We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
Alright, so I have had Jellyfin installed for years now, but my primary issue is that most devices myself or my users use lack official, readily-available clients. For example, the Samsung TV app is a developer mode install. Last I looked, nobody has put a build into the store.
I really want to use Jellyfin, but I feel like my users simply can’t. I’m interested in others’ experiences here that could help.
I mean, except for Tizen OS isn’t most available? You can find the client for Android, Android TV, Windows, Linux (Flatpak), macos, apple ios, and more.
https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients/I was just able to download it on every TV I have
Linux (Flatpak)
So, no, then.
Ah, if you’re allergic to flatpaks and can’t convince your distribution to include it in their repository then you can always build it yourself - https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-media-player
Or just use their web based client with a browser of your choice. :)No idea what Flatpak is, much? Jellyfin is open-source. If your distro isn’t providing you a .deb or tarball to your liking, that’s not on the Jellyfin project.
Why would you ever bother to use either option when you can just access it via the WebUI on Firefox?
Because that basically requires transcoding for modern codecs. H265? Transcode. Subtitles? Transcode. The JF client on the same hardware can usually direct play.
Oh fair enough, I’d highly recommend enabling transcoding anyway it just eliminates all sorts of issues like this.
Don’t ask me? I’ll ftp before I’ll WebUI like so, but for online viewing, I’ll take streaming please. My kids, wife, and mother-in-law find that a million times more convenient.
Meanwhile, there’s a dude in these comments hating on the notion that Jellyfin’s app will download the Raw file for offline viewing purposes. Please, do not ask me to pretend to care what is going on in that person’s head. In my world, using VLC to play my files is a perk. Gimme that yummy 2x or slow-mo as I see fit, please.
I use Findroid for its great UI but also its ability to download and watch offline. It’s a better experience and I was surprised Jellyfin Android didn’t support it.
WebUI is streaming though on desktops though and I assume they’re also using iOS/Android/TV which all have clients, so I’m trying to get at the difference there.
Flatpaks aren’t the worst, at least it’s not a snap only
What do people have against flatpaks? I like them.
Part of it is that Ubuntu/Canonical so aggressively pushed Snaps which became a huge culture war. So you have people who hate the idea of those style of packages because they hate Snap AND people who hate flatpak because they are Team Ubuntu for some reason.
And the other aspect is that it is incredibly space inefficient (by the very nature of bundling in dependencies) and is prone to “weirdness” when it comes to file system permissions and the like. And many software projects kind of went all in on them because it provides a single(-ish) target to build for rather than having a debian and an arch and a redhad and a…
Ah, I see. I’ve not tried Snaps, been avoiding Ubuntu because of Canonical’s weirdly corporate angle. Once they baked in Amazon into Ubuntu I was out.
I like the bundling of deps. Sure it’s inefficient, but it runs, and storage comes cheap nowadays anyway.
A lot of flatpaks early on wouldn’t survive a major point release upgrade or worst case would hold on to dependencies and the user would end up with an unbootable mess after an upgrade.
I haven’t seen that recently though.
However I regularly run appimages on my fedora silverblue system so take what I say with a grain of salt.
The space inefficiency is definitely there.
I find that clients, such as Jellyfin, Moonlight and Signal, works just fine as flatpaks but with those three apps my /var/lib/flatpak/ lands on 6.4GB.
When I temporarily had Discord installed it grew to 6.7GB, so the inefficiency is frontloaded and lessens the more of them you use.
Just use the god damn browser
Don’t ever connect a “smart” tv to the internet. It’s only going to become shit and steal your data.
Raspberry Pi, old pc or any kind of other external player will always be better for connectivity and control.
I agree, but having looked down this road, finding a quality external player that users will understand and is inexpensive is … not easy.
If you’re an Apple user the AppleTV is exactly this. It’s probably Apple’s most fairly priced computing device.
I mean that literally appletv. Barely costs more than a Roku and is vastly better than every other device on the market.
I like my Shield TV: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/shield-tv/
I did need to install a custom launcher on it when the standard AndroidTV launcher added ads.
True, but there’s not much one can do about others’ stubbornness. I’ve been using cheap Android boxes with Kodi or the JF client installed. They make sense to my non-techie family. Dedicated boxes are better (something that can run CoreELEC, OpenELEC) but those are harder to find.
