from Sunny@slrpnk.net to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 29 May 04:11
https://slrpnk.net/post/22860273
Text:
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners. This data is used to deliver personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Your consent applies to all devices on which you have Plex installed. You can withdraw your consent at any time in Account Settings or using this page.
Soure: www.plex.tv/vendors/ (Might have to clear cache)
Can also read about the changes here: www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/
threaded - newest
also: water is wet.
I don’t know why everyone in the selfhosting community still even mentions Plex or uses it.
It’s closed source, not free; Jellyfin is a no brainer yet people still go to Plex??
The sunken cost of buying a plexpass on sale for 39 dollars 15 years ago.
I bought a Plex pass for 90 or something. I officially dropped Plex about 4 months ago now. For 90 bucks I got something like 8 years out of it. I’ll call that a win, I don’t feel like I wasted my money, I don’t feel like I overpayed. Just moving on now.
Same.
Yeah great perspective. I think we all need to have this perspective more as many tech companies will randomly change their minds on their products.
Kind of like how I got free photo backup on my first two pixels. It was a nice feature, I’m sad it’s gone, but it’s fine.
Did they really kill off free photo backup? That’s so incredibly shitty, they even compressed them!
Yeah it was over after pixel 3 or a little before iirc! Although to me it was obvious they would eventually kill it off because that’s soooo much storage. It was just a trick to get people bought into Google photos (which is a great service but much too expensive for me and now basically totally replaced by Immich)
damn I’ve been out of the loop on that one for a while! Agreed, I set up Immich and it’s pretty much a drop-in replacement now
How has immich been compared to photoprism? My issue with immich is that new releases kept breaking things. Has it finally stabilized? Lts are super important to me as I don’t want to spend every weekend reconfiguring services for my family.
I’m new to self hosting and I’ve only used it for about a month. During the last month all updates have been stable for me! But according to their roadmap they plan to do their official “stable” release a little later this year, so you could wait until then?
Also I’m running it in docker so that might help
Forgot to mention- can’t compare to photo prism as I’ve never used it!
Did they really kill off free photo backup? That’s so incredibly shitty, they even compressed them!
Plex is easier to run on older NAS systems, but yeah - that was me :) but i switched to jellyfin, finally
I stuck with Emby for way too long for this reason. I spent $50 in 2017. Gotta get my money’s worth no matter how broken their app was.
Hence the term “sunk cost fallacy”.
I would switch in a heartbeat if Jellyfin didn't... kinda suck, honestly.
But the difference in usability is enough that it's just not an option.
For the record, I updated Plex today and I haven't seen a notification like this anywhere, although that text snippet does match their privacy policy ad data opt-in settings blurb that has been in place for a while. I may need a bit more context here.
Only issues I’ve had with Jellyfin are reduced flexibility in naming/organizing files and inability (for me at least) to detect personal media.
i manage all files and metadata outside of jellyfin/kodi using mediaelch... it scrapes, renames and sets up all the local metadata files for ingestion perfectly into both my media services.
I'll say that not having to do that is a major postiive. One of the UX things that bounced me off of jellyfin was ending up with a reconfigured library. The correct UX choice is for the software to adapt to your preexisting library, not having to rebuild it all with a different set of information files and naming conventions.
That is a BIG deal when you have a big library. Also why I hate Calibre. Screw Calibre.
There is that. Remote access is a pain to set up and maintain, and I had some significant performance issues with library scraping, too. The interface is also kind of a mess, particularly if you want to bolt on more than just a video library.
There should be a library type called “Home videos and photos” for that.
I probably made a small mistake in setting that up but I tried making the dedicated “home movies” folder and it wouldn’t show my videos.
@BrianTheeBiscuiteer @MudMan might I suggest FileBot - just a few bucks but it curates your schtuff and can rename, sort and collate everything in Jellyfin form automagically using imdb and other dbs.
So integrate it in Jellyfin.
I don't want five additional pieces of software to fix Jellyfin's shortcomings, I want it to work.
Mind you, there are still edge cases in Plex, and the renaming dance can still be annoying, but still, it's one thing to have classic Doctor Who DVDs be an alien artifact no software can process and another to have to install additional software to masticate things for Jellyfin on a task that is fundamental to the thing it's supposed to be doing.
Also, I don't want my stuff to be curated and renamed. My library is fine as it is. Part of the annoyance is for software to insist on moving crap around. I know what I have, where I have it and it's all rationally named. It's on the software to parse it.
To be clear, I think you're being friendly and useful, it's just that I'm frustrated by the pattern of helpful users and additional software creating this cluster of self-connected software spaghetti to address UX faults that are fundamental but OSS devs like to ignore indefinitely.
Until jellyfin adds better user log in plex will still thrive. I do the self hosting I don’t want a call every few days about they can’t log in. The one click Gmail login with plex is amazing.
The overhead of the live library upkeep on Jellyfin is also quite insane, at least for me. I'm talking taking the whole thing down for many minutes at a time for every other service trying to run on the same machine bad.
What on earth does this even mean?
I’ve never had to take jf down while managing the library.
It means my last attempt to set up a Jellyfin server on the same machine where Plex is running fine ended up with any changes to my library bringing the entire thing to a grinding halt while Jellyfin tried to parse my media library again.
It may have gotten better over time, but a quick search showed me I wasn't alone in seeing that happen and I was already checked out due to all the other annoyances at that point, so I didn't keep it running longer to see if it went back to semi-acceptable levels later.
It may have been a bug or a config issue, but the point is it absolutely happened to me.
That’s absolutely a config issue.
OK, so why can I mess up a config so that the whole thing grinds to a halt?
Plus, I'm not so sure. A bunch of the people I saw mentioning the same thing did so on bug reports that seemed unattended. It's not like I had a byzantine deployment, all the thing was doing was parse library files held in a given location. I installed the software, pointed it to a location and all I ever touched afterwards were the files on the library folders.
I will opt out of a LOT of things on Plex before I troubleshoot that situation, I can tell you that.
I actually can’t tell if this is facetious or serious. There are a couple hundred (if not thousand) configuration options or reasons why your chosen setup might have caused the problem you’re describing - it isn’t really up to the developer to anticipate how every individual user has configured their home server, with every other application that might be sharing the same environment. It might have even been the plex service that was causing the issue.
I ran jellyfin and plex on the same library and machine for probably a year before migrating completely away from plex without any issues, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have to read a bit of the documentation to get the config right.
Fair enough, managing your own home server isn’t for everyone.
Yes, it is.
People keep answering the question of "why would anybody still use Plex" in this thread much better than I ever could.
Also, "it works on my machine" doesn't mean it's not a bug or a legitimate performance issue inherent to the software. It's always crazy to me how holier-than-thou, not-the-developer's-job people can get without heeding even the most basic, ground-level software development principles.
Also, also, spare me the condescension, I self-host a dozen different things, including other open source libraries for non-video stuff, closed source libraries for other other non-video stuff and increasingly more-trouble-than-it's-worth networking.
But even if I didn't, Plex was one of the first things I hosted because all you have to do is installing like you would any local application and it just works. By the time it's living in a contianer inside a dedicated home server or whatever you are well past the entry level for this stuff. If that's the gap you find acceptable between Plex and Jellyfin you have, again, found your answer to why a whole bunch of people would consider one and not the other.
I just don't think you need to make your whole personality about your pet home server or that it needs to be finicky and annoying to work. Self hosting has tons of potential and it's one of the few areas where open source solutions dominate the field. Somebody should take some time to make it actually accessible before the commercial hounds smell blood in the enshittified waters and turn it into a product all the way.
Kudos to Home Assistant for soooort of doing that, although I still think it's a bit overcustomizable and overengineered. Still the closest to a good self-hosted open application out there by a mile, though.
Of course not, but when there’s an issue that’s limited to certain users, the immediate question is “what is different about this installation that’s causing this issue here and not elsewhere?”. It would have been just as easy for you to start with Jellyfin instead of plex, but then you would have likely run into the same issue when trying to add plex to the same shared media volume. That isn’t an uncommon issue, but when you’ve already said ‘it’s not worth my time to troubleshoot this application’, I can only assume you also didn’t have the time to read the documentation. That’s fine - most of us here understand that homelabs are a niche hobby interest and not everyone is willing to maintain a server that requires technical knowledge and time to keep running smoothly. Some people just want something that works out of the box and don’t care about it being open sourced or customizable, and that’s fair. If that’s why you prefer plex that’s fine. But it isn’t the developer’s fault if you choose to go down a more complicated deployment path and find that you’re out of your depth.
Containerized applications are simply not designed to work like native applications - they are very much built with the assumption that those people who are deploying them have - at a minimum - a cursory knowledge of VM’s and shared volume ACL’s and a willingness to troubleshoot their configuration if there are conflicts. It isn’t because they’re shirking responsibility as developers, it’s because they’re providing source code that’s designed for remote service developers to plug into other services/environments and customized. If you can’t be bothered to do basic troubleshooting that’s very common with shared volume deployments, then maybe you’ve reached your personal threshold for how much self-hosting you’re willing to do. Again, that’s not ‘holier-than-thou’, that’s just an acknowledgment of what remote application deployment requires.
Plex and jellyfin can be run together if you really wanted to do it, but if you can’t be bothered to do basic troubleshooting then I won’t be bothered to soothe your ego.
Lmao, idk what to tell you bud. Some people actually enjoy working on their cars, but I don’t hear you getting mad at them because all you’re willing to do yourself is change your oil.
You are actually wrong about that first assumption, I did try both at the same time and the problems with Jellyfin moved me over to Plex. Plex never had an issue handling my remote library at any point, and in fact ran just as well in a container in the NAS holding the files as it did natively on both Windows and Linux, so it was surprisingly easy to see what combination of placing files and software worked better for me.
Which I guess is a good segue to your second point, because hey, turns out there are plenty of applications that are pretty agnostic about running inside of a container or not, Plex included. And there are several implementations of easy self-hosted apps that will set up a container for you. Unfortunately most of those are commercial software trying to monetize self-hosting, and snobbish hobbyists seem to have no particular urgency for beating corporations to that particular punch.
And yes, you can run Plex and Jellyfin together. I don't know what that point is supposed to add to this. You can mostly run any software alongisde any other software. Frankly, the biggest issue of doing that, besides how redundant it is, is that Jellyfin will insist on writing a whole bunch of garbage all over your library if you want to set it up its way. Plex will mostly tolerate this and keep chugging along, though, so it's not a dealbreaker if you don't mind.
And absolutely you can make a hobby out of self-hosting or whatever else, but the point is car nuts typically don't hold the opinion that nobody should be having cars but them. I mean, there's plenty of car snobbery, and a bunch of people will say they prefer a manual transmission car over an automatic, but it's a pretty extreme position to hear someone say if you can't drive stick you shouldn't have access to cars. Let alone say that if you didn't build your car yourself you aren't skilled enough to have one, which is the actual equivalence here.
I inferred it from this:
And anyway, plex and jellyfin have different media library configuration requirements. Even if you did them at the same time, you’d have to be kind of lucky to have configured them both on the same media volume correctly without reading any of the documentation or having experience with docker ACL rules.
Just as a for-instance (since I don’t see any specifics), sharing a media volume across separated docker containers on linux requires mapping the same users and usergroups to each container. It’s assumed you should know this, if you’re deploying a stack of services on a server, because containers are designed to be isolated and secure - containers are restricted to accessing files in their approved ACL, so that a bad actor can’t get access to a separate volume from a compromised service. One possible problem you were having (again, just a guess) is that jellyfin was assigning itself ownership of the files/folders on the media volume every time it did its scan, and Plex no longer had permission to access them. It actually doesn’t matter which service was there first - as soon as you had two services accessing the same volume you would have run into this issue. It depends on how you configured both services, and if you gave them privileged access or mapped users properly, ect.
If you’re running both services on a store-bought NAS, the problem could have also been a misunderstanding about the combined overhead requirement for the services. Without making any assumptions about how much thought you put into your configuration, I’d check that as a part of troubleshooting. But, again, seems like you don’t give a fuck about troubleshooting your customized service stack and would rather use a ready-made product. That’s fine.
Jellyfin included also. I’m not sure what the point you’re making though.
I agree it’s redundant, which is why I personally only deploy jellyfin now. As far as jellyfin writing to your media drive… Yea, I guess that is a difference between the services. This isn’t really a problem if you configure your containers correctly, but if you don’t want to mess with that stuff I can see why it might be an issue for you. Plex may be storing those files on its container volume instead of the mounted media volume, or it could be storing them on their remote server (it’s been a while since I had plex running), which is a fine way to do it too. There are advantages to writing it to the media volume, but I won’t bore you with that
Good thing nobody is telling you not to have a homelab or use selfhosted services. If you want to use Plex and only want to drive automatic transmissions, go for it. Doesn’t change my preference or enthusiasm for jellyfin or manual transmissions, though. And given the opportunity, i’ll still passionately debate the advantages to learning stickshift and open-sourced and customizable self-hosted applications. And if you give them a try and run into problems, i’ll gladly help you try to solve them if you’re willing to engage with it - but if you’d rather just complain about how much my preference sucks then i’ll have no problem telling you to stick with what you know next time.
Man, you're really itching to talk shop about specifics and complexities and it really isn't about that.
The guy said "why does anybody still consider Plex" about the slightly misleading privacy policy excerpt and a bunch of us pointed out UX and accessibility are reasons. This entire tangent spawns from me claiming I had technical issues on top of the UX stuff and you being super excited to assume it's a skill issue and maybe get to troubleshoot a bit.
Except it wasn't, I'm not particularly interested and the technical issues weren't even the primary reason I moved to something else.
For what it's worth, I barely remember what the setup was when I messed around with Jellyfin because I move things around a bunch and despite this conversation suddenly hinging on it, I didn't think much of it beyond "oh, this sucks, I guess I'll just do Plex instead". It was almost certainly not Plex and Jellyfin running simultaneously on two containers sharing resources, though. I have way too many loose computers bouncing around the house for this not to have been some test run natively installing it on whatever I had lying around, which is also why the Plex server I have now has been on three different machines since then (and is still running natively because why the hell not, being adamant that everything needs to be on some overdone docker setup is just nerds being nerds).
Look, I respect your hobbies, but I reserve the right to find you extremely annoying when you try to patronize people who are actually trying to get shit done just because you're excited at the opportunity to exlpain the difference between a bind and a volume at someone whether they need the explanation or not. The reality of it is if you want to be nerdy and all hobbyist about having a home server (I fully reject the term "lab") that rabbit hole goes deep. You have tons of runway to go nuts about dedicated server hardware and networking software while letting people who just kinda want to be able to open their media without having to plug in a physical drive do their thing.
Jellyfin doesn't HAVE to be complicated. It's not good that it is. All this tier of software that does useful stuff to replace corporate subscription crap doesn't need to be any harder to use and maintain than your average Windows application. Everybody would benefit from a concerted effort to take the faff out of it. And I pinky promise that you'll still have a lifelong hobby if and when that happens.
You’re free to find me annoying, I wouldn’t try to deny that anyway.
You pointed to a ‘technical issue’, and i’ve been pretty upfront about why that isn’t necessarily a problem with the software and more likely a user error. You’re free to not use jellyfin for whatever reason you want but I don’t think it’s accurate to portray that as an issue with the software. Sorry if you disagree.
I haven’t seen any issues with UX design personally, and honestly I haven’t seen anyone making a detailed case here about it, but if all you need is “to be able to open your media without having to plug in a physical drive do your thing” I don’t see anything wrong with jellyfin. Maybe if you really really like your google SSO and can’t figure out how to implement that yourself, great. Use plex, go nuts.
I'm very confused about why you'd assume user error is more likely, given the setup.
But to your other question, if it WAS user error, then it's Jellyfin's fault. Why should it be possible for the user to erroneously set the software so that scanning a library would grind the whole thing to a halt? I mean, it wasn't user error, but in what world is allowing the user to set up a simple library scrape in a way that breaks the functionality of the entire thing an acceptable implementation? A bug I can understand, but that's just bad.
Also just bad, from my recollection, Jellyfin's interface to add live TV channels, its overcustomizable tools for skinning (which are needed because the base skin is pretty plain), the convoluted requirements for remote access, the overly strict library parsing paired with the default choice being to keep data stored within the library (for portability, I suppose? It's ugly and annoying and messy). I briefly tried to get books working on it before giving up and that also sucked, but it was a while ago and I forget the details.
You can get as condescending as you want, but those are all major UX blockers for key use cases. Google's SSO is the least of it, but I guess it's an easy deflection if you don't want to acknowledge any usability gaps at all despite all evidence.
And don't get me wrong, I get that Jellyfin is free software and Plex will charge you and advertisers at any opportunity because it is not. But ultimately I use the software that works. I may prefer a free alternative, because who doesn't, but that's not a get out of jail free card. Particularly when the choice isn't just for myself.
You’ve been extremely vague about what the actual issue was, and the details you HAVE given are often contradictory. I’m getting so tired of this cat and mouse game. Fine, yea. Maybe they should have anticipated your specific use case, and everyone else just got lucky with their config not causing the issue you’re so sure is their fault.
It isn’t designed for that but nice of them to enable you to do it anyway
This is an outdated complaint, but also fuck them for giving you the option to customize the look, I guess?
That’s just what remote hosting entails, bud. Nice of plex to hand hold you through the process but it comes at the cost of privacy. It’s easy enough to access via VPN though, or I guess you can expose your home network but doing that without knowing what you’re doing puts you and all your data at risk. Idk how you’re accessing any of your other services though.
I have no idea what this means but I suspect it’s an outdated gripe. Setting up library scans is as straightforward as plex, or at least it is now.
It’s not designed for that but good of them to make it so you could do that anyway
Lmao, what?! Weren’t you just telling me some people just want something that lets them stream their media to their tv without a hard drive plugged in? And now using it for ebooks is a ‘basic UX block’? GTFO lmao
I've been vague about the details because you are digging your heels into an argument about a one week test run I did a while ago on a piece of software that didn't do what I wanted. "My use case" was "go in there and scrape my video library" on a default install.
The reason I even tried to plug in live IPTV, by the way, is that people made a big deal of Plex's obsession pushing for it, since they plug it in by default and have their own default list of channels pre-baked. Even if I don't use it much on Plex, and I really don't, it was an interesting test case for how the two pieces of software handle their extra options. For all the crap Plex got for trying to become Netflix, and I do agree it's a fool's errand, it was a depressing reminder of how commercial software and OSS often handle UX differently.
Oh, and if the implication is that Jellyfin got itself a better default skin, then good for them, but I saw the interface not that long ago and it still looked pretty grim. And yeah, screw them for letting me customize it. That's bad. Entirely reskinning software is a bad feature that adds next to nothing but complexity if you have good designers make a good UI in the first place. It's fine to have as an extra, but it should either be very well packaged or waaaay out of the way for power users. The average user shouldn't have to think about it. Turning on dark mode, maybe, and even that would be a disappointing omission of a "take system setting" option as a default. UX IS important.
And no, I refuse to concede that self-hosting entails annoying, convoluted setups. There are multiple commercial solutions to this that are different degrees of "better than nothing". At ground level plenty of routers or self-hosted products will one-click set up a VPN for you, which is not great but at least works around the issue. On the other end it's a remote service provider managing your remote access and then yeah, there's data form you leaking elsewhere, but that as an option is at least useful. It's not just pure corpo closed source like Plex, either. Home Assistant's for-profit arm will gladly take your subscription money and handle remote access for you. Whether you trust them more or less than Google (or not at all and want to set up yourself) is up to you.
Also, again, I checked this a while ago, but given how many other people are up and down this thread claiming (and not being disputed) that Jellyfin is still less fire-and-forget for parsing, I don't know how "outdated" that is. You should ping the two separate people who recommended third party software to scrub media libraries so they'd work with Kodi/Jellyfin and explain to them that this is now entirely unnecessary.
And I didn't say that ebooks were "a basic UX block" (although it sucking did make me go for a Plex/Komga setup, not a Plex/Jellyfin setup, so... I guess it is on that front). I gave you a list. I'm not going back to Jellyfin just to verify that you're obviously wrong about it all having been perfectly fixed up to Plex's standards, because I'm pretty sure the bunch of people saying the opposite all over this thread aren't making it up.
UX matters. Jellyfin's UX is much, much worse than Plex's. I wish it wasn't, but it was bad enough when I tried it to push me away and a whole bunch of people here are claiming the same thing. Being delusional about the quality of the implementation doesn't make it better.
Ok, well then why the fuck are you insisting that it’s evidence of poor software design? Are you really bitching about it slugging your system without even looking at what the default settings were, let alone looking to see if they were appropriate for your setup? Like jesus christ, you can’t even play a typical PC game without tweeking your video settings these days, and yet somehow a self-hosted open-source app is supposed to just guess what your setup is?
yea, lowkey fuck plex standards. I’d sooner use a cheese grater as a razor than go back to that POS
Why do you think I didn't look at what the default settings were? I mean, I told you a bunch of times I went as far as getting into bug reports mentioning similar symptoms, you think I just didn't click the checkmark for "don't turn your computer into a doorstop"?
