Man I am so grateful for this project, I was afraid it would feel polished enough after having been with Plex for the last few years. But hot damn Jellyfin is so much better and keeps on giving!
I plan on switching regardless but let's say I was on the fence... Aside from it not being owned by a for-profit company, why is Jellyfin better than Plex?
Plex is focused on making money, whether that is from the sale of your data or selling you products. Jellyfin is a community-driven project, so its focus is just on being better because it exists.
With Jellyfin, it’s truly self-hosting as opposed to leveraging a third party to do some of the legwork. Plex “offers” more, but it all comes at the cost of your data, or your data+an actual fee.
Jellyfin is available directly on most newer TV stores, iOS/Apple TV, Android, Chromecast, Fire stick, and Roku. It already takes some work to set up your media library in the relevant structures, so if you’re going to do the work anyway for a self-hosting option, why pay Plex extra for what Jellyfin can do for free since it is an open-source project?
why pay Plex extra for what Jellyfin can do for free since it is an open-source project?
One big reason for me is that I got Plex lifetime on sale for like 70 bucks and it comes with a discount on Tidal, something I already paid for. With the discount after about 1 year and 2 months I've gotten my Plex Pass value out of Tidal alone. Oh and the paid features for PlexAmp are also really nice to use for the point where I barely use the Tidal app anymore.
There's STILL not a great option for AppleTV. I bit the bullet years ago and have a lifetime infuse option. But that's not really any different than how I paid (also years ago) for a lifetime Plex Pass too.
There is no official support for LG TVs running WebOS 5 or older (which is pretty much any one made before like 2021 or 2022, mine is from 2018), you can add in one if you root the TV, but even in that case it's just a wrapper for the web UI. When Plex forced me to drop them (I had just moved everything to Hetzner), I lost a few users as well since they didn't have clients available for their older TVs. Of course this can easily be remedied by using a streaming stick/STB but the problem still exists.
I believe from last time I checked that it was more an issue of LG not approving the app to be listed rather than it not being available. It being a wrapper makes sense too on the older webOS apps as it's basically a PWA with some JS libs to interact with the TV.
I got a chrome cast because nordvpn didn't have an LG app and the jellyfin client works great on that. Still annoying it's not baked in though.
Honestly the clients for Plex are trash though. We had SO many issues with Plex and have almost none with Jellyfin. The only thing is Plex is a few more features than Jellyfin (one that comes to mind is an easy way to search for open subtitles to for a show without them hard-coded)
Jellyfin is 90% plex, and it's impressive how it comes forward in leaps and bounds, but it's not better than plex. People just appreciate it more.
If you only need that 90% that it does (and don't need things like intro detection, conversions, mobile sync, ass/sas subtitles), then you'll come away super happy with not having to pay plex and not being locked into plex.
It doesn't really do much over that 90%, it's just neat that the 90% isn't plex
Now that's the realistic answer I was looking for, thanks! Open source is really the only reason I want to switch. I bought the lifetime Plex pass like a decade ago so the cost doesn't bother me. The lack of mobile sync is a bummer though
You can run both, since you have Plex paid for anyway. Then you get the best of both worlds, and can maybe get new users on the jellyfin. If they catch that last 10% difference or Plex goes to shit, and jellyfin is a platform you like since you’ll have low-stakes experience with it, maybe you’ll eventually want to move everyone over.
Plus if one service goes down the other may still be up which is nice.
I have remote access for Jellyfin using a domain I purchased just for self-hosting. Using Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) and a dynamic IP service. NPM handles directing the incoming traffic to the correct server. I point a subdomain back to my Jellyfin server. When traveling, I install the Jellyfin app on a smart TV where I am staying, or connect my laptop to the TV and just use the web interface and my subdomain. I also use the Jellyfin android app to connect remotely using a phone or tablet.
At home all my TVs use a Roku and the Jellyfin Roku app to connect locally.
I want to use Jellyfin because of its awesome open source and how much effort the devs obviously put into it, but when I use Plex (lifetime pass for $80 back in 2020) I don’t have to do any of this crazy looking text you’ve typed here. I sign into my account, and it’s off to the races.
So, with that being said, for the people in the back like me who this may look like the most complicated stuff in the world just to get some streaming started, are there ANY easy methods to achieve this such as with Plex?
