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- cross-posted to:
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Time to move to jellyfin I guess.
Can’t you just hide the paid movies/tv tab? Or is it a principle thing
Is jellyfin better? I’d never heard of it 'til now
The biggest problem with Plex (I’m a user) is that you need a network connection just to use it with your local media unless you do a little research to figure out how to bypass this. Why is this a problem? You don’t notice it until there’s a network outage and you want to watch something. Or if the Plex servers are glitching. It’s needlessly complicating the process of watching your media.
Not really sure what you’re getting at here. I’ve had a network outage for the past 2 days and was able to watch stuff on my local NAS just fine. I haven’t done anything special to make it do that.
I believe what they’re getting at is an issue if they’re not already authenticated prior to the outage. Then they’d have no access to their media unless they look into the workaround for that beforehand. It has been an issue in the past, especially when Plex’s auth servers go down. I remember plenty of Reddit threads complaining about it.
if you have to ask someone else to access your own [local] data, youre doing it wrong. ack
i wouldn’t say wrong… it’s SSO. i have multiple servers on my plex account, and i much prefer to have a single login for all of them than different for every server. it also allows things like login with plex for overseer etc
it’s a trade-off for sure, but i’d argue a very worthwhile one
perhaps you could argue that you should be able to run the auth server yourself, and sure… maybe… but i think that’s the worst of both worlds
Yeah this is pretty much it. When it first happened to me I had no idea and just wrote it off as a glitch. Then it happened again or the Plex servers were out so everyone was talking about it. There should never be a reason for your home media server to need access beyond the local LAN.
Ah, makes sense. Thanks.
Ehhhhhh. I don’t think anyone expects to be setting up their Plex server with an Internet outage. As long as you have been setup prior and you lose Internet you can still log in with the last local profile you used. It’s not perfect but you’re not locked out. No workaround (at this point in time) is necessary, assuming you’ve already authed and added your server to your “whatever” device.
And ultimately you just keep Kodi for the apocalypse. This complaint about “not being able to access your media” if the internet is out is misleading. Of course you can access your media if the internet is out, it just might not necessarily be with Plex which is ultimately an online service. Sure we can call it a limitation but that’s just nit-picking since most everyone has their Internet up almost all the time, offline does work, and there’s plenty of other ways to access your media.
You need to specifically set it up to work offline. It’s not out of the box. Either the setup guide you followed included that step, or you went out of your way to enable it, and forgot about it. It’s been that way for 5+ years, at the very least.
You must have. Plex uses their servers to login and there is a setting to not require authentication when on this subnet.
Yeah, one of the reasons I love plex is I don’t actually need to be connected to the internet for it to work. Just my home network. All my devices work fine when the internet goes out, which is frequently does during storm season
No managed users then? I’ve never had them be able to use their profile when plex is down.
Just me.
I’m old and have very few friends, heh. Especially ones who would even know what plex is
It’s just a setting like so many other things. You can put in individual IPs you trust or IP ranges.
It seems Plex has figured out lots of Plex ‘server admins’ are just normal Windows users and click OK on everything w/o reading any change logs or checking any settings. So it’s easier and saver to enable a lot of things right away. Admins can just go into settings and adjust it.
Could you provide a few examples or point me in the right direction to bypass the always online or call home features.
Currently my Library is shared with a reverse proxy and only accessable through CloudFlare. My firewall and pihole block my Plex server from sending anything to the Plex analytics address. Within Plex settings I have it set that Plex is not accessible online.
Is there anything else that I can do or missed.
Here’s one article that runs through it, otherwise just search for terms like “plex local network” or “plex local authentication”
https://www.howtogeek.com/303282/how-to-use-plex-media-server-without-internet-access/
Sure but if the severs are down managed users cannot login.
the idea of signing up at plex is somewhat antithetical to a lot of selfhosters… theres nothing plex is doing that cant be done for free with better software.
To be fair that’s a pretty recent development. Jellyfin apps for smart tvs are only just becoming stable enough for real use. Plex was the only option for a long time.
