Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin | Hacker News Reader

Plex's price hikes prove I was right to switch to Jellyfin

androidauthority.com

49 pointsBrajeshwar93 comments

As expected and as is usual I’ve read through another very salty justification for using Jellyfin that is based on anger or idealism. I rarely if ever see anyone making the argument that Jellyfin is actually materially better usability-wise. it’s always, “Plex is going down the shitter, you’ll see!”. OK then, if Jellyfin becomes better, then i’ll switch. isn’t the point that I own the media, so i can switch to whatever i want, whenever i want? Which to me is, when Jellyfin is better for my use-case. So many people act like this is like placing a bet on your favourite sports team. Like If one piece of software eventually gets bad then it was never worth using at all. We’re all going to die, eventually, so by that logic neither Plex nor Jellyfin would be worth using.

It's better for my use cases. For starters, I don't have to login every so often for no reason. I don't have my local software break because they updated their server. I also find it much slower.

Picking a tool is a very personal decision, and it depends on one's values and one's use.

I logged in 6 years ago. Since then its just working. Yes, plex. On my appletv

Don't you have any privacy concerns with Plex?

They state that they may share/sell certain data to vendors for targeted advertising (even though they offer an "ads" free experience).

They also log Email, username, IP address, device info, usage stats, etc.

Ditto for me on every one of the ~20 places I've logged in starting in ~2017

Well then I was a one off. It got me (along with how slow it was) to leave. Maybe it was a bug? Maybe I misconfigured it? Maybe it was OS? Who knows? Glad it works for you.

This was using the local web server instance to manage permissions for users, so maybe every time my distro undated the web server software or something. Either way, for my use case it didn't work out of the box. JellyFun did and does. Every tool decision is personal.

Your experience doesn't nullify mine.

I see an almost equal amount of both.

I'm still using Plex. It still seems to be better for 90% of my use cases but I'd like to switch eventually. Unfortunately Jellyfin seems to be a lot of work upfront for which I don't currently have the time or motivation.

If you want to install install docker engine (super simple instructions on docker's website) then if you make a directory and put the compose file below in it (you can call it whatever but docker-compose.yaml is a convention choice) and create another directory in that directory named "jellyfin" the below compose file will work mostly out of the box. you just run docker compose up -d in the directory. If you named the compose file something else you just need to specify -f filenameofcompose in the run command. I included an nfs mount example you can delete if you aren't using nfs mount (the volumes: head and examplenfsmount at the bottom) or adjust it/copy it for your nas situation. If you have your media locally mounted on the computer you are doing this on you can change out the xamplenfsmount for /path to your files. you can also duplicate that line for any other paths to media on your system/nfs/etc. once it's up you just go to http://ipofthebox:8096/jellyfin in a web browser and follow the prompts. It's not too bad at all to get going. I'm out of time to check you might not need /jellyfin in the url. if the first line doesn't work try it without /jellyfin

services: jellyfin-jellyfin: container_name: jellyfin image: jellyfin/jellyfin:latest environment: user: 1000.100 #change this if you want your user to not be 1000 and your group to not be 100 should be fine in most cases. TZ: America/Chicago #change me to your timezeone volumes: - examplenfsmount:/mnt/movies:ro - ./jellyfin:/config

    devices:
      - /dev/dri:/dev/dri
      - /dev/dri/renderD128:/dev/dri/renderD128
    ports:
      - 8096:8096

volumes: examplenfsmount: driver: local driver_opts: type: "nfs" o: "addr=YOURNASIP,nolock,soft" device: ":/YOURNASMOUNT"

Thanks for the effort of posting this, but I'm not sure what this solves. Deploying Jellyfin is easy. DRI is easy. Configuring it, herding my library structure, making sure I have friendly file formats, getting the myriad client devices to work, subtitles...

At one point a friend told me "I just went through the Trash guides once and job done". I spent a half hour looking at them, then another half hour giving that stuff ago and threw my hands up in the air and went back to Plex to watch some stuff after a wasted hour.

I found that side easy and the compose file config to be the tricky bit personally, but I have android devices or linux devices, no more exotic things like roku. My directory structure was already /tv/tv show name/season/episode and /movies/movie name/file.mkv/mp4/etc so it just worked. Subtitles was a pretty easy plugin built into jellyfin and maybe an api key (it's been a while I don't really remember).

Its way better for my use cases. Super easy to get the newly unshitified linux client autoloading on bazzite.flirc remote is awesome, not having my data exfiltrated to the cloud to be sold to the hi-hest bidder while charging me for that denigration also super awesome.

