I got so fed up with Plex constantly shoving their streaming service and nagging me to log into Plex servers when I just want to stream my own files locally that I threw my hands up and installed Jellyfin[0]. It's severely lacking in the same polish and functionality as Plex, but I'm pleased that I can run Jellyfin without ads or having to create a non-local account.
You can either navigate all the dark patterns Plex has put and will put in the way to force you to pay, or you can simply install Jellyfin and ditch Plex. I did the last.
Sure, except despite the dark patterns the actual experience of using Plex is much better than Jellyfin.
I have a smallish 100TB library I'd really love to move away from Plex, I regularly test out Jellyfin to see if they've finally made it usable. But sadly Jellyfin is still very far from being a good Plex replacement, it's just janky as fuck.
100TB is not smallish. Here I was, thinking my setup of 8TB was small... What's your hardware? And, if you don't mind me asking, how is that you are using so much space? 4K movies? Honestly curious.
The internet went out, but I had some tv shows I wanted to watch already downloaded and indexed by my Plex server. So I tried loading Plex locally from my phone and it kept trying to "phone home" to have me login to the Plex website, which failed due to not having any internet access.
Yes, for a while Plex was usable without creating a SaaS account, but with some features blocked, and this (reaching the server from outside its LAN) was one of them.
(I say "feature" but of course what actually happened is that the plex developers decided to block requests from outside the LAN unless you sign up for their SaaS offering, which is kind of the opposite)
It has to be setup for local network streaming (and requires a network connection to do so the first time). Plex is far from perfect but its pretty much the best local media service I've found, so I'm not too mad at some of its idiosyncrasies.
Getting plex pass is a must if you use it regularly in order to support hardware encoding.
I can't really speak for the Plex developers. But as an ecommerce developer myself, I feel confident that the answer is that best practice is always to make the default settings the configuration that maximizes security protections. If you, the user, want to back that off trading security to get more convenience, fine, but it's on you, not on me.
Installation wizards ask the configurer to set various levels of security. It's not apparent that this option should be elided from any and all installation workflows.
It has an option to disable the login requirement for certain client IPs, or your whole LAN. Maybe it's erring in the side of caution, but most users just want to stream, disabling login in your LAN should be the default.
DLNA is a horrible experience compared to Plex, just above a network share. Did you know you can install Jellyfin and point to the same storage that Plex uses? That way you keep Plex (in case you bought the pass), and have Jellyfin as a backup.
My main complaint with Plex is local searching is hit and miss - a little while back I typed in a string I knew was in the title of a file (confirmed using 'locate' in CLI) and it returned 'no results'
Plex does some wonky things, like missing external subtitles right there in the same video subfolder, or forgetting/failing to detect a compatible video file for some reason. My goto solution was simply to touch the files so Plex would think they were new and index them.
I used extf4 as storage, but changing to NTFS (yuck) has caused less issues. With the last version the search for subtitles is broken, but at least I can add them manually. I bought Plex Pass for life, but stayed with the free version because it's more stable.
I only had a brief test, but searching seems a little better since this update
I'm on the monthly plan because I wanted to play with GPU transcoding - despite what a lot of folks say it does work in Windows on an AMD iGPU, although I've switched to discrete now (previous server was Ubuntu, but Linux GPU fan control seems to be a mess and we all know the Nvidia driver saga)
Can't emphasize this more: Plex was awesome compared to the alternatives years ago. XBMC (Kodi now) was my goto, but all media was played locally, Plex not only transcoded and streamed, it has native clients even for smart TVs.
I'm still annoyed that by default it requires a login to their cloud to stream locally, which I found when my Internet failed and Plex refused to stream locally. Also the useless third-party stream channels, and the insistence on enabling DRM on Firefox when none of my media needs it to play.
I've installed Jellyfin in parallel, and I agree it lacks polishing compared to Plex, but it gets the job done without getting in your way.
Plex doesn't allow system admins to remove them for all users - each user has to do it themselves. The intention behind the decision is pretty obvious and soured me considerably on Plex.
Uncle and Auntie won't understand that they aren't part of my library, and will complain when something goes wrong with them despite the fact that they're beyond my control.
As the person who owns and operates the service, I should have the control to set default configuration for my users. Just like I should be able to shut off all the ads for everybody, I should be able to set the default quality setting to max.
I never asked for the support burden of content that I'm not interested in offering MY users of Plex. They're not Plex's users, and it speaks volumes of their motives that they think it's appropriate to Trojan horse monetization services onto my users.
I also went the same Plex to Jellyfin route. Though it took me a couple of tries because Jellyfin wasn't quite up to snuff the first time I tried it, but the server/web side seems to be pretty great these days, at least I don't have any issues. While I'm glad they finally have an iOS app, I wish I didn't have to rely on a thirdparty app for Apple TV.
There is an AppleTV app called Infuse that seems to work pretty well with Jellyfin. That said, I am pretty newb to Jellyfin and local streaming in general so YMMV.
Piggybacking off of this, does anyone know of any PS4 apps that can stream Jellyfin content? I have a TV in the spare bedroom with a PS4 attached, but it's not really worth my time to go get some other dedicated device just for Jellyfin.
Reasonably happy Jellyfin user here, though my install is old enough that I guess the Fire TV app doesn't work with it? I'm a little scared to upgrade.
If you're running it in docker, just backup the config and cache dirs and try the new version. If there's a problem, roll back. If that breaks (probably not, but maybe), restore the backup, then roll back.
If you're not running it in docker, that'd probably still work, if you track down those two directories. Just a bit less clean, and a little chance there's some important stuff configured to be saved other places in the non-dockerized version, so it's a little riskier.
Appreciated! I am indeed running it in docker, but it's one of those home servers that doesn't get touched very often, and every time it does get touched seems to end up needing half a day to untangle everything.
> every time it does get touched seems to end up needing half a day to untangle everything.