Short answer no.
Plex works by having a centralised server run by Plex themselves, that facilitates your client connecting to your server.
The external facing part of Jellyfin server is basically a web server, and it's a bad idea to expose that to the internet without putting a reverse proxy in front of it (hence the mention of NGINX above).
Another option is to have a VPN connection to where you are running Jellyfin and then only access Jellyfin pseudo locally (so potential security problems aren't a big concern). This introduces other complications if you want to access it remotely via things like Roku or Chromecast, especially if you have multiple external (and probably not tech savvy) users.
I want to stress that none of this is prohibitively expensive or hard, but doing it involves learning and effort.
All the information and programs you need are available online for free.
If you only wanted to use Jellyfin at home (server in the cupboard, client on the tv), none of this other stuff matters.
If you want to access Jellyfin remotely, and the idea of running a reverse proxy or a vpn server with the corresponding exposed ports and domain configuration sounds scary, Jellyfin is probably not for you.
That is unfortunate. Thank you for the in depth explanation for those of us on Lemmy who don’t know all there is to know about Linux/CLI/Networking!
I’m the only one who uses my Plex, so the real issue is that I don’t want to fiddle around with settings, proxies, or VPNs just to stream an audiobook through my phone while driving to work. Maybe in the future there will be a more simple self host setup for people like me. I’ll keep an eye on it to see how it progresses. Thanks again! 😁
Do you know if there's a good guide for setting that all up? I know all those words but I get nervous about trying to implement them all individually on my own.
I've been a Plex user for over a decade, I have a lifetime PlexPass, and I've also used Jellyfin for a few years. Like you said, Plex is better in the sense that it offers more, but they're also profit driven, which has become more annoying in the past few years.
Plex has way better logging than Jellyfin does, the latter suffers a lot from log spam, and the stack traces it produces when anything errors out are like 10-15 lines. They're not of use to end users, and there's no way to disable them/decrease the verbosity.
There's an option in sonarr to only create folders for shows when needed. That would at least help with the unaired shows. Also, I'm pretty sure when you choose to delete them from sonarr it deletes the folder too. And there's also the option in jellyfin to allow users to delete shows, you have to activate it per user.
There's a few reasons, but number one for me is how incredibly clean the UI is.
Plex is a mess. Half of it is just premium shit they're trying to convince you to use. The actual "stream my own media" functionality is buried at the bottom of the menus.
Trying to get nontechnical family to use Plex was always a challenge, just because of how busy it is. I've never had this problem since moving to Jellyfin.
Besides all the other stuff people mentioned, a concrete one is that you can stream TV via it for free vs Plex. Just add a TV tuner to it and away you go.
That's always been pretty much a niche though (and I know as a former HDHomerun and Kodi user) and over time more people just stream their media anyway.
People mentioned a lot of things. I'll add that plex doesn't offer hardware transcoding without premium. Now, setting up hardware transcoding on an NVidia graphics card on linux is a bit complicated, setting it up on windows is really simple. While it's not just clicking "enable hardware acceleration", it's not much more complicated than that.
Plex has a known and very old issue of improperly transcoding 5.1 audio to stereo and dropping the center channel. It makes movies seem super quiet. That's why I switched.
How can costs only be $600 / month. Do they not pay themselves? I guess that's admirable, but it doesn't set a good precedent. Will any young developers read this and internalize that they shouldn't ask for money? OSS maintainers deserve to get paid for their efforts.
Probably not worth the PR hit. There's at least tens of thousands, if not millions of dollars of development work in Jellyfin. (Sorry my order of magnitude isn't more precise.) Getting $2500 out of a developer budget may not be worth the accusations of being paid in hardware.
Not that I would complain, but I can see the logic. Imagine donating $200,000 worth of developer time and then being accused of doing it for the money because you got a $2100 laptop out of it.
I do wonder what the $300 was for. It's gotta be some kind of specific hardware component testing.
Totally agree, this honestly sounds a bit like putting principles before reason. Personally, I don't at all see why paying people for their work would make projects adhere any less to the "open source ethos", even though I hear this idea a lot. I think that in an ideal world, it should be possible to contribute to OSS projects full-time and make a living, financed by donations from dependants (including corporations) that profit off of the free software and have a vested interest in continued and rapid development of the project.