I'll happily take 10 "oops I messed up your order"s over 1 "I put sawdust in the bread"

The simple fact of the matter is that, for many, enshittification outweighs usability. People are very happy to switch to something that may not be functionally all that better just as long as it doesn't come with a whole bunch of extra, in their opinion, bullshit.

And that's fine. If you're not bothered by what others are, cool beans. Good for you.

God forbid anyone avoid a merchant because of anger, or choose a merchant because of idealism.

What in the world are you even trying to say? That because we all die at some point there is no reason to not sell out to an exploitive corporation because they have better UIs?

No, the opposite if anything. I’m curious how you came to that conclusion.

Ppl want developers to work for free. Especially here on hn

I've stopped paying for software outside of games almost entirely. SaaS is a universally terrible UX and it's impossible to actually purchase software anymore. Especially with local LLMs around to smooth out all the rough edges when it comes to FOSS life is good. The experience of never waking up to having something be worse off than it was before is sublime.

I worry I over-index on my desire for control but it's just so so nice to have my tools work every day and never break, and never change under me and just always do the thing they are supposed to do.

Same & amen. I won’t even buy anything like a Sonos/Homepod, etc. again either. Sonos (the curse, then the blessing, lol) permanently turned me off anything but OSS/DIY IoT stuff. The great thing is, between ESP 32’s, Pi’s, OSS, cheap Ali components & 3d printing, you can have something you actually totally own & control in your house, rather than some remotely cloud locked subscription garbage & normally with better features for a similar, or sometimes lower initial cost.

Sorry cloud providers, but you all burnt (nuked) your bridges and I have zero interest in seeing them rebuilt. I’m more than happy on my own little island!

Tinfoil hatted me would wonder if this might be why they are so desperate to try and ensure local LLM’s never become a thing…

What made you turn off of sonos?

In case the don’t reply I’m betting it was when they changed their API and broke a lot of existing hardware that took a long time to get working right again.

Ah interesting. I had a 5 year break from them. Just picked up the beam 2 home theater setup and they sound decent + was easy to use.

I have bought Infuse and it’s one of the best purchase I ever made, maybe.

I’m subscribed to Infuse Pro for several years now, and I agree it’s one of the top purchases I’ve made (and keep paying for).

The lists, drive shares and libraries on Infuse are more than enough for me. I didn’t have an interest in adding Plex or Jellyfin (or Emby?) to the mix.

Plex started out great for us Boxee users left in the cold, but the writing was on the wall when they started offering rentals. Product development has hit a wall in the last two years. While its UI isn't as intricate, Infuse does a fantastic job of transcoding higher bitrate 1080 content over LAN and WAN, where Plex, Jellyfin, and Emby just stutter. The Plex AppleTV app hasn't received material updates in what seems like years - they haven't even rolled out the Liquid Glass effect like Infuse has.

I would abandon Plex completely, but I still haven't found a capable app to remotely stream the 2.5TB of music on my Synology. Their recent price hike a few months ago converted me from a $5/mo Plex Pass customer to a $120 lifetime customer. I sense a new product tier in the works that us lifetime customers won't have access to without shelling out more.

You might consider setting up Navidrome. It’s working well for me, running NixOS on an N150 minipc along with Tailscale.

Lots of clients are available to connect with it (it also has a functional web UI). It does not touch your music files, keeping things like star ratings in its database.

https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

# Clients

https://www.navidrome.org/apps/

> I would abandon Plex completely, but I still haven't found a capable app to remotely stream the 2.5TB of music on my Synology.

I would look at Navidrome. Completely focused on music, and for that application much better than either plex or jellyfin.

https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

> I would abandon Plex completely, but I still haven't found a capable app to remotely stream the 2.5TB of music on my Synology.

If you use iOS, I'm beta-testing an iOS 26+ Plexamp alternative with ~500 Plex users which supports all media servers (Plex, Navidrome, Jellyfin, OpenSubsonic, etc.). It's not feature-complete, but is daily-driver worthy for common use cases. You can find more info and a TestFlight link here if that sounds interesting: https://www.reddit.com/r/plexamp/comments/1qel35s/new_invite...

I use jellyfin server on my NAS with wireguard + symfonium (android client) on my phone for streaming, but I mostly stream out of the house on my phone.

I switched to Jellyfin and also don't regret it. I agree the quality is lower, BUT that sacrifice in this case was worth it given Plex's shitty track record. If any of y'all are interested in helping the Jellyfin project, that would be dope!

Every time I hear of people complaining about paying for software I wonder what people on here do for a living. Is everyone on here getting paid for developing software that’s free?

