Plex lost their best users by missing the point of self hosting entirely. Nobody wants to deal with third party downtime, even if it is rare and intermittent.
I think most products go through phases like this. Plex has some diehards that have stuck around (I think it's just buyers remorse for the Plex pass) but I think they are at a 5th or 6th tier of "customer" at this point, seeing the continuous churn spiral they are fighting.
I’m asking out of laziness.. my local server has pi hole set up, and the other devices use that for DNS thru Tailscale, but I’m not sure what gets blocked for stuff running on the server. I recall some Tailscale setup involved a flag to disable some DNS thing. Hmmm
In my case not really. There is server side scanning in which plex shares data about your media with their backend. Not sure if there is any setting to disable that.
As far as the web client goes ublock origin handles it for me.
Ok. As per my above comment, it should be possible to filter out the analytics/sentry via DNS using pi hole. In theory, you'd just have to set up your Plex machine to use pi hole DNS ad blocking, and ensure that the pi hole domain list includes analytics domains. And Tailscale MagicDNS with the primary DNS server being your Plex/pi hole server, with your other devices configured with Tailscale, should block everything.
The only potential blocker I can see is whether the HDMI streaming device makes HTTP requests, in which case it would need to use the Tailscale proxy, and I'm not sure if that's supported.
I haven't really encountered any issues besides the downtime that has occured maybe twice since I bought the yearly two years ago.
Everything just works and I never really notice those three submenus except when I'm logging into a new device and it takes like ~10 seconds to unpin them. Everything has been basically perfect for me.
> I haven't really encountered any issues besides the downtime that has occured maybe twice since I bought the yearly two years ago.
> I never really notice those three submenus except when I'm logging into a new device and it takes like ~10 seconds to unpin them.
Maybe it's just me, but the way you've written these sentences makes it sound like you have buyers remorse. Doesn't sound like things are "basically perfect."
FWIW, I left Plex two years ago for Jellyfin, and haven't looked back. Never even bought the garbage Plex Pass.
How does that sound like buyers remorse? Twice over two years is essentially nothing, and I do the ~10 seconds unpinning like twice a year. It's so close to basically no issues I consider Plex to be perfect for me.
I don't think you understand what I mean. Plex has worked perfectly for two years straight. These 2 issues have taken up less than ~2 minutes of my life. That is equivalent to perfect from my point of view. Stop being unreasonably pedantic about my own words.
Don’t forget about 3rd party security, they were recently hacked exposing customer accounts details. thier push for online accounts is what ruled it out for me.
You can’t auth directly to your server from a Plex app with a local account anymore? I thought you could still at some point in the past but haven’t tried it in awhile. I know you can still do that from a web browser (I believe)..
I used to love plex. Now I simply dread the quickly-approaching day when they move all my actual media under three submenus (from its current position of being two submenus away) and I am forced to migrate away. At this point in time, i am prepared to pay them to NEVER EVER change the ui, never shove another streaming shit in my face, and just update for new codecs and security fixes. Screw them for ruining such a useful tool!
I almost went the direction you did, but I got frustrated enough with Tizen and garbage ads in Samsung's UI that I went the Android TV stick direction. It's an extra $40-50 per TV, but I feel a bit more in control; now I just don't allow any of the smart TV functionality to be enabled, and keep the devices disconnected from the network. Thanks to HDMI CEC, the integration with the Samsung remote is fine, though I typically use the Google TV remote instead.
Edit: also, last I checked, Tizen still has no Twitch app, which is a bigger problem since Twitch had Samsung remove the unofficial one. I don't really like Twitch much, but still. YouTube's Android app is also better than it's Tizen app, even on low-end Android TV sticks.
Jellyfin doesn't have an official native app, but there's a quasi-official version [1] you can run. That said, it does require putting the TV into dev mode so you can sideload the app.
I've been running it for a while now and it's actually pretty good, I haven't had any major issues except one freeze when searching, but I'm pretty sure that was the fault of the raspberry pi running jellyfin
> The Jellyfin Android TV app is slightly worse than Plex’s, but they’re both dreadful to navigate with a remote control.
I don't really agree. I've been using Jellyfin for a while now (basically as soon as Emby went commercial) and I find it definitively nicer to browse than Plex. I just prefer the way the UI is structured, and my collections are still manageable enough that navigating with arrows is usable. I admit it probably could be improved, for larger collections, but it doesn't seem unusually bad to me personally.
Plex lost me when they became obsessed with trying to put advertisements in front of my grandparents when all they want to do is watch Mash on my plex server.
I've only seen ads in Plex when watching the streaming services they have integrated, which is expected. Those services need to pay for their content somehow.
Yes, but they now show their catalogue by default on every new client you log into. So you (or whoever has access to your server) have to know to hide their rows in favor of local media collections. They don't differentiate them in any way, so I hope your media libraries are named something more descriptive than "Movies & TV". Really disappointing.
The only reason I still use Plex is that they have (native) apps on nearly every device me and my friends have (tv's, playstation etc.).
I remember starting with XBMC, which had the most beautiful theme's/skins that were really well optimised for the console experience, and there were many of them, all for free.
And now I'm paying for a Plex pass and everything is becoming more clunky and less usable each year, such a shame.
This was the main factor that I checked when switching from Plex to Jellyfin. Was really happy they supported my cheapo Rokus. The apps are perfectly OK. They are less good for music, but the show/movie experience is better than it was for plex after they made it super annoying to get to your collection.
This all feels like it should be 800x less of an issue because phones & tablets should just be able to connect over SMB & you should use whatever media player you want on your device.
Telling your home router to forward 445 is not that hard. Usinf minupnpc or just building in auto-port forwarding would be better. Alas I've seen some isp's block users from connecting to 445, which seems insane (my ispets me host there, but my parents isp blocks me from dialing home?!). So I often forward on another port (ex: 4445) and then everything works fine.