I didn't change any defaults I didn't need to and I didn't have a complicated task for it (and let's be honest, if I did you'd be here telling me that it's user error for trying to make it do complicated things). That doesn't mean I didn't set it up.
But yes, absolutely, a self-hosted open source app is supposed to guess what my setup is. At least as much as its paid competitor. Because that's my entire point, UX matters and being open source is no excuse for your UX sucking, people are just going to use whatever works best. All the well intentioned whining about security and independence in the world won't beat UX. So if you want more OSS get OSS devs to focus on usability.
But hey, I do appreciate the honesty of admitting this defense of Jellyfin's UX is not about Jellyfin's UX being as good as Plex's, it's an ideological argument independent from UX.
Which is fine, I share your goals. I want Jellyfin to be bigger than Plex.
But for that it needs to be as good as Plex. Or better. And it isn't.
Lmao, just fuck off. I don’t have time to be your therapist.
I am glad you don't. Not that I'd pay you for therapy. I mean, no offense, but your bedside manner is terrible, you've lost your shit multiple times and you keep trying to pass double bind crap as reasonable arguments in decidedly toxic ways. You're a 5/10 opinionated online interlocutor, but a 3/10 therapist at best.
Huh? Like just sitting there?
Or is it running a heavy background task like trickplay generation? You can disable trickplay (scrobbling previews) if your system isn’t beefy enough to keep up with them.
I run video game servers on my system, and while stream transcodes used to interfere with them, even that was fixed my assigning JF and the games to run on separate CPU cores.
I have no clue what you mean with having to take it down. But with the *narr stack and jellyseer i basically have no library upkeep. Except for one or two difficult shows
I don’t share videos with people using google to log into any site.
The whole anti Google holier than thou is annoying at these levels.
Ok fine, don’t use Google. But telling your friends and loved ones to switch email providers over your crusade is worse than vegans telling you about their diet.
I’m all for kicking Google to the curb. I’m not for shoving my beliefs down other people’s throats.
It’s not “shoving my beliefs down other people’s throats” telling them that these are the options for signing in the service I’m hosting
Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?
No ma’am, this is a Wendys drive thru.
But really, I think you misunderstood the intended inference from OP, it has nothing to do with email and everything to do with data collection, algorithms, and not quite fair use media access that get’s logged to Google (a third party) ad infinitum.
:)
I don't know that Google gets to log your access in that scenario, Plex is just using their login system.
Plex sure does know, though, whether you log in via Google or not, so "I don't share videos using google to log in" is still a bit of a weird statement and not the reason you'd be worried about your piracy habits.
Incidentally, if a friend or family member is hosting a service and "tells me these are the options to sign in to the service I'm hosting" I'd tell them to go away, which is something my own relatives have done to me a bunch when my proposed self-hosted alternative isn't perfectly smooth and just as convenient as the corpo alternative.
Not surprisingly, the only two selfhosted things my family has ever used are Plex and Home Assistant.
What
Come on, you’ve got a password manager that saves passwords and usernames. It couldn’t be more convenient to login.
Why would you give the responsibility to google for your logins?
Why would you lock yourself into the vendor google by using their login system for every other service? You can’t migrate anywhere easily.
I’m just not enabling such a method. It’s not implemented. People who don’t think about it and hence don’t care usually still use the service eveb if they cannot use “login with google”
I have a password manager.
My parents do not.
They do have a Gmail account and know how to use Netflix, so they know how to use Plex.
I mean, that's not the dealbreaker, there are plenty of bigger issues with Jellyfin than not having a Google authentication integration. They definitely can log in with a password and do for other self-hosted services, but the fact is that Plex having the option does remove one annoyance from the process.
Huh? Google would, at a minimum, know what service is requesting authentication, and plex would know which google user account is being used to authenticate. Maybe they hash that information, but why would anyone trust that? Even if you’re not breaking any laws with what you’re hosting on your plex account, I totally understand why someone might not like the idea of google or plex having data about the identities of users accessing your server and what services are being run from it.
Yeah, you kinda got to the breakdown in this conversation. Google sure knows that you're using Plex.
That is not a concern, though. Plex is a perfectly legal piece of software.
I think people are taking me saying "Google doesn't know what you're streaming with Plex, but Plex does, so that'd be a bigger issue" as irrelevant because they assume Plex is itself a liability, which it isn't.
It's weird how corporate copyright assumptions have seeped to the mainstream and people assume that anything you do with your owned media is illegal unless you're paying somebody.
There are a bunch of reasons why it might be a concern, and only the least of them has to do with the legality of copyright use.
Except plex has already proven themselves willing to ban users based on their use and streaming practices, so it clearly is a liability
If you live inside the US (or a state with trade agreements with the US) and are ripping physical media to store on your server and stream digitally, you are absolutely breaking the law. Doubly so if you are sharing that media with others outside your household.
‘It’s not a problem because I have nothing to hide’ <- you are here.
Well, if you have an issue with people knowing you use Plex at all, then... tough luck, because I hate to tell you this, but a media server needs a client and it's a vanishingly small group of people that will use either Plex or Jellyfin clients and not let Apple, Google, LG, Samsung or whatever other device is running the client software that this is happening.
I give zero craps about whether Google knows I or anybody else uses Plex via their login because they already know this form the Google Play Store, along with the manufacturer of every TV we collectively own.
And for the record I do not live in the US and the way their absolutely idiotic copyright loopholes apply here is very much in question. It doesn't get tested in court much because the times it has been it didn't go particularly great for copyright holders. Private copying owned media is a right regulated by law here and I will continue to do so. If a corporation wants to deliberate with our local courts whether my owning a drive that happens to not be super picky about on-disc DRM I don't have anything particularly intense going on this week.
Ironically, in our own dumb legal implementation we are allowed to back up movies but there is a carved exception for software, so making a copy of a game you own is a bigger deal. Go figure.
First:
but also, it’s not just that they know you use plex or jellyfin, it’s that they know which plex server you use and from what devices you stream from. If, for example, plex decides they want to limit the number of households can stream from a single server (like they’ve already done), all they’d have to do is lock or limit people’s google SSO to that server. They could also report which users are associated with servers engaged in illegal activity when requested, or they could region lock their services or specific media IP’s by request from copyright holders… There’s a ton of abuses that are made possible by even that tiny bit of information they share/collect.
You might not care about it, but a lot of us do. Nobody is trying to convince you to stop using Plex, we’re just trying to explain why we really do not want to use it ourselves
I have no idea where you live, but plex is an american company. Plex will 100% be forced to comply with copyright takedown requests, and could absolutely penalize you for infringing on american copyright law. Could you be arrested? Maybe not. But there are still a ton of ways you could get fucked because Plex has enshittified their service and has made zero commitments to protecting you or your identity.
small thing, but in the US this is technically allowed, but as soon as you format-shift the media (e.g. rip a dvd into a digital format) it is no longer protected. It’s assumed that ‘backing up movies’ is literally ‘duplicate the media in exactly the same format it was originally purchased in’. On top of that, it’s also doubly illegal to then share that media, even as a direct stream via a home server. Idk where you live but I’m actually am not aware of any country who allows for your stated use (unless you’re somewhere without extradition or trade relations with the US like Russia or Cuba, because they don’t give a fuck about US legal claims). Not that it’s commonly prosecuted even in the US, but US companies routinely get takedown requests for that shit and Plex will absolutely throw you under the bus.
No you are not. This thread straight up opens on "why would anybody use Plex" and this whole branch is about how people don't want anybody using Google for login.
You are presenting a lot of great hypotheticals and I'll be happy to stop using Plex if and when they stop being hypotheticals. They are, though, so I don't particularly mind.
Especially because we've moved from "oh, maybe get your family to not use Google to log in" to "actually, get them to move to F-droid or install from source and do so under proper DNS filtering to stop telemetry gathering".
Friend, if people's relatives were willing to install their Plex client from source they wouldn't need anybody to host a Plex server for them. What the hell are you going on about and how detached are you from how people use software?
I swear, online... man, "posers" is so harsh, but I can't find a better word. They always pretend they are running some top secret off-the-grid operation like big corpo is coming after them specifically. Your data is probably not that tightly kept (mostly because a bunch of it probably doesn't depend on you) and it's not that much of a priority.
Oh, and while I get that you get a kick of repeating what your understanding of US law is at me, over here backing up to additional media is explicitly supported by the right to private copy. As is, implicitly breaking DRM.
Not that it matters because nobody is enforcing these at individuals for private use anyway because the rules being sought are absurd and holders know it and they just want scary tools to wave in front of individual users and to actually deploy against major sharers. You are playing out this weird scenario where a company goes to Plex to get your name as if Plex doesn't have a business built on helping you do the thing you think they're chasing you for and has a ton more money they could be sued for. It's nonsense. The reality of it is it makes you feel cool and savvy to secure your home computer as if it held state secrets.
And that's fine, but don't act like anything else is insanity. It's kind of obnoxious.
it’s not hypothetical, Plex has already been banning users for various reasons, all of which stem from them having access to data about your account, connected users, and server data.
You’re the only one making this complicated bud.
I was simply telling you that the US has a similar carve out for breaking DRM, but that it didn’t include the use case you are describing. Just giving you a heads-up that it’s a common misconception here, and it could be misunderstood wherever you are too. Chill out. BUT, even if it IS legal where you are, Plex is bound to US law and can and will ban you for breaking it.
Except Plex is enforcing it because it is excplicitly against their terms of service, and have already done so.
I’m not saying it’s insanity you dipshit, i’m saying there are good and valid reasons to avoid a cloud-hosted service not within your control. You’re free to disagree but fuck off with this incredulousness
No, the bans stem from the EULA. I am not breaching the EULA. Whether Plex can verify that or not is not much of a concern for me.
But to be clear, I have zero to lose here. The outcome of Plex banning me for not breaking their EULA (for some reason, which is technically possible but unlikely) is the exact same as the outcome of me dropping Plex in case they ban me. In both cases the only thing that happens is I'm not using Plex anymore.
Also, in your hypothetical Plex already knows the stuff you are worried about. The SSO has nothing to do with it. Plex doesn't need data from Google to know, they already have your personal information.
I guess adding to the list of reasons to use Plex "being berated by online randos wanting to be performatively tech savvy". Which, again, changes nothing practical, but hey.
Take another look bud.
spoiler
>This TOS will take effect (or re-take effect) at the (and each) time you begin installing, accessing, or using the Plex Solution, WHICHEVER IS EARLIEST, and is effective until terminated as set forth below. Plex reserves the right to terminate this TOS at any time on reasonable grounds, which shall specifically include, without limitation, discontinuation of the Plex Solution (or related services) as an offering of the Plex business, nonpayment, termination of account, fraudulent or unlawful activity, or actions or omissions that violate this TOS, subject to the survival rights of certain provisions identified below. In addition, Plex shall have the right to take appropriate administrative and/or legal action in the event of breach or (alleged) criminal activity, including alerting legal authorities, as it deems necessary in its sole discretion.
> When using the Plex Solution in accordance with the foregoing license, you shall not directly or indirectly (a) use the Plex Solution to create any service, software or documentation that performs substantially the same functionality as the Plex Solution, (b) disassemble, decompile, reverse-engineer, or use any other means to attempt to discover any source code, algorithms, trade secrets, or applications underlying the Plex Solution or any of its tools, content, or features, © encumber, sublicense, transfer, distribute, rent, lease, time-share, or use the Plex Solution in any service bureau arrangement or otherwise for the benefit of any third party, (d) adapt, combine, create derivative works of, or otherwise modify the Plex Solution, (e) disable, circumvent, or otherwise avoid or undermine any security device, mechanism, protocol, or procedure implemented in the Plex Solution, (f) use or access the Plex Solution for any unlawful, fraudulent, deceptive, tortious, malicious, or otherwise harmful or injurious purpose, (g) remove, obscure, deface, or alter any proprietary rights notices on any element of the Plex Solution or accompanying documentation, or (h) use the Plex Solution in any manner which could damage, disable, overburden, or impair the Plex Solution or interfere with any third party’s authorized use of the Plex Solution.
But maybe you don’t care about any of that shit, either? Idk man the list of things you’re dismissing as unimportant is really adding up.
Jellyfin has zero idea who I am or what accounts/IPs access my server, nor do they know what’s a part of my media catalogue or if they are legally licensed to me. If I were to use google’s SSO, then google would know which accounts/IP’s are accessing my server, which isn’t a huge deal by itself, but if jellyfin were to have information about my entire account and library then it would suddenly be a very big issue.
But Plex does know what’s on your account, and they do limit the number of authenticated users of the account as a part of their TOS and through limitations surrounding their paid plex pass, and they have exercised their right to terminate accounts and pass personal information of infringers along to law enforcement and copyright holders. None of which is even a remote possibility with a completely self-hosted solution. But hey, if you’re happy then more power to ya.
You are correct, I don't care about any of that either. And I know about the boilerplate. Bud.
You need to agree with yourself about what you're arguing. Are you saying that the problem is the SSO or Plex?
Because if Plex will go tell on you it will do it based on the data they have internally, not based on any data captured by the login flow, so the SSO is not additional issue compared to using Plex without the Google login and using the email login instead.
And if you're arguing that the SSO is the problem and not Plex which you indignantly reminded me is what the thread was about, then you're arguing against yourself, because it sure seems we agree that if Plex is going to take any action against you illegally sharing files through their system (which, by the way, they are legally obligated to do) it won't be due to the Google login at all, which is just a bit of convenience and doesn't seem to provide anybody with any data they don't already have.
Once again, you are super keen on playing up hypotheticals. Once again, the biggest issue with those hypotheticals is that Plex boots me out... of Plex. I am not doing anything illegal with it or even breaching their EULA, including the paragraphs you quote (not that something being written down in an EULA makes it applicalbe, but still). I will bite that bullet and live with Jellyfin's implementation if and when that happens. Which it likely won't.
There’s a problem with SSO’s and there’s a problem with Plex. Go back and read the conversation - that’s not the problem with plex, it’s a problem. Someone said they don’t trust google login, and you were indignant about why that might be, and I was exceedingly patient with explaining why it’s a problem. I like that jellyfin does not provide a google SSO, because I can choose a better, less invasive one as a server admin. I’ve not said anything contradictory here, you’ve just been willfully misreading shit.
just fucking read the words I so kindly found for you in the TOS (not that it fucking matters if it’s a tos or a eula anyway). It’s also not a fucking hypothetical, Plex has already been exercising this. But I don’t give a fuck if you’re concerned about it, i’m just telling you why so many people are taking issue with it. And given that they’ve already demonstrated that they collect detailed data about your personal library and watching habits, it is certainly not out of the question that they could now sell that data as a part of their new privacy policy.
Unless you live in a country without a copyright agreement with the US, you are absolutely liable under this. I have no idea if you do or not, but I’d venture a guess that most people here do. Good for you if it doesn’t apply.
I don’t give a shit what software you use.
I have absolutely not been willfully misreading. You can't argue that the guy saying he has a problem with Google's sign-in specifically has a point and also say that the data mining happening within Plex is WAY more intrusive. If the point is whether giving Google this data is a problem it must be worse than using any of the other sign-in options. But it isn't. Your data is as widely available one way or the other. It is reasonable to think Plex's visibility over your server is too much, I accept that, particularly if your use case runs afoul of their EULA...
...but then you can't tell me "I don't trust Google", unless your argument is you trust Plex more for some reason. Which you shouldn't. It just doesn't follow.
Oh, and they do sell your data for advertising. There's an opt-in for it, though. Since we're talking about legality, it'd be a punishable offense for them to sell your data without your consent, which is why that's there, and they do need to tell you what data they collect if you request it.
And no, I am not liable under US law. There is a treaty that requires both parties to meet those requirements, but US law isn't directly applicable over here. What is applicable is our own legislation made to comply with those trade agreements. Which includes exemptions for private copy.
As far as I and every piece of legal advice I've seen about this knows, anyway. If you have a source for how apparently US law is directly applicable to any country they have a trade agreement with feel free to point me to this insane new paradigm of international law, though.
Those are not mutually exclusive statements. In fact, mostly it just makes you an idiot for not having a problem with either.
It is worse than an auth method that isn’t maintained by a known data whore like google. It’s substantially worse when you’re using it with another data whore service. For those of us who administrate remote services and care about not being beholden to google’s data addiction, it is absolutely not a good thing to provide it as the default auth method, which is what the OP was saying. Even if jellyfin included it, I would immediately disable it. Especially since, as a server administrator, I have a vested interest in keeping the activity of that server private. Even if the specific details of the media on it aren’t exposed, I don’t want any party with conflicting interests to my own to know what users are associated with my server. Just having a dozen or so users connected through jellyfin to my IP would be enough for a motivated legal entity to look at me, and I have more than just a private media server to worry about. Is it likely to happen? Probably not. But why would I even risk it?
I don’t have a source for you, but typically using a US-based platform can give US authorities a jurisdictional hook, especially if the rights holders are US-based or can show commercial harm. That is why US based web services are extraordinarily strict with all of their users, even those who live outside the US. I’m not even saying it’s common, just that it could happen. I seem to remember operators of p2p services getting nabbed at customs while traveling back in the day - it wasn’t illegal where they were, but it sure as fuck was in the US and they were extremely interested in putting the kabash on it.
No question that plex is a more convenient service, but if you have the tech literacy to manage something that’s completely private that is only marginally more complicated, why the fuck wouldn’t you? Then again, maybe if you think you’re more tech literate than you are, it doesn’t seem all that simple.
Man, you keep thinking that taking digs about how it's all a skill issue is either an argument or an insult, and I keep reminding you that even if there was a skill issue at play (and there wasn't), being hard or annoying to use is the actual problem. If your UX allows for skill issues in making a straightforward setup run then it's a UX issue.
Also, me using Plex to host copies of my own media legally is not the same as operating a P2P service. But if it's any consolation I have no intention to set foot on that hellhole anyway, given that US authorities seem to not need copyright overreach to throw you in a room with no windows indefinitely these days. Good luck with that.
Oh, and yes, those are mutually exclusive. Or mutually inclusive, to be more accurate. If your concern is the govenrment overreach implications of having a portion of your data leaked, worrying about a smaller leak along the way of actively generating a larger leak is entirely pointless. Conversely, I'd argue that if you have a dozen users and are terrified that the cops are going to come and raid the... I'm gonna say meth lab you're running on the side, we're back to the conversation about how cool you are with that dozen users having their Jellyfin clients running on a bunch of Android devices, Smart TVs, Windows boxes or whatever else.
Again, I keep struggling with the irony of this weird position having entirely bought into the narrative that self-hosting media is inherently illegal or dangerous. I came into this argument from the UX angle, you guys are increasingly convincing me that a significant disincentive for self-hosting to become mainstream is that its entire community is convinced that they are doing something wrong, apparently. It's not that I hadn't noticed how central to the whole thing a bunch of P2P-specific paraphernalia happens to be, but I wasn't ready for the gatekeeping to come with a side of edgy 90s we're-so-bad hack-the-world stuff.
I’m not explaining this to you again. What you described is not legal on a US hosted service like Plex, and even most other countries with DRM exceptions for personal use do not include sharing outside your immediate household. Even if it’s perfectly legal in your country, and the US can’t touch you where you are, Plex is still obligated to abide by US restrictions. Good enough if that doesn’t bother you, but it isn’t completely without risk and you should be well aware of it.
What exactly does “government overreach” mean in this context?
Using Google SSO independently is bad. Plex independently is bad. Using both together is worse. Using either while also breaking the law, when there’s a perfectly acceptable way to do neither of those things and still just as easily break the law is a whole lot better.
I’m just not a dumbass. Having a dozen users log in without any of them publicly pointing at me or my server IP is a hell of a lot safer than letting a private service log every sign-in and stream event of the server, and then letting a separate private service link those users to accounts with detailed personal information. Those people can install jellyfin on their phones and tablets all they want - google wouldn’t know what servers those clients are connecting to anyway. And even if they did, my server is not associated with my personal details or ISP-assigned IP address. Maybe you just didn’t know that, idk.
Using a google SSO isn’t a prerequisite for self-hosting becoming mainstream. Maybe SSO generally is, but there are a dozen other ways to achieve the same thing. Maybe I don’t care if it becomes mainstream? Maybe what I actually want is for people to learn tech self-sufficiency so that we’re not indefinitely reliant on SAAS. Maybe i’m content with my special little hobby and I’d rather point and laugh at people who get fucked over by services they delude themselves into believing won’t ever screw them, just because they can’t be bothered to learn a new skill.
If you’re as concerned with self-hosting becoming as mainstream as you claim you are, then I’d imagine you’d be more concerned with the late-stage capitalist reality of media distribution and the increasingly restrictive laws surrounding its use. Where I live, the legal structure that protects the right to self sufficiency is very much under question, and continues to get worse. I got burned several times in the napster/limewire days, before it was established precedent that sharing digital copyright material was illegal, and unheard of still that anyone actually got punished for it. I know better than most that you can’t count on those protections indefinitely.
