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Comment by freetime2 | Hacker News Reader

Recently Plex increased the cost of a new Lifetime Plex Pass to $750 [1]. It seems like they really want to get most users paying recurring monthly or annual fees. But to me at least that kind of goes against the whole purpose of hosting my own media library.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative!

[1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/

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My biggest beef with Plex is that they've pivoted away from being a media server first and are trying to change into a streaming platform first, and because managers inside the company have to show KPI, they're stuffing the streaming buttons and sections and recommendations in everywhere.

Really frustrating because the media server experience is still by far the best.

It really needs to have a "classic" toggle where all the streaming crap is disabled.

I have frozen both my Plex server and app versions to avoid turning them into a streaming app with outdated contents. Ever since they got rid of Camera Upload function it's been going downhill function-wise.

Honestly, this is why I stopped using plex. I set up and ran my own server because I wanted to see the stuff I have, mostly digitized family VHS and then suddenly I'm finding movies and shows on my server that I didn't put there.

To be fair you had to disable those feeds and then the content would not appear. User hostile move nonetheless.

The only good thing about this in my setup is I can add shows/movies to my watchlist from their advertisements and it gets picked up by my arr stack.

Wow, you can do this? At the risk of further complicating my arr stack, which I barely had the wherewithal to get running in the first place, how does that work?

The arr programs have 'plex watchlist' under the connect settings

I would recommend listarr as well. Woke up to "disclosure day" this morning without even asking.

> It really needs to have a "classic" toggle where all the [enshittified] crap is disabled.

This can apply to almost any modern application.

Try the Plezy app or the web server URL directly. For now it's far better. I believe you can disable the streaming garbage to some degree.

I still am not quite sure what value something like Plex offers for my personal HTPC media needs. I have a large collection of disk space that's an SMB file share on my local LAN, on a server in my garage. My home theatre PC mounts it over the LAN.

I have an XFCE4 desktop environment on the HTPC with the font size cranked up a bit and can run nautilus, thunar, or any other file explorer metaphor browser to explore the folders. There's a folder for movies, a folder for TV shows, and then stuff is organized within there by its directory name and filename. I double click on something I want to watch and it opens in VLC. Dead simple and works.

It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies. Shows what’s recently be added, recently released. Keeps track of where you’re at in a TV series, to always play the next episode. It can transcode as needed, to something like a mobile device or TV that might be more picky than VLC.

Lots of quality of life improvements over list of files on a smb share.

BTW, there was a variant of this discussion with the iPod and mp3 players back then. Some people wanted to manage music "by hand" in the file system, and had various schemes for doing so (folders for genre, then artists, then album, etc.), and wanted that reflected 1-to-1 in the mp3 player.

iTunes (and the iPod) had a different idea: The app takes care of file management, and you have a frontend supported by a database containing all sorts of metadata to browse your music (both static metadata (artist, genre) and dynamic (play count, skip count, last heard)). iTunes has smart playlists which I love (all songs with 3 stars or more that I haven't heard in 6 weeks).

I'm firmly in the latter camp, and similarly prefer Jellyfin over a pure SMB share for movies.

The first version in the very early days of 128kbps mp3 seemed to be more popular before people were ripping and encoding music with proper id3 tags. Once it became a defacto standard for proper artist, albumname, tracknumber id3 trags to be embedded as metadata in the mp3, using some sort of automated tool very quickly took over.

I do recall using several different tools about 20 years ago that took a bunch of horribly mangled filename .mp3 files (but which did have proper id3 tags in them, or where the user had manually corrected the id3 tags for the bare minimum of albumname, artistname and track numbers) and then rewrote their filenames on disk to something logically consistent to make them easier to find and move, store, copy manually if needed.

The more I think about it the more there needs to be an ID3 equivalent to video media so the meta data is stored with-in the movie container versus a central database.

Kodi and their meta helpers can create a local meta file. Next step is to push it into the media container.

CppCon and other video recorded events would benefit from this. The shared video file would contain the details and remove the energy to search for the source and other meaningful information.

google "metadata in MKV video file" seems to show that MKV already supports something like that, and mkv is already a container format. One problem would be that some collections of video acquired from dozens of sources/people who did the encode won't by any means be 100% standards compliant MKV.

I remember going through and manually keying in the id3 tags on my mp3s using WinAmp, because without them the dash between the artist and song look slightly different. That was a lot of work over a dash.

Worthwhile work, to me. I’m gonna listen to this music until I perish, might as well fix what’s bothering me.

