End the Streaming Struggle with Plex
plex.tv
plex.tv
Jellyfin is a much nicer alternative.
I'm still annoyed that by default it requires a login to their cloud to stream locally, which I found when my Internet failed and Plex refused to stream locally. Also the useless third-party stream channels, and the insistence on enabling DRM on Firefox when none of my media needs it to play.
I've installed Jellyfin in parallel, and I agree it lacks polishing compared to Plex, but it gets the job done without getting in your way.
Settings | Network | List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth
And add your local LAN range, like 192.168.1.0/24
The internet went out, but I had some tv shows I wanted to watch already downloaded and indexed by my Plex server. So I tried loading Plex locally from my phone and it kept trying to "phone home" to have me login to the Plex website, which failed due to not having any internet access.
(I say "feature" but of course what actually happened is that the plex developers decided to block requests from outside the LAN unless you sign up for their SaaS offering, which is kind of the opposite)
Had to enable hot spot on my phone briefly when I had an internet outage. Annoying but now just works.
Getting plex pass is a must if you use it regularly in order to support hardware encoding.
My main complaint with Plex is local searching is hit and miss - a little while back I typed in a string I knew was in the title of a file (confirmed using 'locate' in CLI) and it returned 'no results'
I used extf4 as storage, but changing to NTFS (yuck) has caused less issues. With the last version the search for subtitles is broken, but at least I can add them manually. I bought Plex Pass for life, but stayed with the free version because it's more stable.
I'm on the monthly plan because I wanted to play with GPU transcoding - despite what a lot of folks say it does work in Windows on an AMD iGPU, although I've switched to discrete now (previous server was Ubuntu, but Linux GPU fan control seems to be a mess and we all know the Nvidia driver saga)
Afaik I am not sure anymore who forked who but I've seen convos on IRC back then and the issue was solely the fact that emby devs wanted to be paid
I also need to be able to set a language preference for both audio and subtitles since I am one of those subs>dubs weirdos. If I have to set the audio track every single episode I am just going to hook up my laptop and play it in mpchc.
Whenever I look at open issues for emby or jelly I get the impression that anime is annoying to deal with so I'll just stick with the plex plugin that already works.
They have a plugin for JellyFin, ShokoFin. And I believe they do have a integration with Plex.
This replaced my previous setup and it works amazing with my Kodi.
As the person who owns and operates the service, I should have the control to set default configuration for my users. Just like I should be able to shut off all the ads for everybody, I should be able to set the default quality setting to max.
I can't do either.
I never asked for the support burden of content that I'm not interested in offering MY users of Plex. They're not Plex's users, and it speaks volumes of their motives that they think it's appropriate to Trojan horse monetization services onto my users.
If you're not running it in docker, that'd probably still work, if you track down those two directories. Just a bit less clean, and a little chance there's some important stuff configured to be saved other places in the non-dockerized version, so it's a little riskier.
This is exactly why I run everything in docker :-) One shell file or docker-compose file per service, and each concisely documents exactly what's running and where all the important stuff is.
Now, if I have to touch zfs for any reason at all... that's half a day of sweating bullets, worried that one of those arcane commands will wipe out the whole volume. The UI is like Git, but what's at stake is all your stuff instead of one easy-to-restore code repo. "Oh you want to do what must be one of the five most common things someone might want to do to a zfs pool? Sure just run these six arcane commands in order. Don't mess any of it up or all your stuff is gone."
Jellyfin is more a network player - your jellyfin server does the heavy lifting, like transcoding etc. so your client basically just needs a web browser (though there are native apps too).
You also used to be able to log into "your" Plex server with a local account, but some years ago it was changed to require authenticating with Plex, Inc. to log in.
After multiple internet issues resulted in me not having access to my local Plex server and not being able to fix that, I decided to drop it. Maybe tons of backlash prompted them to fix this? I don't care, I'm a happy Jellyfin user now.
Plex continues working if you disable local auth if the plex main server goes belly up.
Also, while I know what the movie is about, my SO wants to see what year and genre the film is, and if it passes that first hurdle then she wants to read what the film is about before deciding if it's a pass or a go.
Finally, I enjoy being able to quickly find related movies by clicking on the director or actors and see what other works I have with them. I know I could do this in IMDb but it's nice having it right there.
I've had issues with some stuff getting the wrong metadata and it became annoying enough to fix that I now use MediaElch to tag my files before uploading them to my server.
