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
Remember when Plex tried to sell you a subscription to use outdated versions of open source game console emulators?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.
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 😅)
ok
👌 ok!
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.
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.Sorry to have annoyed you.
Unforgivable, have a wretched hour and a half.
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.
You can use ZeroTier to connect from anywhere. It only makes you pay to use the plex router/relay.
Would a VPN be a solution to that?
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.
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I much prefer jellyfin + tailscale
I’m switching to Jellyfin myself.
Ah the weekly “Plex should be entirely free even though it’s commercial software!”
How is Plex used if you aren’t using it to stream your self hosted media? I remember seeing channels and such before. Is all the official stuff licensed content? I can’t imagine their offering is very competitive.
99.9% of the use mine has seen for the past several years has been to stream to my living room TV in the same house. But regardless, what point are you making? It’s commercial software. And btw the $85 I paid years ago to use it forever was more than worth it to me.
it’s commercial software
digital cancer
Here’s a controversial and complex stance, but you may be able to understand it eventually:
Don’t buy it.
I am a proponent of FOSS too but that doesn’t mean anything built for profit is shitty, let alone “cancer”.
Hey, you paid for them to spy on your media, give them their money’s worth.
God I hate humans
I do too. They tend to speak from the heart but the second something is inconvenient, they’re cool with relaxing their morals.
I’m not trying to make a point, I’m just curious how many this impacts and so on. I imagine it will go down similar to Netflix account sharing crackdown; generally viewed unfavourably, but will convert enough users to pay for it to be worth it.
Gotcha. We’ll see, I guess.
They’ve added commercial supported live channels like many other free services but yeah, it’s lacking compared to others. Pluto.tv is my go-to if I want to throw something on at a family members house or something like that. Owned by the networks, reasonably short ads, completely free. Too bad they didn’t figure that out 10 years ago lol.
Oh I’ve actually heard of Pluto.tv and watched it somewhere.
Also the weekly intentionally misunderstanding how Plex pass/Plex remote pass works in order to complain:
Free to Use: Video (movies & TV) streaming of personal content on the same local network as the Plex Media Server
Can you get around that bs with a VPN?
You should be able to. I have a wireguard tunnel to my parent’s house and when they watch plex it doesn’t go over the relay server (I can’t port forward on starlink).
Except they’re spamming to users that they need this subscription even when they host locally or already have a membership.
I bought a plex lifetime pass for $100 over a decade ago and I never see ads like this. I only occasionally get the notice for plex pro week and stuff like that.
I also bought Plex lifetime pass also for $100 and I am getting ads like this.
That’s pretty fucked up. I’d be shootin off some angry emails to customer support. Sorry to hear that!
Plex is entirely free and completely local, but only if you don’t use the features that make it so convenient (the relay server they offer, authentication and authorization, etc). Things I’m pretty sure jellyfin doesn’t provide at all. If people spent half the time reading as they do trying to convince people to get angry at optional features then maybe we wouldn’t have so many posts like this.
Jellyfin does offer authentication and authorization. Relay can be done via nginx iirc?
Having to set up a reverse proxy is basically a non-starter for most people, while I’ve talked extremely non-technical people into running Plex since it just works out of the box.
Relaying gigabytes of traffic per user costs serious money. Rely on them to do it, and they are either going to charge you or are just waiting to charge you when their VCs come knocking.
The authentication is lacking 2fa and has a half hearted attempt at fail2ban
If you try to properly implement either of those, the standard device clients won’t work anymore.
Plex provides default SSL.
The relay is actually a bit more useful.
You can be on a carrier grade NAT with no real external IP.
It’s more akin to running a VPS somewhere and SSH tunneling your home server through it.
They also cache* the entirety of the TVDB and EPG Services.
I’m not sore about most of this with jellyfin, and I am trying to primarily use it, but I really miss some of the features. But realistically, adding 2FA to the clients would be a huge benefit. trying to replace 2FA with wish.com fail2ban feels particularly dirty.
Good explanation. I’m out in the boonies with Starlink for internet right now so no port forwarding for me. I paid like $100 for a plex lifetime pass 12 years ago or something so none of my family or friends even notice most of the time. HEVC encoding helps too (you can squeeze 720p through their relay server with it).
You can run the OIDC version and use SSO and implement MFA on the IdP. I use Keycloak for SSO w/ MFA and users sign into my Jellyfin via Keycloak. Just disable username/password auth and leave it SSO only.
The only benefit Plex really has is the relaying, but I was able to sync watch with 3 people basically as far across North America as you can get from me and it worked without issue so…
That’s fine for browser-based watching, literally no one in my group watches via the browser. Even on android it’d be a fight. Grandma’s not going to go on to a browser to auth her session.
The clients need to support it. If it were just backend, I’d fork it myself.
Neither do I - I use either my phone, or my smart TV, or my fire stick. SSO works fine there, or you can use the QR based session transfer to SSO on your phone and then “sign in on another device” or whatever by scanning the QR your other device is showing. I think they call it quick connect or something.
It does what you want.
And if you think Grandma can’t figure out scanning a QR code, Grandma is also not gonna figure out MFA lol.
I thought the topic said “FPS Plex” and then I imagined a streaming service where you could play any first-person shooter instantly
Watching people realize this toejam eating weirdo was right about everything makes my day everytime.
context
I was searching for a fitting response and found this, took me long enough to realise it was not a meme, so I decided it kinda fits ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Plex recently switched the remote watch thing to be behind a paywall. If your PC/App was also on the same local network it would probably work.
