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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/
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 keep a Jellyfin instance running as a hedge. Here's the thing with Plex (and actually a lot of companies set up similarly): those "lifetime" memberships are a trap. Think about it: Plex gets your money ONCE but they have ongoing expenses. Sooner or later, they'll have spent every single cent made by a lifetime membership unless they either get more folks OR squeeze everyone a bit more.
Once they started adding their own shows and making strange UI decisions, I could sense the end was coming. A move like this brings it up fast. Jellyfin is not nearly as good as Plex in a lot of ways, but it's really Open Source.
Anyway, a lot of rambling, but in short: when there is a "lifetime" subscription, watch out!
Yes, it’s one thing to offer a lifetime subscription early on to get a large cash infusion and reward early adopters, but it’s a big red flag if they don’t get rid of the lifetime subscription eventually. What will happen is one by one, the people that use the service the most will switch to lifetime and your cash flow will dwindle. Eventually the only people left on the month to month are the casual users who don’t use it very often and will leave as soon as a price increase happens.
I'm surprised by the resistance to Jellyfin in this thread. If you are using Plex, you're already savvy enough to use bittorrent and probably the *arrs. If you can configure that stuff, Jellyfin is absolutely something you can handle. If you like Docker, there's good projects out there. If you're like me and you don't understand Docker, use Swizzin community edition. If you can install Ubuntu or Debian, and run the Swizzin script, you're in business.
ITT: valid critiques of plex, understatements about how easy it is to set up and run Jellyfin for you and your friends/family, and a surprising number of people who don’t understand how plex works.
Ease of setup was how I just got one techie friend and two non-techie gamer friends to set up Plex servers and we had libraries shared to each other within 15-30 minutes. I don't want to think about explaining VPNs and SSL to them for the alternatives.
I'm not pirating a bunch of shows just to pay Plex for the privilege of watching it.
I've said it for years that Plex is shit because of their license and the fact that you have no control everyone said no it's fine it's my media fucking look at it now
Yeah exactly. I tried to set it up once, installed it on a NAS box, and it starts talking about me making a cloud account. Why do I need a cloud account to log into my own hardware on my own network?
I do not want the cloud
I do not need the cloud
I will say it very loud
No cloud, no cloud, no cloud.
But apparently it's set up so the only way to log into your own locally hosted software on your own locally hosted hardware is with an external cloud account.
To that I said no thank you and uninstalled it.
As a result I imagine more users will look at other offerings such as Jellyfin.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin
https://jellyfin.org/
I used to use Plex, then one day my internet was down and since Plex couldn't phone home, it wouldn't let me log in to watch media ON MY LAN.
So yeah it's inherently broken. That's before you even consider the licensing.
i'm not sure why it would do this, i've never had any issues with watching plex while the internet is down (in fact that was one of my original uses for it, to have movies and tv in a building without internet). I don't have it turned on but I do know you can go into server settings -> network and set a list of IPs/subnets that can access without any authorization at all. That lets you use plex without even having a plex account afaik.
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.
Another company fucked by executives.
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.
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!
Wireguard so you are always seen as being on the local network. This bit of assholery is easily defeated.
If you don't like the price there's always jellyfin.
Got to say that I have been very happy with it.
A big part of the appeal with Plex is that you can run a server and friends can sign up for a FREE account and stream remotely. When you take this away, you're going to just kneecap the whole offering. This is such an arrogant move from Plex: they are thinking that when this change goes live they will get a flood of subscriptions. The more likely outcome is they will get a few subscriptions and a lot more angry and frustrated people that walk away.
Friends can still stream for free, as long as the server is paying for plex pass. That was my main concern, too, but they make a point of stating it directly in the release.
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!
This is the best ad campaign Jellyfin could have asked for.
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.
They seem to be getting a lot of hate for this, but Plex is not FOSS... They have the roots but they currently have like 100 paid employees and are trying to make a business out of it. They have to do something to make money to pay people every month. My $75 10 years ago isn't going to do much for that... The fact that they've made it this far without folding is impressive.
Judging by the rest of the thread I'm going to get downvoted for this, but what the hell:
I'm sure I'll switch to Jellyfin eventually but I tried it out a few weeks ago to see what all the hype was about and it just... wasn't great. It was difficult to setup, with way too many overly-complicated settings, and then it refused to play one of the two test files I tried. Like it or not there's a reason that Plex is the dominant player in the game, and a large part of that reason is that it verges on plug-and-play for simplicity of both setup and use.
Yes, it sucks that they're removing remote streaming for free users, but I imagine there's a significant chunk of users who don't know or care how to properly open their server up to the world and are relying on the Plex proxies for their streams (which happens entirely in the background), and those aren't going to be cheap to run. Maybe putting them behind a paywall will provide the resources to make them faster.