The Jellyfin for Kodi add-on has been out for 3 years. I use the Jellyfin app for content when I’m away from home, but I use Kodi for a front end for all my home based clients. Works great.
There’s always the software Jellyfin was forked from: Emby.
It does have a paid model to support development, but with single-purchase lifetime options instead of requiring a monthly subscription.
I’ve been quite happy with it for the last 7 years. Their apps are pretty stable, hardware accelerated transcoding works great, it does a great job identifying content then managing/fetching metadata, and the developers and their community are responsive and helpful.
I would argue that they’re still not, until their UIs can be easily wrangled with just a TV remote.
ha, k.
most of us have been using some form of emby/jellfin, sage(defunct), xmbc, myth(defunct) for decades… i mean theres a huge list of not new software.
smart tvs are only used by people who cant setup their own stuff and are generally derided as garbage.
“tvs” for most of us are an hdmi input
If you look up gatekeeping in the dictionary it gives a link back to this comment.
then your dictionary is absolutely wrong
A gatekeeper is a person who controls access to something, for example via a city gate or bouncer, or more abstractly, controls who is granted access to a category or status. Gatekeepers assess who is “in or out,” in the classic words of management scholar Kurt Lewin.
im not saying what is in and out, im point out a single, terrible product.
plex is a shitty gatekeeper, and broadcasting o everyone the many, many, many alternative products to plex sure doesnt sound like a gate
Sage was a DVR app and live TV guide for a tuner and is ancient, hardly a competitor to plex. Xbmc and Kodi - while great - are not at all parity for Plex. Emby or Jellyfin might let me share my media with my parents in their 70s but Plex just works. Unless you live somewhere with highly unreliable internet there still is no parity to Plex.
haw, wrong. it was great local front end to stuff. i directly replaced it with xmbc as a drop in
you are absolutely wrong about sage. i still own and have a license.
I bought sage in 2003 to use with my hauppage TV tuner. I still have recordings made from it. But once I retired that htpc I stopped using it. Maybe they added functionality after that.
I wasn’t aware that you could even BUY non-smart TVs anymore…unless you’re using PC monitors as a TV of sorts, that is.
“retail display panels” but ya gotta watch refresh specs
or what some of us do, just leave it on hdmi input 1, never connect to a network
Mind throwing a shopping link my way for retail display panels?
For the second thing, if I have to, that’s what I’ll do.
Jellyfin was forked from emby (emby is similar to Plex, jellyfin is open source) in 2018 when emby went closed source, and they implemented sync and remote streaming if I recall correctly.
It’s a principle thing mostly. Plex just keeps ignoring features users want and trying to push some monetization model.
They regularly implement what I’d say most would consider anti features.
For example, I remember the push back on the mandatory “recommended” tab. It’s the first thing you see when navigating to a library. Wow. Neat. Some bean counter at Plex is “recommending” what I should watch on my own library. No thanks.
There was also the fiasco with emailing your friends things you’ve been watching. Just what you want where you store all your legally owned DVDs with your legal streaming rights to your friends.
Then there was also a thing where they began collecting data on your media libraries to their servers.
There’s also mandatory Internet connection if you want to have local users :). Lots of people barked at this and they ignored it and tried to spin it as an ok thing. You cannot have other people in your family have different watched status and stats without connecting to the internet. Oh did your Internet go down? So did Plex. At that point how’s it different than Netflix. Not to mention we’re the ones doing the hosting. It’s in our network. This should not be reliant on an Internet connection.
The list goes on.
It works pretty well and I’ve thus far been too lazy to change, but jellyfin is open source, and doesn’t have evil people behind it.
I never messed with Plex but Jellyfin is pretty easy to muss with so it’s definitely worth giving it go.
Jellyfin is FOSS as well, I assume Plex isn’t since it’s doing…all this. lol
Jellyfin is great and open source. I’ve never tried Plex, but I’ve heard that Plex has apps on more platforms.
Also, I’d recommend checking out Findroid if your on Android. Its UI is native instead of the usual web interface in the official apps. Iirc iOS has a similar project.
