Plex now want to SELL your personal data
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Can someone clue me in on the reason why anyone would prefer Plex instead of Jellyfin?
wrote last edited by [email protected]The lack of a PS5 app makes Jellyfin useless to me. We have a dumb TV with no casting ability so the PlayStation is our media box.
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Can someone clue me in on the reason why anyone would prefer Plex instead of Jellyfin?
I’ve been a Plex user. Honestly it was mostly because I chose Plex years ago before a lot of the recent controversy. Plex always seemed like it had a nicer interface, though I never really gave Jellyfin a try. As of late, Plex has started to add a lot of bloat to their interface, so at this point Jellyfin’s UI might actually be a pro.
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So expected. Now anyone who's able to support the non exploitative alternatives like Jellyfin please do. It's how you keep the good things going.
I'm not even against Jellyfin or anything, but as long as I have to build elaborate VPN solutions to continue sharing my content I'll stick with Plex. Not even starting with the availability of clients on different platforms and the general lack of polish in Jellyfin first party UI (player and config).
I could live with most of that stuff if there was a way to share my library without becoming tech support for half my friends circle
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Just downloaded Jellyfin! Been a Plex user for years. Noticed they’ve stated to add a lot of crap to the Plex interface. I just want to stream my media library. I’m a little disappointed that Jellyfin doesn’t have a native Apple TV app, but SenPlayer looks really nice and their price model is a one time fee. So no subscriptions!
I use infuse for the Apple TV. You can add the jellyfin source and I believe it syncs watch progress. It can’t do prerolls, but it have intro and credits skipping.
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Setting up a server? Pretty darn easy.
Teaching all your friends and relatives to figure out what app to use and login with your dyndns random entry or IP address. Or even more difficult, using VPN.
It's not the hosting that's hard. It's the watching for non-tech people.
"Grab an app called jellyfin, type in this number, pick the profile with your name, password is X"
It's not that different than "Grab an app called plex, here's the username and password, pick the profile with your name" (or sign up yourself and I'll share it with you)
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Jellyfin is not as easy as Plex to use. Many of us are not that technically advanced
If you are advanced enough to run a docker image with Plex, you can do the same with Jellyfin
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Jellyfin is hardly a no-brainer. I set it up out of curiosity a few weeks ago and my first question was how do I give access to my friends and family. So I searched, and all of the results were talking about setting up a VPN or a reverse proxy or whatever. Man, I just want to tell my mom "install this app on your tv and log in", which is exactly what Plex does.
I get that Plex is enshittifying, but pretending Jellyfin is a drop-in replacement is delusional.
I'm not a hardcore tech person and this is exactly the issue for me as well.
I want to be able to stream my music collection when I'm away from home without having to get an associate's degree in networking.
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You're free to find me annoying, I wouldn't try to deny that anyway.
You pointed to a 'technical issue', and i've been pretty upfront about why that isn't necessarily a problem with the software and more likely a user error. You're free to not use jellyfin for whatever reason you want but I don't think it's accurate to portray that as an issue with the software. Sorry if you disagree.
I haven't seen any issues with UX design personally, and honestly I haven't seen anyone making a detailed case here about it, but if all you need is "to be able to open your media without having to plug in a physical drive do your thing" I don't see anything wrong with jellyfin. Maybe if you really really like your google SSO and can't figure out how to implement that yourself, great. Use plex, go nuts.
I'm very confused about why you'd assume user error is more likely, given the setup.
But to your other question, if it WAS user error, then it's Jellyfin's fault. Why should it be possible for the user to erroneously set the software so that scanning a library would grind the whole thing to a halt? I mean, it wasn't user error, but in what world is allowing the user to set up a simple library scrape in a way that breaks the functionality of the entire thing an acceptable implementation? A bug I can understand, but that's just bad.
Also just bad, from my recollection, Jellyfin's interface to add live TV channels, its overcustomizable tools for skinning (which are needed because the base skin is pretty plain), the convoluted requirements for remote access, the overly strict library parsing paired with the default choice being to keep data stored within the library (for portability, I suppose? It's ugly and annoying and messy). I briefly tried to get books working on it before giving up and that also sucked, but it was a while ago and I forget the details.
You can get as condescending as you want, but those are all major UX blockers for key use cases. Google's SSO is the least of it, but I guess it's an easy deflection if you don't want to acknowledge any usability gaps at all despite all evidence.
And don't get me wrong, I get that Jellyfin is free software and Plex will charge you and advertisers at any opportunity because it is not. But ultimately I use the software that works. I may prefer a free alternative, because who doesn't, but that's not a get out of jail free card. Particularly when the choice isn't just for myself.