An old pc running Linux mint and kodi is my current setup in the living room.
$20 Walmart Onn 4k. Degoogle it if you want or just slap smarttube and jellyfin/plex on it.
Pi running Kodi/libreelec
Facebook made one. They attached a gorgeous voice-controlled video-chat-on-tv setup to it, and released it just as they lost all consumer trust.
Then they decided it wasn’t selling.
So they killed it instead of open-sourcing it
just saying.
While I agree with you 100% and every tv in my home is under this mantra I get where the parent comment is coming from. Family members and friends visiting have asked about access to my Jellyfin library and they aren’t necessarily keen on buying additional hardware, aren’t willing to educate themselves on setting up options that would be objectively better for connectivity, privacy, control, etc.
They just want an app in their TVs app store. It’s convenient and easy. I disagree with them but I don’t blame them. It’s human nature to go for the option that results in expending the least amount of effort. But then they don’t get my sweet Jellyfin library. If you cant run the client or kodi then I can’t help you, sorry.
Remember when programming a VCR was a stand-up comedy joke?
Yes and I also remember when there were stupid things like early universal remotes that had big timers on them to circumvent the internal programming needs (but then you had to program the remote and sync it)
Managing your own AV equipment has always been a pain in the ass.
A Chromecast TV device might fill your gap. There is a jellyfin android TV build in the app store and it works with every TV. Just costs about 50 dollarydoos
Similar price for a lifetime Plex pass (until end of April)… just saying…
True and while they are both enshitifying their services. Somehow in this one area Google seems to be going slower. And making slightly less bonehead moves
I had the same experience with my parents. They have a Samsung TV and the Jellyfin experience was awful.
I ended up getting them a little N100 mini pc and installed Bazzite and the Jellyfin app from Flathub. You can configure it so it knows it’s on a TV, and responds to keyboard controls. I got them a remote from a company called Pepper Jobs that gives keyboard input and now they have a great experience with it. Even my mom, who’s a big technophobe, loves it.
My dad also has an LG TV in his workshop that doesn’t have a working Jellyfin app (cause it’s ten years old), and he uses the Jellyfin app for his Xbox on that one.
So the flatpak version of Jellyfin works for you? I cant get it to play more then one thing. hitting the play button just does nothing.
Just played a bunch of episodes on Fedora KDE (Flatpak from flathub, Jellyfin client v.1.11.1, Jellyfin server v.10.10.6) without any trouble.
Are you by chance using Wayland?
yep!
Figured it out. The flatpak version will fail to play video if you have audio pass through enabled. The .deb package works though.
Yeah. I had to go into the settings and change some setting to get it to work with keyboard input.
There’s a jellyfish app on Xbox?
Yep. My dad said it’s working great for him.
You can access Jellyfin through a browser, too. Is that an option for the Samsung TV?
I’ve got a Samsung TV and am nearly a complete Luddite (in the colloquial sense).
I managed to install the Jellyfin app on my TV just by following the step by step instructions on a website
I use Jellyfin client on my new Samsung TV via a Google TV dongle (ONN tv, $25 at Walmart). Seems to work well.
My only complaint is the stream volume has been very low after a recent update. Downsampling helps but seems like it shouldn’ t be necessary.
I can speak from my experience with an Apple TV, the application “Infuse” works amazing with a jellyfin server. Though the application is essentially $1 month subscription, but works across all your apple devices, if you have any. I think it’s worth it.
Additionally, the official app for Android TV worked pretty well when I last tried it on an Nvidia Shield
I run an Android TV box on my Smart TV, because I don’t trust them on the internet.
The only major pain point I had with Jellyfin was getting it on my Samsung TV yes. It is absolutely not a good recommendation for people with Samsungs unless they’re willing to get their hands very dirty. Now, once I got the app side loaded on there, it works perfectly well, but the process sucked ass.
I’ve never had an issue with the apps. It’s on my Chromecast and my android phone, and I typically stream to the TV from my phone.
My only issue is that they require a real cert (which is good tbh) and I am having trouble getting letsencrypt working due to my isp blocking port 80 and me dragging my feet getting DNS working
Let’s Encrypt supports DNS verification, if you have access to update the zone file. It makes automation harder, but there are scripts to do the DNS update for the verification.
