Plex now want to SELL your personal data

And that makes a difference to you?

Not sure if you understand this or not, but you using, or not using jellyfin doesn't affect anyone but you. 🤷‍♂️

If you don't wanna use it, then don't use it. You're still wrong, but that's up to you lil buddy.

If you connect to the internet from 2 or 3 different locations, the hashed email will be the same, so they just need to compare the locations to those from another service like Instagram and they know who you are and what you're streaming.

Idunno why you don't think having an unique hash attatched to your data is no biggie. Especially if that hash is easily cracked in a few years by quantum computers.

Exactly why on so many things it's like... even when it looks like they are getting it, they don't get it. Kind of like watching bluesky rising right now. Unless I'm majorly missing something here. It looks like it's kind of open and kind of federated...

Except in a form that no one can feasibly create their own node. One change in leadership or goals of leadership away, and it can turn into the same neo nazi trash that people are joining it to get away from.

And spoonfed news, food..

I bought a Plex pass for 90 or something. I officially dropped Plex about 4 months ago now. For 90 bucks I got something like 8 years out of it. I'll call that a win, I don't feel like I wasted my money, I don't feel like I overpayed. Just moving on now.

So I searched, and all of the results were talking about setting up a VPN or a reverse proxy or whatever.

The best thing is, you can't use a reverse proxy with it, it doesn't even support it.

Jellyfin is a no-brainer. Publishing services on the Internet is complex.

“install this app on your tv and log in”, which is exactly what Plex does

Yes, but that person has to create an account. Everyone has to create an account. With Plex. Some people I know immediately say no, others are annoyed that plex would try and shake them down for money.

If you configure Jellyfin, all that goes away. THEN they can simply download the app and login.

Seconded it’s not a no-brainer. I spent days trying to get it set up with Docker on two different computers and three different distros. It wouldn’t install, if it did install it had errors, if it would even open at all with anything other than a black screen. Hours trying to search how to fix it. I gave up and installed it as a standalone app on a common distro. Not as convenient, but FML it finally worked. Really felt like I wasted my time. Personally, this is the exact bullshit linux fanatics completely ignore when they insist on how great linux is vs whatever. I’ve got a shitload of patience, willpower and modest skill to try to get something like this working, but 99% of the population doesn’t. That’s why linux will stay on the back burner. And if it ever becomes just as easy as Windows…guess what? You’ll have many of the same problem as Windows.

I just want to tell my mom “install this app on your tv and log in”

I mean, if I didn't know better, I'd start to suspect that the large multimedia corporations building walled gardens of apps in closed Smart TV ecosystems don't really want you to be able to easily tell your mom how to watch shit for free. I mean they'll let you, if you really insist on having that app available, but someone will have to pay THEM money instead first (and probably let them spy on you). That's their racket.

The reason Plex can do it is because they do make money, doing shitty stuff like this to their users, so they can use that money to open these doors into SmartTV-land. The root of the problem is that your SmartTV itself (and your mom's) is a locked down proprietary piece of shit, designed exclusively for shoving all proprietary content these media companies develop down your throat, and there are few convenient workarounds that are available to us, because of course they make workarounds as inconvenient as possible.

Unless you're willing to ditch everything proprietary and insist on open technology for everything, which is hard on its own, you're going to end up with a janky mix of proprietary and open systems that always require some compromises, because the proprietary stuff forces us to compromise. It's literally a "this is why we can't have nice things" situation.

I'm not a hardcore tech person and this is exactly the issue for me as well.

I want to be able to stream my music collection when I'm away from home without having to get an associate's degree in networking.

Jellyfin is a fully self hosted drop in. That means it's up to the server operator to handle everything. You would still tell your mom to just install the Jellyfin app on her TV with the one additional step in your server address which you would tell her.

But yes, you as the operator have to do some extra things like implementating a reverse proxy and if hosting out of your home make necessary network configuration changes to accommodate this access.

and all of the results were talking about setting up a VPN or a reverse proxy or whatever. Man, I just want to tell my mom "install this app on your tv and log in",

This is why I use Yunohost. It makes all of that just a "click buttons" affair. Then you can tell your Mom the same thing. Only the domain is yours so Jellyfin can't hold it over your head.

