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/
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.
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 settingsThis 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.
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 🙄)…
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.
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.
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:
https://sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_6929fca431708191ad097a7679ac1c2b?psh=HXVzZXItcUtrUmZtNkpxTk51dERTZWpxOUZWWUgw.MLaI4cXnOuhj
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.
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.
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.
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)
Depends on the TV. They have an official app on Android TVs, but I still happily use Chromecast for everything
It depends on the TV. They have official clients for Android TV, webOS and some more.
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.