I've considered switching but I have a very large and disorganized media library that Plex does a great job of organizing. About 10TB worth
Edit: NVM, this is pretty neat. Just loaded it up alongside Plex and it's surprisingly good. Going to use it for awhile and see how I like it.
Linuxserver.io hosts containers for Plex, jellyfin, and a bunch of related apps, with example compose or shell scripts.
I had no idea this was there :/
I have a smallish 100TB library I'd really love to move away from Plex, I regularly test out Jellyfin to see if they've finally made it usable. But sadly Jellyfin is still very far from being a good Plex replacement, it's just janky as fuck.
Constant playback errors, terrible client support, significantly higher resource usage.
I still think Jellyfin is interesting and I'm going to keep it running alongside Plex to trial it.
All good options. Although some are trying to push a yearly subscription now. I bought one time licenses for all 3 when they were 20 a pop.
They're looking to push it official via LG though.
I havent bothered to look at alternatives in a long time and it seems there are more now than there used to be. will be looking when i next have time.
That setup would be a media server on your desktop (I'd recommend Jellyfin for this, there's a windows app) which broadcasts a DLNA server on your local network.
Then in VLC, you click on "mDNS Network Discovery" in the sidebar that comes up in the playlist view and your computer will show up with a folder structure.
Here's what that looks like for me: https://f002.backblazeb2.com/file/ATibPod/vlc-as-jellyfin-cl...
Instead they've kind of gone down the route of trying to copy streaming services, and done a really poor job of it, and my experience the last time I logged into Plex was basically "wtf is all this nonsense?". To be fair though I was actually able to accomplish what I wanted - which was to be able to stream a ripped DVD from a media server (Raspberry Pi) to my TV - and for that it still worked pretty well.
What story works better for those two (valid) audiences?
Everyone knows nobody has massive libraries of home movies. These other features offer a more clearly supportable "look, it's not just for (ahem) home video libraries" narrative.
These are largely puritan nerd arguments that I see plastered all over the Plex subreddit but that I simply don’t experience day to day and haven’t in the 10+ years that I’ve used Plex. Plex is probably right to ignore what I personally perceive to be a vocal minority.
On the other hand the amount of crud the app has just for streaming movies from my NAS is ridiculous. All I really want is a prettier interface to DLNA.
The past year or two on Plex has been super annoying unfortunately. I have been getting lots of transcoding and caching issues.
I've reached the point where I will be trying out some alternatives again when I have the time.
Oh, and for some reason local storage deletion doesn't work for me on iOS -- need to investigate that. But if you want to listen to music that's stored on Jellyfin and store some for offline use, it's great so far. Just needs some small stuff built out!
The Android app works really well on a Shield, and is much more pleasant to use. Can't vouch for other devices, and Android experience, especially Android TV, can vary a lot with the device. The Shield also handles more video codecs and can pass through more audio formats than my Roku can, which means less transcoding, which means my poor, weak old server doesn't get abused while still only barely managing to generate a slideshow. In fact, I'm not sure I have any files that the Shield can't handle natively.
I love, love, love having a Web interface to use when I want to change things. Mixing the library & settings management interface with the "6-foot" remote-friendly interface, as on Kodi/XBMC, is a UI disaster. It's also very nice as a fallback streaming option, and works way better than I'd have expected.
You do have to have your media metadata correct though, e.g. ID3 tags, etc.
If that worked (and I'm not sure if its a cert problem or something else) I'd be happily away from Emby/Plex and every other option I've used in the past.
I just made a domain name for all of my local network services. Each service gets a subdomain that resolves to a local IP address, so like jellyfin.mydomain.com -> 10.x.x.x. Then just do DNS validation with letsencrypt. Boom, valid cert.
That said, I don't actually like Jellyfin, and I wish it weren't implemented in such a Windows-centric language framework.
Once I found out that Jellyfin existed, I excitedly spun up an instance and put all my media on it. It can't handle any AVI videos and lags a lot more than my Plex VM with exactly the same specs. Worst of all, it can't detect my external Chromecast, only the one built into my smart TV.
After assessing how well Jellyfin worked, I had to hang my head in defeat and return to using Plex. I can see that Jellyfin has a very active user / developer community on Matrix, and I bet things will get better.