I used to when I worked outside of games. I worked on a payments backend for an etailing website. The software cost was paid for by items purchased. I don't think anyone considers buying an item at a site like target.com considers them paying for software. That software is for the businesses benefit.

I don't buy any (non gaming) software for any other purposes because most of the time the pricing model, licensing model, or lack of platform support is not right for me.

I don't want SaaS for anything because things constantly change (almost always for the worse) from under me. I don't want to have to pay a subscription to play my music, watch my videos, or take my notes.

> I don't think anyone considers buying an item at a site like target.com considers them paying for software.

You do know target adds the cost for their web presence to their cost centre, and you as customer pays for it right?

I do. But I also know that if ask anyone "Do you pay for Target's software?", they are likely to say "no" or "huh". The context was why do people who complain about software costs not work for free.

Or maybe a better way to express my thought: one can work in a paying software job and still dislike "paying for software" where that means a subscription to play local media files.

I am. Plenty of software companies give away software for free and make money on support, hosting, network effects, ads, etc.

But also, paying for software as an enterprise vs as a personal user are very different things. I don't get proper support, bugs and feature requests never get fixed, if a regression is introduced I'm just out of luck completely, etc. There's no SLAs.

If the software is open source I can at least fix issues myself for myself. If I'm paying for software I'm also paying for new bugs, lack of support, and constantly increasing prices. Somehow by paying money I end up with lower agency.

You may find Kevin Kelly's post, "Technology wants to be free" (2007), interesting.

  ... five traits of networked technology – perfect market competition, price transparency, innovation sharing, collaboration, and expanding markets – ceaselessly push technology toward the free.

  ... There is an unarticulated assumption held by many people that the natural state of any created thing is expensive. Technology is believed to be born dear and costly, and it is only through relentless hard work that things can be made cheap. Indeed, according to this perspective, everything is naturally expensive, and would remain so, but for genius and sweat. This natural level of expense and scarcity can only be lowered by applying constant energy, favorable legislation, and technological vigilance, otherwise the price of a good may spring back up to its natural elevated level. God forbid a disaster or calamity collapses the system and allows the prices of everything to revert to their true unattainable price.

https://kk.org/thetechnium/technology-want / https://archive.vn/anPxH

It's not that people are even mad about paying for software, it's that paid-for software is often worse in unique ways that free software is not! Which is maybe shocking, but not so shocking when one considers that money intrinsicly corrupts everything it touches as it re-aligns incentives.

For example, a lot of paid for software actively disrespects the user. A lot of paid for software degrades in quality over time. A lot of paid for software has far too many ads. A lot of paid for software loses features over time. And on and on. In my experience, that's just not the case in open-source land.

I donate for virtually all my open-source software, usually a lot. To me, it's not just that KDE is free and Windows costs money for instance. It's that Windows sucks major donkey dick and fucks its own customers up the ass, and, on top of it, continues to degrade, whereas KDE is amazing software that gets better and better by the day.

"The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."

In that sentence, who's "you" and who's "other people"?

And under Capitalism, how much is the national debt now?

If all you want is to watch your videos over the net, you're better off not using either. Just put it on a shared drive and install VLC.

Complaining about a one-time payment for software backed by a team of lawyers in an age where farts are patented and opposing farts are sent CnD letters, is crazy.

Nearly a decade after my investment, I can stand up as many Plex servers as I want with free relay services, metadata aggregation, trailers, and extras. Not to mention access to all of my music in the same manner. Better yet, it's all curated in accounts for various family members near and distant.

Plex also takes me as long as it takes to install the OS and applicable software (+3s for ufw rule). –It just works.

Maybe Jellyfin has that now. But I hate plugins. Either have it or don't. F** your DLC.

The primary benefit of Plex/Jellyfin over using VLC is realtime video resolution transcoding. I can save the files at 8K resolution on my NAS, then configure the output resolution depending on the client device. I can watch content at 8K on my living room TV, 4K on my laptop, and 1080p on my phone. I don't need to keep three copies of the same content at different resolutions.

Plex/Jellyfin also offer highly configurable mobile / TV companion apps. I can start watching a show on my phone, then continue where I left off on my living room TV.

I tried Jellyfin after some frustration with Plex and found it an inferior relative to Plex so I'm still on Plex. Lifetime Plex Pass is the solution here for now given Plex has not clawed back any features and in fact has added features to the pass.

