Well I already have jellyfin running in a container, just have to figure out how to get mum’s TV to work with it I guess
<edit> log in on a local IP and not the network name and it’s working again. but I’ll be moving to jellyfin from now
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I did try and preempt that in my comment - but it’s hard to switch from plex when there are 5 other people with everything all configured and history etc
but it’s hard to switch from plex when there are 5 other people with everything all configured and history etc
That’s exactly what Plex wants you to say
No it’s not. Tell them to learn to switch or lose access. It’s your server, do what you want.
How to migrate your watch history, apparently: https://www.florianjensen.com/2024/08/21/how-to-migrate-from-plex-to-jellyfin/
Jel-ly-fin, jel-ly-fin, je-ly-fin!
Is there something better than jellyfin? I’ve been using it for a little over a year, and it works for the most part, but clients are often pretty buggy (especially on apple apple devices)
Have you tried the third party ones? I’ve seen recommendations for Swiftfin
Yeah that’s the one I’m using on our appleTV, it’s buggy as hell. “Continue” show often doesn’t work and picks an episode that I’ve watched long ago and not the next in line, often never updating it despite watching several episode over several weeks. Aftee Pausing a show or movie and closing the app, if you want to continue from where you left off, well that doesn’t work consistently either, usually it will just restart from the beginning. Switching language on shows pretty much doesn’t work at all, it will either never change from default audio language, or use an entirely different language than the one picked from the list.
All these things work perfectly fine from a browser or official app on android.
Infuse is so good on Apple TV it’s worth the money
I refuse to support companies with subscription based business models.
I just bought the lifetime since it works out to being cheaper than the subscriptions it saves me from over like a year
I have no trust that lifetime is in fact lifetime, and the price is also too high compared to the product value IMO.
I mostly use Infuse on the Apple TV and Streamyfin on the iPhone.
I’d be happy to pay for Infuse if the lifetime wasn’t AU$150, and I just outright reject paying a subscription for an app for using something FOSS, even if it’s only AU$20/year. A lifetime license that’s 3-5yrs of a yearly sub is much more reasonable.
I’m no fan of software subscriptions. I have only one and it’s Infuse. Took the plunge mainly for Apple TV playback a few years ago and I’m glad I did.
It’s not just relying on FOSS through JF, but allows connection to Plex and Emby servers. And just as importantly direct NAS playback (side note - I honestly think a lot people go through the hassle of setting up a full JF/Emby/Plex server when this option would work just as well for them for single client playback). They also update regularly, and generally adhere to native OS design standards so it feels at home - https://firecore.com/releases
Back to the point, I pay the cost of a McDonald’s meal a year and I’m happy. IMHO it’s fantastic value. And I’ll continue to wait patiently for the official Jellyfin Apple TV client rework (Swiftfin). If it’s great and ticks the boxes I need I’ll cancel the Infuse subscription, if not we get enough value for £8.99 a year to make it a no brainer decision to continue.
I use Emby and it’s flawless, might be worth swimming upstream?
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Yeah, the way things at going I feel like I should protect myself further with a VPN, but it does break some of my services’ access. Just another hurdle in the track to net independence that will be overcome! Heaven knows we’ve overcome many to get where we each are.
No need to bust your brain trying too hard - you’ll find an answer eventually!
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Plex will do the exact same thing if you have an episode earlier in your history that didnt get marked as “watched”. But plex lets you manually tag episodes as watched which usually fixes it. Maybe there’s a similar option in jellyfin?
Jeælyfin also has this, is just doesn’t work on appleTV
Was I supposed to read that with a Scottish accent?
I’m pretty happy with Emby, but it’s not open source.
infuse is a good jellyfin client. there’s a free tier but im not sure of the limitations.
The free tier limitation is that it doesn’t work with jellyfin
Is there something better than jellyfin?
Plex.
What if you want to own your server?
I do own my server. It’s in my living room.