This is exactly why I run everything in docker :-) One shell file or docker-compose file per service, and each concisely documents exactly what's running and where all the important stuff is.
Now, if I have to touch zfs for any reason at all... that's half a day of sweating bullets, worried that one of those arcane commands will wipe out the whole volume. The UI is like Git, but what's at stake is all your stuff instead of one easy-to-restore code repo. "Oh you want to do what must be one of the five most common things someone might want to do to a zfs pool? Sure just run these six arcane commands in order. Don't mess any of it up or all your stuff is gone."
As for Kodi, it's somewhat of a different class of software to Plex/Emby/Jellyfin - Kodi is more a player interface for local files and with the option to install plugins to play from other sources like DLNA, or even from Jellyfin [1] (and I assume Plex and Emby as well)
Jellyfin is more a network player - your jellyfin server does the heavy lifting, like transcoding etc. so your client basically just needs a web browser (though there are native apps too).
The devs of Emby were always fairly hostile to the spirit of open source and when they closed the source in v6, the community's opinion shifted in favor of Jellyfin. As far as I can tell, Emby is pretty irrelevant now.
You can put me on that list, too.
The minute I found out I couldn’t block my plex server from the internet and keep it working was the day it went in the trash.
Except instead of finding another transcoding server, I just stream local media with Kodi over nfs and choose not to watch media outside of my home network. So much more problem free
Why not just organise and tag your media before uploading it to your server?
I've had issues with some stuff getting the wrong metadata and it became annoying enough to fix that I now use MediaElch to tag my files before uploading them to my server.
Honest question: why would I want content metadata? As soon as I know the title of the media file, I’m golden.
Is there something super cool I’m missing out on without it?
Maybe I’m rare in having a well sorted media library?
Cover art is a must for me, as it makes it easier to find the movie again rather than reading the title.
Also, while I know what the movie is about, my SO wants to see what year and genre the film is, and if it passes that first hurdle then she wants to read what the film is about before deciding if it's a pass or a go.
Finally, I enjoy being able to quickly find related movies by clicking on the director or actors and see what other works I have with them. I know I could do this in IMDb but it's nice having it right there.
If you can write what about plex do you miss, I could also suggest you emby, if that makes sense. I also grew to dislike Plex, the UI detached from the base system, the continuous bugging, (it was also very slow for me, and buffery), but I got a lifetime license for emby and never looked back, I wasn't using anything in particular from Plex, but I also have IPTV + integration with the kodi "filesystem", and auto subtitles + conversion + own music streaming, but yeah if you have anything in particular missing I can maybe help, I kinda like Emby so I'd like to help them grow
Making a project open source doesn't mean you can't close-source it later on and cease distributing updates, like what Emby has done. Jellyfin forked from the last open-source version of Emby that was available under a liberal license.
admittedly it has been awhile since I tried it, but a good amount of the stuff I acquire is anime and plex handles it better than anything else, with the AMSA plugin at least. Anime can be a little weird with a different naming formats, multiple language audio and subtitles, fansub preferences, and sequel seasons sometimes having a different name from the first.
I also need to be able to set a language preference for both audio and subtitles since I am one of those subs>dubs weirdos. If I have to set the audio track every single episode I am just going to hook up my laptop and play it in mpchc.
Whenever I look at open issues for emby or jelly I get the impression that anime is annoying to deal with so I'll just stick with the plex plugin that already works.
Mh yeah sorry I have never watched anime so I am not sure how emby would handle that, it's a segment I have no experience with, but about setting default language for sub/audio it's possible, but not sure how much would it help ^^
I've got about a dozen (yeah, I know, not a lot) anime series on my Jellyfin, and also prefer subs in nearly all cases. I've had a problem with them. But, if someone's got something that's already working, they should probably just stick with that.
If you are open for suggestion, there is a software that would work for you. Shoko Server[0] would be best for managing Anime. I like them since they made my anime folder easily to be managed. And they uses AniDB as their anime lookup. Basically it is a cataloger, file manager, file renamer, database lookup, file tracker software.
They have a plugin for JellyFin, ShokoFin. And I believe they do have a integration with Plex.
This replaced my previous setup and it works amazing with my Kodi.
Oh good lord, I meant to write "I've not had a problem with them." Jeez. Too late to edit now. That is, Jellyfin's been fine for me but it might only be because I've been lucky, since I haven't tried a ton of anime on it.
I guess I wasn't hurt so much with their ads yet, but I've been seeing wonky behavior on Streaming to mobile and some other transcoding issues because of which I keep running into frequent pauses while I'm watching stuff.
Was looking into alternatives but haven't found much yet.
Plex shines when transcoding, but sucks with direct streaming. Unfortunately direct streaming has to be disabled on the client, but the buffering and stuttering will go away once Plex always transcodes to that client.
Would you mind sharing what you found better? Asking as a happy Jellyfin user who hasn't tried Emby (mostly audio focus, for me -- maybe Emby is better for video?)
Emby is overall more polished, specifically the mobile app. And I can't remember the Jellyfin Android TV app but there's a cracked version of the Emby app out there.
I tried both Emby and Jellyfin and preferred Jellyfin. It's been a while since I made the switch so I don't remember why I disliked Emby, but my gut tells me they seemed to be going the way of Plex in some regards. Perhaps things have changed since then, but I've been a happy Jellyfin user ever since.
afaik Jellyfin is a fork of Emby once the Emby Team decided to close source the project, which was very unfortunate for me to hear back then as a Emby user.
However, I've tried Jellyfin two times since then and found it (also) to be the inferior product. This might have changed since my last adventure, so might give it another shot.
You should not have to do this at all, and you didn't have to with older versions of Plex.
You also used to be able to log into "your" Plex server with a local account, but some years ago it was changed to require authenticating with Plex, Inc. to log in.
Perhaps it's changed in the last couple of years, but Plex made the process of not letting it call home extremely difficult, and defaulted to new garbage being turned on as they added new garbage, and re-enabling garbage that they made big changes to.
