I moved on to jellyfin after I found out the hard way Plex servers need to authenticate for use. I'm sure by now there are ways to set up offline authentication but I already didn't like the idea of paying monthly to stream my own content from my own machine. It just didn't make sence to me. Jellyfin isn't perfect, or as flashy as Plex, but it works, looks fine, and its free, not counting a much deserved donation to the devs .
I feel like it’s just a matter of time, until they pull the rug from under lifetime subs.
But in any case, this is probably it for me. I’m not completely happy with jellyfin performance on my server, but the price hike puts me outside of what i’m willing to spend for this service. I already host it myself, and i can tunnel it myself too, if i ever decide to run it outside of my home network
I keep a Jellyfin instance running as a hedge. Here's the thing with Plex (and actually a lot of companies set up similarly): those "lifetime" memberships are a trap. Think about it: Plex gets your money ONCE but they have ongoing expenses. Sooner or later, they'll have spent every single cent made by a lifetime membership unless they either get more folks OR squeeze everyone a bit more.
Once they started adding their own shows and making strange UI decisions, I could sense the end was coming. A move like this brings it up fast. Jellyfin is not nearly as good as Plex in a lot of ways, but it's really Open Source.
Anyway, a lot of rambling, but in short: when there is a "lifetime" subscription, watch out!
I've been meaning to set up a homeserver with plex recently but will defnitely go for jellyfin now that I read this thread.
I gotta be honest, when I look at the problem pragmatically, it'll be a lot easier to pay $20 a year than to switch to jellyfin and get all my users to figure out how to install clients and make it work for them.
I'm already at the point in my life where my primary concern is making things work smoothly, and if I need to throw money at something to make it work smoothly, the choice is a no brainer. (At least for some values of "money")
Jellyfin works in the browser just like Plex.
And for now you can do that, but that's not the first, and not the last update trying to prevent people selling access to their server.
I just want to make sure I read this correctly. It says that if you're a Plex plass holder already that remote streaming changes won't affect your service. This means that if I have the lifetime subscription and host my own server than users whom have not payed for Plex pass can continue to access this server without issue correct?
Correct
@Tinks @randomaside what i don't understand is, what processing/compute are they using on their end? My server is transcoding it and I'm connecting directly to it.
If this is enough to push you away from Plex but you’ve tried Jellyfin and it didn’t quite do it for you, try https://emby.media/
It is the software Jellyfin is forked from and bridges the gap between the freedom of Jellyfin and the polished look and function of Plex.
I went from Emby to Jellyfin as they started their enshittification journey. I don't really notice it being less polished.
I’m not aware of any enshittification with Emby, unless you know something I don’t. Emby sort of “just works” which is why it’s a more direct replacement to Plex than Jellyfin is.
As for Jellyfin, I check in on it every now and then and they’ve made a lot of progress but the features and polish aren’t there. I hear good things about the Jellyfin web component, butif you want a good experience with Jellyfin apps on mobile or whatever TVOS you’re running, you have to use third party apps because the official ones are still woefully barebones. I still hear a lot of griping about issues with subtitles, and HEVC playback.
Did Jellyfin ever even figure out proper Intro Skip? That was a big pain point for me for the longest time, as the only way to accomplish it was a third party plugin and the only option was to skip all intros, you didn’t get a button. I remember reading somewhere they added some kind of framework that would allow proper intro skipping going forward, but that the official function was not ready.
The media segments feature has been released as of 10.10.0 and it still needs a plugin. Still feels a bit clunky but works already on my Android TV box. I guess there will be more polish in future versions, now that the groundwork is done.
Do you know how to get intro skipping to work? I’ve reinstalled the latest version of Jellyfin for testing and have the Media Segments Provider plugin installed, but there still seems to be no intro skipping button on any clients. People in this thread keep telling me it exists but outside of this thread there appears to be no evidence it exists.
If you don't like the price there's always jellyfin.
Got to say that I have been very happy with it.
Jellyfin is just so much better, imo. Much cleaner, less stuff that I don’t actually need.
I'm a plex pass lifetime owner, but I don’t regret switching to Jellyfin one bit.
Yeah I switched 2-3 years ago because so many features were paywalled and on jellyfin I can at least use plugins
I switched when I had an internet outage and couldn’t log into Plex locally to watch my own media. Very happy with Jellyfin since then.
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