- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Plex is starting to enforce its new rules, which prevent users from remotely accessing a personal media server without a subscription fee.
If anyone needs it: https://jellyfin.org/
Why would anyone use Plex over jellyfin anyway? The writing was on the wall years ago.
Can I install/use jellyfin directly on my tv? That’s the only think keeping me on pkex (I haven’t tried jellyfin but I’m open to other options)
It depends on the TV. They have official clients for Android TV, webOS and some more.
Depends on the TV. They have an official app on Android TVs, but I still happily use Chromecast for everything
Plex still has the most fully-featured music streaming app (Plexamp)
Also Audiobook apps don’t really exist for Jellyfin.
Yes. There’s AudioBookShelf for audio books.
There are plenty of good Jellyfin players too. I‘m currently using Discrete and I‘m quite happy with it.
Unfortunately it looks like that one is for Apple devices, whereas I use Linux on desktop and Android on mobile.
There’s some, but I haven’t seen any that have the main features Plex and Plexamp have:
And probably other things I’m forgetting.
Navidrome for service. Dsub2000 on android and feishin on desktop.
There, all your needs covered.
As a plus, dsub also does podcasts and audio books.
Plex is more polished, jellyfin is basically functional but we use Plex in our household because we watch movies all the time. I have my own personal jellyfin server on an old computer
How much more polish you need to watch a movie? Jellyfin has everything you need. I keep seeing these discussions and for the life of me I cannot figure out what is missing from jellyfin that people use Plex after all they have been doing for years
Currently my biggest complain with Jellyfin and the reason I can’t switch to it completely is the bad subtitle support. There’s a bunch of clients and some subtitles work on one, but not the other and vise versa. It’s annoying to jump clients depending on what you watch. Sometimes subtitles just don’t want to load by default and you have turn them on for each episode. And even though I have Bazaar, sometimes I still need to download subtitles, and Plex has that built-in.
Either way, I already have lifetime subscription, there’s no point in switching. At this point I’ll only switch if JF becomes better or Plex becomes worse.
Both will happen.
Besides.
For me it has worked everywhere. All of my media is in .mkv so it already contains the subtitles. It works in all browsers clients, Desktop clients, TV and Mobile clients. Works in VLC and MPV as well on desktop, TV and Mobile. Works with Kodi as well. Works on same network (via both host IP and reverse proxy) as well as remotely via Pangolin.
So you can try putting everything in one MKV Container or maybe change the subtitle formats (if that’s a thing).
🤞. Hopefully it’s just JF getting better, of course, but that last app redesign on Plex was really rough. I had to downgrade the app to make it work well again.
Of course I can put extra work into formatting my subtitles to make them work everywhere. Sometimes they are embedded, sometimes they are an .srt file next to the video file. And I don’t want to spend time normalizing all of them. It already just works all the time on Plex, so I’ll simply wait until JF fixes the support.
I don’t think Jellyfins focus is currently to support irregular naming schemes. Naming media correctly with a proper scheme is the way to go.
Just so you know I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I’m not talking about naming schemes. The subtitles are detected, but they either crash the client or render improperly or just don’t show up despite being selected. I guess I’m really waiting for a decent multi-platform client that just works.
You can also try Wholphin, it’s a jellyfin client with subtitle search like Plex.
Thank you for your suggestion. That seems like a very nice JF client, but unfortunately it’s Android-only, and we do most of our watching on iPads.
I will definitely try it on my Android TV though.
I switched from a heavily used Plex server with about 10 users to Jellyfin with the samw usage patterns abour half a year ago. So far it’s been pretty smooth sailing. A better world is possible!
I set up Plex on my mum’s TV and she can just push play. The UI is intuitive (read: familiar) to her.
Jellyfin has a reputation for giving users more control and customizability, but the other side of that coin is that it’s more “fiddly”.
My users don’t want to fiddle.
This is legit the opposite of my experience. I am a relatively tech savvy user, I like to fiddle with all the settings and an ugly UI doesn’t inherently deter me as long as the experience is good, so when I first installed jellyfin I was ready to have a clunky experience fighting the UI.