After multiple internet issues resulted in me not having access to my local Plex server and not being able to fix that, I decided to drop it. Maybe tons of backlash prompted them to fix this? I don't care, I'm a happy Jellyfin user now.
Plex probably has changed this, but a couple of years back it asked for my Plex account on the clients when my Internet went down. It let me login from localhost, and I had to disable login for my LAN so other clients were accepted. IIRC later Plex Inc also was down for a short while, and many people complained on the forums that their servers couldn't stream if Plex Inc. was down.
Yes _technically_ you can go into settings and whitelist local IP ranges, on which you can log in with local credentials. But it's not on by default, and you can't turn it on if the Internet goes down and you can't auth with plex.tv.
I hope plex devs read this thread and get the clue that their system is totally ripe to be replaced with something else, I've used plex for many years and the technical quality of the server has just declined. people who use plex, who are therefore the types of people with an appetite to "run their own server", have absolutely no interest in having to sign up on a website, or get ads, see anything "streaming" (insane! the streaming market has tons of huge players, plex...) or any other kind of crap, all of which has been added to plex over the years, while meanwhile the server uses tons more disk space and memory than it used to and still fails to classify some very simple content quite often.
I havent bothered to look at alternatives in a long time and it seems there are more now than there used to be. will be looking when i next have time.
I do have some sympathy for Plex trying to run a viable business based on a fairly niche product, but I agree the direction they've gone is pretty puzzling. People use Plex for basically the opposite reasons that they use streaming services - they want to actually own their content libraries, they don't want to pay subscription fees, they don't want their personal information stored in the cloud, they don't want to see advertisements, etc. Plex's strength was that they offered an alternative to all of that - and I wish they would have doubled down on just making that whole experience as nice as possible, while also maybe adding in some tools to make it easier to obtain content from "alternative" sources.
Instead they've kind of gone down the route of trying to copy streaming services, and done a really poor job of it, and my experience the last time I logged into Plex was basically "wtf is all this nonsense?". To be fair though I was actually able to accomplish what I wanted - which was to be able to stream a ripped DVD from a media server (Raspberry Pi) to my TV - and for that it still worked pretty well.
It's not puzzling at all if you think about a couple other Plex "audiences": SmartTV and STB makers, and investors.
What story works better for those two (valid) audiences?
Everyone knows nobody has massive libraries of home movies. These other features offer a more clearly supportable "look, it's not just for (ahem) home video libraries" narrative.
With respect, don’t make such absolutist statements. I have a very large Plex library that I use every day. I am really not concerned with off-site auth or whatever. The “free” movies took me all of about 30 seconds to remove. Other people that use my Plex can remove them if they want, too. My parents have access to my Plex and they like the wider range of moves offered by Plex’s streaming service. I’m not going to kick up a fuss if they use it.
These are largely puritan nerd arguments that I see plastered all over the Plex subreddit but that I simply don’t experience day to day and haven’t in the 10+ years that I’ve used Plex. Plex is probably right to ignore what I personally perceive to be a vocal minority.
I've used many systems over the years from PS3 Media Server, to XBMC, and finally landed on Plex and loved the simplicity of it just working and happily paid.
The past year or two on Plex has been super annoying unfortunately. I have been getting lots of transcoding and caching issues.
I've reached the point where I will be trying out some alternatives again when I have the time.
The alternatives to Plex are like comparing Linux to MacOS as a desktop OS. If you want to put in the work, you can probably make something work, but it's not going to be a plug and play experience.
On the other hand the amount of crud the app has just for streaming movies from my NAS is ridiculous. All I really want is a prettier interface to DLNA.
VLC is a pretty viable alternative, and it has client apps for pretty much every platform. There could be some basic features added to make it a bit more usable (text search/filtering), but for basic use cases it works pretty good for me
How do I use VLC to watch my Blu-ray collection that I have stored on my desktop? If I have the VLC application installed on my Windows desktop and I have the VLC app on my phone, how do I browse, select, and watch on my phone a movie that's stored on my desktop? Is this possible? Since if it is I would LOVE to use VLC!
You can't use VLC as a server, but you can use it as a DLNA client.
That setup would be a media server on your desktop (I'd recommend Jellyfin for this, there's a windows app) which broadcasts a DLNA server on your local network.
Then in VLC, you click on "mDNS Network Discovery" in the sidebar that comes up in the playlist view and your computer will show up with a folder structure.
So you think they should stake their whole business on pleasing customers who not only don't pay for the product but who make a hobby out of not paying for media? How do you supposed they keep the lights on?
That's the strange part though. The streaming service and most of these new features are free. Most of the major features they charge for via Plex Pass are geared at people running their own servers. So they seem to be alienating the only people who have any reason to pay them in the first place.
I paid for Plex. I also paid for the media I accessed through it. I don't mind paying for these things. I do mind losing access to my local library because my internet is down, though. I do mind paying a decent amount of money and still getting garbage shoved in my face and a poor and declining user experience.
I *do* pay for plex. I would gladly pay much more to have a simple server that works and for which I can have support when it can't classify things. Also the vast majority of media I serve from plex are my own drum practice videos for my own review. It has other uses besides commercial content.
I'm genuinely rooting for Jellyfin to overtake Plex in functionality and popularity; someone needs to. Plex isn't even fully FLOSS.
That said, I don't actually like Jellyfin, and I wish it weren't implemented in such a Windows-centric language framework.
Once I found out that Jellyfin existed, I excitedly spun up an instance and put all my media on it. It can't handle any AVI videos and lags a lot more than my Plex VM with exactly the same specs. Worst of all, it can't detect my external Chromecast, only the one built into my smart TV.
After assessing how well Jellyfin worked, I had to hang my head in defeat and return to using Plex. I can see that Jellyfin has a very active user / developer community on Matrix, and I bet things will get better.