This is not a rant or an attack on you. I get the point of easyness that Plex and/or Jellyfin offer. I merely would like to explain why i do not need it. I tried both Jellyfin and Plex, but i could not find a huge benefit in using them in our household. Again, not a rant.

I think it's an extra layer on top of things i do not need. I do not need cover art, descriptions or trailers. The smb shares have a folder hierarchy that's very logical and easy to our household so sorting and reindexing is not needed. Kodi (Windows,Linux, Android) keeps track of where i was, but i don't really care that much. Usually i remember what i was watching. File Explorer Pro (paid version) on IOS plays anything. I do not need transcoding, because all the players can play anything i throw at it. My wife and kids know how to use Kodi both on the pcs and the chromecasts.

Mp3's go to a Sonos at the moment. If more mp3 devices would be needed in the future, i'm kinda curious about the CrowdSupply Esparagus systems [1][2]

1: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-media-center 2: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-audio-brick

> "Usually i remember what i was watching"

You must not watch that many TV shows or Anime then. Or you have the memory of a savant.

Without an automated system I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking.

> I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking

curious question then - do you remember the content of what you were watching? i totally get that you don't know on what episode you are and i used and love Jellyfin myself, but if you're watching 100+ series "at once" i'm starting to wonder if you even remember the last episode of a show if you rotate so heavily, know what i mean? i barely remember an episode after a week, even if i exclusively watch one show. so either my memory is even worse than i thought, or - you have the memory of a savant ;)

It's not like the plots are complex :D

Mostly it's shows that are on hiatus, due to release cycles being completely random nowadays. Or Anime releasing a second season under a whole different show name.

Also shows I've watched 1-2 episodes of and decided it's worth watching, but not now - as there are a limited number of hours in a day.

Unfortunately i don't have the luxury to watch a lot of shows during the week. Usually the max is around 5 or so. Call me strange, but sometimes i actually like it that i forget what i was watching. Makes me kinda of realise it's still a little luxury leisure. Usually i get happy when i realise there's more show to watch (happened with Foundation). Or i keep ignoring it, because interest was lost over time (happened with Rick and Morty). The kids tend to watch a series back to front and then ignore it completely once they lose interest.

I still have artifacts in my dirs of TOSORT, TODO, and DONE.

I've resorted to manually tracking some non-Plex/Jellyfin shows on Obsidian manually :D

It's super fun to watch some 7 season show on a local streaming service, be on season 3 episode hellifiknow, come back in a week and poof it's gone.

If you’re using Kodi, that’s effectively the same thing. Kodi is XBMC. Plex started as a fork of XBMC for OS X. At some point they broke it out into a client/server architecture, which Jellyfin emulated.

If you have one primary client, Kodi is fine. Moving to Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby is more about serving multiple clients while maintaining continuity.

I can't watch anything without subtitles. Plex and Jellyfin support them, in many languages, because of the mumbled dialogues. Yes, I know you burn subs in.

Plus the whole *arr stack.

Usually subtitles are not that hard to find.

Yes but there is something nice about automatic subtitles. Less friction in my life.

Plex makes it much easier for non-technical relatives to interact with my media server. That's my own use-case.

Same here. XBMC/Kodi pointed at NFS has served me and my family well for 15+ years. Every once in a while I check out the alternatives with their custom server software and thick "stacks" and conclude that they don't offer me anything I want to do that I can't do with just shared files.

Yup, it’s a great UX and it makes the media experience feel finished, not hacky.

I wonder if we are starting to see a generational gap in how we consume media. When I was growing up, there was no "media experience," you just turned on the TV, selected your channel, and there was your show. Or your turned on the TV, pushed the VHS tape into the VCR, and your movie started playing.

Every once in a while I start looking into things like jellyfin and after a few hours poking around, eventually start to wonder if the heaviest users of these platforms enjoy the process of organizating their media and finding the perfect UI theme for that particular week _more_ than they enjoy actually sitting down and watching their shows.

I would equate browsing for a movie to watch in a Jellyfin library (or Netflix, etc) on the TV to someone browsing at Blockbuster to find a movie to rent, seeing what is available on their DVR, or maybe even the TV Guide.

I think the media servers started as a way to avoid tapes/DVDs and making it easier to get content on the TV. It’s a much better experience than a 100 DVD changer. Now, it evolved based on anxiety around streaming services and never knowing when the TV show you’re watching will get pulled, or your favorite movie will lose availability… and wanting to maintain access. This is especially true as companies, like Sony, remove digital copies of movies people “bought”. So any digital file with DRM from a company is only good as long as they decide to keep offering it, which isn’t forever.

