Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

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I paid for plex, I stream my own music from anywhere via the callback into my home net. I can chromecast, play in-car, whatever. If I have IP "it just works"

Its backed on an RPI-4 NAS I built, running the plex arm linux code. I have another RPI-3 in the living room as a headless music source to an amp. In the past I've used HDMI to VGA+audio splitters to scatter output to devices. This is my music, on my disks, under my control. I own these rips, the bits are mine. I keep the discs behind them on the shelves just in case but I haven't opened a CD case in nearly a decade.

Plex isn't perfect, but its pretty good. plexamp is available when you take subscription, and periodically plex offer lifetime buy deals, which I leapt on.

Jellyfin is [edit: not - it's from emby] another variant of the same codebase (forked)

I also paid for tidal. I don't like these music rental schemes, I like to own my CDs and rip but for exploration, finding what you don't know, its really useful and unlike some of the other choices, its owned by musos. I think at some level its still greenwashing the truly awful world of A&R/IPR on music, but if anyone has to get payola here, it might as well be musicians.

I use Plexamp with a Wireguard tunnel back home. Biggest upgrade to my in-car music listening in years.

If only Google could stop screwing with my Android Auto. I have an older car and using Android Auto on the phone was nice! Then they killed it and replaced it with Assistant "Driving Mode" which they ruined and now it only works when inside Maps while navigating- which means you cannot use it unless you put in directions to where you are going. Most of the time I know where I am going. I need to put in fake directions and ignore them in order to listen to my damn music. We are moving backwards! If there's one place where I have a short fuse/temper for these aggravations it's while I'm trying to drive!

Same. I'm actually surprised at how well Plex works without having direct remote access over the Internet. The only port open on my router is the one for Wireguard.

Does plex have anything for audiobooks (preferably streaming with the option to download locally)? I quit audible after they removed desktop support but I managed to get all my books out of their DRM, but right now they just sit on an external ssd and I have to manually load them onto whatever laptop I'm using (which also means they don't keep their place between devices)

Prologue for iOS is a Plex audiobook player that is better than any audiobook player has a right to be.

Here's a good guide on how to set up Plex for proper metadata with audiobooks: https://github.com/seanap/Plex-Audiobook-Guide

I'd never thought to use Plex with audiobooks before but this post and guide got me started. Now I've got all my [Amazon audiobook service] books saved safely for when someone inevitably tries to pull the plug on it. And streaming through Prologue is a way better experience than the commercial option

I've never used plex so this might be completely out of the ordinary for even more normal plex use cases, but is there a web client?

I use Android, iPadOS, Fedora Linux, MacOS and possibly in the future Windows (my last job required it, my next job might too) and unless the standard plex app supports audiobooks I doubt I'll find much consistency using native apps for each of those operating systems, if they even exist on all of them

Yes, they have a web client, but their audiobook support is not great. Plex is primarily geared towards music (albums/tracks), and the podcast support is built on top of it by independent clients. I recommend Prologue for iOS and Chronicle for Android.

I've heard good things about audiobookshelf [1] as a cross-platform alternative, but it is pretty early in development.

[1] https://www.audiobookshelf.org/

Seconding Prologue. I have successfully listened to many audiobooks with it on Plex

I recommend https://www.audiobookshelf.org/ for self-host audiobooks; they have apps for Android and iOS (you need TestFlight for the iOS one though).

Seconding audiobookshelf. The web player and apps are both pretty good.

In general, I think a dedicated app for the content of interest typically works better than a general media server like Plex or Jellyfin. The same applies to books (Calibre/Calibre Web) and comics/manga (Komga).

+1 for this project and I’m currently testing out the built-in podcast server

Jellyfin is an emby fork, not Plex.

Jellyfin is excellent. Swapped to it from Plex about a year ago. Haven't looked back once. I run the server on an old M1 Mac Mini, it's the first time I've felt I have my own personal Netflix. I can stream 40gb 4k HDR Atmos rips to old stereo 1080p plasmas with ancient Firesticks (on wifi) in bedrooms in my house with almost zero delay, even when fast forwarding, and getting near realtime frame previews as you skip. It's lovely software.

How old can an m1 mac mini actually be

In the UK businesses generally write computer hardware off over 3 years, or 5 years if it's a really extravagannt purchase, this little M1 is now written off from a business perspective... so... They make really great low powered, insanely fast & quiet home servers... It's a lovely time to be alive! :-)

They are still £500 on eBay, compared to the Lenovo micro systems which are less than 1/2 the price for a 10th gen and doesn't have everything soldered down it doesn't seem like a great deal yet.

I'll probably be waiting another few more years before I have an M1 for my home server.