But as an anarchist, I think a little bit of crime is good, actually. More people should be doing crime. But if you’re gonna do it, do the rest of us a favor and don’t be a dumbass about it.
You are saying many things about the legality of this, especially internationally and regarding what Plex is or isn't obligated to do, that are a bit of a stretch. But man, are they put in context by the admission of left wing cosplay there at the end where you concede you do think "a little bit of crime is good, actually", which explains a lot of the hack the world mentality and why you feel so cool and dangerous by sharing some torrents you got with a slightly larger group of people than your direct family.
I still do think that's counterproductive if you ever want a scenario where the late-capitalist media distribution landscape gets at least a modicum of competition from more reasonable and sustainable alternatives. That you prefer to feel edgy than to propose a viable scenario for that is all well and good, but I wish you didn't feel the need to do that at people.
For the record, you are still wrong about SSO. Again it makes sense that if you're cosplaying cops and robbers "this thing bad, this thing bad, both together worse" sounds reasonable, but if you really were at risk of any real legal liability that's really not how that would play out. In the real world ANY leak of that information from any source would be an absolute problem. So the Google login could be a problem by itself, and the Plex data gathering would be a much bigger problem by itself, but both together would just mean you are exactly as screwed as with just one.
But you think it's cool to crap on Google (which I guess it is) and are cosplaying, so that's a cool thing to perform outrage about even if it doesn't really matter in this scenario. Which I'm increasingly realizing is all this conversation is about, from the "I'm so good at networking and system administration" braggadocio to the "I'm such a dangerous anarchist criminal that doesn't give a crap about the rules because I'm so good they can't catch me" stuff.
FWIW, I do care about self-hosting as a viable commercial alternative and about a legal framework to support it, but even if I didn't think it was possible (which it is, and some people at least are working along those lines) I am not ready to give up on the changes required to get there just to feel cool on the Internet. You do you, though, just... try not to scare the normies away. Not that there are any normies around here anyway, so I guess we're safe on that front.
That’s almost exactly what I was saying, except that using both actually increases your risk just by capturing more detailed logs of your server activity and the associated accounts. Your users could use anonymous usernames or share login credentials if they wanted to without it, but being forced to use google SSO means each user is personally identifiable even if they’re protecting themselves otherwise. It’s the same reason I would never use google’s SSO for another web service if I had an alternative, even if for something completely innocuous. Why give them extra information about my web activity and tie it directly to my verified account, even if it’s something trivial like what plex servers i use or how I’m watching my media and on what devices?
But mostly my point was that using google’s SSO by itself, with your own self-hosted server is dumb because it unnecessarily exposes you where you otherwise would have been fine. That was the whole point of this conversation - not that plex was specifically bad because they used it, but that it isn’t a desirable feature for plex or for a self-hosted alternative. Maybe you just misunderstood that, idk.
Where I am people are being black bagged for less than just breaking DRM. I could be disappeared on my way to work tomorrow just for saying something silly like “from the river to the sea”. Maybe you’re privileged enough to feel secure in your legal standing, but that’s not one that I share. Like I said, i’ve gotten burned for using napster when I was young and dumb, and I thought I was safe then, too.
For most people this side of the pacific, ripping DVD’s for personal use is not legal, and streaming them to others is even less so. Any service hosted within the US is subject to that law. You being outside the US but using a private service hosted within it puts you squarely within that jurisdiction, but since you fancy yourself a lawyer, and since IDGAF anyway, i’ll let you mull it over for yourself. If all you’re afraid of losing is access to your plex account then all the power to ya. I just don’t agree with that value judgement.
I’m honestly not sure why you feel so cavalier about your data privacy. If you’re really one of those ‘i’ve got nothing to hide’ folks, I have a larger gripe with you than what a silly ‘plex vs jellyfin’ debate can cover. It’s incredibly shortsighted and normalizes apathy and complacency. There’s no reason to be exposing your private server usage data to private for-profit companies, especially when that activity is already borderline legal at best. My actual fear is that plex gains mainstream attention and comes under legal scrutiny. we go through another tightening of the screws because our bloated media market is bleeding and dragging the rest of the stock market down with it. That’s what happened with napster and the record industry, and it’ll happen with streamers and plex if we’re not a little more discrete.
Yes, rip your dvds. Yes, share them with whoever you want. Go pirate some animes or download a car, IDGAF. But don’t pretend like you’re somehow safe from punitive copyright action just because you’re off in Greenland or whereverthefuck. You’ll end up teaching normies bad habits and poor judgement when it comes to protecting their data privacy.
Again, just don’t be a dumbass about it.
Well there you go. I would really rather self-hosting not even be commercial.
Lmao yes look at me and my data hygiene, you’ll never be as cool as me. It’s clear that you have some misgivings about FOSS as a concept, I guess you can feel good about donating your money to a for-profit entity as a way to stick it to those hippies. God forbid I had tried selling you on linux in this thread, that could have really snowballed.
I mean, my Plex server is on a Fedora machine, it seems to be doing fine. I have gotten into arguments here about how frustrating it is that Linux advocates pretend every usability problem for Windows users is solved and that "just use Mint" is a valid solution to that issue. If you want to know how that goes, it goes a lot like this conversation.
On topic, using any external login or remote access third party service for your self hosted services is a significant change in how much info is not controlled by you, nobody is arguing that. There's a conversation to be had about whether that's worth it for most users. Like I said earlier, is it a good thing for Home Assistant to provide a paid subscription service that will handle that for you? For most people I'd say yes, it's still a much safer, more flexible alternative to Google's or Amazon's ecosystem, so why not? Baby steps.
But if you're already using a commercial service that already has a proprietary login then no, it doesn't matter. Plex already knows which clients go to your server. It does not need Google for anything here, having Google's SSO doesn't give them any information they already have. It does give that to Google, but if your concern is the cops are going to bang on your door for all your illegal pixels that you stream then you're just as boned. It's borderline irresponsible to pretend otherwise.
As for the "I have nothing to hide" thing... look, if you want to have this argument with someone else go pester them instead. It's not "I have nothing to hide", it's "this commercial service that I use does something that is legal and I intend to both take advantage of that and defend my right to own my media". How you get "I have nothing to hide" out of that is your own pretzel logic.
I have a right to store, backup and access my own media and to keep a copy of it for private use. I will exercise that right regardless of how many US corpos pretend that hey own the very concept of showing video to people. I am doing nothing illegal here and of the perfectly legal software options to do this perfectly legal thing I chose the one that had better usability for my family to be comfortable using it. This comes at the cost of an external service storing some of our data, just like our Netlfix and Disney+ subscriptions do, but since I'm not keeping a media server performatively that is a tradeoff we have made on a bunch of places because not everybody who lives here is willing to do homework to be able to use their devices. That cool with you?
For the record, I don't have any misgivings about FOSS as a concept. I do have remarkable contempt for people who want it to keep being a minority option because they like being in the secret treehouse and don't want everybody else learning about it. Widespread, successful FOSS doesn't look like half-baked UX and hobbyist programmers working for nothing in their spare time, and I would certainly like to see a landscape where alongisde hobby projects we have a solid stable of financially sustainable professionally made open source alternatives that anybody can get into. Jellyfin isn't even the worse offender here. If nothing else it's frustrating because it could be a more approachable sustainable alternative in the vein of your Blenders or Home Assistants... but it's kinda not, and that sucks.
Yes, that was the joke
There are so many differences between HA and Plex that it’s almost difficult to pick which one is most significant. All i’d say is - if plex was at all the same as HA, I would have zero problem with it. If jellyfin adopted HA’s model of paid development, I’d be thrilled. But HA’s strategy is actually pretty unique, it’ll take time for that structure to be stress-tested and propagate.
Yea but not really - google accounts are usually pretty specifically identifiable to a person/ad account/collected internet and device activity. Might not be a big deal to you, but having those things tied together is problematic on a number of levels. You can self-host an SSO, and you can also have a security-focused third-party SSO - both would be marginal improvements over using google’s auth system in terms of privacy.
Yes, 100%. If you’re at all concerned about privacy, plex is a terrible idea, with or without SSO. I’m glad you agree.
“What i’m doing is perfectly legal so it doesn’t matter if they have my detailed data”. You’re not hiding it because you think you don’t need to - that’s exactly the argument you’re making. Every step toward data privacy is valuable, even if your total data hygiene practice isn’t perfect. It still matters.
Good for you. Most of us do not.
Neither am I, but I guess I do feel quite passionately about keeping it private and I’m not shy about advocating for the practice. Probably for the same reason you’re very tight lipped about what country you’re from - you don’t necessarily think you’ll get swatted if you do, just that it’s a pointless detail to share with strangers if you don’t have to. Most of my family doesn’t care enough about not using netflix or disney+ that they’re happy to keep using them if my offering is too complicated. I’m happy to help them set up and learn how the server works if they’re interested, and a number of them have become enthusiastic self-hosters themselves as a result. If I was operating a mission-critical service on my server then maybe i’d care more about minimizing UX friction but since it’s not, I’m happy with prioritizing privacy and control over polish. That’s a pretty common mentality for a server administrator - i’m not running a SAAS here. At most I’m just the enterprise IT manager trying to keep the office slack channel running.
You can say that, but boy oh boy is that hard to believe. You certainly don’t think FOSS is worth any level of inconvenience. Looks to me like you’re the kind of person who wants the best tool for every job, regardless of if you could get by with a middling one that supports a FOSS project. That’s fine. I use adobe products for work because I can’t really get by without it, but I still use GIMP or Inkscape when I can and I support those ecosystems with my time and money because it draws more people in. And I actually do want my FOSS tools to be built as side projects, at least at first. There’s a place for polish and professional support, but a lot of this stuff needs to be built out and tested before that kind of thing happens. A lot of these projects act as beta testing for forks that will end up doing one thing really well to a high level of polish. Having a product that’s maybe a little complicated but extremely accessible from a configuration standpoint lets more tech-minded people build on top of them and work toward more polished solutions.
But I certainly don’t find VC backed projects entering into the FOSS space as a good thing. Maybe that competition drives positive movement in the open-sourced ones, but usually they turn out to be ‘embrace, extend, extinguish’ projects. Like, I don’t think meta’s Threads is a positive thing for federated social media, even though by this logic th
Well, hey, there we agree, then. I'd say that the setup for HA is actually fairly Mozilla-like, and people don't seem thrilled with THAT, so it wasn't a given you'd agree. Plex certainly isn't that. For one thing it's commercial and closed source. But crucially HA's commercial branch WILL have a bunch of your data, including voice processing and login info, if you do buy into their paid subscription service.
As for the rest of the argument, most is redundant so I'm not gonna go through the loop again, I am actually busy. But I will add a few things. For one thing, whether I think FOSS is worth "any level of inconvenience" is irrelevant. I do, and I do live with the inconvenience in some cases. But if the goal is for FOSS to be mainstream and a primary choice (and it can absolutely be, there are plenty of examples), then it doesn't matter what I think. The reason the privacy tradeoffs make sense for Plex is that Plex is an app your family is likely to use. Mine does, and they sure won't put up with bad UX for the sake of using an open alternative. OBS didn't crush Xsplit out of the market because of ideology, it did it because it became more powerful, usable and reliable.
And let me clarify I don't "blow smoke for Plex". I opened this whole subthread by saying I wanted to use Jellyfin (hence all the testing we've been nitpicking about) but couldn't justify it. I've said this above. I'd drop Plex in a heartbeat if Jellyfin was just as good to use for me and the rest of my household. But it isn't. There's no reason to blow smoke for Plex, but there is a reason to not delusionally pretend that open source alterantives are better than they are. You're not going to gaslight normies into using them that way and the complacency just makes it less likely for them to succeed at what they're trying to do. It is, after all, the year of Linux desktop.
It would be great if JF did something similar, but I think they don’t specifically because they’d be liable for their users illicit use of it. That’s basically the whole reason OSS streamers exist. Plex started out that way, but when they decided they wanted to compete with the big boys they were forced to lock it down more to protect themselves against legal challenges. That’s why I think you’re kidding yourself if you think it’s a long-term solution for streaming ripped media. That’ll only last until copyright owners decide to push plex to take action against it.
I don’t think that should be the goal - FOSS as a model will never outcompete for-profit corporate models. IMO the goal should be to encourage people to learn the minimal amount of tech self sufficiency so that they can choose FOSS when they need it, rather than pushing FOSS to become OSS, and then eventually just SAAS. Firefox is a good example of what can go wrong with chasing mainstream adoption. There’s a place for projects like Plex, but im pretty adamant that those should be halfway solutions more than end-goals. I’m fine with leaving that as a disagreement.
Nobody is saying JF is easier to use than plex, we just prefer the flexibility and privacy and aren’t bothered or slowed down by the complexity. That’s fine. You just have different priorities than the rest of us. I’m glad there’s an option for you.
I think your read on what people typically do with Plex probably doesn't align with reality. I also think in the end you're way less optimistic about the potential of open source software than I am. There are multiple areas where OSS options are either dominant or very competitive, but I am also clearly way less picky about how that gradient of openness to commerciality than you are. We can agree that it's fine that there are options for both or all steps in that gradient, but there is a ton of snark and all-or-nothing attitude in that community as well.
I will say that If you have a commercial option like Plex and a couple of open alternatives (say Kodi and Jellyfin for the sake of argument) I would prefer one of those to have the type of UX that can compete with the closed commercial product because you can compete with open alternatives.
Damn, I was with you until the unnecessary vegan bashing.
Agreed. I have a dozen or so people using my Plex. There is no conceivable way I’m going to get my less tech literate friends and family to use jellyfin, much less am I going to find a way to set it up for remote access with my limited knowledge. Plex is just too convenient right now.
All of my less tech literate friends are getting a warning to abandon their computers entirely.
So you don’t do a lot of tech support. Nice.
ITT: bunch of nerds with literally no friends or family to share media with lol
Ok but there are a million SSO options out there - just because someone doesn’t want to allow google as a SSO provider doesn’t mean they’re telling anyone they have to switch fucking email services.
If you want a remote service to handle your authentication you don’t have to use google. I feel like that’s something I shouldn’t have to point out in a self-hosting community on an open-source and federated social media platform.
It has nothing to do with email
It’s not a personal crusade. Everyone should be trying to get people away from Google. They are an absolutely fucked corporation who makes a fortune spying on you and everyone you know.
👍
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i dont get this.. im technically still usin emby, but user management is beyond simple and requirs no upkeep. no one has asked me to reset their passwords and ive got a few dozen people usin my instance.
Not forgetting Emby allows either a local or a federated account!
Sounds more of an user problem than a jellyfin problem? If they can’t remember their login I’ll just not add them to jellyfin.
And this is why people use Plex.
I mean, all joking aside, I wish FOSS alternatives paid enough attention to UX and didn't unironically run on this sort of mentality, because I do want good open source alternatives I can use without getting annoyed or having the other people I'm trying to give access telling me that they're actually just gonna use the other thing if you don't mind.
Exactly, we dont add them to jellyfin, we add them to plex because its easier for them lol.
Fair enough, i just have very limited patience for incompetence. if they cant figure out how to remember their user and password. I don’t want to have to deal with them at all.
The overall vast majority of everyone is completely tech illiterate. We can blame them for their lack of tech skills all we want but that won’t change anything. Jellyfin needs a better UX before it’s feasible to use over Plex when sharing libraries with other users.
Let’s not act like a user and password is some revolutionary new technical concept. They can remember it for their email provider if they can access the plex link. So why not jellyfin? I think the UX of Jellyfin is more than acceptable in this regard. Sure I wouldn’t mind they added this feature but i don’t see it as a must have.
Username, password, and URL* Also the majority of users will be on a tv, where typing that in is a huge pain. Plex’s centralized auth makes it trivial to link with a browser or app on their phone so they can login.
Jellyfin has a sign in through the app for tv. Which I tell them to use first. And URL is also nothing new. All this stuff are 30+ year old concepts by now. But to each his own!
I’m starting to think it acts as a nice filter. If they can’t grasp an URL + login, it would save me from tech support down the line.
I have atleast a dozen family members on mine that are more than double the age that 30+ year concept that don’t and never will manage to understand it. You can keep complaining about your own marginal effort, and I will keep preventing hundreds of dollars a month of wasted money by the people I love :)
URL into bookmark, username and password onto paper. Dont tell me they can’t do handwriting anymore.
TV? how did they log into their google account to begin with?
but also: they can log in first on the phone or anywhere else, then use quick connect for the TV… added bonus: phone is now a remote.
I can tell you right now that something like a username and password is exceptionally difficult for most users. Many just have one password for every single application and if they need to use a different email or password, they will be stuck.
The vast overwhelming majority of users do not have password managers, do not know they exist, and will give up at the first sign of complexity. You’re too far into the weeds if you don’t conceptualize this.
Yeah, but since you basically need a VPN to share Jellyfin safely, you now also need to install and maintain that on their end
Conversely, the average FOSS programmer has no idea how to either design for simplicity or document for the novice.
Yeah, being a novice in the FOSS scene can be extremely frustrating sometimes. It can very easily start feeling like you’re reading documentation for a plumbus, where every single sentence seems to introduce a new term you’re unfamiliar with. And it often assumes you’re already intimately familiar with how these new terms work. So even just reading the documentation for one specific thing often means having fifty different tabs open, as you also have to read documentation about a ton of dependencies or terms.
I actually think most of them do, it’s just that the simple designs aren’t universal enough to gain much traction in a FOSS community.
@Decq @Jimmycakes ehh helping people every 6 months of so since they forgot their password. Isn't that bad. I have 10 users and have had to tell people their password maybe four times over four years. Not that bad.
Well yes I know, but that kind of proofs a sign in link is not that important right? :) surely not a deal breaker as they postulated above.
Cool story bro you’re such a big man telling grandma she’s cut off. Tough guy over here. Absolute unit of a guy.
Tailscale
I will not make myself the tech guy for half my friends and family, just because I can’t share Jellyfin safely without a vpn
That’s fair but tailscale isn’t a traditional vpn, it makes direct connections between two devices. it was also designed to be extremely easy to setup and it’s free for up to 100 devices.
Again it’s fair if you don’t want to mess with it
@Jimmycakes @Selfhoster1728 they learn pretty fast and the calls stop. Everyone says it's hard I have very tech illerate people using it and yes I get some calls but not alot. And they managed to login way easier then I thought. I think everyone is overblowing how hard Jellyfin is. I mean most people know how to login to a website.
My family/friends uses it on TV all they do is scan the qr code on plex and it logs them in and basically keeps them logged in forever. On jellyfin it logs out randomly. I run a dedicated Nas with 40tb half filled with media. I started on jellyfin and switched over to plex and never looked back. Just the fact that half the people in my replies think the main use case is on a Pc tells you everything you need to know. It’s perfectly fine for tech literate people for everyone else plex is superior.
I think most of the people complaining about jellyfin being difficult either haven’t tried it for at least a year or are trying to use it alongside their plex service without knowing how to configure them properly.
Which is fair, I just didn’t realize how many people were using plex that didn’t have an interest in learning remote service deployment.
I would not let anyone access my self hosted stuff who is not using a password manager and secure passwords.
I’m actually fascinated/frightened by the number of people here who are apparently comfortable running an exposed remote service on their personal network without enough tech knowledge to manage user auth themselves or maintain a stack with shared volumes…
I think most of the reason people are using Plex is that they don’t have to expose services. Plex handles all the nat traversal and whatnot for them.
Also the people that know how to set that all up and still expose a Jellyfin server to the public internet
You can install a plugin to add SSO.
github.com/9p4/jellyfin-plugin-sso
Did you notice that they’re using a local connection? Still requires VPN/reverse proxy to get it outside the home.
They didn’t mention it in the post I reacted to.
But both of your suggestions are excellent solutions to the problem.
What’s actually bad about it?
Like, this is something you opt into and is only relevant if you’re watching their ad supported stuff, which I don’t know anyone who watches that over their own media on Plex.
And honestly, every “bad” thing I’ve ever heard about Plex has been the same thing, something that sounds horrible until you understand it
Because Jellyfin users like to feel superior. Accepting that other people have other requirements from software is hard, especially when you feel like you choice is the only valid one.
As a long time Plex user, who has a Jellyfin running in parallel, just not shared, I will keep using Plex until they either force me off of it or Jellyfin manages to make accessing servers remotely easier and more secure.
For me it’s PlexAmp and the few tech-illiterate friends I have who use my server for video streaming. 99% of the time, I just watch movies on my desktop with VLC player but I’ve yet to find a self-hosting music player half as good as PlexAmp
Plexamp is pretty great. It’s my streaming music player of choice.
After gpm shit the bed… I vowed to never have another streaming music service.
Plexamp it is.
As I said, I’ve yet to find a selfhosting solution half as good as PlexAmp. It’s very, very good and arguably a better service than normal Plex
Thirded on both your points.
The closest thing I’ve found to Plexamp (on Android) is Symphonium. I only pointed it to my Plex server, but it offers support to so many other services. It also works perfect in Android Audio. It does cost $4, but it’s honestly worth that and then some.
