Why I moved my Plex library to Jellyfin after 14 years
(the.unknown-universe.co.uk)
from TheIPW@lemmy.ml to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 08 Jun 10:30
https://lemmy.ml/post/48456900
from TheIPW@lemmy.ml to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 08 Jun 10:30
https://lemmy.ml/post/48456900
#selfhosted
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Agree. I went directly with Jellyfin because I joined late the party, but never regret it.
So can’t comment on Plex, because I never used it. But I see the news and see the enshittified path it’s going on with Plex
I understand that they need revenue, specially if they actually provide the bandwidth to let you access your media from outside home. I also understand why people is mad, but I guess convenience come with a price, of you don’t want to pay for it, there are alternatives I don’t see anything bad in switching to jellyfin.
Why would Plex need to do that? I can access my Jellyfin and outside of my home just fine without someone else acting as a middle man.
Isn’t that the plesk added value?
I don’t know much about Plex but I guess because it is not easy for the average guy. Setting up a remote connection without a VPN is definitely not something I would recommend to someone who is just a media enthusiast.
You may not need Plex to do anything, but it’s kinda disingenuous to say most people can easily and securely set up port forwarding and a DNS service/reverse proxy/etc to keep outside access working.
I don’t mean that as a “I can do it so obviously everyone else can” I mean it more as a “what purpose does plex even serve in this regard?”
Like what do you mean plex provides bandwidth? It’s hosted locally, no? From your network and your server? They provide software but surely plex as a company doesn’t host your media?
They provide super-simple access from outside your home without any tech knowledge. Automagically. It even works (albeit slowly) without port forwarding.
Is it like a TURN server that provides p2p connection or do they proxy it?
I don’t know, and honestly that’s the beauty of it. It just works, and while I know every system is vulnerable to attack, I suspect it’s more secure than what I’d setup myself.
I guess I don’t understand why remote access is such a popular use case. Throw some shit on your phone, h/d, or thumbdrive and you’re good for a few hours. I crammed 4 full seasons of STNG on my phone recently.
Because I have friends and family that want access to some of the media I host. It’s a lot easier if I can just give them access and have it just work and whatever device they want to use.
Ah, so you have friends and family! That is a blessing, and I know that from distant experience.
They don’t provide much in terms of bandwidth for you to access your own media. Just a few bytes through their web services. Their bandwidth usage comes from their desire to be their own streaming service. They provide access to a whole bunch of other media you may have no interest in.
There’s a relay but it limits the bandwidth allowed through. It can’t be that expensive to run.
To think that right about a year ago I was jumping into the deep hole of selfhosting and was thinking to get Plex perpetual license. Happy I didn’t.
I agree that the rest of plex is undergoing enshittification. But the core features are kinda the same? I use it outside my home a LOT, so I don’t know how jellyfin would work for that. I know Cloudflare tunnel has a bad relationship with streaming video. Does Tailscale too? How do you access jelly outside your home?
I use NetBird and have zero issues.
I use Tailscale and it is absolutely fine. The problem is with other non tech savy people - the setup process is not straightforward so you need to help them a bit. They can’t just “connect”. But after that, Tailscale is great.
Controversial opinion and I say that as someone who started with Jellyfin and keeps that local Wifi only, so I admit a certain bias: going with Tailscale and Jellyfin over using Plex isn’t much better. Instead of enabling remote access via one company that wants to make money, you go via another company that wants to make money. How long is the free tier of Tailscale going to work out? How much do you trust them with your traffic? But I know it is a popular setup, so I am aware saying that here will not earn me any points.
Headscale will still work if Tailscale guess to shit.
Yeah I just set up Headscale via YuNoHost recently
So far so good. Might actually consider setting up Jellyfin now that I have a better, and freer remote access solution in place.
Plex is just so goddamn convenient sometimes
Nah man, this is self hosted, your points are valid and should be discussed. It is true that tailscale may enshittify, however it is only one out of many solutions. Like the other comment said there is head scale, and in the end you still have the possibility to go the way of a reverse proxy server and pipe Jellyfin through the open internet, which will be hard for many in the sense of configuration and hardening. But the underlying software which is Jellyfin is FOSS, that is the most important aspect.
I also want to make sure that people connecting can ONLY access jellyfin. And I keep hearing about its own security flaws.
I don’t trust people connecting to themselves not be compromised by someone else, for one thing.
Why let perfect be the enemy of good?
“tailscale might enshittify in the future” is honestly a poor argument against “plex is enshittified right now”
You must be new here (Lemmy).
I tailscale in to my jellyfin. No probs.
Same here. The Tailscale app also easily passes the wife test which WG unfortunately does not.
I have a dedicated VPS with reverse proxy connected to my network via Wireguard. It acts as the front door to my network so I don’t have to port forward or rely on Cloudflare etc. I used to use Tailscale as the go between but switched to WG recently. Both work fine for streaming content whilst self-hosting all other services including my website.
So you have wireguard connecting to the VPS and a port open on the VPS for the jellyfin client to connect to?
Dedicated PC on LAN talks directly to VPS via Wireguard. The local machine acts as an exit node so when I add a local IP and port to my reverse proxy the whole thing acts like a local network.
I wrote about my setup last month; …unknown-universe.co.uk/…/wireguard-vpn-two-vps/
My router (GLI.net Flint 3) makes it really easy to set up Wireguard servers on it, and from there all I needed to do was get a domain name to use. Set up Wireguard on my phone, and I can access my local network remotely without needing to pay for a VPN subscription. I still use Mullvad, but that’s for privacy not remote access.