EDIT: I accidentally said Windows-centric above, but what I meant was Microsoft-centric. I meant the company and not their OS. Leaving it the "wrong" way above for posterity.
I'm in the same boat, I actually like Plex, but want a truly open source solution so we can keep up to date with FFMPEG and a more clear roadmap. But in the 2 years I've been following, I haven't seen much improvement. They are very active, but from a UX and ease of use, it doesn't come anywhere close to Plex.
Also just a note, C#/.NET is cross platform and totally open source. I run an open source app that is in .NET, like Jellyfin, but just for reading and it runs of everything, including Pis.
> That said, I don't actually like Jellyfin, and I wish it weren't implemented in such a Windows-centric language framework.
That's an unfortunate holdover from it's origin as an Emby fork.
> Once I found out that Jellyfin existed, I excitedly spun up an instance and put all my media on it. It can't handle any AVI videos and lags a lot more than my Plex VM with exactly the same specs.
AVI is just a container format and Jellyfin leverages ffmpeg to do most of the actual decoding work, so that sounds like an issue with the VM's ffmpeg. Jellyfin also doesn't enable hardware decoding by default; could be related? I'm not sure what Plex does (for codecs/etc).
> That's an unfortunate holdover from it's origin as an Emby fork.
Unfortunate? My initial guess on first contact with the project was that it'd be some Node thing. I was so relieved to see it wasn't. My unkind but honest and built-on-experience assessment is that it's a big part of why it's so not-shitty. C#'s a great choice for a backend language.
Different niches. Jellyfin's a server first, with a built-in (but I think, technically, removable) web UI, and optional clients for a variety of platforms, including set-top boxes like Roku and Android TV and (I think) Apple TV—and Kodi, actually.
Kodi's for running on your set-top box, mostly. Like, yes, you can link Kodi instances together and stuff like that, but it's mainly for running attached to a TV.
I've tried with Kodi off and on, never really being happy with it, since it was still XBMC. I much prefer the Jellyfin model of operation. I spend a lot more time using it and a lot less time having to mess around with it, while using more features than I ever even tried to with Kodi.
I even use both, Jellyfin as a backend and easy web interface, Kodi as a frontend on my htpc thats kept in sync (Jellyfin for Kodi plugin). Best of both worlds. Mainly because streaming JF from Firefox doesn't seem to support surround sound, maybe it's a browser limitation?
Here is the very first sentence of the Wikipedia entry [0] for .NET Framework:
"The .NET Framework (pronounced as 'dot net') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows".
The official documentation for both C# [1] and .NET Framework [2] live on Microsoft.com.
I would say the above constitutes a pretty Windows-centric existence relative to some other vendor-agnostic languages, but maybe we're saying different things. What did you mean?
That sentence has perhaps not been edited in a while. .NET has been multi-platform for years. (edit: my bad, I didn't see that you'd linked to the .NET Framework, which is the Windows-only legacy runtime.)
There are several GUI libraries that are still Windows-only (e.g. Winform, WPF, etc.), but the latest one MAUI targets MacOS as well as Windows desktops, in addition to iOS and Android.
Just glancing at the code on GitHub, Jellyfin is primarily an ASP.NET web server targeting .NET 6. The download <https://jellyfin.org/downloads/> page shows a wealth of platforms, of which Windows is only one.
The original statement suggested the Jellyfin was somehow weaker on other platforms than Windows when there's nothing to suggest that there isn't parity on all supported platforms.
The .NET team has put a lot of effort into shedding its Windows-only past. I'm honestly not sure how FOSS the platform is, but at least some of it is open-source.
I made the mistake of saying "Windows" instead of "Microsoft". I didn't mean to indicate that it somehow works better on Windows. I'm running it on Linux and don't have Windows, so I couldn't even be the judge of that. Thank you for this clarifying statement, it helped me to understand.
I was also not aware that .NET 6 is not the same as .NET Framework, so that was my mistake. I'm partly going to blame my ignorance on Microsoft for that one; for us folks that don't develop in M$ land, these distinctions can be subtle.
What I _meant_ to say was that I wish it weren't such a Microsoft-centric language framework.
What the GP meant is exactly what they said, "C# and .net 6 are not windows-centric.", sadly it shares a name with .Net Framework which was windows centric.
Then MSSQL or PowerShell are technically not Windows-centric since they have native Linux ports? While cross-platform, the .Net ecosystem is decidedly Windows first. Zero of the .Net developers I know develop on a non-Windows machine.
I think those are very different. .Net 6 (formerly core) is specifically branched to get away from being tied to windows only. In fact the initial versions lacked many of the windows API supports! It is open source and cross platform by design.
The literal only thing that keeps me from moving to Jellyfin is that I cannot seem to get it to work with a Chromecast.
If that worked (and I'm not sure if its a cert problem or something else) I'd be happily away from Emby/Plex and every other option I've used in the past.
I believe this might be caused by Google. Chromecasts will only cast from URLs that have a valid HTTPS certificate (self signed will not work). If you're accessing your Jellyfin over the local IP it will be impossible to get a valid certificate for it.
> If you're accessing your Jellyfin over the local IP it will be impossible to get a valid certificate for it.
I just made a domain name for all of my local network services. Each service gets a subdomain that resolves to a local IP address, so like jellyfin.mydomain.com -> 10.x.x.x. Then just do DNS validation with letsencrypt. Boom, valid cert.
FWIW if you want to run your Jellyfin on the public internet, you can use NAT hairpinning in your local network and have that subdomain resolve to your public IP, and still access it from within your network :).
For the record, Plex gets around this by having a wildcard cert for a domain which just resolves to the local IP, ie 10.0.1.2.local-plex.tv (or whatever it is) resolving to 10.0.1.2.
I could only get it to work when I was out of the house, but inside, it never connected. You can ask on their Github for support, but I wasn't able to solve even with their help.
This could be a whole lot of causes. For example, our home access points by default isolated each wireless client, so they couldn't even see each other, much less a central server.
