emby server.
deleted by creator
I have a couple of USB Hauppauge TV receivers in our HTPC which I use with NextPVR. I cut the ads from the recordings then bang them into Jellyfin
Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin and all legal, and each have ways to serve liveTV alongside your own locally stored content, and DVR that liveTV if you want. You’d just have to purchase a liveTV subscription from your local provider (or go the Pirate route ofc).
deleted by creator
It’s probably a TOS violation but you can combine it with pinchflat to strip ads and sponsored content from YouTube. It’s not a general YouTube app though, rather you use it to preserve channels you’re interested in.
You can also use Jellyfin to serve legally purchased music from bandcamp etc, or movies and TV shows ripped from Blurays and DVDs.
I just wish Plex on my TV didn’t have this bug where it can’t play the correct audio track when Direct Play is enabled. So annoying.
