Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Remember when Plex tried to sell you a subscription to use outdated versions of open source game console emulators?
Plex wants to be a profit-driven company, but their business model is piracy. They'll squeeze you for subscriptions, while making your experience worse to try and broker a peace deal with content owners.
Watching people realize this toejam eating weirdo was right about everything makes my day everytime.
So glad I installed jellyfin years ago and never bothered to set up Plex.
I got the Plex lifetime pass over 10 years ago for pretty cheap and Plex has served me well over the years. But it's just so damn bloated now and the biggest recent change to their android app is atrocious. The app is so laggy and slow now. And downloading movies to watch locally on a tablet is just painful.
So I decided to start experimenting with Jellyfin this month and I am blown away at how fast and snappy everything is. It still isn't as refined as Plex but there's something to be said about privacy and using FOSS apps.
I'll be using Jellyfin going forward now.
I know it's fashionable to shit on Plex here, but OP either has his server misconfigured or is just trying to stir the pot:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202526943-plex-free-vs-paid/
Free to Use: Video (movies & TV) streaming of personal content on the same local network as the Plex Media Server
Right, the $2 is to use the relay service, which costs Plex bandwidth. They can't just do it free for everyone forever, bandwidth costs money.
They charge for remote access whether it's through their relay service or not, and you can't opt out of fallback to their relay service.
Longtime lifetime Plex Pass holder here.
FOSS is important. Having control over how you use your own hardware and files is important.
But even if none of that mattered, once I actually used Jellyfin for a few days the snappy bloat-free feel of it won me over. Switching between Plex and Jellyfin felt like switching between windows and linux.
Ah the weekly "Plex should be entirely free even though it's commercial software!"
Plex is entirely free and completely local, but only if you don’t use the features that make it so convenient (the relay server they offer, authentication and authorization, etc). Things I’m pretty sure jellyfin doesn’t provide at all. If people spent half the time reading as they do trying to convince people to get angry at optional features then maybe we wouldn’t have so many posts like this.
Jellyfin does offer authentication and authorization. Relay can be done via nginx iirc?
The authentication is lacking 2fa and has a half hearted attempt at fail2ban
If you try to properly implement either of those, the standard device clients won't work anymore.
Plex provides default SSL.
The relay is actually a bit more useful.
You can be on a carrier grade NAT with no real external IP.
It's more akin to running a VPS somewhere and SSH tunneling your home server through it.
They also cache* the entirety of the TVDB and EPG Services.
I'm not sore about most of this with jellyfin, and I am trying to primarily use it, but I really miss some of the features. But realistically, adding 2FA to the clients would be a huge benefit. trying to replace 2FA with wish.com fail2ban feels particularly dirty.
Imagine wanting to charge to stream your own media with your own hardware and resources... Hey wait, we don't have to imagine it anymore, Plex already did it.
I forgot as I am a Plex Pass Lifetime user, and oh boy I'll be sure to milk that out (actually after all these years I think I have already done that) just to keep being an annoying stat for Plex and nothing else 🤣
I know Plex is a business that has to make money, but if I hadn't bought a lifetime pass for $50 a decade ago, I'd have dropped them at this point.
Plex recently switched the remote watch thing to be behind a paywall. If your PC/App was also on the same local network it would probably work.
Just as an FYI, Jellyfin doesn't charge money for.... well, anything.
Aaaand that’s one of the reasons why I got rid of Plex. “Bought” it, then they found some other feature to paywall. Bought that, then another feature. Then it stopped playing files of certain extensions through chromecast. Fuck that. Put together Jellyfin and moved my collection over. Zero trouble since.
I jumped ship early on. They didn't include skipping intros (or removed the plugin or the capability to use plugins, I don't remember).
Went to Jellyfin, took like 2 hours to figure out what's different. I don't even remember, are there any features worth it staying on Plex? At least I'm not missing anything.
Also for watch together you start a watch group and can watch a show episode for episode. Instead of having to open each episode separately and having everyone join again (but maybe Plex fixed this already, I wouldn't know).
its pretty fucking easy to use jellyfin on any device after you have it set up. most platforms have it in their app store.
I got fed up one day with Plex because it blocked me from getting to my server from one of my televisions. My LAN's internet gateway was down and Plex was useless even though all the content was on the local network. I'm sure there's configuration things or something that I could have changed but in the end I decided I didn't want to be pressured into buying anything and I didn't like the constant commercialization of Plex.
So I installed Jellyfin and never looked back. Yes, it's missing a few features but you can get around that with nginx so totally worth it not to be harassed.