Jellyfin has been really nice in my experience for audio streaming. I'll also plug Finamp, my mobile audio jellyfin client of choice, and Sonixd, my macOS jellyfin client, two amazing little pieces of software. Haven't tried it much for video though. I love the fact that I can manage my own logins and self-host -- if the media has to live locally, after all, why not handle the whole thing?
These are both great! Especially Sonixd. Finamp appears to be missing a "recently added" section but I'm going to test drive it for a week or so anyway.
Finamp is missing a few features, but it's a work in progress so I can forgive it. Planning on making a couple of PRs myself, for things like fixing the reverse sort order of album view and implementing other views offline.
Oh, and for some reason local storage deletion doesn't work for me on iOS -- need to investigate that. But if you want to listen to music that's stored on Jellyfin and store some for offline use, it's great so far. Just needs some small stuff built out!
Jellyfin is awesome. The DLNA support enables streaming to my local TVs without having to install apps on the TVs themselves, though I haven't heavily tested it with video yet (works great with music). Also the visibility of libraries can be managed per account, so not everyone you give a login to has to see all your content.
I have a decent size library and accessing Jellyfin via DLNA from a PS4 was unworkable for me. There is no search, and I couldn't find any way to select specific movies other than scrolling through the entire library by title name, or finnicky categories like genre or release year. Plex's DLNA implementation provides a "By First Letter" listing so you can find it via "By First Letter > M > (scroll down past a dozen entries to 'The Matrix')" instead of "By Title > (scroll down past a few hundred entries to 'The Matrix')". I don't think I'd be able to stomach that amount of scrolling to watch "Zardoz" on Jellyfin.
The way I do it is search for the media on my phone using the Jellyfin app, and the app has an option to cast it to whatever detected device via DLNA. You can do this from the phone app or web browser on your LAN.
You do have to have your media metadata correct though, e.g. ID3 tags, etc.
The Roku app is tolerable (so, about as good as anything not from one of the companies that's big enough to gain access to the lower-level SDK)
The Android app works really well on a Shield, and is much more pleasant to use. Can't vouch for other devices, and Android experience, especially Android TV, can vary a lot with the device. The Shield also handles more video codecs and can pass through more audio formats than my Roku can, which means less transcoding, which means my poor, weak old server doesn't get abused while still only barely managing to generate a slideshow. In fact, I'm not sure I have any files that the Shield can't handle natively.
I love, love, love having a Web interface to use when I want to change things. Mixing the library & settings management interface with the "6-foot" remote-friendly interface, as on Kodi/XBMC, is a UI disaster. It's also very nice as a fallback streaming option, and works way better than I'd have expected.
That's "docker, run this and detach the console..."
"Also, mount these two directories in the image, to where Jellyfin expects to store its config, so that stuff persists across container restarts and upgrades..."
"... uh, I don't remember what --net=host does, I think maybe it directly exposes the container's ports on the host interface, because I was being lazy when I wrote this? Anyway, it works..."
".. restart this unless I explicitly stop it..."
"... and run this official Jellyfin image, at this particular version"
Then after the second "--volume" insert more lines for every folder you want to map in, like so:
You'll see the directories on the right of the ":" show up in the Jellyfin UI, where you can add them as media sources and tell it what's in them, who has access (say, granting some users access only to that "Kids" library), et c.
Save as "jellyfin.sh" or whatever, and chmod +x. Run it. Done. To upgrade the version, change the last line to the new version, kill the container with a docker command, and run the script again. Do the same if you want to add more directories.
(might want to check the version, that may not be latest, it's just what mine is running right now)
You could also do it with docker-compose, I just tend not to do that unless I'm dealing with a container that depends on other containers.
Works ~anywhere that can run Docker containers. Doesn't matter which distro you're using. I'm pretty sure it even comes back up on system restart, and I didn't do any extra work to make that happen. Self-contained, simple, and clean.
[EDIT] To be clear, you also need to create those "/opt/jellyfin/config" and "cache" directories. The left side is what's on the host filesystem. But, you can put those anywhere, they don't have to go in "/opt".
Helpfully, the "--volume" list is also a complete list of everything (aside from the shell file itself) that you might want to back up. Which is one of the things I love about configuring services with Docker.
Just to pop in and note that this comment turned out an excellent starting point - it might've taken me four hours to figure out why systemd wouldn't mount my shares on boot, but after that getting Jellyfin itself going took about five minutes, and your comment is a big part of why. So thanks for that! Hit me up if you're ever in Baltimore, I'll buy you that beer I owe you :)
In my case, I'm running FreeNAS/TrueNAS for storage and a Plex jail. I'd imagine there are a number of people in the same boat considering the popularity of TrueNAS.
TrueNAS Scale is Debian-based. It's easy to migrate from Core to Scale [0]. You do lose your jails but there's both an official Plex chart for the underlying k3s, and a community-supported one in TrueCharts [1].
TrueNAS is a pretty small niche, no? Not only that, but the usual way of using NAS involves doing compute tasks on a separate server.
Besides, the FreeBSD based TrueNAS Core will almost certainly be deprecated and replaced with Linux based TrueNAS Scale within the nest couple of years. Further strengthening the idea that this is a pointless platform to support.
How's it compare with Subsonic and allies? I like the interface and the clients for Subsonic, but I've never had good luck with its indexing and transcoding from network sources like my NAS.
It depends whether you care more about music or movies. Jellyfin is a movie-centric solution that happens to have options for music. Subsonic was a music-centric solution that has apparently grown the ability to play video in recent years.
Turns out I don't much care for Jellyfin's approach to music, but for videos it's pretty solid, and I found it very easy to set up. Thanks for the recommendation!
(As for music, I ended up just running Airsonic in another container on the same box, so all set there till something better comes along. Navidrome, maybe...)