EDIT: I accidentally said Windows-centric above, but what I meant was Microsoft-centric. I meant the company and not their OS. Leaving it the "wrong" way above for posterity.
"The .NET Framework (pronounced as 'dot net') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows".
The official documentation for both C# [1] and .NET Framework [2] live on Microsoft.com.
I would say the above constitutes a pretty Windows-centric existence relative to some other vendor-agnostic languages, but maybe we're saying different things. What did you mean?
Refs
----
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework
1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/
2: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet-framework
And the documentation is on Microsoft's site because it was originally developed at Microsoft.
"Free. Cross-platform. Open source. A developer platform for building all your apps."
The download page for .NET which includes downloads for Windows, MacOS and Linux is https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download
What the GP meant is exactly what they said, "C# and .net 6 are not windows-centric.", sadly it shares a name with .Net Framework which was windows centric.
There are several GUI libraries that are still Windows-only (e.g. Winform, WPF, etc.), but the latest one MAUI targets MacOS as well as Windows desktops, in addition to iOS and Android.
Just glancing at the code on GitHub, Jellyfin is primarily an ASP.NET web server targeting .NET 6. The download <https://jellyfin.org/downloads/> page shows a wealth of platforms, of which Windows is only one.
The original statement suggested the Jellyfin was somehow weaker on other platforms than Windows when there's nothing to suggest that there isn't parity on all supported platforms.
The .NET team has put a lot of effort into shedding its Windows-only past. I'm honestly not sure how FOSS the platform is, but at least some of it is open-source.
I was also not aware that .NET 6 is not the same as .NET Framework, so that was my mistake. I'm partly going to blame my ignorance on Microsoft for that one; for us folks that don't develop in M$ land, these distinctions can be subtle.
What I _meant_ to say was that I wish it weren't such a Microsoft-centric language framework.
XBMC (now called Kodi) still exist and is open source. I’ve been using it for going on 15 years now and it’s never disappointed.
Kodi's for running on your set-top box, mostly. Like, yes, you can link Kodi instances together and stuff like that, but it's mainly for running attached to a TV.
I've tried with Kodi off and on, never really being happy with it, since it was still XBMC. I much prefer the Jellyfin model of operation. I spend a lot more time using it and a lot less time having to mess around with it, while using more features than I ever even tried to with Kodi.
That's an unfortunate holdover from it's origin as an Emby fork.
> Once I found out that Jellyfin existed, I excitedly spun up an instance and put all my media on it. It can't handle any AVI videos and lags a lot more than my Plex VM with exactly the same specs.
AVI is just a container format and Jellyfin leverages ffmpeg to do most of the actual decoding work, so that sounds like an issue with the VM's ffmpeg. Jellyfin also doesn't enable hardware decoding by default; could be related? I'm not sure what Plex does (for codecs/etc).
Unfortunate? My initial guess on first contact with the project was that it'd be some Node thing. I was so relieved to see it wasn't. My unkind but honest and built-on-experience assessment is that it's a big part of why it's so not-shitty. C#'s a great choice for a backend language.
Also just a note, C#/.NET is cross platform and totally open source. I run an open source app that is in .NET, like Jellyfin, but just for reading and it runs of everything, including Pis.
You get the whole service, open source, easy to run as a docker container or on K8s, love the web UI.
#/bin/bash
docker run -d \
--volume /opt/jellyfin/config:/config \
--volume /opt/jellyfin/cache:/cache \
--net=host \
--restart=unless-stopped \
jellyfin/jellyfin:10.7.7-amd64
"Also, mount these two directories in the image, to where Jellyfin expects to store its config, so that stuff persists across container restarts and upgrades..."
"... uh, I don't remember what --net=host does, I think maybe it directly exposes the container's ports on the host interface, because I was being lazy when I wrote this? Anyway, it works..."
".. restart this unless I explicitly stop it..."
"... and run this official Jellyfin image, at this particular version"
Then after the second "--volume" insert more lines for every folder you want to map in, like so:
--volume /mnt/storage/movies:/media/Movies \
--volume /mnt/storage/tv:/media/TV \
--volume /mnt/storage/kid-movies:/media/Kids \
--volume /mnt/storage/music:/media/Music \
You'll see the directories on the right of the ":" show up in the Jellyfin UI, where you can add them as media sources and tell it what's in them, who has access (say, granting some users access only to that "Kids" library), et c.
