this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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A gentle reminder that Jellyfin exists to those thinking of alternatives.
For free (FOSS), and is way better than Plex
If you use it weekly it shouldn't be free to you, certainly if you use it more frequently than that. Give money to the projects you depend on or they will disappear.
Supporting software that you use by paying for it?
Ew.
/kidding
I’m a very happy lifetime membership owner and have zero problem with them removing features from the free version. Free doesn’t pay the bills unless you want to become the product.
You find a place on jellyfin.org where they take donations? I was looking last night and only found a link where you could contribute your time.
If you click through some of the options on this page: https://jellyfin.org/contribute/
It links to a donation option here: https://opencollective.com/jellyfin
Thanks!
If you ignore the mostly horrendous UI, the security problems, the worse transcoding performance, the harder setup, the difficulty to access it remotely in a safe way,... Yeah sure, way better
The ui can be improved with community addons like moonfin but i agree it would be nice if they improved these out of the box
I couldn't care less about the client design, since you have free choice there. If only the devs could be arsed to fix the issues that prevent me from just putting it behind a reverse proxy. If I could let people use it without exposing what is essentially an open door or forcing them to install a vpn, I would probably do that and slowly ween off Plex
How are other projects going to handle using the Jellyfin app to log into Jellyfin? I don't understand this. I see sentiments like this pretending Jellyfin is perfect like they don't understand why people use Plex. I want to give my mom a URL that she can login to (or even better she gives me a code) after she downloads an app. What is the point of Jellyfin itself not handling this? It's pointless. If I'm going to have a half baked server app, I might as well just use Kodi. They can be as stubborn as they want with this but people need these very basic things. I'd actually donate money to the project if they didn't stubbornly REFUSE to do the main thing every Plex user wants. Other projects don't need to do this. The Jellyfin developers need to. I first tried Jellyfin 6 years ago and this is STILL an issue and so I just stay on Plex because I've already got lifetime. I WANT to move to Jellyfin but I need to give normies access to my stuff and apparently that's a wontfix for them?? I can host all this shit myself. I just need it all built in and for the apps to support it. I don't think anyone is crazy to want this right?
You just give those people the name of the app your recommend (Jellyfin, Moonfin etc) and give them the URL and their username, then they create a password.
It's not that difficult for most and if it is you help them once with it.
The problem with this imo is that having each individual user needing to login with a password every time is kind of just cancer. I don't get why they can't just password protect logging into my server and then each user doesn't need a password every time. Now it's been a while but my understanding is it's still basically that way? No one wants to type in a password every time on a TV. That sucks. And if they're in a multi user household, that's even worse.
You can use your phone to login to Jellyfin these days and depending on the TV and app you can have a profile switcher. You can also make a passwordless account. Which would be fine if you used some other form of authentication.
Right but afaik there isn't a way to do that other authentication in the TV apps. That's where I'm stuck and why I haven't bothered to set it up again. I was looking into this because of the Plex thing and it seems like it's still a pain in the ass on TV apps. All the other authentication methods require a web browser if I'm not mistaken.
What's the issue with using your phone logged into your account to authenticate on the TC?
I guess I'll have to try it out again and see what it's like. My main concern is my mom and sisters having a hard time using it. Plex is easy for them and I don't want to make it more difficult because I'm getting fussy about Plex lol.
Well fair, you can install both at the same time. I installed Plex again earlier today and it was wat easier this time.
Why are you being such a raging dickhead at this point?
Like you're right, but you're being a a massive jerk to someone who wasn't even the same dude you were arguing with before. Calm down breh.
Nah.
It's not about what I can do. It's about me having a gigantic headache ever getting this access on a TV. Please tell me exactly how that works for my users? Once this system leaves your house and needs normies to use it, everything is a headache I can't host the TV app on my server. It needs to integrate with this authentication. I know how to run a reverse proxy. I'm not a moron. I do it for all my other services. That's not a valid solution when the app CAN'T LOGIN TO IT. Lol. I don't think this is that complicated. You seem to be willfully ignorant of how people actually use these apps. Once we're outside my house, Jellyfin is useless outside a web browser. Period. It's too much hassle for my users and all the self hosting magic in the world doesn't fix that.
Lol, what an insane take. EVERY project that exposes an API is responsible for securing that. Its not rocket science, its server software 101.
Being free is not an excuse, especially when there are perfectly valid migration strategies, that don't force them to abandon legacy clients.
Fans like you are the reason they get away with disregarding their basic responsibility
What an eloquent response
Plex doesn't have hardware transcoding unless you pay almost 800 euro
I, and I assume everyone on this forum who has one, paid around 50-100€ for their lifetime pass. My hardware encoding works great and doesn't need me to tell it about each and ever codec in existence and how to handle each one.
The new price is insane, but that was not the topic of this thread.
You are right,. that is fair. You can also pay 230 euro currently for it.
Isn't plex's price hike the main topic of this post?
Thats why I said thread and not post. This thread was comparing the two
It’s not better in any way other than cost. That cost comes with massive drawbacks.