I predict a "Streaming Day of Reckoning" happening one day, where a critical mass of users suddenly loses access to a critical mass of content, because they became utterly dependent on streaming instead of physical media or local media storage. We occasionally read news of a handful of users losing access to a handful of content, and just shrug saying "Oh, well, streaming isn't perfect and this is growing pains." Maybe a user loses access to all their purchased Amazon movies because they got banned from the platform. "So sad," we say, as we continue to depend on streaming more and more. A niche streaming platform goes out of business and its small user base loses access to content. "Oh, well, there's still Netflix and Hulu," we say, as we keep switching to these platforms.
One day, a big one is going to go dark, and millions of people will suddenly lose access to the hundreds of movies they got used to accessing, and maybe we'll start waking up and looking for better alternative business models than streaming the same bytes over and over from centralized services.
We ought not allow production companies to own distribution channels (and vice-versa), nor long-term exclusive deals with distributors. That's how we solved this when similar issues arose with studio ownership of movie theaters—those restrictions just ended a little while ago, IIRC. But then, that was back when we, like, ever told companies "no" when it was clearly in the public interest. Not sure we can still do that.
Ideally, a production company shouldn't give a shit where you watch their stuff, just that you do. That'd remove most of the friction that makes creation of a universal streaming UI difficult. It'd push distributors to compete on price and features, not exclusive access to content. All around a win for viewers, creating a healthier, more robust market.
I completely agree! I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I think not allowing exclusive licensing deals at all would be a huge win for consumers. Especially in streaming, but possibly in other areas too. I can’t think of a single reason it’s good for consumers — exclusive access to something on Netflix is ONLY good for Netflix. It’s advertised as good for me, but it’d be even better for me if other services also had it.
Exclusive licensing is just a way for the entire streaming industry to avoid competition. Are Netflix and HBO really directly competing if you have to get both to watch the content you want?
Sure, they’re competing for my attention with what I end up watching. But if I really want to watch something else, I’ll just get to it later. It’s not really either/or.
While I agree with the separation, I don't know if exclusive access to content is as bad as you make it out to be. Exclusive deals aren't anything unique to streaming, and even the FTC will say it's a sign of a competitive market [0]. I think there's only so many ways that can compete on features, and price is going to be set by the licenser anyways, who are going to go with the one that pays the best regardless of exclusivity deals.
I really don't understand this as a problem. Maybe for hardcores, who watch the same content over and over again and need to see things as soon as possible, in a particular quality, but those are the types who are likely to invest in physical media anyway (and really, that is the "better alternative" for people who are paranoid about online services going dark/removing access/whatever).
There's just so much content on so many systems, all cheaper than buying one dvd per month that (some even free), that I just can't see anyone really being at a loss for how to entertain themselves in the case Netflix goes dark.
The right to stream content is an asset which can and will change hands. If a streaming service is on the verge of shutdown, its streaming library can and will be sold off as part of shutdown proceedings and other streaming providers will happily step in. As such a "big one going dark" is going to be more of an annoyance than anything else.
> One day, a big one is going to go dark, and millions of people will suddenly lose access to the hundreds of movies they got used to accessing
Probably one of the remaining streaming services will just buy the content at fire-sale prices, and people who want that stuff will have to switch services - which they had to do anyway, because their one went dark.
Where have the mysterious bits to be streamed run off to in your scenario? Is it possible they still remain available to rightsholders, and will simply pass the streaming rights to the next “big one”?
What's stopping you? We're not all going, because I'm not going. For me, it's netflix and done. I don't have time or inclination to mess around with torrents.
Looks like Plex Pass (paid [1]) features are all aimed towards people running their own media center and Plex is targeting casual users with free features that the core audience of Plex doesn't care about or use. I understand that the market of people running their own media server is pretty limited but if growth means totally alienating your core (paying) audience then maybe the approach is wrong.
I bought the lifetime pass way back, when the price was lower than it currently is. No regrets, Plex serves me well at home and when we go out. Paw Patrol can follow us so my son is happy.
I am annoyed that somehow Plex got this to work but Apple TV app does not with Netflix.
Also annoyed that Plex does not integrate with Apple TV App itself.
I wish I could make the TV app my goto. It's great for the things that support it, but sucks that not everything does. I wish apple would be "brave" and force any apps to integrate with it.
I keep looking for a good alternative (especially given the online requirement), but it seems like Plex is the only one with a decent Apple TV app. I have jellyfin running but the app situation is less than ideal.
If anyone has any recommendations with good Apple TV support?
This is the explanation a Plex employee gave for the lack of personal media showing up in their Apple TV integration.
> This feature will only work with our free on demand movies and TV shows. We’d love to integrate personal media as well but that’s not technically possible for a couple reasons. To make this work we provide Apple with a list of content we have available for streaming. As detailed in our privacy policy, we don’t know what content our users have in their personal media libraries.
Former Netflix employee here (left back in 2013 so their stance might have changed).
At the time, Netflix was very opposed to what we called "meta search" (e.g. having Netflix titles available to look up outside the Netflix interface). The idea was that we wanted people to "consciously choose Netflix" as opposed to just choosing what they want to watch and getting it on whatever service happened to have it or was randomly chosen. I've always assumed they maintained this perspective (though, I'm somewhat surprised if they do considering the landscape today with every service leveraging their original/exclusive content more than their generic licensed library).
You sound like you know this, but for others, you can Netflix in top shelf of ATV screen, the icon will drive a whats next within Netflix above the shelf w/o opening Netflix. Netflix decided it didn’t like watchlist integration with Apple’s TV app UI, but does sorta work with AppleTV UI.
To your other question, lifetime Plex, but I also run Infuse and MrMC.
Starting 2021, went mostly native: after HBOMax, Paramount+, Peacock, Disney+, etc., I found everything integrated enough that, together with Prime and Hulu (and Netflix) we didn’t “need” Plex. Note that Hulu Live can act as cable SSO provider to enable 3rd party apps.