From their standpoint I can understand why, tho if you had just one user you might be able to get away with it. When you have 10 users streaming large files at a sustained rate, that eats up some bandwidth. However, I stream audio from Navidrome daily and I’ve had no issues. I am the only user of my network.
If it’s just you using it setting up VPN is an easy solution. I just use wireguard. If you have a pic you can run pivpn which is just wireguard.
I access it via NPM the same as I access most of the rest of my services. As far as I’ve been able to tell, unauthenticated viewing can happen on Jellyfin, but the person trying to access it will need to know the path that Jellyfin uses to access the media. If you already know my internal file paths, you can watch it from my server I suppose.
I quit using Plex for my own enjoyment a year or two ago when my work decided to block Plex.tv, I can still reach my personal server as it’s accessible to the internet, but I cannot login as that requires being able to access Plex’s authentication servers. At least with Jellyfin I can use my own Authentik instance for auth.
I use Zerotier, free tier, fairly easy to set up.
This article doesn’t mention the limitations of remote access for Jellyfin, which requires some tricks like reverse proxy or Tailscale. I think Jellyfin is a great option if you only watch/listen on your home network, but if anyone wants to replicate the remote access capabilities of Plex, I typically warn them they are going to have to roll their sleeves up.
You’re right, I missed that.
I personally use a reverse proxy and Wireguard setup to access remotely.
Not something that unfortunately works as easily for me to connect my ailing mom’s TV to, and do NOT want to manage the reverse proxy + cert + etc setup for a number of reasons
Yeah it can be more limiting. Personally I got lucky and my mom’s TV runs Android so I could just install a wireguard client.
I will probably at some point bridge her network with mine since I want to install a TrueNAS box at her house for remote backup. So the VPN client will be moot at that point.
How do you go about doing that?
How does Plex get around that? I’ve only ever used jellyfin.
Plex operates TURN servers
That’s why I’m running both. I use jellyfin, everyone else uses Plex 🤣
Can’t you just setup a dyndns and port forwarding?
Just fucking yeet it online
expected advice from typical JF users.
What’s the worst that can happen. Someone watches your movies
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There is a third option, the program that Jellyfin was originally forked from back in 2018, Emby.
Sort of the middle child between the two. Nearly identically to Jellyfin for obvious reasons, several third party apps for Jellyfin work with it as well like Jellyseer, it has apps for nearly every device, and easy external connections via their servers like Plex does.
They do however have a premium subscription system like Plex to support things like those servers. It’s not as expensive as Plex, even before the recent rate hike, but it is there and some stuff is locked behind that premium license.
I started with jellyfin a month ago and I miss nothing. Total newbie, used free chatgpt to set everything up. I can access from anywhere.
The only thing I haven’t done is to get the app to the Hisense tv so I use through a browser. Just didn’t have time yet, not sure how that works.
I was using Synology’s video server software. They had an app for android and IOS. Then Synology killed it and the only options were plex or Jellyfin. I bought into Synology because of their remote connection options. When I tried Plex they were making me pay per connected device. No way! Jellyfin became my only option at that point.
There’s also Emby. And some other options.
You dont have to pay Plex per connected device, but you do have to pay something somewhere for remote streaming.
You used to have to pay for the mobile apps (though, not per device but per apple/google account) a while ago, maybe the previous poster was talking about that.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
[Thread #5 for this comm, first seen 8th Jun 2026, 12:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Good bot
Presently “continue watching” is gone for me in android. I can’t seem to avoid all these stupid “recommendations”, and lately I find I’ve been using jellyfin more and more. I have run them in tandem for years.
I am hoping that jellyfin gets better over the next few years. I keep trying it and it keeps feeling broken to me. Lots of people have the same experience it seems but then there’s also always a few people that act like I’m crazy. Nah, it’s still not there, unless things have changed a lot in the past year.
If you mean limitations in the client, I discovered that there’s a Jellyfin for Kodi plugin.
Kodi has had decades of development. It’s super customizable, has every feature you can think of, direct plays every video format, and is fast.
Having it act as a Jellyfin client has been amazing and given me the best of both worlds.
Nice. I’ll try that
Not OP, but I have similar feelings and they have nothing to do with the client or plugins. If I can’t easily and securely share my Jellyfin with the Internet beyond my LAN without resorting to a VPN, then Jellyfish is not going to come close to replacing Plex. Sharing my library securely with tech illiterate family and any browser I have access to, without modification, was the one and only reason I moved away from XBMC/Kodi and installed Plex in the first place. Jellyfin is fine inside my LAN and for my personal use, totally fails at hosting.
I had Kodi installed for a few weeks as my television media front-end, but it has:
It may well have a huge amount of functionality, but configuring and using it is the exact opposite of slick. Have uninstalled in favour of KDE with VLC installed, and manipulated via the KDE Connect mobile app, which is somehow a much better big-screen experience.
What about it feels broken? I’ve been running Plex and Jellyfin together for a long time and always find myself using Jellyfin. I’m curious what problems people run into to see if I have the same problem or maybe I’m just overlooking something.
I got the Plex lifetime pass like 10 years ago, but just switched to Jellyfin over the weekend. It felt like every week Plex was asking me to re-pick my home page list and just insisted on re-adding their live streaming junk. Got tired of it. Reverse proxy is not hard to set up, and while there’s some encoding kinks to work out, it’s not like Plex was immune to those problems either.
The best part is that, if you’re on the fence, you can just run both. That’s what I did at first, but I’ve since let plex die.
hmm I wonder if it’s because of the recent subscription hike … hmmmm
intense HMMMM
I’ve already had a Plex pass for ages, so I’ve just been running both concurrently.
Plex is a lot more accessible for my friends and family that are less tech inclined.