Sure, you can disable a lot of features from the home page, but even the remaining bits push you toward Plex’s ecosystem with things like recommendations. And I’ve even seen people complaining about needing to re-disable promotional content after updates. It’s simply a shady business.
If anyone would care to tell me where I’m being pushed towards Plex’s ecosystem I’d love to understand what the flying fuck he’s talkin about. The only thing I could find that could generously be called part of the Plex “ecosystem” are the social features. Does it give more “ads” if you have a free account or something? Also I’ve had a server for 15 years and I’ve never had to re-do my customization from an update.
On mobile if you install Plex for the first time you’re always dumped on the stupid pointless recommended page.
The writer claims that plex drives people towards recommendations even after disabling the recommended tab, that’s the part I’m trying to figure out.
You mean this part?
“Sure, you can disable a lot of features from the home page, but even the remaining bits push you toward Plex’s ecosystem with things like recommendations. And I’ve even seen people complaining about needing to re-disable promotional content after updates. It’s simply a shady business”
If so I’ve definitely experienced that where all of a sudden the damn tab is re-enabled by itself. And it’s not even “disabled” it’s just not the default selection anymore. I can still see it down there.
I believe I experienced what they called “re-disable promotional content after an update.” Everything was reset and my media was hidden with only their streaming options available. Similarly setting up a new Chromecast it only had their streaming content and I had to hide their content and unhide mine.
I seem to remember there being some weaselly link that would re-enable their content after it was disabled too.
Generously, they’re providing more content and a way to support the development of the product through ads. But all the changes and the way they’re happening show me a picture of a company with changing priorities. So I tend to agree with the sentiment of the author.
Ad supported content is their bread and butter. More users use it then run a server and they make more off of it.
I’m not sure I’ve ever used it, but according to Wikipedia, ad videos started in 2019, live tv is 2020, and rentals in 2024. During that time it’s become more and more intrusive, now replacing your media entirely out of the box.
That means for 10 of its 16 software purchases and software subscriptions where it’s bread and butter and has grown into different revenue streams. It’s still software, but now it’s Ad based revenue streams. Adding more and more fees. You might say it’s growing into the thing it was supposed to replace, corporate cable and streaming service.
oh look, another jellyfin circle jerk.
seriously. it sucks that plex had to increase their price to $250 but they resisted that increase for like 10 years. nobody is forcing anyone to rent plex lol. its still worth it during sales.
Jesus wants you to install jellyfin
Jesus can eat shit from my ass. when he does that I’ll switch to jellyfin.
Bread is Jesus’ body. Poop in a sandwich and your shit will be inside Jesus Christ. Is that close enough to satisfy you?
laughs in Jellyfin
I want to like jellyfin, but it’s authentication sucks
So does a lot of the rest of it.
I’m still annoyed that I spent £100 on Plex a few years ago. It seemed like a good investment at the time but I ended up never using it.
That’s more on you than Plex, though, right? Like do you get mad at Walmart or Home Depot because you bought a tool you never use, or don’t use as frequently as you thought you would?
Not defending Plex, I’m just curious.
EDIT: I realize your post referenced pounds as currency, but I don’t know the equivalent stores on that side of the pond. Been 20 years since I was in London! Apologies.
I didn’t say I was mad at Plex. I was implying that I was annoyed at my own decision to pay for it.
Ah, sorry, that’s not how I read it. Have a great day!
Is there a specific reason you never used it? Plex isn’t great with their enshitification, but once you have a Plex pass, that’s the complete expenditure. I disabled all of the “free” and other streaming suggestions from my Plex environment.
You can turn it around nowadays on something like Craigslist or FB marketplace. It will easily sell for 150 quid. Some of the plex shares will be happy to take it off you because their accounts get constantly nuked.
Jellyfin is great :D
Agreed! I stayed with Plex for a long time because Jellyfin had a rough time with live TV (antenna) and I already had a PlexPass because of a sale a long time ago. Now Plex is only still running because I love Plexamp.
Dude, yeah. Plexamp had me keeping my server up far longer than I should have.
I struggled to find a decent plexamp replacement and ended up using symphonium, if you’re looking for any suggestions. Its been working out pretty well with jellyfin.
Does jellyfin have an easy way for remote streaming? I have a couple dozen people on my Plex server, most not very tech savvy, so setting up tailscale and running remote that way isn’t an option. I have a Plex pass so I haven’t been screwed by Plex yet, so I’m not rushing to get out, but I could see myself running both.
I set mine up with HAProxy for TLS offloading and ACME for the server cert. Restrict your access to just your country/region by GeoIP and you are pretty good to go.
no, tailscale is still the easiest option.
