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?
I've tried Jellyfin and the Live TV / tuner interface sucked so bad I didn't want to bother with it any further. Maybe I could have found plugins or some shit to make it more usable but I've had a lifetime Plex pass for almost a decade and it still works great
Yes, they've made a number of decisions that truly suck in that time but it's still better than the experience I had with Jellyfin or Emby, even recently.
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Text:
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners. This data is used to deliver personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Your consent applies to all devices on which you have Plex installed. You can withdraw your consent at any time in
Account Settings or using this page.Soure: https://www.plex.tv/vendors/
(Might have to clear cache)Can also read about the changes here:
https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/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.
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Thanks for the info. I'm sure it'll also be useful to others reading the comments.
This sucks because, functionally-wise I have zero issues with Emby. But morally, this bothers me a lot. I thought it was going to just be because of the license (I think I paid $99 around Christmas a few years ago for a Lifetime license).
Guess I'll be switching to Jellyfin then and donating to the project. If I paid for Emby, there's no reason I can't donate to a free, open-source project being developed and maintained by volunteers.
Found a good one
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Yeah, and there are decent ways to do that, which many successful companies and individuals manage to pull off every day.
I have no horse in this race because I don’t use any of this stuff, but I despise the direction everything is going.
Human parasites are never happy with being well fed it seems. They aren’t happy unless they gorge until they get fat and explode, or they’re so greedy they end up killing their host.
I hear ya. Thats why i dont use them either.
Books are the better entertainment. -
Can someone clue me in on the reason why anyone would prefer Plex instead of Jellyfin?
Because Plex used to be good but new it's just pure enshitification.
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Text:
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners. This data is used to deliver personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Your consent applies to all devices on which you have Plex installed. You can withdraw your consent at any time in
Account Settings or using this page.Soure: https://www.plex.tv/vendors/
(Might have to clear cache)Can also read about the changes here:
https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/I would probably still want to use Plex due to its superior interface, despite this shit they are pulling. But Plex on my TV is so UNBELIEVABLY slow. I have a large library, like almost 14 TB and still growing. But there's no reason it should take almost a minute (or more than?) for the first content to show after starting the app.
Jellyfin with the same library takes mere seconds before I see the first movie/episode poster cards. It's inexcusable how poorly optimized Plex is.
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Good to know. When I get this prompt at home I'll be watching my Pihole server quite closely for a while to see for sure.
I'd be interested in your results
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Text:
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners. This data is used to deliver personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Your consent applies to all devices on which you have Plex installed. You can withdraw your consent at any time in
Account Settings or using this page.Soure: https://www.plex.tv/vendors/
(Might have to clear cache)Can also read about the changes here:
https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/wrote on last edited by [email protected]Frogs do enjoy a good sauna.
If that's your line, then more power to you. I'm happy to live in a world where people make choices I don't agree with - but I will always respect those who make an informed choice over people who let fate or advertising make their choices for them.
However, I also wouldn't blame others for looking for an exit. Or testing other waters. Or at least thinking the grass might be greener elsewhere.
If you do continue to use Plex, consider taking a weekend for a hobbyist project such as a VPN server (OpenVPN or Wireguard are classics and broadly indistinguishable from work traffic) or a reverse proxy web server (nginx proxy manager is a good place to start). Not only are these useful and fun†‡, but they defang one of Plex's most marketable features - the automatic NAT traversal.
†I put 3 VPNs on all my phones - a split tunnel to home; a full tunnel to home; and a commercial VPN with international egress points. The split tunnel lets my phone access my home services from any network it's connected to (without impeding traffic destined elsewhere; the other ones are for coffee shop use). I can also give out access to the split tunnel to trusted friends to access my guest network. Also have a site-to site with a friend for off-site backup (with an encrypted tarball of my configs).
‡For the reverse proxy, I enjoy stapling it to my router's public 80&443 and using DDNS to point vanity.example and *.vanity.example to my home public IP (I like to live dangerously; cloudflare tunnel & pangolin exist, too). Inside my home I have *.internal.vanity.example and *.home.vanity.example for the management webUIs and intranet versions of services so that they can be accessed via https with a secure lock.
Having your own tools to build your own cloud - on a raspberry pi, or an old spare laptop or retired desktop, or a second-hand mini PC is worth the hassle, particularly if you are using Plex baked into an Nvidia shield or other proprietary product, can offer options - and it never hurts to have options.
… But at this point I'm well and good into preaching to the choir.
Tl;dr: No hate to Plex users, but maybe have a plan.
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Can someone clue me in on the reason why anyone would prefer Plex instead of Jellyfin?
Jellyfin is not as easy as Plex to use. Many of us are not that technically advanced
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Can someone clue me in on the reason why anyone would prefer Plex instead of Jellyfin?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]There are a LOT of pros and cons.