@bamboo @Chocrates “acme.sh” is pretty much the easiest solution for that.
https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh #letsencryptYeah that’s what I’m doing next. My domain name/DNS provider doesn’t let me do it though so i have to self host DNS first. Turned into quite a rabbit hole, and would have just worked if I could just get traffic on port 80!
@Chocrates acme.sh has a manual option…that way it should work with your current provider
They even have Android app. I mean, a server app.
Anyway, they still seem to paywall some things.
Yeah.
Jellyfin is spectacular for LAN usage on two computers. Once you start using devices (because, you know, that is what people tend to plug into their TVs…) or going on travel, it rapidly becomes apparent that it just isn’t a competitor.
Hell, a quick google suggests jellyfin STILL doesn’t have caching of media for offline viewing. Plex’s works maybe 40% of the time but… 40% is still higher than 0%.
I have a lifetime pass for Plex and encourage anyone who even kind of cares to get one next time it is on sale (or shortly before the scheduled price hike). I have tried Jellyfin a few times over the years and… it is basically exactly what I hate with FOSS “alternatives”. It isn’t an alternative in the slightest but people insist on talking it up because they want it to be and that just makes people less willing to try genuinely good alternatives.
To put it bluntly, Plex is an “offline netflix” as it were. Jellyfin is a much better version of smbstation and all the other stuff we used to stream porn to our playstations back in the day.
Jellyfin allows you to download whatever you want to your local device. But in a world of streaming, it seems to be a much smaller usecase. I take my tablet camping with me all the time, download some shows via Jellyfin and watch via Jellyfin. Maybe you’re using the term “caching” differently from the use case, but if local files is what you’re after, it absolutely does it. Just click download in a couple of different locations.
Yeah, I don’t know what that dude’s on about. My kids download stuff from jellyfin to their tablets all the time for road trips.
Did they? Or is that still the old hack of “just download the raw file. Your tablet is just a computer”?
Because I didn’t see it advertised on the main web page and a quick google got me to https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin/discussions/364 which is open and abandoned tickets for the ios apps.
https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-offline-downloads?pid=16373#pid16373 suggests it is also in the same boat for android. You can find workarounds but they aren’t using jellyfin.
Which is “fine”. I watched WAY too many movies over the years with VLC on a laptop. But… why are we using a shim to treat a library as a streaming service in that case? Which gets back to Jellyfin just not actually being a Plex alternative for the majority of users.
Oh no! Please GOD, anything but tHe rAw fIlE!!
Seriously though, wtf did I just read? That can’t possibly be your real stance, can it?
This is a huge problem. The blueray remux might be 80 gigs. Most children’s devices will already be filled with other crap.
I run ffmpeg on my phone. Alternately, I could shrink the file on my server and then download it without much trouble. You’re in a vanishingly small subset of users who know enough to care about file-size and know what can be done about it, but can’t be bothered to do it themselves.
I was avoiding suggesting getting more storage, but it sounds like in your case, keeping a 720p x265 version of each file(~1gb per movie) on-hand would cost you nothing.
Your kids will be ok without the 4K60 version of Paw Patrol.
You might be right, it might play in an external player. I don’t recall that or didn’t notice. We’re a few months from the last camping season. If it does play in an external player, seems like an inconvenience vs a dealbreaker, but I get it. We all have our things. I would argue that it’s maybe a big deal for you and not a majority of users. Maybe a small but focused minority.
As I was curious, Findroid gives you an android client that allows offline mode and downloading/playing/removing movies from the client.
Seems Infuse Pro (paid) version also has support for it if you’re an iPhone user.
edit: I see the discussion regarding filesizes and I believe that Findroid is downloading the raw file in the background, so for those that wish for smaller transcoded versions in the cache it isn’t a solution. I don’t own any apple devices so can’t tell how Infuse handles it.
Huh? I used jellyfin just fine in the hospital on public WiFi on my ancient busted iPad air [some number].
The only thing I did was install pivpn and upload my VPN profile file to Google drive so I can remote into my network. I legit never even had to set anything up it just worked, didn’t even need to know the IP of the server because my locally run DNS server (and failing that, the basic hostname based DNSMasq in the router) took care of everything.