But I totally get how great Plexamp is. I use it every day.
Yeah, the sad reality is that Plex’s setup experience is much smoother. And when you’re trying to convert people, the single largest obstacle is often social inertia. So lowering the barriers to entry is extremely important. My mother-in-law would need to sideload the Jellyfin app onto her TV, but Plex is available right on its app store.
Luckily, you can run both side by side. Jellyfin for me and my more tech-literate friends, Plex for those who don’t know/don’t care to learn.
I have read many people say this, but I don’t understand what they mean by it. When I set up Jellyfin, it was a very simple process.
Simplicity is relative to each person’s abilities and the tool in question.
Apparently all your friends and family are comfortable with hostnames and ip addresses. Not everyone’s are. Also, not everyone wants to buy a static ip or setup a dynamic dns service or similar. Plex is definitely simpler. I have used both.
I understand this but we have to realize that what makes Plex simpler is the fact that they are a network intermediary that does what it wants with your home networks; it’s like insisting that NordVPN is better than Mullvad
IMHO the only solution will be improving wireguard guis and stuff, Jellyfin is not lacking.
I haven’t used Plex, so I’m not exactly sure what it’s doing, but I’m guessing it presents you some sort of search to find the server? Isn’t that pretty much the same as a domain name, just w/ a search bar instead of a URL bar? If your domain is easy to remember, I guess I don’t see an issue. I’ve also heard you can connect to multiple servers, so maybe that’s what people are talking about.
Regardless, I think Jellyfin could handle both. Get some community-funded STUN relay servers to handle discovery and implement a way (if it doesn’t already) to have your client connect to multiple servers. There should also be a way to copy all the configs from one client to another (say, a QR code or UUID, settings copied over the same STUN server).
My main issue is that this could open up servers to more potential attack vectors, and Jellyfin already has some security weaknesses. But other than that, I’d be happy to help implement this sort of thing, a STUN server can be run on as little as a $5 VPS.
No, Plex lets you invite friends to your server with a link they can click and sign up. Then they can type a code into their TV app or login to a browser and watch basically like a standard streaming setup they already probably have used.
Jellyfin is less familiar. Arguably not much more difficult but people aren’t always rational. The unfamiliar is often intimidating.
Can’t you just send your link to them over SMS, IM, or email? Is the main difference that you can do this from the UI?
I guess entering a code on the TV is pretty cool though. Maybe I’ll poke around in the Jellyfin community to see what the interest is in such a feature, because it should be possible w/ minimal hosting costs.
Yeah, you have two options, as the server owner:
You can enter a user’s email from the Plex UI to invite a user to your library. The user then gets an email asking them to sign up if they don’t already have an account.
You can generate/send a link to join, any way you choose.
Once signed up, the user can accept the library invitation, then they login to the TV or other device. The code is used for the TV login process, like on other streaming platforms. But yeah, you could do an account-less version of this for Jellyfin, which I think laypeople would like.
I haven’t used Plex in a decade and I use Jellyfin, what you’re describing sounds perfect. I read up a bit on STUN servers and it’s what Syncthing uses, but they also mantain discovery and relay servers (and anyone can host one and can be added to the public list). Security wise they seem to be doing fine?(I’m not an expert, just an informed user)
Idk what combo Jellyfin would benefit the most from; are relay servers needed? The workload is similar but probably higher on average, people stream more often than they do backups
I wonder if having a “sign in” page within jellyfin that just fronts a wireguard configuration panel, saves the creds, and automatically connects and routes app traffic over the vpn iface is a remotely viable idea.
That depends on if someone wants it enough to make it happen.
That sounds good to me, we use wireguard in the family when out and about to access my homeserver, but I’d love if Jellyfin could create ad-hoc tunnels, it’d make us feel safe enough sharing our libraries with friends, perhaps it will convince many Plex users too. What are funkwhale users doing to share their music for example?
The other commenter wrote about STUN servers (IP), I’ve seen that Syncthing uses them as well, together with discovery and relay servers. Would wireguard be used at any of this stages or standalone? Personally I have no idea, I’m just an observant user 😅
Off topic, but what? Is Nord doing wacky shit with network settings?
I’m not a security expert but my guts (and the many things I read about this stuff over many years) tell me that cheap highly marketed VPNs like Nord seek the less informed users that sign up because half of their favorite youtubers sent them there, the default M.O. is install the (proprietary) app. It might be possible to use them safely but it’s not what’s happening to 99% of the customers.
They operate in grey legal areas, there are many scandals over the years, they write in their TOS that they can change the terms themselves without notice, if you use their service, you agree at any time.
When I wrote that they do what they want w your network, this is what I’m referring to; idk about the “settings”, more like selling access to your residential line (perhaps to other VPN customers)
Excuse me, I thought the comment I replied to was talking about the setup process of the jellyfin server itself.
Well yeah maybe that too, but a server no one connects to is a paperweight. The connection part confuses laypeople
I mean, even in that regard, I did not find it that hard, but I do have a domain.
As I said, most people don’t have that nor do they want to set it up.
I wasn’t ignoring you. I explicitly put the caveat after “but” specifically because of what you said.
Gotcha. I read the tone differently, but all good.
I mean pretty much everyone I know uses web browsers and sometimes type in web addresses lol
You seem a little out of touch with how people think.
I doubt they’re thinking at all if writing a web address is too much lol
“Facebook dot what? Stop the tech speak, nerd!”
And yet most people will just type “facebook” into the omnibar in their browser and click the first result that google gives them.
Yes… A LOT, and I do mean a significantly plurality… have no fucking clue what a URL is.
Then, you are completely out of touch with how most people use computers.
I’m not sure if you’re just surrounded by mentally deficient people for some reason or seriously underestimating them, but pretty much everyone I know can type in a website address lol
Or maybe it’s some zoomie “what’s a computer” thing
They can if forced to, but they never have to do that normally. What you’re telling people to do is make normal people do things they don’t normally do when browsing the web and saying its as easy as making them sign up for a Plex account. Most people have done similar things as the latter, but they only have to type a full URL once or twice in their lifetime.
That is way beyond the comfort zone of most people I know. The general use case of web browser for normal people is googling the website they want and clicking the link while being blissfully unaware of what a URL is or does.
This does not mean they are mentally deficient, it just means they spend their mental processing and memory on other things they deem actually important.
We know very different sort of people. Remember that older people wrote the full address as the default, bookmarks and especially googling everything (and “apps”) only became the default later on.
Yeah, but the proportion of people who used computers during that time is much smaller than the generations after, meaning they only represent a very small minority of non-technical computer users.
Not to mention that my country lagged behind in terms of computer adoption during the 90’s and 00’s compared to developed nations, so it is even less likely for you to find that category of people around me.
How is someone who can’t manage to copy and paste “www.my-jellyfin-server.com” into the address bar going to figure out where to get a Plex account?
Tell them to copy and paste that text from their phone to their TV and tell me how it goes. First, you gotta explain what apps are available on whatever TV they’re using, though.
You also conveniently forget to mention the amount of work you need to setup a domain name that points to your Jellyfin server vs just telling them to sign up for a Plex account and tell you the email address they used.
Btw, the average person have no trouble signing up for an online account. How do you think people create an account for their social media, email address, and online shopping? Just google Plex and sign up. It’s a familiar process for them, unlike dealing with URLs or VPN apps.
This thread is comparing the ease of setup between Plex and Jellyfin and having to purchase your own domain and set a bunch of stuff up on your own definitely doesn’t make for an easier install. You might be right about people’s ability to type in a URL, but this definitely illustrates the added difficulty in setting up Jellyfin.
Setting up a server? Pretty darn easy.
Teaching all your friends and relatives to figure out what app to use and login with your dyndns random entry or IP address. Or even more difficult, using VPN.
It’s not the hosting that’s hard. It’s the watching for non-tech people.
Maybe I’m just callous but I just don’t see that as a problem myself. If I’m offering my own self hosted services for friends or family, the least they can do is put in some effort to learn how to use it. If they couldn’t bother, that is their loss.
If people operate a car, the least they could do is learn how to change their brakes or do an oil change.
To most non-tech people, that’s the level of complexity you’re expecting them to adhere to.
That is a very strange equivocation to make and not at all like what I said. But if I did give someone a free car, yes I would expect them to take care of it. And if they don’t, and the car breaks, then yes that is also their loss.
We’re here in the plex bashing thread
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/64fd2b6f-482d-4918-9341-25c802b02b12.jpeg">
“Grab an app called jellyfin, type in this number, pick the profile with your name, password is X”
It’s not that different than “Grab an app called plex, here’s the username and password, pick the profile with your name” (or sign up yourself and I’ll share it with you)
For me it’s a trade-off: yes Plex is less good than Jellyfin from a data/cost perspective. But so far the UI of Plex (which is not perfect mind you), availability of Plexamp (which honestly is very very good), and the fact that I don’t have to pay for it anymore after buying lifetime swings the scale towards Plex for me.
If Plex somehow canceled my lifetime or forced ads on my shows or something, that would be a line — but making me opt out of selling my data is not that line for me.
Different taste on the UI front I guess. I thought the default Plex was awful, couldn’t stand it. Jellyfin can be a bit messy though
I just use Jellyfin for this too, not sure I follow the issue but I haven’t used Plex since migrating
Maybe you’ve tried it already, but navidrome is a great purpose built music streamer. I was using subsonic back in the day, then airsonic, then airsonic advanced. When I first got on navidrome it was a tough pill to swallow since I never maintained my tags, but I gave a little time here and there to comb through it and in the end it feels like a worthwhile investment. It paid off a little bit more when I adopted lyrion music server and squeeze players for local playback around the home since this organizes by the same tags (mostly), so the whole library is kind of plug and play with things that honor the same tags.
Who downvoted you?
Anyway, if you have directory-based music organization, Navidrome won’t take that, sadly. However, it will take m3u playlists.
So I can just
ls playlistdir/* > Playlist.m3uand get that directory as a playlist. Simple, lazy solution.Oh, you can also add internet radios to Navidrome.
And one cool trick, which is also pretty good to test out Navidrome without effort, in Termux it is already in the repos, so you can just effort-free
apt install navidrome, run it and play around.Privacy
Notable config:
EnableInsightCollector = ‘false’www.navidrome.org/docs/getting-started/insights/
Yeah that was the tough pill to swallow, moving away from folder based (the old *sonic gang) to tag based navidrome. Not for everyone, but getting your tags in order opens up some nice doors.
They publish a container image as part of their releases, and you can manage everything with environment variables. If you’re used to running containers I’d say this is even easier for testing and playing around.
For me it’s chromecast support. Maybe Jellyfin has that now but it didn’t last time I checked.
When did you check? I’ve been using it that way for over a year.
“still even mentions plex”
I’ve been using plex for a LONG time, and bought a lifetime plexpass 12 years ago. I’m pretty sure I haven’t started a thread on Lemmy regarding Plex, but I’m sure I’m not alone as a LONG TIME user. Plex just works for me and cost me $75 in 2013. Right now I’ve got no pressing reason to switch.
If they remove my plexpass features, or start showing me ads / making my user experience worse, then I’ll probably look to change, and won’t participate in these awful ‘plex’ posts.
P.S. we should encourage as much new content on Lemmy as possible if you ask me.
Same with me, 12 years, about $70, and it still works just as well as ever. I turn off any new features I don’t want, my friends and family can still stream from me for free since I have plex pass already, and it’s easy to share without having to pass around my IP address.
Same. I bought the lifetime pass on sale many years ago, my setup is still working fine without me having to have touched it for at least the past 3 years outside of applying an update from time to time. I don’t stream their free shows or movies and have those setup so that they don’t even show up as an option on my tv.
Do I wish it was still the same company it was a decade ago? Of course… but so far they haven’t impacted my experience to the point that I feel the need to replace it with something else. The second that happens I will be spinning up Jellyfin.
Yep, exactly, when they screw me I’ll leave
Plex was the reason why I learned Docker + watchtower, so that I wouldn’t have to worry about updates (work smarter not harder). Now I have like 35 containers and am comfortable with docker. 🐳
Another longtime user here. If you haven’t already, you might want to disable autoupdates on all your devices. The “new experience” is not without its controversies.
Yeah, first thing I did after testing the new app. Still don’t know why they feel the need to push this out so aggressively instead of letting it run in parallel until its ready
Because this is the selfhosted community, not the FOSS community. There is some overlap, but they are different. There are many reasons to not use Plex, it not being free and open source are not among them.
spoiler
askldjfals;jflsad;
what? It’s not like everyone needs to run jellyfin at home. the only thing you need to use is the jellyfin webapp, which I don’t understand how is it more complicated than netflix or any other similar service. you log in, pick a movie and hit play. that’s it.
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askldjfals;jflsad;
Yes. It’s very easy. It might not have used to be easy but it is for the last couple of years. Dead simple. About a dozen people use my Jellyfin server across TV’s, phones, tablets, laptops. None of them are what I would call techies. It’s as simple for them as Netflix.
If you have not set up a VPN for accessing your Jellyfin, I would suggest looking into the myriad of security issues the Jellyfin Backend has. Jellyfin has no business being accessible from the public internet
I don’t mean to diminish your comment, but I just went through the setup process for both Plex and jellyfin (moving to new hardware) and there was no significant difference between the setups.
Maybe this wasn’t the case a few years ago, but jellyfin is just a setup, point to libraries, and enable hardware accel.
spoiler
askldjfals;jflsad;
Yep. My son lives in another city and uses my jellyfin server. Actually since yesterday, because Plex stopped allowing him to watch remotely.
spoiler
askldjfals;jflsad;
Sorry, I meant “Plex took away free remote streaming”.
You’re being really, really snippy. Either have a coffee or take a breather, but calling strangers liars is way offside.
I’m not lying, I can show you my Fw config. My son called me yesterday saying he couldn’t watch Plex, something about the Plex pass. I just changed the Fw rule DST nat mangle port and told him to use jellyfin. The user is local, so that’s dead easy. Done in 10 minutes.
And yes, most users don’t have this kind of experience, granted. But Plex comes with its own stupidities, like in 2020 when my wife had to pay $5 for the Plex app so she could access our library. Or the exercise of sharing libraries if you don’t have a Plex pass, which is a real pain.
But that wasn’t my point. I was trying to relay that jellyfin isn’t as buggy and difficult as a lot of self hosters claim.
spoiler
askldjfals;jflsad;
Well, I didn’t appreciate your “frankly I think you’re lying” comment, so I guess we’re even.
spoiler
askldjfals;jflsad;
You called him a liar and then got pissy when he fired back. Grow a thicker skin or don’t start shit.
spoiler
askldjfals;jflsad;
Are you also a fellow MikroTik/RouterOS user?
Haha, yes I am. I think I’m on my 8th year moving on from pfsense, still rocking the rb4011.
Learning curve is something else, but mikrotik just sits there and works.
I don’t mean to add fuel to the fire with Gentry or anything but I can speak towards my experience with jellyfin here. When I started with jellyfin I didn’t know a lot about networking or even self hosting, I pretty much jumped in blind. Although it’s fair to say I am not new to technical concepts/troubleshooting so my experience is definitely going to be smoother than a non technical user.
For context I am using truenas scale to host jellyfin and I was able to install it, configure it, and get my library going on the first try and it was definitely under 20 minutes. Once I decided I wanted remote access to my library it wasn’t super crazy to figure out tail scale (maybe 30 minutes?) and have that available too. It might not have been under an hour total but coming from almost nothing as a newer user I didn’t really experience a lot of turbulence.
That’s valid.
When I first got whiffs of Plex becoming not-so-great, (maybe 3 years ago?) I struggled to get jellyfin up and running. It felt less polished.
But as of last month when I recently installed JF in an incus container, it has come a long way. Very easy setup.
My Jellyfin tunnels via traefik and cloudflared. However, the normal Android app somehow can’t login, but streamyfin works like a charm. I always had issues with plex, because it relied on their own service. But jellyfin now simply works, pretty nifty
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askldjfals;jflsad;
I mean, if they don’t want to learn, there is always netflix, prime, Disney +.
Or stay with plex, no shade.
Or you take an afternoon and build something cool like this.
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askldjfals;jflsad;
Plex never worked outside my network so I’m not worried about that on Jellyfin
Jellyfin is basically as easy to use as plex within the same network. I’ve set up both dueing the past 6 months. The only big difference is that Jellyfin is much more of a pain to work through port forwarding.
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askldjfals;jflsad;
Probably because it works well, and has working clients on everything at this point. For some, a one-time fee was worth it when it was cheaper.
Sharing is also easier, as your friends just sign up to a plex account and you share your library with them. No need to send them an ip address and port, or fqdn that you have to maintain if your isp changes your ip address. It has its benefits, tbh, and the core sharing features still work for streaming. All the extra crap you can just turn off.
That why I think its still popular.
I don’t use either service. Do they serve the same purpose?
It’s already setup, and a lack of motivation/time/energy/urgency to make the change…
There’s no jellyfin app on my TV.
Can’t access remote unless u setup port forwarding, NAT rule etc etc. Too much work with jelly bin, plus it looks like 1990s UI created by illegal IPTV distributors
I have Plex running alongside Jellyfin.
When transcoding video, Plex uses an extra 5 watts of power. Jellyfin uses an extra 55 watts.
Jellyfin also has security holes for accessing videos via URL without being authenticated.
I don’t feel like Jellyfin is ready for being exposed to the internet.
Jellyfin is hardly a no-brainer. I set it up out of curiosity a few weeks ago and my first question was how do I give access to my friends and family. So I searched, and all of the results were talking about setting up a VPN or a reverse proxy or whatever. Man, I just want to tell my mom “install this app on your tv and log in”, which is exactly what Plex does.
I get that Plex is enshittifying, but pretending Jellyfin is a drop-in replacement is delusional.
Seconded it’s not a no-brainer. I spent days trying to get it set up with Docker on two different computers and three different distros. It wouldn’t install, if it did install it had errors, if it would even open at all with anything other than a black screen. Hours trying to search how to fix it. I gave up and installed it as a standalone app on a common distro. Not as convenient, but FML it finally worked. Really felt like I wasted my time. Personally, this is the exact bullshit linux fanatics completely ignore when they insist on how great linux is vs whatever. I’ve got a shitload of patience, willpower and modest skill to try to get something like this working, but 99% of the population doesn’t. That’s why linux will stay on the back burner. And if it ever becomes just as easy as Windows…guess what? You’ll have many of the same problem as Windows.
You struggled to set up Jellyfin with docker?
Damn
Don’t be smug.
I’ll take any chance, even one involving docker
I am a devops engineer and application architect who spends their entire day developing automated docker deployments for custom applications from scratch and I manage all our reverse proxies and TLS termination and certificates.
5 years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what a docker container really was. Thankfully migrating legacy apps to docker on Linux hosts is my full time job and it has allowed me to become proficient enough in a fairly short amount of time.
We all have to start somewhere and shitting on someone for not knowing something now will dissuade them from ever learning it and potentially remove a future contributor to the open source tech stack before they ever even get started.
If they said they had trouble understanding docker it would’ve been clearer, but they said Jellyfin was the issue.
I’ve definitely pulled my hair out with docker too. Banged my head against the wall for a couple days before finally giving up.
I’m not ridiculously tech savvy, but I’ve tinkered with Linux since I was young, daily drive it on my laptop. I’m not afraid of the command line, and I’m smart enough to search for help and guides when I need it.
But something about docker just breaks my brain. Maybe I’m too old and there’s too much abstract thought required, I don’t know. But I can’t figure it out.
IMO it was my hardware on the first tries. Not sure what your problem was, but after digging around I found something that loosely indicated that my hardware was too old or something - it didn’t play well with the onboard graphics or similar. But the second hardware set I tried it on was far newer, and after all the installation was complete I got a black screen. Every time. No matter which guide I used, no matter what dependencies I thought might be missing or whatever I tried to get it working. A hair pulling experience indeed.
Jellyfin is a no-brainer. Publishing services on the Internet is complex.
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askldjfals;jflsad;
Yeah, but then you’re not self-hosting, you’re paying or using their free services to manage that for you.
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Yup. And letting them collect data on what goes through their service is the cost.
Happens with most services.
I’m sure that one boutique website you shopped on had buried in the T&C that they can sell your data.
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askldjfals;jflsad;
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Very few people care. So no, for most it is not really a no brainer. It’s more effort and work pretty much everywhere. Try to use jellyfin on the Xbox client and tell me that isn’t trash.
If they adhered to somewhat modern security principles for their Backend I wouldn’t mind hosting it behind a reverse proxy. But since large parts of the API is unauthorized and unprotected, I wont.
And I do not plan on supporting family and friends in setting up vpns on all of their devices
What are the worries behind it? Last time someone was worried about the security it was about knowing filenames of the stuff you host by brute forcing iirc
The issue is their approach to security. I don’t trust them to properly secure their software, since they have proven to prefer client compatibility over security.
Understandable. I don’t worry that much myself since I haven’t heard anything bad happening yet. And with ro rights to media, potential damage at least should be pretty limited.