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If you are advanced enough to run a docker image with Plex, you can do the same with Jellyfin
wrote last edited by [email protected]My first time fucking around with Plex did NOT include docker. I googled what docker was like 9 times over the course of stupid few months cause I just didnt understand it. Now I do, and I run it via a docker stack but very very few beginners are gonna go for docker.
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Jellyfin is not as easy as Plex to use. Many of us are not that technically advanced
I use samba (file sharing) and vlc.
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The Jellyfin devs have made it clear, that they will not make changes that invalidate existing clients. Rebuilding the things that make sharing content via Plex so much easier would most definitely break client compatability
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You might not care about it, but a lot of us do. Nobody is trying to convince you to stop using Plex, we're just trying to explain why we really do not want to use it ourselves
No you are not. This thread straight up opens on "why would anybody use Plex" and this whole branch is about how people don't want anybody using Google for login.
You are presenting a lot of great hypotheticals and I'll be happy to stop using Plex if and when they stop being hypotheticals. They are, though, so I don't particularly mind.
Especially because we've moved from "oh, maybe get your family to not use Google to log in" to "actually, get them to move to F-droid or install from source and do so under proper DNS filtering to stop telemetry gathering".
Friend, if people's relatives were willing to install their Plex client from source they wouldn't need anybody to host a Plex server for them. What the hell are you going on about and how detached are you from how people use software?
I swear, online... man, "posers" is so harsh, but I can't find a better word. They always pretend they are running some top secret off-the-grid operation like big corpo is coming after them specifically. Your data is probably not that tightly kept (mostly because a bunch of it probably doesn't depend on you) and it's not that much of a priority.
Oh, and while I get that you get a kick of repeating what your understanding of US law is at me, over here backing up to additional media is explicitly supported by the right to private copy. As is, implicitly breaking DRM.
Not that it matters because nobody is enforcing these at individuals for private use anyway because the rules being sought are absurd and holders know it and they just want scary tools to wave in front of individual users and to actually deploy against major sharers. You are playing out this weird scenario where a company goes to Plex to get your name as if Plex doesn't have a business built on helping you do the thing you think they're chasing you for and has a ton more money they could be sued for. It's nonsense. The reality of it is it makes you feel cool and savvy to secure your home computer as if it held state secrets.
And that's fine, but don't act like anything else is insanity. It's kind of obnoxious.
You are presenting a lot of great hypotheticals and I’ll be happy to stop using Plex if and when they stop being hypotheticals.
it's not hypothetical, Plex has already been banning users for various reasons, all of which stem from them having access to data about your account, connected users, and server data.
Especially because we’ve moved from “oh, maybe get your family to not use Google to log in” to “actually, get them to move to F-droid or install from source and do so under proper DNS filtering to stop telemetry gathering”.
- someone suggested they didn't trust google SSO
- you said 'why does that matter, they don't collect much info from it'
- I pointed out that it's still a big deal because of the potential abuses it enables
- you said 'why should you care, they'll know you use it from downloading the client app'
- I pointed out that there are ways to use it without them necessarily knowing, and...
- anyway the real risk is associating your identity with a specific host server, not that you have plex on your phone or tv
You're the only one making this complicated bud.
Oh, and while I get that you get a kick of repeating what your understanding of US law is at me, over here backing up to additional media is explicitly supported by the right to private copy. As is, implicitly breaking DRM.
I was simply telling you that the US has a similar carve out for breaking DRM, but that it didn't include the use case you are describing. Just giving you a heads-up that it's a common misconception here, and it could be misunderstood wherever you are too. Chill out. BUT, even if it IS legal where you are, Plex is bound to US law and can and will ban you for breaking it.
Not that it matters because nobody is enforcing these at individuals for private use anyway
Except Plex is enforcing it because it is excplicitly against their terms of service, and have already done so.
but don’t act like anything else is insanity. It’s kind of obnoxious.
I'm not saying it's insanity you dipshit, i'm saying there are good and valid reasons to avoid a cloud-hosted service not within your control. You're free to disagree but fuck off with this incredulousness
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Aww come on guys, my JF boner can only handle so much /s
Seriously though, why did they even give you the option to disagree, you know they're just going to force it 3-6 months.
The disagree is for soft walking things. They give you the choice so people feel like they have one and don't complain, then in the future they will continue to ask everything anything changes and if you accidentally agree they will never ask you again.
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I use infuse for the Apple TV. You can add the jellyfin source and I believe it syncs watch progress. It can’t do prerolls, but it have intro and credits skipping.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I can't imagine what an Apple TV can do that a $30 Android box can't.