I don’t even have any reverse proxy or firewall because I still pretend to value my sanity and my time, nor did I expose it to the internet either, thanks to almighty NAT.
Didn’t have to do any caching or anything crazy like that, no idea what you’re talking about, but I think there’s an option to download the files right through jellyfin.
I watched star trek TAS while having fun with opioids and it was a great time.
That’s nice.
That doesn’t work if you are on an airplane (unless you want to spend the entire flight downloading one episode). Or if you just don’t want to deal with hotel wifi. Or if you just don’t want to expose your internal home network at all.
Which is the point and why this is one of those big features of plex that there are so many tickets and requests to get into jellyfin et al. Because yes, you can just copy files from your NAS to your phone’s internal storage (assuming you don’t care about transcoding and the like)… at which point there isn’t much use to a metadata oriented media server/service.
Or you can just set up Plex to always download the next 10 episodes of whatever show you are watching when it has network access. I mean… that probably won’t work (see: 40%) but when it does, it is awesome. Which is the “it just works” functionality.
Which gets back to the issue where, because it is FOSS, it is the greatest thing ever and anyone asking for anything else is wrong and stupid. Which is a shame because if the Jellyfin devs could actually get the “download the next N episodes” functionality to reliably work (even at 80-90%) it would be a killer app. And, for what it is worth, I have liked the devs a lot when I interacted with them in the past. But the users and evangelists are just… what we can see in this thread.
You can just download the episodes though? Like right in Jellyfin:
Because yes, you can just copy files from your NAS to your phone’s internal storage (assuming you don’t care about transcoding and the like)… at which point there isn’t much use to a metadata oriented media server/service.
No you do not need to do any of that.
Or you can just set up Plex to always download the next 10 episodes of whatever show you are watching when it has network access. I mean… that probably won’t work (see: 40%) but when it does, it is awesome. Which is the “it just works” functionality.
You can download in Jellyfin also, like in the screenshot above.
anyone asking for anything else is wrong and stupid.
I mean, you are asking for things that are already in the app, you tell me if that’s stupid or not. I’m just trying to help.
I’d never call anyone even trying to use these self-hosted alternatives stupid.
Jellyfin devs could actually get the “download the next N episodes” functionality to reliably work (even at 80-90%) it would be a killer app
Is there some reason you can’t do this manually? I actually can’t think of any app with this feature, not even Netflix way back not Spotify.
As someone who has attempted to switch to Jellyfin a few times now, I have to agree. Its a great project and my switch would have been successful if it was only me using it. But between my parents streaming remotely and my kids, its not even remotely close to what Plex offers currently.
any recommendations to get it to work remotely? the good thing about plex was it was easy to set up, but the quality was medicore.
I just figured it out. You have to open the port on your router
I used a Cloudflare tunnel for security (no open ports) but that’s for people with limited tech ability mostly. Everyone else I’ve got connected with a tailscale node.
Careful with that I think it’s against their TOS to do that due to the large volumes of data video streaming takes.
It used to be against their TOS. They removed the language over a year ago last I saw.
That’s good to know.
Yeah don’t use a cloudflare tunnel for that, it’ll get you banned.
I’m in the process of moving houses at the moment. But I’ve already got a nice PC put together to host a mess of services. Should be “fun” LOL
That works but is pretty insecure as you have nothing protecting your server outside of a basic password.
I’m pleading full ignorance here. Because I opened the port for JF, doesn’t that mean the only thing exposed would be my jellyfin? I thought having the rest of my ports closed would not allow access to the rest of my system?
I’ve been testing out jellyfin for the last couple months but it doesn’t really fill the void of this specific feature that’s being locked behind a pay wall. If anyone has good recommendations for securely and reliably hosting jellyfin behind SSL and auth with email password resets where I don’t have to worry about it as much as Plex.
I use jellyfin locally but for a handful of remote clients I have I may well block off their access they’re not going to be able to figure out my hand spun services and wall of text.
I would go for a reverse proxy to get ssl running.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/networking/#running-jellyfin-behind-a-reverse-proxyHandling users with forgotten passwords is, sadly, a manual chore for the administrator.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/users/adding-managing-users#profileIf I reverse proxy does the video stream itself travel via the proxy too?
