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Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

This was the wake-up call me and my friends needed to stop using this proprietary piece of garbage. I moved to Jellyfin this morning and I was pleasantly surprised that unlike a few years ago, the Swiftfin app now works well on both iOS and tvOS.

This kind of move by Plex only highlights that even though you’re running the server, they still feel they have the right to break your application at any time for reasons they decide. For me that’s completely unacceptable and I won’t spend a cent with them again.

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> piece of garbage

That’s pushing it. You’re entitled to dislike that it’s proprietary, but Plex works great. You can like an alternative better without shitting on Plex for no reason

True it's a hot piece of garbage. Enshittification is probably a better word.

It's not though. You are both speaking in hyperbole. Plex is actually objectively better than Jellyfin. Skipping intros still doesn't work consistently in Jellyfin.

But it is a company and I am glad that there is serious competition from Jellyfin. It isn't a publicly traded company, so pressure from an open source product can push it to be better and not necessarily turn it in to a money grab that makes the product shit. They've made some missteps the community hasn't liked, but they have also had improvements as well.

To me it seems "objectively better" and "capable of shutting down your server remotely due to your server host" don't belong in the same solar system.

That's a recipe for an unhappy life IMHO. If I stopped using every service/product/business that did things I didn't approve of I'd be compiling my own linux distro (kill me) and probably growing all my food (of course where are you going to morally get some of the seeds you need?).

This kind of black/white thinking is harmful. Plex "just works" for the family I share it with, I have zero interest in being 24/7 tech support so I don't use things like Jellyfin. If this UI/UX improves enough then I might consider it but everyone I've shared my Plex with has been able to use it without peppering me with 100 questions. I seriously doubt the same would be true for Jellyfin.

You can just buy IPTV and and a Chromecast and disregard the headache of everything else. Megacubo for pCs. Plex was great but they have slowly just destroyed their brand loyalty.

IPTV sounds like a poor replacement for paying for access to content you don't control on someone else's Plex server, not a replacement for running your own Plex server with only content you want.

You run your own IPTV and then you use the available clients to stream your catalog. It works impressively well.

Xsteve, tvheadend and stream River are options

> shitting on Plex for no reason

I thought the reason was obvious (it's the first word of first sentence of the parent comment)

> You can like an alternative better without shitting on Plex for no reason

Have you not noticed the topic you are commenting on? It's pretty clear why Plex is now unusable for a significant number of users. Other commenters likened Plex to a honeypot. How did you fail to be aware of that fact?

> no reason

1) The UI is trash, bloated and unreliable.

2) The UI regularly tries to convince me to look at their junk TV/movie sales pages.

3) The UI doesn't provide proper feedback during the media library tagging/discovery process.

4) Oh yeah even though it's hosted in my network only using resources in my network, it feels the need to call home regularly.

Sorry, you seemed confused, and I'm not the person you're replying to, but I thought I'd help you out anyway. This list isn't comprehensive, but it should at least help you understand people might actually be shitting on Plex for actual reasons that exist :)

Doesn’t help. I disagree on 1, I actually like Plex UI and it mostly works fine for me. It’s especially useful in that I have official apps everywhere (tv, smartphone, laptop), I can chromecast, and I can download movies locally on my phone. All that reliably.

For 2, it’s just a tab you can hide no? I think I had that the first time I used Plex, but I’ve not seen that in months…

3 is true, the discovery process is too opaque, especially when it doesn’t find one of your files.

4 is not a UI complaint but a technical complaint.

None of that makes it garbage.

> I disagree on 1

I disagree with your disagreement.

Your statement has achieved nothing as it doesn't address that it is a frustration users have (I'm not the only one) that might incline someone to thinking a product is garbage; "I disagree" is a moot point, as the behavior discussed influences user experience and opinion. I don't know how to make that more clear.

> For 2, it’s just a tab you can hide no?

What's your point? I don't want it. I don't want to see it. It's advertising garbage to me. I will choose products that don't do that and rank products that do as closer to garbage than products that don't.

> 3 is true

It's also essential to the most important feature of Plex: Parse my fucking media and let me search and view it. It is core functionality and it's garbage.

> 4 is not a UI complaint but a technical complaint.

I wasn't aware we were being restricted to complaining just about the UI of Plex. Can you show me where this goalpost was established? I must have missed it. As Plex is a self-hosted application, non-UI behavior is relevant to the user experience. This includes the setup and operational process.

agree, it may have shortcomings but "piece of garbage" is something that does not fit, its one of the longest running apps of its kind with the largest user base of superfans

> I moved to Jellyfin this morning and I was pleasantly surprised

Perhaps I'm an outlier but I've never had a good experience with Jellyfin. It seems that anything and everything that could go wrong does.

The Jellyfin codebase also terrifies me. I would not feel comfortable hosting a publicly-accessible instance of Jellyfin.

> The Jellyfin codebase also terrifies me

Ok, why?

It is a large codebase with a mix of new and legacy (Emby) modules. Errors or intermittent issues seem common, and nobody really seems to understand what's happening.

Many of the dependencies, especially for the legacy modules, are old or deprecated with numerous CVEs. Some functionality involves dispatching commands to external binaries.

Overall it seems like a product that works, but isn't necessarily well designed. A critical vulnerability was discovered earlier this year, and I feel that a security audit would more than likely result in a few more.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/security/advisories/GHS...

Is it possible to import "watched" and the placeholders and other user metadata? I'd switch, but i'm not willing to wipe out everyone's metadata to accomplish it, especially as I have a lifetime plex pass

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