- 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/
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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.
Imagine hosting a software on your own hardware and still choosing the one that makes you dependent on the whims of a corporation lmao
*only for external streaming.
You can cut it off from the internet and stream in your house locally for free still.
End from any external streaming perspective, they are hosting a repository with your connection and port info, so your external friends can connect without you needing to manually configure or update their settings when you make a local change. Plus they are hosting stream relays for those that are unable to make a direct connection. To me, seems fair they’d ask for payment for that service.
When I first set up my server this year it was a VERY easy decision between this and jellyfin. Why would I ever go with the corporate, closed source option?
In my case, I was not able to make jellyfin work: transcoding issues, lagging, client disconnection or unresponsive… Plex worked flawlessly out of the box with the same hardware and the same library.
From time to time I try Jellyfin again, but things never change …
Would you like help/guidance on your next attempt? It definitely works, but possibly not on corporate devices like Roku and such - I never did have a lot of luck with those, other than I think I had Jellyfin casting to a couple of Chromecasts we have kicking around. Not when the internet was out, of course, cause why would they keep working if Google can’t get their data on the spot?
Thank you, but it won’t be necessary. I think my issues are hardware -related, or simply my NAS is under too much load from other applications 😅 Other than that I should try with the Chromecast as you suggested, maybe the problem was the shitty client application…
If I don’t succeed I’m still good with Plex, and I have a raspberry hanging around for an emergency Kodi.
Imagine being so addicted to having every nanosecond of your waking life filled with noise and colors that this announcement means anything.
What does that even mean
Seems pretty simple to parse, what is causing you an issue? What is not clear?
I don’t understand what your reasoning is for making that statement.
Said the needle to the arm. You’re all addicts.
You ok man?
Sorry, I didn’t read your reply, I was streaming every movie, album, book, and magazine in existence to every location in the universe at all times. Even when I blink I have 16K screens inside my eyelids.
This is normal behavior in 2025. If you cut off my terabit stream, I will writhe on the ground and scream.
I am not in any way addicted to digital hoarding or continuously upgrading systems that have already exceeded the capacity of any normal person to watch a movie since 20 years.
Did you just make up an imaginary person to hate?
I never shared my server anyway, but a lot of the other design decisions they’ve made over the last couple years drove me to Jellyfin. My issue though is I cannot figure out how to set it up properly like I had Plex setup with genres, sort by added to server, lists, etc. I can’t tell if I’m missing something obvious, or Jellyfin just lacks those features and I need to get a plugin or something. Anyway, sorry for the rant. Just hoping someone has experienced similar and might point me in the right direction.
Don’t know all the answers but the home screen has the “Recently Added” rows if you scroll down.
And you can go to plex settings and disable all the love channels, discover, friend activity, etc that everyone complains about. Make it a simple plex server again.
I display my movies and music in the order they were added by default, but I do recall a lot of historical problems with that functionality. It has not been a problem for me the last year or two, I would say, but I do remember it being a problem.
There’s still lots of room for improvement, to be damn sure. But can’t beat the feeling of freedom, you ask me.
I’m just thankful that the app doesn’t run like garbage due to all the bloat like Plex does. That and I really like the fact it auto checks for subtitle files and plays them. Overall I am glad I moved I just wish there were a couple more features.
Good luck setting up remote streaming with Jellyfin.
Already did ages ago
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.
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?
or use tail scale / headscale
Yes, but that’s not always doable, e.g. on LG TV’s.
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.
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.
while not technically allowed by cloudflare TOS for the free plan, it’s possible to host jellyfin under a cloudflare tunnel
“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).
Sir, this is a /c/selfhosted.
Jellyfin users, how is the transcoding situation? I have a mix of AV1 and H265 and I need to get smooth playback to my living room Apple TV for families’ sake.
I can’t speak for client capabilities on Apple devices, but what’s your server hardware? CPU or GPU transcoding?
I have an AMD GPU in my server and have no issues transcoding AV1 and H265 for my lesser capable clients.
You can also setup Jellyfin in parallel to Plex and give it a whirl.
You can also setup Jellyfin in parallel to Plex and give it a whirl.
Usually. When Plex leaked that they were selling user data, I was running Plex server on an Nvidia Shield, a unique build of Plex that ran as a core service of the Android device. There ain’t no Jellyfin analogue of that monstrosity.
If you’re ok with Plex, then you’ll be ok with Jellyfin
And we also have metadata manager, so you don’t have to rename your TV show files every time!