You’re in a post about people outraged about an opt-in anonymous data sharing option on Plex, and you’re not worried about known security issues because you haven’t heard of anything bad happening yet?
Make it make sense.
I don’t care if they probe for my media considering I block 99% of the world. Yes blah blah they could get around it. If someone really wants to see what I have on my media server that bad, I don’t think I’d be able to stop them anyway.
I’m not sure how a service selling my data and services having potential security issues are the same. Two different issues imo
Depends entirely on where you live I would think.
Knowing (guessing) the file path allows them to access and stream the content. Meaning worst case scenario… Sony (the people known for putting malicious stuff on CDs) can probe your server, and prove the content is there because your server will return the movie file itself.
I mean, if I didn’t know better, I’d start to suspect that the large multimedia corporations building walled gardens of apps in closed Smart TV ecosystems don’t really want you to be able to easily tell your mom how to watch shit for free. I mean they’ll let you, if you really insist on having that app available, but someone will have to pay THEM money instead first (and probably let them spy on you). That’s their racket.
The reason Plex can do it is because they do make money, doing shitty stuff like this to their users, so they can use that money to open these doors into SmartTV-land. The root of the problem is that your SmartTV itself (and your mom’s) is a locked down proprietary piece of shit, designed exclusively for shoving all proprietary content these media companies develop down your throat, and there are few convenient workarounds that are available to us, because of course they make workarounds as inconvenient as possible.
Unless you’re willing to ditch everything proprietary and insist on open technology for everything, which is hard on its own, you’re going to end up with a janky mix of proprietary and open systems that always require some compromises, because the proprietary stuff forces us to compromise. It’s literally a “this is why we can’t have nice things” situation.
Or… You know… Jellyfin could make it so I don’t have to setup elaborate VPN schemes and have every user install that on every one of their devices. For example they could fix their security issues to make it safer to expose JF through a reverse proxy, bug they refuse to not break client compatibility
There is one thing I want from jellyfin. It is to be able to login from their Android app to watch or set something to record without jumping through a bunch of hoops.
I’m not a hardcore tech person and this is exactly the issue for me as well.
I want to be able to stream my music collection when I’m away from home without having to get an associate’s degree in networking.
Tailscale makes this easy if you are the only user.
I’ll look into Tailscale then. I’m guessing there’s something funky about adding additional users. I would eventually like to add one or two other people.
It’s not that hard but they will have to make accounts and set the correct exit node or use the weird magic dns. Takes some hand-holding and depends on how you set things up.
I think the free tier lets you have three users. I ended up going with headscale so that could be wrong.
Easy if the device you’re trying to listen on has a tailscale app and a JellyFin app, which is unlikely unless you’re using your phone or a tablet/pc.
You saying you wouldn’t have those things away from home? Or a firestick.
No, I don’t generally carry Firesticks around with me.
So assuming you are traveling, what do you bring with you if it isn’t a mobile streaming device, a laptop, or a mobile device that you are going to stream to?
Jellyfin is a fully self hosted drop in. That means it’s up to the server operator to handle everything. You would still tell your mom to just install the Jellyfin app on her TV with the one additional step in your server address which you would tell her.
But yes, you as the operator have to do some extra things like implementating a reverse proxy and if hosting out of your home make necessary network configuration changes to accommodate this access.
You as server operator also have to check what device your mom has and point her to what app download, because Jellyfin doesn’t have an app for everything
True though that’s less server operator and more “just being helpful to your mom”. That said it seems nowadays that a Jellyfin app is available on most devices/ecosystems (or maybe I just don’t have experience with enough devices to have an accurate idea).
This is why I use Yunohost. It makes all of that just a “click buttons” affair. Then you can tell your Mom the same thing. Only the domain is yours so Jellyfin can’t hold it over your head.
Does it work on a smart tv or roku or whatever?
Yeah they have apps on all the platforms.
All of these, plus more unofficial ones: jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/
Yes, but that person has to create an account. Everyone has to create an account. With Plex. Some people I know immediately say no, others are annoyed that plex would try and shake them down for money.
If you configure Jellyfin, all that goes away. THEN they can simply download the app and login.
I make the account for them. Then I log in as them and set it up so they only see my server. Then I send them the credentials and have them login
So I told people download app enter this url and login. I even send out an email inviting them so they can click the link and create their own username and password. Then if they forget their password they can ask for a reset link.
Since you need to self-host Jellyfin, then you are responsible for making the service public.
The best thing is, you can’t use a reverse proxy with it, it doesn’t even support it.
I don’t even know what a reverse proxy is
Odd, since my Jellyfin sits behind a reverse proxy.
Oh, right, it was basic auth (behind a reverse proxy, or even in general) that Jellyfin doesn’t support and isn’t planned to support IIRC.
Here is a GitHub issue where they said they don’t plan on supporting it: github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-android/issues/123
The point for me is, that I have an acient synology NAS (ds214play) which acts as my media server. There is a community made plex package which I can install easily. As far as I have seen, there is no way to install jellyfin on this NAS, as it doesn’t support docker
My TV doesn’t have a Jellyfin app, only a Plex app. I’m not buying a new TV just to use my preferred media server, sadly :-(
You can cast jellyfin to any receiver. I use a Chromecast.
Hearing people think they need an app just to use their TV as a TV is painful.
This is why you shouldn’t use the built-in TV OS. Use an Apple TV, Nvidia Shield, fire stick if you’re fine with ads, a tiny NUC would work, maybe a raspberry Pi although idk about that one.
I host a Plex server for close to 70 friends and family members, from multiple parts of the world. I have over 60TBs of movies, tv shows, anime, anime movies, and flac music, and everyone can connect directly to my server via my reverse proxy and my public IPs. This works on their phones, their tvs, their tablets and PCs. I have people of all ages using my server, from very young kids to very old grandparents of friends. I have friends who share their accounts with their families, meaning I probably have already hit 100+ people using my server. Everyone is able to request whatever they want through overseerr with their Plex account, and everything shows up pretty instantly as soon as it is found and downloaded. It works almost flawlessly, whether locally or remotely, from anywhere in the world. I myself don’t even reside in the same home that my Plex server resides. I paid for my lifetime pass over 10 years ago.
Can you guarantee that I can move over to jellyfin and that every single person currently using my Plex server will continue having the same level of experience and quality of life that they’re having with my Plex server currently? Because if you can’t, you just answered your own question. Sometimes we self host things for ourselves and we can deal with some pains, but sometimes we require something that works for more people than just us, and that’s when we have to make compromises. Plex is not perfect, and is actively becoming enshittified, but I can’t simply dump it and replace it with something very much meant for local or single person use rather than actively serving tens to hundreds of people off a server built with OTC components.
That’s just the nature of service migration; of course for people like you who are very dependent on it, it’s not a no-brainer, but for anyone who wants to start hosting one of the two, yes it will be.
In your case yes Plex is more appropriate but at the same time the clock is ticking for Plex if they continue on this route…
Can I guarantee? There are no guarantees in self hosting. By this logic you can never move away from Plex. There’s always unknowns. There’s always new issues to trip over. Plex is hardly without it’s own warts, but because they’re ‘known’ to you and your users nothing else will ever be able to measure up.
It’s a logical fallacy and a trap.
I set up Jellyfin basically overnight when the Plex pass changes occurred. Reverse proxies are trivial, as are docker containers, don’t let the anecdotes about things being hard or VPN being needed intimidate you.
There were absolutely bumps in the road. I had to make users for each person and email them customized sign-up links. Yes, that kinda sucked, but that’s the price for running and controlling the authentication yourself instead of though a 3rd party service that can and absolutely will eventually use that data to snoop.
Most of the time, once sent the link the users were fine, 9/10 of my users had no further issues and quickly adapted. For the last 1/10, I had to trouble shoot a few things and eventually ended up recommending a different device to connect with (it was an old TV with a really old version of Plex for TVs, they ended up buying a $40 Google TV device from Walmart and got set up that way).
The whole time I was running both Plex and Jellyfin so the migration process could happen at my speed.
My point is this: no, it wasn’t painless to switch. Yes, some tech support was required. Yes, the user who was getting hundreds of dollars (annually) of streaming services effectively for free had to shell out a paltry sum to upgrade and actually enjoys their experience much more now. No, that didn’t make it impossible or not worth doing.
I’m not saying what’s best for you and your users, and I’m absolutely not guaranteeing you’ll have no issues beyond these, but I hope you understand your hands aren’t actually tied, you’re just boxing yourself in.
It’s not fair to characterize jellyfin as being unable to scale, and it’s just downright wrong to cast it as being built “for one single local user”.
Jellyfin has great support for setups that include numerous users. The entire dashboard is basically designed around this concept of an admin keeping track of dozens upon dozens of users.
You seem like you have many reservations about specific functions in Jellyfin, but you were vague in explaining thrm - what specific things are you worried about?
Because it works. Call me in a few years when movies, TV shows, dvr recordings, live TV (with free, built-in guide support), and working picture support shows up. Oh, commercial removal too (again, built-in, just check a box). A not-shit setup process would be nice, too.
I’ve tried jf three times now across as many years, and it’s still got that ‘Linux developer feel’ of a tool where the devs got what they need the most mostly-working, and just don’t give a fuck about anything else - or a decent UI. No, blue boxes on a black background is not a decent UI. It wasn’t when W8 launched, and it’s not now. And when W8 is winning the competition, you’ve already lost.
Feature parity or the argument is moot.
I completely agree. I thought Plex would be fast in the collective rearview mirror as soon as they started forcing connections to their servers, pay-walling, etc. I also had issues with the database corrupting and causing huge slowdowns. I spent days trying and failing to preserve my ratings, watch data, etc.
In the end, I switched to a much simpler setup of an NFS/CIFS share accessed by Kodi on my Nvidia Shield TV. If Kodi chokes (happened once since 2017), I can just wipe the app and/or reinstall and then import the local metadata (XML or NFO IIRC). That takes about five minutes. It just works. Kodi also gives me access to the IAGL, so that’s a huge plus.
I’ll switch to jellyfin as soon as it works nearly as well.
But for the moment it’s missing a lot of features compared to Plex.
Jellyfins UI being only mouse based is garbage. Using it on Xbox for instance is terrible. Using it outside of the house is also a pain in the ass.
I don’t know why people use dishwashers. It’s in the kitchen. A lawn mower is a no brainer, yet people still use dishwashers??
It might be because of security.
github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
Selling IP address info. Huh.
Incoming lawsuit in 5…4…
I swear, I found it all on a hard drive laying in the streets, officer!
Jellyfin is the way. Costs nothing other than the hardware needed and nobody is selling anything about you.
Our personal streaming library with Jellyfin is bigger than any public service and we can add to it from VHS, DVD, Blueray, though extra equipment was required for the VHS/Blueray.
It’s also available anywhere we go and we can set up separate accounts for different family members. There’s even a phone app.
How big is that library supposed to be that it is larger than all public ones? There are some with 10’000s of videos.
We have over 15,000 videos in TV episodes, alone. Not counting movies.
So…yeah.
Wow. But now I had to look it up, the German “ARD Mediathek” has over 200’000 files, a playtime of 100’000 hours.
feels so much more illegal than just streaming for yourself tho
Cute of you to make such assumption based on zero evidence but just your feels.
I literally said “feels” lol
Got to change that mindset tbh
It shouldn't feel that way at all IMHO
I mean you are literally hosting pirated content for anyone to see, is it denial or is it really less illegal? Yall mention multiple user accounts, if ppl pay you in any way you are now a bootlegger?
But not Fire tablets (kids profile) or Samsung TV or many others that Plex currently supports.
JellyFin android phone app’s UI is a little weird at times, but does work pretty well for me.
…
What I would adore from any app would be an easy way to upload specific content and metadata via SFTP or to blob storage and accessible with auth (basic, token, or cloud) to more easily share it with friends/family/myself without having to host the whole damn library on the Internet or share my home Internet at inconvenient times.
Client-side encryption would be a great addition to that (eg. password required, that adds a key to the key ring). And of course native support in the JellyFin/other apps for this. It could even be made to work with a JS & WASM player.
on the tablet it should work fine in the browser. maybe that would also work on the TV, that’s exactly what most TV apps do anyway.
Checkout 3rd party jellyfin android apps. Findroid is working pretty well. Theres another one called Streamyfin which is catching up and a third one called Fladder, which is maybe a bit too early in development.
Can a link be provided to this consent page?
www.plex.tv/vendors/
You wil have to clear your cache I think.
Can also read about the changes here:
www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/
Emby is a good option if you don’t want to hop to jellyfin. I have been pleased with it so far. I found the media tag/idenifier to work better/quicker than plex’s.
@Sunny lol OK so which subdomain do I block.
*.plex.tv
you’re welcome :)
@Sunny
use #jellyfin
I already do :) but ty
If you’re watching their “free” content and agree to that box…
The title made it seem waaaaay worse than what the screenshot actually says
Edit: OP update the title and has my support should they run for public office.
OP is posting misleading hyperbole
This from the Plex site, emphasis mine.
We’re never going to get anywhere if people on these communities can’t act in good faith and share correct and information - not sensation. Change the OP or mods delete this misinformation.
ETA: shame on the 63 people who mindlessly upvote this crap without factchecking OP too.
What part of the op was misinfo? They DO sell the info, even if they claim it’s only with your consent
OP is claiming Plex will now SELL your personal data.
Omitting that the user must provide consent, not like Firefox or Adobe just updates T&C and forces user agreement. OP’s title is upvote seeking, cherry picking to quote certain text which makes it seem like they leave the user no choice, and leaving out the part of the text that stipulates the user does have to consent prior to the sale of information.
Moreover, the sale of data seems to be in order to facilitate the ads they show in their free movie and tv content, and even then is still opt in. The ads aren’t, but the data sale isn’t.
For posterity the full OP at the time of this post
Yep, all that info is in the original post, TWICE.
It’s mentioned both in the screenshot AND the text that Plex claims to only sell the data with your consent.
Most people will anyways just click “I agree” without reading because that’s how we are trained to do
I’ve changed the title to better align with the context. Doesn’t change the fact that Plex is a gobshite is ran by a company 🙃
Thanks OP, appreciate it.
I’m not disagreeing with any of your other statements. The enshitification is real. However, let’s not put them in the Adobe camp just because they are selling ad metrics and open about it. That’s actually transparent and still only applies to people watching content with ads in it.
The overall Lifetime Plexpass user is completely not affected by this, so the entire first reaction to your post that it’s time to ditch Plex for some other platform is not really justified.
People who are using Plex for just selfhosting without using their free online streaming stuff are not affected by this at all.
But eventually yes, I’m sure capitalism will also kill Plex. But possibly our planet and entire civilisation before that.
Yeah, op didn’t say you couldn’t opt out of it. It’s that they’re doing it at all. Every year they ask for a little bit more info, chipping away, making it harder and more obscure to opt out. That’s enshittification.
Mate, I’m just posting what is on Plex’s own website. Their words, not mine. You might be able to opt out of this if you’re lucky, or maybe its off by default - idk. But let’s face it Plex is on a heavy enshittification roll, rolling faster than the contestants running for Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling contest. Ain’t nothing stopping them from enabling this for all users much like what Roku did last year.
You can conscent to whatever you like. I’m not touch Plex with a stick.
how dare you bring facts to this community! we just want to shit on anything but jellyfin!
Why does nobody ever mention Emby? To me, it’s everything Plex used to be before it got enshittified!
I think Emby failed to get a lot of momentum due to having hardware acceleration behind a paywall, and then having jellyfin out there offering it for free. When I was first getting away from plex, emby was my first stop, and then I moved over to jellyfin shortly after because of the hardware acceleration situation.
Yeah that’s definitely true. I gladly pay for Emby and thing it’s worth every penny for how I use it. Jellyfin has got to be the best free+open one for sure.
I pay for emby too. It’s only like £5 a month and it’s worth every penny to me.
Isn’t it proprietary?
It is, but also incredibly quick, easy to use etc.
Everything Plex used to be in the good old days imo!
What makes you think it won’t be victim to enshitification?
Jellyfin exists because Emby was only open source until it wasn’t convenient. Some of their own devs pointed out they were violating the license, and their response was… non-ideal.
So Jellyfin was forked with the last fully open-source Emby code.
At least that’s my recollection several years down the line.
I decided then that no amount of headache from Jellyfin (and let me say that I was an EARLY jellyfin adopter AND former Plex user) would be enough to get me to use Emby. (Because things like that are important to me, though I realize they aren’t important to everyone.)
And reading this thread I’m apparently a super-genius because I have my Jellyfin behind a reverse proxy and serve it to my elderly parents with a simple login and an app they were able to install, and never found it to be a headache. (Which, if I’d read this thread only, I’d conclude was just not possible without voodoo magic)
No headaches along the way, and whereas Plex had already begun the march to enshittification when I left, Jellyfin has done nothing but steadily get better.
Anyhow, longer answer than intended, but I’d go back to Plex before I’d go to Emby, just on principle.
Me eating 🍿 and reading the comments of Plex users arguing with Jellyfin users, while myself being a user of Kodi which has it’s own problems…
Kodi and mythtv for me. I feel like I am the slowpoke meme.
Library scans and picking up added/removed media, kill me. I love kodi, but how such a basic function can be so squirrely I’ll never understand. Maybe it’s just a quirk with NFS back ends.
I let Radarr and Sonarr handle that (including creating NFO metadata and fanart files), Kodi now only parses/syncs that local data.
This change was a huge improvement for me, though I am using SMB and not NFS. (But I assume NFS would be more robust than SMB.)
Same here regarding *arrs handling the data movement/layout and nfo files. I even have the “Connect” sections for each set to trigger rescans, but it seems especially for files that get replaced by a more optimal version, a duplicate is left over in kodi alongside the new one which only goes away when you try and play it. I tried switching to a dedicated mysql instance for shits and giggles, no effect. Some day I’ll actually dig in the logs.
Kodi ain’t a self host tool, nor a server though but it is a great player, and I happily use the big 3, Kodi, Stremio and Plex (I’d add Cloud Stream as a runner up).
I haven’t set up Kodi, but I would assume the go-to here would be a
minidlna,samba, ornfsserver w/ Kodi providing the FE.Right. Personally I don’t stream and only access my library from my TV at home. So Kodi is all I need for now. Though I’d like to try Jellyfin one day when I don’t have so much other stuff to do. I actually don’t know what exactly I’m missing out on.
If you want to sync watched state, resume position, that sort of stuff outside of your house, Jellyfin would be a good tool for that. And it integrates seamlessly into Kodi. Plex unfortunately doesn’t, you have to launch an addon from Kodi, so it’s not as nice.
I’ve never seen Plex users argue in support of Plex. only comments along the lines of, “I use it because…”
the jellyfin users are generally the ones getting bent or upset because people still use Plex for their own personal reasons. they then accuse the Plex users of not contributing to jellyfin because they still use Plex. “if only you used jellyfin, xyz feature would be magically finished because you are a part of the community!”
point is, the only people arguing here are jellyfin users. Plex users are gonna Plex.
there are dozens of us!
I use the Kodi plugin for Jellyfin
I have absolutely no experience with Jellyfin, what does the Kodi plugin do?
Or do you mean you have the Jellyfin addon installed in Kodi, so you can accsess Jellyfin from within Kodi?
I can access my Jellyfin library just like it was native kodi
Do people actually watch whatever plex streams? The only reason I use plex is to rewatch Star Trek for the 18th time.
Hello Jellyfin.
.
My aim is to get my friends and family to stop paying for streaming services and if I have to pay for Plex to achieve this then that’s a win.
Jellyfin is nowhere near as feature complete as Plex and not by a long shot. My users don’t like the UI of Jellyfin and setting up for remote access is no trivial feat. With this in mind and my goals Plex is better suited.
So far have 8 users all saving £10-40 a month not going to streaming services.
Jellyfin is open source. You could be helping out.
Best of luck with Plex, though. I would say this is even more writing on the wall but it does not sound like that matters to you.
You’re right I could be helping out I mom the open source side, but I really struggle to even turn on my Pc when not working (mental health) so don’t feel I am the best person to contribute.
This is why my focus has been on getting friends and family to stop spending money on streaming services as every little helps.
You’re correct in that the only thing that matters to me is that people I care about save money. That’s it. I’m in awe of people doing more than me, but we can only do what we feel we are able. Together it all makes a difference.
You sound like me. I hope you can find a way to flip your focus: your time outside work should be way more about you than it sounds like your work life is letting it be.
Maybe you are one of the very few with a meaningful job. If not, consider trying to treat your job like the bullshit it is and use your best cycles outside work on stuff that will really make you happy.
Thanks dude.
I am incredibly fortunate that my boss is a Saint and we literally put ourselves first and the work second. It’s a small company and we are not expected to think about work outside of work and they’ve shown time and time again with their actions that they are good people.
I just don’t have that kind of drive for coding now outside of work as work satiates that desire, which means out of work I can focus on mental health which for me comes from being outside or doing something.
