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/
Imagine hosting a software on your own hardware and still choosing the one that makes you dependent on the whims of a corporation lmao
When I first set up my server this year it was a VERY easy decision between this and jellyfin. Why would I ever go with the corporate, closed source option?
In my case, I was not able to make jellyfin work: transcoding issues, lagging, client disconnection or unresponsive… Plex worked flawlessly out of the box with the same hardware and the same library.
From time to time I try Jellyfin again, but things never change …
*only for external streaming.
You can cut it off from the internet and stream in your house locally for free still.
End from any external streaming perspective, they are hosting a repository with your connection and port info, so your external friends can connect without you needing to manually configure or update their settings when you make a local change. Plus they are hosting stream relays for those that are unable to make a direct connection. To me, seems fair they’d ask for payment for that service.
I never shared my server anyway, but a lot of the other design decisions they’ve made over the last couple years drove me to Jellyfin. My issue though is I cannot figure out how to set it up properly like I had Plex setup with genres, sort by added to server, lists, etc. I can’t tell if I’m missing something obvious, or Jellyfin just lacks those features and I need to get a plugin or something. Anyway, sorry for the rant. Just hoping someone has experienced similar and might point me in the right direction.
Don’t know all the answers but the home screen has the “Recently Added” rows if you scroll down.
And you can go to plex settings and disable all the love channels, discover, friend activity, etc that everyone complains about. Make it a simple plex server again.
I ultimately want to ditch Plex, but as an existing lifetime member, it currently handles everything so smoothly for my users that I don’t see enough benefits in switching. Particularly on the music streaming side (PlexAmp), I think the experience is the most polished one I’ve seen.
My hope is that by the time the lifetime Plex Pass experience has become enshittified, Jellyfin will be more ready than it is today, and I’ll make a switch then.
I ran Jellyfin and plex for a while, using Jellyfin instead of plex at every oppurtunity. Then Jellyfin broke, I couldn’t figure out how to fix it in an evening, and I just went back to using Plex, which had continued working. It isn’t great, sure, but it’s fine. I think Jellyfin would need to be Immich levels of cool, or plex would actually need to be unusable for me to switch.
I’m in the same boat, I have a Plex pass, I have my reverse proxy setup, Plex just works ™ and when it stops, Jellyfin is already installed and ready to go.
Anybody still using Plex kind of deserves what they get at this point. They’ve been announcing these anti-consumer “features” for a while now.
Two years ago, when I found out that you need damn subscription, to watch YOUR stuff with transcoding on your device in local network, from your local server - I complained on reddit and a lot of people was disagree with me for harsh position.
They_got_what they_focking_deserve.png
Welcoming the incoming dowvotes for correcting your comment just like the many similar comments and posts I’ve seen on Reddit, but this is purely a configuration issue.
Transcoding on local network is allowed without a subscription. If you are running your own DNS server (like pihole or unbound) you need to configure an internal “plex.direct” record. You also need to uncheck an option to “treat your WAN IP as internal” option which corrects double NAT issues.
I have yet to see a need to move away from Plex. I paid for the cheap lifetime sub over a decade ago at this point and everyone I invite to my server has no complaints and has not had to pay Plex a dime. I don’t use their plex.tv proxy, I direct connect to my own IP and leave their remote proxy option off in the server and everything works great.
I will check out Jellyfin at some point if Plex makes things more difficult in time, but for now these articles are literally just rage bait in the homelab ecosystem. They enacted this back in April of 2025 already!
I never checked to see what was actually in the logs but when i was running Plex, it constantly tried to send a lot of log data to its masters. That alone was enough to budge me up and get Jellyfin. Jellyfin isn’t as polished but it works perfectly fine for me.
Pure rent seeking. It’s not the only example. So many products have artificial defects deliberately added by the manufacturer so that they can then charge you to disable the defect.
They deliver a working piece of software to you. They employ people to maintain it and add new features. They ask a price for this work.
How is this rent seeking?
Lies. Local streaming never required a plex pass. Its for remote streaming only, but keep pushing that false narrative.