Save as "jellyfin.sh" or whatever, and chmod +x. Run it. Done. To upgrade the version, change the last line to the new version, kill the container with a docker command, and run the script again. Do the same if you want to add more directories.
(might want to check the version, that may not be latest, it's just what mine is running right now)
You could also do it with docker-compose, I just tend not to do that unless I'm dealing with a container that depends on other containers.
Works ~anywhere that can run Docker containers. Doesn't matter which distro you're using. I'm pretty sure it even comes back up on system restart, and I didn't do any extra work to make that happen. Self-contained, simple, and clean.
[EDIT] To be clear, you also need to create those "/opt/jellyfin/config" and "cache" directories. The left side is what's on the host filesystem. But, you can put those anywhere, they don't have to go in "/opt".
Helpfully, the "--volume" list is also a complete list of everything (aside from the shell file itself) that you might want to back up. Which is one of the things I love about configuring services with Docker.
(As for music, I ended up just running Airsonic in another container on the same box, so all set there till something better comes along. Navidrome, maybe...)
"Note that this project is supported on all major operating systems except FreeBSD, which is still incompatible."
There's a Jellyfin chart on TrueCharts as well.
[0] https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/gettingstarted/migratingf...
Besides, the FreeBSD based TrueNAS Core will almost certainly be deprecated and replaced with Linux based TrueNAS Scale within the nest couple of years. Further strengthening the idea that this is a pointless platform to support.
One day, a big one is going to go dark, and millions of people will suddenly lose access to the hundreds of movies they got used to accessing, and maybe we'll start waking up and looking for better alternative business models than streaming the same bytes over and over from centralized services.
Ideally, a production company shouldn't give a shit where you watch their stuff, just that you do. That'd remove most of the friction that makes creation of a universal streaming UI difficult. It'd push distributors to compete on price and features, not exclusive access to content. All around a win for viewers, creating a healthier, more robust market.
So, probably won't happen :-(
Exclusive licensing is just a way for the entire streaming industry to avoid competition. Are Netflix and HBO really directly competing if you have to get both to watch the content you want?
Sure, they’re competing for my attention with what I end up watching. But if I really want to watch something else, I’ll just get to it later. It’s not really either/or.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Probably one of the remaining streaming services will just buy the content at fire-sale prices, and people who want that stuff will have to switch services - which they had to do anyway, because their one went dark.
There's just so much content on so many systems, all cheaper than buying one dvd per month that (some even free), that I just can't see anyone really being at a loss for how to entertain themselves in the case Netflix goes dark.
Also annoyed that Plex does not integrate with Apple TV App itself.
I wish I could make the TV app my goto. It's great for the things that support it, but sucks that not everything does. I wish apple would be "brave" and force any apps to integrate with it.
I keep looking for a good alternative (especially given the online requirement), but it seems like Plex is the only one with a decent Apple TV app. I have jellyfin running but the app situation is less than ideal.
If anyone has any recommendations with good Apple TV support?
I didn't hate it, but it had some quirks that annoyed me coming from Plex. But maybe I will give it another shot. Pretty sure my Jellyfin server is still just sitting there running alongside Plex.
I have a feeling that this is because Apple has some onerous little line in their contract that Netflix was not willing to accept. There's certainly no technical reason that it can't happen.
And it annoys the hell out of me.
But apparently other's have this ability?
So you are probably right. Annoying as hell and tbh has led me to use Netflix significantly less... which has led me to consider canceling it.
> This feature will only work with our free on demand movies and TV shows. We’d love to integrate personal media as well but that’s not technically possible for a couple reasons. To make this work we provide Apple with a list of content we have available for streaming. As detailed in our privacy policy, we don’t know what content our users have in their personal media libraries.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/lniiij/plex_testing_t...
Apple could pass the search request to each service/app and collate the results, but that's not their way.
At the time, Netflix was very opposed to what we called "meta search" (e.g. having Netflix titles available to look up outside the Netflix interface). The idea was that we wanted people to "consciously choose Netflix" as opposed to just choosing what they want to watch and getting it on whatever service happened to have it or was randomly chosen. I've always assumed they maintained this perspective (though, I'm somewhat surprised if they do considering the landscape today with every service leveraging their original/exclusive content more than their generic licensed library).
To your other question, lifetime Plex, but I also run Infuse and MrMC.