I will say the past isn’t amazing as I’m quite new but has two raises and a reduction in hours in less than 2 years.
The Jellyfin devs have made it clear, that they will not make changes that invalidate existing clients. Rebuilding the things that make sharing content via Plex so much easier would most definitely break client compatability
Citation needed.
The most compelling feature I always get asked if Jellyfin has ala Plex is the discovery/NAT punch for linking people up.
That does not strike me as something that necessarily breaks backwards compatibility. It would require some centralized discovery, and I think that is probably where we run into an issue because if I were the Jellyfin devs, I wouldn't want to have to support that, either.
They argue against most suggestion with the notion, that existing clients can’t handle authentication. The devs prefer working clients over a properly secured backend.
You can now extrapolate this idea and every major change that would change the way the API is accessed by clients will be stopped for the sake of continued client compatibility.
It's this old link, eh?
Well, just because they closed the issue (without resolving it), doesn’t mean it does not speak to their views on security and client breaking changes
Yup the old one… here’s the new one too… still unaddressed
github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/13983
hashed email xD, if someone has email it’s just hash(email) == email. given how many emails leaked producing hashes of 90% of population emails is not a problem
Assuming they’re not salted hashes.
They prominently point this change out and kind of force you to choose whether you opt in or out. There is a single checkbox to opt out of all. But yes, it’s a bad direction. Just maybe not the apocalypse implied by some.
Relevant XKCD: www.xkcd.com/743/
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a81c72ef-68f8-4577-ab2e-eda1de3f8afb.png">
This hit so hard I wanna puke diamonds. Damn.
Every day of my life trying to explain to friends they need to quit using spoon fed software. Sigh.
And spoonfed news, food…
I think we can make an exception for soup and ice-cream, no?
NO SOUP FOR YOU! NEXT!
Haha totally, I should have said processed food, it’s the most marketed.
We could also say ultra processed news now that I think about it: statistical data -> random blog article misinterprets the charts -> tweet w people not reading the sources -> screenshot goes around on facebook -> LLM regurgitates it -> TV news anchor says it with a straight face
You forgot the step of “presidential candidate quotes the Facebook post in a presidential debate”
That’s a new one. I like it.
Exactly why on so many things it’s like… even when it looks like they are getting it, they don’t get it. Kind of like watching bluesky rising right now. Unless I’m majorly missing something here. It looks like it’s kind of open and kind of federated…
Except in a form that no one can feasibly create their own node. One change in leadership or goals of leadership away, and it can turn into the same neo nazi trash that people are joining it to get away from.
And it will. Capitalism makes it inevitable.
America always does what’s right, after they’ve tried everything else. - Someone
Can’t sell my data if I’ve never given them any
someone should make a jellyfish plugin that brings up a consent screen that says you consent to give yourself over to eevee and naruto.
It is as if it is a general rule at this point that centralization breeds corruption. No matter how many statements people make early on in social engagements, centralization leads them to screw people depending on these systems. When making long term commitment to anything, check if it is centralized or how easy it is to unshackle yourself from it.
Welcome to the enshittification phase of the economy. Everything will be enshittified, even the economy itself.
What is Plex?
A software you put on your NAS to stream media
Its like jellyfin but sells your data
Why would anyone want that?
While selling data in general is shitty, I want to push back on the fear mongering a little bit.
This only applies to new accounts, can be opt-out of, and doesn’t apply to self-hosted content.
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/7902357b-d084-4566-a7cc-c92b8a7b2a9a.png">
…for now.
Yet.
“We have changed the terms. Pray that we don’t change them further.”
“Hashed emails”. Besides the fact that they can match up a hash from one source to a hash from another source to link them to the same person (they never said they’d salt them), emails often have enough predictability to break the hash. Assuming they all end in “@gmail.com”, “@outlook.com”, or “@yahoo.com” will get you the vast majority of emails out there. Unlike a good password scheme, people don’t shove a lot of random data into their email addresses.
The hash:
liamg@9696yddadgib
Was about to say this.
I saw a small-time project using hashed phone numbers and emails a while ago, where assume stupidity instead of malice was a viable explanation.
In this case however, Plex is large enough and has to care about securiry enough that they either
did this on purpose to make it sound better, as a marketing move,
did not show this to their security experts,
or chose to ignore concerns by those experts and likely others (turning it into the first option basically)
There is no option where someone did not either knowingly do or provoke this.
That is a honey pot rights holders will be falling over themselves to pay Plex for access to once they hear about it.
Been telling anyone that would listen that they need to get out of Plex since they implemented that first iteration of trying to require you to sign into your own self hosted server with a Plex.tv account. They were telegraphing what direction they were going in with that kind of user hostile move.
Lots of responses about how it was easy to get around so no big deal (or worse that they liked it for some coping mechanism reason) and that nothing else was as easy and feature rich as Plex so it was worth it.
Well now a few years down the road from that they are now going to use that beach head on everyone’s Plex server they can to collect what is being watched and sell it to the highest bidder.
Boy am I glad I just switched to Jellyfin
I joined Plex after I already needed to have a login to plex.tv to be able to stream. I understand that that already was problematic, but Plex was leagues ahead of its competition in terms of ease of adding users, as well as polish. You must be forgetting how awful Jellyfin was in comparison, even just 5 years ago. I’ve been keeping up on Jellyfin and it’s amazing how far they’ve come. Now Jellyfin has great theme options, a simple-to-install skip intro/outro plugin, an app option with built-in jellyseerr integration, decent collections support (still needs some work here on feature parity with Plex, but it’s on the way) and with Wizarr, onboarding new users is as easy as sending an invite link, just like Plex. All this came in the last 5 years, and were pretty much requirements for my use cases.
Sure you can say that I’m picky, but Plex really was the best option until like, this year. I started to accept the need to switch when they added the social media aspect to it. They completely ignored what their users actually wanted. Since then, they’ve been making worse and worse decisions, which is crazy because now more than ever their competition has reached their level. Hell, by pushing all their users away, Plex is only going to accelerate the development on Jellyfin.
Yep I see this as the end game of Plex MPA purchases the data and goes after people.
If we find out “I do not consent” opts out, I’m fine with it. If we find out “I do not consent” leads to a “Close our account” page, it’s time for pitchforks, especially since they recently had a huge sale on lifetime memberships.
Why? They don’t need more money. Jellyfin proves how much of their service can be done for free
From what Ive seen in arguments about this, Plex generally is more accessible with QoL and easier to understand interface for non-techie people to share with family/friends. Something thats hard for nerdy people to understand is that average people are perfectly fine paying for digital goods and services. An older well off normie has far more money than sense and will happily pay premiums just to not have to rub two braincells together with setup or for a nicer quality of experience. If you figure out how to make a very useful plug-an-play service that works without the end user of average intelligence/domain knowledge stressing about how to set up, maintain, and navigate confusing layouts, you’ve created digital gold.
This isn’t the fault of open source services you can only expect so much polish from non-profit voulenteer. Its just the nature of consumer laziness/expectation for professional product standards and the path/product of least resistance.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmus.org/pictrs/image/8c8c49a5-f112-4d9c-956e-d938dc0b91c4.webp">
xkcd.com/2501/
I don’t disagree at all, but morally and legally speaking if “no” means “no”, I don’t actually see anything wrong with the prompt or the idea itself. If no means “later” or “limit this data”, or even “anonymize this data”, it’s time to revolt.
I agree Jellyfin’s pretty rad and DOES prove what can be done for free, I’ve used both and Plex is a much more “set and forget” and I personally have had more issues with streams breaking/stopping for no reason with Jellyfin- are those probably my fault? Yep, probably borked a setting or misconfigured it- just saying that’s my personal experience.
I’m just one idiot making noises with my meat flaps. I’m no authority.
That’s exactly what it does. I got the prompt on my system, I said no, and it said ok and everything proceeded on like normal.
“I do not consent” is indeed an opt out and you can use plex just as you were before.
Good to know. When I get this prompt at home I’ll be watching my Pihole server quite closely for a while to see for sure.
I’d be interested in your results
Is that really the message you got? It’s worded differently than what I see in mine.
<img alt="" src="https://reddthat.com/pictrs/image/f6a436c5-ca82-4dd3-bcbd-f0be17d65f00.png">
Yes this is the concent form I get.
Just deleted my account.
Hey, you reading this? You should too.
Can someone explain to me why you need anything more than directories filled with files to view content?
I’m struggling to understand why anybody would need or want something like Plex.
I want to watch a movie. I open explorer, go to the folder movies, select the movie, and double click the icon.
The end.
How do I do that with my TV?
Jellyfin user here, glad I dodged the bullet when I had to pick between it and plex.
Tl;dr you want something like plex to:
And the biggest one for me
Because that’s pretty inconvenient?
I need something like
ability to watch from any device
transcoding
watch history and progress save
You are imagining how to use a computer filled with video files.
Now imagine having your own personal netflix available on a variety of devices, using just that one computer full of video files.
I don’t have the addiction or condition that makes that compelling to me.
I can’t figure out why or how that is a need people have.
Well, I can tell you how Jellyfin differs from a directory full of files, but I can’t help you with understanding that other people have different preferences and desires than you which are neither “conditions” nor “addictions.”
You’ll have to make it to that one on your own.
The more services you have depending on a 3rd party which can do whatever the fuck they want, either directly or by changing the rules when the feel like it (i.e. not bound by rules they cannot change, such as root DNS providers are) and then doing it, the less your system is actually self-hosted, IMHO.
For me the whole point of self-hosting is exactly being as independent as possible of 3rd parties that can just fuck you up, be it on purpose (generally for $$$) or because they go bankrupt and close their services.
This is why I’ve actually chosen to run Kodi on my home server that doubles down as TV Box even though I can’t easilly use it from anywhere else (it’s possible but it involves using a standalone database that is then shared, which can only be safelly done through customly setup ssh pipes) rather than something like Plex.
It’s kinda funny to see people into self-hosting still doing the kind of mistake I did almost 3 decades ago (fortunatelly in a professional environment) of trusting a 3rd party to the point of becoming dependent on them and later getting burned when they abused that trust, and which led me to avoid such situations like the plague ever since.
Mind you, I can understand if people for whom self-hosting is not driven by a desire to reduce vulnerability to the whims of 3rd parties (which includes reducing the risk of enshittification) and is instead driven by “waste not” (for example, bringing new life to old hardware rather than throwing it out) or by it being a fun challenge, don’t really care to be as independent as possible from such 3rd parties.
So expected. Now anyone who’s able to support the non exploitative alternatives like Jellyfin please do. It’s how you keep the good things going.
I’m not even against Jellyfin or anything, but as long as I have to build elaborate VPN solutions to continue sharing my content I’ll stick with Plex. Not even starting with the availability of clients on different platforms and the general lack of polish in Jellyfin first party UI (player and config).
I could live with most of that stuff if there was a way to share my library without becoming tech support for half my friends circle
Your reply just raised so many questions but most importantly why would you need a VPN with Jellyfin? I mean it’s just server like any other which means install, add certificates or reverse proxy with certificates and if you’re behind NAT you would need to setup port forwarding.
I mean if you’re worried about server being exploited if not updated then opening it to the internet wouldn’t be good but isn’t that the case with Plex already?
Can someone clue me in on the reason why anyone would prefer Plex instead of Jellyfin?
People commonly cite more polished clients and clients available on obscure platforms like legacy smart TVs and such
I am a die-hard Jellyfin user, but I still haven’t found a proper way to index and stream my music library with it. As far as i know, Plex is still better at that.
I dropped my library in, Jellyfin indexed it and streamed first try. What didn’t work for you?
Not the user you replied to, but for me, the issue I’ve been running into is with featured albums or albums with album artist metadata info filled out {image}.
Its been a minute so I dont have the specific cause I was focused on. This problem was more prevalent in EDM tracks
lemmy.ml/…/5fa246a8-22bc-4bfc-90f5-d9ff04b768a8.j…
I don’t think jellyfin does any tagging for you. Pretty sure you can edit it, but it’s not automatic. I use lidarr and mp3tag for that. Maybe musicbrainz picard on a rare occasion, if I’ve got a bunch of files that need to be identified first.
Can this edit the metadata in bulk? I’ll have to give it another shot. I’m pretty sure the album artist was the the problem, and I couldnt just delete that bit.
Not OP, I’ve kinda had a middle of the road experience with it.
I run JF and Plex on the same shares.
I dropped 10k tracks on it and a bunch of audiobooks, my stuff is 100% tagged.
I use tailscale to get to the server because here’s no Nat Holepunching going on.
I try to use it as much possible for audio, but some days, I just give in and use plexamp (like a guilty pleasure)
cons:
pros:
I dropped my music library into Jellyfin just as an extra. I’ve built up quite a collection over the years of CDs and always rip and tag them as I acquire new CDs, so while the collection is a little messy it’s sizable and mostly correctly tagged
Jellyfin’s music playback has been buggy but getting better with updates. At the current rate of improvement it’ll probably be really good in a 2-4 years, but right now it’s kinda meh. It exists but it’s buggy enough that I don’t use it much
Navidrome and Airsonic advanced provide a better music experience than jellyfin for me anyway and both are free.
I’ve recently had really good luck with Finamp on Android at least. With the recent support of time lyrics in Jellyfin and Finamp’s redesign I’ve been using that to stream my Flac audio files. Works quite well with separate collections as well. Though, to this day I still have to force close it more times than I like to get the UI to refresh after closing it. Plexamp was tough to lose when I swapped many years ago, but the third party space has slowly been closing that gap over the years.
Can I ask why nobody recommends Emby? I’ve been using it for years with zero issues. The only thing I can think of is that Jellyfin exists and is free. Emby is sort of a middleground between Plex and Jellyfin; it has a paid license (lifetime option exists), but it’s closer to Jellyfin than Plex on the whole.
Emby rugpulled their users, that’s why jellyfin exists at all.
Do you mind elaborating on that? It sounds like I got in on Emby after the rugpull. It works fine for me and I use it without the Connect (online account) feature.
For one, they moved from open source to closed source without notice.
web.archive.org/web/20181212104719/https:/…/3479
Thanks for the info. I’m sure it’ll also be useful to others reading the comments.
This sucks because, functionally-wise I have zero issues with Emby. But morally, this bothers me a lot. I thought it was going to just be because of the license (I think I paid $99 around Christmas a few years ago for a Lifetime license).
Guess I’ll be switching to Jellyfin then and donating to the project. If I paid for Emby, there’s no reason I can’t donate to a free, open-source project being developed and maintained by volunteers.
Found a good one ☝️
Seeing the person chewing out folks for calling for a fork is pretty funny in hindsight. They aren’t wrong, but now they’re the recorded naysayer in a pivotal moment for a major open source project. It’s like anyone who said Open Office shouldn’t be forked when Open Office was purchased by Oracle. Now Open Office is abandonware with only functionally useless commits and multiple unpatched security issues and Libre Office has completely replaced it
End user management.
Essentially, accounts and passwords are not my problem.
Years ago, I tried out Jellyfin (Emby at the time) and it couldn’t do chromecasting with subtitles (probably fixed by now, this was a long time ago). Since I wanted to watch anime, I bought a Plex lifetime subscription instead, and I’m too lazy to switch.
It is a matter of time before they will get to you
I am in the same boat but jellyfin ain't there yet for my use case
It can Chromecast these days
Because Jellyfin et al are all still very much “open source projects” in terms of UI/UX and it is still “missing” so many features.
For me? The big reasons why I just use plex boil down to:
My personal opinion? For something that only “tech savvy” people are using more or less locally, Jellyfin is fine. For something that “just works”? There is no competition with Plex. And considering how many of the Jellyfin workarounds end up being “just download a copy of the file locally and watch it in VLC”… why would I use Jellyfin at all in that case when I could otherwise just mount a samba share or use Kodi (that is the latest incarnation of XBMC or whatever the samba share frontend we all used to watch porn on our playstations was, right?).
To be clear. I check in on Jellyfin probably every other year at this point? I WANT an alternative to Plex. But… Jellyfin ain’t it.
I feel exactly the same as you, but i’d like to add a number 4 point: Plex has an offical app for every system/SO
I think it mostly comes down to sharing stuff with others.
There’s a lot of stuff in Jellyfin you wouldn’t want to expose to the internet.
No idea if Jellyfin even has a client for my dad’s shonky old 4K TV, but I certainly wouldn’t be able to set up Wireguard or anything on it.
I wouldn’t expose Plex to the internet either
I’ve tried Jellyfin and the Live TV / tuner interface sucked so bad I didn’t want to bother with it any further. Maybe I could have found plugins or some shit to make it more usable but I’ve had a lifetime Plex pass for almost a decade and it still works great
Yes, they’ve made a number of decisions that truly suck in that time but it’s still better than the experience I had with Jellyfin or Emby, even recently.
It works pretty well for me personally. What was the problem?
The guide (or lack thereof) and UX was severely lacking.
Have you used a tuner on Plex?
Because Plex used to be good but new it’s just pure enshitification.
Jellyfin is not as easy as Plex to use. Many of us are not that technically advanced
If you are advanced enough to run a docker image with Plex, you can do the same with Jellyfin
My first time fucking around with Plex did NOT include docker. I googled what docker was like 9 times over the course of stupid few months cause I just didnt understand it. Now I do, and I run it via a docker stack but very very few beginners are gonna go for docker.
Then how did you use Plex? Did you even RTFM?
Lmao I dont know how stupid got used in my reply, made me sound angry
Since I originally started using it on my everyday use Windows PC via an exe, no I did not hahahaha. Now I have it running in Open Media Vault on my NAS.
You can run Jellyfin as exe too.
You can run plexserver as a service outside of docker. That’s how I ran it years ago, before I got comfortable with docker.
What is a docker? Plex is just a few clicks.
You don’t even have to use docker for Jellyfin, you can install the server as a regular program
I use samba (file sharing) and vlc.
I went to the Jellyfin landing page, went to the install instructions, copy pasted and ran literally one command, opened it in a browser, made my local account, clicked a button to point it at my media folders and then I was done.
What isn’t easy?
Sharing it with people outside your house. Added hardships if behind CGNAT.
I’ll edit this…sharing it securely outside of your house. Just port forwarding to the box and saying have at it isn’t really a great idea.
UpNp or port forwarding is the same way both Plex and Jellyfin work.
I don’t know what makes Jellyfin less secure since they both work the same way for this as far as I can tell…
Can you be more specific about what makes Jellyfin less secure when it comes to UpNp/port forwarding?
In the case of port forwarding at least Jellyfin is open source and has more eyes on it so it’s less likely for someone to zero day it and have at it unless I have misunderstood how each can connect off-network.
Furthermore the hash for your password is stored along with many others at a single (or relatively few) attack point/s on a Plex business server since it’s a centralized business whereas this is never the case for Jellyfin.
Also this thread is about Plex literally selling your personal data so I don’t really consider Jellyfin worse for exposing your personal data.
I’ll take my chances with a single idiot who want’s to compromise my poor asses tiny network versus an actual hacker who wants to compromise an enterprise businesses network that is storing thousands or hundreds of thousands of user credentials, data, and payment information (Which Jellyfin doesn’t store even half of).
If someone hacks Jellyfin on my network -> They have my… media files? Maybe the hash of the one password I use there?
If somone hacks Plex on my network or anywhere - or the people they sold that data to -> They have my password hash, credit card number and probably my name that is associated to it, personal data that Plex is selling, etc.
TL:DR I think Plex is more likely to be hacked rather than myself and the outcome of Plex getting hacked is worse than if my personal Jellyfin server gets hacked.
With a fresh install of Plex you can still connect to it remotely…with no ports open. It will use Plex’s relay service to make the connection. That has limited bandwidth so it’s rarely anybody’s long term choice but it works right out of the box.
If you do choose to open a port then Plex partnered with Let’s Encrypt and Digicert to setup and maintain all the certs for you. So at least your connections are encrypted provided you use one of the many apps that support secure connections.
Is that the most secure way to run Plex? No. But it’s a couple steps in the right direction for basically zero effort on the server admin and users part.
You might not like the centralized auth of Plex but I don’t have to manage user accounts/passwords for people and deal with distributing them. Just send an invite to their email, they set it all up, and I never need to know about it. They forgot a password?…I never need to know about it.
I see, thanks.
There are a LOT of pros and cons.
Pros:
Cons:
edit: * a word ** forgot to shout out for the tuner support *** replaced media with audio for clarity
User sharing without opening my Plex server to the public internet. For Jellyfin I would have to become a VPN provider and allow people into my private network to share it safely, since you wouldn’t want to have Jellyfin available to the internet with their stance on security
The lack of a PS5 app makes Jellyfin useless to me. We have a dumb TV with no casting ability so the PlayStation is out media box.
$30 Android box solves this
I generally agree with you and its what I did, but why do i need yet another device plugged in, draining power all the time? I dont want to leave an even larger co2 footprint and software support on existing hardware could aid in that. The android box is a workaround, not a green enough solution in my opinion.
Because of proprietary garbage, copyright law and enshittification. Sony wants you to use the software its bribers pay it to support, another symptom of our dystopian, profiteering world.
