I'm old, I ripped all my CDs in the 1990s and early 2000s, but abandoned all of it when Apple Music replaced iTunes in a disaster of product launch. After a decade of streaming, I'm trying to head back to curated media files, at least for video. Music is far harder to obtain in ways that compensate the musicians, at least for the stuff I'm looking for.
I cancelled all my subscriptions this year and working on getting JellyFin up and I was thinking of paying for GameFly or some other DVD service and start putting a library back together. Torrenting just seems icky to me and I am not convinced I could find good copies.
That inspired me to build a homelab finally, which then became a NAS, which then became an OCIS server to replace my commercial cloud storage.
I finally got proxmox setup, OPNsense, with Caddy for reverse proxying the externally facing services and tailscale for access to those services I want to keep only for me and not others in my family.
So yeah, all of this big massive avalanche of work started with the little tiny snowball of Plex deciding they wanted to charge me to use my own media while away from my house.
Thanks Plex!
And thanks Jellyfin for being a fantastic alternative for video.
(ymmv, I work in risk management, a component of which is vendor risk management, so the professional mental model gets applied to home systems when applicable; rug pull? not on my watch, and the rug pull will happen eventually)
Really, just start downloading every new release and you wouldn't even have to dip into the back catalog much.
Right now I just have them make a Plex account and they just login. Easy on my part since I don’t have to be tech support.
It's not any more work for me than giving a user library access on Plex, but it does require I have a reverse proxy and a domain.
Subject: Welcome to <my real name>'s Jellyfin Media Server
Hi there,
Welcome aboard! You now have access to my media server and can enjoy my library of Movies and TV Shows.
Here are your login details:
Link: https://{JELLYFIN_DOMAIN} (bookmark this!)
Username: {USERNAME}
Temporary Password: {PASSWORD}
Please update your password as soon as you log in for your security:
Log in with the information above. Click your profile icon (top-right corner, looks like a person). Choose "Profile" (same icon again). Enter the current password and your new chosen password, then click Save.
Tips:
Jellyfin works like any other streaming platform, you can browse, watch, and favorite. It always keeps your place and remembers what you were watching so it's easy to come back to.
Jellyfin can be used in a web browser, or you can find apps for phones, tablets, and some TVs.
Browse the full list of movies or shows available by clicking the boxes under "My Media" on the home page.
You can request new media by visiting {REQUEST_DOMAIN} and logging in with your same Jellyfin username and password. Please only request things you are sure you will watch in the next month or two.
Jellyfin and Ombi are software packages that I run on my own computer, but I did not build them.
Please reply to this email if you have any issues.
Enjoy!Jellyfin is also a single docker container, by the way. That would've been an easy thing to verify before making this comment.
Turns out it is pretty straightforward and I never had to deal with the hassle of maintenance. The two non-mandatory configuration steps I had to make were: - the file permission to share Jellyfin's library with my torrent daemon. But IIRC this is the same with Plex. - the nginx reverse-proxy with WebSocket for the "watch together like" feature to work
(For awhile I was VLC off a ram SMB share but that was confusing even to me sometimes.)
I also found Infuse's scanning performance to be absolute dog shit over even clean 5 GHz Wi-Fi. I solved that with a wire, but it sounds like middleware would have skipped that problem as well.
When compared to the current breed of streaming services it really shows the difference between something designed to drive up engagement and revenue while driving down cost vs something designed to actually be useful and pleasant.
Also I hadn't heard of OCIS, but it looks like something I want. So thanks for that.
- Plex
or...
- Jellyfin
- Navidrome
- Homelab
- proxmox
- OPNsense
- Caddy
- Tailscale
Plex is not worried about people like you, because you just described an insane amount of effort just to avoid a one-time cost. Most will not.
I think you're right the bar is still too high for most folks, although I will note that I think it's dramatically lower than it used to be. A lot of the tools are all-around way easier to deal with, tailscale makes a lot of "personal cloud" use-cases much more feasible, and then coding agents (I'm using claude code) dramatically reduce the labor costs of getting this stuff all working and fixing it when something goes wrong.
But I will say for the size of my music library, Jellyfin was not quite as good as plex and was the impetus behind my switch to navidrome for audio.
And navidrome isn’t the best for audiobooks so I’m in the process of testing good audiobook hosting platforms.
So the reply wasn’t wrong either. Plex is just easier for a lot of folks, and that is why I don’t have any ill will towards their changes. They just aren’t for me.
Tried again a few months ago and couldn't be happier. The whole thing is very stable and reliable. I think my only annoyance is that the HW I have it running on isn't beefy enough for transcoding, and my LG C4 can't play some of the 4K codecs natively (particularly around DV). Obviously this isn't Jellyfin's fault, but this kind of thing is just one more item for the list of stuff to have randomly be a surprise when setting up this kind of thing.
