I bought a Plex pass for 90 or something. I officially dropped Plex about 4 months ago now. For 90 bucks I got something like 8 years out of it. I’ll call that a win, I don’t feel like I wasted my money, I don’t feel like I overpayed. Just moving on now.

I stuck with Emby for way too long for this reason. I spent $50 in 2017. Gotta get my money’s worth no matter how broken their app was.

Hence the term “sunk cost fallacy”.

Jellyfin is a no-brainer. Publishing services on the Internet is complex.

Seconded it’s not a no-brainer. I spent days trying to get it set up with Docker on two different computers and three different distros. It wouldn’t install, if it did install it had errors, if it would even open at all with anything other than a black screen. Hours trying to search how to fix it. I gave up and installed it as a standalone app on a common distro. Not as convenient, but FML it finally worked. Really felt like I wasted my time. Personally, this is the exact bullshit linux fanatics completely ignore when they insist on how great linux is vs whatever. I’ve got a shitload of patience, willpower and modest skill to try to get something like this working, but 99% of the population doesn’t. That’s why linux will stay on the back burner. And if it ever becomes just as easy as Windows…guess what? You’ll have many of the same problem as Windows.

I just want to tell my mom “install this app on your tv and log in”

I mean, if I didn’t know better, I’d start to suspect that the large multimedia corporations building walled gardens of apps in closed Smart TV ecosystems don’t really want you to be able to easily tell your mom how to watch shit for free. I mean they’ll let you, if you really insist on having that app available, but someone will have to pay THEM money instead first (and probably let them spy on you). That’s their racket.

The reason Plex can do it is because they do make money, doing shitty stuff like this to their users, so they can use that money to open these doors into SmartTV-land. The root of the problem is that your SmartTV itself (and your mom’s) is a locked down proprietary piece of shit, designed exclusively for shoving all proprietary content these media companies develop down your throat, and there are few convenient workarounds that are available to us, because of course they make workarounds as inconvenient as possible.

Unless you’re willing to ditch everything proprietary and insist on open technology for everything, which is hard on its own, you’re going to end up with a janky mix of proprietary and open systems that always require some compromises, because the proprietary stuff forces us to compromise. It’s literally a “this is why we can’t have nice things” situation.

Since you need to self-host Jellyfin, then you are responsible for making the service public.

Jellyfin is a fully self hosted drop in. That means it’s up to the server operator to handle everything. You would still tell your mom to just install the Jellyfin app on her TV with the one additional step in your server address which you would tell her.

But yes, you as the operator have to do some extra things like implementating a reverse proxy and if hosting out of your home make necessary network configuration changes to accommodate this access.

“install this app on your tv and log in”, which is exactly what Plex does

Yes, but that person has to create an account. Everyone has to create an account. With Plex. Some people I know immediately say no, others are annoyed that plex would try and shake them down for money.

If you configure Jellyfin, all that goes away. THEN they can simply download the app and login.

There is one thing I want from jellyfin. It is to be able to login from their Android app to watch or set something to record without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

So I told people download app enter this url and login. I even send out an email inviting them so they can click the link and create their own username and password. Then if they forget their password they can ask for a reset link.

So I searched, and all of the results were talking about setting up a VPN or a reverse proxy or whatever.

The best thing is, you can’t use a reverse proxy with it, it doesn’t even support it.

Maybe you’ve tried it already, but navidrome is a great purpose built music streamer. I was using subsonic back in the day, then airsonic, then airsonic advanced. When I first got on navidrome it was a tough pill to swallow since I never maintained my tags, but I gave a little time here and there to comb through it and in the end it feels like a worthwhile investment. It paid off a little bit more when I adopted lyrion music server and squeeze players for local playback around the home since this organizes by the same tags (mostly), so the whole library is kind of plug and play with things that honor the same tags.

I just use Jellyfin for this too, not sure I follow the issue but I haven’t used Plex since migrating

For me it’s chromecast support. Maybe Jellyfin has that now but it didn’t last time I checked.

Same with me, 12 years, about $70, and it still works just as well as ever. I turn off any new features I don’t want, my friends and family can still stream from me for free since I have plex pass already, and it’s easy to share without having to pass around my IP address.

Same. I bought the lifetime pass on sale many years ago, my setup is still working fine without me having to have touched it for at least the past 3 years outside of applying an update from time to time. I don’t stream their free shows or movies and have those setup so that they don’t even show up as an option on my tv.