> you just turned on the TV, selected your channel, and there was your show

You've just described the media experience. When I was a kid I spent so much time just flipping through channels. The same activity today is a vastly different and inferior experience. Modern televisions take forever to change channels.

It seems like all home technology adds friction and inscrutable failure modes in order to gain functionality/flexibility.

"Smart" seems to mean "powerful but complicated and frustrating."

I get the functionality benefits. I just don't want to pay the friction price.

My personal media library has over 600 moves and 70+ shows and around 8,000 books. There is no way I can watch and read all of it in my lifetime. But I do find joy in being a little librarian and I also care deeply about art and like to keep my own little nest. All of it is sharable with anyone i like anywhere in the world. I do use jellyfin but i don't think I have ever switched its theme though.

Either way, yeah one of the joys of running a home lab to me is definitely the managing and maintainence to me and I don't think its any lesser pursuit than watching the media itself

Jellyfin took me 20 minutes to setup with docker-compose. I’ve never customized anything about it aside from pointing it at my media library. It’s way less effort than making an SMB share play nice with a smart TV.

And you can stream to your phone. And I set my elderly aunt up to be able to stream it from her Apple TV ~80 miles away from me. And there are phone apps that let you download stuff in advance to watch on a plane. And I've been able to cast Jellyfin from my phone to the TV in a hotel before

>It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies.

Infuse [1] is a nice way to get these features on Apple TV and iOS devices while simply sharing files via SMB.

1. https://firecore.com/infuse

Infuse also supports some codecs on Apple TV that the official Plex client doesn't.

And it connects to both Plex and Jellyfin too.

Plex subscription also includes a “Skip Intro” for TV shows. That’s the only value I’ve gotten out of it other than being able to stream to my phone.

Not sure if Jellyfin has an equivalent

Jellyfin can support intro/outro skipping as well with a plugin. https://github.com/intro-skipper/intro-skipper

i've used this plugin a lot, and it is nice, but a bit hit-or-miss. it analyzes all episodes of a show to start seeing a pattern in the beginning of shows, or checks chapters which my files rarely had. works well for most shows, but if a show has unique intros for every episode, it doesn't really work. also had trouble with 100% consistent intros, but i never really figured out why that happened.

kind of a 50% solution, works a lot of times but a lot of other times you still end up scrubbing. (also consider that if you install this plugin onto a large existing library, it's going to take a considerable amount of compute and real-world time to do complete it for every show).

That sounds like what I see with Plex, too. It definitely doesn't get it when the intros are unique. And if there's something later that's the same each show (an explanation of the game show, etc) it'll target it as the intro instead.

It's good most of the time, but not 100%.

ah i see, then they must use a similar process. i wonder how big streaming sites do it. underpaid global south workers who manually tag the intro for every episode, or do the files come pre-tagged by the production. maybe a mix of both.

There is a plugin that is supposed to provide this, but I don't think it works with every client, and I'm moderately sure it doesn't work with Kodi. Oddly, skip credits/jump to next episode works fine.

It does work with Kodi, you just need to add a client-side plugin for Kodi to support it: https://github.com/SgtJalau/service.jellyskip

It does. Has for a while.

Yes. And with something like a GL.iNet travel router + Tailscale, you can watch Jellyfin from anywhere without ever exposing it to the Internet. You plug it in your hotel room, tell the hotel TV to connect to it, and voilà: Jellyfin on any random TV.

Connect a random TV to your home LAN over a VPN? No thank you! I would rather use HDMI in. You can also cache data locally. Or just watch on a smaller screen or tablet. There are a lot of jurisdictions where I would not want to take private keys or passwords with me.

I just bring a $25 Onn 4k Google TV “box” I use for travel that’s roughly half the size of a deck of cards and pre-configured with Jellyfin/ad-free home screen/etc in addition to the travel router linked to my VPN.

Less due to security and more because I’ve seen hotel TVs that literally had like 5 sec latency for any button press and are full of ads so I don’t want to deal with that.

Jellyfin does all these things too, and it’s free.

I have a HD TV from 2007 and I still vividly remember having to convert videos to a certain format because it was so picky. IIRC it only played .mp4, most of the movies I had on my external drive back then were .mkv and maybe some .avi , so almost nothing played

Plex used to have that problem, but in the last few years it's gotten MUCH better at transcoding on-the-fly.

The only thing I value from that list is the played/unplayed status, and resuming a title from where I left off. My two preferred clients handle that for me on my various devices.