I kind of understand why someone would honestly. Jellyfin subtitles are still a hot mess for a lot of formats unfortunately. Also, while plex has tried really hard to ruin their UI, I’ve still had more trouble explaining where to find things in Jellyfin. And if you’re sharing your collection with friends or family members there’s a lot more technical stuff involved.
So I can see why the balance might still tip toward paying plex still for some people.
Luckily I bought a lifetime license ages ago before the first price hike so this doesn’t affect me yet. So I’m just riding out the decline, running them in parallel until plex completely breaks. slowly transitioning the family as they get annoyed with broken features. Plexamp is quickly taking care of that 😅
People don’t deserve to be mistreated but it is surprising that folks haven’t abandoned it if they’re so actively anti consumer.
Agree to disagree. When they actively and willingly go for the product that’s screwing them over.
Do you think that applies to you as well? That you deserve bad things to happen to you because of your consumer choices?
The alternatives are not as easy use
To anyone saying they’re happy since they already have a lifetime Plex pass, do you really think they won’t come for you too?
I paid 79€ almost a decade ago. I got more than my moneys worth. Even the current lifetime (on sale) is less than a year of Netflix. More expensive than piracy + Jellyfin ofc if that’s your benchmark 😀
I have a Jellyfin instance running anyway, I’ll switch to that if Plex enshittifies.
if Plex enshittifies.
Anyone want to break the news?
So far the enshittification has not hit lifetime Plex pass subscribers
Which part has enshittified?
The only change I can see that when I scroll down on my Plex front page, there’s a bunch of stuff that’s not on my NAS. Some of them actually interesting, like this full ass category of old school kungfu movies:
You are entirely entitled to do whatever you want, but for me I go into a towering rage when something I own is taken over for someone else’s ads.
Have the lifetime since like 2012, every time a post like this surfaces I wonder if the contents of it are finally going to force my hand to use jellyfin instead
This is a "slippery slope’ argument and thus a fallacy.
Let users decide how they want to run their own stuff. Right now if you have Plex pass this isn’t an issue. If it becomes an issue, then you’re in the exact same position you’d be in today if you decided to move away from Plex now.
I moved away from Plex years ago, but I don’t blame users for sticking with it, it still has a lot of advantages over jellyfin.
EDIT: Y’all are trippin’ over yourselves to complain about what other people choose to deploy on their own hardware.
If it becomes an issue, then you’re in the exact same position you’d be in today if you decided to move away from Plex now.
I disagree. Right now you got time to do the research, plan the move and test it out with a demo setup. You do not know if you got the time if Plex decides to screw their lifetime users.
Yes this is hypothetical.
The steaks are very high. I could lose access to my media library for 1-2 evenings (the time it would take me to switch to Jellyfin).
Plex are trying to start a beef
Locking horns with users
It’s entirely hypothetical. Jellyfin could also close source tomorrow, hypothetically (It happened with Emby so there’s precedent).
Jellyfin can’t go closed source as it’s a fork of Emby from before it was closed source, licensed under the GPL. They don’t own that code so they can’t change that license, thus the whole project is GPL. In addition, Jellyfin isn’t being developed by just one company (it’s all volunteers), so every new contribution is also GPL licensed, owned by each contributor. The only way Jellyfin could go closed source would be to cut out the Emby backend and for every single contributor ever to agree to change the license, or have their code cut out. In short it’s not happening, and if somehow it did the project would just get forked regardless for everyone to switch to (the community did it once already!).
No, you have not understood anything. Assuming Jellyfin would go closed source, (ignoring the GPL license and so on) you would not notice anything. Your server and service would be unchanged by this.
Emby is the best example, the community will fork it and you server lives on. Even if not, then the server and software is still yours.
Bought a lifetime pass, switched to Jellyfin after way too much Tidal promotion on my server.
But they haven’t yet
Oh I’m fully aware I’m just to lazy to set up jellyfin and navidrome quite yet.
Imagine, you software get massively used for piracy, and then you decide to ask for licence for the use of thir software, host on server you do not control. I suspect this will not be result they expected
Welcome to JF
I just wish Plex on my TV didn’t have this bug where it can’t play the correct audio track when Direct Play is enabled. So annoying.
Can I avoid updating to a version to avoid this enforcement?