Despite that, I was legitimately surprised at how Jellyfin was far less confusing for me to use out of the box than plex ever was. I found Plex’s UI very confusing to navigate on my TV and my family did not like using it either. I remember especially hating all the extra categories and freemium content plex added that I wasn’t interested in viewing but couldn’t remove (or at least did not find a way to remove). In Jellyfin all of my content is just there and very easily categorized and there’s no superfluous elements in the UI, just my stuff that I want to watch.
I remember plex also gave me more trouble during installation than jellyfin did. I actually found jellyfin very pleasant and intuitive to setup. Plex sent me down a Google rabbit hole to diagnose why it wouldn’t boot at all.
It was genuinely such an awful experience as a first-time user that it made me wonder why anyone would use plex.
That’s the opposite of my experience. Jellyfin just works and immediately exposes the content we’re looking for, plex tries overloading you with bullshit and burying your actual content
For remote streaming to, say, your mum’s house? (Or a friend, etc)?
Yes, after I set up the server properly (reverse proxy). With this change the same setup on the server side is necessary for remote streaming with free Plex.
My mum puts in the domain, username and password and starts streaming.
Guess what I didn’t have to setup with Plex or Emby.
I believe you. I feel that way about iTunes (trauma intensifies).
But Jellyfin doesn’t have that reputation.
Are you seriously telling us you reading from three reddit threads from almost a decade ago and consider that “reputation”?
I am beginning to remember what made me think Jellyfin wasn’t user friendly.
Maybe it wasn’t the user interface after all.
You’re not wrong.
I set up Jellyfin on my mother-in-law’s TV, it’s just push play.
My mum has an Apple TV (the device, not the subscription) and on there she uses swiftfin. The only issue has been sound not working on certain audio tracks on certain movies, but in general it is easy for anyone.
Both are very familiar interfaces for anyone used to playing something from a streaming service.
Not sure about swiftfin but try the option
downmix to stereosomewhere in the client playback settingsThanks, I didn’t manage to find many options in swiftfin, you don’t know if I can enforce it for a user from the server side?
That will be transcoding so from the server side make sure it’s enabled and working. Then you can limit the bitrate (per-user, or globally)
This way the client will stream the content and not direct play it.
Hopefully this fixes the issue with audio.
I think I tried this when troubleshooting and didn’t notice a difference. Nevermind, I pretty easily taught her how to bring up the menu and switch audio streams so she can solve it herself now.
I never really understood intuitive as a description for user interfaces. I remember back when opinion articles on Tech news websites would use that term to mean it “looks and functions exactly like Windows XP”
Idiomatic usage of ‘intuitive’ regarding interfaces breaks down into
‘familiar’, so, confusing intuition with knowledge, or
‘discoverable’, which is more accurate and describes things like icons and tooltips and menus, where the rules of usage become more or less apparent with exploration and logic.
Yep. What’s considered intuitive UI changes depending on what you’re used to.
It’s why Google fought so hard to put Chromebooks in American classrooms.
I’m ready to replace plex but unless something major has changed in the last several months I simply can’t understand how people feel jellyfin is a comparable solution to plex. I couldn’t even get past the user interface and it falling flat on its face with media recognition.
You need to properly name your media with a proper scheme (including tmdbid/imdbid).
Jellyfin is the solution if you have a media file on your computer and you want to stream it to your TV in a different room and Bare Bones works fine. It serves my use cases for a lot of things pretty well, but for hardcore self-hosted streaming Plex still has more features and polish
I dunno what you were doing wrong, but Jellyfin is a strong alternative to Plex that has feature parity. The only reason to use Plex over Jellyfin is if you want the streaming channels Plex has. Especially since many of the features Plex has are locked behind a paywall, whereas on Jellyfin they are free.
What about remote streaming, to other users…?
I use consoles because I have kids. Ps5 doesn’t have jellyfin but does have plex in its store.
This is a big part of the problem. You can use Plex on PlayStation, xbox, Roku, apple tv, iPhone, android, etc…
The apps are ubiquitous, the coverage is complete. In just about any situation, Plex is a workable option.
Might want to take another look at Jellyfin. My experience has been that as long as the video file s are at least somewhat reasonably named and organized, Jellyfin has no problems identifying a file and looking up its metadata.
Looks fine to me, I replaced plex like 3-4 months ago
Jellyfin / jellyseer + arr
There are custom themes out there that change the interface.
Right click -> identify-> Title name, has yet to fail me.