Then you signed it over to Plex. Smdh
For remote streaming access, sure. But I don’t see a problem otherwise.
You can absolutely run plex in a local only mode. You don’t sign it in to an account and then set your subnets in the local networks section like so. Or leave it blank if you have a standard flat home network.

What’s an “apple apple” device? 😁
Yea, Jellyfin on iOS hsed to be buggy. Seems much better these days, and there’s also Finamp for music
The web interface is fantastic. I just use a spare laptop with a wireless keyboard and mouse
I can’t say I’ve given Jellyfin a proper try (as in using it and the clients exclusively for a long period) but we have been using Emby for quite a while before I knew it existed.
If I’m not mistaken Jellyfin is actually a fork of Emby so they’re pretty similar, but one is a bit older.
If I’m not mistaken Jellyfin is actually a fork of Emby so they’re pretty similar, but one is a bit older.
Jellyfin forked from Emby in 2018 when Emby chose to switch to a closed-source model. Because of this, there are many similarities, but the projects continue to become increasingly different from one another as time goes on.
I was probably using Emby already by then, had bought a lifetime license since it didn’t require bouncing things off and outside server like Plex did (or was it that Plex was a renewing subscription, I forget) , so it just stayed out of inertia.
What sort of bugs are you experiencing? I’m using the official Jellyfin app and it’s been extremely stable on all my Apple devices. But I noticed a while ago that videos that were not MPEG were problematic so I converted all the AVI and WMV and WEBM to MP4 and it has been much more reliable. Scrubbing and previews have worked much better also
“Continue show” often doesn’t work and picks an episode that I’ve watched long ago and not the next in line, often never updating it despite watching several episode over several weeks, even if they’re marked as “seen”. After pausing a show or movie and closing the app, if I want to continue from where I left off, well that doesn’t work consistently either, usually it will just restart from the beginning. Switching language pretty much just doesn’t work at all, it will either never change from default audio language, or use an entirely different language than the one picked from the list.
btw i use jellyfin
lol crap, it’s the new arch!
We need a name for lemmy users running arch on their pc that they’re using to watch stuff on their Jellyfin server
USE JELLYF-
Be prepared for a barrage of “Jellyfin” in your comments.
Oh.
I mean, with a post like this, I’d call it baiting
I wanted to move to Jellyfin, but there isn’t an app for it on the LG WebOS library like there is for Plex, so I wouldn’t be able to watch stuff on my TV, which sadly makes it useless for me :-(
I don’t have the money to be going out and buying extra add-ons for my TV to watch stuff either, sadly. So, Plex it is for now!
When was the last time you checked? A client was added to the WebOS store maybe 2 or 3 years ago for recent models, and support for older models (like my C9) came months later.
Root your TV and install the homebrew channel on it.
Yes, this is real.
now I need to find a Wiimote, damnit
You can use the Smart remote which is basically the fusion of a wiimote, a tv remote and a computer mouse
I tried googling some of this but I must be misunderstanding the thread, mind ELI5 for the rest of us? ^_^’
OK.
So, you know of android rooting?
(I'm assuming no)
Android rooting is the action of getting superuser prileveges on an android device, which lets you do literally anything. From removing bloat, to overclocking, it gives you full power over the device.
Keep in mind that “with great power comes great responsibility.” -the
sudocommand on first useWell, it’s that, but for TVs.
As for the remote, how you move the cursor is wii-like, and you can click the [OK] button to click stuff. You can also scroll, because the [OK] button is also a scroll wheel.
What I meant is I tried to Google homebrew smart remote and found nothing. I do have understanding of the concepts and was looking for the specifics :)
15 years ago a pirate decided to name the main channel on the Nintendo Wii for homebrew the “Homebrew Channel”, as it has been for 15 years.
That was my reference. If you found a hacked Wii right now and turned it on, it would be one of the channels available.
