As expected and as is usual I’ve read through another very salty justification for using Jellyfin that is based on anger or idealism. I rarely if ever see anyone making the argument that Jellyfin is actually materially better usability-wise. it’s always, “Plex is going down the shitter, you’ll see!”. OK then, if Jellyfin becomes better, then i’ll switch. isn’t the point that I own the media, so i can switch to whatever i want, whenever i want? Which to me is, when Jellyfin is better for my use-case. So many people act like this is like placing a bet on your favourite sports team. Like If one piece of software eventually gets bad then it was never worth using at all. We’re all going to die, eventually, so by that logic neither Plex nor Jellyfin would be worth using.
It's better for my use cases. For starters, I don't have to login every so often for no reason. I don't have my local software break because they updated their server. I also find it much slower.
Picking a tool is a very personal decision, and it depends on one's values and one's use.
Well then I was a one off. It got me (along with how slow it was) to leave. Maybe it was a bug? Maybe I misconfigured it? Maybe it was OS? Who knows? Glad it works for you.
This was using the local web server instance to manage permissions for users, so maybe every time my distro undated the web server software or something. Either way, for my use case it didn't work out of the box. JellyFun did and does. Every tool decision is personal.
The simple fact of the matter is that, for many, enshittification outweighs usability. People are very happy to switch to something that may not be functionally all that better just as long as it doesn't come with a whole bunch of extra, in their opinion, bullshit.
And that's fine. If you're not bothered by what others are, cool beans. Good for you.
What in the world are you even trying to say? That because we all die at some point there is no reason to not sell out to an exploitive corporation because they have better UIs?
I've stopped paying for software outside of games almost entirely. SaaS is a universally terrible UX and it's impossible to actually purchase software anymore. Especially with local LLMs around to smooth out all the rough edges when it comes to FOSS life is good. The experience of never waking up to having something be worse off than it was before is sublime.
I worry I over-index on my desire for control but it's just so so nice to have my tools work every day and never break, and never change under me and just always do the thing they are supposed to do.
Same & amen. I won’t even buy anything like a Sonos/Homepod, etc. again either. Sonos (the curse, then the blessing, lol) permanently turned me off anything but OSS/DIY IoT stuff. The great thing is, between ESP 32’s, Pi’s, OSS, cheap Ali components & 3d printing, you can have something you actually totally own & control in your house, rather than some remotely cloud locked subscription garbage & normally with better features for a similar, or sometimes lower initial cost.
Sorry cloud providers, but you all burnt (nuked) your bridges and I have zero interest in seeing them rebuilt. I’m more than happy on my own little island!
Tinfoil hatted me would wonder if this might be why they are so desperate to try and ensure local LLM’s never become a thing…
Plex started out great for us Boxee users left in the cold, but the writing was on the wall when they started offering rentals. Product development has hit a wall in the last two years. While its UI isn't as intricate, Infuse does a fantastic job of transcoding higher bitrate 1080 content over LAN and WAN, where Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby just stutter. The Plex AppleTV app hasn't received material updates in what seems like years - they haven't even rolled out the Liquid Glass effect like Infuse has.
I would abandon Plex completely, but I still haven't found a capable app to remotely stream the 2.5TB of music on my Synology. Their recent price hike a few months ago converted me from a $5/mo Plex Pass customer to a $120 lifetime customer. I sense a new product tier in the works that us lifetime customers won't have access to without shelling out more.
You might consider setting up Navidrome. It’s working well for me, running NixOS on an N150 minipc along with Tailscale.
Lots of clients are available to connect with it (it also has a functional web UI). It does not touch your music files, keeping things like star ratings in its database.
Every time I hear of people complaining about paying for software I wonder what people on here do for a living. Is everyone on here getting paid for developing software that’s free?
I used to when I worked outside of games. I worked on a payments backend for an etailing website. The software cost was paid for by items purchased. I don't think anyone considers buying an item at a site like target.com considers them paying for software. That software is for the businesses benefit.
I don't buy any (non gaming) software for any other purposes because most of the time the pricing model, licensing model, or lack of platform support is not right for me.
I don't want SaaS for anything because things constantly change (almost always for the worse) from under me. I don't want to have to pay a subscription to play my music, watch my videos, or take my notes.
I do. But I also know that if ask anyone "Do you pay for Target's software?", they are likely to say "no" or "huh". The context was why do people who complain about software costs not work for free.