Starting 2021, went mostly native: after HBOMax, Paramount+, Peacock, Disney+, etc., I found everything integrated enough that, together with Prime and Hulu (and Netflix) we didn’t “need” Plex. Note that Hulu Live can act as cable SSO provider to enable 3rd party apps.
I don't love the cloud login either, but I do still use it. Just wanted to point out that the server and (some?) clients work without it.
I run a server for family, and use the Nvidia Shield as the client for pretty much any "nice" TV or sound system. This worked great for a couple years until a software regression made all 4k content have a 70% chance of locking up the Shield - which exists to this day.
There are other small annoying bugs like that that don't make much sense, things like transcoding being weirdly laggy (minutes) on a quite idle machine that I never fully tracked down.
I suppose writing this I am on the "bleeding edge" in that I expect to have "gold" 4k remux copies on-server, and then transcode down to whichever device is playing it.
The Plex Kodi plugin is a workaround for the above mentioned 4k "original quality" playback bug, but that is not a great option for most end-users.
Kodi + TVHeadend had me 90% of the way there, but a handful of persistent bugs around PVR destroyed it for the family.
I have a MythTV setup curreny, but the sheer amount of hoops I had to go through to make it work with the tuner card and SchedulesDirect meant that I was loathe to change anything lest the house of cards breaks.
Perhaps it's time to check this alternative out.
There is a nice docker image that runs deluge and wireguard. Works great with my VPN. Keeps a port open and everything. Has the firewall set to prevent using anything other than the vpn. It’s also nice I don’t have to play with my servers network settings as it’s all in the container.
And yeah, plenty of piracy also.
I changed my home launcher to one like this one https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.cosinus.la...
it has made the experience much much better.
Not sure what else they'd show there. My Plex does the same thing; a list of things I can watch.
Just wondering if plex has anything similar so I know to avoid that too.
Also if anyone knows of any other things that could be similar to stremio that I can avoid please let me know. Thanks.
I don't think logging in locally with a cloud account should be required, but IIRC it isn't strictly required... just a dark pattern.
If the internet goes down, we’ll read a book or play a game.
Fake news. I spent barely 300 million minutes every night trying to figure out what to watch. And my friends are usually down under 200 million.
it insisted on throwing up the configuration screen for selecting the streaming services that I am subscribed to. However, since I'm not in the US and they didn't test where I am (unsure how many places they did test) it failed and crashed the app on startup.
A redditor found the solution that you needed a vpn into the us to get past the initial configuration. One still can't reconfigure the streaming services, but that doesn't matter as at least it doesn't crash once one gets past the initial configuration.
I wonder how much plex devs get paid, because my job wouldn't be happy if I broke peoples usages like they regularly do.
I tinkered with this last night. This is false advertising in my books. Took me awhile to discover this:
>Does this mean I can play [streaming service] content in Plex?
>If you select an available Plex Media Server or Plex’s own streaming service, then you can obviously play the content in Plex itself. Content from other streaming services does not play in Plex, though.
Not only was it hard to find this new feature, it was worthless.
I have been using Roku TVs for years and if they have this feature I'm not aware of it. I also have various TV's around the house that have different OSes and apps...Plex can simplify that cruft.
I love the idea that it can pull all my media into one place, but realistically it doesn't work with all apps - a particularly relavent example in this thread being that it completely ignores my plex - and is buggy with the rest, such as BBC iPlayer which usually correctly shows up in Apple TV app (all be it with a worse UI than BBC's not-amazing-itself app) but doesn't always show my latest next-up info.
I dislike it so much that I have watched illegal rips of Apple TV+ shows on plex despite having a valid subscription to watch them in the Apple TV+ section of the Apple TV app on my Apple TV device.
personally I watch everything downloaded offline, streaming is still too unreliable
I don't use it personally, but I guess it can have some appeal for some, I'm fine with no nice UI for my downloaded files from USB stick, I do all my research prior downloading so I'm in no need of fancy UI.
It kind of is one of those missing features which I would have wanted back when I was subscribed to several streaming services. But now there is only one at the time + plex.
I believe this is not an Apple thing but something that the third party app has to do, they can "offer up" their content to the Apple TV app but bigger ones like Netflix want to keep people in their app.
Just like third party apps can integrate with Siri and provide Siri with a list of titles / podcast episodes if they want.
If it were indeed the original title, I'd flag this one.