The Homebrew Channel for LG WebOS is got three pieces of absolutely essential software:
A YouTube app modified with built in ad blocking and sponsor blocking. The Jellyfin app. The Moonlight app.
With these three plus the toggle to block system updates your TV gets 1000% better for free.
Can you try using DLNA to connect to jellyfin? You need to install the plugin first.
More effort, but there’s also this https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-webos
Yes there is, I literally have it installed on my two LG WebOS TVs. Plus there’s a web browser app that you can create shortcuts for, which works for Dropout so I would assume it works for Jellyfin as well.
Yes there is. I have it on my tv.
Remember when Plex tried to sell you a subscription to use outdated versions of open source game console emulators?
Plex wants to be a profit-driven company, but their business model is piracy. They’ll squeeze you for subscriptions, while making your experience worse to try and broker a peace deal with content owners.
idk I find $2/month to be very reasonable. I don’t feel squeezed.
EDIT: Just to be clear there is no amount of condescending replies form trilby wearing neckbeard keyboard warriors that will change my opinion.
To stream remotely from your own server?
If I chose to use Plex’s
plex.tvservices to expose my server to the internet, that’s one thing. But I have my Plex server exposed through my own infrastructure (NPM + Let’s Encrypt), so fuck that shit.The $2/mo is for the Plex relay service. If you access the server directly it should be free.
It’s not. Now you need to pay any time you want to connect to your server from outside of your LAN.
Would a VPN be a solution to that?
Yes, a VPN can resolve it. Depending on how you do it you may need to add a subnet or list of IPs to the local allow list like so. This also, for me, fixes my wifi subnet being treated as remote.

Yes. You only need to pay if you’re connecting via their relay or trying to use the remote hosting functionality. But since a VPN would land you inside of the network, you’d be fine. You’d probably need to dig into the plex settings to specify that the VPN subnet is LAN traffic. But after that, you should be good.
Sorry to have annoyed you.
Unforgivable, have a wretched hour and a half.
I much prefer jellyfin + tailscale
I’m switching to Jellyfin myself.
Setting up ddns takes 15 minutes for a professional (mostly setting a 1-line script to reload a simple url every ten minutes)
and poking a hole in the firewall takes maybe half an hour (since every router puts the relevant page in a different spot)
And for this you think it’s reasonable to pay ~$25/year for the rest of your life? You’re not wrong in the sense that you’re welcome to choose your own values, but I … disagree with you on the value position.
I’d be fine paying $25 a year to not maintain that shit myself. Plus the money should contribute to development efforts.
It should. I agree, but speaking as someone in the industry - usually it doesn’t. Just lines some rich guy’s pockets.
Fair in the instance of Plex, but I’m happy to pay for the feature with Home Assistant.
Good call! 100% (at least for now 😅)
I mean, you just listed the most insecure way to host Jellyfin. Poking a hole in your firewall will technically work, but that doesn’t mean it’s the correct way to do things. A good setup would use a reverse proxy, and some sort of authentication wall like Authentik or Authelia.
All of that would only take about 15 minutes for someone who knows what they’re doing. But the vast majority of people setting up Jellyfin for the first time won’t know what they’re doing. And seeing the inevitable “lol just open your firewall” comments only serves to scare them away, because even the noobs have heads that’s the wrong way to do things.
I would be ashamed of myself and be tempted to leave the industry in disgrace if setting up DDNS and allowing a single port through a firewall took me 45 minutes.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhh. I want the newbs to feel accomplished when it only takes them 2 hours to figure it out. 😉
But seriously, you and I have it on reflex, but there’s merit to the notion that we also have our mise en place - we’ve read the manual, we’ve saved or memorized the script, already know our local equipment passwords, etc - all things we took the time to do before and now have at the ready.
ok
👌 ok!
I got the Plex lifetime pass over 10 years ago for pretty cheap and Plex has served me well over the years. But it’s just so damn bloated now and the biggest recent change to their android app is atrocious. The app is so laggy and slow now. And downloading movies to watch locally on a tablet is just painful.