Given the state of RAM pricing, it's probably cheaper at this point to just buy an Apple TV or the like to put on the TV end. Eventually the NAS can go to an AM4 build when I upgrade my workstation to AM5 and the CPU and RAM from that are freed up.
Woah cool! Does it work well? Google Maps is the only Google service I really rely on these days.
There are a few approaches to tile generation, and the routing engine I used offers 2 alternate routes.
Claude Code whipped up a new front end for me that switches between various tile sets and provides a turn by turn instruction overlay.
It’s a tool worth having for me at least.
Personally I use Gonic rather than Navidrome, because I don't care about a web UI, but if you go to the Navidrome website and look at the "Apps" page it lists every Subsonic API compatible app. There's a lot.
For me folder view is partially just what I’m used to, but even with good tags some kinds of music is easier to look up by folder (clsssical).
I’d love have my own local mp3s get this super power. I just don’t see it happening. Plex has their own attempt but it’s no where close.
You can decouple discovery from offline music experience. Outside certain genres that I'm not deep into, there's almost nothing I get rec'd on Spotify that I didn't already know of from other sources.
For discovery, there are plenty of (especially linear) streaming music sources that are dirt cheap or free, anyway.
But it may be that I hit a bug quite some times ago where each offline downloaded song got added to the liked songs playlist and even though I manually removed quite a few of those, it may have corrupted my user profile.
I've written a client for Navidrome however, so I'm biased by the investment in time that required.
I've also spent time working with several of its private APIs to track my own listening activity.
[I'm aware there is one I can muck around with and install via Samsung developer portal]
It is thankless work, but they are actually quite close!
I guess that's my cue to finally try and upgrade. I dragged my feet given how widespread the friction of the upgrade, but if this is as good as it's going to get, I might as well pull the bandaid off now.
A few of my users already messaged me that with the next version, the android tv app will cease to work with the old jellyfin version, so I guess I have to upgrade soon
I hear people recommending clients like Infuse, but it feels odd to swap out Plex at this point if I can't go all in on the open source side of things.
Am I missing something here wrt Jellyfin clients? I guess I could try running it side-by-side with Plex and see how it goes.
SwiftFin is what I use, and it is the free and open source option. Works great.
Before that stabilized I used Infuse, but it wasn't great.
MrMC is another one I haven't tried, but it definitely supports Jellyfin.
I wonder why the officially developed SwiftFin isn't shown as recommended? I guess maybe because it's still considered beta.
As my needs are quite simple, I currently just use VLC with a SMB share. Works quite well, VLC is able to play standard .mkvs just fine! http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-appletv.html
Even supports some of that *arr stuff
Unfortunately, I don't think so. I had many issues with playback on ATV using Swiftfin. Infuse works very well, so it is worth the ~$15 yearly to me. I am hopeful that Swiftfin will improve over time, they have a few dedicated developers working on it.
There are some small bugs that you can work around. The rework to the new version has been in progress for about two years but it works just fine right now.
A game changing project that solved my streaming scenarios. It just works.
But they have a very long way to before they reach feature parity with even just the stuff I use. Let alone everything Plex can do.
I think this year I’m going to try and find an issue or feature I can contribute on. I’d like to end up moving to Jellyfin based on it being good and not Plex being bad.
You mean to say dropping version 11 (and moving straight to 12)
The availability of clients (Roku, Apple TV, Android, Xbox) is good enough that I have no problem inviting friends and family to join mine. I've learned so much about the tech bubble I live in simply from getting them onto the server.
I think the biggest obstacle to adoption beyond simple home servers is the reliance on SQLlite. If it were possible to set it up with Postgres you could run a monster server on AWS with RDS, S3, a Kubernetes. Not sure about the business case for that... but I would enjoy setting it up and pushing it to its limits.
I do have the benefit of a PC connected to my living room TV, but even if I didn't, most TVs these days can natively play media from a network share.
There’s wide compatibility with all sort of devices and you dont need to firewall tunnel vpn or do any setup. It’s totally grandma friendly.
Your approach works great for a single user with a tv connected PC. Lets say with your current system you want your parents, right now, to be able to view your movies files. How easy is that to do, and how much technical knowledge or assistance is required?
Ultimately if you just want to browse a filesystem, network shares are fine, but if you want a nice looking front end for that with logos/artwork, descriptions or reviews from the internet, or features that require the files and metadata to be indexed in a DB of some kind, then these UIs come in handy.
Plus they look nice are generally easier for other less tech. savvy members of the househould to use.