Do I wish it was still the same company it was a decade ago? Of course… but so far they haven’t impacted my experience to the point that I feel the need to replace it with something else. The second that happens I will be spinning up Jellyfin.

Another longtime user here. If you haven’t already, you might want to disable autoupdates on all your devices. The “new experience” is not without its controversies.

I don’t mean to diminish your comment, but I just went through the setup process for both Plex and jellyfin (moving to new hardware) and there was no significant difference between the setups.

Maybe this wasn’t the case a few years ago, but jellyfin is just a setup, point to libraries, and enable hardware accel.

what? It’s not like everyone needs to run jellyfin at home. the only thing you need to use is the jellyfin webapp, which I don’t understand how is it more complicated than netflix or any other similar service. you log in, pick a movie and hit play. that’s it.

Jellyfin is basically as easy to use as plex within the same network. I’ve set up both dueing the past 6 months. The only big difference is that Jellyfin is much more of a pain to work through port forwarding.

Plex never worked outside my network so I’m not worried about that on Jellyfin

I don’t share videos with people using google to log into any site.

i dont get this… im technically still usin emby, but user management is beyond simple and requirs no upkeep. no one has asked me to reset their passwords and ive got a few dozen people usin my instance.

You can install a plugin to add SSO.

https://github.com/9p4/jellyfin-plugin-sso

Sounds more of an user problem than a jellyfin problem? If they can’t remember their login I’ll just not add them to jellyfin.

@Jimmycakes @Selfhoster1728 they learn pretty fast and the calls stop. Everyone says it’s hard I have very tech illerate people using it and yes I get some calls but not alot. And they managed to login way easier then I thought. I think everyone is overblowing how hard Jellyfin is. I mean most people know how to login to a website.

Tailscale

I would not let anyone access my self hosted stuff who is not using a password manager and secure passwords.

The overhead of the live library upkeep on Jellyfin is also quite insane, at least for me. I’m talking taking the whole thing down for many minutes at a time for every other service trying to run on the same machine bad.

Only issues I’ve had with Jellyfin are reduced flexibility in naming/organizing files and inability (for me at least) to detect personal media.

It’s not fair to characterize jellyfin as being unable to scale, and it’s just downright wrong to cast it as being built “for one single local user”.

Jellyfin has great support for setups that include numerous users. The entire dashboard is basically designed around this concept of an admin keeping track of dozens upon dozens of users.

You seem like you have many reservations about specific functions in Jellyfin, but you were vague in explaining thrm - what specific things are you worried about?

That’s just the nature of service migration; of course for people like you who are very dependent on it, it’s not a no-brainer, but for anyone who wants to start hosting one of the two, yes it will be.

In your case yes Plex is more appropriate but at the same time the clock is ticking for Plex if they continue on this route…

Can I guarantee? There are no guarantees in self hosting. By this logic you can never move away from Plex. There’s always unknowns. There’s always new issues to trip over. Plex is hardly without it’s own warts, but because they’re ‘known’ to you and your users nothing else will ever be able to measure up.

It’s a logical fallacy and a trap.

I set up Jellyfin basically overnight when the Plex pass changes occurred. Reverse proxies are trivial, as are docker containers, don’t let the anecdotes about things being hard or VPN being needed intimidate you.

There were absolutely bumps in the road. I had to make users for each person and email them customized sign-up links. Yes, that kinda sucked, but that’s the price for running and controlling the authentication yourself instead of though a 3rd party service that can and absolutely will eventually use that data to snoop.

Most of the time, once sent the link the users were fine, 9/10 of my users had no further issues and quickly adapted. For the last 1/10, I had to trouble shoot a few things and eventually ended up recommending a different device to connect with (it was an old TV with a really old version of Plex for TVs, they ended up buying a $40 Google TV device from Walmart and got set up that way).

The whole time I was running both Plex and Jellyfin so the migration process could happen at my speed.

My point is this: no, it wasn’t painless to switch. Yes, some tech support was required. Yes, the user who was getting hundreds of dollars (annually) of streaming services effectively for free had to shell out a paltry sum to upgrade and actually enjoys their experience much more now. No, that didn’t make it impossible or not worth doing.

I’m not saying what’s best for you and your users, and I’m absolutely not guaranteeing you’ll have no issues beyond these, but I hope you understand your hands aren’t actually tied, you’re just boxing yourself in.

You can cast jellyfin to any receiver. I use a Chromecast.

Hearing people think they need an app just to use their TV as a TV is painful.