Selfhosted

The sunken cost of buying a plexpass on sale for 39 dollars 15 years ago.

I host a Plex server for close to 70 friends and family members, from multiple parts of the world. I have over 60TBs of movies, tv shows, anime, anime movies, and flac music, and everyone can connect directly to my server via my reverse proxy and my public IPs. This works on their phones, their tvs, their tablets and PCs. I have people of all ages using my server, from very young kids to very old grandparents of friends. I have friends who share their accounts with their families, meaning I probably have already hit 100+ people using my server. Everyone is able to request whatever they want through overseerr with their Plex account, and everything shows up pretty instantly as soon as it is found and downloaded. It works almost flawlessly, whether locally or remotely, from anywhere in the world. I myself don't even reside in the same home that my Plex server resides. I paid for my lifetime pass over 10 years ago.

Can you guarantee that I can move over to jellyfin and that every single person currently using my Plex server will continue having the same level of experience and quality of life that they're having with my Plex server currently? Because if you can't, you just answered your own question. Sometimes we self host things for ourselves and we can deal with some pains, but sometimes we require something that works for more people than just us, and that's when we have to make compromises. Plex is not perfect, and is actively becoming enshittified, but I can't simply dump it and replace it with something very much meant for local or single person use rather than actively serving tens to hundreds of people off a server built with OTC components.

"still even mentions plex"

I've been using plex for a LONG time, and bought a lifetime plexpass 12 years ago. I'm pretty sure I haven't started a thread on Lemmy regarding Plex, but I'm sure I'm not alone as a LONG TIME user. Plex just works for me and cost me $75 in 2013. Right now I've got no pressing reason to switch.

If they remove my plexpass features, or start showing me ads / making my user experience worse, then I'll probably look to change, and won't participate in these awful 'plex' posts.

P.S. we should encourage as much new content on Lemmy as possible if you ask me.

Jellyfin is hardly a no-brainer. I set it up out of curiosity a few weeks ago and my first question was how do I give access to my friends and family. So I searched, and all of the results were talking about setting up a VPN or a reverse proxy or whatever. Man, I just want to tell my mom "install this app on your tv and log in", which is exactly what Plex does.

I get that Plex is enshittifying, but pretending Jellyfin is a drop-in replacement is delusional.

I would switch in a heartbeat if Jellyfin didn't... kinda suck, honestly.

But the difference in usability is enough that it's just not an option.

For the record, I updated Plex today and I haven't seen a notification like this anywhere, although that text snippet does match their privacy policy ad data opt-in settings blurb that has been in place for a while. I may need a bit more context here.

My TV doesn't have a Jellyfin app, only a Plex app. I'm not buying a new TV just to use my preferred media server, sadly :-(

Every day of my life trying to explain to friends they need to quit using spoon fed software. Sigh.

How big is that library supposed to be that it is larger than all public ones? There are some with 10'000s of videos.

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.

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

Mine too! I'm enjoying your media server right now.

/s

I bet you'd like filebrowser. Cleaner interface while being minimal as http.server