The biggest problem with Plex (I’m a user) is that you need a network connection just to use it with your local media unless you do a little research to figure out how to bypass this.
Why is this a problem? You don’t notice it until there’s a network outage and you want to watch something. Or if the Plex servers are glitching. It’s needlessly complicating the process of watching your media.
Not really sure what you’re getting at here. I’ve had a network outage for the past 2 days and was able to watch stuff on my local NAS just fine. I haven’t done anything special to make it do that.
You need to specifically set it up to work offline. It’s not out of the box. Either the setup guide you followed included that step, or you went out of your way to enable it, and forgot about it. It’s been that way for 5+ years, at the very least.
It’s just a setting like so many other things. You can put in individual IPs you trust or IP ranges.
It seems Plex has figured out lots of Plex ‘server admins’ are just normal Windows users and click OK on everything w/o reading any change logs or checking any settings. So it’s easier and saver to enable a lot of things right away. Admins can just go into settings and adjust it.
Could you provide a few examples or point me in the right direction to bypass the always online or call home features.
Currently my Library is shared with a reverse proxy and only accessable through CloudFlare. My firewall and pihole block my Plex server from sending anything to the Plex analytics address. Within Plex settings I have it set that Plex is not accessible online.
the idea of signing up at plex is somewhat antithetical to a lot of selfhosters… theres nothing plex is doing that cant be done for free with better software.
To be fair that’s a pretty recent development. Jellyfin apps for smart tvs are only just becoming stable enough for real use. Plex was the only option for a long time.
The Jellyfin for Kodi add-on has been out for 3 years. I use the Jellyfin app for content when I’m away from home, but I use Kodi for a front end for all my home based clients. Works great.
There’s always the software Jellyfin was forked from: Emby.
It does have a paid model to support development, but with single-purchase lifetime options instead of requiring a monthly subscription.
I’ve been quite happy with it for the last 7 years. Their apps are pretty stable, hardware accelerated transcoding works great, it does a great job identifying content then managing/fetching metadata, and the developers and their community are responsive and helpful.
A gatekeeper is a person who controls access to something, for example via a city gate or bouncer, or more abstractly, controls who is granted access to a category or status. Gatekeepers assess who is “in or out,” in the classic words of management scholar Kurt Lewin.
im not saying what is in and out, im point out a single, terrible product.
plex is a shitty gatekeeper, and broadcasting o everyone the many, many, many alternative products to plex sure doesnt sound like a gate
Sage was a DVR app and live TV guide for a tuner and is ancient, hardly a competitor to plex. Xbmc and Kodi - while great - are not at all parity for Plex. Emby or Jellyfin might let me share my media with my parents in their 70s but Plex just works. Unless you live somewhere with highly unreliable internet there still is no parity to Plex.
I bought sage in 2003 to use with my hauppage TV tuner. I still have recordings made from it. But once I retired that htpc I stopped using it. Maybe they added functionality after that.
the funny thing is, i dont use DVRs … myth tv was the last one i really had setup as dvr, and that was back in 00-04… i realized the DVRing was a waste of time, i can just download that stuff… so i switched to SageTV because of its local file handling.
when google bought SageTV and shut that shit down i was beyond pissed… i had custom XML all over that bitch, which is why i made sure to grab the license the developers leaked on the way the door.
Jellyfin was forked from emby (emby is similar to Plex, jellyfin is open source) in 2018 when emby went closed source, and they implemented sync and remote streaming if I recall correctly.
It’s a principle thing mostly. Plex just keeps ignoring features users want and trying to push some monetization model.
They regularly implement what I’d say most would consider anti features.
For example, I remember the push back on the mandatory “recommended” tab. It’s the first thing you see when navigating to a library. Wow. Neat. Some bean counter at Plex is “recommending” what I should watch on my own library. No thanks.
There was also the fiasco with emailing your friends things you’ve been watching. Just what you want where you store all your legally owned DVDs with your legal streaming rights to your friends.