So I decided to start experimenting with Jellyfin this month and I am blown away at how fast and snappy everything is. It still isn’t as refined as Plex but there’s something to be said about privacy and using FOSS apps.
I’ll be using Jellyfin going forward now.
I’m glad I really only use it for music, but the fire TV app works decently well. Better than the fucking Netflix app, at least.
Something that’s getting glossed over in these comments is the ability to easily watch or listen to friends’ media.
I have my own library with about 1k movies, a bunch of anime and TV, and 10k albums. But I have like 6 or 7 friends with libraries even larger. My one friend has 37k albums, they all have thousands of movies I never even heard of, etc. It really makes it like my own mini streaming service, and I love throwing on a huge music library on shuffle via plexamp while driving to/from work.
I paid like $70 for a lifetime pass years ago, so I’m along for the ride I guess. I really rely on the music aspect of it, I haven’t had a spotify subscription in like 7 years.
I know they changed a lot lately, and particularly what pisses me off is how vague and how they intentionally obfuscate how their model works now. I have friends that for years used my library, and recently have been like “I saw Plex started charging now so I stopped using it” and I have to be like “no it’s still free because I have a lifetime pass”. It’s definitely just to trick people into getting monthly subscriptions.
the ability to easily watch or listen to friends’ media
Why do you think this can’t be done with Jellyfin?
My friends don’t have it set up. Some of them are friends of friends, and people I don’t talk to regularly. I’m not going to try and convert them. It’s also a bit more complicated via tailscale or VPN reverse proxies and Plex “just werks”. If there’s anything beyond just installing an app and clicking an invite, a bunch of people who use my library are going to have a hard time. Like my dad, he’s pushing 70. My friends would also have to do the goofy networking setup for it to work for me.
I’m also not even sure if people I share with have means of installing. My one friend who uses my library a lot does it through a Samsung TV. That involves sideloading the app to install jellyfin.
Lastly, like I said, music. Plexamp is one of my #1 used apps. There’s a lot that goes into that beyond just being able to play media. It curates playlists depending on what you just listened to or gives you similar artists, similar to how Spotify makes a “radio” after playing something.
the thing that everyone always glosses over is that jellyfin should not be run on a public network. it has known security vulnerabilities… that includes VPN remote proxy, so now you have to have external users on your actual VPN, and if that’s the case then plex will work fine because it’s “local”, and has a lot more features
(and my main issue: media segments don’t work on swiftfin)
Just use wireguard between the two devices
i’m not likely to wrangle installing and maintaining wireguard on my mums cheap smart tv
and if that’s the solution, as i said you get plex local playback so that’s free still anyway
Yeah, Plex makes it easy…other than dealing with their cloud data breach.
which they handled about as well as you can: prompt and clear notification without trying to pass the buck
the potential of a data breach is just a fact of life with any SAAS product - bugs happen… and it’s exactly the SAAS part of the product that makes the invites/login/aggregation of servers so smooth
You have to port forward a port and setup dynamic dns, for 99% this is a insurmountable difficulty.
You do not have to port forward. In fact, I would suggest against port forwarding. There are other options to access remotely
Are these options going to require installation of specialist software and then entering of special configuration parameters on the client computer as rather than just using any standard browser on any internet connected computer and typing yourjellyfindomainname.com ?
Longtime lifetime Plex Pass holder here.
FOSS is important. Having control over how you use your own hardware and files is important.
But even if none of that mattered, once I actually used Jellyfin for a few days the snappy bloat-free feel of it won me over. Switching between Plex and Jellyfin felt like switching between windows and linux.
what is FOSS
I’ve also got lifetime plex pass. I might take more of an interest in Jellyfin if there was an easy way to transfer all of my server settings, playlists, metadata, etc. over. But it just seems like such a hastle to make the switch and I really don’t have any big issues with plex aside from needing to change the settings so they don’t sell my data.