I can imagine lots of things the Apple TV can't do that the $30 Android box can.
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I'm very confused about why you'd assume user error is more likely, given the setup.
But to your other question, if it WAS user error, then it's Jellyfin's fault. Why should it be possible for the user to erroneously set the software so that scanning a library would grind the whole thing to a halt? I mean, it wasn't user error, but in what world is allowing the user to set up a simple library scrape in a way that breaks the functionality of the entire thing an acceptable implementation? A bug I can understand, but that's just bad.
Also just bad, from my recollection, Jellyfin's interface to add live TV channels, its overcustomizable tools for skinning (which are needed because the base skin is pretty plain), the convoluted requirements for remote access, the overly strict library parsing paired with the default choice being to keep data stored within the library (for portability, I suppose? It's ugly and annoying and messy). I briefly tried to get books working on it before giving up and that also sucked, but it was a while ago and I forget the details.
You can get as condescending as you want, but those are all major UX blockers for key use cases. Google's SSO is the least of it, but I guess it's an easy deflection if you don't want to acknowledge any usability gaps at all despite all evidence.
And don't get me wrong, I get that Jellyfin is free software and Plex will charge you and advertisers at any opportunity because it is not. But ultimately I use the software that works. I may prefer a free alternative, because who doesn't, but that's not a get out of jail free card. Particularly when the choice isn't just for myself.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Why should it be possible for the user to erroneously set the software so that scanning a library would grind the whole thing to a halt?
You've been extremely vague about what the actual issue was, and the details you HAVE given are often contradictory. I'm getting so tired of this cat and mouse game. Fine, yea. Maybe they should have anticipated your specific use case, and everyone else just got lucky with their config not causing the issue you're so sure is their fault.
Jellyfin’s interface to add live TV channels
It isn't designed for that but nice of them to enable you to do it anyway
its overcustomizable tools for skinning (which are needed because the base skin is pretty plain)
This is an outdated complaint, but also fuck them for giving you the option to customize the look, I guess?
the convoluted requirements for remote access
That's just what remote hosting entails, bud. Nice of plex to hand hold you through the process but it comes at the cost of privacy. It's easy enough to access via VPN though, or I guess you can expose your home network but doing that without knowing what you're doing puts you and all your data at risk. Idk how you're accessing any of your other services though.
the overly strict library parsing paired with the default choice being to keep data stored within the library
I have no idea what this means but I suspect it's an outdated gripe. Setting up library scans is as straightforward as plex, or at least it is now.
I briefly tried to get books working on it
It's not designed for that but good of them to make it so you could do that anyway
You can get as condescending as you want, but those are all major UX blockers for key use cases
Lmao, what?! Weren't you just telling me some people just want something that lets them stream their media to their tv without a hard drive plugged in? And now using it for ebooks is a 'basic UX block'? GTFO lmao
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The lack of a PS5 app makes Jellyfin useless to me. We have a dumb TV with no casting ability so the PlayStation is our media box.
$30 Android box solves this
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My first time fucking around with Plex did NOT include docker. I googled what docker was like 9 times over the course of stupid few months cause I just didnt understand it. Now I do, and I run it via a docker stack but very very few beginners are gonna go for docker.
Then how did you use Plex? Did you even RTFM?
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I just want to tell my mom “install this app on your tv and log in”
I mean, if I didn't know better, I'd start to suspect that the large multimedia corporations building walled gardens of apps in closed Smart TV ecosystems don't really want you to be able to easily tell your mom how to watch shit for free. I mean they'll let you, if you really insist on having that app available, but someone will have to pay THEM money instead first (and probably let them spy on you). That's their racket.
The reason Plex can do it is because they do make money, doing shitty stuff like this to their users, so they can use that money to open these doors into SmartTV-land. The root of the problem is that your SmartTV itself (and your mom's) is a locked down proprietary piece of shit, designed exclusively for shoving all proprietary content these media companies develop down your throat, and there are few convenient workarounds that are available to us, because of course they make workarounds as inconvenient as possible.
Unless you're willing to ditch everything proprietary and insist on open technology for everything, which is hard on its own, you're going to end up with a janky mix of proprietary and open systems that always require some compromises, because the proprietary stuff forces us to compromise. It's literally a "this is why we can't have nice things" situation.
Or... You know... Jellyfin could make it so I don't have to setup elaborate VPN schemes and have every user install that on every one of their devices. For example they could fix their security issues to make it safer to expose JF through a reverse proxy, bug they refuse to not break client compatibility
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You are presenting a lot of great hypotheticals and I’ll be happy to stop using Plex if and when they stop being hypotheticals.
it's not hypothetical, Plex has already been banning users for various reasons, all of which stem from them having access to data about your account, connected users, and server data.