Infuse player with jellyfin or direct nfs/samba if in same network
Infuse is not free. I love it and use it on my Apple Devices, but just wanted to have this as an FYI.
I’m moving to jellyfin because of my customzation obsession after using Plex for YEARS (bought lifetime as a kid in college), but I’m still going to donate to the Jellyfin team if I love the software they made. I’m so new to self hosting and it’s awesome how much free stuff is out there, but how do they maintain it for free?
Is the argument that we shouldn’t have to pay money to use software or that Plex / software is changing things after taking money? This is the one area that confuses me the most. Free as a selling point but like, are we just not supposed to send money or am I dumb for doing so?
All dependent on the hardware you run the server on. Give it a good GPU and you’re off to the races
Just as long as you’re fine with your media server absolutely eating power all the time
Stop encoding in av1 and get a low power older intel chip around 10th gen or so with quick sync. Unless you have like 5+ users watching 4k media at the same time this will handle transcoding absolutely fine while using far less power than a dedicated gpu
I don’t encode in AV1, I use HEVC. But while your argument is not unreasonable, it misses the component of file size and amount of disk space required.
HEVC (x265) takes half the space of x264. While it does require a more modern GPU, it can be run on lower powered Intel CPUs with an integrated GPU just fine, so long as the CPU is new enough. Though it can only handle 2-3 streams on a CPU like the Intel chips in a ZimaBoard. So you need to choose wisely.
I guess it’s a platter vs energy cost thing. For me it’s way cheaper to buy more storage for my little puck PC that can handle ~4 streams at 1080p and sips power.
Person you responded to said av1, I didn’t mean to imply you did. HEVC is good balance and quicksync will handle it as you’ve said. 10th gen stuff will handle 4-5 at the expense of more power (but less than like a typical gpu build).
Last statement you made is critical - usage dictates build
Running Jellyfin off of a Dell Optiplex 3060 and encoding all of my media in AV1. I’m able to stream my movies just fine via the Apple TV.
Am I the only one who thinks jellyfin is not only superior to pure, but also way more intuitive to setup? I still don’t understand how plexs routing works, and why I need a central account in order to connect to my own server.
took all of 5 minutes to convert plex-on-pi to jellyfin-on-pi. Probably harder to rename the host than install… fstab’s already set up and errything
Is it more intuitive to set up for remote streaming to friends…? That’s the use case here and as far as I know the answer is a big “no”.
I got Jellyfin set up and available for streaming in less than two hours. Plex kept demanding that my friend buy a pass to download something, so I was like, nah. Jellyfin works flawlessly and is (in my opinion) a far superior option. I constantly had issues with Plex.
Simple reverse proxy like Nginx PM or Caddy before Jellyfin server and that’s it? Yes, it’s also good to have some DynDNS domain but those don’t cost a thing. Then CrowdSec plugin to keep the bots away and look you’re homelabbing like a pro! Next thing you know you are building this all on top of hypervisor like Proxmox, configuring GPU passthrough and whatnot.
Vs “just install Plex on any NAS from its built in appstore” that’s like 42 steps too many for the regular user.
If you have a static IP it’s super easy. If you don’t, it’s less easy, but you should configure Plex the same way if you don’t want to use their proxy, which lowers the speed anyway.
pretty easy with tailscale
Lol
well hello Mr. cranky 😅
Explain how you connect your in-laws roku to Jellyfin with tailscale.
forgot most of you here are americans, roku isn’t a thing in my country. everyone who i share to uses a pc, htpc, phone or tablet for that
Roku is also a thing in Europe.
Though I also gave up trying to set up Tailscale for people and just exposed Jellyfin (behind a reverse proxy).
Guess what I didn’t have to setup with plex? That’s right, a reverse proxy.
didn’t have to
Now you do have to, unless you pay for Plex and its convenience.
A VPS with a reverse proxy connected to your tailnet and a dyndns domain. It would be cheaper than Plex premium, you can use the vps for other stuff, and you have 100% certainty it will never ever show ads.
If you want to try it I think you should be able to do it With a Raspberry pi or equivalent on their network running Tailscale, use iptables to forward all inbound traffic on the Jellyfin port from that device to your Jellyfin server which is also running tailscale. Connect their Roku using the pi as the address for Jellyfin. I’ve not tried this with Jellyfin but I had something similar working with a Minecraft server
Step one: get your in-laws a cheap Apple TV from whatever site you use for used electronics. Or even a new one.
Step one: you buy it and send it to me if you’re so bent on people running Jellyfin.
I’m only bent on people running software on shit hardware. Roku is bottom barrel crap along with cheap TV sticks.