The main problem why the obvious "just use computers" problems doesnt work is... Android. Phones. These incressingly user-hostile anti-general-purpose-computing systems. Some of my media players still work with the 2017 code drom of the Android Samba Provider, but it uses old Android APIs so many media players wont work with it. I have no idea if Android still makes filesystem providers possible at all, but we havent seen any, and this one old one-time-drop artifact remains the only example I know of it ever having beem done ever on Android. But then again I really have had no interest in Box/Azure Drives/whatever... it'd be interesting/great to know if anyone does remote drives on android today. It feels wild that we have so much bespoke special software for remote media serving... when we have seemingly so little that does the general job.
Ideally upnp/dlna should also somehow be an option too, but it assumes secure private networks I think? I'd love if it could be exposed publicly but locked down but it does all use mdns. And Tailscale's the only company on the planet who seemingly has the sense to extend our homenet's reach quickly/easily.
> phones & tablets should just be able to connect over SMB & you should use whatever media player you want on your device.
This does not provide the same feature set as Jellyfin and others like it provide. An important omission is server-side transcoding; if I upload 4K content to my instance I might want to be able to watch it from an Airbnb with a subpar connection.
Keeping track of things I've watched (regardless of which device), auto playing the next episode, automatically fetching metadata and subtitles, being able to share collections with friends are some other features I enjoy from Jellyfin that most players don't do out of the box.
Sure, you could rig up a bunch of different programs to do something more or less comparable, but that would be a bunch of extra work for the server operator and would ultimately provide a worse experience.
Phones and tablets can access windows shares just fine. You just need a file manager that supports it. Regardless, direct playing files from a share, doesn't come close to matching the UX a media server provides.
Also, don't expose windows shares to the internet.
Generally speaking unless you are prepared to (at a minimum)
1. Harden the operating system
2. Actively monitor logs, and apply updates upon release
3. Put a Firewall with IDS/IPS between the server and the internet (which most home "routers" do not provide)
you should not put anything on the wider internet, instead using something like tailscale (which you mention in another post) to create a secured private network across unsecured inet
That sounds way overblown on multiple levels. "Harden the OS"... why... if you are port forwarding samba? Firewall with IDP? Please. This kind of advice seems designed to intimidate & scare, and it's absurd & cruel to convince people self hosting is so impossible and terrifying. Geeks oversell their conservative paranoia & gate-keeping like this all the te but this naysaying is just posionous!
I've gone through every CVE for Samba & there seemingly is 1 potential problem since 2007 that would possibly potentially be an issue for a basic non-domaim controller smbd fileshare that a random non-user could possibly exploit. If you dont trust your users, there's indeed some CVEs of real threat, but still, like... 4.. https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-102/...
Yes you probably should update fairly regularly, just in case. But more often than not, if you are a couple years behind, it's not a problem. Maybe someday that goes bad. But... so far... being super lax on updates generally hasnt had much impact. Maybe check logs every now and then, but honestly... once you have some confidence, it's fine. This stuff runs fine. It's easy.
One problem with (at least samba) is that the configuration is a PITA and it's easy to do a lot of unsafe things (which probably wouldn't get a CVE because "well you enabled anonymous users, which are often enabled by default by distributions...")
SMB has been a huge transmission vector for viruses over the years, that's why some ISPs block it by default (its security is terrible).
And as someone who used to watch over SSHFS for years... the biggest feature of things like Jellyfin/Plex is automatically remembering what I'm watching and where I am. Admittedly it's mostly an issue if you watch shows instead of movies (I'm never going to remember which episode of 52 episodes I'm on) but having the app remember is so much better than updating a wiki page/text file/whatever manually as to where I am so I know where to restart watching (which I've accidentally messed up before. Very fun to watch stuff out of order and be like "wut....").
Speaking of dlna... it's kind of awful (at least years ago when I tried to use minidlna with my TV). It's way better to just get a Linux mini PC and hook that up to the TV and let the TV be a monitor.
(Also yeah, I wish we had a better than Android option for phones... https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ exists if you want to throw a bunch of money at it, not sure if there's a whole lot better)
Dlna works really well for me... on linux with a PlayBin media renderer. Which will support essentially any media thrown at it. I've definitely found tv's and sticks to be very hit or miss eith codecs, need transcoding too oftenm But dlna worked pretty nicely when I used it with a competent media renderer.
The appeal is being able to have some network connections to other people's media servers too. Making the media server less of the primary focus is a shift, & handling media-providers as replaceable modular systems would be a step up, & is essential for group-usage to evolve; something we technically cant really do effectively now.
I do very much see your point that Jellyfin has a lot of good capabilities for media-watching. I'm stillfeeling strongly like media providing/serving is a different role tham media consuming, that many of these responsibilities could shift to a more local-centric android or tv app that expects you to have used general file sharing systems to coonnect up.
Good discussion thanks. Shout out to the other mention of transcoding, which definitely plays a part too. Setting up a fuse mount to transcode your stuff to a given quality & them file-sharing that too would be doable & still "generic" versus a specific media-sharing system like this, but yeah, it's more into the cobbling stuff together realm.
I feel like the better approach to what you want is "let Jellyfin/etc access other people's media servers (syncthing, torrent, smb, somehow)".
And there are FUSE filesystems that do transcoding, but they have really weird limitations because of FUSE and wouldn't let you change bitrate during a watch based on network conditions (if you're the kind of person to watch shows on a phone on LTE on a subway for instance).
Even though I selfhost (some things) I am very biased towards more "centralized" stuff (aka serve off the NAS in my house and let most stuff be web clients/thin clients) because of the seamless experience... I very commonly go from using an app on my phone to the same app on my desktop to on my laptop when I travel and even on my tablet or my TV and if everything just works the same it's all so much better then having to deal with weird oddities because maybe read status doesn't work or some metadata doesn't show up properly or whatever.