Yeah, the reverse proxy will need to be able to handle the network bandwidth of your video stream too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy
You can connect Jellyfin to an SSO provider. It still needs work, and client support is lacking. Ideally I think it maybe should be built in rather than a plug-in (would definitely encourage more client support). But it exists.
https://github.com/9p4/jellyfin-plugin-sso
Feature request for oidc/sso:
https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/230/support-for-oidc-oauth-sso
As it stands, you could enable both the SSO and LDAP plugins, and let users do password resets entirely through your auth provider.
Basically, this is all stuff that comes with Plex out-of-the-box, but you sort of have to glue it together yourself with Jellyfin, and it’s not yet in an ideal state. Plex is much much easier to configure. I wouldn’t allow yourself to believe that Plex doing all this for you will make you totally secure through – there’s been multiple incidents with their auth, and IIRC the LastPass attacker pivoted from a weak Plex install. Just food for thought.
Ah, that’s good to know!
My jellyfin server is only available over vpn (and locally) so I haven’t much looked into beefing up the security on the jellyfin server itself.
Authentik + jellyfin SSO plugin?
I haven’t tried it out personally, but I use authentik, for that you can just create a password policy, then add a new stage for identification (just make sure to add the email field), and an email stage, then create a flow.
More work on your end than paying someone else obviously.
Forget the Auth, use VPN profiles as access controls. Give them to trusted folks and you’re gold.
Dumb question but should there be VPNs operating on both ends, server and client? Or just the client because I’m guessing the server might change the connection address.
A VPN Server on the server or home network (look into PiVPN for instance), and a VPN Client on clients (look at openvpn for instance).
Good luck and let me know if you have any further questions - I’m more than happy to answer!
Alas my TV (LG WebOS 2) doesn’t have an application for Jellyfin, or I’d have switched years ago :-(
Is there an emby app available or Kodi? The base of Jellyfin should work in either. Plug and play as far as I’m aware with maybe some issues for certain versions.
Jellyfin depends on proprietary Microsoft .NET, even on Linux.
It’s still better than Plex and Emby, which are fully proprietary, and have no source code. But I will stick with sshfs with kodi, and nginx plus mpv for now.
Except, it isn’t, .NET Core is an open source framework by the .NET Foundation
As a result I imagine more users will look at other offerings such as Jellyfin.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin
https://jellyfin.org/This might be what it takes to at least get me to install it.
Do they live well together with the same shared media library?
Also, are there audiobook clients for Jellyfin?
I found audiobooks to be kind of awkward on jellyfin. I’m now running Audiobookshelf for all my audiobooks, radio shows and podcasts. Together with the Lissen app on Android, it works very nicely!
I also recommend audio bookshelf but am using ShelfPlayer on iOS
And what about just plain music? Is Jellyfin or Audiobookshelf better suited for that?
For music, I selfhost navidrome. Works nicely with the Tempo app on android, or Feishin on desktop.
I’ve heard rumors that they do play well together, but that’s people running it in docker with a “read-only” flag set for the content folder, with metadata saved in the config folder
I’ve used the Jellyfin app to listen to audio books, but for my purposes, it’s easier to run the separate client/server Audiobookshelf.
Makes sense. I’m fully dockerized so I’ve got that going for me
I’m fully Dockerized (well, uhh… Podmanized) and I’m dual-wielding Plex and Jellyfin. Runs smoothly and both only have read to the content. All management of the media is handled by the *arr stack anyway. I even set up a volume for Plex to throw conversions into that Jellyfin can’t see. I’m currently personally using Jellyfin and I’m waiting for Jellyfin to be good enough (or Plex bad enough…) for the users I share with to switch over.
I can definitely recommend that setup.
I’ve had Plex and Emby (what Jellyfin was forked from) running alongside one a other for years now on Windows with zero issues. They shouldn’t have any effect on one another.
I’ve had Jellyfin and Plex running using the same media directory for a couple years now. I think I had to make a couple small changes for things like seasons of a TV show to show up correctly, but nothing incredibly difficult. Definitely worth setting up and playing with periodically so when you do finally get sick of Plex, you’re ready to just switch.