Leaving Plex and switching to Jellyfin would work even better.
I jumped ship early on. They didn’t include skipping intros (or removed the plugin or the capability to use plugins, I don’t remember).
Went to Jellyfin, took like 2 hours to figure out what’s different. I don’t even remember, are there any features worth it staying on Plex? At least I’m not missing anything.
Also for watch together you start a watch group and can watch a show episode for episode. Instead of having to open each episode separately and having everyone join again (but maybe Plex fixed this already, I wouldn’t know).
my main issues
- jellyfin has known security vulnerabilities and shouldn’t be run on a public network. that means everyone using your server remotely needs to be on a VPN… and then you may as well use plex because it’s “local” so the remote streaming thing doesn’t apply
- swiftfin (which i need for apple tv) doesn’t support media segments
What are the vulnerabilities?
there are some admin endpoints that are authenticated using any local IP, but the method they use allows spoofing the IP so those endpoints become accessible essentially without authentication
there were some other issues to do with unauthenticated enumeration and playback of content i believe too
ur missing out on seeing 20 dollars a month go down the drain. fool. jumped ship before the good stuff
man, i remember paying like 40 bucks for lifetime premium on plex.
Same, I think deals on the lifetime pass still show up periodically, but I got it when it was about $40 too. It’s good software I use daily, so I’m happy with it.
Looks like on the last deal it was $120
Currently it is $250, which is too rich for my blood. Then again I just paid $70 for Doom the dark ages
Honestly, I lowkey hated plex when I was using it. We never used it because it wasn’t very good at the one thing it was supposed to be fore.
It was trying so hard to get me to use their media, when what I wanted was to watch my media. By contrast, jellyfin just shows me my media.
If you have a few bucks, the chromecast with android TV is what I’d recommend. The jellyfin app for android TV looks and works great – as good as any paid streaming service imo. I got my wife using it daily, and she’s not a tech person at all.
Plex does not show me anything but my media at the forefront. 🤷♂️ But it’s slow on my TV.
By default for me it seems to really want me to get off of my server altogether and get onto their servers, and it seems to really want to get me off of my media and onto their half-baked streaming service.
Really complex compared to just having my media show up.
It’s literally one checkbox in the settings to shut those external media sources off
Zero with jellyfin.
When you first set it up it asks what you want to see, you probably just kept everything. Seems odd to purposely keep all their stuff, then complain about seeing all their stuff.
If plex is “complex” to you then I don’t know what to tell you, my parents can use it with zero issue, and that’s saying something.
Well, let me tell you a story.
Recently I needed to use BitTorrent to download a very large file from an independent project. Usually I can just use my web browser, but this one was in the hundreds of gigabytes there just was no way.
So I installed the original official bittorrent client, because I’m really out of the game I haven’t torn today anything outside of my browser in years now.
I had to pay close attention to not install multiple pieces of unwanted software. I had to uncheck a bunch of stuff and carefully navigate the installer. Even after that, the client was junk and constantly showed multiple videos ads at all times, and besides that it just didn’t have the horsepower to download my torrent for me.
I remembered using transmission on Linux so I decided to try getting that instead, turns out it had a Windows version.
Downloaded, ran the executable, pressed next three times, opened up the torrent file, pointed to my existing download hoping it’d figure out what parts the file needed and in fact it did and the download was done quickly.
If I had failed to uncheck any of the boxes, I guess you could call me stupid for non-un checking them, but to me it seems a lot simpler using the FOSS products that never had any checkboxes to uncheck in the first place.
Meanwhile, and honestly I didn’t use Plex very much because it just didn’t seem like a very good product, but I also seem to remember I kept on ending up on the plex.net website instead of my own server. I think it was something along lines of if you go in to change certain settings it’ll change domains on you? Either way, it was just not very well set up compared to Jellyfin, which had everything that I was using right there I never even remotely tried to send me somewhere else.
Definitely sounds like a human error, for sure. Somebody messed up during installation/configuration.
As soon as I saw Plex show media that wasn’t part of my personal library I knew it was becoming enshitified.
At one time it was great. Because it’s just become slowly shittier over the years. As any for-profit product becomes.
That’s why I switched to Emby and only sometimes regret it lol.
My server seems to have easier time transcoding with Emby and personally like the UI over Plex. Emby sucks at finding metadata though.
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.
Aaaand that’s one of the reasons why I got rid of Plex. “Bought” it, then they found some other feature to paywall. Bought that, then another feature. Then it stopped playing files of certain extensions through chromecast. Fuck that. Put together Jellyfin and moved my collection over. Zero trouble since.
sigh
This is why I switched to Jellyfin and recommend everyone to switch to Jellyfin
Jellyfin’s local download function suuuuuucks by comparison. Lifetime Plex pass has been worth it.
Not gonna argue that Jellyfin is technically superior, but I switched to Plex to stop others from giving/selling my viewing habits. Stopped using Plex when it leaked they were doing the same.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 yearsI 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.
I tried hitting the X thinking it was an ad XD
Genuinely Plex has become so obtrusive about NEW FEATURES, NOW WE HAVE THIS, USE THIS THUS WAY!!! and then also my libraries have somehow become even slower to load. I’ve been using jellyfin way more often
