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The Corporate Creep of Plex: Why it may be time to move to Jellyfin

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Re: The Corporate Creep of Plex: Why it may be time to move to Jellyfin

#51
Weird article.

Not only does it acknowledges that Plex is still far better than Jellyfin with its whole ecosystem, but it also depict pretty nicely the entitlement of the users overall.

On one side, they paid $75 more than five years ago for a piece of software for which they still receive weekly updates. On the other, they talk about how leadership at Jellyfin decided to throw the blanket after a burning themselves out for free.

Up till now, Plex kept their promise regarding the Lifetime pass: we still receive updates, we still have all the features. So, unless they change that, they haven't broken their promise. It seems only fair from them to try to run a sustainable business, which you can do without renewed income. They have to find money. They raise subscription price: no impact on existing Lifetime pass owners. They add ad-supported features: no impact on existing Lifetime pass owners. I don't see a single add wherever I access my Plex library, I have hidden their "free" library. I still have 100% of the features I had when I bought the Lifetime pass. Except that I have now access to more features.

Sure, nobody forced them to say "Lifetime", but I don't see how I could be mad if they decided to release a completely new version that is out of the Lifetime scope. I would still have access to the old one, but if I was interested in the new one, I would have to move to one of their new plans, that looks more sustainable in the long run.

Plex is still the easiest one to use for regular user or for the people, like me, that act as IT support for their family and friends, and don't want to spend their evenings and weekends tweaking their aunt's TV just for the sake of using Open Source software.

Re: The Corporate Creep of Plex: Why it may be time to move to Jellyfin

#52
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are the pain points I experienced moving from Plex to Jellyfin a while ago: - Jellyfin forced me to organize my files into Show/Season folders, whereas Plex just handled my original flat mess of scattered files. - When playing video on Plex, I generally have to wait some time before subtitles show up, whereas the subtitles in Plex just show up immediately - Plex has built in search for openly available subtitle…

> Jellyfin forced me to organize my files into Show/Season folders Regarding this, try out sonarr/radarr with hard links.

Does sonarr/radarr fix not having to use Show/Season structure?

Re: The Corporate Creep of Plex: Why it may be time to move to Jellyfin

#53
post #49

Silo is a new up and coming competitor, also completely open source and written in go, and has full Postgres support from the get-go, along with proper architecture decisions to allow transcoding across multiple hosts. The vision of Silo appears to be much more clear, and has quite a few great devs behind it. It also has features to run side by side and has full JF api support. I have no involvement in the project, j…

> and has full Postgres support from the get-go I was like: why should I care? Then I went on siloserver's website and I was even more confused. What made the success of Plex is how easy it is to setup, how nice it looks and how easy it is to use. Siloserver's marketing miss all those points because they focus on the tech stack, don't show a single picture of the UI and don't demonstrate the UX. Even as someone who u…

As I mentioned it’s pretty new and the server doesn’t even have a tagged or release version yet. Take a look at the repo activity: https://github.com/Silo-Server/silo-server/graphs/commit-act...

Marketing is not really the important bit at the moment when they’re working on building things from the ground up.

I was just mentioning it because it’s a new contender to the space, changing the status quo. Always a good thing in the OSS world.

Re: The Corporate Creep of Plex: Why it may be time to move to Jellyfin

#54
I've been a paying Emby user for close to ten years, ever since plex tried to launch a VR player or some shit, while there were still critical bugs in the player for web and other devices.

Emby just works, it's players are great, and issues actually get fixed. I know it's a closed source fork of XBMC, I know that's controversial, but the product itself is just so good.

Re: The Corporate Creep of Plex: Why it may be time to move to Jellyfin

#58

For those curious to see Jellyfin in action https://demo.jellyfin.org/stable/web/#/home Username is demo, PW is blank Also, I've been running jellyfin for many years, I've had no issues

Looks and feels like an Android app from 10 years ago and all this hides whatever setup and management went into getting this going. Plex Just Works, and is very easy on the eyes.

Re: The Corporate Creep of Plex: Why it may be time to move to Jellyfin

#59
post #16

This was always going to be the fate of Plex. You can’t build a sustainable business off the back of most of your users viewing pirated content. I say that without judgement, it’s just a reality. Open source was always going to be the path.

I’ve always figured recurring costs require recurring revenue.

That killer remote user connection brokering can’t be free, right?

Re: The Corporate Creep of Plex: Why it may be time to move to Jellyfin

#60
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. Swiftfin: https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin

a) It's not official, or even recommended at https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients b) I would never use an app that used VLC for playback.

It’s there. jellyfin.org/downloads/clients/all/

And it’s in their repo.

It seems to be status “official beta” and closing in on a new release with a considerable amount of rework done.

I’m running a local build deployed to my appletv and it’s working fine.

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