(or in other words just cobble stuff together ~once and then let all the other devices use the result)
>Telling your home router to forward 445 is not that hard
At first I thought this was sarcasm...
Dont do not... putting samba or any other SMB server on the wider internet is a bad bad idea. It is a good way to get your system compromised.
>>& tablets should just be able to connect over SMB
The draw of Emby, Plex, and jellyfin is not just to file browse and open up files
They Provide Meta Data about the Media, Play Series in proper order, Allow you to see rankings, Ratings, provides Art, etc and most importantly Keeps track of play history on a per user basis.
SMB would not do any of this.
>>Tailscale's the only company on the planet who seemingly has the sense to extend our homenet's reach quickly/easily.
Yes and no. VPN's have been used by home users for a long time, and tailscale is far from the only company / project doing what they do [1]. Tailscale was made possible do to a new(ish) VPN protocol (wiregaurd) that is very light weight and secure, previous VPN systems like OpenVPN would not be able to support something like tailscale
> At first I thought this was sarcasm... Dont do not... putting samba or any other SMB server on the wider internet is a bad bad idea. It is a good way to get your system compromised.
Fearmongering FUDdy advice thats a decade old now. There's nothing in this 10 year old post that seems relevant today, from what I can tell. People just cannot give up their fear! Get over it.
Post a real reply if you have it but dont just shit up a topic with insubstantiated terrormongering.
> They Provide Meta Data about the Media, Play Series in proper order, Allow you to see rankings, Ratings, provides Art, etc and most importantly Keeps track of play history on a per user basis. SMB would not do any of this.
Have you never used a media player on a phone? They all do this. I should be able to do this with files on my phone, or files shared with my phone. I dont see ehy custom software beyond a regular media playing app is warranted.
Except transcoding. That alone is a harder problem.
Yes the entire cyber security industry is just one big con... One big FUD attemptinh to prevent you from playing your media on your phone. You got us... My 20+ years of professional networking and security is a just fear mongering scam....
In reality cve's only get you so far and chances are you have left something open for some one to exploit and are right now probably sending out Nigerian Prince emails from your network or part of a ddos swarm or something like that.
One day I will see a post from you about how to buy some Bitcoin to unencrypt your files
As to "media apps on my phone". Consume media on multiple devices the least used on is my phone. Even if the app on the phone did that it would not translate to my Roku's, FireTVs, and other media devices, and they would not sync
I am & I have seen a number of people run samba just fine & it took like 20 minutes to set up. Are there reports online of this going bad? Would I be the first ever to try this & to have it explode?
Clutching of pearls yo. It's so not a big deal. Dont be driven by fear, dont sell fear.
I have actually been happy with Plex's direction over time. The free ad-supported section of Plex is easy enough to ignore but adds legitimacy to the service and gives revenue to the devs. The last thing I want is for Plex to become Kodi and then get removed from app stores and tvs because it is synonymous with easy and accessible piracy.
Especially since it seems like everybody who wants plex pass already has it and just buy it once from their secret sale emails and then never give them a cent again.
I'm still waiting for the Plex Original Series to start being produced. (ok not that)
Lifetime Plex for goes on sale a few times a year instead of $120 it goes down to like $75. Everybody (including me tbf) just waits a year until a sale and buys lifetime. I don't know why they keep offering deep discounts on their lifetime pass because their userbase has an upper limit - there's only so many people interested in running their own illegal piracy server
Yeah, that's the theoretical limit but you also need to understand VPNs, torrenting, local networks, etc. Plex/Jellyfin/Emby make it super easy on the network/port forwarding/GUI side but it doesn't help with the media itself.
Or you could go with ripping dvds you legally purchase at Goodwill.
Because their lifetime pass is a good way to increase their customer base, who they'll then have to monetize... because they sold an ongoing service requirement for a lifetime price...
I actually run Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin. I would like to only run Jellyfin, but unfortunately some devices will not have jellyfin, but will have plex and/or emby. The main reason I personally still use Plex (or sometimes Emby) even though I am running Jellyfin with all the exact same stuff -- is because Jellyfin sucks at live TV / iptv. It's interface is complete trash and I can't seem to get a good "guide" going like I can with Plex or Emby. If that can be resolved then I'd definitely only ever use Jellyfin.
It's all automated for each one, and yeah they write the metadata into the folder. I have Radarr/Sonarr/Prowlarr + Ombi + rtorrent, which pretty much automates everything. I just type in what I want and it shows up in all 3 a minute or two later. Sonarr also keeps track of TV schedules, so if it's a new show that is still airing it automatically shows up when a torrent of it becomes available.
Swiftfin works fine. It was a little clunky to set up because you need to go through the apple beta software app, but I’ve been using it months with no major issues.
Is it just me or has plex slowly become less stable? Everything from random crashes which can be solved by exiting and reentering the stream through to subtitles just not working at all?
On the fire tv client, every time I load up the client and watch the 1st video, none of the ui/buttons respond. If I back out and go back in then it all works fine. Started a few months ago after working perfectly for years.
Biggest selling point of Jellyfin for me is that it has a Roku app. It still needs some work and some polish but it's very usable. Also the dev community is huge.
I bought a 4k projector recently to use for a home theatre which came with AndroidTV. I have a small collection of 4k movies and shows that I wanted to enjoy, but my PC was on a different floor from my projector. I had used Plex a long time ago, and looked for an open source alternative and found JellyFin. It took like 20 minutes to get set up and start watching my content on my projector. The JellyFin AndroidTV app auto-discovered the server running on my PC, and it also supports streaming HEVC encoded content natively, which the web browser client on Firefox and Chrome doesn't seem to yet [1]. When I streamed HEVC content in the web browser client, the server was transcoding it on the fly, which was nice but it was sending my PC to 100% CPU. The library organization features are probably not as good as Plex's, but they are good enough for me.
I tried to switch to jellyfin from plex, but the TV app is not yet good enough. The subtitles looked ugly, there was no way to customize it. They are huge, almost covering up a quarter of my 55 inch screen.