Love jellyfin, super easy to install on my proxmox server. Its been running for nearly a year now, no problems. ❤️
Same. The setup was super easy.
Probably not the only one, but configuring your server for outside access is way easier with Plex.
Since I mainly use these services for streaming my music collection (long time cd collector), I declare that Plexamp is simply superior to jellyfin. It is really awesome and feature-rich and jellyfin does not even come close to Plexamp regarding music in my opinion.
Have you checked out the Finamp app? It’s to Jellyfin what Plexamp is to Plex. It’s much better for music that Jellyfin proper.
Have you checked out the Finamp app?
Yes, and it’s nowhere close to PlexAmp. Have you ever used PlexAmp?
Yea, I come from Plex. Why do you ask?
Then you’d know that FinAmp doesn’t have a quarter of the features of Plexamp.
Yeah, it‘s okay. But PlexAmp just plays in a different league.
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.
To anyone saying they’re happy since they already have a lifetime Plex pass, do you really think they won’t come for you too?
This is a "slippery slope’ argument and thus a fallacy.
Let users decide how they want to run their own stuff. Right now if you have Plex pass this isn’t an issue. If it becomes an issue, then you’re in the exact same position you’d be in today if you decided to move away from Plex now.
I moved away from Plex years ago, but I don’t blame users for sticking with it, it still has a lot of advantages over jellyfin.
If it becomes an issue, then you’re in the exact same position you’d be in today if you decided to move away from Plex now.
I disagree. Right now you got time to do the research, plan the move and test it out with a demo setup. You do not know if you got the time if Plex decides to screw their lifetime users.
Yes this is hypothetical.
It’s entirely hypothetical. Jellyfin could also close source tomorrow, hypothetically (It happened with Emby so there’s precedent).
Jellyfin can’t go closed source as it’s a fork of Emby from before it was closed source, licensed under the GPL. They don’t own that code so they can’t change that license, thus the whole project is GPL. In addirion, Jellyfin isn’t being developed by just one company (it’s all volunteers), so every new contribution is also GPL licensed, owned by each contributor. The only way Jellyfin could go closed source would be to cut out the Emby backend and for every single contributor ever to agree to change the license, or have their code cut out. In short it’s not happening, and if somehow it did the project would just get forked regardless for everyone to switch to (the community did it once already!).
No, you have not understood anything. Assuming Jellyfin would go closed source, (ignoring the GPL license and so on) you would not notice anything. Your server and service would be unchanged by this.
Emby is the best example, the community will fork it and you server lives on. Even if not, then the server and software is still yours.
The steaks are very high. I could lose access to my media library for 1-2 evenings (the time it would take me to switch to Jellyfin).
Plex are trying to start a beef
But they haven’t yet
I paid 79€ almost a decade ago. I got more than my moneys worth. Even the current lifetime (on sale) is less than a year of Netflix. More expensive than piracy + Jellyfin ofc if that’s your benchmark 😀
I have a Jellyfin instance running anyway, I’ll switch to that if Plex enshittifies.
if Plex enshittifies.
Anyone want to break the news?
So far the enshittification has not hit lifetime Plex pass subscribers
Which part has enshittified?
The only change I can see that when I scroll down on my Plex front page, there’s a bunch of stuff that’s not on my NAS. Some of them actually interesting, like this full ass category of old school kungfu movies:
You are entirely entitled to do whatever you want, but for me I go into a towering rage when something I own is taken over for someone else’s ads.
Have the lifetime since like 2012, every time a post like this surfaces I wonder if the contents of it are finally going to force my hand to use jellyfin instead
Bought a lifetime pass, switched to Jellyfin after way too much Tidal promotion on my server.
Introducing “Plex pass plus”! With no advertisements!
I should not have paid for it.
Oh I’m fully aware I’m just to lazy to set up jellyfin and navidrome quite yet.
Any recommendations for Linux distros for a Jellyfin server?
Yunohost
I set mine up with Debian and Swizzin community edition.
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 have my jellyfin container running in podman on Alpine Linux.
Can I avoid updating to a version to avoid this enforcement?
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
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.
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.
🥾👅
The only reason I went with plex was easy remote access. Now with the state on reverse proxies and tailscale tunnels we happily ditched it.
just pay for a lifetime pass…
I did in like 2007 how is that relevant to what I posted?
I’m almost certain you changed your comment.
however, I fail to see the relevancy of proxies and tunnels to the content of the original post.
You’d be wrong both times, have a good weekend though