Now I just get a pop-up on my phone that Plex has the latest episode. I sit on my couch, hit play on my nvidia shield, and watch on my giant OLED. It's great - and I've been doing this for years now.
Once you go through the initial set up, the UX is fantastic. Far better than anything Netflix, or any commercial provider has ever built.
And for music - Plexamp is an ode to Winamp and is worth it alone. It completely brought me back to the pre-Spotify world of music enjoyment.
What is a little nicer about it is that we can hear about something, have it downloaded to the folder that gets indexed, and have it available to play near instantaneously. My NAS also does transcoding if necessary, so that eliminates a lot of hassles around codecs and such as well.
A lot of people take this a step further and avoid all paid services and just use tools like radarr and sonarr to get whatever content they are interested automatically off the high seas and play it when they want to.
The network share is the hard part- well really having the always on server that hosts it- plex/jellyfin/emby etc are just a little bit of sugar on top that make it a nicer experience. And IME, you install once and you are done, there is no maintenance to deal with afterwards so there is little downside.
And my content is always available from my NAS no matter where I am or what device I have with me.
I do both. But when watching with the family it's much easier to have them a media streaming server than to have to hook the PC to the TV (or projector) and use VLC.
Now at times for whatever reason some media file won't play over the network: dunno why... Maybe it's a blue moon, maybe there's a space in the filename, maybe I didn't respect the directory naming scheme or the file permission or whatever freaking bullshit. When that happens, I put the file on a USB stick, then on to a laptop, then HDMI cable. And that always work. (just had to make sure the TV wasn't using interpolation to 60 Hz or whatever otherwise every movie looked like a soap opera).
I have a weird setup where power isn't really a concern, have a bunch of ancient blades, access to a fast uplink, and am looking to set this up for a smallish collective of about 100 people.
A single node would definitely fall over, but a little cluster should be able to do a good job.
- server: my laptop. I manually download everything.
- clients: everything in LAN with a browser, plus Jellyfin android client.
- typical use: open android app, cast to big tv, watch on big tv.
next planned steps:
- move the server to a minicomputer. Still download everything manually from the laptop to the server
- convince myself it's time to use the *arr programs
- once Jellyfin has a Tizen client, ditch the android app + chromecast for good
The take away is the app ecosystem needs some serious bolstering. That's the holdup for most people I know who are still sticking with Plex.
s_dev•1d ago
vachina•1d ago
gadders•1d ago
benoau•1d ago
ninju•1d ago
paxys•1d ago
bombcar•1d ago
But damn if it wasn't magical having all those movies at your fingertips in the early 2000s.
gf000•1d ago
This was the point that made a bunch of people (me included) absolutely furious with Plex. Like I gladly pay for services and donate to open source projects. But it hits differently to pay for my very own hardware being used.
jaffa2•1d ago
horsawlarway•1d ago
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As a more serious response - The last time I purchased MS office (decade+ ago) I paid once for a product license I could use forever. That felt fair - I buy a tool, I use it.
Plex had that payment model and got a lot less pushback from the community - but this whole "we're a SaaS now!" thing is just not going to fly.
I just don't trust the company anymore, and Jellyfin is absolutely great.
ffsm8•1d ago
As a matter of fact, I paid them 150€ for a "lifetime license" - because a long time ago, that was their business model.
I too left for jellyfin because of their pivot to being "Netflix" as paxys phrased it.
They just decided to throw away the market they established themselves into previously. Saltines should be expected at that.
ziml77•1d ago
NoMoreNicksLeft•6h ago
Images are worse still, I know anyone serious about personal photos probably uses Lightroom, but damn. There aren't any rips harsh enough to describe Plex's image support.
And really, it would've been nice if we could share game roms for emulation (with high-score support and remote game-saves).
TacticalCoder•1d ago
jdboyd•1d ago
Meanwhile most of their updates were about streaming support, and then they started cramming their streaming service into it, and pushing it, and I just got sick of all of that. Eventually I just switched to jellyfin. It is far from perfect. The music player isn't as good as plex's, there is no download feature. But at least it hasn't turned on me yet.
NegatioN•1d ago
The streaming issue is another matter though :/
BeetleB•1d ago
crtasm•1d ago
Finamp is the app to use for proper offline playback/sync of music from your Jellyfin server. Go for the beta version, it's far ahead of stable and works well.
1980phipsi•1d ago
Krastan•1d ago
add-sub-mul-div•1d ago
observationist•1d ago
Plex is a VC funded project, they've raised some $50m to date. Crazy what money can buy, isn't it?