Plex is definitely more user friendly. I would like to try Jellyfin again but I host Plex for my parents back home and I don’t want to troubleshoot Jellyfin internationally when I know they can just install Plex and log in on their devices and I don’t have to deal with it.
Definitely different strokes for different folks but I understand Lemmy is very big on FOSS so it’s no surprise Jellyfin has such a positive following here.
Ultimately I’m glad to have options regardless.
Why can’t your parents just login to JellyFin and browse from their profile? I don’t really see what extra work would be required on their end?
Does Jellyfin have you open the app, type in a 4 character code, and then just work? I’m assuming it doesn’t. So that is why.
If Jellyfin requires any more effort than that - EVEN if it’s simply entering a username and password with a TV remote, that is extra work.
It’s a 6 digit code.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/quick-connect/
But I’ve never used it so it may be more complicated to setup? Worth looking into for sure.
Ah, thanks. I’ve been considering installing it on my Plex server so I can evaluate it but I have no issues with Plex whatsoever. But yes them getting bigger means more chances for things to get bad.
How is a login screen less user friendly?
Eveny non-technical mother got the hang of it after I explained it to her one time.Just the playback has some quirks with audio/subs sometimes.
Its not better, but its worth it for not being dependent on internet
Depending on your server, and how you install you might have a bad experience. I’ve had issues where it wasn’t finding the film/series metadata, having plugin issues, and being incredibly slow (slow UI when anything is being done, slow scanning folders, slow loading saved metadata, etc). Jellyfin, like a lot of open source software, feels like jank. The devs know about a lot of issues, but they’re swamped with so much, with this big of a project.
People criticise Plex, rightfully so with some of their bad decisions, but it still works better. For me, Plex runs so much better, and without issues. I won’t be moving away to Jellyfin in the foreseeable future, but I’ll be glad when I am able to.
I know plex has some features that jellyfin doesnt, but it was time few years ago, at least for me
It’s the app availability, LG TVs don’t have jellyfin which is awkward for me.
There’s an official Jellyfin app in the LG app store.
I may not have checked in awhile but I could have sworn that walhen I got the TV that was a con of it.
Unreal thank you.
My TV is not even smart. I use 40$ xiaomi tv stick (android 1080p). Its powered from USB port on tv and connects via wifi. Its not the fastest device, but it works just fine Edit: not sure about price anymore, seems like its more like 50$ now, but still cheap IMO
Chromecasts and derivatives etc. exist?
I can cast to my nest speakers and TV’s with Chromecast built in.
Then again, with Jellyfin you don’t have to pay for hardware transcoding. That is the one that really bothered me. It seems insane you’d have to pay to properly utilize your own hardware.
As soon as they get xbox app that’s not just a fucking browser…
Sure, you might be fine, my 7 year old and wife aren’t. The ui and ux are hot barbage without a mouse. I just want to use my tv remote and simple arrows and for the play/pause button to work.
I paid for plex pass because jellyfin didn’t pass the usability test in our household.
Does Jellyfin have a PlexAmp equivalent?
Yes, finamp. I have it installed. I haven’t tried it.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.unicornsonlsd.finamp
I’m gonna hold off switching for as long as possible. This looks like it’s not even close to PlexAmp. I mostly use artist stations and the DJ features. This just looks like it only plays albums or manual playlist.
It’s coming, a redesign will hopefully hit beta very soon now.
https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp/issues/220#issuecomment-1868600157
It’s similar in name only though. Plexamp has a lot of great features that this one is missing.
Hot take: If I get the actual MP4/MKV/whatever, I don’t actually care about this and think it might be a good thing, hell, I might actually purchase a couple movies and TV shows through it.
If it’s just the same “license” that everywhere else gets you, then I ain’t buying shit.
I don’t know how it would even be possible with media files (since people know how trivial it is to relocate those) but I would actually be perfectly fine with a “license” if it used something akin to the GoG/GOO DRM model.
For those not aware, the gist of those kinds of DRM is that you authenticate with a server to get access to the file. The file may or may not be sent encrypted and then locally decrypted. After that, there is no DRM until you want a new version and you can copy it anywhere you want.