FOSS is free and open source software. And the word “free” does a lot of heavy lifting there because it refers to much more than it typically not costing anything. It means that you have the freedom to do what you want with your stuff, basically. You (or others on your behalf) can see the source code for what the software is doing, and you can even change and improve it.
You’ll see the word “libre” thrown around in this context too, for that reason. For many people the liberty side of free matters a lot more than the no-cost side. But they do go hand in hand, because not needing to protect a revenue stream makes it a lot easier to not enshittify software. You’ll see names like LibreOffice and FLOSS instead of FOSS.
So it’s basically the whole Linux world that is very well represented on Lemmy and the fediverse. :)
Sent using FOSS Voyager web client …in FOSS browser LibreWolf (a fork of FireFox) …on FOSS operating system Linux.
I use Mint btw.
(This is an inside joke for the other Linux people – a play off of “I use Arch btw” where Arch Linux is a hardcore distro where you kind of build your operating system piece by piece, but with excellent documentation. Valve switched SteamOS to be based on Arch a while back)
I have a lot of custom artwork, covers, playlists, etc. How easy did that data migrate? I’ve got 6,500 movies
I can’t imagine moving over would be difficult. Just point Jellyfin to the same folder containing your content. When I first setup my home lab, I was going to use Plex, but I could not get it to recognize media. The naming format wasn’t right or something. Jellyfin just worked immediately
man, I’ve manually setup tons of huge playlists, and entered in a hell of a lot of TV show information by hand so episodes play in an order I like. Getting that working in plex probably constitutes days of work. I don’t want to even think about re-doing that in jelly fin. If there were a way to automate the process though, I’d probably be more interested.
Very new to using Jellyfin but I also feel the difference in loading and such. Feels so much cleaner! Already uninstalled Plex :)
I got fed up one day with Plex because it blocked me from getting to my server from one of my televisions. My LAN’s internet gateway was down and Plex was useless even though all the content was on the local network. I’m sure there’s configuration things or something that I could have changed but in the end I decided I didn’t want to be pressured into buying anything and I didn’t like the constant commercialization of Plex.
So I installed Jellyfin and never looked back. Yes, it’s missing a few features but you can get around that with nginx so totally worth it not to be harassed.
There is a dlna server but it has “totally unintentional” memory leaks that cause it to crash after a few days and they refuse to fix.
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sigh
This is why I switched to Jellyfin and recommend everyone to switch to Jellyfin
Because OP doesn’t know what he’s doing? Or because you like opening your server to the internet without any authentication?
How about… Neither.
I don’t think OP doesn’t know, but I feel like its been said multiple times here, so maybe op either missed it or has a use case where he still wants to use Plex.
I have a Jellyfin server and I don’t need to expose it to the internet. Look at all the posts and comments here about setting up a reverse proxy and to securely expose your server to the internet. But you can also just keep your server locked behind your firewall and only access your network using a self hosted VPN.
Op doesn’t know what he’s doing, otherwise we wouldn’t have this thread.
JellyFin can’t be securely exposed to the internet.
VPN go burrr
Not sure if you understand what a VPN is?
Ok buddy, go bother other kids now. I obviously know what a VPN is. But you don’t like Jellyfin so keep using whatever you are using and I’ll keep using whatever I’m using.
You obviously don’t though lol. Using a VPN is not exposing it to the internet - it’s a private network. It’s even in the name!
Jellyfin’s local download function suuuuuucks by comparison. Lifetime Plex pass has been worth it.
The most annoying thing about Jellyfin is that there’s no way to consolidate all of your servers under a single interface.
With Plex, I have a huge library made up of all my friends’ libraries.
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I know Plex is a business that has to make money, but if I hadn’t bought a lifetime pass for $50 a decade ago, I’d have dropped them at this point.
Same. Lifetime pass. That money is gone, and I use jellyfin nowadays. My photo collection will be stored on ente soon. Still no idea where to host my music library.