Or maybe a better way to express my thought: one can work in a paying software job and still dislike "paying for software" where that means a subscription to play local media files.
You may find Kevin Kelly's post on "Technology wants to be free" (2007) an interesting read.
... five traits of networked technology – perfect market competition, price transparency, innovation sharing, collaboration, and expanding markets – ceaselessly push technology toward the free.
... There is an unarticulated assumption held by many people that the natural state of any created thing is expensive. Technology is believed to be born dear and costly, and it is only through relentless hard work that things can be made cheap. Indeed, according to this perspective, everything is naturally expensive, and would remain so, but for genius and sweat. This natural level of expense and scarcity can only be lowered by applying constant energy, favorable legislation, and technological vigilance, otherwise the price of a good may spring back up to its natural elevated level. God forbid a disaster or calamity collapses the system and allows the prices of everything to revert to their true unattainable price.
I tried Jellyfin after some frustration with Plex and found it an inferior relative to Plex so I'm still on Plex. Lifetime Plex Pass is the solution here for now given Plex has not clawed back any features and in fact has added features to the pass.
Same. I started out early in 2003/2004 with XBMC, and used all sorts over the years - probably Plex for 4/5 years or so in there… the writing was on the wall 4(?) years or so back when the nag emails and data capture all started ratcheting up. I dumped it for Jellyfin and never looked back once. I pay for Infuse to make it work on Apple stuff, but it’s < £10 year (mainly to cover codec licence nonsense?), which seems a small price to pay compared to any other alternatives I could find.
For a time and I have no idea if this is still true Plex had a serious advantage in the sheer range of client platforms it supported (iOS, Android, smart TVs, Roku, etc.)
One thing Plex does better is media detection. Like you can plop all your shows in a folder and it still will make sense of it. Jellyfin insists on a very specific directory structure and file naming. It’s very frustrating if you only want to watch a show and not interested in maintaining a perfect library.
Is there anything around that does _not_ force a management system? I really just want a thing that primarily just tracks if I've seen a particular file, secondarily maybe let me control playback from a different device. Actually figuring out what media those files map to is a distant third.
DLNA usually doesn’t force any system and more or less exposes fs. Some TVs natively have a client. Otherwise Kody or some other client app can be used to browse and play files.
As far as I can tell plex only wants separate folders for different kinds of media and file names that give at least some clue to what it is. Plex is much more lax.
The problem with Plex is that is has a very opinionated system that ignores how things are in real life.
One example I can point to is Stargate SG-1. Episode 1 is a two parter and depending on who you ask it's either Episode 1 and 2 or Episode 1 which causes all subsequent episode numbers to be thrown off by 1 depending on how you count.
This confusion is further complicated by the release order on DVD/Bluray, the order of airing, and the fact that all of these things can be different in different regions of the world.
That has more to do with TheTVDB than with Plex itself, and it's really nothing compared to what Jellyfin demands. Plex at least supports several different alternative directory structures and file naming schemes. In order to transition to Jellyfin I would have to rename thousands of files to comply to its specific requirements, whereas Plex was mostly okay with the way I had organized my files offline.
It's astounding how much every single system out there fights and fights and fights against showing you your directories, as they are.
I started but didn't finish a Rygel + local-search (nee Tracker) plugin to try to finally get that. I wish the upnp media services were better. I keep telling myself I'll build a nice client/controller... Some day.
Yesterday, I went to try to cast music from the Plex app to the Vizio Smartcast SP70 I had just bought (awesome speaker, weighs 900 lbs and is as wide as my closet door)... but you can't do music on the Plex phone app. Like, wtf, when did this happen?
So, now I need to try to install the older Plex app on my phone with Sideloadly, because Plex is more interested in streaming shit to me and trying to be Netflix or Paramount+ than it is in doing the the thing it always did best and that no one else was doing: allowing me to stream things to my own devices from my own storage.
It gets frustrating. At some point, no matter how bad Jellyfin is, it will be better than Plex because Plex is trying to become worse than anything else. I guess I got my Lifetime Pass long enough ago ($75) that I've gotten my money's worth out of it, but goddamn.
three paragraphs of complaining all because you didn’t look this up? because if you did, you would’ve seen that Plex has a separate, dedicated app for listening to music. If your complaint is that “it should be in the same app!” then that’s just an absurdly silly thing to have gotten yourself worked up about.
>three paragraphs of complaining all because you didn’t look this up?