Unlike most here, I don’t mind buying my media. Hell, I generally prefer it since I don’t care enough to find a private tracker (and am not looking for that smoke on movies/tv…) and like having a proper 4k/hdr/whatever rip with whatever audio tracks I feel like ripping. Same with extras and so forth. With studios increasingly realizing they don’t want physical media to cannibalize their service, we get nonsense of “Well… we might get Andor on blu-ray some day but, until then, enjoy a highly compressed and crushed version of what may be the greatest single season of TV ever made”
Theoretically, the various VOD services avoid that but… you still get the same shitty streamed copy for the vast majority. If I can get a proper 4k release that contains HDR data, actual 5.1 sound, and so forth for a reasonable price? Stick it in my veins!
Search your feelings, you know the truth.
Exactly, there’s no way the studios are going to let them sell actual ownership.
Yeah, but there is no way in hell they somehow convinced movie studios to let us have drm-free files. It would be amazing but I can’t see it happening.
They could stick to public domain & indie titles. They won’t, but they could.
If a storefront starts making people pay money for public domain movie files I am becoming a terrorist.
It would be a nominal charge for storage, bandwidth, and indexing. Book stores carry public-domain titles, for profit, and most have no issue with that. You can always procure the same files somewhere else—they are public domain, after all. Those who pay are doing so for the convenience, not because they’re forced to.
I can’t hear you over the dastardly bubbling of my nefarious cauldron where I am brewing vile elixers.
For people who purchased lifetime plex pass, what does this mean for them?
Not much really. Plex hasn’t presented this as a normal subscription based streaming service and more of a digital storefront akin to Google Play Movies & TV. The way I’ve always seen it is that Plex Pass was more like a software license since it granted all the features of the Plex software library. Maybe Pass users will get a discount or something.
Ahhhh, So this is why they’re really cracking down on banning plex shares.
I missed that news. What’s happening?
Our plex share had to move over to emby. And then they were kind of going through in systematically banning people. So a lot of people just got banned for pirated content.
I went through the same thing with the share I was on.
Plex biting the hand that fed them. There’s no reason to use Plex over anything else at this point.
They got banned for selling access to pirated content.
Source?
Oh hey! Actually I did find a news article. I was curious if I could https://medium.com/@divitia/what-are-plex-shares-why-they-were-banned-f5a43735ffbb
Edit. Just finished reading it… Eh… “News” might be a bit of a stretch for the article.
Ahhh… Yeah definitely a bad idea to advertise you’re breaking the TOS on a public website
I mean the source I have is not really particularly great, Just my first hand account and what I was told about why we were moving to a different system. It was just that I was part of a plex share where all of us were getting banned for it being associated with the the Plex share. So the plex share moved over to using emby.
Thanks, that’s fair. I share my Plex with about five people who use it often but I’m waiting for the day it goes away.
You know…
For lemmy being so dead set on replacing everything propietary with (F)OSS they are really firm on only using/stayung with Plex and pay a 100$ for their pass instead of things like Jellyfin…I’m too lazy to get a DNS name pointed at my home server and setup the reverse proxy to get jellyfin publicly accessible
And then hope that I did it securely
You can get a cheap domain (~8 digit .xyz is 0.80$/y) and use cloudflare tunnels. You won’t have to expose your home network and the setup is really easy. You will be dependent on Cloudflare but I feel they’re fairly reliable.
- Create a cloudflare account
- Buy a .xyz domain (on for example Namecheap) consisting of only digits, it should cost less than a dollar a year of you have the right amount of digits.
- Set your domain to the Cloudflare DNS server. (You can find instructions on Cloudflare for this).
- Go to zero trust and create a tunnel. This allows you to share traffic from your local device on your domain in the next step. (It shows instructions on how to install it on your server)
- Add public hostname and create a subdomain for jellyfish and point it to
localhost:JELLYFIN_PORT.
Note: You can also do this for other services you host but I recommend using a VPN to connect to your device / home network instead because it does not require exposing it to the internet.