Apart from this one issue, I didn't feel anything missing. It's quite good. I don't see a reason to use plex over jellyfin unless you want some of their paid features.
My time in front of a TV screen is 10 minutes per year, basically the count down of new year at Times square that is. I use my computer(streaming services, e.g. prime video, netflix,etc) and youtube for entertainment needs. For big movies I went to theaters. From the comment here I realize there are still lots of TV watchers, even though TV is probably just acting as a big screen.
I had two TVs(47", not that large) for like 10 years, but rarely anyone in the house ever used them, everyone stares at their smaller screen these days somehow.
Plex is one of the reasons I now always choose open source over closed source but free as in beer. They start out great but as financial constraints creep in the compromises are made that create a very unpleasant experience. For example, I'd love to use Obsidian, which is an amazing app, but who knows what will happen to it in the future.
But there's an entire workflow embedded in the use of Obsidian. It's not "just markdown". That's like saying you could move from vscode to notepad because it's "just text".
Their stack is primarily comprised of other independent open source projects. The one component that isn't is their "realtime" server that serves updates from postgres' WAL over websockets, but that is open sourced[0] under Apache 2.0. From my understanding the primary part that has not been open sourced is their database browser / web UI. There are plenty of alternative management tools for postgres though. As you can export your database what else would you need to ensure your portability and independence?
Granted they make their docs fairly opaque for trying to self host. Presumably to encourage you to just use their hosted service. Hosting open sourced projects seems like a very ecosystem friendly way of monetizing.
I don’t use Obsidian, but their bustiness model seems simple and honest. Hopefully, I think the worst that can happen is that they will get acquired by a larger company to be sunset.
I posted about Foam, an open source alternative to Obsidian that run in VSCode, just yesterday [0]. It can work interoperable with Obsidian on the same files and folders, if that's your preference.
Not paying for software all but guarantees that it will be abandoned at one point. People want to eat, after all.
(The dichotomy between "I must earn a gazillion dollars because I'm a senior dev" and "I will not pay money (that pays those salaries) for software" that's so prevalent on HN is mind boggling)
I paid $75 for plex 9 years ago and have gotten way more than my monies worth. Their shift to monetization In my opinion is over blown. You can simply go and turn that crap off. Having my media on any device at any time is a life changer. Especially with small kids.
From what I've been told a lot of the frustration is that you can't simply turn it off for your server, all your users have to do it individually. If you've set it up for non-techie people who don't live nearby I can see how that'd be pretty annoying to deal with.
I have some copy pasta with screen shots on how to turn that stuff off I spent a bit making. Just send that out and let people know respectfully that I’m not providing tech support and I hope they enjoy the service. I don’t have anyone bug me ever.
That's a non sequitur. I was talking about financial constraints of the company, not the user. I'd have no problem paying for a piece of critical software if they contractually guaranteed that they wouldn't break the functionality and/or litter it with ads, or at least make it open source if they do. It has nothing to do with my personal financial constraints. That's a misinterpretation on your part.
"Financial constraints" of a company, any company, are such that:
- development costs money
- workplaces cost money
- people want to eat
You can pay for Plex with money (Plex Pass). And while I sort of dislike them
pushing their own content and monetization, it can be easily switched off in settings.
Apparently a free model works perfectly well. I am using Jellyfin happily. Why should I use Plex when Jellyfin works without all the cruft? The developers working on Jellyfin are doing perfectly fine in their endeavors. Is your suggestion that a project is deserving of more use if it is paid for rather than free? Are free projects poisoning the well for all of us trying to make money off of software? Not sure what point you are trying to make.
Plex seems to regularly add new features which I really have no use for but makes it relatively easy to turn them off if you want.
Every month or three when I login to the web interface there's Some New Thing which I need to disable.
Recently I needed a 100% offline-capable media player (and while Plex would probably work, it's not 100% reliable) and tried with Kodi.
It's a very unfluid experience, requiring multiple plugins and a setup process which was complicated even for me. It wasn't terrible, and it did work and I'm glad it exists but it's not something I would ever use on a daily basis, Plex just works better.
I'll admit I haven't tried Emby or Jellyfin (yet), and, I'm sure I will some day. Plex will probably add something which is truly objectionable or otherwise not disableable and I'll be compelled to switch but for now I'll stick with the fluid experience, even if it requires me to occasionally disable their new "features".
Kodi isn't a fork of the old school XBMC on Xbox, it's the direct continuation of the project. After they migrated their focus onto PC and other platforms the Xbox version was actually forked off into a separate codebase and dropped from the main project, but Kodi is the direct descendent/inheritor of the original XBMC.
I've been using it since it was still called XBMP, it really hasn't changed that much UI wise.
I tried Kodi for the PC. I turned on UPNP broadcast. It locked up. I had to kill it with task manager. I turned UPNP on on the Xbox XBMC a few weeks later. I had to reboot the OG Xbox. Both of these were about three months ago, they still have the same bugs.
The thing with Kodi is you set it once and then you pretty much forget about it. I'm not sure what plugins you need because for playing media off a SMB share or local drive it has everything included out-of-the-box. There is some configuration but, once again, its a one-time thing.
I've installed it on dozens of devices over the years (OG xbox, windows boxen, an nvidia shield, raspberry pi clones) and it is and has been amazingly consistent and low-maintenance.
I paid for Plex and have never seen any ads. I tried Jellyfin and required too much tinkering. If you spend more than an hour tinkering with Jellyfin it's worth it to pay for Plex lifetime and be done with it. A good example of this is using it say on an Apple TV or more niche devices.
That being said, I do like Jellyfin and it's fine for tinkerers. Things like sharing, watching together, etc are a huge pain with Jellyfin.
I recently got my own server, and I installed Jellyfin. The payment part of plex would not have been an issue, but all the remote parts are. I’m not selfhosting because I want to login through a remote website. Let me buy the software and give me a license key, like with desktop software.
