Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April
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With version 10.10 they integrated chapter markers into Jellyfin. You still need a plugin to generate the intro timings, but any client I tried has support for skipping with a button.
Well that’s good news, that means they’re close at least.
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Oh no I’d absolutely recommend it for anybody switching from Plex. Anybody who liked Plex and the state it was in pre-enshittification will obviously have no qualms with a proprietary solution. If FOSS is your end goal then you’d have a better argument, but Plex refugees are for obvious reasons not a part of that demographic.
Emby is a great product that “Just works” in the same way Plex used to and for that purpose it is head and shoulders above Jellyfin even if it doesn’t have the benefit of being FOSS.
That's just putting them on another enshitification train that just happens to be a couple stops back, but is still moving along.
How they went about going closed source was unforgivable and also means they will absolutely have no qualms implementing crappy enshitification type decisions in the future
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So the flatpak version of Jellyfin works for you? I cant get it to play more then one thing. hitting the play button just does nothing.
Just played a bunch of episodes on Fedora KDE (Flatpak from flathub, Jellyfin client v.1.11.1, Jellyfin server v.10.10.6) without any trouble.
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Nah, as far as I’m aware Emby hasn’t started their own streaming service and pivoted away from their self-hosted oriented position, or shoving a bunch of bloat into their server software. They haven’t shoehorned a bunch of unwanted social features into it either. If you were fine paying for Plex five years ago, you’ll be fine with Emby.
Yea because like I said, they're on an enshittification train on the same track just some stops behind, except they started with far worse decisions
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What do people have against flatpaks? I like them.
Part of it is that Ubuntu/Canonical so aggressively pushed Snaps which became a huge culture war. So you have people who hate the idea of those style of packages because they hate Snap AND people who hate flatpak because they are Team Ubuntu for some reason.
And the other aspect is that it is incredibly space inefficient (by the very nature of bundling in dependencies) and is prone to "weirdness" when it comes to file system permissions and the like. And many software projects kind of went all in on them because it provides a single(-ish) target to build for rather than having a debian and an arch and a redhad and a...
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We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
Would this affect self hosters?
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I haven’t noticed any enshittification with Emby, unless you know something I don’t.
As for Jellyfin, I check in on it every now and then and they’ve made a lot of progress but the features and polish aren’t there. Like if you want a good experience with Jellyfin apps you have to use third party apps because the official ones are still woefully barebones.
Did Jellyfin ever even figure out proper Intro Skip? That was a big pain point for me for the longest time, as the only way to accomplish it was a third party plugin and the only option was to skip all intros, you didn’t get a button. I remember reading somewhere they added some kind of framework that would allow proper intro skipping going forward, but that the official function was not ready.
The media segments feature has been released as of 10.10.0 and it still needs a plugin. Feels a bit clunky but works already on my Android TV box.
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That's just putting them on another enshitification train that just happens to be a couple stops back, but is still moving along.
How they went about going closed source was unforgivable and also means they will absolutely have no qualms implementing crappy enshitification type decisions in the future
Emby’s enshittification train isn’t a couple stops back, there’s currently no evidence it exists. Simply having an Emby Premiere license is not enshittification for the same reason it wasn’t for Plex. Even in Plex’s most beloved golden age they had the PlexPass. That is not now nor was it ever an issue. Not every software existence has to be FOSS to provide any value. Emby went closed source and Jellyfin got to pick up the torch from that point on. That is a perfectly reasonable resolution as thats how things are supposed to work, that’s a good thing. Do you see Plex being forked into an open source version? No you don’t.
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True, but there's not much one can do about others' stubbornness. I've been using cheap Android boxes with Kodi or the JF client installed. They make sense to my non-techie family. Dedicated boxes are better (something that can run CoreELEC, OpenELEC) but those are harder to find.
An old pc running Linux mint and kodi is my current setup in the living room.
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The media segments feature has been released as of 10.10.0 and it still needs a plugin. Feels a bit clunky but works already on my Android TV box.
Yeah I heard about that. That is good news as it means hopefully Jellyfin can start closing the gap on feature parity with Emby.
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We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CURRENT PLEX PASS HOLDERS:
For users who have an active Plex Pass subscription, remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media Server, after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge—not even a mobile activation fee. More on that later in this update.I was worrying about this change because my Plex server provides free streaming for several of my friends and family and I didn't want them to have to start paying for it. The whole point was to get them away from Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc.
But this sounds like, since I'm already a Plex Pass subscriber, my remote viewers will still be able to access my stuff for free. Do I have that right? Because if so, this change is just business as usual for me.
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We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
If I didn't already have my lifetime pass, I'd use Jellyfin as my primary media server platform instead of Plex.
One of these days though, I'm sure Plex will make a mistake serious enough that it impacts me, and I'll end up switching to Jellyfin as my main media server platform.
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Alright, so I have had Jellyfin installed for years now, but my primary issue is that most devices myself or my users use lack official, readily-available clients. For example, the Samsung TV app is a developer mode install. Last I looked, nobody has put a build into the store.
I really want to use Jellyfin, but I feel like my users simply can't. I'm interested in others' experiences here that could help.
I love Jellyfin, but it has weak weak searching, tagging, and TV show identification compared to Plex.
I tried using it even as recent as yesterday for some searching and tagging, but it's searching, tagging, and even TV show identification is weak in comparison to Plex. I couldn't mass-tag certain videos which was annoying for me, I had to do it one-by-one and it ended up taking a long time. Also, tags don't show up in searches anymore because it hurts performance apparently. With that said, maybe Plex has the same limitation, but it doesn't mean that Jellyfin has to.
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Before now I was on the sunk cost fallacy of not wanting to teach my extended family how to use Jellyfin instead of plex but after this I'm already mid-way through setting up a Jellyfin docker container on my server and I only found out an hour ago
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I've paid for the lifetime subscription for Plex...Still only using Jellyfin
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Yea because like I said, they're on an enshittification train on the same track just some stops behind, except they started with far worse decisions
It sounds like they haven’t even made their first stop, nor do they even have the train yet. And it seems like none of those bad decisions have even been made yet.
I guess you could predict that one day they will start their enshittification journey, but that day is not today.
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I'm not pirating a bunch of shows just to pay Plex for the privilege of watching it.
lmao me either
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Part of it is that Ubuntu/Canonical so aggressively pushed Snaps which became a huge culture war. So you have people who hate the idea of those style of packages because they hate Snap AND people who hate flatpak because they are Team Ubuntu for some reason.
And the other aspect is that it is incredibly space inefficient (by the very nature of bundling in dependencies) and is prone to "weirdness" when it comes to file system permissions and the like. And many software projects kind of went all in on them because it provides a single(-ish) target to build for rather than having a debian and an arch and a redhad and a...
Ah, I see. I've not tried Snaps, been avoiding Ubuntu because of Canonical's weirdly corporate angle. Once they baked in Amazon into Ubuntu I was out.
I like the bundling of deps. Sure it's inefficient, but it runs, and storage comes cheap nowadays anyway.
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I mean, except for Tizen OS isn't most available? You can find the client for Android, Android TV, Windows, Linux (Flatpak), macos, apple ios, and more.
https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients/I give all my friends the choice between Plex and jellyfin (I run both containers side by side pointed to the same media folders) and they all invariably choose Plex. I think it has a lot to do with the jellyfin UI, and I think an overhaul like jellyfin-vue or something that looks like findroid needs to happen in order for jellyfin to really appeal to regular people.
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Careful with that I think it’s against their TOS to do that due to the large volumes of data video streaming takes.
It used to be against their TOS. They removed the language over a year ago last I saw.