Do you really hate plex so much that you willingly used cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a decent service, with really good security. Plus, with their tunnelling feature, they’re helping to keep you private. If you just pointed your A record to your IP, that’d be visible to everyone. Instead, your A record is just visible to Cloudflare. Plus it’s handy if you’re using them to forward a bunch of services onto the net. Not to mention all the other security features you can use. DNS records by design, are not private.
DuckDNS and Caddy are what I use and those were piss easy. But yeah, inertia. If it works and you’re happy with it, why change
Lifetime member here. I’m good with Plex.
I paid for it years ago when it was like $50 mostly because the interface was simple enough for my non tech savvy family to use.
I share Plex with friends
Here, friend. Plex will send you an invite, use it on whatever device you have because it probably supports Plex
I share jellyfin with friends
Now download this app, no that one…no this one. Why does this one not work . What do you mean it doesn’t exist. Now you need my help getting you going…
Sorry, Jellyfin is great if tech people but I run a Plex server so I don’t HAVE to help anyone anymore.
Hey friend,
the domain is: https://jellyfin.domain.comYour credentials are:
Username: Friend
Pw:***********To watch search “Jellyfin” on the playstore or visit this link:
Link to playstore
Link to Windows JMPHave fun.
Sorry but those are at best comfortable excuses of moving dependencies to another platform.
At most you’d need to train them on how to the same as before.
The only issue I’d seen so far were playback issues with non-standard encodings (audio codecs for example) and playback devices unable to work with whats reported…
But this is one of the rare uglies I have seen so far.no tv app what do you mean no tv app i mean no tv app
you’ve lost them at this point unless you literally do everything for them first
The problem I have with Plex is that default UI is bloated with recommendations, alternative sources and what might as well be ads. Meaning I need to help less technically literate (and sometimes technically literate) friends set up the UI anyway. Just so that they can actually cut through the piles of bullshit to see my server content.
Plex’s default UI is ruined by it trying to shovel its extra shit onto you constantly, making it a terrible new user experience.
At least with Jellyfin you connect to the server and you’re done. It’s a lot more manual, but the UI is just better and easier to navigate.
I say this as an avid Plex user, mostly due to Jellyfin having somewhat dodgy support for more advanced audio and video codecs
The problem I have with Plex is that default UI is bloated…
Also an avid Plex user.
The Plex new user experience is absolute garbage. What if you just want to share a family video with your grandma? Someone better be there to do the initial app setup because it is overloaded with nonsense like Discover. Sharing Plex with a normal person? You still need to walk them through setup or they will not find your stuff, and stumble into the ad-supported streams.
Oh, and every client app is kinda different, which is terrible.
I do use and like Plex but man, I wish they would make some changes.
I use emby Plex and jellyfin. Plex just started it all so that’s where my library began. It’s clean and everything looks good. It will take me considerable time to migrate off it. I also paid 75$ for it in 2014, so I think that makes my point.
Jellyfin has always been on the back burner as a to-do, because I’m a huge advocate for open source.
Not me. I set up my server last November and tried Plex. It reminded me too much of too many services starting to lose their way. Given recent events it looks like I was right. We use Kodi because my partner prefers it, but I really like Jellyfin myself. It was a learning process but really only took two or three hours with research time to set up. Costs me nothing and I don’t have any ads, upselling, or any other BS that will eventually turn into more extreme attrition.
Plex is definitely trying to monetize and I am wary of how they will reconcile all of the discount lifetime passes that were sold over the years
But I still think it is “good”. Yes, they are adding in hooks for different services and are technically a service of their own (every month there is a “free” movie they offer that I tell myself I will watch and then I never do). But all of that can pretty easily be hidden if I just want access to my library and the libraries of my friends. Its very much a case where the extra features are not getting in the way of the core functionality.
I have “see if jellyfin is viable” on my todo list and have been checking in for years now. Basically every time I do it is “This looks better than it used to be but X or Y is still a headache”. Hopefully that will change if/when Plex shits the bed. But they haven’t so it isn’t really a concern for me.