The Jellyfin Android TV app is pretty much okay for me. The browsing interface seems to default to a phone UI, but that was easily fixed.
I have used Plex for about 12-13 years but am very very far from a power user. I find it mildly annoying I need to login but other than that I've not noticed anything that annoys me. I admit this is most likely due to how little I use it and how non-advanced that usage is. Given this, is there any value add to Jellyfin for someone like myself?
My read on this article is that it gets back to an earlier, more raw state of Plex. For my use case my interpretation is that would mean extra work for potentially lower quality, and unlikely any value add given that nothing annoys me about current Plex. Does that sound right?
> For my use case my interpretation is that would mean extra work for potentially lower quality, and unlikely any value add given that nothing annoys me about current Plex.
Here's a positive example from my experience from switching to plex to jellyfin. When I drop files into my movie/tv folder jellyfin automatically syncs the files whereas in plex I always had to go to the page and click a menu icon and then click sync folder. Maybe there's a way to do it in plex that I don't know about but jellyfin did it by default.
I also find the web version of the media player better on jellyfin. I hated the google auth login to plex, and so far jellyfin feels lighter weight.
Like you, I don't need advanced sharing options and or anything beyond a private website that I can play my movies/tv shows so plex always felt overkill.
Thanks for the info, didn't know that about Plex. A couple of a hours does not work with my workflow. I get a movie, add it to my media folder, and then I want to watch it, so I'm not surprised I missed it.
I believe config settings exist for Plex to be more aggressive. Alternatively if you use third party software like Radarr or Sonarr they can use webhooks to update instantly when media is added
as i said in my ancestor post i'm far from a power user. its quite likely i tweaked some setting several years ago and forgot about it. I put something in my flex drive and it's there within seconds.
Who has hardware for transcoding any more, and what hardware is modern for that?
Last dedicated hardware encoder I used was bad old days of MPEG2 for DVDs, but that went the way of the dodo when MPEG2 went native to the CPU. Never used hardware for h.264/5. I guess there was a board for J2k doing realtime lossless, but that was 2010ish.
So I'm legit curious what hardware transcoding looks like today, and that Plex charges for the pleasure
Why are you having to do realtime transcoding for streaming to devices? Why not just have a streaming version? Transcode one time at whatever speed, then it's ready for you whenever you want it anytime after that? Not that you can't do whatever you want to do with your own gear or anything. I've just never understood the desire for realtime encoding for everything
It's simpler and more space efficient to just transcode according to the desired quality setting and device profile of the viewer. Unless you're a large streaming service or have an extremely uniform profile of users it's not practical to store all the possible variants you might need to cover the full range of devices and stream qualities.
It would be interesting for there to be the option to see what formats your historical clients do support, allow selection of a set of them to generate a best common format list for, and all configuring your server to automatically transcode new content to some of those formats. I suspect many of us have a few high-quantity or quality-outlier consumers that it would be useful to be able to pre-transcode newer content, that's the most likely to be consumed, for.
Are you talking about manually pre-transcoding to a more streaming-friendly format? Since anyone taking about issues with transcoding is almost certainly talking about 4K formats (anything else is almost no load even on 10 year old hardware), I'd be interested to know what format you're picking that retains 4K Dolby Vision and/or HDR10 with the Atmos audio and is supported for more efficient non-transcoded transfer by the Plex client and server software. Certainly some are better but only work on specific clients, I haven't heard of a good efficient format that works on the majority of client devices.
> Why are you having to do realtime transcoding for streaming to devices?
Because I don't want multiple copies of the same thing wasting space on my drive? Cloud storage might be endlessly cheap, but local storage is still very finite.
Also, both my CPU and GPU have enough spare compute that they can do it without stressing out too much. I also might not watch something multiple times, and I might watch it across different devices and networks (not all of which support 4k), so paying the cost of compute + storage to generate the transcodes ahead of time doesn't make a lot of sense, especially if a movie gets watched once every 2 years or something.
I use it all the time. It allows me to keep the highest-quality videos (4k HDR) for my own use while allowing family to stream it to less capable devices by hardware transcoding and tone mapping. A mid-range 11th gen i5 handles it without a stutter. Got a Plex lifetime pass many years ago and I’ve never regretted it.
I regret getting a Plex lifetime pass because it created the situation where Plex had no reason to listen to me as a customer and give up being the #1 home media server so they could be the #4312th gateway to all the off brand streaming services.
not trolling at all. i just don't think of the GPU as that. probably silly on my part, but as stated, i come from the world of expensive dedicated encoding devices vs generic parts of a computer you already have.
It represents parts of the CPU optimized to transcode video. The newer CPUs support HEVC/h265 which would otherwise introduce a huge load on a machine when done in a normal CPU.
Having the "hardware transcoder" as part of the chip means you can transcode huge videos without consuming huge amounts of system resources.
Jellyfin includes this, or more accurately exposes the ffmpeg implementation of this, whereas Plex charges for it.
Sure, it is available, but _why_? For years and years now, even low end devices are perfectly capable of playing media over a network without transcoding being required? Why do people think they need transcoding? Are they streaming to ancient video game consoles from their PCs? I mean, it was helpful when I was streaming to a PS2, but that's a long time ago, now.
I use hardware transcoding, and don't want to pay the 'Plex Tax' for doing so. It was pretty simple to configure Jellyfin with hardware transcoding. I use an Nvidia Quadro P400, which can transcode nearly anything thrown at it.
There’s no cloud services in Jellyfin. You have to set up a VPN on your server, and an account for them on the VPN, plus create a user account for them on Jellyfin. It’s not impossible, but it’s more work.
I think it's funny everyone is complaining about Plex forcing you to sign in... and the first thing Jellyfin does when you click "see it in action" is force you to sign in. Just saying...
you are comparing jellyfin's online demo and its requirement to "login" to show you how it works and how it supports multiple accounts vs plex's inability to use the app if you dont login to servers hosted by Plex?