I sometimes think Jellyfin gets on Roku devices because none of the little snots at Roku’s corporate office have taken notice, fallen through the cracks and forgotten about.
If it’s any benefit to you, the Android box being Android allows it to sip power at an LED bulb’s level of efficiency when it’s idle.
🤫
Chromecast. Regular is cheap, and grab the 4K one if you wanna stream higher quality movies. Cost you less than $100.
Have you even tried the web UI?
I’ve been a Plex user. Honestly it was mostly because I chose Plex years ago before a lot of the recent controversy. Plex always seemed like it had a nicer interface, though I never really gave Jellyfin a try. As of late, Plex has started to add a lot of bloat to their interface, so at this point Jellyfin’s UI might actually be a pro.
They’re going to sell the data to movie companies so they can find out what is being pirated
I fuckin guarantee it.
Trakt did the same thing I bet
It’s not hard to find out what’s being pirated, BitTorrent isn’t private.
It is when you use a private tracker and disable DHT, Local Peer Discovery and Peer Exchange.
TV apps.
What is wrong with Jellyfin’s TV app? I use it on my Android TV and I don’t have any problems
Not available for my Samsung or the kid’s Visio TVs
Sunk cost. It took me loosing my Plex watch history to say fuck it I’m going to Jellyfin.
I saw several solutions on Github that could migrate it.
Assuming you use/-d trakt you could use that to re-import the watch history
It just works and has a native app for basically everything.
Nothing is ever truly free in this world. They gotta pay their bills too.
Sure, that’s why I paid for Plex Pass. Plex isn’t free.
Yeah, and there are decent ways to do that, which many successful companies and individuals manage to pull off every day.
I have no horse in this race because I don’t use any of this stuff, but I despise the direction everything is going.
Human parasites are never happy with being well fed it seems. They aren’t happy unless they gorge until they get fat and explode, or they’re so greedy they end up killing their host.
I hear ya. Thats why i dont use them either. Books are the better entertainment.
why you gotta bring reason and logic to this jellyfin orgy?
Last shit they pulled I moved to Jellyfin. Today I deleted my Plex account.
Man Plex when fully enshitified FAST!
Aww come on guys, my JF boner can only handle so much /s
Seriously though, why did they even give you the option to disagree, you know they’re just going to force it 3-6 months.
The disagree is for soft walking things. They give you the choice so people feel like they have one and don’t complain, then in the future they will continue to ask everything anything changes and if you accidentally agree they will never ask you again.
They legally can’t for European users
I would probably still want to use Plex due to its superior interface, despite this shit they are pulling. But Plex on my TV is so UNBELIEVABLY slow. I have a large library, like almost 14 TB and still growing. But there’s no reason it should take almost a minute (or more than?) for the first content to show after starting the app.
Jellyfin with the same library takes mere seconds before I see the first movie/episode poster cards. It’s inexcusable how poorly optimized Plex is.
Not to rain on your parade, but the Plex App on my TV, with a library of almost 40TB also loads in seconds
No rain here. ☀️👍
What TV is that? I have an LG OLED TV from 2019 running WebOS, so that’s the version of Plex I am using.
My Plex library loads instantly on my phone and on the web.
I have a Philipps OLED TV from 2019, with Android 9 or smth. But WebOS is a different beast.
Ah okay. Yes, it seems to be indeed. 😅
sounds like a poorly optimized system tbh. My Plex instance loads within a few seconds. on roku, android, and web.
keep in mind I’m using nginx caching and some advanced configs.
I am using the Plex app on my LG TV, to be more precise. That’s the WebOS version of Plex. On my phone and on the web, it loads instantly.
haiyaaa…that explains it.
I have never had a smart TV worth a damn.
Yeah dude. Besides Plex, the TV is FUYOOOH! 😙👌
Unfortunately, that is just the system your TV runs on being slow. If you use a dedicated streaming device, you will have much better results.
How do you explain this? Every other app is very quick to load on the TV… Plex is the only issue.
What do you call a TV? The streaming isn’t the problem, it’s the loading or processing of data from the server, and/or transitions between views, that are the issues here.
Streaming is fine. Once I start a 4K HDR 5.1 movie with direct play (full quality), there is no issue, even when seeking. It’s only the browsing and loading/displaying of data that is super slow. And only on Plex.
Plex is heavier, of course. They don’t have the spending luxuries that Netflix or Disney has to optimize for every platform perfectly. That said, TV’s notoriously use inferior hardware for the built in streaming portion so they can sell them at the prices they do and make higher profit. Sure, they can play the media they were designed to do, but that is the bare minimum requirement. They also sell your data to recoup more profit.
Unlike good dedicated streaming devices, they lack the processing power needed to make it go quickly. I have both and it is a night and day difference in responsiveness in the UI. It either lacks the memory/CPU power to work as well. Don’t just take my word for it though, do your own testing or look at somebody elses. Plex definitely has improvements that can be made, but they are not at complete fault here.
If you pick a good dedicated one, it might not even sell you out to advertisers. Lol. You don’t really want to connect your TV to the internet anyway. They phone home constantly.
This all still doesn’t address the first thing I wrote:
Why can Jellyfin perform perfectly on the same hardware? Very snappy. It’s obviously not the hardware’s fault, but more a lack of optimization — and testing. If they tested/dogfed their app on WebOS at all, they’d know it’s ass.
Edit: I just did a quick research on this in the Plex forums, and it seems like a lot of posts detail the same experience as mine: Plex used to work great until a year or more ago where it just turned into an unoptimized mess where even stepping left or right to a different poster, or button, has like a 1+ second lag.
It’s very clear this is Plex’s fault. It wasn’t always like this.
Every single post is ignored by Plex and automatically closed due to inactivity (from Plex). They don’t care.
Frogs do enjoy a good sauna. 😊
If that’s your line, then more power to you. I’m happy to live in a world where people make choices I don’t agree with - but I will always respect those who make an informed choice over people who let fate or advertising make their choices for them.
However, I also wouldn’t blame others for looking for an exit. Or testing other waters. Or at least thinking the grass might be greener elsewhere.
If you do continue to use Plex, consider taking a weekend for a hobbyist project such as a VPN server (OpenVPN or Wireguard are classics and broadly indistinguishable from work traffic) or a reverse proxy web server (nginx proxy manager is a good place to start). Not only are these useful and fun†‡, but they defang one of Plex’s most marketable features - the automatic NAT traversal.
†I put 3 VPNs on all my phones - a split tunnel to home; a full tunnel to home; and a commercial VPN with international egress points. The split tunnel lets my phone access my home services from any network it’s connected to (without impeding traffic destined elsewhere; the other ones are for coffee shop use). I can also give out access to the split tunnel to trusted friends to access my guest network. Also have a site-to site with a friend for off-site backup (with an encrypted tarball of my configs).
‡For the reverse proxy, I enjoy stapling it to my router’s public 80&443 and using DDNS to point vanity.example and *.vanity.example to my home public IP (I like to live dangerously; cloudflare tunnel & pangolin exist, too). Inside my home I have *.internal.vanity.example and *.home.vanity.example for the management webUIs and intranet versions of services so that they can be accessed via https with a secure lock.
Having your own tools to build your own cloud - on a raspberry pi, or an old spare laptop or retired desktop, or a second-hand mini PC is worth the hassle, particularly if you are using Plex baked into an Nvidia shield or other proprietary product, can offer options - and it never hurts to have options.
… But at this point I’m well and good into preaching to the choir.
Tl;dr: No hate to Plex users, but maybe have a plan. 😅
Just downloaded Jellyfin! Been a Plex user for years. Noticed they’ve stated to add a lot of crap to the Plex interface. I just want to stream my media library. I’m a little disappointed that Jellyfin doesn’t have a native Apple TV app, but SenPlayer looks really nice and their price model is a one time fee. So no subscriptions!
I use infuse for the Apple TV. You can add the jellyfin source and I believe it syncs watch progress. It can’t do prerolls, but it have intro and credits skipping.
I can’t imagine what an Apple TV can do that a $30 Android box can’t.
I can imagine lots of things the Apple TV can’t do that the $30 Android box can.
Yeah, but I need something that kids/spouse are comfortable with that can also have pretty strict content and purchase restrictions. Android still doesn’t fit that bill either. Ideally I would run something on an htpc with custom interface for all that but will a full time job that frequently has been taking me out of state and 2 hours of commute daily, $100 is a drop in the bucket for something that I don’t have to worry about my family breaking. I don’t have the time to do things that I want anymore and the Apple TV hits the simplicity/control intersection.
Yeah. I love open source, but people kinda assume you have unlimited time to sink until this stuff. Apple has done a great job selling an intuitive experience that I need for the non technical people in my household. That being said, I don’t understand why AirPlay doesn’t just fucking work. Siri is also garbage.
And if I have to listen to one more person try and explain to me why I have the wrong router, mdns, multicast, IPv6 settings, etc, I’m gonna lose it. One person is like, “buy Uniquiti, that plays nice with Apple Home and never use your ISP router”. The next person is like “you idiot, why would you think Ubiquiti + Apple would ever work stick with your IPS router”. Even if they’re right, it’s a failure of Apple to design a system that requires an IT person to setup.
Thank you for listening to my rant.
Maybe if you had more time to sink into your Apple problem…
I dont have an apple TV myself yet. But I can tell you one thing. Pretty much all the androids including my google TV Chromecast doesn’t have codec support for the dolby audio like truehd. Its so annoying I can’t play hardly any of the 4k movies I have on Plex. Looks like my options is to ether switch to apple TV, a nivida shield pro, or by a HTPC.
Really it comes down to I distrust Google more than Apple. But I recognize there are a lot of issues with Apple, and I get the cognitive dissonance on my part combining open source with Apple. But I’m happy Apple has Android as competition.
…I also may have purchased HomePods and I do use the Apple TV + HomePod audio setup. Not messily the best value but it’s decent audio with minimal clutter/wires. I’m pretty happy with the Apple TV experience so far, but if Apple starts enshitifying (especially if they ever plaster their devices with ads the way Roku has) I’m gone immediately.
I looked at Infuse, but as soon as I saw it was a subscription I decided no. They have a lifetime option but I don’t trust those anymore. If it’s good software with a one time fee of $40 or less, I’m there, but anything $10/month or $100 lifetime is a dealbreaker for me.
Edit: I totally misread the price. It’s a way more reasonable $12.99/year not what I said above
That’s reasonable. I’ve had pretty good experience with infuse over the years and I don’t mind paying for it. If I’m constantly using it, I feel like devs oughta get something out of it.
Edit: you made me go check my subscription. It’s only $10 billed yearly which I think is more than reasonable for something I use almost every day. If they stop developing the application or something changes then I just won’t be paying the subscription anymore. It’s not a necessary thing for jellyfin on Apple TV. It’s just one of the ones that I’ve really come back to over the years as a good video player in general.
Oops I must have misread the price. Tbh it’s the subscription fatigue, but I’m a developer myself $12.99/year is very reasonable.
I totally get the subscription fatigue, that’s one of the main reasons I got a Plex pass whenever you could get the lifetime passes on Black Friday for a pretty decent discount. Now that all that seems to be changing I am more and more getting in the habit of paying a little bit of money annually to have more control over the things that I use.
Infuse is also very good !
There is a native Apple TV app, I didn’t migrate from plex until there was and I migrated over 18 months ago. It’s called Swiftfin.
Ohhh I did see that but the name threw me. Didn’t realize that’s the official app
Yeah it’s a little strange. Swift is Apple’s own programming language, and there was an older Jellyfin app on iOS that didn’t use it and so wasn’t fully “native” in a similar way to how most social media apps are just a web browser.
Swiftfin is basically a pre-beta release: it’s barely usable and doesnt’ support HDR or DolbyVision. The lack of an AppleTV app isthe only thing that is stopping me switchwing from Plex. I tried infuse and worked perfectly, but sadly it doens’t support multi-profiles (on Plex i have a separate profile with kid’s movies)
I think people feel loyalty to Plex and I understand why. I even understand why they’re charging for self-hosting considering their costs of delivering the dynamic DNS, software development, content info, etc. But being closed source, VC funded, and with their core product an increasingly small part of their business, it’s all a powerful recipe for enshittification. Tech Altar has talked before about how enthusiast brands often betray their users. Jellyfin was not a trivial set up for remote access, but I’ve really been happy with it, and I like having the peace of mind of having control over how it works
I set up tailscale for remote access and it was pretty easy and painless. Maybe not as “average user” simple as plex, but no harder than setting up lan games to play across the internet that non techy people were doing in my high school 20 years ago.
Yeah with VPN it’s more straightforward. I wanted it accessible without which was more involved. Honestly the average user doesn’t even know what tailscale or wireguard are, so you are already advanced using those
That’s true, but tbh I only know about it because chat gpt put me onto it. I asked it how to access jellyfin outside my home and it told me tailscale and explained how to set it up pretty easily.
So, forwarding a port on your router was a difficult process?
Nginx/caddy, dynamic DNS, buying a domain, setting it up with cloudflare is well outside the capabilities of most people. Took me a few hours to figure out
So if I’m not behind a double nat, I can just forward a port like a civilized person?
imagine not being behind a CGNAT in current year
if you're not paying a fucking mint for a real IPv4 address never tell anyone, it's a mistake.
Lol, I’m not. My ISP does not use cgnat and offers symmetrical bandwidth nationwide.
Feels good not being American.
Port forwarding is a breeze to me and my NAS. Id be willing to switch to JF if I can seamlessly setup the connection, even with my lifetime Plexpass.
Weird, I live in America, have 8gbps symmetrical and am not CGnatted. Odd for you to so blindly exclaim what you did.
How much are you paying for that?
$165/mo. Under business contract.
Edit: No caps either… Last 30 days 11TB download, 175TB upload.
That’s nice. I pay 28 USD for mine, so yeah, mines a better deal.
Not without additional context it’s not… Is your service 8gbps? Do you have SLAs in place? Will your ISP send you hate mail after using a mere 10TB of data?
I don’t need 8gbps. What would I be doing with that? My internet is not capped either. You’re comparing a good doméstic internet connection with a business level service…
It’s like saying your 10k build is better than a 500$ PS5 for playing games. It obviously is, but I can still play the same game.
Are you okay?
I didn’t compare mine to yours at all. You’re the one that said your 28 USD service was a better deal. YOU made the comparison. YOU asked for the details.
No, he provided details for his internet first. You’re the one who came in comparing your business contract internet with his non-business one. Did you just conveniently forget that?
You need to scroll up and pay attention.
Them:
Me:
Them:
<Requests direct information about cost>
Me:
<I oblige>
Them:
<makes a comparison without qualifying anything about the comparison, claiming theirs to be superior>
Me:
<calls it out>
They provided no details at all… this whole engagement. We still don’t actually know what speeds they even get for their mere 28USD. Could be 100mbps and it would be significantly worse by ever metric than my 8gbps. I can’t compare my service to something that we have no details for.
He provided details about his non-business internet being symmetrical and YOU compared it to your business contract line, that’s literally how it started.
The cost is to prove that Americans do not have easy access to the same level of internet his country has, which is his main point. You needed to purchase a business line to have it symmetrical, which is not accessible to the everyone.
Just because you can pay 100 times the cost of healthcare in European countries to get high quality heathcare in America, it doesn’t mean the average American can afford to go to the hospital or that your healthcare system is just as good. The same thing applies to your internet.
To my residential house… of which my neighbor can get the same service, under a residential contract. Also they didn’t say if their internet was residential or not.
No. My neighbor can also get 8/8, under a different SLA as residential. I only provided “under business contract” because that changes the price.
You’re not making a good look for your stance when you over hyperbolize the situation. I pay 5.89 times more… for what could be 8-80 times more speed. We don’t know because THERE IS NOT ENOUGH INFORMATION.
If your neighbour can also get symmetrical internet with a residential contract, then that would be the better example to prove his point wrong.
A business contract is not a good comparison because they usually are symmetrical for a premium price regardless of the quality of the residential internet in your area.
Even in my country you can get symmetrical internet with a business contract, yet I’ll never claim my country’s internet is comparable to one that do provide it for a normal residential connection, because we don’t have that option here.
And he did say his internet was a normal domestic internet, btw.
I needed to hyperbolize the situation because you can’t seem to grasp why a business line wasn’t a good comparison, as you can see from how it works in my country. All you needed to do was provide the point that the symmetrical internet is not exclusive to a business contract and it would have made your argument completely valid.
Sure, but I don’t get their bill now do I?
Which was the point of me bringing it up… my price is likely higher than my neighbor. But I know that the same speeds are available. Symmetric.
Once again though… Without more information we can’t actually compare but at face value… I pay 5.89 times for for presumably 8-80 times more speed. EVEN ON MY BUSINESS CONTRACT. Hard to say that their service is categorically better than mine…
Man, you’re still missing the point and you wonder why I had to resort to hyperbole. Nvm, since you don’t actually seem interested with disproving his point effectively and still want to compare prices despite it being irrelevant to the actual point, there’s not much use with continuing this discussion. You’ve provided information that proved half his point about US internet is incorrect, and that’s good enough for me.
I’m not behind a CGNAT and that’s completely free. I do pay for that IP to be static though, but that’s only ~$6.50/month (USD).
Been with 2 providers this year and neither have been behind CGNAT.
don’t proxy the jellyfin domain through cloudflare. They don’t like transiting video and will kill your account for it, especially if you’re just a free user.
I thought that was only for tunnels
blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos
The proxy will auto-CDN content. You need to disable CDN in order to stay in line with TOS. You can use one of the available rules to “fix” this… but this will already be even more above the general person’s head that it’s just better to tell people to not proxy the plex/jellyfin domain at all.
Oh I think I turned off the CDN, but I’ll check, thanks for the tip
I got concerned when people started buying Plex hats. And being excited about that purchase.
I noticed that Logo on Hats people who are willing to pay for them is often a bit concerning.
It was easy considering I was already using custom domain for Plex.
Seeing the replies in this thread it kinda makes me wonder what Plex actually has to do for these zealots to quit using their platform.
Like do they literally have to steal naked pictures of you and pass them around the office? Like wtf.
I’m slowly building up Jellyfin to replace it.
Need a jellyfin PS5 app
And a Samsung TV app. There’s an entire branch of Samsung TVs that require side loading to get a Jellyfin app installed.
You can literally click “I do not agree” lol. Also the “personal data” is a hashed email (so they don’t get your email), ip address, and watch history. Not very “personal”, and not anything that violates your privacy or is of any concern to you.
If you connect to the internet from 2 or 3 different locations, the hashed email will be the same, so they just need to compare the locations to those from another service like Instagram and they know who you are and what you’re streaming.
And? Why should we care? If I’m already using instagram and other social media platforms that we all know do this, I am clearly ok with it aren’t I?
Companies want your money. The more they know about you, the more possibilities they have to get it. You don’t know what the political landscape may look like down the road. You may feel safe now, but that can change quickly. Imagine you suddenly need to pay back money to the copyright owners unless you can prove you already did?
And just like that we’re at silly made up hypothetical situations to drive fear and an agenda. That’s not even worth entertaining.
Btw these changes and the data that is shared/sold are only for plex’s hosted movies and shows - not your personal media collection.
Source: link in the OP
Lmao we already see people are being influenced by social media and targeted marketing, where do you think the source of that is? Do you think you’re immune? Think again. And it’s not just about selling you things, it’s about shaping how and what you think. And what’s the agenda I’m trying to drive in your eyes?
You’re right that they for now don’t sell personal library streaming information, let’s see how long it stays that way.
It’s all hypothetical until it isn’t anymore. You’re literally the slowly boiled frog.
So how long before you admit you’re wrong? If they don’t sell it in 2 years? 5 years? 10 years?
You’re literally spreading FUD based on your paranoia.
Idunno why you don’t think having an unique hash attatched to your data is no biggie. Especially if that hash is easily cracked in a few years by quantum computers.
It’s an email address, it doesn’t matter lol
Just say you don’t care about privacy and having all your data out there for anyone to do anything they want with.
“All your data” lol
I care about my actual private data. My email that I hand out to dozens of sites isn’t that. What movies/tv shows of Plex’s - not my collection - isn’t that. It’s definitely not an issue when it’s opt-in like this is.
Nobody is gonna be using a quantum computer to “crack email hashes” of Plex users in a few years… I’m not even sure there is a speedup to hash cracking with quantum computers.
But depending on the hashing algorithm used, it’s likely pretty easy to crack hashes of email addresses today with a normal computer. They’re not particularly high entropy.
I have no skin in this game, but IPs are definitely not anonymous data. Also there is a lot of great info out there about de-anonymizing seemingly random data. Interestingly enough, this is similar to the Netflix prize dataset that was one of the more famous ones. Maybe a good introduction to that would be www.schneier.com/blog/…/anonymity_and_t_2.html
My guess when the MPA buys plex data and they have what movies everyone has on their servers.
Tbh, the way people push Jellyfin every single time Plex is mentioned is so extremely annoying that I’m now even less inclined to use it, especially the way the JF zelots completely ignored the legit reason that most people use it.
