Well I already have jellyfin running in a container, just have to figure out how to get mum's TV to work with it I guess
log in on a local IP and not the network name and it's working again. but I'll be moving to jellyfin from now
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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Ah the weekly "Plex should be entirely free even though it's commercial software!"
Plex is entirely free and completely local, but only if you don’t use the features that make it so convenient (the relay server they offer, authentication and authorization, etc). Things I’m pretty sure jellyfin doesn’t provide at all. If people spent half the time reading as they do trying to convince people to get angry at optional features then maybe we wouldn’t have so many posts like this.
Jellyfin does offer authentication and authorization. Relay can be done via nginx iirc?
Having to set up a reverse proxy is basically a non-starter for most people, while I've talked extremely non-technical people into running Plex since it just works out of the box.
The authentication is lacking 2fa and has a half hearted attempt at fail2ban
If you try to properly implement either of those, the standard device clients won't work anymore.
Plex provides default SSL.
The relay is actually a bit more useful.
You can be on a carrier grade NAT with no real external IP.
It's more akin to running a VPS somewhere and SSH tunneling your home server through it.
They also cache* the entirety of the TVDB and EPG Services.
I'm not sore about most of this with jellyfin, and I am trying to primarily use it, but I really miss some of the features. But realistically, adding 2FA to the clients would be a huge benefit. trying to replace 2FA with wish.com fail2ban feels particularly dirty.
Good explanation. I'm out in the boonies with Starlink for internet right now so no port forwarding for me. I paid like $100 for a plex lifetime pass 12 years ago or something so none of my family or friends even notice most of the time. HEVC encoding helps too (you can squeeze 720p through their relay server with it).
You can run the OIDC version and use SSO and implement MFA on the IdP. I use Keycloak for SSO w/ MFA and users sign into my Jellyfin via Keycloak. Just disable username/password auth and leave it SSO only.
The only benefit Plex really has is the relaying, but I was able to sync watch with 3 people basically as far across North America as you can get from me and it worked without issue so...
That's fine for browser-based watching, literally no one in my group watches via the browser. Even on android it'd be a fight. Grandma's not going to go on to a browser to auth her session.
The clients need to support it. If it were just backend, I'd fork it myself.
Neither do I - I use either my phone, or my smart TV, or my fire stick. SSO works fine there, or you can use the QR based session transfer to SSO on your phone and then "sign in on another device" or whatever by scanning the QR your other device is showing. I think they call it quick connect or something.
It does what you want.
And if you think Grandma can't figure out scanning a QR code, Grandma is also not gonna figure out MFA lol.
Relaying gigabytes of traffic per user costs serious money. Rely on them to do it, and they are either going to charge you or are just waiting to charge you when their VCs come knocking.
Also the weekly intentionally misunderstanding how Plex pass/Plex remote pass works in order to complain:
Can you get around that bs with a VPN?
You should be able to. I have a wireguard tunnel to my parent's house and when they watch plex it doesn't go over the relay server (I can't port forward on starlink).
Except they're spamming to users that they need this subscription even when they host locally or already have a membership.
I bought a plex lifetime pass for $100 over a decade ago and I never see ads like this. I only occasionally get the notice for plex pro week and stuff like that.
I also bought Plex lifetime pass also for $100 and I am getting ads like this.
That's pretty fucked up. I'd be shootin off some angry emails to customer support. Sorry to hear that!
How is Plex used if you aren't using it to stream your self hosted media? I remember seeing channels and such before. Is all the official stuff licensed content? I can't imagine their offering is very competitive.
They've added commercial supported live channels like many other free services but yeah, it's lacking compared to others. Pluto.tv is my go-to if I want to throw something on at a family members house or something like that. Owned by the networks, reasonably short ads, completely free. Too bad they didn't figure that out 10 years ago lol.
Oh I've actually heard of Pluto.tv and watched it somewhere.
99.9% of the use mine has seen for the past several years has been to stream to my living room TV in the same house. But regardless, what point are you making? It's commercial software. And btw the $85 I paid years ago to use it forever was more than worth it to me.
I'm not trying to make a point, I'm just curious how many this impacts and so on. I imagine it will go down similar to Netflix account sharing crackdown; generally viewed unfavourably, but will convert enough users to pay for it to be worth it.
Gotcha. We'll see, I guess.
digital cancer
Here's a controversial and complex stance, but you may be able to understand it eventually:
Don't buy it.
I am a proponent of FOSS too but that doesn't mean anything built for profit is shitty, let alone "cancer".
Hey, you paid for them to spy on your media, give them their money's worth.
God I hate humans
I do too. They tend to speak from the heart but the second something is inconvenient, they're cool with relaxing their morals.