Because they did it wrong. Me looking it up and finding out that they did it wrong doesn't mean I'm wrong.
>you would’ve seen that Plex has a separate, dedicated app for l
I don't want 10,000 fucking icon on my phone screens, having to swipe through 5 of them to find anything. Why do I want this split into two apps? That serves them. Not me. That makes it easier for them to try to become Spotify in one place while trying to be Disney+ in another. Fuck that shit. They're breaking something that wasn't broken.
No one everything's being enshittified. It's because I have to share a planet with losers who not only tolerate it, but cheer it on like stooges.
The article misses a couple points:
- sharing. With plex this is easy using plex accounts
- 3rd party integrations. There’s a whole ecosystem around plex.
- a lot of things that are built in into plex are either not available in jellyfin or are offered as (no longer maintained) plugins
- clients are far from the quality one needs
I switched to Jellyfin and also don't regret it. I agree the quality is lower, BUT that sacrifice in this case was worth it given Plex's shitty track record. If any of y'all are interested in helping the Jellyfin project, that would be dope!
I do not want to be in a business relationship with a company for a trivial amount of money, be it $29.99/yr or $69.99/yr or $249.99 lifetime. None of that is real money. You have no leverage, you do not own your own destiny. Complaining about the price hike is missing the whole point - Plex does not care about any individual customer, and that's the real problem (and the problem with just about every B2C business).
As expected and as is usual I’ve read through another very salty justification for using Jellyfin that is based on anger or idealism. I rarely if ever see anyone making the argument that Jellyfin is actually materially better usability-wise. it’s always, “Plex is going down the shitter, you’ll see!”. OK then, if Jellyfin becomes better, then i’ll switch. isn’t the point that I own the media, so i can switch to whatever i want, whenever i want? Which to me is, when Jellyfin is better for my use-case. So many people act like this is like placing a bet on your favourite sports team. Like If one piece of software eventually gets bad then it was never worth using at all. We’re all going to die, eventually, so by that logic neither Plex nor Jellyfin would be worth using.
It's better for my use cases. For starters, I don't have to login every so often for no reason. I don't have my local software break because they updated their server. I also find it much slower.
Picking a tool is a very personal decision, and it depends on one's values and one's use.
I logged in 6 years ago. Since then its just working. Yes, plex. On my appletv
Ditto for me on every one of the ~20 places I've logged in starting in ~2017
Well then I was a one off. It got me (along with how slow it was) to leave. Maybe it was a bug? Maybe I misconfigured it? Maybe it was OS? Who knows? Glad it works for you.
This was using the local web server instance to manage permissions for users, so maybe every time my distro undated the web server software or something. Either way, for my use case it didn't work out of the box. JellyFun did and does. Every tool decision is personal.
Your experience doesn't nullify mine.
The simple fact of the matter is that, for many, enshittification outweighs usability. People are very happy to switch to something that may not be functionally all that better just as long as it doesn't come with a whole bunch of extra, in their opinion, bullshit.
And that's fine. If you're not bothered by what others are, cool beans. Good for you.
Ppl want developers to work for free. Especially here on hn
What in the world are you even trying to say? That because we all die at some point there is no reason to not sell out to an exploitive corporation because they have better UIs?
No, the opposite if anything. I’m curious how you came to that conclusion.
God forbid anyone avoid a merchant because of anger, or choose a merchant because of idealism.
I've stopped paying for software outside of games almost entirely. SaaS is a universally terrible UX and it's impossible to actually purchase software anymore. Especially with local LLMs around to smooth out all the rough edges when it comes to FOSS life is good. The experience of never waking up to having something be worse off than it was before is sublime.
I worry I over-index on my desire for control but it's just so so nice to have my tools work every day and never break, and never change under me and just always do the thing they are supposed to do.
Same & amen. I won’t even buy anything like a Sonos/Homepod, etc. again either. Sonos (the curse, then the blessing, lol) permanently turned me off anything but OSS/DIY IoT stuff. The great thing is, between ESP 32’s, Pi’s, OSS, cheap Ali components & 3d printing, you can have something you actually totally own & control in your house, rather than some remotely cloud locked subscription garbage & normally with better features for a similar, or sometimes lower initial cost.
Sorry cloud providers, but you all burnt (nuked) your bridges and I have zero interest in seeing them rebuilt. I’m more than happy on my own little island!
Tinfoil hatted me would wonder if this might be why they are so desperate to try and ensure local LLM’s never become a thing…
I have bought Infuse and it’s one of the best purchase I ever made, maybe.