I originally setup Plex and was immediately unhapy with their always online model as well as really poor support on their forums.
Pretty quickly moved to Emby and have been happy since (7 years). It’s not FOSS but it’s not locked down nearly as much as Plex, and they have a focus on keeping your info within your own systems. No telemetry.
I don’t mind paying a bit to support development, especially when they offer lifetime options instead of being stuck with a monthly subscription.
Jellyfin has branched out more into niche features like watch parties, leaaving some stability to be desired. Especially with apps like smart TVs. Emby has focused more on its core reliability across all platforms, comming up with a product that’s nice and stable pretty much everywhere.
Jellyfin was a fork of Emby when Emby went closed source as users kept removing the paywalls for premium features. Development time isn’t free; that’s not sustainable for a fulltime dev. Since, Jellyfin has barely kept up, lacking the resources/funding to really flesh out their code. (hell, ~75% is still embys code AFAIK)
Regarding free dev time: Donations can be made as a means to thabk and compensate the project.
Yeah, but relying on peoples generosity is less than ideal unfortunately…
On the other hand; when you’ve got to pay to use a product, you’re a bit more entitled to its use and support than a free project that gets worked on at the devs leisure. Especially when the developers maintain that same view.
It’s a fine line between securing stable income for your efforts while not limiting the usage of your products. I think Embys developers have done a pretty good job keeping that balance. I’ve certainly never had an issue with the activation and use of premium features, and the licence I bought 7 years ago has held excellent value. I’ve just been waiting on some funds to donate ontop as I feel I’ve gotten more than I’ve paid for.
It would be great if the Jellyfin Devs could have some sort of paid service that just does all the DNS/reverse proxy stuff required for remote access, and charge like £5 a month for it.
They would just have to make it clear that the money is going towards further development, not just for the actual service. And obviously continue to allow others to set things up themselves if desired.
I’d pay for that so quick, it would just be so convenient
Jellyfin is awesome! It does everything I could ask for and has been super stable for myself and a dozen friends and family. Almost all my media is 4k and some version of HDR. My cheap Intel ARC A380 and jellyfin handle everything beautifully. I tried plex but it’s hardware transcoding wasn’t as good with Intel GPU on Linux.
How was implementing the A380 as a transcoder?
Am certainly interested it (the series, not this card specifically) in buying it as an accelerator.
Very easy if you’re building a new box. The latest Linux kernel (6 I think) has all the required drivers available, and no encoding limit like Nvidia. The Intel GPUs are pretty great for media transcoding.
Personally I setup an old Dell r720 and stuck the GPU in that. My hypervisor is proxmox and I just run jellyfin as an unprivileged container.
If I have the spare funds for a new server, this sounds like a lovely idea!
Thank you :)
Sure thing. My electric rate is pretty cheap though. You may be better off finding a small box with integrated graphics in the CPU. Then add storage separately. Connected NAS or something else.
But I like the Dell servers since they’re so cheap for the value.
Yeah no. Most likely a spare pc case or sff pc (depending on finacial situation).
If it doesn’t work like Bandcamp then I’m not using it.
I was initially skeptical but if they actually sold lossless, Blu-Ray quality rips of videos, I’d pay more than a few bucks per movie or show for that.
This would be awesome, but I just don’t see it happening this way. They have to work with the copyright holders who set those kinds of terms and who have the majority of the leverage in negotiating those terms. Unfortunately, I don’t see any reason this kind of deal would be made.
The business model is to force consumers to purchase and repurchase the same content over and over. Changing only the format, or distribution method, or platform of consumption. This kind of deal would undercut that business model.
You’re most certainly right, but a pirate can dream…
Same. Doubt they will, but I’m open to being surprised.
We can only hope that this is what they do.
It wouldn’t be so bad if you could buy and actually own
🤣🤣
Things like this are why I am mostly glad to still be using xbmc on my original hacked Xbox. Not much space and I have to deal with FTP, but it still works a treat.
My friend, there is retro… And then there is masochism. :)
