Projects like Plex, they started out from the open source community, had free contributions, and then monetized. People are bastardizing open source.
The reason Plex is as popular as it is is because of their infrastructure and software that lets users stream video and music remotely on any device at the press of a button. That costs money to build and maintain.
It certainly doesn’t cost what they’re charging. They have a cache, a relay and an auth service. I’ll grant them some more allowance for an active security team. They’ve wasted manyears on features nobody wants and have eliminated any feature that costs them any amount of money to maintain if they can’t make money off it. (sync, client serve, yada yada)
Really? Cuz Jellyfin literally does the same thing and doesn’t cost money.
I have a Jellyfin server as backup, but its clients are shit for anything that uses subtitles. I bought plex pass years back for $80 on sale, can’t complain, but I’m never going to wholly rely on something closed source that requires online credentials.
Never had any subtitle trouble on Roku or shield
Ohh, I’ve had PLENTY of CC problems on Roku.
I use CC quite a bit, Every time a video has subtitles on it, and default is set to english, it fucking turns them on even iff they’re set to off. Until a couple of months ago, you had to turn them on then off to get them to stop. I reported it, found the flag that wasn’t being honored, I gave exact steps. They refused to fix it but did make it where i just had to turn them off. Now every movie/tv show i have that has english->default flags turns them on. about 1 in 10
No options to delay subtitles if they’re messed up, no options to pull from opensubs.
I main Jellyfin, but have to keep Plex around because I have a decent number of remote users and don’t feel like dealing with trying to walk through putting them on Tailscale and I can’t trust any company that won’t even put 2fa in their clients to be open to the world.
That’s great if you have a Roku or Shield. I don’t. I’ve owned both in the past and don’t want either because they’re both an absolute mess of advertising. I currently have an Apple TV and an Android tablet. Jellyfin is okay on Android (and I emphasize okay and not amazing or great), but the Apple TV is may main viewing device and Swiftfin is the best option and still miles behind Plex.
Particularly because on Apple TV with Plex you can override built in subs with the closed caption styles, meaning literally all subs that aren’t explicitly burned into the image can be made consistent and easy to read. Haven’t seen that feature anywhere else, including on the Shield TV/Pro (I used to own one, got rid of it when Android TV updated to the ad-riddled version it is today). It’s a really amazing feature IMO to be able to have full control of subtitle font, size, style, color, outline, and spacing, no matter what you’re watching.
I’ve never used Plex, but I have my own server at Hetzner with large drives and I love my Jellyfin server. I use it every day for shows, movies, and tons of music at home, in the metro, and walking around town and traveling. I’ve never had a problem with it. Honestly, it’s fantastic.
I can’t comment on Plex vs JellyFin, but it’s an interesting perspective that $3/mon for remote access is too much
I use another piece of opensource software, where I consider that a plus. It takes the headache and security issues off my hands, while I can support the developers with a small contribution for an optional feature
$3/mon is $36 a year. That adds up - most people have to work several hours to earn that money.
Plex may also be harvesting your data. When I used it years ago it was already trying to send logs back home, blocked by the firewall.
Plex is a series C for-profit company and is 100% beholden to its investors who expect a handsome return on investment; the enshittification & price hikes are literally guaranteed to continue. Existing users can, and should expect to be squeezed for profits until they have nothing left to give
Strange, I haven’t paid another cent since I paid like AUD$50 for the lifetime pass well over a decade ago.
You can’t say their service hasn’t gotten worse though :)
I paid $75 USD, but they took my plugins, (pour one out for youtube on plex for my DanTDM obsessed kid back in the day) made my interface hard to navigate, try constantly to shove their own content down my (and my users) throats. Hey, remember when you used to have that sync feature that kept you up to date with a selection of titles, then you could use the client on your phone to serve to other phones even offline, god that was awesome with kids on vacation.
Imo anyone who stayed with Plex after they required you to create an account is insane, especially considering there have always been good alternatives.