3 years is pretty short, I feel like it's 5-7 here. Maybe laptops are different nowadays.

have you been able to work out how to stream when you are not in LAN, like with tailscale or other overlay network?

Mine just works with Wireguard. I took a couple extra steps to make it convenient:

1. Public DNS entry gives jump box IP. With some http forwarding the Letsencrypt flow initiated from the internal Jellyfin server.

2. My Wireguard server (running on the jump box) runs dnsmasq and answers DNS queries for wireguard clients with the wireguard IP for the Jellyfin server.

3. DNS server on the home network gives those internal clients the local IP.

Works great now; obviously not plug and play but I had fun setting it up.

Tailscale + Jellyfin + Finamp (iOS Jellyfin music client) has been a game-changer when not on my LAN

I have a similar setup, with an internal Jellyfin server on my lan. Every phone in my household has Wireguard that automatically connects if you are not on my wifi (which means pi.hole, nextcloud, access to cameras, and other services are also available).

It works quite well. Each family member has their own 'Library', since we all have very different taste in music, plus an 'All Library' that includes everything. We can also stream movies and tv shows I own and have ripped.

The clients are OK. We are mostly using Finamp for music playback.

I like knowing my music is always available to me, can't be removed, and is always the same version (I don't necessarily want a new remastered version)

I have a caddy proxy in front of jellyfin's web UI with HTTPS and a domain. It's publicly reachable.

I used Jellyfin for the first time recently. It was very smooth and worked flawlessly for my use case (watching episodes of a TV show on my phone after downloading them on my computer).

I never used Plex because it creeped me out. Maybe I misunderstood something but it seemed like it was needlessly phoning home.

I'm really trying to like Jellyfin, but unfortunately the Roku app is just absolutely terrible by comparison. The thing that grinds my gears the most is I can't see how much time is left in what I'm watching without pausing.

Personally - I've stopped using Roku devices.

I feel like they had a boom early in the pandemic and then just completely flamed out. Now I feel like support is terrible across the board - It's not just jellyfin that sucks on Roku, so does Netflix/Hulu, and don't even get me started with channels just entirely disappearing because of developer disagreements and licensing.

That said - Jellyfin really sucks on Roku. The android tv version of the app is miles better.

Yes roku app leaves a lot to be desired. I went to play music on it, and it only displayed the list of artists. Still, I’m rooting for it to improve!

Ah my bad. Apologies. It's mentioned so often in writeups of plex I got their origins mixed up.

Emby was also a plex fork, so its kinds the same?

Emby, a (somewhat) open source C# project, is not a fork of Plex Media Server, a closed source C/C++ project. Emby was forked as Jellyfin however, as a reaction to Emby becoming more and more of a closed source project.

Plex was forked from XBMC which is renamed to KODI an open source project. Think the fork was around version 8 or 9. KODI is up to 20. Downside to KODI is it does not have streaming built in like Plex. But has built in emulation again like earlier version of XBMC.

what do you mean by "KODI ... does not have streaming"? I have rpi with KODI on my son's TV and it streams everything over CIFS from my NAS - the NAS doesn't transcode or otherwise do anything but host the cifs share.

Plex can act as a 'head unit' and do format transform and metadata management. Then stream it to a secondary plex client. KODI does not do that. That is the one killer feature Plex has over KODI. In all ways KODI is better except in that use case. Picking data from a CIFS is basic XBMC/KODI/Plex functionality and has been in there for a long time going back to the original xbox days. Jellyfin is similar with its ability to transcode and stream that to a client. In some cases they let you stream it thru a web client (which is kinda cool).

It is a nice feature for low bandwidth applications. Say a VPN to your phone, or a friends house who has crappy internet. If I remember correctly there were a lot of clients also for TV's which have absolute rubbish CPU power and no local storage (for holding metadata). Also the centrally managed metadata is nice when you have more than one client. You can get the same effect with KODI and using a DB like mysql or mariadb. But it is sort of finicky to setup correctly.

I personally use KODI as I do not need that particular streaming feature. Also it is broken with ISO's which is one of my major use cases.

Does Kodi serve up files? e.g. Can I install Kodi on my PC with all my media, then watch that stuff on my phone when I'm away from the house, or grant a friend access to my library?

That's what Plex does: it has server apps and client apps.

No, it's not.

That's too much effort, don't you think.Maybe not for you but for general tech folks.

OP has a somewhat complicated setup. Here's an easier one that I use:

* Pay $15/month for a VPS (whatbox in my case).

* whatbox has a notion of first class apps, including Plex. Click a button in their GUI to install it.

* drag and drop your music using whatbox's GUI file browser

That's it.

