Plex now want to SELL your personal data
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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This is an outdated complaint, but also fuck them for giving you the option to customize the look, I guess?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.
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Jellyfin is a no-brainer. Publishing services on the Internet is complex.
If they adhered to somewhat modern security principles for their Backend I wouldn't mind hosting it behind a reverse proxy. But since large parts of the API is unauthorized and unprotected, I wont.
And I do not plan on supporting family and friends in setting up vpns on all of their devices
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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.
Yeah, but I need something that kids/spouse are comfortable with that can also have pretty strict content and purchase restrictions. Android still doesn’t fit that bill either. Ideally I would run something on an htpc with custom interface for all that but will a full time job that frequently has been taking me out of state and 2 hours of commute daily, $100 is a drop in the bucket for something that I don’t have to worry about my family breaking. I don’t have the time to do things that I want anymore and the Apple TV hits the simplicity/control intersection.
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Apparently all your friends and family are comfortable with hostnames and ip addresses. Not everyone's are. Also, not everyone wants to buy a static ip or setup a dynamic dns service or similar. Plex is definitely simpler. I have used both.
Apparently all your friends and family are comfortable with hostnames and ip addresses.
I mean pretty much everyone I know uses web browsers and sometimes type in web addresses lol
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Its like jellyfin but sells your data
Why would anyone want that?
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Have you set up jellyfish at your home, given access to a friend outside of your network who could not setup Jellyfin themselves, and successfully got them playing on their TV, table tablet, and/or phone? Have you been able to set them up without them having to call you every week?
Yes. It's very easy. It might not have used to be easy but it is for the last couple of years. Dead simple. About a dozen people use my Jellyfin server across TV's, phones, tablets, laptops. None of them are what I would call techies. It's as simple for them as Netflix.
If you have not set up a VPN for accessing your Jellyfin, I would suggest looking into the myriad of security issues the Jellyfin Backend has.
Jellyfin has no business being accessible from the public internet -
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.
I dont have an apple TV myself yet. But I can tell you one thing. Pretty much all the androids including my google TV Chromecast doesn't have codec support for the dolby audio like truehd. Its so annoying I can't play hardly any of the 4k movies I have on Plex. Looks like my options is to ether switch to apple TV, a nivida shield pro, or by a HTPC.
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For me it’s a trade-off: yes Plex is less good than Jellyfin from a data/cost perspective. But so far the UI of Plex (which is not perfect mind you), availability of Plexamp (which honestly is very very good), and the fact that I don’t have to pay for it anymore after buying lifetime swings the scale towards Plex for me.
If Plex somehow canceled my lifetime or forced ads on my shows or something, that would be a line — but making me opt out of selling my data is not that line for me.
Different taste on the UI front I guess. I thought the default Plex was awful, couldn't stand it. Jellyfin can be a bit messy though
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Another longtime user here. If you haven't already, you might want to disable autoupdates on all your devices. The "new experience" is not without its controversies.
Yeah, first thing I did after testing the new app. Still don't know why they feel the need to push this out so aggressively instead of letting it run in parallel until its ready
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There should be a library type called "Home videos and photos" for that.
I probably made a small mistake in setting that up but I tried making the dedicated "home movies" folder and it wouldn't show my videos.
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If they adhered to somewhat modern security principles for their Backend I wouldn't mind hosting it behind a reverse proxy. But since large parts of the API is unauthorized and unprotected, I wont.
And I do not plan on supporting family and friends in setting up vpns on all of their devices
What are the worries behind it? Last time someone was worried about the security it was about knowing filenames of the stuff you host by brute forcing iirc
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I'm actually fascinated/frightened by the number of people here who are apparently comfortable running an exposed remote service on their personal network without enough tech knowledge to manage user auth themselves or maintain a stack with shared volumes....
I think most of the reason people are using Plex is that they don't have to expose services. Plex handles all the nat traversal and whatnot for them.
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Seconded it’s not a no-brainer. I spent days trying to get it set up with Docker on two different computers and three different distros. It wouldn’t install, if it did install it had errors, if it would even open at all with anything other than a black screen. Hours trying to search how to fix it. I gave up and installed it as a standalone app on a common distro. Not as convenient, but FML it finally worked. Really felt like I wasted my time. Personally, this is the exact bullshit linux fanatics completely ignore when they insist on how great linux is vs whatever. I’ve got a shitload of patience, willpower and modest skill to try to get something like this working, but 99% of the population doesn’t. That’s why linux will stay on the back burner. And if it ever becomes just as easy as Windows…guess what? You’ll have many of the same problem as Windows.
You struggled to set up Jellyfin with docker?
Damn
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What's actually bad about it?
Like, this is something you opt into and is only relevant if you're watching their ad supported stuff, which I don't know anyone who watches that over their own media on Plex.
And honestly, every "bad" thing I've ever heard about Plex has been the same thing, something that sounds horrible until you understand it
Because Jellyfin users like to feel superior. Accepting that other people have other requirements from software is hard, especially when you feel like you choice is the only valid one.
As a long time Plex user, who has a Jellyfin running in parallel, just not shared, I will keep using Plex until they either force me off of it or Jellyfin manages to make accessing servers remotely easier and more secure.
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I'm actually fascinated/frightened by the number of people here who are apparently comfortable running an exposed remote service on their personal network without enough tech knowledge to manage user auth themselves or maintain a stack with shared volumes....
Also the people that know how to set that all up and still expose a Jellyfin server to the public internet
