Plex is discontinuing its “watch together” feature
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cluegy
I believe the word you're looking for is "kludgey."
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Probably around 40% of my watching is via syncplay on Jellyfin, as I like watching with buddies.
Sans jellyfin you have to find a way for both of you to access the same file/stream and manually sync across snack/bathroom breaks or use the external and separate syncplay app.
I do like the external syncplay app but if I'm going to have to get the file to them anyways, why not just stream it synced? In my mind this is a really convenient feature.
It is not perfect, in my experience;
- on rare occasions, it gets 'stuck' and won't sync correctly, so one will play but noth the other, pausing one unpauses the other, etc. Usually rebooting helps, but if not, I just manually sync
- there was 1 occassion which made no sense. I played a movie with a friend, we were watching together, but they were ahead of me by a whole ~15 minutes by the end of the film. Neither of us felt it was fast/slow or skipping anything.
- I haven't had luck using syncplay on my TV. The feature exists but it doesn't actually work.
But these are rare, minor gripes IMO. I'm glad Jellyfin has this feature.
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I text my buddy, and say "hey do you wanna watch xyz, when you're done with work?". We hop on discord to chat and watch it. An hour or two timezone is not an issue, and for someone 'local' I'm probably not driving half an hour to their house after work. I do prefer watching together in-person, but thats not always as convenient.
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Speak for yourself, Jellyfin has been awesome for me. Fantastic piece of software.
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First they removed downloads and now this? Feels shitty. I used this feature weekly to watch a show with a remote friend.
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Now if they could just tidy up remote access so that everyone is comfortable being able to use it.
They really need to partner with let's encrypt. If they implemented automated SSL generation and regeneration in the app and a dynamic DNS/Port registry, they would get mountains of new users.
Just tidying up remote access would probably be enough to sync Plex.
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LoL. That feature is literally the only reason I also have a Plex docker pointing to my library. But they’ve definitely not been supporting it for a while, because I don’t think it’s worked well in forever. Last few times I tried it with friends, we ended up having to just try to hit play at the same time.
Oh well. One less container now.
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Downloads havent been removed
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Findroid has been around longer with downloads working well too. Just has an issue where it doesn't download the images of the items, which is a bit silly.
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I'm seeing a lot of love for Jellyfin in the comments. Seems like Jellyfin is finally mature enough to give a real shot.
Does anyone know how Emby is doing in relation to Plex feature parity?
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They already have a guide on this, its not too difficult. How would a "partnership" work?
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Similarly, I feel the same way about Jellyfin but Plex is making it really hard to be a Lifetime Pass member as well.
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I have had a plex instance but when they started adding their own movies and crapola into it, and requiring logins and etc etc etc I started keeping a Jellyfin instance live as a hedge. I still use Plex primarily, but use Jellyfin and keep it patched just in case. If there's any kind of ugly action with Plex, I feel like my bets are pretty well hedged. Plex definitely has a lot more polish than Jellyfin, but I wouldn't doubt if there is a rug-pull in some way or another. After all, Plex sold a bunch of lifetime subscriptions ONCE but they still end up paying to support those. Sooner or later they are going to want more money again.
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Emby I feel is more mature then jellyfin in the sense of every device my family or I have just works on emby but has some issues on jellyfin. Also emby has features closer to plex that jellyfin doesn't have, like offline downloads and, at least in the emby beta, smart playlists. Jellyfin gives you more settings options for things like transcoding and per user settings than emby or plex. Both programs do some things better than plex too, like scheduling individual server tasks or outright disabling them. Overall from my experience a direct competitor to plex right now is emby while I would say a few more features are needed for jellyfin to be a direct competitor.
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That's interesting, I wonder why no one in these comments mentioned it if it's a bit farther along than Jellyfin. Maybe just good word-of-mouth marketing?
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By it's not too difficult, are you actually expecting average users to run certbot cli?
We need to get out of the mindset of jellyfin being self hosted and into the same mindset Plex has of you're just running it.
Hosting is one of my professional duties so I don't have problems doing all this. But any idiot can install PMS and have secure shared communication with their friends and family. And we need those idiots.
Jellyfin needs the ability to request certificates and install them without any serious user intervention beyond the initial setup, maybe just an email address. And none of this should require users to touch CLI. This probably needs to be dynamic DNS, maybe we also partner with duck DNS. Right in the GUI make an account, store off the URL in the configs.
I'm presuming this means a le API that will not change from the let's encrypt side, or advanced clear notice when things are going to change, with opportunities to delay if possible and necessary. That's where your actual partnership comes in.
We need that thing that Plex has that shows you that your server is remotely accessible from inside the admin. This will help the uninitiated set up a port forwarding and test it.
Once the server is set up and working we don't need centralized login but we need something. Start with the main settings page, where you drop down in your account on the admin We need an invite users option. It just takes you to users add.
Users add needs to have email or slack or something so that when you add the user it can notify them that they've been added and send them a link back to your server. It could be a mailto:// or maybe just a page saying here's the link to share with your family.
That link would contain the dynamic DNS previously set up and whatever port you're able to use.
It's just a handful of creature comforts that plex does particularly well that is barely touched on the jellyfin side. But there's some of the most important comforts.
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I used to use Plex as well but similar to your remarks, they started doing a lot more updates that added a "corporate" feel to it such as adding their own movies/tv. Nothing inherently wrong with that but in my opinion, when a platform has the option to add features such as that, that costs money. And they're gonna want to get that money back somehow. Yeah they offer subscriptions but to me this all was a redflag that I could see them taking further in the future. Where as Jellyfin is completely free at the cost of a little extra work to setup.
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Jellyfin is actually open source and free. Totally self hosted. Emby is closed source and has a licensing model similar to Plex's.
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Agree, they’re making all the wrong moves lately
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Switch to jellyfin, it's really at the point where it's ready for everyone