Not sure if you understand this or not, but you using, or not using jellyfin doesn’t affect anyone but you. 🤷♂️
If you don’t wanna use it, then don’t use it. You’re still wrong, but that’s up to you lil buddy.
Sure thing zelot
That doesn’t many any sense, because I just specifically told you that it doesn’t matter to anyone but you whether or not you use Jellyfin… If it mattered to me, then yeah, sure. I’d be a zealot. But I don’t give a shit what you personally use.
Also, pointing out the fact that Jellyfin is pretty indisputably better for people in this specific space isn’t zealotry. It’s just good common sense.
I think you missed the part where I said that the zelots completely ignore the legitimate reason why people use it over JF. Same reason I use it.
Also you can literally opt out of the data sharing, the button is right there. And if you don’t live in a corporate shit hole like the US, data protections make sure that they won’t use it without your consent or even store it because it’s protected PII.
For now. It’s always for now. You used to be able to opt out of Google data sharing too. And Reddit’s. And Microsoft’s. And Apple’s. And your Credit Cards… The list goes on and on and on and on and on.
Soon as a large company realizes that they can vertically increase revenue by selling your data it ceases being an option. A realization that Plex will very soon learn because they’ve begun to sell data “optionally” for now. Then by next year, or maybe even the year after that it’ll no longer be optional.
It always goes this way. Always. I can’t even think of a single antithetical example.
FWIW apparently this is talking about their free content, not about user content.
And that makes a difference to you?
It does, yeah.
If they are providing the content, they can see that they are providing the content and that much is obvious.
If you are providing the content, you wouldn’t expect that they can identify what you are watching.
That’s the difference to me, yeah.
Mmmmm gross.
I’ll leave you with this, though. Shit like this is all goalposts. For now it’s just “their” content and not yours. But in 12 months it’s gonna be all content. And what excuse will you make for them, then?
I’ll switch to jellyfin like a normal adult who actually reads the updates and not a reactionary who just reads thread titles.
On no, an opt out, such a tragedy.
I would simply click I Do Not Agree and then throw the computer in the trash
I just hit no, and everything still works fine afaik
Perhaps. The issue I perceive is that, for corporations, evil deeds are only illegal if you get caught and the government actually pursues you. Then, the most the corpos face is a fine, and remember: if the penalty for doing something illegal is a flat fine, then it isn’t a punishment, it’s a price.
Thus, this corporation has indicated its clear intent to sell me to the highest bidder. I would not give them a chance to do so. A “do not agree” button is just that: a “do not agree button”.
Thanks for the headsup. This is the final push I needed. Been running Jellyfin for 6months or so but need to put more time into it. Plex has been great, and I’ve also been paying (though felt a little conflicted) a sub which I’m willing to do if it keeps a worthwhile project on an honest trajectory aligning with my needs and restrictions, for a good service or product. However they’re now doing exactly why I started on the self hosting path. Who’s to say the third party is jot going to be a heavy handed industry body, corrupt authority , let alone the problematic world of adsales? They’re walking a very strange line and seem very confused about their purpose. Other than the all ruining ‘growth’. Seeya plex.
.
I’ve had a lifetime plex pass for several years. Once I tried Jellyfin a few months ago it was all over. My “I’ll run both just in case” period lasted a week or two.
The downside is that Jellyfin will take more setup on your end, especially if you want to let other people connect securely to your server.
The upside is performance and responsiveness. Once I started using it I decided Plex had to go, even if I have to drive to each family member’s house to fix their shit. It was like moving between Linux and Windows, as far as one being designed to work and the other being designed to satisfy dozens of corporate KPIs.
Fortunately the setup for the end user is just as simple once your server is good to go. They just need URL, login, and password.
And since it’s all open source, there’s some fun diversity in clients. I use Finamp specifically for music, and there are audiobook focused ones.
Plexamp is what keeps me in the Plex ecosystem. I really like the “Mixes for you” and generating mixes based on listening habits. Have you found anything on jellyfin to do that for music?
Same.
One day! 🤞
Not listening habits. But symphonium can do genre and general mix.
And honestly it keeps you from hearing all the same stuff in every mix like Spotify (and seemingly Plexamp) does
Very true. I’m okay with hearing the same songs. It’s when I get the intro/intermission/joke tracks I get annoyed. Plexamp has a deep cuts mix that plays the lesser known music which I’ll throw up to change it up. It’s just easy to pick a premade mix and move on to what I’m doing.
Finamp has artist/album mixer but it’s truly random. You could get the same artist 6 times in a row if that artist selection is bigger than the other artist.
That’s my must-have feature. I need to look to see if there is something already comparable out there.
There are a lot of people here who simply cannot be bothered to figure out remote access
A weird one i saw today was actually “jellyfin took too many resources scanning my library” and ‘if it doesn’t have an SSO my family won’t use it’
I think a lot of people just enjoy plex better and will accept any minor inconvenience as justification. That’s fine though. I’ll swear up and down that apple products are not worth the convenience, either, but there will always be people who simply like them more than others, and thats fine
I find it how many useres here almost scream “The year of linux” every day for every little grain of news Windows comes up.
And yet they do literally the same with Plex.
That’s a strange one to me. In my experience Jellyfin scans my libraries in about 1/10 the time Plex used to take on the same machine.
Yea, they were extremely vague about what the nature of their problem was, but they mentioned it was running on the same media library as their plex install. They insisted that it was because jellyfin was poorly designed and definitely not user error. Could have been a bunch of things, but it was almost certainly a config error. They said the server ‘locked up’ and all the other services became unresponsive any time jellyfin was scanning. They also did not like the way jf wrote metadata files to the media library volume. It was among their other complaints, such as ‘i didn’t like that you could reskin it’ and ‘it was too complicated to use for managing my book collection’.
sounded like a usergroup mapping issue to me but hard to say for sure. They said they weren’t interested in troubleshooting it so, whatareyagonnado? They seem really invested in not liking it though.
I think being apprehensive is natural when you’re entirely left on your own for security, knowing that you could leave yourself vulnerable if you do it incorrectly. Add to this the fact that half the info you’ll find on the process is people claiming you just need to open some ports, which you know to be wrong, and it’s easy to see why it’s hard to trust any advice you find.
Yea, I don’t disagree, and I don’t actually fault anyone for using plex for it’s simplicity of remote configuration.
I do think a lot of people overlook simple workarounds to doing straight reverse proxies. I’ve used a VPN to access my remote services without issue for a long time. Granted, that’s still a prerequisite skill a lot of people don’t have, but I think a lot of people already inside the self-host space already have that knowledge. And frankly, self-hosting as a concept stems from this idea that with a little bit of effort, we can free ourselves from corporately owned SAAS companies - it shouldn’t be so divisive to be advocating for self-sufficiency.
There’s absolutely a place for plex. It’s a lot of people’s first foray into selfhosting. But I think people miss the opportunity to learn a new skill when they decide they’re willing to put up with abuse instead of taking the hint that it’s time to migrate.
Also a lifetime Plex holder. Plex wouldn’t let me watch my local content without authenticating the other day… But my internet went out and I couldn’t. Decided I’d swap to Jellyfin the first chance I could (couldn’t that day because no internet)… So that’s what I did today. It was painless and I’m never going back to Plex.
Disclaimer, I don’t need access outside of my house so I didn’t set any of the remote stuff up.
Yeah, if you’re 100% local, that’s basically the ideal use case for Jellyfin. Plex really shines when it comes to remote access. But if you never use that, then there’s very little reason to use it over Jellyfin.
My suggestion: Get Symphonium in addition/to replace Finamp.
Much more advanced in what it can do.
Only downside: You can’t exclude libraries. If you have a soundtrack-like library separate from the regular music library, it can’t be separated.
Thanks for the suggestion. I will try it!
Is it good with gapless playback? It isn’t as crucial for me as for some people who listen to live recordings etc, but it’s always nice to have and is a good sign for the quality of the player.
Didnt notice anything special with gapless. But I only have one album that is peimary gapless. Thus I am no metric to count on. Best you check yourself as you can refund the app if it doesnt fit your needs :)
I don’t even use remote sharing local access only.
What I cannot do without is, resume and watch history.
Skip intro.
Category management of the library.
Does jellyfin support these 3 items?
One of the security upsides to plex is that any number of people can log in with the same credential.
That means that while Plex can harvest information- what account, what’s being watched, IP address, device and player identifier- It doesn’t know who to attach that information to. So you can get dozens or maybe hundreds of users polluting the same account with watch information. Less useful information to be sure.
And you can say no. Where’s the problem?
Also “personal data” is a bit of a stretch.
luckily it never had it
Damn. They’re really ripping the copper wiring out of the walls.
And then finding out it’s all fiber optics and everyone migrated to Jellyfin. :/
best bet for your home theater PC is STILL old computer parts with high capacity storage
so whats the issue? just declining doesn’t work?
I feel like I know the answer but what happens if you click “I do not agree”?
Like all companies complying with European data collection laws, they can’t collect your data and have to delete anything they have collected.
They can’t delete everything they’ve collected and they propaply don’t.
In a few years the “do not agree” will dissapear anyway.
…wikipedia.org/…/General_Data_Protection_Regulati…
ohyeah im fully aware. Will they actually delete it or will they just mark it in database as deleted? Are big companies like google going to send their tech workers to go through all their tapes and databases archived all around the world and prove they actually deleted your data? Are there enough consequences to ensure companies actually scrub your data rather than do the bare minimum?
First of all, the European Data Protection Board have shown they are more than willing to throw their weight around issue large fines and request audits. Second of all, have you actually looked at the types of data data brokers buy and sell? Massive records of IPs, and metrics.
Like above what “amazing treasure trove of personal data” are you giving up by clicking “I Accept”. Search queries of the Plex Free Movie\TV library, watch times of the same free library and whether you click on pre, mid or post roll ads. And who is going to buy and sell this? Ad providers who swear they are providing targeted advertising, but really have quotas and metrics to fill. They will end up showing irrelevant ads anyway, not because of some algorithm, but literally because the advertising industry does not give two shits about click through rates just that ads get shown.
There’s so much bitching in this thread like someone from AdSense or Outbrain has personally murdered a family member, but the truth is, these places are a grift. Annoying, yes, but mostly harmless. Oh and don’t try to pull “oh but governments can use this for surveillance” yes they could but as someone who has held a job a federal level tax office, they do not have the budget for profiling people like this and a corrupt government has cheaper and better options.
I will try my best to respect your opinion and what you think a “right to privacy” means but I have great trouble understanding the paranoia
python -m http.server is still my media server of choice. It’s never let me down.
Mine too! I’m enjoying your media server right now.
/s
I bet you’d like filebrowser. Cleaner interface while being minimal as http.server
Beautiful! I’ll definitely give this a go
This is specifically related to watching their free content. You can opt out of the sale & sharing of said data, which is used to play you targeted ads when watching their free content. I am not a big fan, but this is the typical “free” TV spiel. Was there something that changed recently or is it just being recognized now?
It’s the recent “We all hate Plex now” because they implemented a price in regards to the way we access content remotely because it was costing them too much to maintain for free. So anything that smells even remotely like they are trying to make money is getting the shocked and dismayed reaction. Usually followed by a dozen or so people talking about how they’ve ditch Plex ages ago for a truly free platform like jellyfin/Kodi/etc.
My friend in England uses my server all the time and neither of us have gotten that email about being charged for shared library yet lol.
Maybe im just the chosen one.
Are you using the free version of Plex or the paid for version?
I’ve yet to see a single email about any of the shit on here about Plex. I’m not defending any of these choices, just more confused as to who this applies to, where and when.
I have actually never considered watching Plex’s free shows.
If I did see something I liked, I’d probably ‘acquire’ it and put it in my own library.
They also serve you their version of the show with ads if you have the same show on your Plex. I have Ghost in the Shell S.A.C on Plex and I’ve never watched their version but it sure as shit showed up in my “continue watching”. The same thing happened when my gf was watching Midsomer Murders.
What devices?
Nvidia shield
It’s opt-in. Zero issue here.
Because Plex would never dare to turn this on by default for everyone…?
It’s also not for your personal media, only what you watch of their hosted content. They aren’t selling that your most watched thing is your highly curated big booty whores collection.
Even if you can mental gymnastics into believing this won’t affect you, we know that’s the way Plex is going. How long until it does?
For those who aren’t quite ready to delete their accounts get, this link buried on their privacy page can let you opt out: www.plex.tv/vendors-us
Not sure why “us” is in the URL, I’m in Canada
That was very helpful. Thanks!
*For now
Didn’t even need to dig. As soon as I opened Plex in my browser, it gave me a giant full screen “hey we want to sell your data. Do you consent” page. I disagree with data sale in general, but at least they didn’t go out of their way to bury the opt out. In fact, they actually went out of their way to present the notification in a way that was impossible to miss. If you’re capable of reading, you’ll know what the popup is for.
Agreed, but I don’t always trust myself not to have clicked through something like this on autopilot and make the wrong choice.
This post had me wanting to double-check I’d opted out (I had).
Yeah, I mean this seems like much ado about nothing. Don’t get me wrong…I’d prefer Plex never even attempt this, but they make it dead easy to opt out. There’s literally an “All No” checkbox. It’s been that way for a while. Every time someone posts another “Plex sux and steals your data!” thread, I check it and everything is still set to opt-out. They’ve never auto-opted-in anything, unlike how back when I still had a Facebook account I’d have to constantly re-opt-out of things because FB seemingly changed my settings to opt back in every time the moon entered its waning phase. Roku does that too. Every time I go into the “secret” menu and turn off ads and stuff, then there’s a system update, you have to go turn that stuff back off.
I can imagine this data would sell for quite a bit of money. Networks love to winge about how much they lose to piracy
Stopped using plex, replaced with jellyfin
Do they have the same features?
It’s interesting to see the different kind of comments here and on Redshit.
Here, people are smart and they are switching to Jellyfin. On Redshit, if people mention Jellyfin in a comment they get downvoted right away.
There’s a reason we all left reddit.
A lot of people moved to jellyfin even on Reddit. www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1kwyqs5/_/
I think it was maybe last week or the week before there was a thread about plex enshitification and I recall a lot of downvotes to folks praising/recommending jellyfin over plex.
It’s all fake and manipulated there anyway.
I’m afraid it will be fake and manipulated here in the future.
I miss when you could use something without it turning into spyware. Jellyfin it is then.
honestly for my purposes, jellyfin is more than enough. Does everything I want. Even got the icons of the series I watch implemented in the player
I might actually have to switch to Jellyfin then…
I say that as a paying plex pass customer
I find it wild that you still seem unsure. What would make you say “Thats it, im switching!”?
Years of continued enshittification
They’ve been putting ads on your home screen for years
yup
Damn it damn it damn it!! I can’t use Jellyfin because…its what I watch all my porn on. Plex was used for all the family stuff. Mother fuckers! Greed is a bitch. Edit: Wait…what if we are using a VPN…shouldnt we be good then?
lmao.
also: github.com/stashapp/stash
Yes! How can I use this with my seedbox? Just FTP to my computer and use the stashapp from there?
It specifically mentions email addresses (used for account creation I assume) and what content is being watched, which a VPN wouldn’t do anything for.
What if its all tied to a seedbox, would that matter?
You can hide libraries on jellyfin.
Just create a family user and a porn user and login how you please.
Sweet Jesus thank you!
Or…If feeling a little bit paranoid, run a second copy of Jellyfin. That’s what I do. Works well for me.
Yup, just spin up a second Docker image for your porn Jellyfin server. Copy your transcoding settings over from the existing image, and point the new image at different media folders.
Docker and tailscale you can run multiple instances
This is basically my exact situation lol
We are altering the deal. Pray, we do not alter it further.
Force PlexPass first, get money, then change terms.
Coordinated big-brain evil.
Big plus - identify all accounts interested in privacy. Thus = suspicious accounts.
This is the path for Plex to become Digg, Playon, and reddit.
“enshittification wont happen to my software of choice”
hahahaha… those ppl with discord, iphones, windows,plex…they wont learn.
android is risking enshittification too if google keeps trying to close down it’s development. nothing is safe unless it is free of greedy corporations
Is Kodi still a thing? Been a while since I had a media server but I have another one in the works because fuck streaming services
Kodi exists however it’s a client only, it is not made to host content. You are looking for jellyfin
+1 for Jellyfin!
Eh, I’m pretty sure it is. Haven’t had Kodi running for a while, but I used it on a Raspberry Pi with an USB HDD with my content long before I had Jellyfin. Though it cannot stream the content over network, just display it on the machines video output (which is what media PCs do)
That was what I was leaning towards. Do you (or does anyone) happen to know if it is easy to get going on Bazzite? And if so, does it play nice with a Steam controller?
Entire Kodi interface can be navigated using only arrow keys, enter, esc. If you use Steam Input, you can rebind keys. And good news, Kodi is on Flathub so you can install it with ease: flathub.org/apps/tv.kodi.Kodi
How else can they afford to stream samurai cop 3 and other things you never asked? You guys need to support them in becoming the best corp they can be! They want to be big boys now.
Plex has always been trash imo. Far better open source options available.
Meanwhile, poor Jellyfin just quietly doing the job.
The client apps are a lot better these days too.
Until it supports proper external access I just can’t switch.
I have a lifetime Plex pass but still I am considering switching. Currently I have both Jellyfin and Plex on the same libraries but Jellyfin doesn’t have support for chromecast (on iOS and Firefox) nor support for offline . (Not) covering neither my at home nor travelling use cases 😕
Can you clarify what you mean by Chromecast support? I have a Chromecast device and it has the jellyfin app on it. Works like a charm without issues. I have a feeling you mean something else though?
He’s probably referring to just Chromecast without the Google TV module. Jellyfin works great for me as well on the Chromecast w/GTV
This 🙂
I think you can use Infuse on iOS to chromecast. I’m not sure if that’s behind the subscription though.
For chromecast to work with the app, you need to install the jellyfin app from google play, not fdroid or other store.
Goddammit… Right after I got the lifetime pass…
It literally gives you a gigantic “hey we want to sell your data. Do you want to allow that” prompt when you open it. They didn’t even make the “no, don’t sell my data” button grey and tiny like so many cookie prompts do. Plex went out of their way to put it up front and center, instead of quietly burying it in an obscure opt-out. There are plenty of perfectly valid complaints about Plex… But if a company wants to sell my data, (and here’s a spoiler warning: They all want to) this is how it should be handled.
Interesting. I’ll have to look for that. I don’t believe I’ve actually seen the prompt yet.
I assumed they already were.
No chance Plex wasn’t making money from those who didn’t pay for Plex Pass.
I know, right? Any ‘free’ service with that much infrastructure to support, is more than likely selling your data. I guess, it’s kind of refreshing that a company comes right out and tells you they’re about to bend you over the barrel.
.
Oh, you expect proprietary software to behave nicely? That’s cute!
I’ll just be over here with Jellyfin, watching the chaos unfold with my popcorn!
The downfall of Plex needs to be compiled into an 80 minute YouTube video with sponsors spaced in for NordVPN and Viagra
Got rid of Plex a long time ago. Trash ass program
I’m a big fan of Jellyfin. I would say it is easily family approved. That is for my family in my household who is using it on our home Wi-Fi.
But I am not about to expose it publicly. I have WireGuard set up on my immediate family’s devices and that is mostly ok (until you get on a public Wi-Fi that fails because you haven’t gone through their portal and can’t because the vpn is on, or you are on an airplane’s Wi-Fi with no internet trying to watch their movies and it doesn’t work until you turn off the vpn). Explaining this to my wife has been a nonstop battle.
I’d like it open it up to my siblings families, especially because I have the ersatztv plug-in to create approved child stations, but so many smart tvs and devices don’t support a vpn. How have others handled that situation?
Wireguard doesn’t necessarily need to have those limitations, but it will depend in part how your VPN profile is set up.
If you configured your wireguard profile to always route all traffic over the VPN then yeah, you won’t be able to access local networks. And maybe that’s what you want, in which case fine :)
But you can also set the profile to only route traffic that is destined for an address on the target network (I.e your home network) and the rest will route as normal.
This second type of routing only works properly however when there are no address conflicts between the network you are on (i.e. someone else’s WiFi) and your home network.
For this reason if you want to do this it’s best to avoid on your own home network the common ranges almost everyone uses as default, i.e. 192.168.0.* and 10.0.0.*
I reconfigured my home network to 192.168.22.* for that reason. Now I never hit conflicts and VPN can stay on all the time but only traversed when needed :)
I typically use split routing BUT also have dns set to my pihole, both so dns works for my internal services and for tracker blocking. That causes a big issue. Also I wish WireGuard would just handle failures better. Even when it can’t connect, it seems to break networking (at least on iOS)
Speedrunning destroying your platform.
"Updated “Who does Plex share or sell Personal Data with?” to include the Plex activity that you share based on your account visibility and activity settings as well as sharing/sale of certain Personal Data to third parties.
Seems like it’s just for their other services, which I already assumed they were tracking and selling view counts.