I setup music with Clementine, and output analog via the jack. Surely there must be better way… But it was easy & I can choose songs to play from cellphone.
For your photo collection I’d also suggest Immich.
I paid too, but consider that you basically paid $5 per year for 10 years and I’d say that good. You don’t need to feel guilty if you decide to leave, you got your money’s worth.
(And I mean, I have a sneaky suspicion they’re coming for the lifetime users sooner or later)
Yeah, for sure. They can’t survive if people just paid 50 $ ten years ago. They’re going to restrict the service for lifetime users sooner or later.
Same here. I have no complaints about the service and it’s easy for my tech illiterate family and friends, but I’ll switch as soon as they try to charge pass owners for new features.
“Try our new Plex Pass Lifetime* Plus!”
*Valid for the lifetime of the product†.
†2 years
I don’t have the link(s) on hand but there’s a Tizen build of Jellyfin for Samsung TVs. It runs rather slow on my old tube so I wouldn’t recommend it outside of a last resort. It’s actually smoother for me to just open the app on the TV and then remote control it from a browser/app on another device (my Steam Deck is my homelab universal remote). But you can use the Tizen dev tools or a simpler docker container to push it to the TV.
For my folks I got a cheap Walmart brand Android box (Onn 4k Plus). I installed Jellyfin from the app store then black hole’d the thing because I’m wary of cheap Android apps and their history of supply chain attacks. It’s much more responsive and also leaves me with the option of installing additional stuff like Smart Tubes, Retro Arch and whatnot.
Sorry to hit you with a random question, but since I’m in a similar situation: are you using Tailscale to remote stream to your parents, or how do you get that working seamlessly with Jellyfin?
Unfortunately I can’t help in that regard. I keep everything local/unexposed so my solution for them was just running Jellyfin at their place. I was already
rsyncing some stuff to a NAS I set up for them (and vice versa), as off-site backup. Since the files were already there it made the most sense to just give them their own instance.Not the guy, but I use a domain I bought from cloudflare with a cloudflare tunnel on my network. Not as secure as a VPN like tailscale, but doesn’t require setting up a VPN for my friends and family’s TVs so they can connect to the server while keeping my actual IP hidden and without needing to do any port forwarding.
This is a helpful. This sounds like a way, even if I’m still in the “hmmm, yes, I recognize some of those words” stage. Maybe I’ll look for a detailed guide.
I admit, though, the details of how to do this are pretty hard to imagine for me - networking and tunneling seems very technical. Before I can jump off the Plex enshittification train, I just want a way to share my media with tech-illiterate family without complex setup on their end.
Yes, I’m a technical person, but not a web developer and so this was all new to me until very recently. Good luck!
The way I think of the cloudflare tunnel is very similar to a VPN into your system from outside, but for web application traffic specifically.
I tried hitting the X thinking it was an ad XD
I don’t get this? is this because I have a lifetime pass?
Yeah
Either a lifetime pass, or you actually configured local access correctly instead of botching it (or ingoring it entirely) and then coming to lemmy to complain.
Last I knew it was only a thing for sharing between accounts and outside of “Plex home”/managed users… I haven’t seen anything since the announcement months ago. Lot of whiners tho…
E: I’m wrong (except about whiners)… It only affects free/non-pass users.
Imo Plex is worth the lifetime pass if you get it on sale.
All the comments saying Jellyfin is better always puzzle me. I’ve given it like three chances now and each time it feels just as buggy as the last. And that doesn’t even consider the fact that you’ll need more steps to expose it to the Internet for remote viewing or the fact that there’s literally a list of unaddressed security holes https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
I used Plex for privacy reasons. I stopped using Plex for privacy reasons.
So don’t expose it to the internet - which should be the default stance for anything.
The internet was (mistakenly and intentionally) built without security - that doesn’t mean we should just accept that, but instead build everything with our own security.