In particular the main value-add is that they have clients across so many different platforms, including most major bespoke smart TV brands[0], and their solution to streaming on WAN (HTTPS brokering) is pretty darn good for most people. Accessing my media from hotel rooms is pretty darn seamless, other than the wifi connection sometimes requiring downscaling to 720p or or so.

0: not really an issue nowadays with everyone moving to Big Tech-provided smart TV OS, but when you use an old TV with like mid-2010s webOS it's nice to see some old Plex app that still works.

I guess this applies to a relatively small subset of population who are always on the riad and travelling for work.

One must have a nightmare of a vacation to even consider turning on a tv in an hotel room, I can't even remember the last time an hotel TV served any other purpose than hanging a wet towel.

It means access from anywhere.

Want to watch an episode of that series while you're sitting at work waiting for a long test pass? Plex.

You're hanging out with friends and they want to watch that movie you own? Plex.

You're at the gym and want to watch The Wire instead of whatever reality show is on the gym TV? Believe it or not, straight to Plex.

To your direct point, it doesn't have to be a terrible vacation. Any time I plan a vacation longer than a week it includes down day(s) with no itinerary, just recuperating. Sometimes that involves staring at a screen. Sometimes I've been out for 10 hours, it's only 7PM and I don't want to go to sleep, but I want to chill out in my room (maybe I'm overstimulated, maybe I'm just tired, doesn't matter).

I guess we are a different breed. I didn't even knew there were TV in gym clubs (I am exercising outside, never understood paying for exercising either). I don't really understand why someone would be so little engaged on his exercising/training/sport that they would need a screen to entertain themselves to be honest.

That is interesting to hear, a completely foreign concept to me that sounds a bit like addiction to be honest.

If exercise was pleasant you wouldn't have to remind people to do more of it. The only thing worse than running for an hour is running for an hour and actually paying attention to the complaints your body is sending while doing so.

> I am exercising outside

Doing deadlifts outside when it's -30C is pretty hardcore.

Also what's "engaging" in running? You put one foot in front of the other, it's not exactly something that needs 100% of your brain power to execute.

Well I'll give a pass to those who live in Siberia, Ulaanbataar or anywhere else with permafrost then ;-)

My experience in cold places, especially those with a lot of snow and ice, is that there are usually enough chores to do that skipping deadlifts day is not really a problem though.

> Also what's "engaging" in running? You put one foot in front of the other, it's not exactly something that needs 100% of your brain power to execute.

I guess that is the difference between running or cycling outside and doing it on a machine.

I can do all of this stuff with my Jellyfin server for the yearly cost of a domain name

This thread was a "why does remote access matter", not a comparison of Jellyfin and Plex.

I run both and Jellyfin is very clearly an open source project.

By that I mean that the interesting technical problem (streaming) is implemented rather well and there is a UI that technically has buttons to expose the things it does while simultaneously not being good at many of the things people use Plex for.

Jellyfin's remote access story is "set up a VPN or Tailscale". Plex's remote access story is "it works".

Jellyfin's story for accessing content from multiple servers doesn't exist. Neither does a global auth system for sharing access to your library, having friends, etc.

Jellyfin's sorting, filtering, and searching are just OK. Its web UI is nowhere near as nice for libraries of O(1000).

Real world example: I was at an AirBnB last week that had a Roku TV. To get to my Plex library I installed the Plex app. There was a Jellyfin app but I couldn't use it because there was no VPN client for the TV, and I don't feel the need to set up and run Tailscale when I already have Wireguard.

I use a reverse proxy for Jellyfin remote access, people saying you need a VPN or Tailscale (which is also a VPN) are unnecessarily paranoid IMO. That said, I'm a software engineer with more than 10 years of experience and a lifelong tinkerer, and I've set up an OpenWRT One as my primary router, so my firewall is more up to date and useful than 99% of consumers and I'm comfortable restoring a PC if it gets hacked.

But maybe more importantly IMO, Jellyfin doesn't have a central server that would serve as a high-priority target for hackers. Plex may have funding and full-time devs, but they're also relying on security through obscurity, which is hardly best-practice. Their central servers were hacked 10 months ago and passwords were leaked. For that to happen to me, hackers would have to be interested in my little Intel N100-powered server running from my house with maybe 10 daily active users. On top of that, Jellyfin's team have generally been quite fast at addressing all known high severity vulnerabilities because the project is open source. Everyone can see the code, so anyone can fix an exploit as soon as it's found.

As far as sharing access with my friends, I just ask them to put in the username/password they'd like on my phone in person for account creation, then I text them all the details about the URL for my Jellyfin instance, how to set up their smart TV app for it, etc.

