Honest question, because I know multiple people who are not looking to jump ship since they already have the Plex Pass.
I got a lifetime pass for cheap ages ago and while the company isn’t doing so well, Plex itself isn’t getting any worse. Its just not getting better.
As long as that continues, then I’m fine with staying. I only really use it for Plexamp anyway.
oh I forgot about Plexamp. Its been my main music app since it also does Android auto.
It just works so well and nothing else comes close so far.
I run both, I got the lifetime license for under $100 and it is much easier to have my various family members install the Plex app and then login than to get them on my VPN to access Jellyfin.
Grandma ain’t installing Tailscale
I’m in the throes of attempting a migration from Plex (lifetime pass, here) to Jellyfin, and my main issue is echoed elsewhere: It’s a headache to set up secure external access. My users would either need a new account through some auth gate I’d have to set up & manage, or I’d have to wire everyone up through wireguard or something they’d have to remember a password for and blah blah blah.
Plex is the only thing my home server is sharing. I don’t have anything directly exposed to the external internet. In any case I can think of, doing this “right” means extra steps (on top of new steps) for my current users, plus new security concerns & added user management for myself.
I got a Synology NAS and despite being a technical idiot I was able to set up my family with Jellyfin on Roku phoning home to my NAS.
The UI didn’t support remotes on console and use tiles. Really amateur shit. No need to set up a reverse proxy. I have a lifetime, zero need to switch.
Last time I tried it, it wanted my media in a specific file structure, so I ended up having multiple instances of the same show. I could reorder everything but I got a plexpass when it was dirt cheap so I’m not that inclined to reorder everything.
If I was just starting out, I’d probably use Jellyfin but haven’t mostly due to inertia.
Plex clients arent great, but they are better on many TVs compared to jellyfin. Also the wife is used to it, so I don’t really want to retrain
Jellyfin crashes when living next to Plex in Docker, something about grabbing the same transcoder or something - I forget I’m pretty removed now.
But if I can’t run in parallel, I can’t eventually make the switch, since I can’t get started. And it’s not a great time to pick up a second box just for testing.
Life time subscriber since a very long time. So no need, but I would have switched if there was a decent Xbox or LG TV app.
Plex works for me, Jellyfin doesn’t because of missing apps 🤷♂️
I have a lifetime pass from many years ago when it was cheap. So I’m not in a huge rush to convert and want to do it right. But I am on the path to converting. I decided to make a major change to my home server infrastructure and it’s still in an experimental stage. Moving from a really old standalone computer I’ve used for. HTPC purposes over the years, currently dedicated to Plex combined with a few raspberry pi’s of various generations for the little stuff, and a single, good NUC for my router, to adding two additional NUCs and eventually upgrading the Plex computer with a more modern processor and video card for ML stuff for Immich and a few other systems that I plan to start using. I’m not just moving from Plex, but also a lot of Google and Nest products.
My dilemma has been Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes. I was trying to set up Kubernetes in a way that is easily repeatable and self documenting, but ended up with lots of manual steps required to install things and lots of things that I had to write my own helm charts for as well as the scripts to install and set up Kubernetes itself on each of the servers. Lots of custom stuff. Docker Swarm would be way easier, but the issue is I’m worried about Docker getting so proprietary these days and swarm mode getting so little attention, and Podman quadlets aren’t self balancing across multiple small servers like swarm. So that’s why I haven’t switched to Jellyfin yet.
I wanted the same thing with Kubernetes and ended up using FluxCD. Highly recommend it. It basically syncs a git repo to the cluster, so you just push to github or whatever, and it auto applies the changes you pushed. Also, llm models tend to be good at teaching this topic and even writing yaml files for it, so the initial learning curve was not bad actually.
Now I’m exploring doing this even better with this template: https://github.com/onedr0p/cluster-template
I started with Plex because it was an installable app on my NAS. It worked great with a Roku stick that was given to me. Same for a TV that had the Plex client. It works well for the others in the house. I got a Plex pass on sale a few years ago.
I’d like to switch to Jellyfin, but would need to find the client for 2 TVs and deal with the complaints if it doesn’t work exactly like Plex.
Te kodi integration has nothing on plex4kodi. If they worked the same I’d switch in a heart beat. Jellyfin and Plex both have terrible interfaces and can’t play media nearly as well as Kodi hence the requirement.
The Apple TV client is basically unusable. Otherwise I would have switched already.
I’d be getting rid of apple whatever at that point
I absolutely love jellyfin and frequently take advantage of its features. But the client absolutely suck butt. When I can hardly get my mom to remember which app on her TV lets her watch what, I can’t also have her fucking around with play buttons that don’t do what they say, a “continue watching” list that’s often haunted by episodes that have been marked as watched, or inscrutable menu icons mashed into the top-right corner of a media browser.
And don’t get me started on getting people logged in on the client.
I got started with jellyfin and never used Plex but there’s a bunch of rough edges:
- No apps on several smart tv/streaming stick stores, Vizio has an app for plex but not jellyfin so I would need to buy a new streaming device. Yes smart tvs spy on you but the alternatives people recommend either spy on you just as much or are expensive (Nvidia shield) and most of them still require side loading so it’s a major obstacle for sharing with anyone else.
- Casting from the mobile app won’t play at full resolution, you can get around this by using VLC as your player and casting from that but that causes it to frequently lose watch progress. Also stopping casting or playing the next episode doesn’t work properly with VLC and you need to rapidly mash “back” to get into the jellyfin app again and queue up a new episode.
- The current release of Jellyfin desktop won’t play audio for iptv streams, this is fixed in the dev branch but I have yet to find a build without other critical bugs so I’ll likely need to wait for the next release which currently has no target date.
- The browser version has spotty controller support that stops working constantly. When it does work it lacks any way to access context menus to mark shows as watched etc. If you’re using a flatpak browser to run it on steam deck or whatever, you’ll have codec and passthrough issues (Chrome is the only flatpak with decent codec support).
- Others have mentioned the security issues which you can bypass by putting authentik or something in front of it but then you can only share with people using browser.
What about exposing through Pangolin tunnel, Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale Funnel approach? Would that allow proper client access?
Same problem regarding security because if you leave it up to jellyfin to do auth you are betting on the wrong horse. With pangolin auth in front of it you have the same problem as before. Clients can’t handle the additional auth.
Or am I misunderstanding the concept of tunnels wrong? I am using pangolin as a reverse proxy with nice VPN management included. How do you the tail scale style “connect this client to this network that has the jellyfin server on it” thingy?
Cloudflare doesn’t allow streaming large quantities of data through their tunnels. At least it’s against their ToS.
Lifetime subscriber when it was like $75 bux
Setup and runs on my NAS (unRAID) Uses a small GPU to transcode as needed Shared only with non technical family members
Has worked as is for YEARS.
So, the question is, am I looking for something to replace a working free (prepaid) solution I have? That answer is nope.
Having non-technical family on board is priceless tbh.
Yeah, my mom uses it. My mom. I have to remove search bars from her chrome like it’s 2005.
This is my POV. It already works perfectly, is prepaid, and is accessible to my nontechnical users. Switching would be a major pain for a worse experience.
Also, Plexamp.
Someday in the future no doubt Plex will enshittify for lifetime users such that it will justify a change, but that hasn’t happened.
+1 to all of this. I paid for it when it was $90 lifetime, before either Jellyfin was popular before I heard of it, who knows. It works fine. No reason to put extra effort into replacing something that I have no problems or qualms with.