Its been a long time since i used plex so I can’t say how much “easier” its over there but compared to the days before streaming this little upfront work takes less time then going to a physical store to rent.
Maintenance takes no work and it cant be enshitificated (someone will just port it)
Works great for me, I pay nothing, why would I change that?
Because I don’t have to learn about things like proxies to try and open the service up outside my network in a secure manner or try to explain to family they need to run tailscale at the same time and then inevitably have to provide tech support for another aspect of “why is this not working?”
I just check allow remote access and it just works and I can go about my day doing things I enjoy more because fucking about with Linux and providing tech support are pretty low on that list for me :)
Same. For whatever reason Jellyfin just does not want to work outside of my network. I have fiddled with port numbers, settings, and everything else. I have no idea why it won’t work.
Sounds like you’re behind cgNAT, which essentially means there’s another router owned by your ISP that’s between yours and the open internet, which also requires port forwarding, but your ISP will never do that for you.
It complicates things, but the solution(s) are tools like tailscale, cloudflare Tunnels, or to rent a VPS just to host a proxy/vpn.
Plex solves this by using their own public servers as a proxy for you, but this is part of how they have control over your users/server/data, such as blocking remote streaming… That makes more than a few people uncomfortable.
Yeh these are things I realise and I know there are solutions. The way Plex does it isnt ideal but also it works for me and my current knowledge level.
Maybe in the future as I learn more I can move on but right now it works for me and I dont have the time or motivation to put into learning everything else I need right now, as with everyone else in the world right now there is a lot of other shit going on that it just isnt high on my priority list unfortunately.
I’m still in my first year of self hosting personally and as well as being a Linux newbie I have learnt a lot and it has been a steep learning curve with everything.
I only bring it up because you explicitly said you have no idea why it doesn’t work.
Take things at a comfortable pace; there’s no sense overwhelming yourself. Then you just forget what you’ve done and end up lost in your own maze.
I started with Plex myself, almost 10 years ago. Moved to Emby, where I learned about buying a domain, setting up ssl through a reverse proxy, and just continued to explore from there. Today I run ~26 containers/projects across three systems and I’m always keeping my eye out for interesting new things.
Best of luck with your journey m8.
The way networking has developed is honestly embarrassing. We shouldn’t have to have cgNAT or any of the other problems that come with how we’ve broken the end to end principle, and it’s made us reliant on centralized Services when there’s absolutely no technical reason why that ever had to be the case
Thankfully CGNAT isn’t as common in the USA as it is in other countries. In the US, ISPs generally either offer native IPv4 (most of the major ones), or only use IPv6 and provide IPv4 at all. The latter is the case with a lot of the mobile carriers, especially T-Mobile. Your phone only gets an IPv6 address, and their network uses 464XLAT to connect to legacy IPv4-only servers.
Should I begin telling you about the wonderful man in the middle attack that I reported to Plex over 3 years ago and how it’s still not fixed? Anyone can setup a plex instance and use that very instance to request an ssl certificate on behalf of any other plex instance, and then setup shop and gain complete access to your machine.
You’re going to need to back up your claim otherwise you might as well be lying as there’s no CVE like this I can find nor any public disclosure.
Plex have a bug bounty program and a responsive security team too.
Post your security report.
Do you have a CVE for this?
I can’t wait till meshvpn technology becomes so common that we forget what life is like without it. Tailscale is awesome but it is just the beginning
Sounds like a skill issue.
Typical condescending reply that I expect, yes it is a “skill issue” and I don’t really give a fuck. We don’t all have the same skills or the same levels of interest in acquiring those skills, some of us just want a solution that works easily for their skill level.
It is your kind of attitude as well that puts more people off learning these things because without a real interest in learning these things those kinds of hostilities just put people off of wanting to participate in those circles.
Yes. You could learn everything you need to know by watching a 20 minute YouTube video, but you’d rather use a paid product instead. That’s, like, the definition of a skill issue. The issue isn’t that the software is hard to use, it’s that you refuse to learn how to use it.
And that’s not the fault of Jellyfin, because the “ease of use” of Plex is because it’s a paid product. They can afford to run servers to make everything work for you without having to put in any effort to learn. You’re using their servers to make it easy for you, and you’re paying to do it.