I can access my Jellyfin instance from almost any smart TV in the world with the official apps because I followed their official guide and set up with a reverse proxy instead of Tailscale.

So on vacation you just come to the hotel room and fall on the bed. First thing you do when you wake up is leave the room?

Seems like you don't need hotels, a hostel would work just fine :D

Some of us need to unwind even on "vacation". Just get your feet up and watch your shows and relax before hitting the sack.

Well usually if I am on vacation that is not to stare at walls but to visit, enjoy the place I am visiting and and experience stuff so yes I usually only come back to the hotel room either to wash/change myself or to sleep and/or have sex.

Are you staying all day in your bedroom when you are home?

Vacation is also transit, a Mariot here a Hilton there. I watch content curated by me or YouTube.

Maybe different people vacation differently.

Maybe that's OK.

What I want to know is, what happened in your life that turned you into the kind of monster that destroys hotel electronics with wet towels when there are always perfectly good towel racks in the bathroom??

In my experience there are never enough towel racks or they aren't wide enough for the towel and the bathroom ventilation is usually set to stop automatically when you close the door.

Hotel electronics do not have feelings so I don't really think that the monster qualification applies, and they are probably ok anyway as they are so rarely used and have time to dry before being powered on thanks to the aircon helping maintaining a dry air. I don't think the actual electrical components do suffer from a lot of moisture from the towel.

You can't know for certain that modern AI-imbedded electronics aren't sentient and humidity-averse... YOU MONSTER!

You can do that with Jellyfin and Tailscale trivially on devices you own; for a hotel TV you can use a GL.iNet travel router (which will also let you access your LAN from any device connected to it) and it's all free (except for the router of course, that you just buy once).

How are you going about installing Jellyfin on random hotel TVs? None of the hotels I've stayed at have that level of freedom on their TVs.

(So I instead travel with an Apple TV that does all of the above, and more)

If there is a browser then that's all that's needed. Just point it to the LAN IP of your Jellyfin install.

Admittedly my use case is not the most common. For a number of what I think are well founded reasons I don't use the "smart TV" OSes built into any televisions I own, none of my TVs have the wifi password or access to the Internet. The HTPC screen is just a screen, something else that's smarter is driving it.

I also don't have any need for realtime transcoding as my home internet upstream speed is sufficient that I can watch 'full resolution' stuff remotely from my laptop or phone via VPN back to home office, and smbfs or sshfs access to the same file shares, without needing to use any CPU or GPU resources to process the video in realtime in between where it's stored any my client playback device.

If you don't care for any of the modcons of a media streaming system similar to Netflix, etc. then more power to you, stick with a SMB share. It's undeniably less that can go wrong and god knows these systems can become a janitorial hell sometimes.

However I hope you can see that there is a plethora of benefits that others may enjoy from it. Otherwise, this kinda feels like the classic HN Dropbox critique.

I am definitely in the former category. I’m not dedicating the time to replicate a Netflix client equivalent with all the metadata (although I do make the time for FLAC albums). There’s nothing as straightforward as directories and a SMB conf file. Plus, you name individual files however you want.

I have straightforward SMB shares, but two distinct groups for movies. The first is standard bitrate, where everything is 1080p SDR h265. The second is for 4K HDR, higher bitrate. That second group is only for a small number of movies that I like very much, will rewatch, and have cinematography and visuals that justify the storage. If I love a movie but it is mostly an indoor dialogue affair, there is no point in it being in the second group. There is duplication between the two groups so I am covered if I want to watch the high def version at home on my large TV connected to my Pi NAS via Ethernet, or the standard def version around the house (usually working out) on a mobile device (or possibly on the road via my Tailnet).

The transcoding isn't just about bandwidth, it's about compatibility. I store most media in H.265 because that's the most space efficient, and most things can play it, but a decent number of devices still need H.264. I also have older content with DTS soundtracks, which isn't supported by a bunch of new devices.

Plex/Emby/Jellyfin will handle that compatibility by converting on the fly.

Plus, when using a Fire Stick, or Google TV Streamer, or old Chromecast it just isn't easy/possible to browse a SMB share.

Yeah I would definitely need to look into some kind of real time transcoding setup (jellyfin, etc) if I had a use case for remote watching of things on any other less-capable platforms, particularly that can't handle x265 or AV1 encoded things.

Right now if I'm not at home, and I'm watching something remotely that's served from a home fileserver, the only two client devices that I have in use are either my MacOS laptop (VLC), or a fairly recent Android phone with a file explorer app that supports sshfs mounts to open files (again VLC as the video player).

