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Comment by squeedles | Hacker News Reader

I ran a plex server for about a dozen years just to watch local movies and photos on a couple of rokus. No matter how they pushed, I never created an account because I didn't like the idea of remote access proxied through them.

It ran on a desktop pc that we would just boot when we wanted to watch something. It met our needs. Considered a lifetime pass back in the day just to support the project, although the constant churn of "look at me!" stuff made me quickly realize that their goals were not mine.

A few months ago I finally got around to building a NAS, and discovered that plex won't even run now without a pass. Moved to Jellyfin and never looked back. Getting hardware accel configured took a day or so, but we now use it 10x as much as the old plex server.

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FYI, getting hardware acceleration for Intel working with Jellyfin is pretty straightforward. The key thing is that you have to put the server acct into the render group, then pass through the dri device. I also pass through the video group, but I don't think that is strictly necessary. NVIDIA seems a bit different but I can't speak to that. Docker compose file looks something like the following (uids and gids may vary)

  services:
    jellyfin:
      container_name: jellyfin
      image: jellyfin/jellyfin:latest
      pull_policy: always
      user: "1007:1003"  # jellyfin / jellyfin
      group_add:
        - "44"   # video
        - "992"   # render
      network_mode: bridge
      ports:
        - 8096:8096
        - 8920:8920
      volumes:
        [ ... config, cache, and content ... ] 
      devices:
        - /dev/dri:/dev/dri

I had a jellyfin server on the same machine as my plex. I really tried to use both, the jellyfin experience was so much worse overall.

It had one technical feature that I valued (the ability to tone/color map dolby vision content for non dolby vision devices), but that was such a minimal feature for me (very little of my content is in the proprietary dolby vision colorspace).

I have a lifetime Plex Pass, but I'd gleefully dump it for open source if the experience were as good.

But as you say, it's not, and the lack of churn (only patch releases and one blog post this last 6 months) doesn't inspire me to think it's getting better nearly quick enough.

Are you talking about the Jellyfin server? It is quite an active project. Last release was 10.11.8 about a month ago, and github says that there have been 1049 commits to master since then.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/releases/tag/v10.11.8

The clients are even more active

> I didn't like the idea of remote access proxied through them

This is not and has never been required. If by remote access you mean actually streaming from the public Internet, their proxies are a low-bitrate fallback in case you can't connect directly - and it can be disabled altogether IIRC.

Remote access is provided through them. The content is not. The access is. We're far past the point of quibbling technicalities to defend your chosen celebrity-company

Was the attempted offensive remark required to make your point?

The solution I use for remote access is tailnet plus exit nodes. It also is probably more secure as the attack surface is wireguard + the tailscale control plane rather than an entire internet facing Plex server.

Agree, same here.

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