If only my TV had a Jellyfin app, I could switch, but alas it doesn’t. Got to use Plex if I want to watch stuff from any home streaming thingy. That said, it’s free to do that, at least.
I just don’t have the money or time to buy an external box and fiddle with it to get it running these days either, otherwise I’d build a modern version of the XBMC server I used to have in days gone by :-(
My opinion: Plex has made it clear that they want your money. They don’t want you to host your own media and be happy with that. They want you to pay a subscription.
The whole Plex Pass Lifetime subscription is kind of a trap. You might be getting away with paying once currently, but let’s be honest: That means that they have taken your money once. And a some time in the future, a MBA dude will notice that they have a lot of non-paying heavy users (meaning: users who have paid several years ago, which is not relevant for the revenue goals of the current quarter) - and they will try to get you to pay again and again. You might be okay with that, but if you don’t want to get hassled, you need to switch to something else.
I don’t understand this argument.
I paid once many years ago. I’ve never been asked to pay again. Why would I switch before they make a change?
In the meantime, jellyfin is getting better and better. Plex will probably be dead to me at some point, and when that happens, I’ll hop over.
Plus you can easily run them side by side. I setup jellyfin a while back when Plex used to charge users for streaming on mobile but now they don’t if the server owner has a Plex pass.
For me Plex is still a lot simpler to manage if you have a lot of users, and if users have their own servers they share with you
Don’t use either, what’s the usecase of these apps?
Easy streaming of media that you own to (mostly) any device. That’s for jellyfin anyways.
Sharing your home media with extended family and friends and they share theirs with you in a Netflix like TV application
Streaming your Linux ISO’s to any device, from anywhere.
Oh god,I have to pay $3 to use someone else’s code to stream my stolen media 🤣
Not just code but infrastructure as well.
Plex makes it possible to stream remotely even if you’re behind double NAT, firewalls and whatnot blocking a simple port forwarding approach. they do that through proxy servers that need to handle a lot of bandwidth, even with the limited streams…
It’s not really about cost for me. Accounts in control of someone else and increased fees to use my own hardware can take a long walk off a short pier.
If only people applied these principles to all software…
I started selfhosting just because throwing cash on subscriptions at big corpos is not feasible since subs are increasing on a year-on-year basis. To my mind, if I’m going to self-host to yet again pay sub prices defeats the sole purpose of selfhosting.
That money you can pocket and invest in your own hardware for spare parts, upgrades & the like
You could also consider donating it to the projects you are hosting. Because developing that software still takes a lot of labour and these devs really need it
One thing is the price, a whole another thing is the cluttered UI with too many features. I just want play a movie/tv series. Switched to Jellyfin and not looking back.
Just hope Jelly doesnt suffer the same fate. 🙂
I heard Jellyfin is doubling prices next year
😀
I saw the writing on the wall when they kept pushing me for needing an account on their servers. Glad i left.
Plex prices are expensive just to access your own media.
I’m as guilty as the next guy, but it’s nearly never our “own” media.
Maybe that’s not the most popular content on my Plex config but all my fishing session recordings are on it and those belong to me :)
In this community I’d assume it nearly always is …
It is though. Property doesn’t know who it belongs to like crap you steal in a video game, all flagged red when you try to sell it at a potion shop. Owning the information on your computer is as natural as owning the bugs that are eating your mouldy mint plant.
I have accidentally observed a reflection of a Disney movie in the reflective windows from a house i do not live and saved that information trough my retinas into my brain.
Who needs to go to jail in this situation? I who now possesses illegal information in my mind, or the careless home owner who flashed their copy onto me?
Pie in the sky techno babble with zero meaning. How the fuck did this comment get up votes?
Cake in the ground capitalism-babble
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If I was starting new today I’d go for Jellyfin but my family is all set up for Plex now and I’m not going through that painful process again :D
Yep. I have a lifetime sub to Plex anyway, and I don’t want to deal with the pain of giving my in-laws access
Ragebait headline.
And I am a Jellyfin user, who never used Plex so I don’t care about the comparison much.
How is the headline ragebait? Ragebait is the cynical production of content to increase clicks and engagement. The author clearly actually is that passionate about FOSS self-hosting over paid gatekeepers like Plex, and the tone of the article is adequately reflected in the headline.
An opinion author stating a strong opinion in the headline isn’t automatically “ragebait” just because you personally aren’t as passionate. And I say that as someone who isn’t as passionate as the author.
I never understood why you would pay to do things that you can do for free
Because the free version usually isn’t as good.
Jelly fin, as of a year ago, was still using a mouse cursor for remote use. It was a dumpster fire compared to Plex. And that’s before you have to include hosting a reverse fucking proxy to share.
You want me to go through the full list of shit that’s been broken on my steam deck? A device that should be polished and ready to the consumer? Do you think shit like steak decks are as polished and easy to use as a switch?
It’s not hard to figure out if you drop the biases that come with most foss community members.
hosting a proxy server is part of self hosting, so I would to that anyway. asking me to pay for that is not going to fly
I give money to LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Armbian, the Wikipedia, and so on. I don’t have to, but it shows my appreciation, and maybe helps them do more in some small way.