Enshittification intensifies
Plex is not free. Plex is paid software, just like Google Photos or iCloud. The only free software is open source. Open source everything. Doesn’t matter if the client is open source. If the server isn’t, it’s not open source. (I’M LOOKING AT YOU, SNAP!)
Jellyfin users, how is the transcoding situation? I have a mix of AV1 and H265 and I need to get smooth playback to my living room Apple TV for families’ sake.
All dependent on the hardware you run the server on. Give it a good GPU and you’re off to the races
Just as long as you’re fine with your media server absolutely eating power all the time
Stop encoding in av1 and get a low power older intel chip around 10th gen or so with quick sync. Unless you have like 5+ users watching 4k media at the same time this will handle transcoding absolutely fine while using far less power than a dedicated gpu
I don’t encode in AV1, I use HEVC. But while your argument is not unreasonable, it misses the component of file size and amount of disk space required.
HEVC (x265) takes half the space of x264. While it does require a more modern GPU, it can be run on lower powered Intel CPUs with an integrated GPU just fine, so long as the CPU is new enough. Though it can only handle 2-3 streams on a CPU like the Intel chips in a ZimaBoard. So you need to choose wisely.
Infuse player with jellyfin or direct nfs/samba if in same network
Infuse is not free. I love it and use it on my Apple Devices, but just wanted to have this as an FYI.
I’m moving to jellyfin because of my customzation obsession after using Plex for YEARS (bought lifetime as a kid in college), but I’m still going to donate to the Jellyfin team if I love the software they made. I’m so new to self hosting and it’s awesome how much free stuff is out there, but how do they maintain it for free?
Is the argument that we shouldn’t have to pay money to use software or that Plex / software is changing things after taking money? This is the one area that confuses me the most. Free as a selling point but like, are we just not supposed to send money or am I dumb for doing so?
Not really. The argument is not that everything should be free. I think, I was trying to make a point that Infuse is a third party application that is not free to use (unlike jellyfin).
Running Jellyfin off of a Dell Optiplex 3060 and encoding all of my media in AV1. I’m able to stream my movies just fine via the Apple TV.
Any recommendations for Linux distros for a Jellyfin server?
Why would anyone use Plex over jellyfin anyway? The writing was on the wall years ago.
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.
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 settings
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.
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).
Not doubting your experience at all. For all I know it’s a new option; I just discovered it, but for the other folks like me still stuck with Plex, most (all?) of this can be disabled in the Online Media Sources setting on the server (yeah - I know 🙄)…
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
Come on, I love libre software as much as the next Lemming, but the Plex TV and mobile app is leagues ahead in terms of usability over jellyfin.
I still prefer jellyfin for many other reasons, but in terms of UX and UI for the average person it’s an easy win for Plex
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.
…reverse proxy…
Guess what I didn’t have to setup with Plex or Emby.
That’s because you had somone elses servers doing that part for you.
Good.
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.
The only real usability issue I’ve had is auto cataloging. It isnt right much of the time. But I don’t have any remote users that don’t have network access so that simplifies things a whole lot.
You’re not wrong.
What it’s like in these threads:
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
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‘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.
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Because its more polished, has more platforms for clients to run on, and can be remotely shared with a simple account login and no configuration required. To name a few.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Yeah, I would love to use Jellyfin over Plex but the ability to reliably select subtitles on Apple TV is crucial. I can’t do this currently.
Working “watched” labels on the Apple TV client would be nice. Not having those is a deal breaker for me considering 99% of my use case is streaming media to my Apple TV over LAN.
I have Jellyfin running along side Plex in case I want to do remote streaming, but I never use it and generally just copy the files for what I want to watch to my laptop if I’m going to be watching something away from home. Or I can just VPN in to my home network.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
What about remote streaming, to other users…?
what about it? anyone who hosts a Jellyfin server probably already has a reverse proxy set up. if not, then that is another 2min setup required, if you don’t know what you’re doing.
I think the situation under discussion is converting plex users to jellyfin though. Most plex users won’t have a reverse proxy setup because it’s not needed.
Lol, guess who just made themselves a target. They are now profiting directly on people who stream content they don’t own from other people’s servers. Plex is going to go down when Hollywood sues them.
