this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Yeah, I've got one of those too. Plex is great.
ITT: Have you heard the good news about our lord and saviour, Jellyfin?
I'm trying to switch to Jellyfin I really am. With Plex I could just throw a file bot at my files normalize the names and it was fine. I can't mark things watched or unwatched from the Roku client. I've now tried three separate times to get the Doctor who specials to show up with names. Plex is by no means perfect but it's so much easier to keep Plex goomed
I was fretting over Doctor Specials, season numbers, eras and naming a few weeks back. In fairness it has been running since black and white times so not too bad considering. Whats a filebot by the way and whats a good one?
Filebot a piece of software, it looks up your files on TMDB and themoviedb and renamese your files based on those lookups. Plex takes that naming very very well. We really need jellyfin to work with it too.
You know, I've heard this gospel before, I might still have the pamphlet...
Honestly, I haven't really looked into jellyfin yet. I hear it's superior in some way... But I already have Plex all set up and I have 4 friends with servers and we all share content. So it would take a lot for me to switch.
It really isn’t superior. It’s just the hivemind that gets annoyed with Plex being stagnant, not open source etc. that claims it is. At best it has feature parity for some use-cases. Don’t get me wrong, it’s neat, but it’s not as polished as Plex.
Tbh, I just like that mobile app watching is free instead of paywalled
Lasted a week and went back to Plex.
Plex is a privacy nightmare that's slowly trying to faze out you having a server all together in favor of feeding you commercialized content from other providers; and many people find Jellyfin is far too unpolished/disorganized for a lot of debatable reasons I won't go into.
I've been quite happy with the middle ground: Emby. It's not FOSS, but is well polished with consistent development, great feature parity across platforms, excellent clients for pretty much every device I'd want to use, and a helpful community ready to assist with any problems you come across. They also have a heavy focus on privacy; with no third party partners collecting your info like Plex, and no telemetry sent from servers/clients.
The lifetime premier license I bought 7 years ago was well worth it.
Wasn't Jellyfin developed using the Emby source code as a starting point?
Yes. Emby was originally open source, but people would regularly fork it to remove the licensing. When they chose to go closed source; jellyfin forked that final release and has built from there.
Emby has a premier licencing system to support their development, instead of selling user data and making deals with content providers like Plex, or depending on OSS development/contributions like Jellyfin.
As far as I understand almost 80% of jellyfins current code is the original Emby code (called 'media browser' or 'MB' at the time), though to be fair, I haven't verified that claim.
Couldn't get on with Jellyfin...emby however has been fantastic!
Jellyfin is a bitch to get working outside my network. I don't get how Plex made it so easy
really? I never had an issue with just sticking it behind a reverse proxy, doing some port forwarding, and setting an apex domain record, that was it. curious what wasn't working for you?
The number of people I've come across that are absolutely baffled by the concept of port forwarding....
Then you add CGNAT ontop and things can get really complicated for someone unfamiliar.
Lol
...............do what now?
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/networking/caddy/
Plex operates a service on their end that mostly covers you if you fuck up the network routing. It's probably the least user friendly part of the setup, so kind of a big deal.
I want to switch very badly but their device apps are lacking.
I always wonder why some people are so dedicated to Jellyfin. Even if JF had full feature and experience parity, it would still not have secure remote access the way Plex does. There is no need to port forward or NAT Plex for external access if you use app.plex.tv to access. With the threat landscape the way it is today, that is worth a lot.
I haven't used Plex in a while, but I'm confused how Plex handles WAN connections without using any port forwarding? how is that possible?
Both the client and server connect to plex.tv which then brokers the connection between them. They essentially work as a very limited vpn between your clients and server.
This also gives them unrestricted access to the entirety of data passed between devices; and the ability to request any and all info from your server to be handed to whoever they chose.
This is also how they allow you to 'share' content/libraries with each others servers; through their public infrastructure that's collecting your information. Information they then sell to third parties to support their development and broker content agreements.
thanks for the explanation. I'll stick with jellyfin for now, I've heard rough things about privacy with Plex and that explains why.
I think there's a misconception.
Plex can "hide" (not really) your own server because you can direct your users on Plex.tv (they can login there, etc. without ever typing your IP address).
But Plex can also use an internal reverse proxy that lets you see your content from outside even without port forwarding. However, quality and speed will be decreased.
I think Jellyfin should work to ease the process of setting up your server as much as they can, but unless they start managing a SaaS like Plex does, they'll never be able to offer the same simplicity for the end user.
Last time I looked at Jellyfin server setup was fine. It's getting non-techies to a place where they can access it that was rough. They're getting better with 3rd party app support but Plex has a huge head start.
personally, I wouldn't want my files going through plexs servers, especially with how shit I've heard they are with their privacy policy. that's a really interesting concept tho, and makes a lot of sense. I doubt jellyfin will ever do that simply because they don't have the resources to host that as you said.
thanks for the explanation tho! greatly appreciated
Plex, as a company, definitely is aware of what items are in your library but streams don't go through the Plex servers unless you use the Plex proxy service which is enabled by default but only used when the client connection speed is too slow to use the desired streaming setting.
Everyone who accesses their Plex externally should use app.plex.tv rather than NAT/port forwarding unless you're also doing IP whitelisting on the NAT (not feasible for most remote access scenarios, as IPs are dynamic in most cases). Jellyfin should never be exposed externally.
I work in a highly regulated sector of IT and have learned that even the most robust software will have serious exploits at some point.
I have not looked into it for a while but I believe their servers broker a direct connection between the client and server.