Pros:
- Developed by a professional, multi-disciplined full-time team with some security oversight.
- Hosted caching of The Movie DB for faster lookups
- Provision of SSL communication to and from your server without any special setup
- FREE EPG data caching
- Centralized server management from the web
- Low-speed relay for those stuck behind CGNAT.
- A REALLY solid mobile audio*** player (sorry, but plexamp beats the pants off the JF alternatives)
- Centralized Login for your friends and family with email-based password reset
- 2FA already set up
- A nice reflector gauge to see if your* ports are open and what your limits are
- Great client support on a LOT of devices
- Search is fast out of the box, even with extensive collections
- Their clients tend to do a better job supporting all the decoding features on every player
- Very reasonable Tuner support (but somewhat ugly) **
Cons:
- Not free
- Not Open
- They have a lot of your historical data and will eventually sell it when they sell the company. This is not going to be optional. That data is worth a lot and they likely already have enough EULA rights to sell it to whoever asks. Imagine if the MPAA gets in on the fun.
- Their security history is quite dicey
- The lifetime membership will eventually be enshitified as it's not economically sound in the long run
- They constantly change the terms of the agreement.
- They constantly remove features people are using
- They constantly push to share data between users
- They constantly push Ads
- They are making previously free features pay.
- Their investors are starving, which makes them a liability.
- Their clients are generally slower.
edit: * a word ** forgot to shout out for the tuner support *** replaced media with audio for clarity
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I would probably still want to use Plex due to its superior interface, despite this shit they are pulling. But Plex on my TV is so UNBELIEVABLY slow. I have a large library, like almost 14 TB and still growing. But there's no reason it should take almost a minute (or more than?) for the first content to show after starting the app.
Jellyfin with the same library takes mere seconds before I see the first movie/episode poster cards. It's inexcusable how poorly optimized Plex is.
Not to rain on your parade, but the Plex App on my TV, with a library of almost 40TB also loads in seconds
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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.
Can this edit the metadata in bulk? I'll have to give it another shot. I'm pretty sure the album artist was the the problem, and I couldnt just delete that bit.
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Man, you're really itching to talk shop about specifics and complexities and it really isn't about that.
The guy said "why does anybody still consider Plex" about the slightly misleading privacy policy excerpt and a bunch of us pointed out UX and accessibility are reasons. This entire tangent spawns from me claiming I had technical issues on top of the UX stuff and you being super excited to assume it's a skill issue and maybe get to troubleshoot a bit.
Except it wasn't, I'm not particularly interested and the technical issues weren't even the primary reason I moved to something else.
For what it's worth, I barely remember what the setup was when I messed around with Jellyfin because I move things around a bunch and despite this conversation suddenly hinging on it, I didn't think much of it beyond "oh, this sucks, I guess I'll just do Plex instead". It was almost certainly not Plex and Jellyfin running simultaneously on two containers sharing resources, though. I have way too many loose computers bouncing around the house for this not to have been some test run natively installing it on whatever I had lying around, which is also why the Plex server I have now has been on three different machines since then (and is still running natively because why the hell not, being adamant that everything needs to be on some overdone docker setup is just nerds being nerds).
Look, I respect your hobbies, but I reserve the right to find you extremely annoying when you try to patronize people who are actually trying to get shit done just because you're excited at the opportunity to exlpain the difference between a bind and a volume at someone whether they need the explanation or not. The reality of it is if you want to be nerdy and all hobbyist about having a home server (I fully reject the term "lab") that rabbit hole goes deep. You have tons of runway to go nuts about dedicated server hardware and networking software while letting people who just kinda want to be able to open their media without having to plug in a physical drive do their thing.
Jellyfin doesn't HAVE to be complicated. It's not good that it is. All this tier of software that does useful stuff to replace corporate subscription crap doesn't need to be any harder to use and maintain than your average Windows application. Everybody would benefit from a concerted effort to take the faff out of it. And I pinky promise that you'll still have a lifelong hobby if and when that happens.
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.
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Text:
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners. This data is used to deliver personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Your consent applies to all devices on which you have Plex installed. You can withdraw your consent at any time in
Account Settings or using this page.Soure: https://www.plex.tv/vendors/
(Might have to clear cache)Can also read about the changes here:
https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/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!
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Can someone clue me in on the reason why anyone would prefer Plex instead of Jellyfin?
User sharing without opening my Plex server to the public internet. For Jellyfin I would have to become a VPN provider and allow people into my private network to share it safely, since you wouldn't want to have Jellyfin available to the internet with their stance on security
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Can someone clue me in on the reason why anyone would prefer Plex instead of Jellyfin?
wrote on 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)