Plex started out great for us Boxee users left in the cold, but the writing was on the wall when they started offering rentals. Product development has hit a wall in the last two years. While its UI isn't as intricate, Infuse does a fantastic job of transcoding higher bitrate 1080 content over LAN and WAN, where Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby just stutter. The Plex AppleTV app hasn't received material updates in what seems like years - they haven't even rolled out the Liquid Glass effect like Infuse has.
I would abandon Plex completely, but I still haven't found a capable app to remotely stream the 2.5TB of music on my Synology. Their recent price hike a few months ago converted me from a $5/mo Plex Pass customer to a $120 lifetime customer. I sense a new product tier in the works that us lifetime customers won't have access to without shelling out more.
You might consider setting up Navidrome. It’s working well for me, running NixOS on an N150 minipc along with Tailscale.
Lots of clients are available to connect with it (it also has a functional web UI). It does not touch your music files, keeping things like star ratings in its database.
https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome
# Clients
https://www.navidrome.org/apps/
> I would abandon Plex completely, but I still haven't found a capable app to remotely stream the 2.5TB of music on my Synology.
I would look at Navidrome. Completely focused on music, and for that application much better than either plex or jellyfin.
https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome
> I would abandon Plex completely, but I still haven't found a capable app to remotely stream the 2.5TB of music on my Synology.
If you use iOS, I'm beta-testing a native Plexamp alternative with ~500 Plex users. Not feature-complete, but daily-driver worthy for listed capabilities. Info and TestFlight link: https://www.reddit.com/r/plexamp/comments/1qel35s/new_invite...
Every time I hear of people complaining about paying for software I wonder what people on here do for a living. Is everyone on here getting paid for developing software that’s free?
I used to when I worked outside of games. I worked on a payments backend for an etailing website. The software cost was paid for by items purchased. I don't think anyone considers buying an item at a site like target.com considers them paying for software. That software is for the businesses benefit.
I don't buy any (non gaming) software for any other purposes because most of the time the pricing model, licensing model, or lack of platform support is not right for me.
I don't want SaaS for anything because things constantly change (almost always for the worse) from under me. I don't want to have to pay a subscription to play my music, watch my videos, or take my notes.
> I don't think anyone considers buying an item at a site like target.com considers them paying for software.
You do know target adds the cost for their web presence to their cost centre, and you as customer pays for it right?
I do. But I also know that if ask anyone "Do you pay for Target's software?", they are likely to say "no" or "huh". The context was why do people who complain about software costs not work for free.
Or maybe a better way to express my thought: one can work in a paying software job and still dislike "paying for software" where that means a subscription to play local media files.
You may find Kevin Kelly's post on "Technology wants to be free" (2007) an interesting read.
https://kk.org/thetechnium/technology-want / https://archive.vn/anPxHI tried Jellyfin after some frustration with Plex and found it an inferior relative to Plex so I'm still on Plex. Lifetime Plex Pass is the solution here for now given Plex has not clawed back any features and in fact has added features to the pass.
I went straight to Jellyfin ans I find it awesome.
I wonder what exactly am I missing.
Same. I started out early in 2003/2004 with XBMC, and used all sorts over the years - probably Plex for 4/5 years or so in there… the writing was on the wall 4(?) years or so back when the nag emails and data capture all started ratcheting up. I dumped it for Jellyfin and never looked back once. I pay for Infuse to make it work on Apple stuff, but it’s < £10 year (mainly to cover codec licence nonsense?), which seems a small price to pay compared to any other alternatives I could find.
For a time and I have no idea if this is still true Plex had a serious advantage in the sheer range of client platforms it supported (iOS, Android, smart TVs, Roku, etc.)
One thing Plex does better is media detection. Like you can plop all your shows in a folder and it still will make sense of it. Jellyfin insists on a very specific directory structure and file naming. It’s very frustrating if you only want to watch a show and not interested in maintaining a perfect library.
They both insist on their own systems and both are wrong.
Is there anything around that does _not_ force a management system? I really just want a thing that primarily just tracks if I've seen a particular file, secondarily maybe let me control playback from a different device. Actually figuring out what media those files map to is a distant third.
DLNA usually doesn’t force any system and more or less exposes fs. Some TVs natively have a client. Otherwise Kody or some other client app can be used to browse and play files.