Numerous mesh VPN solutions exist: Hamachi has been around since at leas 2006. NeoRouter since at least 2012. Then we have Wireguard and Tailscale, and others.
Business build their own tunnels between locations, using routers/gateways with that capability. Consumer routers from Linksys could do this in 2006.
There’s zero excuse for running anything exposed to the internet.
In closing NO SOFTWARE is free of bugs. With Plex you get to pay for those bugs and still have software that depends on a connection even though you’re hosting and viewing your own media, locally.
You wanna denigrate Jellyfin, at least be honest about the pros/cons between the different solutions.
So don’t expose it to the internet
No
Thwres zero excuse for running anything exposed to the internet.
…except this entire thread is based on a use case for it
With Plex you get to pay for those bugs and still have software that depends on a connection even though you’re hosting and viewing your own media, locally.
You’re condescending dude. I wouldn’t be using Plex if I didn’t understand like 37 things you’re implying I don’t understand here. I paid for it once, it was a good value for me, and I find it pretty weird that you apparently want to admonish me for that. If you want to use jellyfin have at it. I found it buggy to the point of barely being usable. Just sharing that experience and I don’t need anyone to agree with that.
…except this entire thread is based on a use case for it
Except it’s not. OP is trying to watch stuff on his own network.
Then they aren’t doing it correctly, or lying. That is an included/free feature. They advertise it that way and other users ITT say it works. I’ve no reason to doubt them.
Don’t expose stuff to the internet
Are you advocating for an self hosting to only exist locally? Or are you advocating for hosting everything on corporate servers?
Don’t expose things to the internet
That goes for corporate settings as well as personal stuff. You almost certainly do not need your self hosted services to be publicly accessible by bots. Anything on the internet gets pounded.
… You just literally said hosting shouldn’t exist. You are using the Internet right now.
Also pretty weird to keep phrasing this as a command, discounting an entire class of use cases to be invalid because bad actors exist?
The problems with Plex are not technical. The problems from Plex are that they take away features and change the terms of use to the detriment of the user. Given plex’s pricing changes over the last year, I would be concerned that your lifetime pass be affected by some policy change.
Yes, they changed the free featureset, and afaik those changes were fair. Providing a tunnel for remote streaming for free doesn’t seem like a good business plan. I mean, yeah they could always back out of the promise of what a lifetime pass is, and if they do I will find a new solution and hope they’re sued for it.
If they do back out of their lifetime commitment, I suspect that would drive some other similar apps to get better. Maybe I would even learn to live with jellyfin as it currently exists in that situation. But so far I don’t see a reason to, and that would almost have been true if I never paid for plex.
Fair enough.
I’m speaking from both sides here, having used Plex for years and now jellyfin:
Don’t tie technical competence of a product with its monetary cost. They are not necessarily equivalent.
From one of the Jellyfin devs in the issue you linked, posted in April this year:
Now, let’s address this clearly once and for all. What is possible is unauthenticated streaming. Each item in a Jellyfin library has a UUID generated which is based on a checksum of the file path. So, theoretically, if someone knows your exact media paths, they could calculate the item IDs, and then use that ItemID to initiate an unauthenticated stream of the media. As far as we know this has never actually been seen in the wild. This does not affect anything else - all other configuration/management endpoints are behind user authentication. Is this suboptimal? Yes. Is this a massive red-flag security risk that actively exposes your data to the Internet? No.
At this point, this over-4-year-old issue has gotten posted to HackerNews more than enough times and gotten quite enough unhelpful peanut-gallery comments like those above… We are limiting this issue to Jellyfin collaborators only at this point. Most of the big items are already tracked elsewhere (specifically, unauth playback) or have already been fixed. And many other options are now open to us in a post-10.11 landscape now that we have a proper library database ready.
That only addresses one of several items.
Yes, but it’s always the one people come back too.
They mention the other issues are either being tracked elsewhere or already solved.