Especially because we’ve moved from “oh, maybe get your family to not use Google to log in” to “actually, get them to move to F-droid or install from source and do so under proper DNS filtering to stop telemetry gathering”.
- someone suggested they didn't trust google SSO
- you said 'why does that matter, they don't collect much info from it'
- I pointed out that it's still a big deal because of the potential abuses it enables
- you said 'why should you care, they'll know you use it from downloading the client app'
- I pointed out that there are ways to use it without them necessarily knowing, and...
- anyway the real risk is associating your identity with a specific host server, not that you have plex on your phone or tv
You're the only one making this complicated bud.
Oh, and while I get that you get a kick of repeating what your understanding of US law is at me, over here backing up to additional media is explicitly supported by the right to private copy. As is, implicitly breaking DRM.
I was simply telling you that the US has a similar carve out for breaking DRM, but that it didn't include the use case you are describing. Just giving you a heads-up that it's a common misconception here, and it could be misunderstood wherever you are too. Chill out. BUT, even if it IS legal where you are, Plex is bound to US law and can and will ban you for breaking it.
Not that it matters because nobody is enforcing these at individuals for private use anyway
Except Plex is enforcing it because it is excplicitly against their terms of service, and have already done so.
but don’t act like anything else is insanity. It’s kind of obnoxious.
I'm not saying it's insanity you dipshit, i'm saying there are good and valid reasons to avoid a cloud-hosted service not within your control. You're free to disagree but fuck off with this incredulousness
No, the bans stem from the EULA. I am not breaching the EULA. Whether Plex can verify that or not is not much of a concern for me.
But to be clear, I have zero to lose here. The outcome of Plex banning me for not breaking their EULA (for some reason, which is technically possible but unlikely) is the exact same as the outcome of me dropping Plex in case they ban me. In both cases the only thing that happens is I'm not using Plex anymore.
Also, in your hypothetical Plex already knows the stuff you are worried about. The SSO has nothing to do with it. Plex doesn't need data from Google to know, they already have your personal information.
I guess adding to the list of reasons to use Plex "being berated by online randos wanting to be performatively tech savvy". Which, again, changes nothing practical, but hey.
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I don't think jellyfin does any tagging for you. Pretty sure you can edit it, but it's not automatic. I use lidarr and mp3tag for that. Maybe musicbrainz picard on a rare occasion, if I've got a bunch of files that need to be identified first.
Not OP, I've kinda had a middle of the road experience with it.
I run JF and Plex on the same shares.
I dropped 10k tracks on it and a bunch of audiobooks, my stuff is 100% tagged.
I use tailscale to get to the server because here's no Nat Holepunching going on.
I try to use it as much possible for audio, but some days, I just give in and use plexamp (like a guilty pleasure)
cons:
- It has issues with displaying some of the songs, they're tagged right but you just can't find some of it. They're all Discogs coded, so there's not even a lot of extra characters.
- It doesn't always remember where in a book I am,
- It has no idea about collections of book files.
- Search is very slow, (yes there is a plugin for this, yes it's complicated enough I haven't tried it yet)
- Scrolling a large list is stupid low, it should just stream everything text into ram and bring thumbs in on demand
- Finamp: Finamp is barely a wrapper for the JF engine to the point that they can't implement effects or crossfade without the feature being added in JF first. But JF is just using a ready-to-go library to play music, so changes to JF require upstream library updates. Audio development feels stagnant.
- Finamp scrolling loads one letter at a time. Scroll to Z? you get to wait, A....B...C...D...E...F...G...H...I...J...K...L...M...N...O...P...Q...R...T...U...V...W...X...Y...Z, no skipsies. It literally takes me a couple of minutes to go to songs that start with Z.
- Plugin installs are complicated and poorly documented, and compatibility with versions is dicey
- Finamp: If you lose the network in the middle of a song, you can soft-lock the app.
- Finamp: occasionally crashes if left for a long play session on my late-model Android phone.
- No options to cast.
- No listening through a NAT without port forwarding (which is dicey without a security team)
- No 2FA
- Finamp?: Shuffle is too random, you can get the same song to play twice in a couple of minutes. it needs to pull at least a couple of hours of list and shuffle that, rather than random play.
pros:
- It's free
- It works good enough-ish for a daily car ride.
- It has some form of limited home-grown fail2ban
- The developers are super nice people.
- I exported my Plex playlists and used some Python to turn them into m3u lists, which worked fine. (Would be a cool feature to import from Plex)
- Playlist and Shuffle work mostly fine.