> I also don't have any need for realtime transcoding as my home internet upstream speed is sufficient that I can watch 'full resolution' stuff remotely from my laptop or phone via VPN back to home office, and smbfs or sshfs access to the same file shares, without needing to use any CPU or GPU resources to process the video in realtime in between where it's stored any my client playback device.

And if your remote internet connection is insufficient? Especially if you have all content in high bit rate HDR stuff… that can be problematic in some parts of the world.

That's definitely a consideration, and I'm not watching 72GB 3-hour length 4K movies remotely if the far end's internet connection is insufficient. But the times that I find myself in such a place are fairly uncommon these days. If I were spending a lot of time in places where Internet service was considerably worse than where I travel now, I would probably just download the 1080p, HEVC/x265, 2.2GB total file size version of a movie and call that "ehh, good enough".

After being too used to the streaming app experience, I wanted the same thing for my own library. You don't need to use the transcoding feature but the Netflix experience is a nice upgrade. The Jellyfin server doesn't need much for resources either (if you aren't transcoding), people run it on raspberry pis with external harddrives attached. Once nice thing is that I often forget about the stuff I've downloaded, Jellyfin has a "recently added" section and will also remember where I've left off with a "continue watching" section and also a "next up" section showing the next episode in series I'm watching. Since I have sonarr subscribed to currently airing TV shows, the latest episode will appear there after its been downloaded.

The annoying thing is that Jellyfin is particular about how your TV shows are organized. If you just dump whole seasons into one directory, that's fine but if you have individual episodes, they need to be organized by Title/Season #/Episode.mkv. The good thing about Sonarr is that it will make a second library directory for you comprised of hardlinks organized in the right structure. Plex is less picky, it seems to recognize files no matter how messy your downloads folder is but Plex has infected their client with ads and freemium garbage of late. Obviously if you use usenet, this isn't a huge problem, you can do whatever you want with your files once downloaded.

If I had your setup, I would still prefer the client experience of either Infuse, Jellyfin, or Plex, but I don't think I'd value it enough to pay. The first time I used plex, I was impressed by the fact that I didn't really need to do any of what you've described with your collection (for the most part). I just had a huge dump of torrents and other randomly sourced video files, in wildly varying formats, that were named just barely well-enough for Plex to turn that into a very nicely browsable home media experience with no extra work, that I could then stream to any device with a client. Not that I'd be dismissive of manually organizing a collection, it's just not a compelling hobby to me, so a drop in media viewing experience with an amazing frontend that handled all of the meta stuff was spectacular.

In contrast to your HTPC setup, I've actually never even considered owning my own TV, it was just a streamlined way for me to access my collection on other non-TV devices, including the mac I didn't want to keep files on.

Clients on everything, watch history tracking, meta data collection, nicer player, quick transcode for mobiles and other portable media players you don't want 4k on, automatic subtitle collection, live TV DVR, and an interface so simple my grandmother can use it.

I assume Plex "just works". Jellyfin is some assembly required.

You also occasionally run into a "Love Exposure" type bug.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/10494

jellyfin was pretty plug and play for me

If you want it accessible outside your house, the two most common options are NGINX + LetsEncrypt or Tailscale.

(or you make your peace with sending your login details in cleartext)

VPN is also common in those discussions, it's more setup on the client side but can win on security. Of course there'd be a lot of people in trouble if you couldn't trust tailscale to be better than a beginner selfhoster on security so it's still a good goto option.

You’ve described NAS in general. It’s more than just file system. Plex gives you Media Library indexing, web app, mobile and TV apps to play content from your NAS, from anywhere in the world (it even includes Relay, in case you don’t have public IP or accessing NAT traversal).

Even with public IP, it brokers an HTTPS certificate for you, which many smart TV platforms and OSes require for operation nowadays.

Thats what I used to have 15 years ago when I was streaming over SMB to my Xbox running XBMC. It works but having something like Plex or Jellyfin is just so much nicer. It gives you the "Netflix" experience of browsing your media library. My Jellyfin is setup to offer an automatic "skip intro/credits" button. I used to use Plex and was a yearly subscriber mostly for the ability to download media to my phone for offline playback. Obviously I could do that with an SMB share but Plex (and the others) have built-in transcoding which is nice if you don't have the time or space for a bunch of full size 1080p files.