Bummer… unfortunately, that’s a deal breaker for me to completely drop Plex. Maybe someday.
Tailscale. You don’t even need it on the client device, you can get a gl.inet travel router that’ll do the work.
I’m not going to all of my friends and families houses and swapping out their routers wtf
Yeah that’s totally how it works. 👍
Could you explain then instead of just posting a snarky comment that contributes nothing to the conversation?
I swear every single Plex related thread has the same Jellyfin fanatics coming in. Same energy as “my MIL has trouble with her computer” “just install Linux bro!” comments.
Still better than the army of Plex fanboys that all claim to have dozens of senior citizens streaming from their Plex server.
Tailscale is woefully impractical, as is setting up travel routers. You’re adding so much unnecessary complexity that has the chance to fail and frustrate them even more. Doubly so for anyone an appreciable distance from you (having tried this before, it’s just not worth it for me - about the 3rd time their tailscale client lost my network I was done with it). And not everyone wants to buy hardware to setup a remote streaming platform for blue hairs, because that also adds to the administrative complexity of the setup.
But feel free to continue your childish tantrum about how people don’t understand why your genius ideas are really super great.
Holy… you’ve been BTFO in the arena of intelligence I’m afraid…
Can you fly out to my MIL every time her router breaks and fix it for her?
Editing your post like this instead of engaging in conversation is so childish, grow up
So I don’t get it, I have mine up with a domain without tsilscale… The clients are quite happy wherever. I don’t even see that much “crawling” traffic that goes to the domain, most just hit the server by ip and get a static 401 page that the “default” site is hard coded to give out.
At some point, somewhere on the internet, someone authoritatively claimed that tailscale is the one and only acceptable solution to getting your jellyfin server outside your LAN and it just kind of took root. nginx has worked perfectly fine for me.
I’m so confused why so many people think a VPN is the best solution. It’s easy to implement, but hardly optimal, and certainly not the only solution
Yes-ish, it’s harder for you than the users. But you will have to secure a URL and they will have to remember that URL. Also there’s some security issues with some unsecured endpoints on Jellyfin. That said I have mine out there exposed to the net and am comfortable enough with it.
I already have to expose my Plex Media Server with a Tailscsle funnel (for IPv4 only) for IPv6 I use my Synology NAS reverse proxy which can be accessed globally.
I have been maining this setup for years now that I forgot if I can access my PMS outside without either those solutions lol (I am GGNATED but IPv6 works fine as stated).
The main thing here is that I don’t need my users to do anything, they just open the app and access it, no need to remember IPs/URLs or install VPNs to my server… Is that possible with Jellyfin as well?
No, there’s not centralized host server to connect your users with your server. They need a fixed IP or URL to access your server from outside your network.
So how do they access from, let’s say a Smart TV/Android TV device?
Jellyfin apps ask you for three things in order to login: URL, username, password.
Thanks, that clears everything up for me…
Now if you could set that URL from the server itself and not the client apps… Certainly I don’t think that’s an impossible task.
Yes you can do the same thing for Jellyfin. I use Synology ddns and setup subdomain in reverse proxy to jellyfin port. For tailscale, I previously use this but needs to add the jellyfin port after the tailscale IP.
I have mine behind a caddy reverse proxy that forces https. I think that handles most sniffing concerns
You could just get a domain and set up a reverse proxy. Or use Cloudflare tunnels.
All possible, but currently I have lifetime Plex pass and just need to share with people I want to share with. No extra config. Once Jellyfin can do that or something similar, I’ll look at jumping ship. Until then, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Fair enough. I doubt Jellyfin will ever offer something like that. Its designed to be completely self hosted and not rely on a central server, which I dont see changing.
Once Jellyfin can do that or something similar
Once Jellyfin does that then it’ll be time to look at jumping ship to something else, because that’ll be the indication that Jellyfin is going down the same road as Plex.
The first one, yes. That’s what I do. But IIRC hosting media via cloudflare tunnels goes against the TOC and they reserve the right to ban users over it
They changed their TOC a while ago, the only thing they have in there now is boiler plate stuff about not hosting pirated content.
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/terms/
You agree not to, and not to allow third parties to use the Services to ... post, transmit, store or link to any files, materials, data, text, audio, video, images or other content that infringe on any person’s intellectual property rights or that are otherwise unlawful;I just set up a cache rule to ignore my jellyfin subdomain and they won’t ever care about me and my half dozen users.
I moved away from plex as well. I do have remote access but had to set up Tailscale on the accounts that access it. It’s a bit of a hassle initially but works well.
