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Comment by n0zmer | Hacker News Reader

Jellyfin is still so far behind Plex in media organization and just general reliability and polish.

Also, Plexamp is by far the best music player to exist right now.

That's a bold claim. Personally I'm very much liking Finamp (for Jellyfin), it's coming along nicely and it does a great job IMHO, especially its offline mode works robustly. Looking at the feature list of Plexamp, sure, it does have a few more niceties, but it doesn't look like Plexamp is free or open in any way, so I'm never going to run it.

That's great and all, but the quality difference is 100% there and there is absolutely nothing wrong with paying developers to make great software.

Kind of a straw man. I keep seeing this comment, but haven't seen a single person say that there is something wrong with paying developers to make software.

Great, so pay the jellyfin devs. The "free" means freedom not price and you are very much encouraged to pay for free software.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

But Jellyfin is open source and doesn't try to force you to open an account.

I'm at the point now where I will always choose open source if the product is "good enough" even if it is not the best. Jellyfin is "good enough" for my needs at least.

I have no problem paying for great software. There is an obvious quality difference between the two and it's completely worth it.

Sure, each person is free to have their own strategy. For me, I've been burned many times when commercial software was abondoned, or changed for the worst for financial reasons, or no longer works on my platform for some reason, or never gets some requested feature implemented, or is full of spy telemetry.

But I am not against commercial software and have no problem with others using it. Just not for me.

But it doesn't trick you into an account or subscription

I found that Plex was pretty upfront about how membership works. I was happy to pay for a lifetime membership given the usage I’ve gotten out of it.

(though if I’m honest the lifetime membership concept feels like a bad idea on their side. Despite using their product regularly they now get no more money from me)

This alone, finally got me and my husband to switch. Jellyfin is FANTASTIC, and I wrote a simple script with ChatGPT to help with tagging and metadata for our home collection.

What does it do exactly? I'm always always looking to improve my jellyfin setup

corrects metadata, and adds some custom stuff like our own reviews from our family google account spreadsheet.

Two things that work OOTB with Plex, might I add.

Not for me they didn't.

Can't say I've ever had to script anything for Plex.

Where’s the trick? Pretty much every feature a typical user would use is free. Everything else is clearly outlined on their website. Just because you don’t want to pay for software you use doesn’t mean it’s a trick.

I paid for lifetime over 7 years ago. So, I'm not worried about that.

And it doesn't require internet access to watch things on your local network.

That was the last straw for me with plex.

Having to log into a server on the internet to access local content isn't just bad, it's broken by design just like DRM.

Why? Do you not have an internet connection?

My ISP went down. Nothing I could do about it.

And you couldn’t just play the video over smb in VLC for the ten minutes it was down? Like it really seems like a non-issue that a paid SAAS would expect an internet connection.

Why does it have to be a paid says? It's locally hosted

Because developers have to eat? And my experience with Plex is that they handle all the network negotiation so you can smoothly stream from home anywhere, that’s the core of the service.

Although many projects are offered free of charge, individuals can choose to donate or seek sponsorship to ensure their continued development. Not all freely available software depends solely on financial support, with some projects choosing to develop without any monetary compensation. However, it can be frustrating to feel like the Plex Pass and associated account offerings are being pushed upon you.

The server is running on my local network. It was blocking watching content on my local network from within my local network because it couldn't phone home.

That's broken by design.

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