I was a big supporter of PLEX for a lot of years but I don’t want all the streaming options and ads and crap it was giving me. All I want is a solid media server application and Plex was no longer it.
JellyFin has been fantastic. I’ll never go back
I started selfhosting just because throwing cash on subscriptions at big corpos is not feasible since subs are increasing on a year-on-year basis. To my mind, if I’m going to self-host to yet again pay sub prices defeats the sole purpose of selfhosting.
That money you can pocket and invest in your own hardware for spare parts, upgrades & the like
You could also consider donating it to the projects you are hosting. Because developing that software still takes a lot of labour and these devs really need it
I run both concurrently, but Plex has had a rash of outages recently that led to it and any services relying on it completely useless. It’s insane that an online service outage would cause me to be unable to stream media locally, so yeah Jellyfin has been all but essential, recently.
That’s a big red flag for privacy imo
Oh, I generally couldn’t agree more. In this specific case it was actually their authentication service that was down, but it meant if you use multiple accounts with Plex or have a pin on your singular account that you were essentially locked out. But I agree it’s a bad look to have remote dependencies at all.
Not that I want to defend Plex which is definitely enshittifying, but I don’t think most people are buying Plex to stream their own media. They’re doing it so other people can stream their media. Not wanting to buy a domain and set up port forwarding or a reverse proxy or whatever doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. My grandparents are never going to use Tailscale, and even if they did, I don’t think there are any Tailscale smart TV apps.
Disclosure: I run Plex and Jellyfin (and Navidrome) in parallel, and bought a lifetime pass years ago.
They’re doing it so other people can stream their media
and they went to a subscription model, in part, so they could get their ‘cut’ from plex shares.
If I could get Jellyfin to work remotely I would never use Plex again quite happily. I pay £4 a month and my in laws have to pay £2 a month for remote access, it’s starting to add up for content I download and host on my storage.
Buy a Lifetime Plex pass.
My opinion: Plex has made it clear that they want your money. They don’t want you to host your own media and be happy with that. They want you to pay a subscription.
The whole Plex Pass Lifetime subscription is kind of a trap. You might be getting away with paying once currently, but let’s be honest: That means that they have taken your money once. And a some time in the future, a MBA dude will notice that they have a lot of non-paying heavy users (meaning: users who have paid several years ago, which is not relevant for the revenue goals of the current quarter) - and they will try to get you to pay again and again. You might be okay with that, but if you don’t want to get hassled, you need to switch to something else.
I’m reminded of a few things. Enpass giving away Pro subscriptions, then years later on adding a higher tier, Premium. Nova’s Prime will apparently become just one tier of many premium tiers for the app. Podcast Addict adding another subscription on top of the premium IAP.
This kind of shit happens all the time, and Plex could do it. Good thing I’m already with Jellyfin.
I have paid for lifetime years ago and I’m still using it. They may introduce new features and try to entice me to pay for them, but so far no one is trying to cut me off from what I paid for
Isn’t that kinda exactly what the OP was saying with their comment about MBAs realising they have non-paying users?
I don’t run Plex so I don’t know, but from your comment it sounds like the Plex Pass isn’t “all past, present and future premium features”?
Or were you theorising about a future where they do ask you to pay more?
I’m not missing any features I got when I paid for it (I believe they’ve added some), so no complaints from me.
To me this means they know they don’t have a viable business model. It’s possible they took on a lot of debt years ago, and now they have to enshittify to pay it back. I paid for the lifetime membership years ago, and I would say I’ve more than gotten my money’s worth and I’m mostly still happy with Plex, but I would drop them in a heartbeat if jellyfin was a viable alternative.
People don’t like to admit it, but jellyfin doesn’t have feature parity yet. I think they could solve a lot of the issues if they went the federation route, but until then, it’s just easier for my family and friends to each have 1 plex account instead of N jellyfin accounts. Not to mention the jellyfin vulnerabilities that prevent me from considering hosting it openly.
