Plex is locking remote streaming behind a subscription in April
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I don’t like it, but it’s a pragmatic decision.
Hosting for a simple website can be as little as a few bucks a month. That’s easy for any project to absorb, even if they are open-source with no one pulling a paycheque.
Streaming requires high-performance, high-bandwidth machines that cost anywhere from several dozen dollars to several hundred dollars a month. You build a resilient high-availability network, and you could easily be looking at several tens of thousands of dollars a month.
That isn’t easy to absorb, even for a for-profit company with clearly-defined revenue streams.
Some people want everything for free, but free doesn’t pay the bills.
Full disclosure: I don’t use the streaming feature. I prefer to grab actual copies to drop onto my NAS. I also don’t share to friends and family, as I am the only one I know of who uses Plex.
they need none of that stuff. It's your own pc that handles the heavy stuff. From their end, the only point is to allow you to stream videos from behind one or more NATs
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I have had both a Plex and Emby lifetime subscription since around 2018 and relied on Emby for quite a while during Plexs shenanigans 5-6 years ago but still think Plex and Jellyfin are the only true options. Emby is just an amalgamation of the worst qualities of Plex and Jellyfin. It "just works" as a media player in the same way that VLC "just works" but doesn't offer a whole lot outside of that especially nothing that these other two don't offer. Plex is the "polished but expensive and limited" solution and Jellyfin is the "free, some work required, and open" solution.
Emby offers a more robust, polished experience than Jellyfin and it’s just not even close, I’m sorry. You can get sort of close with some third party Jellyfin clients but then you’re split up between multiple apps that look and operate with different design languages depending on whether you’re watching media, managing your server, or listening to music, etc.
With Emby, I get very polished, functional, good looking apps on mobile and Android TV. I can use the Emby IOS app to manage my Emby server,
watch TV, Movies, and listen to my music collection. It looks great and works great with no fiddling or plugins needed for basic functionality like intro skip that Jellyfin still does not support without the help of plugins in the year of our lord 2025.On the Jellyfin side however you have the official Jellyfin app which is just an uglier and more dated looking version of the Emby app, and it can’t play any of my music collection. StreamyFin is much nicer looking than the official app, but you can’t manage your server or play music so you still need the official app also. It also lists your music playlists as libraries, though it can’t play music so you’re just given errors. Now if I want to actually play my music I need a THIRD app, Finamp, which can actually play my music library but it struggles with metadata and needed hours of fiddling to get all the metadata right, but at the end of the day it’s just a fuck ugly knockoff of the music section of the official Emby app.
So the comparison between Jellyfin and Emby for me is, do I want one iOS app that just works, looks great, and functions great? Or do I want three separate apps, 2/3 of which look a college students very first app they threw together in a single weekend? Emby being the obvious winner here.
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While I agree with you 100% and every tv in my home is under this mantra I get where the parent comment is coming from. Family members and friends visiting have asked about access to my Jellyfin library and they aren’t necessarily keen on buying additional hardware, aren’t willing to educate themselves on setting up options that would be objectively better for connectivity, privacy, control, etc.
They just want an app in their TVs app store. It’s convenient and easy. I disagree with them but I don’t blame them. It’s human nature to go for the option that results in expending the least amount of effort. But then they don’t get my sweet Jellyfin library. If you cant run the client or kodi then I can’t help you, sorry.
Remember when programming a VCR was a stand-up comedy joke?
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Canada can just become the 51st state and solve that /s
Cheaper plex subscription at the cost of healthcare and taking orders from a moron. Can’t say no to a great deal!
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Even better, it's now a nice database of who companies and governments can go after when they want or need to!
It always has been.. just now they want you to pay.
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Why would anyone even used Plex since we have jellyfin?
Plexamp full features are only available with Plex Pass. Jellyfin doesn't have anything remotely comparable (though you could always just run Lyrion).
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Remember when programming a VCR was a stand-up comedy joke?
Yes and I also remember when there were stupid things like early universal remotes that had big timers on them to circumvent the internal programming needs (but then you had to program the remote and sync it)
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As a plex pass lifetime user, this doesn't change anything for me.
I am, however, blown away that the price went from $75 CDN to $350 CDN over the last 10 years!! That's just insane!
They have sales, and it's not really worth paying the "MSRP" price. My wife got Plex Pass for $80 back in 2023, and I got it late last year for $90.
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It was there first and you can share it with friends more easily. For Plex you just register with the central server and share your username with your friends or w/e. Jellyfin has nothing like that.
And now, that feature costs $240. Suddenly, jumping through hoops to configure Jellyfin's external SSO plugin becomes a lot more rewarding.
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All these comments mentioning jellyfish and I haven’t see a single mention of emby. Is it considered bad or something? Because I switched over to it and I am liking it a lot better than plex so far
If you're leaving Plex because it's subscribeware, Emby is also subscribeware.
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I agree, but having looked down this road, finding a quality external player that users will understand and is inexpensive is ... not easy.
$20 Walmart Onn 4k. Degoogle it if you want or just slap smarttube and jellyfin/plex on it.
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Another user said that was because users were modifying the code to avoid supporting the project?
I got a lifetime subscription relatively inexpensive and haven't had troubleWho said that? I did a search in the thread and no Ody said anything about that that I saw
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Linux (Flatpak)
So, no, then.
Just use the god damn browser
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Plexamp full features are only available with Plex Pass. Jellyfin doesn't have anything remotely comparable (though you could always just run Lyrion).
Was does it do better than say 'Symfonium'?
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I believe emby went proprietary, and jellyfin is the fork that stayed open source. Naturally Lemmy prefers the FOSS one
Ironically Plex users cling to their solution like it's life or death without considering the other side.
Just like when someone mentions that Windows has it's place too and sometimes Linux isnt the be all and end all of all OS.The hyprocrisy of some users here...
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Does Jellyfin do remote streaming?
If you can set it up? Yup.
Behind CGNAT? Maybe you need to set up a relay or something to circumvent it. -
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 can speak from my experience with an Apple TV, the application "Infuse" works amazing with a jellyfin server. Though the application is essentially $1 month subscription, but works across all your apple devices, if you have any. I think it's worth it.
Additionally, the official app for Android TV worked pretty well when I last tried it on an Nvidia Shield
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It totally depends on how you expose it to the outside world. If it's exposed just like it is, it works fine with every device. If you put an authentication before it (e.g. Authelia), it can only be accessed by browsers from outside the network. That being said, it's not recommended to expose Jellyfin directly, because there are a ton of security flaws. Best practice is to use a VPN
it can only be accessed by browsers from outside the network.
Weird.
If I nslookup my jellyfin URL it responds with an IP in my local IP range...
And it works both outside with a 2FA page and inside without... -
does jellyfin have a roku app?
You should ditch Roku amyway considering the posts I have seen here on lemmy.
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Well, looks like my decision to stick with Kodi and never bother with Plex is about to pay dividends.
The equivalent to Plex is Jellyfin I think, Plex can be used as a media server for Kodi.