Then there was also a thing where they began collecting data on your media libraries to their servers.
There’s also mandatory Internet connection if you want to have local users :). Lots of people barked at this and they ignored it and tried to spin it as an ok thing. You cannot have other people in your family have different watched status and stats without connecting to the internet. Oh did your Internet go down? So did Plex. At that point how’s it different than Netflix. Not to mention we’re the ones doing the hosting. It’s in our network. This should not be reliant on an Internet connection.
The list goes on.
It works pretty well and I’ve thus far been too lazy to change, but jellyfin is open source, and doesn’t have evil people behind it.
Jellyfin is great and open source. I’ve never tried Plex, but I’ve heard that Plex has apps on more platforms.
Also, I’d recommend checking out Findroid if your on Android. Its UI is native instead of the usual web interface in the official apps. Iirc iOS has a similar project.
Plex is definitely more user friendly. I would like to try Jellyfin again but I host Plex for my parents back home and I don’t want to troubleshoot Jellyfin internationally when I know they can just install Plex and log in on their devices and I don’t have to deal with it.
Definitely different strokes for different folks but I understand Lemmy is very big on FOSS so it’s no surprise Jellyfin has such a positive following here.
Ah, thanks. I’ve been considering installing it on my Plex server so I can evaluate it but I have no issues with Plex whatsoever. But yes them getting bigger means more chances for things to get bad.
Depending on your server, and how you install you might have a bad experience. I’ve had issues where it wasn’t finding the film/series metadata, having plugin issues, and being incredibly slow (slow UI when anything is being done, slow scanning folders, slow loading saved metadata, etc). Jellyfin, like a lot of open source software, feels like jank. The devs know about a lot of issues, but they’re swamped with so much, with this big of a project.
People criticise Plex, rightfully so with some of their bad decisions, but it still works better. For me, Plex runs so much better, and without issues. I won’t be moving away to Jellyfin in the foreseeable future, but I’ll be glad when I am able to.
Then again, with Jellyfin you don’t have to pay for hardware transcoding. That is the one that really bothered me. It seems insane you’d have to pay to properly utilize your own hardware.
My TV is not even smart. I use 40$ xiaomi tv stick (android 1080p). Its powered from USB port on tv and connects via wifi. Its not the fastest device, but it works just fine
Edit: not sure about price anymore, seems like its more like 50$ now, but still cheap IMO
As soon as they get xbox app that’s not just a fucking browser…
Sure, you might be fine, my 7 year old and wife aren’t. The ui and ux are hot barbage without a mouse. I just want to use my tv remote and simple arrows and for the play/pause button to work.
I paid for plex pass because jellyfin didn’t pass the usability test in our household.
Time to move to jellyfin I guess.
Can’t you just hide the paid movies/tv tab? Or is it a principle thing
Is jellyfin better? I’d never heard of it 'til now
The biggest problem with Plex (I’m a user) is that you need a network connection just to use it with your local media unless you do a little research to figure out how to bypass this. Why is this a problem? You don’t notice it until there’s a network outage and you want to watch something. Or if the Plex servers are glitching. It’s needlessly complicating the process of watching your media.
Not really sure what you’re getting at here. I’ve had a network outage for the past 2 days and was able to watch stuff on my local NAS just fine. I haven’t done anything special to make it do that.
You need to specifically set it up to work offline. It’s not out of the box. Either the setup guide you followed included that step, or you went out of your way to enable it, and forgot about it. It’s been that way for 5+ years, at the very least.
You must have. Plex uses their servers to login and there is a setting to not require authentication when on this subnet.
It’s just a setting like so many other things. You can put in individual IPs you trust or IP ranges.
It seems Plex has figured out lots of Plex ‘server admins’ are just normal Windows users and click OK on everything w/o reading any change logs or checking any settings. So it’s easier and saver to enable a lot of things right away. Admins can just go into settings and adjust it.
Could you provide a few examples or point me in the right direction to bypass the always online or call home features.