Yesterday, I went to try to cast music from the Plex app to the Vizio Smartcast SP70 I had just bought (awesome speaker, weighs 900 lbs and is as wide as my closet door)... but you can't do music on the Plex phone app. Like, wtf, when did this happen?

So, now I need to try to install the older Plex app on my phone with Sideloadly, because Plex is more interested in streaming shit to me and trying to be Netflix or Paramount+ than it is in doing the the thing it always did best and that no one else was doing: allowing me to stream things to my own devices from my own storage.

It gets frustrating. At some point, no matter how bad Jellyfin is, it will be better than Plex because Plex is trying to become worse than anything else. I guess I got my Lifetime Pass long enough ago ($75) that I've gotten my money's worth out of it, but goddamn.

I think I might be missing something.

900 lbs is 400~ kilograms, but according to the Vizio spec page, the speaker is:

Sound bar Weight w/ Stand: 14 Lbs. Packaging Weight: 15.5 Lbs.

It's a figurative 900lbs.

Someone forgot to put figurative weights and measures into the model's instructions again. Going to take twice as long to farm updoots with such lazy prompt engineering.

Plexamp is actually a really good music app for phones

PlexAmp is a Plex official app for music streaming.

three paragraphs of complaining all because you didn’t look this up? because if you did, you would’ve seen that Plex has a separate, dedicated app for listening to music. If your complaint is that “it should be in the same app!” then that’s just an absurdly silly thing to have gotten yourself worked up about.

>three paragraphs of complaining all because you didn’t look this up?

Because they did it wrong. Me looking it up and finding out that they did it wrong doesn't mean I'm wrong.

>you would’ve seen that Plex has a separate, dedicated app for l

I don't want 10,000 fucking icon on my phone screens, having to swipe through 5 of them to find anything. Why do I want this split into two apps? That serves them. Not me. That makes it easier for them to try to become Spotify in one place while trying to be Disney+ in another. Fuck that shit. They're breaking something that wasn't broken.

No one everything's being enshittified. It's because I have to share a planet with losers who not only tolerate it, but cheer it on like stooges.

> I don't want 10,000 fucking icon on my phone screens, having to swipe through 5 of them to find anything

Lol you’re using your phone like it’s 2019

I went straight to Jellyfin and I find it awesome.

I wonder what exactly am I missing.

Same. I started out early in 2003/2004 with XBMC, and used all sorts over the years - probably Plex for 4/5 years or so in there… the writing was on the wall 4(?) years or so back when the nag emails and data capture all started ratcheting up. I dumped it for Jellyfin and never looked back once. I pay for Infuse to make it work on Apple stuff, but it’s < £10 year (mainly to cover codec licence nonsense?), which seems a small price to pay compared to any other alternatives I could find.

One thing Plex does better is media detection. Like you can plop all your shows in a folder and it still will make sense of it. Jellyfin insists on a very specific directory structure and file naming. It’s very frustrating if you only want to watch a show and not interested in maintaining a perfect library.

They both insist on their own systems and both are wrong.

It's astounding how much every single system out there fights and fights and fights against showing you your directories, as they are.

I started but didn't finish a Rygel + local-search (nee Tracker) plugin to try to finally get that. I wish the upnp media services were better. I keep telling myself I'll build a nice client/controller... Some day.

It's one tickbox away in Jellyfin: Libraries > Display > Display a folder view to show plain media folders

What're the chances VLC will do what you want as both server and client?

Is there anything around that does _not_ force a management system? I really just want a thing that primarily just tracks if I've seen a particular file, secondarily maybe let me control playback from a different device. Actually figuring out what media those files map to is a distant third.

DLNA usually doesn’t force any system and more or less exposes fs. Some TVs natively have a client. Otherwise Kody or some other client app can be used to browse and play files.

Torrents go in, properly matched Plex entries come out, 99% of the time

I do agree that both systems are wrong. At least Plex's is more compatible with the even-more-wrong conventions of the high seas

As far as I can tell plex only wants separate folders for different kinds of media and file names that give at least some clue to what it is. Plex is much more lax.

The problem with Plex is that is has a very opinionated system that ignores how things are in real life.

One example I can point to is Stargate SG-1. Episode 1 is a two parter and depending on who you ask it's either Episode 1 and 2 or Episode 1 which causes all subsequent episode numbers to be thrown off by 1 depending on how you count.

This confusion is further complicated by the release order on DVD/Bluray, the order of airing, and the fact that all of these things can be different in different regions of the world.

And that's just one show.

That has more to do with TheTVDB than with Plex itself, and it's really nothing compared to what Jellyfin demands. Plex at least supports several different alternative directory structures and file naming schemes. In order to transition to Jellyfin I would have to rename thousands of files to comply to its specific requirements, whereas Plex was mostly okay with the way I had organized my files offline.

