Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Jellyfin is fine if you're an advanced user and you don't care about streaming outside your network — and your software is made by an AI company (Microsoft) or an advertising company (Google). If it's made by a computer company (Apple), you have a bit more work ahead of you. Mac users are a minority, so Jellyfin does not prioritise them. Even if you go all-in with ads and AI, you still don't get remote streaming, which is kind of the point of Jellyfin.

iPhones come in up to 2TB (for the Pro Max) now. I have 512GB on mine, and I have a dozen HD-4K movies (one is actually 1440p) and a few TV shows. I use an app called Outplayer. It's like VLC but it has folders, you don't have to have everything in one place like VLC does. (Though, I suppose you can put your files in the Files app and have them open with VLC. But I mean in the app itself you can have folders.) Android phones have similar sizes, though I'm not sure they go up to 1-2TB. I'm not sure though. Older ones can get there with SD cards, but the read/write on those things is so slow, I would hate to move big videos to and from them. Like start that transfer and then go to bed, hope it's done in the morning without errors.

Plex went from $120 to $250 a few years ago, and they warned people first. No one who had any sense waited for the price increase before buying. Like most others, I paid less. I think I paid $90? Anyway, at this point they're just going after the whales. There were plenty of sub-$100 deals on Plex back in the day. Those who didn't see any value in running your own Netflix chose not to pay, and of course they're not gonna pay more. Plex was worth paying for at $120 or less. I could almost make the case for it at $250. At $750, if you'd told me 10-15 years ago when it was new how much value I'd get from it, I would have paid — and bought more hard drives.

If you do use Apple stuff, you kinda have the best option, but it's not free, and it absolutely does not work outside your network. It's called Infuse. First, the price. It's priced old school, so if you buy lifetime, it's only lifetime of the current major version. 6 or 7, I think. So when the next one comes out, you can buy at a discount or you can go to monthly. Yearly is actually the best option, it's $10 a year. That's not bad. Ten years of it is $100, and paying monthly or yearly means you're always on the latest version. Considering lifetime is like $60-80, I think it's a great deal to go yearly. The thing is, Infuse only works with Apple tech, and it's not a web server and I don't think you can make it be one. What it does do is catalogue your media and let you easily download to your Apple devices. It's got some quirks I don't like. For example, the player will work with a Plex (or Jellyfin) library, but it won't write back. What that means is, if you're watching a series on Plex hosted by Plex, you know, it's gonna update what episode you're on. Infuse will read that data (say, it knows you're on episode 6), but it won't tell Plex what it's playing, so if you watch 2 episodes on Infuse, Plex still thinks you're on 6. Infuse clients only talk to Infuse hosts. (Infuse also doesn't need a host. Just share the files on the Mac using macOS's built in file sharing feature like any OS has, and Infuse will read straight from that. It's very smart and robust, and it's also considered one of the best media players in the Apple ecosystem, rivaling VLC, and that other one that is only on Apple stuff that people love to recommend. I think it's ugly, but I'm a dyed-in-the-wool VLC diehard, so I got no room to talk about ugly software. I just like the one I'm used to.

I don't think Jellyfin is really good at much of anything but being free. It's not Plex. It kind of acts like Plex, but it doesn't do for its users what Plex users consider worth paying for. Infuse doesn't, either, but Infuse takes a different approach. It's one that Plex also takes (you download stuff to your device rather than streaming it remotely, which is based on you having an idea of what you want to watch when you're not at home), but it's not Plex's priority and I don't know about Jellyfin.

That said, Jellyfin does let you edit certain things. For example, both Jellyfin and Plex use The TVDB for metadata, but The TVDB tends to prefer foreign language casts when multiple exist, so if you don't speak the language, and you don't listen to that dub, the metadata is kind of useless. The problem is that there's no source as good as The TVDB that provides multiple dub casts, so the media server apps don't have the ability to let you pick the cast based on your language preferences. However, Jellyfin will let you manually change the metadata, per show. It takes time, but you can do it. Plex doesn't let you do it at all.

I do feel for people who are looking at Plex's $750 price tag, but it's not like they weren't warned. Plex users have been promoting the hell out of it for years. Those who thought "it'll go down" and it more than doubled, and then thought, "oh it'll go down for sure now" and now that it's tripling... you kinda gotta lay in the bed you made. Or go build one from scratch. Or use a computer from a company that isn't based around AI or advertising and find a different way.

Also, I don't think you can pirate Plex, if anyone's asking. The server runs locally, but the Plex Pass features are server-based.

What I'd suggest if you don't like Plex or paying for media server tools is, work on Jellyfin or donate in some way or otherwise contribute to the project. Because at some point Jellyfin is probably going to start charging. So I would "get in on the ground floor" now. Be using it. Be advocating for it. Be contributing to it any way you can. Not just to avoid having to pay if and when they do start charging (I do not know that they will, it's just my guess), but to make it something worth paying for before (if it does start charging), it starts charging more and you're back at square one. Because none of us are getting any younger. If you missed the Plex boat, don't miss the Jellyfin boat. Or get into the Apple ecosystem and pony up for Infuse. (Though, as an Apple guy/Mac guy/iPhone guy, I don't use or pay for Infuse. I just copy the files over to OutPlayer and play them there. It's not as pretty, but it works.