Once i install jellyfin, the only "login" is to my own server, and this is because by default jellyfin supports multiple users unlike Plex which requires a membership to enable this feature.
>When I looked into Jellyfin last year, the main problems were:
>- Can't connect to people's existing Plex servers.
that isnt what you wrote is it?
you looked at jellyfin last year and listed that it did not support connecting to plex as a "problem". Why would you think that jellyfin not connecting to plex is a problem?
> Why would you think that jellyfin not connecting to plex is a problem?
A problem can have no obvious solution, yet still be a problem. If you want to use existing Plex servers, then that makes migrating to Jellyfin problematic.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadI think most products go through phases like this. Plex has some diehards that have stuck around (I think it's just buyers remorse for the Plex pass) but I think they are at a 5th or 6th tier of "customer" at this point, seeing the continuous churn spiral they are fighting.
Not only that, I don't want my adblocker to have to block services running on my local network (they have some analytics + sentry).
I’m asking out of laziness.. my local server has pi hole set up, and the other devices use that for DNS thru Tailscale, but I’m not sure what gets blocked for stuff running on the server. I recall some Tailscale setup involved a flag to disable some DNS thing. Hmmm
As far as the web client goes ublock origin handles it for me.
The only potential blocker I can see is whether the HDMI streaming device makes HTTP requests, in which case it would need to use the Tailscale proxy, and I'm not sure if that's supported.
Everything just works and I never really notice those three submenus except when I'm logging into a new device and it takes like ~10 seconds to unpin them. Everything has been basically perfect for me.
> I never really notice those three submenus except when I'm logging into a new device and it takes like ~10 seconds to unpin them.
Maybe it's just me, but the way you've written these sentences makes it sound like you have buyers remorse. Doesn't sound like things are "basically perfect."
FWIW, I left Plex two years ago for Jellyfin, and haven't looked back. Never even bought the garbage Plex Pass.
> It's so close to basically no issues
There are issues. You can keep contradicting yourself by explaining how perfect means there are still problems. I'm enjoying it.
I don't think you understand what I mean. Plex has worked perfectly for two years straight. These 2 issues have taken up less than ~2 minutes of my life. That is equivalent to perfect from my point of view. Stop being unreasonably pedantic about my own words.
I'm taking your words at face value, you can communicate more clearly but it is your choice to do so.
Do any of the competing solutions work with Sonos and have iOS and webOS (LG TV) apps?
Edit: also, last I checked, Tizen still has no Twitch app, which is a bigger problem since Twitch had Samsung remove the unofficial one. I don't really like Twitch much, but still. YouTube's Android app is also better than it's Tizen app, even on low-end Android TV sticks.
I've been running it for a while now and it's actually pretty good, I haven't had any major issues except one freeze when searching, but I'm pretty sure that was the fault of the raspberry pi running jellyfin
[1] https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-tizen
It requires some terminal stuff, but only for installation.
https://github.com/e7d/docker-jellyfin-for-tizen-installer
I don't really agree. I've been using Jellyfin for a while now (basically as soon as Emby went commercial) and I find it definitively nicer to browse than Plex. I just prefer the way the UI is structured, and my collections are still manageable enough that navigating with arrows is usable. I admit it probably could be improved, for larger collections, but it doesn't seem unusually bad to me personally.
My media is completely ad-free.
I remember starting with XBMC, which had the most beautiful theme's/skins that were really well optimised for the console experience, and there were many of them, all for free.
And now I'm paying for a Plex pass and everything is becoming more clunky and less usable each year, such a shame.
Telling your home router to forward 445 is not that hard. Usinf minupnpc or just building in auto-port forwarding would be better. Alas I've seen some isp's block users from connecting to 445, which seems insane (my ispets me host there, but my parents isp blocks me from dialing home?!). So I often forward on another port (ex: 4445) and then everything works fine.
The main problem why the obvious "just use computers" problems doesnt work is... Android. Phones. These incressingly user-hostile anti-general-purpose-computing systems. Some of my media players still work with the 2017 code drom of the Android Samba Provider, but it uses old Android APIs so many media players wont work with it. I have no idea if Android still makes filesystem providers possible at all, but we havent seen any, and this one old one-time-drop artifact remains the only example I know of it ever having beem done ever on Android. But then again I really have had no interest in Box/Azure Drives/whatever... it'd be interesting/great to know if anyone does remote drives on android today. It feels wild that we have so much bespoke special software for remote media serving... when we have seemingly so little that does the general job.
https://github.com/google/samba-documents-provider
Ideally upnp/dlna should also somehow be an option too, but it assumes secure private networks I think? I'd love if it could be exposed publicly but locked down but it does all use mdns. And Tailscale's the only company on the planet who seemingly has the sense to extend our homenet's reach quickly/easily.
This does not provide the same feature set as Jellyfin and others like it provide. An important omission is server-side transcoding; if I upload 4K content to my instance I might want to be able to watch it from an Airbnb with a subpar connection.
Keeping track of things I've watched (regardless of which device), auto playing the next episode, automatically fetching metadata and subtitles, being able to share collections with friends are some other features I enjoy from Jellyfin that most players don't do out of the box.
Sure, you could rig up a bunch of different programs to do something more or less comparable, but that would be a bunch of extra work for the server operator and would ultimately provide a worse experience.
Also, don't expose windows shares to the internet.
Is this a problem? I feel like this reputation is 10 years out of date.
Personally I use smbd & I am not afraid for it. I'd like to tell Windows users the dame, provided I trust them to disallow all but logged in users.