If you really don't want the money to reward contributors, why not pass it on to open-source dependencies of your project that are looking for funding? FOSS projects not scrambling for funding is pretty rare today unfortunately.
Oh for sure. I don't think anyone is arguing that they don't have the right to ask people to stop sending them money. But we can still criticize that position. I'm not sure they've thought through the message they are sending.
Yes completely agree. The cool thing about opencollective is the transparency - that should mean the core devs should be happy to pay themselves some money for their time. This is how projects sustain themselves IMHO.
Hard to believe, but there is still people out there doing thongs for fun or to make the world a better place.
Its very sad to think that all efforts shall be rewarded by money alone.
All the open source contributions I do, I do for free, just because I feel obliged to give back to the community, and I think its the right thing to do.
I don't condemn devs who want to make money out of open source, but I applause those who truly understand what is at the base of the concept of open source and are able to contribute for the fun or for the good of it.
I fully agree with everything you said. I too have contributed countless hours to open source for personal enjoyment or for the good of the community and never been paid a cent.
The thing I lament is this sense I've seen in some circles that accepting donations or getting paid is somehow shameful. That the mere act of being compensated somehow diminishes the contribution. You can be paid and do it for the love of coding and do it for the benefit of everyone.
Everyone has the right to refuse payment, and people who do's wishes need to be respected. And I don't know the beliefs of the Jellyfin devs. But to me, a post like this feeds into that vague feeling that being paid somehow makes your contributions less "pure" or "desirable", than if you're solely doing it for fun or selfless reasons.
It's my strong belief that for open source alternatives to truly take off and go toe to toe with big tech, there needs to be a robust funding model underpinning it. If we as a community even see accepting donations as somehow "lesser than", what chance do we have of ever getting there?
This is genuinely one of the most impressive open source projects out there right now. Seems like 10.9 opened the flood gates for all these amazing contributions and improvements. 81 merges in the last 30 days! Great job jellyfin team!
I can't tell you how many times I've looked up some feature or low-priority bug only to find the answer is "there's a PR for this that will be added in 10.9", commented like a year ago, glad to see the future plan is more frequent but smaller feature releases!
I'm glad for people who were waiting on this release. It took so long that I wrote my own media server in the mean time to resolve all the problems I was having with Jellyfin. I hope they can get more frequent releases out for folks still using it. Having looked at the code base, I understand that the cruft from Emby slows down development.
As always, please ensure you stop your Jellyfin server and take a full backup before upgrading!
Now, if only there was a simple, built-in way to backup/export and restore/import all settings and other data, so that all platforms could do this easily, without having to search the internet for which folders to back up...
FYI, this is the best we have atm (which is pretty terrible). Please correct me if there is a better way:
I'm surprised at the lack of enhancement request/PR addressing this.I really want to dust off my C# and try but I'm kinda scared that the reason it isn't yet a thing is because it's a mess to implement.
Based on some comments in recent PRs for requested features that seem to have gone nowhere, the devs are trying not to overly complicate the project at the moment with other people's code that they'd have to support, and instead leaving certain requests to be handled in some grand refactoring they're working on.
I believe they're suggesting just doing a full backup up of your system/Docker container. Which isn't ideal, but I think they're trusting people who can run a Jellyfin server to be able to use the scripts.
Sure. But what if Docker is not available on a machine? What if the import should happen on a Linux machine coming from Windows? What if I want to sync two installations on different OSs?
I know it's all doable, but not easy, let alone foolproof. It's so easy to install, but genuinely not easy to keep safe without tech knowledge.
Syncing two instances sounds like a fun challenge. I think there's some project to replicate an sqlite db over the network. Similarly, you could use ceph or other distributed storage for the media.
I built something like this for Nextcloud a few years back, fun times.
I run JF in a docker container, and although I don't have backups of my config files yet (because I don't really care about setting up from scratch if need be), it would be trivial to simply backup the mounted config volumes. Makes upgrading safe and easy, too.
That's probably how I would recommend going about this, personally.
Yes, it works that easy. I had to move hard drives, last time I did that without docker somehow it didn't recognize the library, might have been a mistake from my end though.