Currently my Library is shared with a reverse proxy and only accessable through CloudFlare. My firewall and pihole block my Plex server from sending anything to the Plex analytics address. Within Plex settings I have it set that Plex is not accessible online.
Is there anything else that I can do or missed.
Here’s one article that runs through it, otherwise just search for terms like “plex local network” or “plex local authentication”
https://www.howtogeek.com/303282/how-to-use-plex-media-server-without-internet-access/
Sure but if the severs are down managed users cannot login.
the idea of signing up at plex is somewhat antithetical to a lot of selfhosters… theres nothing plex is doing that cant be done for free with better software.
To be fair that’s a pretty recent development. Jellyfin apps for smart tvs are only just becoming stable enough for real use. Plex was the only option for a long time.
The Jellyfin for Kodi add-on has been out for 3 years. I use the Jellyfin app for content when I’m away from home, but I use Kodi for a front end for all my home based clients. Works great.
There’s always the software Jellyfin was forked from: Emby.
It does have a paid model to support development, but with single-purchase lifetime options instead of requiring a monthly subscription.
I’ve been quite happy with it for the last 7 years. Their apps are pretty stable, hardware accelerated transcoding works great, it does a great job identifying content then managing/fetching metadata, and the developers and their community are responsive and helpful.
I would argue that they’re still not, until their UIs can be easily wrangled with just a TV remote.
ha, k.
most of us have been using some form of emby/jellfin, sage(defunct), xmbc, myth(defunct) for decades… i mean theres a huge list of not new software.
smart tvs are only used by people who cant setup their own stuff and are generally derided as garbage.
“tvs” for most of us are an hdmi input
If you look up gatekeeping in the dictionary it gives a link back to this comment.
then your dictionary is absolutely wrong
im not saying what is in and out, im point out a single, terrible product.
plex is a shitty gatekeeper, and broadcasting o everyone the many, many, many alternative products to plex sure doesnt sound like a gate
Sage was a DVR app and live TV guide for a tuner and is ancient, hardly a competitor to plex. Xbmc and Kodi - while great - are not at all parity for Plex. Emby or Jellyfin might let me share my media with my parents in their 70s but Plex just works. Unless you live somewhere with highly unreliable internet there still is no parity to Plex.
haw, wrong. it was great local front end to stuff. i directly replaced it with xmbc as a drop in
you are absolutely wrong about sage. i still own and have a license.
I bought sage in 2003 to use with my hauppage TV tuner. I still have recordings made from it. But once I retired that htpc I stopped using it. Maybe they added functionality after that.
the funny thing is, i dont use DVRs … myth tv was the last one i really had setup as dvr, and that was back in 00-04… i realized the DVRing was a waste of time, i can just download that stuff… so i switched to SageTV because of its local file handling.
when google bought SageTV and shut that shit down i was beyond pissed… i had custom XML all over that bitch, which is why i made sure to grab the license the developers leaked on the way the door.
I wasn’t aware that you could even BUY non-smart TVs anymore…unless you’re using PC monitors as a TV of sorts, that is.
“retail display panels” but ya gotta watch refresh specs
or what some of us do, just leave it on hdmi input 1, never connect to a network
Mind throwing a shopping link my way for retail display panels?
For the second thing, if I have to, that’s what I’ll do.
Jellyfin was forked from emby (emby is similar to Plex, jellyfin is open source) in 2018 when emby went closed source, and they implemented sync and remote streaming if I recall correctly.
It’s a principle thing mostly. Plex just keeps ignoring features users want and trying to push some monetization model.
They regularly implement what I’d say most would consider anti features.
For example, I remember the push back on the mandatory “recommended” tab. It’s the first thing you see when navigating to a library. Wow. Neat. Some bean counter at Plex is “recommending” what I should watch on my own library. No thanks.
There was also the fiasco with emailing your friends things you’ve been watching. Just what you want where you store all your legally owned DVDs with your legal streaming rights to your friends.
Then there was also a thing where they began collecting data on your media libraries to their servers.