I did buy a lifetime pass last time they announced a price hike; it's honestly paid for itself many times over, and I've been encouraging other users I know to do the same before this next one, because yes, it is a significant hike this time around. That said, while I wouldn't pay monthly for it, I do still feel like the lifetime pass is tremendous value for such a polished product. It's a shame they've had to do it at all, but I don't begrudge them for it.
Why do people use this when Jellyfin exists?
Because of the Wife Factor. Getting people to convert requires getting past a lot of social inertia. It requires you to first convince them that the convenience of streaming services isn’t actually worth paying for. Then it requires an elegant onboarding experience. Lastly, Plex simply makes remote access easy. Sure, you could fiddle with reverse proxies for Jellyfin. But that’s easy to mess up. Instead, it’s much smoother to simply sign into Plex.
I can talk my tech-illiterate “My google chrome desktop icon got moved, and now I don’t know how to check my email” mother-in-law through Plex’s sign-up process over the phone. In fact, I did. It’s familiar enough that anyone who has signed up for a streaming service can figure it out. I can’t do that with Jellyfin, because their eyes glaze over as soon as you start talking about custom server URLs or IP addresses. Hell, my MIL’s TV doesn’t even have a native Jellyfin app available on the App Store. If I wanted to install it for her, I would need to sideload it.
Jellyfin does a lot of things right. But by design, the setup process will never be as elegant as Plex’s, because that elegant system requires a centralized server to actually handle it. And centralized servers are exactly what Jellyfin was built to rebel against.
To be clear, I run both concurrently; Jellyfin for myself, and Plex for friends/family. I got the lifetime Plex Pass license a decade ago, and it has more than paid for itself since then. But it sounds like a bunch of my friends and family may end up switching to Jellyfin if they don’t want to deal with the PlexPass subscription.
I stopped using Plex shortly after they started forcing logging in with your online Plex account to connect to LAN only based server. The writing was on the wall all those years ago. Who wants to be locked out of their media when the internet is offline, completely defeated the point of self hosting local infrastructure
Jellyfin, while lacking a bit when I first migrated, has continued improved over the years and it has been joyful to use. Plus Jellyfin supported hardware transcoding before Plex did, which was a gripe I had with Plex at the time.
I stream from my server remotely and share with Family without hassle. I dunno where Plex is trying to go, glad I bailed long ago
The audacity of this company to increase prices when:
A) downloads are locked behind the paywall but havent worked in years (probably close to a decade at this point)
B) they focus all the development time on bringing bullshit to the platform (live tv, rentals, other streaming app searches, etc)
Requiring a subscription for remote access is actually fucking insane, they don't have any bandwidth costs associated with that other than authentication so ???
This will drive people to Jellyfin, and watch how fast Plex drops into irrelevance when all the selfhosters move away. Plex is (now was) the #1 thing to that both myself and others in this community would recommend to someone looking to get into selfhosting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not anymore, wonder how much the revenue will drop?
I've been meaning to set up a homeserver with plex recently but will defnitely go for jellyfin now that I read this thread.
I gotta be honest, when I look at the problem pragmatically, it'll be a lot easier to pay $20 a year than to switch to jellyfin and get all my users to figure out how to install clients and make it work for them.
I'm already at the point in my life where my primary concern is making things work smoothly, and if I need to throw money at something to make it work smoothly, the choice is a no brainer. (At least for some values of "money")
Well, looks like my decision to stick with Kodi and never bother with Plex is about to pay dividends.
Well this is a good reason to finish my migration to Jellyfin I think.
I only use remote streaming a couple times per year, so paying for plex pass just for that seems a bit silly. Their online-only account auth is also super annoying if the internet is down.
I’ve been using Plex many years. I abandoned it about 1-2 years ago when they began their enshittification journey. Now I see they are continuing to double down on being assholes.
They do not need any more resources to allow people to use what already exists. Most people run their own servers, and, they track all that by the way. Hence why people moved away from it.
Don’t give them your money. Let them rot. They fucked their user base who built them.
I just want to make sure I read this correctly. It says that if you're a Plex plass holder already that remote streaming changes won't affect your service. This means that if I have the lifetime subscription and host my own server than users whom have not payed for Plex pass can continue to access this server without issue correct?
I moved on to jellyfin after I found out the hard way Plex servers need to authenticate for use. I'm sure by now there are ways to set up offline authentication but I already didn't like the idea of paying monthly to stream my own content from my own machine. It just didn't make sence to me. Jellyfin isn't perfect, or as flashy as Plex, but it works, looks fine, and its free, not counting a much deserved donation to the devs .