Just to think of replacing the mount points in the docker container from Plex to Jellyfin (in order for it to read my Riven and Decypharr symlinks) scares me… Mostly because after I finish a docker project my mind seems to go blank lol.
At least they still kinda honour the Plex Pass lifetime users…
At least they still kinda honour the Plex Pass lifetime users…
for now.
The way you switch between two servers you own is more than inconvenient; it’s what keeps Plex in my life.I wish things would change because everything else is better.
That’s why I use Emby. Paid for lifetime within a day of switch from Plex (which I also have has lifetime for like a decade) because it has a ton of plugins that have been useful and has a cloud server switch function.
Thats how I describe Jellyfin, it works fine, its just inconvenient to use.
I’d love Jellyfin if not for their incredibly infuriating seek behaviour. Why do I have to press play to start the video again?
For me I just want a fast forward button. They have something they call fast forward, but it seeks instead.
In case this helps, for me when I use it on Android TV with said TV’s remote, the arrow buttons on the direction pad for anything require pressing play/OK button after. But if I use the fast forward buttons, it does seek and then just keeps playing.
For the love, as a Plex alternative, they don’t even have a native app on all major tv stores. It should be a P1 feature. I would throw money at them if they get Apple TV support. Right now, there are no functional apps running on the latest Apple TV OS.
I haven’t used apple tv in a few years, but like, swiftfin worked just fine for me??
Swiftfin?
For me the audio is desynced and subtitles are completely broken. :(
Oh weird. I would guess a transcoding issue, maybe double check those settings to make sure you have the right config for your hardware.
Theres also Infuse, its a video player that supports jellyfin, but I think some features are behind a premium purchase.
Yeah. The entire jellyfin support is behind subscription.
I believe Infuse has Jellyfin support on Apple TV. But they want like £100 for a lifetime license or £2 a month / £13 a year.
Yeaaaaaaaah, I mean it’s a good app, but I don’t know if it justifies a $100 license.
For the love, as a Plex alternative, they don’t even have a native app on all major tv stores. It should be a P1 feature.
Are you really bitching this hard about a completely free and open source project?
It’s not technology or finances that kill most FOSS projects and burn out the devs. It’s this kind of shitty entitled unappreciative demanding attitude from users.
As others have pointed out, there are fully functional and good quality frontends available, such as Swiftfin.
I maintain open source projects too, and I fully understand the burnout, the pressure from supporters and such. What I was saying is they can do better from a project management perspective. Otherwise I love their work :3
Swiftfin is buggy atm, like my other comment.
Except the sync / group watch feature is pretty broken which makes me sad
No, it’s not.
No shot you linked to fucking sora
The writing was on the wall when they started getting American VC money.
American VC culture is anthenema to truly user focused products.
Stremio + Torrentio FTW
If they were going to get enshittified, they should’ve been smarter about it to gradually introduce lock-in. The switching cost of going to Jellyfin is almost zero. Did it in an afternoon about a year ago. Ya done goofed, Plex
There is only one reason. Greed.
It’s sad but at least it’s still competition where desperately needed.
The thing it replaced… XBMC? O_o
Xbmc was renamed Kodi and it’s still revenant. It has a totally different use case than Plex or jellyfin and there’s plugins for both.
I hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this. But no, it’s just “4 ways in which Plex now sucks” which we all know already.
Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?
Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?
We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.
Plex took a significant degree of other people’s money, to the tune of over 40 million dollars. The people who gave said money were not kickstarter funders, donators, subscribers, etc but investors, who have an expectation that plex will move the company in a direction that makes them profitable enough to not only repay the 40+ million investment, but to then earn profits for a lengthy period (possibly in perpetuity) as they are stakeholders. This is the same thing that happened to Reddit (though Reddits scale and timeline was FAR more vast), openai, Google, literally every company ever basically. Plex now has an obligation to not just continue development but to continue it in a way that maximizes growth and revenue, even if that is anti consumer.
Jellyfin on the other hand has language on their contributions page that almost discourages financial support. This is because the only financial support they accept is donations, which are clearly explained are to support the free software and give no ownership stake. The software does not generate profit and donation does not equate to any kind of investment, other than supporting continued development. Expecting any kind of return on your part (again, other than the project continuing to move forward) is foolish. Lemmy is similar, as are many other FOSS projects. Jellyfin can remain ideologically stable to its goals, and because it is free if its users feel the lead developers are straying from this they can fork it and make “new ideologically pure jellyfin” (see xmbc to plex to emby to jellyfin, or lemmys 938 forks, many of which are tweaks and some of which are because people got beef with the main devs)
Further to this, I heard Cory Doctorow talk about open source licensing being a Ulysses Pact. Basically Ulysses wanted to hear the sirens song. Normally, hearing it would drive you mad and you would wreck upon the rocks. Ulysses ordered his men to bind their ears with wax so they would not be affected by the sirens song. He also ordered them to tie him to the mast.