There’s also mandatory Internet connection if you want to have local users :). Lots of people barked at this and they ignored it and tried to spin it as an ok thing. You cannot have other people in your family have different watched status and stats without connecting to the internet. Oh did your Internet go down? So did Plex. At that point how’s it different than Netflix. Not to mention we’re the ones doing the hosting. It’s in our network. This should not be reliant on an Internet connection.
The list goes on.
It works pretty well and I’ve thus far been too lazy to change, but jellyfin is open source, and doesn’t have evil people behind it.
I never messed with Plex but Jellyfin is pretty easy to muss with so it’s definitely worth giving it go.
Jellyfin is FOSS as well, I assume Plex isn’t since it’s doing…all this. lol
Jellyfin is great and open source. I’ve never tried Plex, but I’ve heard that Plex has apps on more platforms.
Also, I’d recommend checking out Findroid if your on Android. Its UI is native instead of the usual web interface in the official apps. Iirc iOS has a similar project.
Plex is definitely more user friendly. I would like to try Jellyfin again but I host Plex for my parents back home and I don’t want to troubleshoot Jellyfin internationally when I know they can just install Plex and log in on their devices and I don’t have to deal with it.
Definitely different strokes for different folks but I understand Lemmy is very big on FOSS so it’s no surprise Jellyfin has such a positive following here.
Ultimately I’m glad to have options regardless.
How is a login screen less user friendly?
Eveny non-technical mother got the hang of it after I explained it to her one time.
Just the playback has some quirks with audio/subs sometimes.
Why can’t your parents just login to JellyFin and browse from their profile? I don’t really see what extra work would be required on their end?
Does Jellyfin have you open the app, type in a 4 character code, and then just work? I’m assuming it doesn’t. So that is why.
If Jellyfin requires any more effort than that - EVEN if it’s simply entering a username and password with a TV remote, that is extra work.
It’s a 6 digit code.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/quick-connect/
But I’ve never used it so it may be more complicated to setup? Worth looking into for sure.
Ah, thanks. I’ve been considering installing it on my Plex server so I can evaluate it but I have no issues with Plex whatsoever. But yes them getting bigger means more chances for things to get bad.
Its not better, but its worth it for not being dependent on internet
Depending on your server, and how you install you might have a bad experience. I’ve had issues where it wasn’t finding the film/series metadata, having plugin issues, and being incredibly slow (slow UI when anything is being done, slow scanning folders, slow loading saved metadata, etc). Jellyfin, like a lot of open source software, feels like jank. The devs know about a lot of issues, but they’re swamped with so much, with this big of a project.
People criticise Plex, rightfully so with some of their bad decisions, but it still works better. For me, Plex runs so much better, and without issues. I won’t be moving away to Jellyfin in the foreseeable future, but I’ll be glad when I am able to.
I know plex has some features that jellyfin doesnt, but it was time few years ago, at least for me
Then again, with Jellyfin you don’t have to pay for hardware transcoding. That is the one that really bothered me. It seems insane you’d have to pay to properly utilize your own hardware.
It’s the app availability, LG TVs don’t have jellyfin which is awkward for me.
There’s an official Jellyfin app in the LG app store.
I may not have checked in awhile but I could have sworn that walhen I got the TV that was a con of it.
Unreal thank you.
My TV is not even smart. I use 40$ xiaomi tv stick (android 1080p). Its powered from USB port on tv and connects via wifi. Its not the fastest device, but it works just fine Edit: not sure about price anymore, seems like its more like 50$ now, but still cheap IMO
Chromecasts and derivatives etc. exist?
I can cast to my nest speakers and TV’s with Chromecast built in.
As soon as they get xbox app that’s not just a fucking browser…
Sure, you might be fine, my 7 year old and wife aren’t. The ui and ux are hot barbage without a mouse. I just want to use my tv remote and simple arrows and for the play/pause button to work.
I paid for plex pass because jellyfin didn’t pass the usability test in our household.