1. Harden the operating system
2. Actively monitor logs, and apply updates upon release
3. Put a Firewall with IDS/IPS between the server and the internet (which most home "routers" do not provide)
you should not put anything on the wider internet, instead using something like tailscale (which you mention in another post) to create a secured private network across unsecured inet
I've gone through every CVE for Samba & there seemingly is 1 potential problem since 2007 that would possibly potentially be an issue for a basic non-domaim controller smbd fileshare that a random non-user could possibly exploit. If you dont trust your users, there's indeed some CVEs of real threat, but still, like... 4.. https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-102/...
Yes you probably should update fairly regularly, just in case. But more often than not, if you are a couple years behind, it's not a problem. Maybe someday that goes bad. But... so far... being super lax on updates generally hasnt had much impact. Maybe check logs every now and then, but honestly... once you have some confidence, it's fine. This stuff runs fine. It's easy.
(at least compared to caddy or wireguard...)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/smb-zero-day-...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2513099/new-windows-ze...
And as someone who used to watch over SSHFS for years... the biggest feature of things like Jellyfin/Plex is automatically remembering what I'm watching and where I am. Admittedly it's mostly an issue if you watch shows instead of movies (I'm never going to remember which episode of 52 episodes I'm on) but having the app remember is so much better than updating a wiki page/text file/whatever manually as to where I am so I know where to restart watching (which I've accidentally messed up before. Very fun to watch stuff out of order and be like "wut....").
Speaking of dlna... it's kind of awful (at least years ago when I tried to use minidlna with my TV). It's way better to just get a Linux mini PC and hook that up to the TV and let the TV be a monitor.
(Also yeah, I wish we had a better than Android option for phones... https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ exists if you want to throw a bunch of money at it, not sure if there's a whole lot better)
The appeal is being able to have some network connections to other people's media servers too. Making the media server less of the primary focus is a shift, & handling media-providers as replaceable modular systems would be a step up, & is essential for group-usage to evolve; something we technically cant really do effectively now.
I do very much see your point that Jellyfin has a lot of good capabilities for media-watching. I'm stillfeeling strongly like media providing/serving is a different role tham media consuming, that many of these responsibilities could shift to a more local-centric android or tv app that expects you to have used general file sharing systems to coonnect up.
Good discussion thanks. Shout out to the other mention of transcoding, which definitely plays a part too. Setting up a fuse mount to transcode your stuff to a given quality & them file-sharing that too would be doable & still "generic" versus a specific media-sharing system like this, but yeah, it's more into the cobbling stuff together realm.
And there are FUSE filesystems that do transcoding, but they have really weird limitations because of FUSE and wouldn't let you change bitrate during a watch based on network conditions (if you're the kind of person to watch shows on a phone on LTE on a subway for instance).
Even though I selfhost (some things) I am very biased towards more "centralized" stuff (aka serve off the NAS in my house and let most stuff be web clients/thin clients) because of the seamless experience... I very commonly go from using an app on my phone to the same app on my desktop to on my laptop when I travel and even on my tablet or my TV and if everything just works the same it's all so much better then having to deal with weird oddities because maybe read status doesn't work or some metadata doesn't show up properly or whatever.
(or in other words just cobble stuff together ~once and then let all the other devices use the result)
At first I thought this was sarcasm...
Dont do not... putting samba or any other SMB server on the wider internet is a bad bad idea. It is a good way to get your system compromised.
>>& tablets should just be able to connect over SMB
The draw of Emby, Plex, and jellyfin is not just to file browse and open up files
They Provide Meta Data about the Media, Play Series in proper order, Allow you to see rankings, Ratings, provides Art, etc and most importantly Keeps track of play history on a per user basis.
SMB would not do any of this.
>>Tailscale's the only company on the planet who seemingly has the sense to extend our homenet's reach quickly/easily.
Yes and no. VPN's have been used by home users for a long time, and tailscale is far from the only company / project doing what they do [1]. Tailscale was made possible do to a new(ish) VPN protocol (wiregaurd) that is very light weight and secure, previous VPN systems like OpenVPN would not be able to support something like tailscale
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/910766/
Fearmongering FUDdy advice thats a decade old now. There's nothing in this 10 year old post that seems relevant today, from what I can tell. People just cannot give up their fear! Get over it.
https://superuser.com/a/311664
Post a real reply if you have it but dont just shit up a topic with insubstantiated terrormongering.
> They Provide Meta Data about the Media, Play Series in proper order, Allow you to see rankings, Ratings, provides Art, etc and most importantly Keeps track of play history on a per user basis. SMB would not do any of this.
Have you never used a media player on a phone? They all do this. I should be able to do this with files on my phone, or files shared with my phone. I dont see ehy custom software beyond a regular media playing app is warranted.
Except transcoding. That alone is a harder problem.
In reality cve's only get you so far and chances are you have left something open for some one to exploit and are right now probably sending out Nigerian Prince emails from your network or part of a ddos swarm or something like that.
One day I will see a post from you about how to buy some Bitcoin to unencrypt your files
As to "media apps on my phone". Consume media on multiple devices the least used on is my phone. Even if the app on the phone did that it would not translate to my Roku's, FireTVs, and other media devices, and they would not sync
Clutching of pearls yo. It's so not a big deal. Dont be driven by fear, dont sell fear.
Especially since it seems like everybody who wants plex pass already has it and just buy it once from their secret sale emails and then never give them a cent again.
I'm still waiting for the Plex Original Series to start being produced. (ok not that)
The upper bound is roughly anyone who enjoys watching TV/movies, and owns a computer.
Or you could go with ripping dvds you legally purchase at Goodwill.
[1] https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/
Apart from this one issue, I didn't feel anything missing. It's quite good. I don't see a reason to use plex over jellyfin unless you want some of their paid features.
You should buy a TV. They’re cheap and great.
https://youtu.be/wKiIroiCvZ0
You store your markdown files locally and then copy them to your hosted blog.
Their stack is primarily comprised of other independent open source projects. The one component that isn't is their "realtime" server that serves updates from postgres' WAL over websockets, but that is open sourced[0] under Apache 2.0. From my understanding the primary part that has not been open sourced is their database browser / web UI. There are plenty of alternative management tools for postgres though. As you can export your database what else would you need to ensure your portability and independence?