Now I did it again just a few weeks ago with a docker setup, all folders are on the hard drive. Could just mirror the drive, set it up at same mount point and there was no difference in the library, just worked.
If you run it on a container, it should be enough to just make a copy of the set up volumes, right? (with permissions and all the metadata kept of course)
Theoretically, support for that could be coming... Emby (where Jellyfin is based on) always used their own layer for interacting with a SQLite database. All that custom made logic is currently being swapped out for EF Core. EF Core is a DotNet library for interacting with databases and EFCore that also supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server besides SQLite.
So my guess is that, once all that work is completed, support of other database can be added.
For a little bit of context. I am currently running Jellyfin on Btrfs and there is quite a performance impact due to CoW. If 2 clients decide to browse the libraries, both clients grind to a near standstill with regards to being able to see things. So I am following this work with quite some interest.
I am currently running Jellyfin on Btrfs and there is quite a performance impact due to CoW. If 2 clients decide to browse the libraries, both clients grind to a near standstill with regards to being able to see things.
CoW is not recommended for databases, all DB servers advise for turning it off for the actual database. You'll run into the same issue with a dedicated database if you leave CoW on I guess. You could also disable CoW for jellyfin's database right now and performance should increase.
I also follow the progress of a dedicated DB, but on the other hand I don't know how much sense it makes architecturally. The likeliness that you have multiple jellyfin server instances access the same database is low - after all, there is info very specific to the server in there like the file path. Just migration is already not easy, how likely is sharing the database live? And if each database is specific to an instance - why not use SQLite (like it's done right now) and allow for more specific parameter tuning, like used memory and the like?
Jellyfin is such a great piece of software and I'm so glad the main project has the funds they need. I follow one of the lead android tv app developers and I'll absolutely plug him as a great place to send some donations. These people do enterprise grade work as a hobby and absolutely deserve a few of our dollars.
Idk about the rest of these jabronies, but I didn't even know jellyfin had its own comm until this appeared in my feed. But I'm gonna subscribe now that I know of it!
A server & client software pair that allows you to have all your personal media available on demand. Movies, TV Shows, Music, Photos, Books, etc. All served from your server to a client device - Android, Roku, iOS, etc.
Really pleased with this new development strategy of releasing whatever is done at regular intervals instead of holding it all for a huge release every X months.
Hopefully they will attempt to fix the sqlite db locking issues instead of chastising users for having them on network storage. Last version before 10.9.0 continues to work fine.
Locking issues? News to me! I have a problem with the database migration pausing during the "[INF] Applying migration 'MigrateRatingLevels'" step and while googling the issue, I haven't seen enough chastising, myself.
As a precaution, I changed my CIFS mount to NFS to no avail. I'm on the cusp of doing all the necessary prep-work to officially submit an issue to GitHub.
Ah. I felt like a x.x.3 version was long enough to wait for things to be shaken out, and had decided to update to 10.9.x, but I might leave it for a little bit.
It's how agile development is meant to work. The faster you get feedback on a feature, the faster you can improve on it while it's still green in your head (and the faster you can drop it and put your efforts elsewhere if it turns out to be a dud).
A fully written feature sat there doing nothing is offering you no value.
My limited experience with Agile is being forced to share the stage with half-hour soliloquies every morning**, so as long as the dev team doesn't have to deal with poorly-managed scrums, I'm all for it.
** I made a failed attempt at reminding everyone that it's called a 'standing meeting' partly because we're supposed to stand for its entirety. If the average person is overcome by the urge to sit down, then the _weak_ly-chaired meeting has been going on for way too long.
Ooh, thanks. So big things for us users seem to be transcoding improvements and audio normalisation. And a bunch of security stuff that's important for people that run this on the public internet.
I recently installed Jellyscrub via plugin and it spent a long time building BIF files. Any chance those will be seamlessly picked up by the new version if I upgrade via Docker container?
Open collective can let you specify where you want that donated money to go, so if the jellyfin admins wanted to they could have set OC up in such a way that donations could go to specific areas - not just clients, but specific feature development even.
If you're concerned that your donation to the project wouldn't go to something you value or your wanted to ensure a client you cared about had support, that would have been a better way to manage it.
I really think jellyfin is making a mistake by not centralising development costs for all the various clients and such out there, especially for those that require some developer account or certification to get on a storefront.
Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System
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