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.
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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.
Dito. Every discussion I’ve seen, people were acting like Plex is already dead. This will basically change nothing for most people
And free local network management is still a fair deal… Pay for extra features makes sense for this kind of service? The software needs maintenance and new hardware is always being released so new bugs. Better methods of netow and transcoding etc, this kind of software isn’t a drop and run, it still needs work after release. So I get the need to form some kind of long term sustainability, we all saw it coming.
This is why we stremio
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?
Thus to all proprietary software!
The “Remote playback with a Remote Watch Pass subscription” just sounds like IPTV with extra steps. I’m kind of ok with them requiring Plex Pass for remote streaming for the server owner, but then I have lifetime so it doesn’t affect me. Might feel differently I was having to pay.
It also means they will now have official payment info to tie everyones identity to their Plex server. So if the cops come-a-knocking they’ll be fully able to comply with information requests.
I mean, that’s always kinda been the case. Plex uses their own infrastructure to do remote streaming, and that requires that they know your IP address, and therefore your ISP. I don’t think this really changes much in regard to cops.
I mean, that’s always kinda been the case. Plex uses their own infrastructure to do remote streaming
Only if you don’t configure your server properly. Then you use their infrastructure to punch a connection through.
I’m not sure what you mean.
You don’t need to use their infrastructure for remote streaming. If you forward the port properly and setup your server properly. You can actually outright disable the remote streaming through them by unchecking the relay option in settings…
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.
What “resources” do you need, exactly, to allow my friends to stream from my server?
Developers to keep things up to date and secure. Which I wouldn’t mind paying for, but instead they spend it all on making Plex a social media that emails your friends a list of shows you watch? I can tell you right now that other than “watch together” no one is using the Plex social features on purpose
Pretty sure they’re also sunsetting watch together lol
Just to make it clear to any other people reading this, Jellyfin has Group Sync where you can create groups with participants and syncplay media.
for real though, such a dumb decision on plex’s part lol
As long as you have Plex pass it’s all good and nothing changes. That said, this was exactly my reaction. Plex expends exactly zero fucking resources for my server, so wtf is this shit supposed to mean?
I’m pretty sure that’s corporate speak for “we need to drive plex pass subscriptions more so we need to lock more feature behind it.”
This is 100% my opinion too.
I’m annoyed that I supported them and got a lifetime account on sale. At the same time I’m happy that I can take my time testing and moving my family and friends over to something else.
Paying devs
What does that have to do with my friends streaming from my server?
Did they write their own software?
The software already exists, and has for decades.
Then just ask them if they would share their work for free, or recreate it yourself?
They’re already sharing it for free
they never said they needed resources for the remote playback… they said that they needed more resources - ie money to develop the software in general, and this are feature gating a useful feature to try and convince people to pay
they never said they needed resources for the remote playback…
That’s exactly what it sounds like to me…
that’s fine… but it’s not necessarily what it says. it’s ambiguous at best, but if they’d meant they need you to pay them for resources then theyd probably say it more outright
Their revenue stream is based on license fees for the software? So if they want to keep the lights on they need money
Okay so you agree it’s nothing to do with “resources” and everything to do with locking features behind paywalls to drive up revenue?
developers are a “resource” and they need to be paid. Do you want to keep getting updates for your server? Someone needs to do that and that someone wants to be paid in this case
Glad I moved to JellyFin years ago.
I thought it was pretty commonplace for people to just set up a vpn on their router and act like they’re on their own network. I guess I’m an idiot, but I’m actually surprised people were paying for this in the first place.
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
I was about to get a Plex Pass, but I saw this news today.
If you were going to get the lifetime pass before the price increase then I’d say to still go for it. Personal opinion
My brother doesn’t have Plex pass but I do, so he will still be able to watch stuff from my library for free.
Might have to pull the trigger. I’m really enjoying plex. I’ve used Jellyfin in the past, but it’s not as polished as Plex. However, the plug-and-play remote access feature on Plex is a big plus. I’ll still use Jellyfin alongside Plex.
And if you buy the lifetime now, you might actually get it on sale. Just create an account and wait a few days, usually you get a sale offer
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 🖕
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!
I bought a lifetime pass a decade ago. This doesn’t affect me, right? Not that it makes me want to stay.
if it’s anything like our guaranteed ‘price for life’ internet from the phone company here–it lasts as long as they want it to.
(which, for our internet, was less than two years)
No it doesn’t change anything for lifetime pass.
Maybe it will in a few years, but not today.
It will change. They know they’re gonna have to figure something out about those of us who aren’t paying monthly.
Still don’t get why people use Plex over Jellyfin
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Inertia, mostly.
Of course Plex then takes advantage of that with the slow erosion of the free edition.
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.
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.
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
Client Support is way better, Hardware transcoding is more reliable and easier to set up (as in you don’t have to in Plex), UI/UX is better (if you can live with removing Plex’ stuff once from your homescreen), that also means the settings, which I find convoluted in Jellyfin. The media matching is way worse and I won’t go through thousands of folder to rename them just because Jellyfin only accepts one singular way to name things
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
It syncs all movie covers and metadata automatically. When I used jellyfin last, this was a struggle.
Definitely not an issue anymore
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.
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.
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
I paid Plex Pass Lifetime for peanuts (maybe $50 or $75) a decade ago, not using it would mean wasting that so yeah…
So I’ve currently got a yearly Plex Pass, because I didn’t want to get locked into Plex or feel any pressure to stay if they went down the dunny, but have been putting off migrating to JellyFin. For anybody who has, how did you find the process?
My media isn’t named the most sensibly. I just keep whatever name it came with for the most part. I also liked how Plex just handled the authentication and remote streaming for me - at no stage did I have to open up a port on my router, setup a reverse proxy, etc. Can I migrate my watch history?
I’m fairly new to this. Any migration advice or thoughts would be appreciated!
E: only me, though I stream things externally while out of the house fairly regularly. I’m tech literate enough to follow a readme and read docs, but that’s about it. I don’t need to worry about other, less tech savvy, users streaming my library
I switched to jellyfish last year. Though I didn’t try to get watch history over. Jellyfin should handle your file structure very similarly to Plex, so if what you have now works, it should work on jellyfin.
If it’s only you and you’re only using phones and laptops outside, then you can just skip reverse proxy and all that and just VPN into your system. Wireguard, tailscale, or zerotier are good options with simple easy setups.
I think you should just give jellyfin a try. You can run it at the same time as Plex, so you can just play around with it and see how you like it.
Thanks rusty for the helpful answer! I’m going to have a look at downloading it and setting it up later tonight. I’ve heard a lot of good things about tailscale, so I might look for some newbie tailscale guides. When it comes to that kinda stuff, my biggest worry is that I might miss a step or not set it up right and then I’ve ended up exposing everything to the unfiltered internet and then my PC ends up in a botnet