Only thing I use Plex for exclusively now is when I’m flying, Plex has the Netflix style download option and Jellyfin just downloads the video file. I like Plex’s way better just from personal preference.
My Jellyfin and Plex containers were able to use the same locations for media.
I installed Plex before learning I’d have to pay for any of the functionality I was looking for. Installed Jellyfin and used the Plex folders lol
I haven’t used Plex myself but Jellyfin doesn’t create any kind of meta files in the library folders. If that is true for Plex as well then I don’t see why it would be a problem to point them at the same shared library.
My experience is that both Plex and Jellyfin pointed at the same media files causes no issues.
Plex stores its metadata in a special folder, and I’ve got the *arr stack managing the actual media files, so I think I can run them in parallel.
Looks like I’ve got a project for the weekend! Jebediah’s just gonna have to wait to go to Jool.
I didn’t enjoy using Jellyfin for audiobooks, on my android I use the Jellyfin client to download the book I wanna listen to and then I use AudioAnchor for listening to it.
They too put a whole lot behind their subscription though
https://emby.media/support/articles/Premiere-Feature-Matrix.htmlI bought a lifetime sub, now I don’t have to pay anything
FUCK Emby! What they did was worse than what Plex is doing even now
What did they do?
Basically, slammed the source code door shut after making promissory statements like “Don’t worry, we’ll always be open source” for years. With little/no notice they relicensed everything and pivoted to a closed source paywall model.
No discussion with the community or contributors, no alternatives explored, no polls or surveys. Just woke up one day to a “Sorry, but we’re going closed source because moneyyyy” blog post
Jellyfin was born right after, forked out of vengeance.
In retrospect we should have seen it coming when they would do odd little things, like keeping the build scripts closed source n crap, but eh hindsight and all that lol
Another user said that was because users were modifying the code to avoid supporting the project? I got a lifetime subscription relatively inexpensive and haven’t had trouble
Who said that? I did a search in the thread and no Ody said anything about that that I saw
So the issue is kind of similar to bitwarden; how to protect the premium bits when having an open source core?
They just didn’t handle it as gracefully.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/04/bitwarden_gpls_password_manager/Here’s the history regarding emby if you’re curious:
https://github.com/nvllsvm/emby-unlocked
I’m not pirating a bunch of shows just to pay Plex for the privilege of watching it.
I have a lifetime plex pass so this does not really affect me but I expect the trend of degrading experience to continue. I would have switched to Jellyfin a long time ago but I am dreading contacting everyone I share with and getting them migrated.
Same boat here. I chose Plex because the apps were everywhere. Smart TV’s, phones, web…
I can switch, no problem. I don’t want to have to teach my parents a new app. OMFG!
This is also true of Jellyfin, though. I have apps on my Windows PC, my Android phone, multiple Nvidia Shield boxes on my TVs, plus the web interface if I need it.
I switched over from Plex several years ago, and while it takes a bit more time to configure, compatibility for clients seems just as good for Jellyfin as it is for Plex.
Most importantly, Jellyfin is strictly client/server, no “cloud” bullshit and no remote account is required; I don’t want Plex phoning home with a list of the media on my file server.
Jellyfin certainly took off. Great for them. It just wasn’t polished or an option when I set things up way back then.
its actually the sole reason why i ended up paying for plex myself. its not because on ME that i ended up using plex, its moreso everyone else that I want to give my server access to with the least amount of hurdles that made me ultimately go that route.
deleted by creator
You can use Cloudflare Tunnel as well.
deleted by creator
Everything I see online says it’s free.
I’ve also used it recently and did not pay for it.
It’s against CloudFlare ToS to use CF tunnels for media streaming like this. You can risk it ig but I have important stuff like domain registrations on CloudFlare so I’m personally not willing to risk getting banned.
I have not used it for streaming, but you’re right. I purposely do not proxy my media traffic for this reason, utilizing their other solutions.
Hellooooo jellyfin!
Only use open source software
If you don’t like the price there’s always jellyfin.
Got to say that I have been very happy with it.
Glad I bought the Plex Pass like 13 years ago. While I understand everyone seems to think everything should be free, I’m sure your boss wishes you worked for free too, but the world doesn’t work that way.
