Ahoy mateys, it’s time to setup Jellyfin if you prefer not to pay for the privilege of self-hosting your own content.
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/27204525
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.
Just gonna… Drop this here…
In my experience Jellyfin doesn’t find or handle subtitles nearly as well, and I can’t watch modern movies without subtitles.
I have never had an issue with subtitles on Jellyfin, and my wife has turned our household into an always-on subtitles household. Are you making use of the Open Subtitles plugin?
Yet again, FOSS showing why it’s always the way to go vs proprietary tech. So glad I started my self-hosting journey with Jellyfin!
I’m starting mine this weekend, what timing!
Right on!
They would charge you to watch your own DVDs if they could
… A fee for adding content to each media, capped libraries? What is next?
Let’s brainstorm guys ;D
nice try Plex
Fuck around with proprietary software and find out.
Still don’t get why people use Plex over Jellyfin
In my own house, or just myself. Jellyfin is fine. I haven’t spent as much time on it though compared to Plex.
Plex has its own user auth, I don’t need to manage that. My friends and family don’t have to hit me up for password resets.
It has apps on pretty much every device.
Users can just log in. They don’t need to know what server to type in.
TIL that jellyfin doesn’t support an actual password reset. I’ve never had to actually try. That’s somewhat disappointing.
Yer it’s clear people who go on about not understanding either have small circles of users, or don’t actually support people…
You aren’t getting Pop and Nan to understand how to troubleshoot or setup Jellyfin access on their old TV compared to just throwing in a Chromecast or fire stick and having Plex auto logon with an account you setup for them if the couldn’t. Makes life a ton easier, even at the cost of other liberties.
They just want to watch Zulu or Are you being Served again, nothing more.
Just gonna drop this link here for anyone who’s interested in a 3rd party Jellyfin user management application. This fixes the issues related to inviting users and allowing them to reset their own passwords. Would obviously prefer all of this built into jellyfin, but solutions do exist for those determined enough.
I am a lifetime Plex Pass User… I am not affected by their BS… Yet (watch together is going though).
you are, though. your personal information (like usage data) is going through them
No no, they promised they don’t do that nasty stuff, I gotta believe them.
Inertia, mostly.
Of course Plex then takes advantage of that with the slow erosion of the free edition.
I paid Plex Pass Lifetime for peanuts (maybe $50 or $75) a decade ago, not using it would mean wasting that so yeah…
It’s a lot easier to setup and get non-techy family to join. Setting up Jellyfin is easy until you want access outside your LAN. Setting up TLS or a VPN is a hassle I don’t want unless there is no other option. Plex has features I (and my family) use that jellyfin doesn’t support by default yet. Last I checked syncing of files for offline viewing in the official app wasn’t very good yet. Plex has a bunch of ad supported live streams baked in that aren’t too bad. There is a “How It’s Made” channel, a Mythbusters channel, and Top Gear channel. PlexAmp isn’t perfect, but it’s better than any of the Jellyfin options I’ve seen.
Because some of us bought the lifetime Plex Pass for cheap many years ago and it’s what our family is used to. Plex also passes the “wife test”, and my kids use Plexamp on their phones for music.
Not gonna stop me from ditching Plex in the not-too-distant future though, once I figure out Jellyfin and another local music streaming app that doesn’t have an interface stuck in 1997.
Because comparitively, jellyfin sucks.
Once they reach some semblance of feature parity, then you can in good faith ask this question.
Jellyfin does everything it needs to. Movies, tv, metadata, music. What else?
that is the most basic list of features… if something implemented only that list id consider it an alpha
the thing im waiting on to switch is skip buttons on intro/outro/etc across all platforms i care about
It has that.
it does not have that on apple tv, thus it does not have that on all platforms that i care about - in fact, that’s the main, if not only platform that i really care about
heck, it doesn’t have skip buttons on any platform: it places chapter markers, which is a great implementation!… if they also added metadata that showed a button overlay for “special” chapters like this as wellupdated and checked again - they do add buttons now, but still not on tvosall of this is fine, and i’m sure they’ll get there but it’s disingenuous to say that everything is at feature parity with plex
I will make the switch once they revoke my lifetime pass, but in the meantime I’m really hoping that Jellyfin gets a face lift. I’ve tested Jellyfin a good bit and it mostly has feature parity for everything I care about, but it’s UI is objectively uglier than Plex’s
because it’s actually usable?
I didn’t realize my setup wasn’t usable. What does plex offer that makes the usability so much better? I considered plex for my newish setup but if anything, all the privacy controversies and charging for features was more unusable to me than anything I’ve noticed with Jellyfin
since the last time I checked (could be they’ve made progress since then):
- subtitle auto sync
- smart collections
- way better support for downloads, particularly transcoded ones
- skip intro and credits
- better UI (this one is subjective but I did find annoying little bugs often)
- I’ve found that it takes way longer to update & scan larger libraries
- overall disparity between clients on different platforms (in my case, webos, firetv and iOS).
in short it’s a lot of tiny little things that make my overall experience just annoying.
bad take, jellyfin is great.
bad take, people are allows to have opinions that aren’t yours
Not about jellyfin being bad. One of the best FOSS
It syncs all movie covers and metadata automatically. When I used jellyfin last, this was a struggle.
It’s only an issue if the files aren’t properly named. If you’re using *arr this won’t be an issue. E.g. “Title (Year) - TMBD/TVDB ID” works flawlessly.
That’s good to hear. I’ve got an arr setup so this is promising whenever plex becomes unusable to me.
Definitely not an issue anymore
For me?
- Remote Play (I’ve never been able to get it to consistently work on every device with Jellyfin)
- PlexAmp is awesome
- LiveTV
- IPTV
- Way better clients
- Numerous small little issues.