DANmode•22h ago
gosub100•1d ago
Macha•1d ago
xienze•1d ago
zen928•1d ago
xienze•1d ago
All I wanted to do was self host a Plex server and access it from devices on my intranet using Infuse. Why should I have to bounce to a third party server to do that?
And to be clear, the devices using Infuse didn't have to do that, but accessing the dashboard (for admin) did require an external hop. There's no reason IMO for that to be necessary.
zen928•1d ago
Cool, a real discussion. Plex has the weakness of requiring a first time online auth because they didnt implement a local ldap/oauth/sso pathway. After that point, Settings > Network > "List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth", use a generous netmask. Entirely local after that point if desired.
xienze•1d ago
> https://support.plex.tv/articles/200890058-authentication-fo...
They certainly try to scare people away from changing this setting, which is not a good look IMO.
bigstrat2003•1d ago
You don't. There's a setting for which networks are allowed access without authentication.
seniorThrowaway•1d ago
barnabee•1d ago
Plex is for streaming my media from my server to my clients. I know a decent number of people who use (or used) Plex and I don’t think any of them would ever use it to access streaming services.
I have no problem with charging for functionality that needs their servers, or introducing streaming. But the way their authentication, “services”, and streaming features hae been shoved in our faces in the UI over time feels like a rug pull to those of us who paid for something else.
nebezb•1d ago
Yes, Plex _should_ work without an internet gateway. Why? Because it’s a client/server media application; it transcodes media to clients/players over the network.
Plex used to work like this. Actually, it was exclusively unauthenticated. Then early 10s they added optional auth, and eventually allowed you to reserve “server names”, and finally enforced with for running their server. But you can still use a client without auth today. Just read their docs: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200890058-authentication-fo...
dang•1d ago
You obviously know a lot about this, and your comment contains fine information, but unfortunately the negative elements do more harm than the fine ones do good.
seniorThrowaway•1d ago
darknavi•1d ago
If Jellyfin was a comparable product (in user experience and ease of use for my extended family's platforms) I'd switch tomorrow.
horsawlarway•1d ago
Spoken as the person hosting a jellyfin instance for my extended family. I switched years ago and it's only gotten easier.
You can find things to complain about if you want to, but generally speaking - Jellyfin just works. The idea that it's not comparable is pretty silly.
driverdan•1d ago
* Social sharing stuff that shows what you watch to others by default.
* Adding their streaming services and other paid services.
* Changing the UI layout to hide self hosted content, promote paid services, with poor UX for changing it back.
* Ignoring bugs that have been known and unfixed for years.
* Ignoring user feedback, doubling down on their poor decisions.
TheCondor•1d ago
I too have a lifetime subscription, I don't mind a lot of what they do, but it feels like our media has become less centric, they want to stream pluto.tv channels and stuff like that.
The biggest thing I dislike was how I had a single app to all my media and then they blew that up and I need multiple apps. It's not that big of a hassle; I just wish I had more heads up to when it was going to happen. And while I'm not aware of them having any music-streaming media, the music app ever only streams my own media and feels like it might be on life support. Maybe music streaming is "done" but it feels kind of neglected.
driverdan•1d ago
That's what I was implying with saying "existing users." It seems they're caring less about their self-hosted core userbase and trying to expand to other types of users.
barbazoo•1d ago
jaffa2•1d ago
barbazoo•1d ago
jaffa2•1d ago
My point exactly. If you want the timer pay for it? Otherwise what are you complaining about ?
Ferrari dont’ even let me use a car for free, and I dont post complaining about how if I wanted one I would have to pay.
barbazoo•1d ago
So it would be more like Ferrari giving me the car for free, and then after a while when it starts raining I find out the windshield wipers are behind a paywall. Sure that would also be my fault, technically but it's also a shit company for doing that.
jaffa2•22h ago
Many TV's also have an explicit sleep timer. Yes this doesn't resolve plex issue but could solve the issue in the meantime. Or go old school and plug an actual electric timer in the socket and cut power to the TV after X minutes/hours
barbazoo•22h ago
That's actually clever, I didn't think of this and is much better than just a timer. I'll check that out later!
DANmode•22h ago
gilrain•1d ago
barbazoo•3h ago
0x457•1d ago
Syncing (a paid feature) was broken for years. It might download video, it might fail. You will find out on the plane.
When internet goes down, Plex becomes weird...my home network still works just fine.
Library navigation follows netflix pattern, but netflix pattern is to let me browse for hours without finding anything.
BowBun•1d ago
The irony is they won't have a customer base from my mom/dad. Why in god's green earth would a layperson pay for Plex when they can get streaming bundles? I just don't get it. And that's why I got rid of my ~10 year plex instance and replaced it with Jellyfin in maybe ~1 day.
Happy to help others do the same!