At the end of the day, it’s a community project, done by primarily volunteers, who is not making any money doing this. No VC funding to hire developers to take care of these issues.
I understand there’s an explanation for it. Doesn’t make these things not things to consider when choosing one’s solution
Feel free to go read the multiple writeups from the maintainers that go over each one, we don’t need to copy them all here into the comments for you.
But it’s FOSS, compared to Plex. And it also does not ask for money for anything.
You can also add more security yourself if you want to. Not by coding new stuff into jellyfin, but by adding some sort of auth BEFORE jellyfin.
Setting up auth before Jellyfin breaks clients. This is not an option. Edit: Unless you meant VPN like Tailscale, but then you’d have to install Tailscale too, which I don’t want to explain to others.
Tailscale needs you to explicitly add your device to the tailnet, so it’s some form of authentication.
Also, why don’t you want to explain tailscale? It’s really simple.
Good luck installing Tailscale on my friends’ LG webOS TVs.
And making sure Tailscale auto launches on a FireTV stick is a pita too. Telling them to open Tailscale on each start is not an option.
y’all don’t use jellyfin???
for music: navidrome
for music: not streaming.
Music is a solved problem, the files are small even at FLAC quality and can be tiny with Opus whilst sounding transparent. Any SOC made in the last 15 years features a more than fully capable DAC.
Why even bother with streaming? Have a local collection of files. Even syncing is easy.
i understand what you mean. there´s bad phone reception in my area and streaming is a horrible experience, i download everything on my phone. if i have a stable wifi connection i can stream easily. the benefit of it is just not bloating my 128gb phone to it´s limits
the benefit of it is just not bloating my 128gb phone to it´s limits
That’s kinda the thing though, using modern codecs there’s no way you’ll get anywhere close to facing this issue. A song encoded with Opus at higher than necessary quality is 2.5 MBs on average - that’s over 20 thousand songs in 50 GB, not even half of your total storage gets you 50 days of continuous audio.
With navidrome, my library is a little messed up from what I have on my local and the album art is wrong. Do you know any guide to properly setup navidrome library.
Something like picard to fix the metadata for you?
Thanks, that’s actually what I’ve been using but I guess something got messed up locally after I copied the data over. Maybe I’ll pass Picard directly over the server side data or try copying the music again because the metadata looks fine locally which was the cause of my confusion.
Oh weird. Then I don’t have anything to offer other than generic troubleshooting and best wishes.
i wish i could help. i got the privilege of having a friend who took the headache off me and just set everything up properly before i even got my server ready lol
we haven´t encountered this issue, so all i can say is: it´s solvabe. sorry
What benefits does navidrome provide as a separate music server if jellyfin can host your music already?
Does Jellyfin do smart playlists yet?
Edit: There seems to be a plugin. So, now it’s just about the fact that I already have it set up the way I want, and that I don’t wanna put all my eggs in the same basket. But I guess using Jellyfin for music is totally viable now.
Jellyfin can’t even do smart collections of TV and movies
I can only tell you that personally I’m interested in trying out Navidrome because I don’t like all my eggs in one basket (Jellyfin is more complex sw for sure too) and I think I’m not the only one caring more about my music collection than movies and tv. But I did try Jellyfin for music (not with my main library) and it works very well, Finamp on android has offline mode which I find almost essential.
I’d like to personally, however with my home environment being Apple TV device the plex application is fantastic. And sharing my libraries with other friends sharing back with me is pretty great. Does jellyfinn have that ability? I’ve seen about an app that’s supported but I’m not sure about it, the Apple TV app that is.
And sharing my libraries with other friends sharing back with me is pretty great.
This feature is imo THE killer feature of Plex, although I use Jellyfin. There’s no sharing of libraries like Plex does. Multiple user accounts per server, yes, but you have to switch between servers and search separately.