It’s fine if you don’t want to learn to set up a service, but it does make me wonder why you’re commenting on a self hosting community. It seems to me like you’re not interested in self hosting. (Not trying to assume, but what you said is not what I would associate with someone who likes to self host.)
Except that just isn’t true unless you have prior knowledge of lots of other things. As with a lot of documentation within this space it all presumes prior knowledge of different things.
Most things you read or watch will start with just do x but if you don’t already even know how to do x then you have to go down a further rabbit hole to find out how to do that. Everything you try and do is a series of these things so your 20 minute YouTube video turns into hours of trying to learn other things to tie in with it.
On top of that I dont understand the underlying security implications behind opening my network up to the outside world, it is all well and good following some 20 minute video but without understanding the underlying implications of what you are doing how can you really fully trust that information because I dont understand everything behind it?
Again, I never said it wasnt a skill issue, I literally agreed with you that it was…
Also why can I not comment and participate in a self hosting community just because I dont do things exactly the way YOU want me to does that mean I automatically can’t participate?
It is your kind of hostile and condescending attitude along with documentation that assumes too much prior knowledge that makes both the self hosting and Linux communities really unwelcoming to people that are looking to even dip a toe into them. This all or nothing attitude where only your method of doing things is acceptable and anything else is seen as fair game for mockery and condescension.
I’m new to the space and maybe in the future as I learn more about it I can move on to other things as I gain the knowledge I need but people like you, whose attitude is just fucking shitty are really off putting in these spaces. Everyone needs to learn and the culture of condescension and mockery towards new users by a large majority of the existing user base doesn’t make more people want to join in and learn.
Cheers for adding absolutely nothing to the conversation though and further putting me off wanting to learn any more or continue to interact with the communities though. You’re really helping push adoption of things like this.
Again, you just sound like you’re not interested in self hosting. I wasn’t even that condescending to you, but you took it that way. You said you don’t want to learn how to self host in a community about self hosting. Like, imagine if someone went into a community about bicycling and was like, “Well, I don’t want to ride bikes, but I like motorcycles because I don’t have to pedal.” You should expect a certain level of disregard in a community if you’re going into that community saying you’re unwilling to learn the basics of what that community is about.
If you’re not interested in self hosting, I’m not saying you’re not welcome here, because a. you are and b. I don’t moderate this community anyway, but I genuinely wonder why you’re here. You did say you might be interested in the future, so…
This is a genuine offer: if you want to learn how to self host, I will get on a video call with you and teach you how to set up some services on your home network and open them up in a secure way. I write and run my own servers, and have for well over a decade, so I am qualified to teach you what you need to know, if you want to learn.
Yeh that is fair enough, maybe I worded it wrong in the first place as it is more that right now I dont have the time or motivation to do the learning due to everything else going on in life and I do conceded that I did jump first to condescension but that was based more on a lot of previous interactions I have had within the broader Linux community so I apologise if that was not your intention but “sounds like a skill issue” is a usual dismissive response that is often meant to be condescending.
I have put a lot of time in the last year into learning Linux to get to a place where I have proxmox running as well as a NAS and that was all from a place of zero prior knowledge and that was a steep learning curve and I think I am some what jaded from that experience going forward too due to some interactions and how not easy to follow documentation is for someone entirely new to the space.
I do appreciate the offer and maybe in the future I could take you up on the offer when I have more time and mental capacity to put back into furthering my learning within this space. Apologies for jumping straight to an assumption of your position based on previous interactions if that wasnt your intention, it just came across as such.
Thank you for being understanding. I shouldn’t have stated it as bluntly as I did either, so I think you were justified in taking it as condescending, and I’m glad we’re seeing each other’s view more clearly now. I think it’s awesome you’re getting into Linux, and even if you don’t ultimately do it, even considering self hosting is awesome. Getting Proxmox and your own NAS up and running is awesome too, btw. Something you should be proud of. I do want Linux and self hosting to be a welcoming space, so I’m going to try in the future to be more welcoming.
When you’re ready, you can email me at hperrin-friends@port87.com about my offer. The offer stands any time you feel ready to dive in. :)
Quick question, do you know how to wipe your own ass?
Do you know how to rebuild your car’s engine?
Do you know how to remediate black mold spreading on the walls of a houseboat?
Do you know how to compile Linux to run on some custom arm hardware?
Do you know how to repair or rebuild a crumbling stone retaining wall?