In the moment, he knew he would not be strong enough to resist the sirens song and because he was bound to the mast, he could not jump overboard. In the same way, people that use open source licenses on their projects are binding themselves to the open source license so that if a large temptation was to present itself (such as investors wanting to give them life changing money in exchange for mistreating their customers) they are already bound by that license and cannot break that bond.
Or they’ll do what plex did. Reminder that plex started life as a fork of xbmc/kodi for macos. When their fork showed some popularity they shifted development to various names (plex home theater). While this still contained a lot of GPL code they then spent a good deal of dev time rewriting said code to be fully closed source.
This is less discussed but also why plex is one of the most insidious and disgusting pieces of unethical software one can use. The writing is on the wall and the company is led by scumbags, sure, but people don’t talk as much about how they forked xbmc, built a huge product based on everything learned from it, and then closed everything off once they did the minimum required cover your ass moves.
What they did is legal but is it ethical? If they did it to a company like apple or Microsoft they’d get sued, that’s for damn sure. And ethically speaking I would say it’s really fucked to take all this stuff from the community: architecture, ideas, ui/ux, approaches to plugin design, data modeling, etc and build a whole company off of it, then basically give nothing back. They closed it off so they could get their bag, fuck the community that taught them so much and helped build their MVP.
What you describe is similar to the creation of jellyfin from emby though; where embys dev team suddenly decided to close source the GPL server code (a violation) and add monetization. the community rejected this, and forked the last version prior to the nonsense into what is now jellyfin.
Here you can see, what they do with the momey:
https://opencollective.com/jellyfinI hate headlines like this. I’d love to hear the REASONS WHY Plex are doing all of this.
- Greed… do you really need 3 more?
Before someone says “the reason is money” we need to ask: do the developers of Jellyfin not use money? Why won’t the same thing just happen to them too?
Plex is a private company wanting money… Jellyfin is a voluteer-drive effort
Before someone says “enshittification,” we need to ask: does this mean Jellyfin will soon have the same problems?
Enshitification happens to privately develop products due to <checks notes> greed… Jellyfin is not a private company pushing a product for profit
We all seem to love Jellyfin so I think we need to understand the actual reason why, or this will just continue happening.
Back to “greed”
As predicted, a one-dimensional answer.
Let’s say they want more money: they do have a healthy software subscriptions business. How can they get more by becoming the world’s tiniest streaming service? And won’t that cannibalize their subscriptions business as the experience gets shittier and shittier?
Some actual “whys” within this would be things like (made up, but for example)
-
the subscriptions business is dying - less than 1% of users ever buy a pass and efforts to increase that failed for (another reason here)
-
streaming services are dumping cash into viewer acquisition because a war is on for dominance in that space and Pled is capitalizing on that
-
Plex has high overlap with gamers and are making good money on midroll gaming ads during these streams
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Plex has legal concerns about facilitating piracy - this is the real reason why sync is shit and they killed watch together. They are desperately trying to pivot out of their old business before they get sued - OR all this streaming nonsense gives them a kind of fig leaf over that somehow
See, issues can be complex and interesting. Just calling them greedy is neither. How is this the greedy play, even?
Nobody outside Plex’s finance department is going to have what you’re looking for if those examples are anything to go by.
What it comes down to is they have $130M that investors are going to want back and all the decisions they’re making now are aimed at doing so. That doesn’t mean any of those decisions are good or are going to work. It didn’t even mean they won’t backfire and have the opposite effect.
-
plus jellyfin is open source. if they start enshittifying, people can just fork it. That will keep them in line. Look what happened with emby. They’ve been sent to oblivion and no one even talks about them anymore.
Plex is a private company…
- It’s a commercial product, what else could you expect?
Should be a full stop with “profit”. All the shitty things that go with companies chasing it.
I use Plex for audiobooks and TV shows primarily.
The fact that you can’t (or at least can’t easily) scan library files from Plexamp is utterly insane to me. Especially after they made audio libraries completely unavailable on the regular Plex app.
I’ll probably switch to Audiobookshelf or something else down the line.
+1 for audiobookshelf, after using tools like Plex for a long time I was honestly shocked by how much more user friendly it felt. And it’s a one man team! The only significant demerit is that the IOS app is stuck in test flight limbo, so you have to find another player. Though most do that already I think.
You can scan from plexdash.
Capitalism.
Yeah, only one reason. It’s always capitalism.
Enshitification has entered the chat
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