Yeah, the sad reality is that Plex’s setup experience is much smoother. And when you’re trying to convert people, the single largest obstacle is often social inertia. So lowering the barriers to entry is extremely important. My mother-in-law would need to sideload the Jellyfin app onto her TV, but Plex is available right on its app store.

Luckily, you can run both side by side. Jellyfin for me and my more tech-literate friends, Plex for those who don’t know/don’t care to learn.

Plexamp is pretty great. It's my streaming music player of choice.

After gpm shit the bed.. I vowed to never have another streaming music service.

Plexamp it is.

Maybe you've tried it already, but navidrome is a great purpose built music streamer. I was using subsonic back in the day, then airsonic, then airsonic advanced. When I first got on navidrome it was a tough pill to swallow since I never maintained my tags, but I gave a little time here and there to comb through it and in the end it feels like a worthwhile investment. It paid off a little bit more when I adopted lyrion music server and squeeze players for local playback around the home since this organizes by the same tags (mostly), so the whole library is kind of plug and play with things that honor the same tags.

For me it’s chromecast support. Maybe Jellyfin has that now but it didn’t last time I checked.

Same. I bought the lifetime pass on sale many years ago, my setup is still working fine without me having to have touched it for at least the past 3 years outside of applying an update from time to time. I don't stream their free shows or movies and have those setup so that they don't even show up as an option on my tv.

Do I wish it was still the same company it was a decade ago? Of course... but so far they haven't impacted my experience to the point that I feel the need to replace it with something else. The second that happens I will be spinning up Jellyfin.

Another longtime user here. If you haven't already, you might want to disable autoupdates on all your devices. The "new experience" is not without its controversies.

I don't share videos with people using google to log into any site.

You can install a plugin to add SSO.

https://github.com/9p4/jellyfin-plugin-sso

i dont get this.. im technically still usin emby, but user management is beyond simple and requirs no upkeep. no one has asked me to reset their passwords and ive got a few dozen people usin my instance.

Sounds more of an user problem than a jellyfin problem? If they can't remember their login I'll just not add them to jellyfin.

@Jimmycakes @Selfhoster1728 they learn pretty fast and the calls stop. Everyone says it's hard I have very tech illerate people using it and yes I get some calls but not alot. And they managed to login way easier then I thought. I think everyone is overblowing how hard Jellyfin is. I mean most people know how to login to a website.

I would not let anyone access my self hosted stuff who is not using a password manager and secure passwords.

Tailscale

The overhead of the live library upkeep on Jellyfin is also quite insane, at least for me. I'm talking taking the whole thing down for many minutes at a time for every other service trying to run on the same machine bad.

I don't mean to diminish your comment, but I just went through the setup process for both Plex and jellyfin (moving to new hardware) and there was no significant difference between the setups.

Maybe this wasn't the case a few years ago, but jellyfin is just a setup, point to libraries, and enable hardware accel.

what? It's not like everyone needs to run jellyfin at home. the only thing you need to use is the jellyfin webapp, which I don't understand how is it more complicated than netflix or any other similar service. you log in, pick a movie and hit play. that's it.

Jellyfin is basically as easy to use as plex within the same network. I’ve set up both dueing the past 6 months. The only big difference is that Jellyfin is much more of a pain to work through port forwarding.

Only issues I've had with Jellyfin are reduced flexibility in naming/organizing files and inability (for me at least) to detect personal media.

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try it!

Is it good with gapless playback? It isn’t as crucial for me as for some people who listen to live recordings etc, but it’s always nice to have and is a good sign for the quality of the player.

There are a lot of people here who simply cannot be bothered to figure out remote access

I think being apprehensive is natural when you're entirely left on your own for security, knowing that you could leave yourself vulnerable if you do it incorrectly. Add to this the fact that half the info you'll find on the process is people claiming you just need to open some ports, which you know to be wrong, and it's easy to see why it's hard to trust any advice you find.

"jellyfin took too many resources scanning my library"

That’s a strange one to me. In my experience Jellyfin scans my libraries in about 1/10 the time Plex used to take on the same machine.