Granted they make their docs fairly opaque for trying to self host. Presumably to encourage you to just use their hosted service. Hosting open sourced projects seems like a very ecosystem friendly way of monetizing.
[0] https://github.com/supabase/realtime
FYI, this is also open source: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/studio
I only lose the convenience of Obsidian, not the data I spent years building.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33561876
> They start out great but as financial constraints creep in
Funny how you talk about financial constraints, and still refuse to pay for software.
(The dichotomy between "I must earn a gazillion dollars because I'm a senior dev" and "I will not pay money (that pays those salaries) for software" that's so prevalent on HN is mind boggling)
And there are significantly more projects that have stagnated and disappeared than those that survived.
- development costs money
- workplaces cost money
- people want to eat
You can pay for Plex with money (Plex Pass). And while I sort of dislike them pushing their own content and monetization, it can be easily switched off in settings.
As long as they have something to keep them above poverty line: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html (among other articles, the question of how free open source isn't sustainable is discussed often)
Every month or three when I login to the web interface there's Some New Thing which I need to disable.
Recently I needed a 100% offline-capable media player (and while Plex would probably work, it's not 100% reliable) and tried with Kodi.
It's a very unfluid experience, requiring multiple plugins and a setup process which was complicated even for me. It wasn't terrible, and it did work and I'm glad it exists but it's not something I would ever use on a daily basis, Plex just works better.
I'll admit I haven't tried Emby or Jellyfin (yet), and, I'm sure I will some day. Plex will probably add something which is truly objectionable or otherwise not disableable and I'll be compelled to switch but for now I'll stick with the fluid experience, even if it requires me to occasionally disable their new "features".
I would appreciate a simpler batteries included media center software in that theme.
I've been using it since it was still called XBMP, it really hasn't changed that much UI wise.
I've installed it on dozens of devices over the years (OG xbox, windows boxen, an nvidia shield, raspberry pi clones) and it is and has been amazingly consistent and low-maintenance.
That being said, I do like Jellyfin and it's fine for tinkerers. Things like sharing, watching together, etc are a huge pain with Jellyfin.
The Jellyfin Android TV app is pretty much okay for me. The browsing interface seems to default to a phone UI, but that was easily fixed.
Share network folder, and done.
My read on this article is that it gets back to an earlier, more raw state of Plex. For my use case my interpretation is that would mean extra work for potentially lower quality, and unlikely any value add given that nothing annoys me about current Plex. Does that sound right?
Here's a positive example from my experience from switching to plex to jellyfin. When I drop files into my movie/tv folder jellyfin automatically syncs the files whereas in plex I always had to go to the page and click a menu icon and then click sync folder. Maybe there's a way to do it in plex that I don't know about but jellyfin did it by default.
I also find the web version of the media player better on jellyfin. I hated the google auth login to plex, and so far jellyfin feels lighter weight.
Like you, I don't need advanced sharing options and or anything beyond a private website that I can play my movies/tv shows so plex always felt overkill.
See this article:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200289306-scanning-vs-refre...
Last dedicated hardware encoder I used was bad old days of MPEG2 for DVDs, but that went the way of the dodo when MPEG2 went native to the CPU. Never used hardware for h.264/5. I guess there was a board for J2k doing realtime lossless, but that was 2010ish.
So I'm legit curious what hardware transcoding looks like today, and that Plex charges for the pleasure
Because I don't want multiple copies of the same thing wasting space on my drive? Cloud storage might be endlessly cheap, but local storage is still very finite.
Also, both my CPU and GPU have enough spare compute that they can do it without stressing out too much. I also might not watch something multiple times, and I might watch it across different devices and networks (not all of which support 4k), so paying the cost of compute + storage to generate the transcodes ahead of time doesn't make a lot of sense, especially if a movie gets watched once every 2 years or something.
1. My phone 2. My wife's phone 3. My Tablet 4. My TV
They each have different screen geometries and even my tablet has two profiles really, local streaming at home or playing downloaded media on trips.
So I could transcode everything to 5 different formats and store it, or just transcode on demand and not worry about it.
Hardware transcoding is available with modern GPU:s.
VAAPI is in Intel chips: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...
It represents parts of the CPU optimized to transcode video. The newer CPUs support HEVC/h265 which would otherwise introduce a huge load on a machine when done in a normal CPU.
Having the "hardware transcoder" as part of the chip means you can transcode huge videos without consuming huge amounts of system resources.
Jellyfin includes this, or more accurately exposes the ffmpeg implementation of this, whereas Plex charges for it.
TO LOG IN: User "demo", empty password
you are comparing jellyfin's online demo and its requirement to "login" to show you how it works and how it supports multiple accounts vs plex's inability to use the app if you dont login to servers hosted by Plex?
Once i install jellyfin, the only "login" is to my own server, and this is because by default jellyfin supports multiple users unlike Plex which requires a membership to enable this feature.
nonsense.
- Can't connect to people's existing Plex servers.
- Can't just invite someone without storing their password on my server. No support for (e.g.) OAuth2.
Right, Jellyfin has nothing to do with Plex other than competing with it. It's not a Plex client.
This is such a weird thing to write.
I was shocked to learn that very nice seat from my ex-wife's Lexus wont fit in my Hyundai?
Is the opposite true, can the plex client connect to jellyfin?
Plex and Jellyfin are competitive, why is there some implied compatibility?
>When I looked into Jellyfin last year, the main problems were: >- Can't connect to people's existing Plex servers.
that isnt what you wrote is it?
you looked at jellyfin last year and listed that it did not support connecting to plex as a "problem". Why would you think that jellyfin not connecting to plex is a problem?
A problem can have no obvious solution, yet still be a problem. If you want to use existing Plex servers, then that makes migrating to Jellyfin problematic.