Plex hasn't bothered to work on this in 15 years. It's been the same since I was in college and I'm almost 40.

I actually discovered the advanced item ordering menu where can you change the series episode order source, it solved this exact problem for me yesterday

This is not really a big deal. If you want it organized arbitrarily put the files in other and it will be.

It's a big deal because there's no rhyme or reason why it's one way or another way in different series so when you ask your TV through voice command to "Play Season 3 Episode 2 of [Show] through Plex] and then your TV plays the wrong episode it becomes a big deal.

It's really not a Plex problem, it's an "Internet TV metadata" problem

Use your remote or organize your files accordingly such that the integration works

You are not listening. There is no way to make it work properly all the time.

Use remote and put everything in other, it will use your file directory organization. People, man.

Funny, I found no issues with it.

Maybe the way I organized my library intuitively sort of matched Jellyfin's expectations?

For a time and I have no idea if this is still true Plex had a serious advantage in the sheer range of client platforms it supported (iOS, Android, smart TVs, Roku, etc.)

Plex's outrageously heavy Android client (on my admittedly older phone) was actually what pushed me the rest of the way over to Jellyfin

They support (or did previously support) more platforms, but Jellyfind is what runs at a reasonable speed on my phone, so that's what'll get used

Ouch. I wonder if this is related to when Plex tried to unify development of their mobile app in late 2025 so they’d have a single shared codebase for both Android and iOS?

I’ve heard from a lot of people who accidentally upgraded to the latest version of Plex on their iPads that it’s a shadow of its former self: tons of features are missing, SRT are unreliable, picture-in-picture flakes out, etc etc.

It's possible, because I used the Plex app on that same hardware for years. It certainly wasn't Google's software gettng heavier (it was already RAM and battery-hungry enough I'd dropped it), but trying to use Plex became an exercise in frustration around that time

Jellyfin's outrageously heavy Android client was what made me switch to Plex

Jellyfin works awesome on Android cellphone and Android TV.

No native app for LG TV, but I have an Android TV box anyway.

I can't say how well it works on Apple devices and other TV brands.

Jellyfin has had a native LG TV version for 4 years

Jellyfin is so much ahead when it comes to hardware acceleration on different platforms that it is actually sad to see how Plex has not made any improvements in years

Glad i got Plex pass at the old ~$100 price years ago. Honestly I've had such few issues with Plex it's basically one of the only applications I've willingly bought and not regretted. And with the costs of everything on earth climbing I'm sure their bills are growing too. So it goes.

I've never been convinced that Jellyfin will be an improvement, like at all, let alone one that would be worth all the headache of migrating Tunarr and Seerr and the rest, and trying to keep my watch data, and the risk of all my family's TV and mobile clients becoming tech support liabilities for me. Honestly the fact the Plex apps are on every platform and keep getting updates is worth the money for me

The article misses a couple points: - sharing. With plex this is easy using plex accounts - 3rd party integrations. There’s a whole ecosystem around plex. - a lot of things that are built in into plex are either not available in jellyfin or are offered as (no longer maintained) plugins - clients are far from the quality one needs

Everytime I read these post I'm glad I bought a lifetime pass 12 years ago, very well got my $$'s worth over the years.

More than the price, the privacy concerns and previous outrages justify using Jellyfin IMO.

To me it proves I was right to get the lifetime pass many years ago

Same here, got it on a Black Friday sales yeaaars ago for $90 I think. It's served me well and still does, I use it everyday.

I do not want to be in a business relationship with a company for a trivial amount of money, be it $29.99/yr or $69.99/yr or $249.99 lifetime. None of that is real money. You have no leverage, you do not own your own destiny. Complaining about the price hike is missing the whole point - Plex does not care about any individual customer, and that's the real problem (and the problem with just about every B2C business).

I want to like jellyfin or any other option, it is disappointing people still have too many complaints, so I know it’s still not worth the time.

Ultimately Plex is just fancy wrapper on ffmpeg and some media index/scraper, library management, and then native device apps. It’s crazy that something like jellyfin still hasn’t improved well enough.

> I’m all for paying for a service that offers fair value

They say, about not paying for a product to let them stream pirated content from other services:D. I’m annoyed by all the various streaming services too but at some point you just gotta admit you don’t want to pay for anything regardless of value.

not sure if i'm retarded, but there's not a single mention of xbmc

It's called Kodi now

Reply on news.ycombinator.com