Now, I use Jellyfin alongside Seerr (so me and others can quickly pick-out media to automatically download in a preset quality). I've also installed a plugin for Jellyfin called Moonfin that offers a ton of quality of life improvements and also integrates Seerr within one app. I just click on a movie or TV season I want, Seerr tells radarr or sonarr to query my private trackers for the selection, and then radarr/sonarr send the torrent to rtorrent. After a few minutes, Jellyfin picks up the files and adds them to the database.

What are these private trackers? Asking for a friend…

Its missing the wife/husband/child acceptance factor.

One thing that Jellyfin does really well is integrate devices like the HDHomeRun. You can then watch OTA TV from any device on the LAN or elsewhere through the Jellyfin Web portal or dedicated clients for Linux/Android/iOS.

If your HTPC is powerful enough, you should also check out Plasma Bigscreen as a substitute for XFCE4.

I started using it because me and my flatmate had different media libraries and we wanted to share them. Plex very conveniently merged both into a single deduplicated library that we could pick from when watching something on the TV.

For me the metadata is a big part of it. I have a large physical media collection so I could just use the discs, but putting it all into plex has made it so much easier to browse and watch. For example I can pause and skim the cast/crew filmographies right in the plex UI, including being able to see what I already have and investigate the stuff I've never heard of for possible future purchases. When watching several movies in a row, after finishing one I can follow the automatically-populated trail of related/similar movies until I find something that fits my mood.

I can share plex with my friends and family easily. Your solution sounds good but it’s just too hard for most people.

There are plex client apps for most tvs and boxes, even the really cheap bad ones, and it all just kinda works.

Weird I scrolled this far for “friends”.

That’s the killer feature. I haven’t met a person who couldn’t use PLEX.

A friend who doesn't live close had one season of a series I wanted to watch and I could stream it from his Plex. I'm not saying this could not have been solved in another easy way, but it worked without friction because he had Plex anyway.

I'm kinda over downloading gigabytes of files and then deleting them after watching. And I'm not doing this regularly so I've not investigated. All I'm saying is that it solved a problem nicely.

My jellyfin setup is not that different.

Jellyfin container instance running on a mini pc, reading media from an NFS share on a NAS, organised in a very similar fashion.

The advantage is there is a "native" app on the TV, so everything is very adapted to the TV UX, i.e. remote control driven UI etc.

(And the jellyfin side is relatively disposable, the container can be trashed and redone fairly quickly).

That’s very detailed. Sounds like you have everything the way you want it. So plex would probably add nothing.

Jellyfin is nice for various reasons (main for me is play synching) but Apple TV + Infuse + SMB share made something pretty bulletproof and kid friendly even before.

Yes but do you have no friends and family and are you never outside of your house? I think the answer is hopefully yes to all of these.

I have almost the same setup. Plus a 3rd party app called "Material Files" to access it on my phone.

Plex/Jellyfin is for those without a home theater. I typically listen/watch media on my phone or old iPad, or sometimes a laptop. Since Jellyfin works through the browser it covers all these scenarios. On the occasion I have some people over and we want to watch it on a TV I can connect the laptop to the TV.

Makes me feel lucky that I got it for $120 in 2021. But I appreciate that they still offer a lifetime pass at all.

$120 isn't too bad. I paid $75 in July of 2019.

$750 is nuts.

I paid $75 December 2013 and then a similar amount as you in 2021 when I set up a system for my parents.

$750 is insane considering how little they care about user feedback.

The lifetime model isn't sustainable, that's why they're pricing it out.

It had been sustained for something like 14 years, though?

Yep, but there’s a limit to everything.

At some point you hit market saturation and the forever users are just costing you money and new user acquisition isn’t enough to offset it.

Nobody likes the subscription model but it’s the easiest way to sustain constant development bigger than side hustle projects.

It isn't sustainable in the context of their desire to pivot to being a streaming service, along with their desire to blow resources on repeatedly redesigning the apps to make the UI slower and buggier.

It was $120 even a year ago (bought one in April of last year), the jump $750 is really weird.

The change to $750 just took effect July 1st. I suspect we're going to see some big discounts down to $400 or less around Black Friday and periodically at other times of the year.

pCloud, a cloud storage provider who offers lifetime plans, uses a similar strategy.

Basically I think they are putting the $750 price out there a) for anyone who is dumb enough to pay it, and b) as a way to make limited-time discounts and the annual plan seem like better deals by comparison.

How is that even a viable business model? I don't know a single self host person that would pay a subscription for something they are hosting

According to this Forbes article [1], Plex earns the majority of their revenue from selling ads in their streaming platform:

> Valory said that Plex, which currently does not disclose financial information, generates roughly 20 percent of its revenues from member subscriptions, which unlock premium capabilities of its media platform, compared to 80 percent from the ad business.