As far as I can tell plex only wants separate folders for different kinds of media and file names that give at least some clue to what it is. Plex is much more lax.
The problem with Plex is that is has a very opinionated system that ignores how things are in real life.
One example I can point to is Stargate SG-1. Episode 1 is a two parter and depending on who you ask it's either Episode 1 and 2 or Episode 1 which causes all subsequent episode numbers to be thrown off by 1 depending on how you count.
This confusion is further complicated by the release order on DVD/Bluray, the order of airing, and the fact that all of these things can be different in different regions of the world.
And that's just one show.
That has more to do with TheTVDB than with Plex itself, and it's really nothing compared to what Jellyfin demands. Plex at least supports several different alternative directory structures and file naming schemes. In order to transition to Jellyfin I would have to rename thousands of files to comply to its specific requirements, whereas Plex was mostly okay with the way I had organized my files offline.
This is not really a big deal. If you want it organized arbitrarily put the files in other and it will be.
It's astounding how much every single system out there fights and fights and fights against showing you your directories, as they are.
I started but didn't finish a Rygel + local-search (nee Tracker) plugin to try to finally get that. I wish the upnp media services were better. I keep telling myself I'll build a nice client/controller... Some day.
It's one tickbox away in Jellyfin: Libraries > Display > Display a folder view to show plain media folders
What're the chances VLC will do what you want as both server and client?
Funny, I found no issues with it.
Maybe the way I organized my library intuitively sort of matched Jellyfin's expectations?
Yesterday, I went to try to cast music from the Plex app to the Vizio Smartcast SP70 I had just bought (awesome speaker, weighs 900 lbs and is as wide as my closet door)... but you can't do music on the Plex phone app. Like, wtf, when did this happen?
So, now I need to try to install the older Plex app on my phone with Sideloadly, because Plex is more interested in streaming shit to me and trying to be Netflix or Paramount+ than it is in doing the the thing it always did best and that no one else was doing: allowing me to stream things to my own devices from my own storage.
It gets frustrating. At some point, no matter how bad Jellyfin is, it will be better than Plex because Plex is trying to become worse than anything else. I guess I got my Lifetime Pass long enough ago ($75) that I've gotten my money's worth out of it, but goddamn.
I think I might be missing something.
900 lbs is 400~ kilograms, but according to the Vizio spec page, the speaker is:
Sound bar Weight w/ Stand: 14 Lbs. Packaging Weight: 15.5 Lbs.
Plexamp is actually a really good music app for phones
three paragraphs of complaining all because you didn’t look this up? because if you did, you would’ve seen that Plex has a separate, dedicated app for listening to music. If your complaint is that “it should be in the same app!” then that’s just an absurdly silly thing to have gotten yourself worked up about.
>three paragraphs of complaining all because you didn’t look this up?
Because they did it wrong. Me looking it up and finding out that they did it wrong doesn't mean I'm wrong.
>you would’ve seen that Plex has a separate, dedicated app for l
I don't want 10,000 fucking icon on my phone screens, having to swipe through 5 of them to find anything. Why do I want this split into two apps? That serves them. Not me. That makes it easier for them to try to become Spotify in one place while trying to be Disney+ in another. Fuck that shit. They're breaking something that wasn't broken.
No one everything's being enshittified. It's because I have to share a planet with losers who not only tolerate it, but cheer it on like stooges.
> I don't want 10,000 fucking icon on my phone screens, having to swipe through 5 of them to find anything
Lol you’re using your phone like it’s 2019
PlexAmp is a Plex official app for music streaming.
The article misses a couple points: - sharing. With plex this is easy using plex accounts - 3rd party integrations. There’s a whole ecosystem around plex. - a lot of things that are built in into plex are either not available in jellyfin or are offered as (no longer maintained) plugins - clients are far from the quality one needs
I switched to Jellyfin and also don't regret it. I agree the quality is lower, BUT that sacrifice in this case was worth it given Plex's shitty track record. If any of y'all are interested in helping the Jellyfin project, that would be dope!
More than the price, the privacy concerns and previous outrages justify using Jellyfin IMO.
I do not want to be in a business relationship with a company for a trivial amount of money, be it $29.99/yr or $69.99/yr or $249.99 lifetime. None of that is real money. You have no leverage, you do not own your own destiny. Complaining about the price hike is missing the whole point - Plex does not care about any individual customer, and that's the real problem (and the problem with just about every B2C business).
not sure if i'm retarded, but there's not a single mention of xbmc