There’s a good chance you may not know how to accomplish all of those tasks. There’s also a very good chance you may not care about knowing how to accomplish all of those tasks, as some of them may not be relevant to you. This is ok.
Finally, I know you’re posting on the Internet, but you don’t have to be an asshole, that’s a choice.
No, I am intending to take that course next year, any tips?
What?! Why don’t you have to do those things with Plex?
Because it does it for me? In Plex I just tick one box in settings to allow remote connections and then choose which libraries to share to which users and bam they can access all that content just by downloading the Plex app and logging in on their end.
No fucking about.
Doesn’t Jellyfin operate the same way?
I’m not sure there is any difference.
It does not, not at all.
Plex has an automatic proxy service hosted by their public servers. If you haven’t or can’t configure port forwarding correctly, plex will route the connection through their own servers.
The problem is, that also means Plex co has total control over your server and the data sent between it and clients if they so choose. Anything from quietly logging the data sent back and fourth, to controlling who can connect and what they can do while they are.
Jellyfin has to be correctly exposed to the internet via port forwarding or tools like tailscale/a vpn; but it’s entirely your server under your control. You have ultimate control over how your server can be accessed, but that also means you’re responsible for actually setting that up.
Thanks! It’s been so long since I’ve used plex. I didn’t know they offered their own proxy service now.
No, not at all. Jellyfin you’d have to setup a proxy or some kind of VPN like tailscale for the remote client to be able to access the media. I started to try and figure it all out when I first set up my server but as I have said in another reply j dont really care to waste the time learning how to do it in a secure manner and minimise the friction on my other users so I dont know the ins and outs but jellyfin you absolutely can’t just tick a box and share a library.
Also jellyfin meta data analysis was shit compared to Plex and so I’d have to spend even more time actually managing the server that I dont have to do with Plex.
Jellyfin is free open source software, they don’t have the money to provide free proxies to their users.
Jellyfin is notoriously full of security holes. It’s recommended to not expose it to the Internet. It’s also easy easier on Plex, at least until this bullshit, to have a random non-techie family member sign in to your Plex server from anywhere. I never liked Plex and never got into it, but I see why people used to prefer it.
I think Emby is a good middle ground for people looking to jump ship from Plex. But I switched to jellyfin from my lifetime Emby sub because the plug-in community there feels dead and Emby development felt dead in the water.
Please do explain or link sources to what you think are “security holes”.
It has several unsecured endpoints.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
If you read the comments the devs know it’s a serious issue but don’t want to break backwards compatibility fixing them. Their solution for now is to warn people of the risks of exposing their instance to the Web. Which I don’t think they’re doing a great job of.
Aside from most of those being “potential issues”, which weren’t proven, the rest are GETs of things that do not need to be secret, things like album art and list of installed plugins. Besides the one plugin issue, which was an actual security issue, which was fixed over a year and a half ago. https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/pull/11436
Contrast that with Plex which has numerous high severity CVEs that include things like remote code execution, directory traversal, and more.
Yeah, as you said, that’s a pretty serious security issue. That’s a data leak that explicitly lays out the shape of your attack surface. It tells the attacker exactly what additional software your server is running and if any of it includes known vulnerabilities, the attacker now knows how to gain access.
You’re aware those CVEs are only relevant for ancient versions of Plex and were fixed long ago?
And you think if Jellyfin were a comparable size, there wouldn’t be just as many or more?
Isn’t that the point of major version upgrades? To make breaking changes?
Its also possible for a webserver to offer two versions of an API. Add a new one that needs authentication, mark the old one as deprecated and add a checkbox to disable it. Then clients can update to use the secure one and if you use and unmaintained client you can enable the old insecure api
Using jellyfin on Chromecast. For the past 3 weeks I’m stuck not being able to use it because some update broke subtitles support for external players. App became useless, I can’t downgrade it, and the bug is still not fixed.
Not going to use Plex, just my 2 cents.
I haven’t had any problems with subtitles. You mind linking the issue report you’re referring to?
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv/issues/5095
I am buying a old computer to setup a jellyfin server. It looks simple enough for me.
Setting up Jellyfin as a local media server is very simple. Setting it up with easy access for remote friends and family is a hassle.
it’s not a hassle. just add a reverse proxy and you’re set. the setup for that takes less time than setting up Jellyfin.