There’s FinAmp for jellyfin. There’s also support for LiveTV and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was at least a plugin for IPTV.
LiveTV refers to a PlutoTV like service for Plex. There are a lot of amazing channels, but the big gain for me is having broadcast news networks.
FinAmp really isnt up to PlexAmp yet. PlexAmps “guestdj” mode is really awesome and it still doesn’t have a Carplay App which kills it right there for me.
I really don’t see how anyone in their hierarchy thought this was a good idea.
There are at least 3 other competitors that moreorless work better than plex already does, without even having a subscription.
I’m amazed they decided to go this route, especially when migrating is as simple as uninstall plex, install competitor of choice(like jellyfin), and then just specify media locations.
the only real annoying part is remaking user accounts and losing watch progress/history, but there is usually a migration tool for that
The key difference is client app support for various platforms. Jellyfin is far behind Plex on that front, and I say this as a user and advocate for Jellyfin. That’s a huge hurdle for migrating even just family and friends users.
I haven’t actually experienced this. I use my JF server on my roku, my Samsung tv (ok that was a pain because you have to side load it which requires a PC for TizenOs), all my families systems, and my tablet. The only systems I’ve found that seem to lack support of a jellyfin app is my ps5 and my xbox. It’s either been on native or been able to be side loaded on every smart tv I’ve used, and every mobile device has had an app in the app store allowing me to use it. I don’t understand the people saying there are no clients for it.
Sure, every use case is different, and I didn’t say there’s “no clients for it”, just that, objectively, there’s a gap in client support for Jellyfin in the context of migrating from Plex.
The gap also exists in maturity of available clients. In my case on tvOS/iOS, I’m using a third party client (Infuse) because Swiftfin is beta software and Jellyfin for iOS is a web view. I would have better feature coverage on Plex, if I could stomach that.
Glad I moved to JellyFin years ago.
This headline is misleading. If the owner of the server has Plex pass than the users can use remote streaming as normal. If the owner does not have Plex pass, then the users need Plex pass to use that server remotely
Imo a stupid move by Plex, but as a lifetime Plex pass holder, no one that uses mine will have to worry so I’m relatively unbothered.
Was a little worried from the headline that it was being moved to another subscription tier.
I’ve owned a Plex Pass Lifetime subscription since it’s basically been available. I’ve honestly forgotten Remote Streaming was a free service at this point.
Lol, OK Plex, cya.
They’re honestly lucky I was willing to pay the $2.99 or whatever it was to be able to access MY server, using MY internet and cell data, to access MY media files from MY phone. Plenty fair a price for a nice app, might’ve paid a few bucks more but they can screw off trying to charge a monthly fee for… nothing in particular in my usage case.
Literally just set up Jellyfin w/ Tailscale which took all of 10 minutes and works just as well. GG no re 🖕
I’m probably gonna set up Jellyfin this weekend. Any tips for a first timer?
Take it slow.
Don’t ditch Plex just yet but slowly transition the move.
Test it with your usual browser. If playback doesnt work, test with another browser or the phone app.If setting up official docker container looks hard, check out linuxserver.io’s docker container for Jellyfin. Even HWA is very easy.
You can’t even fucking bring yourself to write hardware acceleration for the newbie asking for help?
🤡
Set up docker. I ran an installation on Linux and on Windows for a few years but having it running from docker using external drives for library is a game changer. Always up to date. User files and settings Safed on a seperate folder so you can transfer it to a different os any time. Fantastic.
This, also a recurring thing I keep hearing from people moving from Plex to Jellyfin is that not all media get recognised correctly.
Which is probably because Jellyfin is less forgiving on file structure, file names. So check their site first for what Jellyfin needs: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows
It’s not unreasonable requirements just seems somehow Plex didn’t care about structure as much.
Just use the arrs correctly and there will be no issue except for weird stuff.
I set up tail scale with mine so I can easily access it anywhere.
Thus to all proprietary software!
It’s pleasantly surprising that they aren’t deep sixing the lifetime pass.
Yet.
Yeah this is definitely coming at some point. What are we gonna do? Stop paying?
I deleted Plex from my barely functional home server.
I’ll give Jellyfin a try. I just want to be able to access my music away from home
Use Finamp for offline Music from Jellyfin
Correction. Use the finamp beta version, unless that recently made it out of beta.
I prefer Symfonium
As in, symfonium.app? If so, seems questionable, given its proprietary nature and unavailability outside the play store. Although, the feature set is interesting.
Edit: yeeeah, no
From their FAQ:
licences checks requires a call to the verification server from time to time
The license is tied to your Google account
I’m actually using Jellyfin but I hate the fact that there’s no easy way to install a client on Samsung TVs (Tizen OS) :(
Yeah fuck Samsung
Soon™ it’ll be on the store. Having to build and push to tizen is the absolute worst part of jellyfin (if you have to) otherwise there’s clients for every platform - even LG’s webOS.
There’s also finamp for music specific playback, so jellyfin can pretty much do everything
There is a alpha client and instructions available here: https://smartdigihere.com/jellyfin-on-samsung-smart-tv/
However as stated further down the article, it’s easier to just use a web browser and access your jellyfin server that way. Login, bookmark the URL (don’t forget to include the port) and then hit full screen.
Note: You may need to tweak (server side) your transcoding and subtitle settings.
You could try emby? Seems to have a Samsung tv app according to their docs https://emby.media/emby-for-samsung-smart-tv.html
Is there an easy way on any smart tv? I’ve got a Sony, it’s been a pain for some things but I haven’t tried jellyfin or emby on it yet.