Roku has had this for ages, but some time ago the results for Netflix were crippled - if you are searching in the mobile app, selecting a Netflix result will bring you to a launcher for the Netflix mobile app instead of playing it on your TV. I haven't the foggiest idea why they would want this behavior but I have to conclude Netflix mandated it for some reason as they've taken other efforts to cripple the Roku experience in recent years as well. If Roku can't even get this working I have a hard time believing Plex will, considering they represent a much more existential threat to Netflix.
Assuming the devices are all from Apple, I’m curious to understand what Plex provides when it’s serving Infuse on the frontend. In other words, what does Infuse lack when it’s connected to a plain file share or file server as compared to having Plex in the backend? Infuse is already able to transcode various formats as necessary. It’s also able to index media, fetch cover images, etc. Other than offloading the power usage for transcoding (which may be important in battery powered devices), what benefits does Plex or Jellyfin (or anything else) provide here?
I tried infuse maybe a year ago? maybe more, idk... it was around that time that Plex had that big outage that stopped you from even viewing your own local content.
I didn't hate it, but it had some quirks that annoyed me coming from Plex. But maybe I will give it another shot. Pretty sure my Jellyfin server is still just sitting there running alongside Plex.
> I am annoyed that somehow Plex got this to work but Apple TV app does not with Netflix.
I have a feeling that this is because Apple has some onerous little line in their contract that Netflix was not willing to accept. There's certainly no technical reason that it can't happen.
Same. Several years ago I was a happy Plex user, but our Internet got knocked offline and we wanted to watch some local content, no dice. I canceled my Plex Pass sub as soon as I had Internet again. I use Emby now which offers pretty much the same experience without the need for a permanent Internet connection. Their subscription offers a few bonus features but it's not required for LAN streaming.
Not that I'm trying to convince you to come back, but Plex does work without internet access. The Roku app allows you to set up a fallback ip when it happens as well.
I don't love the cloud login either, but I do still use it. Just wanted to point out that the server and (some?) clients work without it.
I do wish Plex would focus more on technical aspects of their ecosystem than features at this point.
I run a server for family, and use the Nvidia Shield as the client for pretty much any "nice" TV or sound system. This worked great for a couple years until a software regression made all 4k content have a 70% chance of locking up the Shield - which exists to this day.
There are other small annoying bugs like that that don't make much sense, things like transcoding being weirdly laggy (minutes) on a quite idle machine that I never fully tracked down.
I suppose writing this I am on the "bleeding edge" in that I expect to have "gold" 4k remux copies on-server, and then transcode down to whichever device is playing it.
The Plex Kodi plugin is a workaround for the above mentioned 4k "original quality" playback bug, but that is not a great option for most end-users.
Channels-DVR blows Plex out to of the water for live content, including live streamed content from services like YouTube-TV. Will have to see if Plex can aggregate the rest now!
Thank you for this as I'm ready to try something new. Used MythTV, then tvheadend, and now plex for LiveTV/DVR. I absolutely loathe Plex, nothing but problems with transcoding. I shouldn't need to have a transcoding server in 2022 with hardware accelerated devices.
Kodi + TVHeadend had me 90% of the way there, but a handful of persistent bugs around PVR destroyed it for the family.
I have a MythTV setup curreny, but the sheer amount of hoops I had to go through to make it work with the tuner card and SchedulesDirect meant that I was loathe to change anything lest the house of cards breaks.
That and I have over-the-air antenna to get local channels hooked up to HDrunner and Channels-DVR makes easy work watching local stuff and record as needed.
Because not many people actually care how things are implemented if they work well. If some closed source iOS app is in Swift or ObjectiveC doesn't really affect me as a user.
I manage a Plex instance for my whole family (old). Plex keeps adding "online" features like this and each and every time I get evening messages confused with the changes. I'll be getting a couple tonight it looks :)
Slightly off-topic, but I have been interested in setting up Plex (or similar) in my homeserver but never figured out a good workflow or source to add movies/shows to it? Are people generally just torrenting, or are there DRM-free stores that I do not know exist? Or if there is an efficient workflow for ripping blurays?
I personally use private trackers and sonarr/radarr apps to manage the content. You could probably use public trackers if you want.
There is a nice docker image that runs deluge and wireguard. Works great with my VPN. Keeps a port open and everything. Has the firewall set to prevent using anything other than the vpn. It’s also nice I don’t have to play with my servers network settings as it’s all in the container.
I don't believe anywhere is selling DRM free movies. iTunes DRM used to be pretty easy to crack, which may be legally piracy in some jurisdictions but at least for me I felt morally pretty ok with it. Bluray ripping is not too hard these days either, you basically need MakeMKV and a bluray drive with the right firmware (which is actually most "LG" drives).
I don't know of a store that offers DRM free movies for general content, but there are places you can get very specific things DRM free. RiffTrax is DRM free for example.
The latest Chromecast w/remote has this kind of functionality, and it's a real gamechanger. Kind of funny how we're right back where we were, price wise, but at least now you do the bundling yourself and can dial in what you are paying for.
Except it doesn't support all services in the "global" search, and you get spammed with all sorts of ads. I like my Chromecast with Android/Google TV, but the software experience could be a lot better.
Those are also known as ads. I frequently see repeatedly shows I have no interest in(actually negative interest, in that I would be better of not knowing about them). I see stuff that I don't like, I see stuff that pushes or attempts to push buttons, it's a constant annoyance. Apple tv doesn't do this, alternative launches don't do this. They are ads, they don't have the next thing you are mostly likely to watch but rather whatever show they are trying to push at the moment without any ability to change this. I would be really surprised if this isn't directly monetized(though it is indirectly monetized).
Is plex like stremio? Stremio has torrent plugins which make it function like popcorn time. Absolutely and totally illegal if you use it with a VPN or not! That's why I avoid it.
Just wondering if plex has anything similar so I know to avoid that too.
Also if anyone knows of any other things that could be similar to stremio that I can avoid please let me know. Thanks.