I’m OK supporting products I use , and Plex is an example of this for me. It was a well spend $75 in 2013
Nah. Cool that you think that, though. The moment they started charging for what was a free service, they lost me. I have gigabit internet. The only reason i used their service to begin with was ease of use.
Hot take but maybe everything doesn’t need to be an infinitely expanding business. Just imagine for a second that it’s fine for something to just break even, pay for the few mainteners salaries and not expand the business at all ever. I know that I just uttered the cardinal evil under capitalism but fucking seriously. The primary userbase of plex is pirates. The whole incentive is not having to pay for a streaming service. Charging money for it is just torpedoing your entire userbase. The entire appeal of Plex was it not charging money.
As a plex pass lifetime user, this doesn’t change anything for me.
I am, however, blown away that the price went from $75 CDN to $350 CDN over the last 10 years!! That’s just insane!
Can’t say I have a huge issue with this - Plex isn’t FOSS and the infrastructure to make this happen isn’t free. Other options are available if you don’t want to pay the fee.
It looks like as long as the host has a Plex pass, this doesn’t change much. It is a regression of service, which sucks, but there are viable alternatives for those unable or unwilling to pay. And honestly, jellyfin is the clear winner in that case and always has been.
Now, if they start to charge my friends and family for access to my media after I have already paid them for their lifetime subscription, then I’ll grab a pitchfork with the crowd.
Also, why not run both and be ready? The resources required are minimal if you’re running via docker, just some extra RAM and a negligible amount of compute for overhead on library maintenance tasks.
Same. I’m not switching to Jellyfin yet either - mostly because of my boomer parents - but this is getting close to the tipping point for me
I run both on my unraid NAS. I use plex for streaming to my phone over cell data. I use jellyfin for streaming to my laptops and TV.
Plex tends to break every once and a while though. Not often, but it happens enough that I’m replacing it with just having my music on a DAP that is synced with Syncthing.
I also use the comic viewer function of jellyfin.
I’ve been meaning to set up a homeserver with plex recently but will defnitely go for jellyfin now that I read this thread.
So glad i switched to jellyfin half a year ago
Same. My wife also just asked me to get a bunch of audio books too…so looks like I have to set up that now
The default Jellyfin client isn’t great for audiobooks.
For Apple iOS you might wanna look at https://github.com/LeoKlaus/plappa
For Android I would look at https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf
Personally I just download the audiobooks from Jellyfin and play it in https://f-droid.org/packages/com.prangesoftwaresolutions.audioanchor/I run audiobookshelf and it’s amazing!
Thank you
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/i-threw-away-audibles-app-and-now-i-self-host-my-audiobooks/
Check out this arstechnica article on AudioBookshelf. Should cover most of what you need to get started.
I would recommend audiobookshelf for the audiobooks, especially if you have your stuff running in docker. It seemed to me like the solutions to force Plex or jellyfin to do books were a bit more hacky than I wanted.
Dude, I’m blown away by how easy AudioBookShelf was to set up. I was going to go with Jellyfin for audiobooks too since I already had my libraries set up, but I wanted to try an alternative just to see. So easy, I was up and running in under 10 minutes! Thanks for the recommendation!
This is the best ad campaign Jellyfin could have asked for.
I can understand new features being behind a fee, but this is putting old, old capabilities behind a paywall. Hmmm…
This with a recent decision to remove watch together sort of eliminates the whole reason I would have tried Plex so many years ago.
I’m a fan of Plex (it’s worked for me) and understand the Jellyfin crowd too. I’m worried about who is calling the shots at the moment. They aren’t aligning with their users.
I can understand new features being behind a fee, but this is putting old, old capabilities behind a paywall. Hmmm…
I am a Trakt user, was an Evernote user and I am (thankfully) a Plex Pass user…
What service are we missing that has done the same? We should make a list if there is not one already.
I already pay for plex pass but I’m going to start looking into jelly fin out of principle. I will not support the enshitification of a service I use and this is how it starts. Soon they will have tiered subscriptions and then the cheap one will be taken away and the cheapest paid one will be stuffed with ads then all tiers will be stuffed with ads then they will jack up prices again or charge more for sharing with family or block it all together to force your family to get their own sub and the circle of enshitification will be complete.