I dont have a problem with donations, thats different from “you must pay me to use my thing”. As donations is an opt in, I would do that. Paying to host my own content on my own server is taking the piss
Purchasing is an opt in too. I use both but paid for a Plex lifetime pass almost 10 years ago. It was easier to set up remote access. Setting up a server was new to me at the time so anything I could find that made it easier was worth it. I also bought an unRAID lifetime pass for the same reason (among other reasons).
I’ve been on a lifetime Plex subscription for the last 15 years. The only nothing preventing me from switching to Jellyfin (I have it running in parallel) is giving elderly family members, who live in 3 other countries than me, access.
If I were to start today though, I would not even consider Plex though, but momentum is a bitch.
I used plex for over a year before spending 80€ on a lifetime supscription. So it was a okay proposition for me, espacially as jellyfin still misses features plex had back then.
I switched to jellyfin after plex broke my setup with some verification change. Still missing some features, but atleast i dont have to deal with entshitification.
Two reasons:
-
because “free” often means there is an ulterior motive for providing the service (see: search)
-
because developers need to eat, and servers cost money. Paying for goods and services helps keep them from collapsing under their own weight.
Big for profit businesses are generally bad, but small dev teams transparent about their costs just trying to live comfortably? They can have my money.
- because “free” often means there is an ulterior motive for providing the service (see: search)
Maybe this is true for some cases, but it’s not for jellyfin. It’s simply open source and free like tons of other utilities people work on for the fun of it. If it were closed source maybe you’d be right.
Agree on number 2 though.
-
I pay for a lot of things that I don’t have to, for many reasons. Paying for piracy tho, that’s something I’m sort of unwilling to do.
Some people will pay for a vpn, for exactly that purpose. And it’s worth it because you don’t have to use 30 different streaming services and 30 different apps to find what you want to watch. And it’s all hosted in the same format.
Because paid versions are often better and for many people those improvements are worth it.
Last time I compared the Plex handled finding and using subtitles so much more user friendly than Jellyfin.
Someone doesn’t know how to configure bazarr…
Not having to configure a separate utility is part of the user-friendliness
I think having distinctly separate utilities for each part of makes the whole thing work is better. But hey, what do I know? If only been running jellyfin + arr stack for 6 users without them ever complaining for over a year.
If you prefer paying a monthly bill instead of spending an afternoon configuring some services, you do you.
Maybe someone doesn’t even use the arr stack.
Maybe they should.
Seems 80% of readers don’t care …
Plex prices are expensive just to access your own media. Tailscale can do it for free.
Tailscale isn’t exactly free. It requires a lot more knowledge, configuration, maintenance, etc, than Plex alone.
Sure, many self-hosters have the ability to figure it out and the proper networking and/or server hardware to implement it. But many Plex users aren’t really self-hosters in that sense. Hosting a local media server that deals with all of the networking stuff for you is much easier than maintaining a tailscale or similar setup on top of the media server stuff. I mean for me, if I hadn’t gotten a lifetime Plex Pass early on for cheap, I probably would have put more effort into my Jellyfin setup. But Plex mostly just works and I have other bigger priorities. I hate the functionality they’ve removed that makes things more difficult than it should be, or I wouldn’t be switching, but it’s not all that bad. So if I didn’t have the expertise and hardware already, I could see it being worth the money to stick with it.
Tailscale is as simplified as it gets and it doesn’t require any knowledge, configuration or maintenance. The fact that you can use it for free makes me wary, but you can’t deny how simple it is to use. Just log in with your account in all of the devices you want to access jellyfin on and voila. It’s as if they were in the same lan.
I think their idea behind it is to convince relatively tech savvy people how great it works (it does) so they talk about it in their relatively tech savvy professional role at small and medium companies.
And at some point they will either start charging money for the small time user, or it will turn to shit, or both. You just know it will happen, the question is when not if. It isn’t free, it’s corporate.
Honestly it is kind of wild that they have a cap on how many devices you can use at all. They store so little it’s wild. The thing that makes it really worth being a service is the relay network they handle and the fact that you can support the team building awesome features into the client. That being said headscale is a thing and if you wanna demystify it then you should take a look at that project. The tailscale docs have tons of info about how they operate under the hood too.
My problem in the first place is that due to my ISP 's limitations, I can’t run wireguard. If I could run it, I would do that instead of using headscale.
I skipped tailscale, so feel free to ignore me, but Netbird has been excellent and has no limitations I’m aware of.
Yeah so I’ve set up remote access to two different homes, one where the router was facing the internet directly, and that was easy, setting up a reverse proxy is not for the average user, but neither is other stuff involved in this sort of system.
Then at another place, where the router was behind cgnat and therefore could not perform its own nat, I set up a wireguard connection to a VPS that itself hosted the reverse proxy… Homemade tailscale, sorta. That was a bit complicated, I don’t think most people have the patience for that.