You're scaring people away from selfhosting with that $15/month. There are plenty of cheaper options, including under-$1/month with a dedicated IPv4 and enough storage for thousands of songs (or hundreds if you're using flac): https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/

Those 1$ offers usually come with just a single 10GB disk, so pretty useless for storing anything. Unless you manage to store the files elsewhere, which will probably have costs again.

Fair point. I was trying to emphasize the ease of use with my setup, not the price.

$15/mo is only marginally better than a family streaming plan on price, but loses out on music availability.

Getting that down to $5-10 would be worth it for most who aren't into the social aspect of music services.

The negative reactions to you saying $15 are a good example of why there are no good Spotify and Netflix alternatives for people wanting to stream their own media.

People claim to want it, but they put a very low monetary value on it. No new business can survive on $3 a month subscriptions.

At that price the transaction fees are large.

~35 - 36 USD a year? Depends on what's going on and the volume. Probably no support or paid per incident support.

Common wisdom is that you can't bootstrap for less that $50 per customer per month, and at $100 it actually becomes a business that can grow.

No one wanting to self-stream will pay that, so then you would need to look for investment to stay alive until you have scale.

That's 600 to 1200 USD a year per customer, an _entirely_ different class of service and relationship.

The completely different order of magnitude endpoint I was thinking of is much more like the sort of 'streamed remote file storage as a service' (using off the shelf tech and software with a tiny bit of maybe custom glue) and almost zero support; with you get what you pay for levels of congestion and peek usage pains as potential problems to complain to that greedy last mile ISP you were forced to use because it was cable or barely better than dialup DSL.

iCloud is $0.99 for 50GB. Surely somebody can offer a 5GB stream-your-own-music plan for $10/year? Another person in this thread apparently is already running one, but the minimum plan starts at 250GB! And 5GB to 250GB is also a huge jump for most people.

Wow $15 a month? What's in that box, you're not just using it for some music streaming right? I've got my reverse proxy running on a 3.45€ instance from hetzner and I can't imagine you need much more for some music streaming right?

I'm guessing that your Hetzner instance loses when it comes to storage space.

https://whatbox.ca/plans

I'm paying 36€/month for 6TB of storage and my own real server. Used to be cheaper, they've been raising the price slowly over the last 2 years.

The name of the service they use is a bit of a giveaway :)

I use it for many other use cases...

> I paid for plex

I just spent 5min browsing their website and I still have no idea how much it costs, or whether they offer cloud storage or I need to install a media server application on my NAS at home. And how come they can offer "free movies"? Could anyone explain what their business model looks like? The website looks rather sketchy…

Plex through its web interface and apps offers free streaming of some live TV and movies. Free as in beer.

For enthusiasts, it can also catalogue and offer a portal for your local media collection. That is also free.

The Plex Pass is not free. It offers some neat customization features for the app, plus hardware transcoding of media which I suspect is the reason most people pay for it.

I wish Plex or Jellyfin would get support for audiobooks. I can keep my music library on my phone but my audiobook library is much larger and sometimes I get an itch to listen to something I don't have on me.

I just set up Plex with the Audnexus agent (https://github.com/seanap/Audiobooks.bundle), using the Prologue app (https://prologue.audio/) to listen on my phone. It was a little bit of a fiddle to set up, but it's worked wonderfully.

Plex has a setting at the library level that tells it to remember your last spot in an audio track. So if you set up your audiobooks as if they're music, this will allow you to listen to them reasonably through plex/plexamp.

That's not really a satisfying solution - you're missing out on the metadata matching features of the system. But it does get you there.

There's another app, audiobookshelf[1], that does this better. There's a server component analogous to plex server, as well as a web app or a mobile app for playback. The user experience is way better, but organizing the audio files is rather a pain.

[1] https://www.audiobookshelf.org/

What do you do for podcast? I feel like its the biggest (and really only) regression Plex ever did. Theres a plethora of other apps, but they all kind of suck and don't work with everything. My pain point is lack of Sonos support.

Spotify has podcasts but literally has the worst UI for keeping up with podcasts. They make it as difficult as possible to find what you've already listened to and what you're currently listening to, outside of the last few played podcasts.

So I'm not the only one fighting the podcast UI in Spotify!

I've been trying to use Spotify for a few podcasts and the UX is just terrible.

I can't believe they spent millions of dollars getting Joe Rogan exclusively and then not invest a tiny bit in improving the podcast experience.

yup, the plex streaming music solution works perfectly for my family as well. I wish plexamp was a little better though. the interface is a bit unintuitive/inconsistent and it doesn't behave well with android auto.

And playlists need work. The way they implemented there are size limits because .. scaling fails.

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