So possibly they are just trying to extract as much money as possible from their "legacy" userbase while they can, with the expectation that people hosting their own media libraries are a dwindling market.

Looking at their different features offered in different pricing plans [2], it seems like their strategy is to make money on sharing media libraries with friends and family. $70/year isn't a huge amount to simplify streaming to other (non-technical) people on a variety of different devices. And I suspect some plex users are charging for their access to their media libraries - even if it's something informal like accepting donations or asking for a payment on venmo - in which case the fees would just be a small operating cost.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2024/04/17/venerab...

[2] https://www.plex.tv/plans/

I have seen people talking about this "hosting a small streaming service for friends" thing, and I really have trouble understanding that. It just seems a bad idea to expose such a server to the Internet and maintain it, even with a VPN, and I don't know what kind of friends they have. That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it takes to curate your library including "acquisition" and pruning etc.

It's not an open server that anyone can just connect to, only specific Plex accounts that you invite.

They also don't need to know anything about how to connect to your server, it simply shows up as a server name in the list on their "app" or the Plex website, there is no need for dynamic DNS or VPN or anything like that as Plex's servers do a kind of "service discovery" automatically.

It does require you exposing the Plex TCP port to the internet, so you are relying on them making sure there are no vulnerabilities. You could probably do a VPN approach and give them a URL they can enter into a web-browser, but it's unlikely to work on TV and mobile apps.

I've given access to my Plex server to my siblings and parents and it's great. Since I got a decently fast fibre line, no more having to manually copy shows/movies they want to watch over a LAN or using a USB HDD or memory stick.

> It just seems a bad idea to expose such a server to the Internet and maintain it

Why? Nerds have been hosting services for their friends and family for decades now. It was one of the primary benefits of knowing an IT nerd. They probably had a few servers co-located at work or with their friend who worked for the local ISP. These days with cloud I suppose it's changed, but I didn't think this skillset had eroded that much.

Hosting services on the public internet isn't very scary. If your Plex server gets zero day'ed, you just reinstall it and start over. Chances are that will never happen.

I host the media server, you come help me fix my plumbing when I need it sort of thing.

> That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it takes to curate your library including "acquisition" and pruning etc.

This part, sure. But it's like anything else you do for family and friends. When I ran an e-mail server for everyone it was a giant pain that eventually became not worth it once the free providers got better and more accessible.

Plus the whole "curating" thing is the fun part, usually! Most of that stuff is usually about 98% automated either way so the "job" is largely fixing automation when it chokes.

They’re not “friends”, they’re people paying a small fee to conveniently access pirated media.

While I'm a lucky lifetime Plex pass holder, the service I get with my own self hosted setup is leagues ahead of anything I could pay for. I would probably pay for a Plex subscription if I started today. I hope Jellyfin improves its remote streaming UX, subtitle management, and app polish, because it's a pretty good contender otherwise.

There are lots of folks self-hosting the music app Roon and paying for it.

Have to admit, quite impressive that someone is still paying this much for Plex given the free alternative like Jellyfin that can do pretty much everything the same.

What’s the psychology here that people are willing to pay this much for this software, yet not even $20 for another?

It's pretty slick looking which is worth something to me. Not $750, but something. But even though some of the UX choices of Jellyfin didn't make sense to me, it's an amazing piece of software, so I'm sticking with that, and using Wholphin [1] as a frontend.

[1] https://github.com/damontecres/Wholphin

Not hard to understand. People will pay for a better UX. Which Plex has, once you disable all the streaming junk.

Also there’s simply more clients for it. The only way to play Bluray Dolby Vision layers correctly is with an AM6B+ which has an amazing Plex frontend.

I have a lifetime pass I bought many years ago for not much money, Plex had apps in all Platforms. Jellyfin does not at this point, even though there’s work being done everywhere.

Plex just works and is supporter everywhere. Not that surprising that people use it.

What information do you have that people are actually paying this price?

There are plenty of situations where a business must charge over X for one reason and must charge under Y for another, where Y < X. What happens is generally they go for the "over X" branch for fairly obvious reasons, then go out of business sooner or later because they can't actually charge that. Just the fact that they are trying to charge that much doesn't mean people are paying it.

I remember when Plex wasn't a money grab. Many moons ago.

$750?!! Holy shit.

It's $980 if you buy it through Apple... and the crazy thing is Plex is actually losing $75 if you buy it that way!

Losing $75 while gaining $675.

If your paycheck was shorted $75, you might care.

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