I tried Jellyfin after some frustration with Plex and found it an inferior relative to Plex so I'm still on Plex. Lifetime Plex Pass is the solution here for now given Plex has not clawed back any features and in fact has added features to the pass.
I switched to Jellyfin and also don't regret it. I agree the quality is lower, BUT that sacrifice in this case was worth it given Plex's shitty track record. If any of y'all are interested in helping the Jellyfin project, that would be dope!
I've stopped paying for software outside of games almost entirely. SaaS is a universally terrible UX and it's impossible to actually purchase software anymore. Especially with local LLMs around to smooth out all the rough edges when it comes to FOSS life is good. The experience of never waking up to having something be worse off than it was before is sublime.
I worry I over-index on my desire for control but it's just so so nice to have my tools work every day and never break, and never change under me and just always do the thing they are supposed to do.
Every time I hear of people complaining about paying for software I wonder what people on here do for a living. Is everyone on here getting paid for developing software that’s free?
It's not that people are even mad about paying for software, it's that paid-for software is often worse in unique ways that free software is not! Which is maybe shocking, but not so shocking when one considers that money intrinsicly corrupts everything it touches as it re-aligns incentives.
For example, a lot of paid for software actively disrespects the user. A lot of paid for software degrades in quality over time. A lot of paid for software has far too many ads. A lot of paid for software loses features over time. And on and on. In my experience, that's just not the case in open-source land.
I donate for virtually all my open-source software, usually a lot. To me, it's not just that KDE is free and Windows costs money for instance. It's that Windows sucks major donkey dick and fucks its own customers up the ass, and, on top of it, continues to degrade, whereas KDE is amazing software that gets better and better by the day.
I do not want to be in a business relationship with a company for a trivial amount of money, be it $29.99/yr or $69.99/yr or $249.99 lifetime. None of that is real money. You have no leverage, you do not own your own destiny. Complaining about the price hike is missing the whole point - Plex does not care about any individual customer, and that's the real problem (and the problem with just about every B2C business).
Plex started out great for us Boxee users left in the cold, but the writing was on the wall when they started offering rentals. Product development has hit a wall in the last two years. While its UI isn't as intricate, Infuse does a fantastic job of transcoding higher bitrate 1080 content over LAN and WAN, where Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby just stutter. The Plex AppleTV app hasn't received material updates in what seems like years - they haven't even rolled out the Liquid Glass effect like Infuse has.
I would abandon Plex completely, but I still haven't found a capable app to remotely stream the 2.5TB of music on my Synology. Their recent price hike a few months ago converted me from a $5/mo Plex Pass customer to a $120 lifetime customer. I sense a new product tier in the works that us lifetime customers won't have access to without shelling out more.
As expected and as is usual I’ve read through another very salty justification for using Jellyfin that is based on anger or idealism. I rarely if ever see anyone making the argument that Jellyfin is actually materially better usability-wise. it’s always, “Plex is going down the shitter, you’ll see!”. OK then, if Jellyfin becomes better, then i’ll switch. isn’t the point that I own the media, so i can switch to whatever i want, whenever i want? Which to me is, when Jellyfin is better for my use-case. So many people act like this is like placing a bet on your favourite sports team. Like If one piece of software eventually gets bad then it was never worth using at all. We’re all going to die, eventually, so by that logic neither Plex nor Jellyfin would be worth using.
I'm still using Plex. It still seems to be better for 90% of my use cases but I'd like to switch eventually. Unfortunately Jellyfin seems to be a lot of work upfront for which I don't currently have the time or motivation.
If you want to install install docker engine (super simple instructions on docker's website) then if you make a directory and put the compose file below in it (you can call it whatever but docker-compose.yaml is a convention choice) and create another directory in that directory named "jellyfin" the below compose file will work mostly out of the box. you just run docker compose up -d in the directory. If you named the compose file something else you just need to specify -f filenameofcompose in the run command. I included an nfs mount example you can delete if you aren't using nfs mount (the volumes: head and examplenfsmount at the bottom) or adjust it/copy it for your nas situation. If you have your media locally mounted on the computer you are doing this on you can change out the xamplenfsmount for /path to your files. you can also duplicate that line for any other paths to media on your system/nfs/etc. once it's up you just go to http://ipofthebox:8096/jellyfin in a web browser and follow the prompts. It's not too bad at all to get going. I'm out of time to check you might not need /jellyfin in the url. if the first line doesn't work try it without /jellyfin
services:
jellyfin-jellyfin:
container_name: jellyfin
image: jellyfin/jellyfin:latest
environment:
user: 1000.100 #change this if you want your user to not be 1000 and your group to not be 100 should be fine in most cases.
TZ: America/Chicago #change me to your timezeone
volumes:
- examplenfsmount:/mnt/movies:ro
- ./jellyfin:/config
Its way better for my use cases. Super easy to get the newly unshitified linux client autoloading on bazzite.flirc remote is awesome, not having my data exfiltrated to the cloud to be sold to the hi-hest bidder while charging me for that denigration also super awesome.
The article misses a couple points:
- sharing. With plex this is easy using plex accounts
- 3rd party integrations. There’s a whole ecosystem around plex.
- a lot of things that are built in into plex are either not available in jellyfin or are offered as (no longer maintained) plugins
- clients are far from the quality one needs
I want to like jellyfin or any other option, it is disappointing people still have too many complaints, so I know it’s still not worth the time.
Ultimately Plex is just fancy wrapper on ffmpeg and some media index/scraper, library management, and then native device apps. It’s crazy that something like jellyfin still hasn’t improved well enough.
Jellyfin is so much ahead when it comes to hardware acceleration on different platforms that it is actually sad to see how Plex has not made any improvements in years
If all you want is to watch your videos over the net, you're better off not using either. Just put it on a shared drive and install VLC.
Complaining about a one-time payment for software backed by a team of lawyers in an age where farts are patented and opposing farts are sent CnD letters, is crazy.
Nearly a decade after my investment, I can stand up as many Plex servers as I want with free relay services, metadata aggregation, trailers, and extras. Not to mention access to all of my music in the same manner. Better yet, it's all curated in accounts for various family members near and distant.
Plex also takes me as long as it takes to install the OS and applicable software (+3s for ufw rule). –It just works.
Maybe Jellyfin has that now. But I hate plugins. Either have it or don't. F** your DLC.
Glad i got Plex pass at the old ~$100 price years ago. Honestly I've had such few issues with Plex it's basically one of the only applications I've willingly bought and not regretted. And with the costs of everything on earth climbing I'm sure their bills are growing too. So it goes.
I've never been convinced that Jellyfin will be an improvement, like at all, let alone one that would be worth all the headache of migrating Tunarr and Seerr and the rest, and trying to keep my watch data, and the risk of all my family's TV and mobile clients becoming tech support liabilities for me. Honestly the fact the Plex apps are on every platform and keep getting updates is worth the money for me
> I’m all for paying for a service that offers fair value
They say, about not paying for a product to let them stream pirated content from other services:D. I’m annoyed by all the various streaming services too but at some point you just gotta admit you don’t want to pay for anything regardless of value.
23 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 29.0 ms ] threadI worry I over-index on my desire for control but it's just so so nice to have my tools work every day and never break, and never change under me and just always do the thing they are supposed to do.
For example, a lot of paid for software actively disrespects the user. A lot of paid for software degrades in quality over time. A lot of paid for software has far too many ads. A lot of paid for software loses features over time. And on and on. In my experience, that's just not the case in open-source land.
I donate for virtually all my open-source software, usually a lot. To me, it's not just that KDE is free and Windows costs money for instance. It's that Windows sucks major donkey dick and fucks its own customers up the ass, and, on top of it, continues to degrade, whereas KDE is amazing software that gets better and better by the day.
I would abandon Plex completely, but I still haven't found a capable app to remotely stream the 2.5TB of music on my Synology. Their recent price hike a few months ago converted me from a $5/mo Plex Pass customer to a $120 lifetime customer. I sense a new product tier in the works that us lifetime customers won't have access to without shelling out more.
I'm still using Plex. It still seems to be better for 90% of my use cases but I'd like to switch eventually. Unfortunately Jellyfin seems to be a lot of work upfront for which I don't currently have the time or motivation.
services: jellyfin-jellyfin: container_name: jellyfin image: jellyfin/jellyfin:latest environment: user: 1000.100 #change this if you want your user to not be 1000 and your group to not be 100 should be fine in most cases. TZ: America/Chicago #change me to your timezeone volumes: - examplenfsmount:/mnt/movies:ro - ./jellyfin:/config
volumes: examplenfsmount: driver: local driver_opts: type: "nfs" o: "addr=YOURNASIP,nolock,soft" device: ":/YOURNASMOUNT"Ultimately Plex is just fancy wrapper on ffmpeg and some media index/scraper, library management, and then native device apps. It’s crazy that something like jellyfin still hasn’t improved well enough.
Complaining about a one-time payment for software backed by a team of lawyers in an age where farts are patented and opposing farts are sent CnD letters, is crazy.
Nearly a decade after my investment, I can stand up as many Plex servers as I want with free relay services, metadata aggregation, trailers, and extras. Not to mention access to all of my music in the same manner. Better yet, it's all curated in accounts for various family members near and distant.
Plex also takes me as long as it takes to install the OS and applicable software (+3s for ufw rule). –It just works.
Maybe Jellyfin has that now. But I hate plugins. Either have it or don't. F** your DLC.
I've never been convinced that Jellyfin will be an improvement, like at all, let alone one that would be worth all the headache of migrating Tunarr and Seerr and the rest, and trying to keep my watch data, and the risk of all my family's TV and mobile clients becoming tech support liabilities for me. Honestly the fact the Plex apps are on every platform and keep getting updates is worth the money for me
They say, about not paying for a product to let them stream pirated content from other services:D. I’m annoyed by all the various streaming services too but at some point you just gotta admit you don’t want to pay for anything regardless of value.