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From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

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71–80 of 348 posts

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#71
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody wants to deal with third party downtime Not only that, I don't want my adblocker to have to block services running on my local network (they have some analytics + sentry).

Does this require any special set up? 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.

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#72
post #47

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…

If you don't want to pay for Plex then you don't have hardware transcoding. This is of course free in Jellyfin.

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#73
post #2

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…

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.

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#74
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

Both Jellyfin and Plex sync by default automatically but Plex’s default was a few hours or so.

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.

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> there's only so many people interested in running their own illegal piracy server The upper bound is roughly anyone who enjoys watching TV/movies, and owns a computer.

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.

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#76
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Obsidian the thing that made me ok with this was it's all just markdown. I have all my data stored locally in an ubiquitous file format

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".

Yup and that is my problem with startups like supabase too. I have just started using pocketbase for that reason.

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#77

I've considered moving from Plex to Jellyfin (or some other offering in the space), but I don't think anything can really compete with Plex. Plex, for me, required quite a bit of fiddling, but once you get it working it works _very_ well. There are decent-quality apps on every platform you want to use. There's a whole lot of software that integrates with Plex from things like requesting/adding new media to monitoring…

I dunno, the things you say about Plex I would also say about jellyfin: requires a bit of fiddling, works very well, not always perfect. Jellyfin has bugs, but it's free and works for my use cases, and improves quickly. I like that I can, and have, compiled jellyfin from source when there was a bugfix for one of the features I use that hadn't made it into a point release yet.

I think all software comes with trade-offs and frustrations. It sounds like, for my uses, Plex would trade in a different set of frustrations plus cost money and be closed source.

So I guess it depends what you mean by "compete with" Plex, because for me, it's more like I haven't found anything that competes with jellyfin.

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#78
Tried Jellyfin, but it doesn’t seem to have the capability to stream directly to my TV, it always wants to transcode it which strips away all the 4K and HDR niceties. While Plex would try its best to preserve the original stream and only transcode what the TV can’t support.

Also Plex’s clients are more polished, it actually feels like I’m browsing my own Netflix.

You can always turn off third party content in Plex (by unpinning them). I only use Plex locally so maybe that’s why I’ve been missing all the cloudy bloat lol.

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#79
post #78

Tried Jellyfin, but it doesn’t seem to have the capability to stream directly to my TV, it always wants to transcode it which strips away all the 4K and HDR niceties. While Plex would try its best to preserve the original stream and only transcode what the TV can’t support. Also Plex’s clients are more polished, it actually feels like I’m browsing my own Netflix. You can always turn off third party content in Plex (b…

Use a fire TV stick that costs virtually nothing and install the Jellyfin app. You are done.

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#80

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.

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.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33561876

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