People don’t like to admit it, but jellyfin doesn’t have feature parity yet. I think they could solve a lot of the issues if they went the federation route, but until then, it’s just easier for my family and friends to each have 1 plex account instead of N jellyfin accounts. Not to mention the jellyfin vulnerabilities that prevent me from considering hosting it openly
Could you maybe elaborate on the feature parity? What is missing? I also don’t get the info about N jellyfin accounts, as in separate jellyfin account per each different jellyfin server?
Why would you host it openly rather than in a VPN like Tailscale or whatever wire guard is?
Could you maybe elaborate on the feature parity?
- I travel often. There are a lot of devices in hotels, bnbs, and friend’s houses that have native plex support. Not so much for jellyfin.
- Casting to cast-compatible devices is very hit-or-miss, but mostly miss. I know the casting ecosystem is already a mess, but as far as user experience goes, Plex has spent more effort ironing it out.
- The native Plex client works with a controller on my bazzite HTPC when launched from the steam ui, while the native jellyfin client doesn’t.
I keep trying jellyfin out every few months, but so far keep hitting enough friction that I can’t reliably make the switch.
as in separate jellyfin account per each different jellyfin server?
Yes, if me and 5 of my friends have jellyfin servers, we all need accounts on each other’s servers. I then need to juggle accounts to access their content.
Jellyswarrm is a reverse proxy plugin I could run to mask the problem for myself, but it’s not a solution for mom who may have access to my server, and one other friend’s server that I don’t know.
The correct solution is federated accounts, but the devs have already stated that they don’t want to do that.
Why would you host it openly rather than in a VPN like Tailscale or whatever wire guard is?
Then friends and family have to be on my VPN to stream anything.
They will release Plex-a-rama or Plex 2.0, stop providing security patches for 1.0, proxy routing, tmdb caching, epg caching, and add ads to your experience. They will then require the people connecting to you to have subs.
They were hoping to sell out and buy an island by now. Eventually, it will change hands or go public. Your features will be stripped as necessary to keep making money. Look at what happened to PlayOn’s lifetime subscription.
It’s already lasted WAY longer than anyone expected.
I’ve been using Jellyfin for about 4 months as a home media server on an old laptop I installed Debian on and… I have nothing to add to the conversation, I just wanted to brag about that because it works really well and I was afraid I would fuck it up.
Anyway, Plex no good.
I had Plex long enough to try to watch a movie from outside my house and realize I had to pay to do it. Luckily swapping to Jellyfin on unraid was just uninstalling Plex and using the same folders
You can get around this by extending your network with a VPN. I know that’s an extra config, but a lot of people who are setting up home labs are already doing this anyway.
How does jellyfin offer remote streaming without a VPN?
It has User accounts and have people access with a login through port forwarding. myIPaddress:8383 effectively, which directs to my movie NAS
I tried to do a VPN with Tailscale and just couldn’t wrap my head around it.
So, it sounds like it doesn’t offer a remote streaming service like Plex then. You just publicly expose or use a VPN like you can with Plex.
I literally pay the same for Nebula, which is decidedly not my own media. Paying a subscription for your own media playback is so stupid.
One thing is the price, a whole another thing is the cluttered UI with too many features. I just want play a movie/tv series. Switched to Jellyfin and not looking back.
Just hope Jelly doesnt suffer the same fate. 🙂
I heard Jellyfin is doubling prices next year
Its ok. Send me a DM and I can give you a 75% off discount code
😀
Jellyfin was created by just such a move and nobody talks about Emby any more.
If Jelly suck, Jelly fork.
Jelly works well for me. Simple, intuitive, hw encoding works great. Responsive app. I had Plex installed on a Phillips TV. It got slower and slower.
But I do understand Plex. They have a business case and need to earn money. Sadly the UI got more and.more confusing.
I’ve been running a Jelly server for 2 years now on a used desktop I bought for cheap. It’s just been good and zero effort since setting everything up.