By itself, you wouldn't have access to pirated content. You would have to make the conscious action to access illegal material. Plex doesn't enable it on its own.
I, for one, still enjoy the plex server and plex app. The new version on nvidia shield fixed 4k performance issues, and plex.tv being an IdP for friends to login to my server is cool.
I don't think logging in locally with a cloud account should be required, but IIRC it isn't strictly required... just a dark pattern.
I use Plex for my whole family, storing all our content on a cloud provider. I don’t mind at all the internet connectivity/login requirements. I enjoy the “channels” Plex adds, if only to add a little background noise so I feel less lonesome when home alone.
If the internet goes down, we’ll read a book or play a game.
this broke plex for at least the non US users that is me on my shield.
it insisted on throwing up the configuration screen for selecting the streaming services that I am subscribed to. However, since I'm not in the US and they didn't test where I am (unsure how many places they did test) it failed and crashed the app on startup.
A redditor found the solution that you needed a vpn into the us to get past the initial configuration. One still can't reconfigure the streaming services, but that doesn't matter as at least it doesn't crash once one gets past the initial configuration.
I wonder how much plex devs get paid, because my job wouldn't be happy if I broke peoples usages like they regularly do.
I would LOVE the ability to have a unified place. I have Amazon, Netflix and Disney+. Obviously Plex is entirely offline. I disable all those streaming and plex stuff they keep trying to force.
I tinkered with this last night. This is false advertising in my books. Took me awhile to discover this:
>Does this mean I can play [streaming service] content in Plex?
>If you select an available Plex Media Server or Plex’s own streaming service, then you can obviously play the content in Plex itself. Content from other streaming services does not play in Plex, though.
Not only was it hard to find this new feature, it was worthless.
All I want Plex to do is serve some MP4 files from a raspberry pi. I had it working at one point with some hidden setting. But now it keeps trying to transcode and such. And it'll randomly just stop working and I have to reboot the pi. Looking for something simpler, something I can use to just Chromecast MP4 files without all of Plex bells and whistles that seen to make it fragile.
I feel like Plex is late to the game with this given that all the new, up-to-date smart TV/streaming stick interfaces already have this feature - either they allow downloaded apps to register the movies they can stream, or there’s a central directory that surfaces apps that can stream certain content even when they’re not locally installed. See the TV app on iDevices or Google TV for an example.
Anecdote of one, but personally I found the Apple TV app on my physical Apple TV (and yes I add my name to the long list of people asking how high they were when naming overlapping but not nearly identical hardware and software products the same as each other) to be so bad that I never use it.
I love the idea that it can pull all my media into one place, but realistically it doesn't work with all apps - a particularly relavent example in this thread being that it completely ignores my plex - and is buggy with the rest, such as BBC iPlayer which usually correctly shows up in Apple TV app (all be it with a worse UI than BBC's not-amazing-itself app) but doesn't always show my latest next-up info.
I dislike it so much that I have watched illegal rips of Apple TV+ shows on plex despite having a valid subscription to watch them in the Apple TV+ section of the Apple TV app on my Apple TV device.
I have my personally owned media on Plex so this is natural progression for me--to use it as a hub.
I have been using Roku TVs for years and if they have this feature I'm not aware of it. I also have various TV's around the house that have different OSes and apps...Plex can simplify that cruft.
For local media streaming to Chromecast or Apple TV devices, I highly prefer Airflow app[0] over Plex. The experience for playback really is a night and day difference. Scrubbing/seeking is instant and it basically avoids transcoding whenever possible, including when using subtitles.
I‘m assuming this is at least partly a client feature so every user has to add their own subscriptions to their Plex account or does this allow to share subscriptions through a server with multiple users? So so you could add your subscriptions to your server and anyone with access to that server will also be able to use your subscriptions?
Ok scrap that, you only indicate what services you have access to and this is only the search engine part, it will simply redirect you to the services app/site when you select play on something, it is not embedded.
I was surprised to find out recently there is even whole sub dedicated to paid plex sharing r/plexshares
I don't use it personally, but I guess it can have some appeal for some, I'm fine with no nice UI for my downloaded files from USB stick, I do all my research prior downloading so I'm in no need of fancy UI.
Plex is nice if you have one of the TVs they support, but they recently pulled the Panasonic client over a falling out over certificates (iirc) and their attitude in their forums seems to be that they are doing you a favour.
For now I use the Panasonic TV's dlna browser. It's janky, but it does the job and saves me £100 per TV. Even a Plex app for the Sky TV satellite box would be good but I doubt if that will ever happen.
It kind of is one of those missing features which I would have wanted back when I was subscribed to several streaming services. But now there is only one at the time + plex.
The Apple TV+ app gives me a dashboard with Netflix, HBO, etc. material at the top of the screen - even before their exclusive content. I just wish Apple supported all streaming services with this.
> I just wish Apple supported all streaming services with this.
I believe this is not an Apple thing but something that the third party app has to do, they can "offer up" their content to the Apple TV app but bigger ones like Netflix want to keep people in their app.
Just like third party apps can integrate with Siri and provide Siri with a list of titles / podcast episodes if they want.
So how would I use this when I have an Apple TV? Is there an app I download and then I use Plex to find what I want to watch and then it launches whichever streaming service has the content?
That's how I've interpreted it. So basically what their Apple TV+ app does but with the addition to your local content (and what's been shared with you through other plex servers)
if anyone streams plesk on a browser, i made an extension that adds 21:9 ultrawide support, a dynamic audio compressor (night mode), library shuffling, and links to trailers. its open source and cross browser too! enhance-o-tron for plex:
This is a neat feature to introduce alongside what Plex offers. It seems pretty similar to what JustWatch [0] does; I'm interested to see how they compare in practice.
Did you try adding your VPN subnet to the trusted / local networks setting? I use OpenVPN in opnsense to access my local plex, though I can also use app.plex.tv which usually automatically uses direct connect using my forwarded wan ip which is fine for me.
[0] https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin