> "My media content had been pushed aside into a submenu while the app promotes its own streaming media and premium services instead."
This is my biggest pet-peeve coming from Linux world. In Linux the music players you find bundled with different distros are simple, but they just work.
However since moving to MacOS, I have to either use iTunes or Music, and in Android the default music player and the latest updates of the alt music player I installed the author problem is true; they expect me to use their services and that's front and clear, while my local music is hidden away in a menu button.
This is a fairly ridiculous situation IMHO (well, solitaire in Windows getting ads/online is slightly more, but I'll never go there) since a music player that fulfills my needs is pretty easy: show a list of artists, play either the whole artist or a single album in shuffle mode.
> However since moving to MacOS, I have to either use iTunes or Music, […]; they expect me to use their services and that's front and clear, while my local music is hidden away in a menu button.
I'm not sure what you are referring to here.
Listening to your own music in the macOS Music app is as simple as dragging (importing) the music into Music.app and selecting any of the options ("Recently Added", "Songs", etc.) in the Library sidebar.
Most media players I've used work like that.
The application reopens where you last left off,
so it is not like the Apple Music "Explore" or "Listen Now" page is shown on every launch
to push the service on you.
I think the complaint makes sense in relation to the Apple Music sidebar items,
but considering that there are users who want to use Apple Music,
how would you surface it without having an easily discoverable item in the sidebar?
I think having the option to hide it would be enough to alleviate it, but apparently one cannot,
so that's a point against Apple here.
> How would you surface it without having an easily discoverable item in the sidebar?
There are many ways!
- The "music player" plays your local music, the "music shop/service/itunes/spotify" can handle music stream/buying/etc, which gets incorporated into your music player. Or you'd have all your local and streaming music (IF you subscribe) mixed all together seamlessly.
- Allow to easily change the default music player in the system. They make it impossible now, you have to fiddle with 3rd party software and scripts.
- Only require agreeing with the terms if you are going to buy music, not for playing your own music. Don't analyze my local music for your algorithms, thanks.
And TBF, Apple Music is still one of the best closed source music players I've tried, but pushing for their service hard is a no-go, I don't want to feel like I'm being sold at every time I'm using a simple app.
But on OSX, there are TONS of choices for music apps. You just need to bother yourself to explore the landscape a bit. Nobody will force you to use Apple's apps.
On Android, PowerAmp is still there and still the best.
If anyone ever forced you to use Windows, then MusicBee is the best.
> Listening to your own music in the macOS Music app is as simple as dragging (importing) the music into Music.app and selecting any of the options ("Recently Added", "Songs", etc.) in the Library sidebar.
This was not true in my experience. Sure it worked most of the time but I had tracks in my collection which were apparently incompatible with the Music.app and would not play. This led to me migrating to Plex about 4 years ago.
I think GP's issue is not lack of technical solutions but that most OSs and BigTech are increasingly user hostile to extract more revenue.
I alsobfind it concerning that they are succeding. We now have whole chunks of the world's demographic that don't even know it doesn't have to be that way.
> and in Android the default music player and the latest updates of the alt music player I installed the author problem is true; they expect me to use their services and that's front and clear, while my local music is hidden away in a menu button.
Tell it which directories to search (if its defaults are not to your liking) and all your local music is front and center -- and no "streaming services" anywhere in the player.
The biggest problem with IINA is that it regularly hangs on the legacy part of my vid collection (you know, mpg files and such), so I had to use it with mpv on standby. Mpv is absolutely stable, so the problem I guess is in some components that IINA added (GUI?).
Besides I am not sure if IINA video collection capabilities cover author’s demands (can’t say, I use it strictly as a player).
I suppose I understand the reasons people prefer Jellyfin. But on the small chance of liking a commercial product, Plex is truly dead simple for my parents. They have an AppleTV. They signed up. I share it with them via their registered email address. And they’re in. It was as simple a process as I could hope for.
That being said, do I like everything they’re pushing for? No. But they at least allow users to opt out.
I understand the sentiments here, truly. I just don’t have a compelling reason to change since it does what I want, is simple to set up and use, simple to share, and gets refined all the time.
This is heresy, but not all commercial software is the devil. I suspect RMS would hate me for this.
Not all commercial software is the devil, but money is the root of all evil. Rember Big G's old slogan before they were beholden to shareholders? Given Plex already employs multiple dark patterns in an attempt to obtain your email address, it's hard to imagine they wouldn't slide down the same slippery slope if they got bigger.
> For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil...
1 Timothy 6:10 NRSV
So, just for random theological context, money itself isn't good or bad - it's just a convenient token of value... But it's the love of money, ie, the desire to possess and control value that you can use to get things from others, and somehow find security and worth in your possessions that is the big problem. And not "the" root of "all" evil, but "a" root of "all kinds" of evil...
As a side note - the original quote isn't in fact 'money is the root of all evil' rather the quote says 'it is the lack of money that is the root of all evil'.
A subtle difference I'll grant you but one that makes a huge difference to understanding and empathy imo.
[Edit to Expand] The original Hebrew text says it is the 'desire to possess money' that has somehow become mistranslated into 'love of money' rather than the original meaning of 'scarcity of money'.
Yeah, sure, it's a mild annoyance that they keep trying to enable features I don't need or want. I guess I could stop upgrading. But still, it's pretty easy to go to Settings -> Online Media Sources and set them all to 'Disabled.' With that done, it does exactly what I want it to and no more.
How do you handle the default quality on their devices? I believe Plex defaults to 720p which forces unnecessary transcoding, and this is a per-user per-device default setting. I have to continuously remind my users how to update their default quality to maximum available.
First off I have hardware transcoding so that’s not an issue. Second, all of my 1080p direct stream to my AppleTV and do not transcode. I changed no default settings for this.
As for remote users, it doesn’t seem to impact them either way.
Plex is one of the reasons I now always choose open source over closed source but free as in beer. They start out great but as financial constraints creep in the compromises are made that create a very unpleasant experience. For example, I'd love to use Obsidian, which is an amazing app, but who knows what will happen to it in the future.
But there's an entire workflow embedded in the use of Obsidian. It's not "just markdown". That's like saying you could move from vscode to notepad because it's "just text".
I don’t use Obsidian, but their bustiness model seems simple and honest. Hopefully, I think the worst that can happen is that they will get acquired by a larger company to be sunset.
I posted about Foam, an open source alternative to Obsidian that run in VSCode, just yesterday [0]. It can work interoperable with Obsidian on the same files and folders, if that's your preference.
That's a non sequitur. I was talking about financial constraints of the company, not the user. I'd have no problem paying for a piece of critical software if they contractually guaranteed that they wouldn't break the functionality and/or litter it with ads, or at least make it open source if they do. It has nothing to do with my personal financial constraints. That's a misinterpretation on your part.
Plex seems to regularly add new features which I really have no use for but makes it relatively easy to turn them off if you want.
Every month or three when I login to the web interface there's Some New Thing which I need to disable.
Recently I needed a 100% offline-capable media player (and while Plex would probably work, it's not 100% reliable) and tried with Kodi.
It's a very unfluid experience, requiring multiple plugins and a setup process which was complicated even for me. It wasn't terrible, and it did work and I'm glad it exists but it's not something I would ever use on a daily basis, Plex just works better.
I'll admit I haven't tried Emby or Jellyfin (yet), and, I'm sure I will some day. Plex will probably add something which is truly objectionable or otherwise not disableable and I'll be compelled to switch but for now I'll stick with the fluid experience, even if it requires me to occasionally disable their new "features".
The thing with Kodi is you set it once and then you pretty much forget about it. I'm not sure what plugins you need because for playing media off a SMB share or local drive it has everything included out-of-the-box. There is some configuration but, once again, its a one-time thing.
I've installed it on dozens of devices over the years (OG xbox, windows boxen, an nvidia shield, raspberry pi clones) and it is and has been amazingly consistent and low-maintenance.
Kodi isn't a fork of the old school XBMC on Xbox, it's the direct continuation of the project. After they migrated their focus onto PC and other platforms the Xbox version was actually forked off into a separate codebase and dropped from the main project, but Kodi is the direct descendent/inheritor of the original XBMC.
I've been using it since it was still called XBMP, it really hasn't changed that much UI wise.
It’s not hard for my parents. Just “search for X thing”. It doesn’t really matter what server it’s coming from.
3 & 4 aren’t issues for me. My home upload speeds suck (same for many people), so transcoding to optimize for this is unfortunately necessary. And I don’t even have subtitles downloaded.
I have a hard enough time with people getting Emby settings right and it’s all local accounts but it’s definitely easier then that: here’s your l/p, please check the quality settings as “auto” is often not great
My pet peeve with plex is they aren't really focusing on the fundamentals.
Checkout this issue [1]. A 2 year old request to support a newer codec, AV1, with seemingly no support in sight.
Or you've got the fact that plex's transcoding STILL only targets h264 (and gives limited options for bitrate/resolution targets). Most hardware support H.265 (and some newer hardware supports H.266 and AV1).
It's a product that was originally built on serving a media library and it's pushed most of us to working around it while the business is clearly focusing on other priorities.
But software support is lacking, especially in browsers. It's licensing scheme requires developers to pay for a licence to support it in their application, which means that no open source developer is going to get themselves burned on it. It's the singular reason that AV1 was developed.
I’ve stopped using Plex-like stuff. I don’t really need it because transcoding isn’t as relevant as it was before. Pretty much every device I own can play h265 without CPU overhead.
What I’m doing is basically a Samba file share + Infuse/Kodi. Thats it. You pretty much get the same results. Infuse can sync between devices using cloud sync and trackt, which can be used through a hide-my-mail account. Kodi can sync watched shows through said Trakt account.
Infuse costs me a dollar a month and Kodi is free. I don’t need a NAS with a powerful CPU that can transcode. Anything that has disks and saturates the gigabit connection is enough.
I just use Jellyfin with transcoding disabled. It’s still nice having a web client and being able to watch anywhere. Plus it doesn’t cost me a dollar a month which is nice.
So you're using four or five different things to replicate the functionality of one thing? This is sounding a lot like a certain Dropbox-related comment.
Not at all. There is a samba server and there is a media player in each device. I don't need to run .net or whatever code with a web server and a wrapper around ffmpeg. So it's totally the opposite of what you said.
I think the way I described how those devices get in sync gave you that opinion but to me as an user is basically just 2 things.
Yeah, I haven't needed transcoding since I was watching stuff streamed from my PC to my PS2. The entire existence of Plex, I've been confused about why so many people thought they needed transcoding, because even low end devices can play most media just fine without it for many years now.
I use Jellyfin and my primary device for watching content is a Roku TV. It has to transcode quite a few different formats. Roku TCL TV apparently has issues playing certain MKV and AVI files. Regardless of transcoding settings in jellyfin, the Roku _refuses_ to play any MKV with S_TEXT/UTF8 subtitles. Errors out on playback. Using ffmpeg to JUST remove the subtitles via `-vcodec copy -acodec copy -sn`, the resulting copied codecs file plays just fine on the Roku.
Maybe I can help with your confusion: zero percent of the reason I use Plex is for transcoding. It's a wonderful library-management tool with sharing for remote users and clients for every platform.
One major upside to plex is the ease of watching content over the internet though. There isn't a an easy way for me to give my friends access to samba over the net and then also 4k blu ray rips are a lot to stream over the internet
Adding Jellyfin to the mix was the best thing I’ve done for my Kodi setup. I agree re transcoding - overused these days - I keep all that disabled
Jellyfin-Kodi gives fast and automatic library updates - no waiting 5 minutes for ‘update library’ on large collections - new content appears automatically. Also some nice QoL improvements like synced progress, slightly better metadata fetching, automatic subtitle fetching
I have used Plex for about 12-13 years but am very very far from a power user. I find it mildly annoying I need to login but other than that I've not noticed anything that annoys me. I admit this is most likely due to how little I use it and how non-advanced that usage is. Given this, is there any value add to Jellyfin for someone like myself?
My read on this article is that it gets back to an earlier, more raw state of Plex. For my use case my interpretation is that would mean extra work for potentially lower quality, and unlikely any value add given that nothing annoys me about current Plex. Does that sound right?
Who has hardware for transcoding any more, and what hardware is modern for that?
Last dedicated hardware encoder I used was bad old days of MPEG2 for DVDs, but that went the way of the dodo when MPEG2 went native to the CPU. Never used hardware for h.264/5. I guess there was a board for J2k doing realtime lossless, but that was 2010ish.
So I'm legit curious what hardware transcoding looks like today, and that Plex charges for the pleasure
> For my use case my interpretation is that would mean extra work for potentially lower quality, and unlikely any value add given that nothing annoys me about current Plex.
Here's a positive example from my experience from switching to plex to jellyfin. When I drop files into my movie/tv folder jellyfin automatically syncs the files whereas in plex I always had to go to the page and click a menu icon and then click sync folder. Maybe there's a way to do it in plex that I don't know about but jellyfin did it by default.
I also find the web version of the media player better on jellyfin. I hated the google auth login to plex, and so far jellyfin feels lighter weight.
Like you, I don't need advanced sharing options and or anything beyond a private website that I can play my movies/tv shows so plex always felt overkill.
Plex lost me when they became obsessed with trying to put advertisements in front of my grandparents when all they want to do is watch Mash on my plex server.
I've only seen ads in Plex when watching the streaming services they have integrated, which is expected. Those services need to pay for their content somehow.
Yes, but they now show their catalogue by default on every new client you log into. So you (or whoever has access to your server) have to know to hide their rows in favor of local media collections. They don't differentiate them in any way, so I hope your media libraries are named something more descriptive than "Movies & TV". Really disappointing.
Readit News
This is my biggest pet-peeve coming from Linux world. In Linux the music players you find bundled with different distros are simple, but they just work.
However since moving to MacOS, I have to either use iTunes or Music, and in Android the default music player and the latest updates of the alt music player I installed the author problem is true; they expect me to use their services and that's front and clear, while my local music is hidden away in a menu button.
This is a fairly ridiculous situation IMHO (well, solitaire in Windows getting ads/online is slightly more, but I'll never go there) since a music player that fulfills my needs is pretty easy: show a list of artists, play either the whole artist or a single album in shuffle mode.
Attempt 1: https://twitter.com/FPresencia/status/1364892370509127681
Attempt 2: https://twitter.com/FPresencia/status/1578720636645826560
https://swinsian.com/
https://colibri-lossless.com/
https://cog.losno.co/
https://vox.rocks/
[0] https://www.foobar2000.org/
I'm not sure what you are referring to here. Listening to your own music in the macOS Music app is as simple as dragging (importing) the music into Music.app and selecting any of the options ("Recently Added", "Songs", etc.) in the Library sidebar.
Most media players I've used work like that. The application reopens where you last left off, so it is not like the Apple Music "Explore" or "Listen Now" page is shown on every launch to push the service on you.
I think the complaint makes sense in relation to the Apple Music sidebar items, but considering that there are users who want to use Apple Music, how would you surface it without having an easily discoverable item in the sidebar? I think having the option to hide it would be enough to alleviate it, but apparently one cannot, so that's a point against Apple here.
There are many ways!
- The "music player" plays your local music, the "music shop/service/itunes/spotify" can handle music stream/buying/etc, which gets incorporated into your music player. Or you'd have all your local and streaming music (IF you subscribe) mixed all together seamlessly.
- Allow to easily change the default music player in the system. They make it impossible now, you have to fiddle with 3rd party software and scripts.
- Only require agreeing with the terms if you are going to buy music, not for playing your own music. Don't analyze my local music for your algorithms, thanks.
And TBF, Apple Music is still one of the best closed source music players I've tried, but pushing for their service hard is a no-go, I don't want to feel like I'm being sold at every time I'm using a simple app.
On Android, PowerAmp is still there and still the best.
If anyone ever forced you to use Windows, then MusicBee is the best.
This was not true in my experience. Sure it worked most of the time but I had tracks in my collection which were apparently incompatible with the Music.app and would not play. This led to me migrating to Plex about 4 years ago.
I alsobfind it concerning that they are succeding. We now have whole chunks of the world's demographic that don't even know it doesn't have to be that way.
alias music='find /home/me/music > /tmp/tunes.m3u; vlc -I rc -Z --no-auto-preparse /tmp/tunes.m3u'
For Android, give this one a try:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ch.blinkenlights.android.van...
Tell it which directories to search (if its defaults are not to your liking) and all your local music is front and center -- and no "streaming services" anywhere in the player.
Load your music into "Music" and it is all there and not "hidden in a sub-menu". ITunes is terrible, but "Music" isnt bad.
Has items on the left for "recently added, or "Songs" can sort by ratings, search, etc.
also, with brew or macports you can install pretty much any audio player you want
Besides I am not sure if IINA video collection capabilities cover author’s demands (can’t say, I use it strictly as a player).
That being said, do I like everything they’re pushing for? No. But they at least allow users to opt out.
I understand the sentiments here, truly. I just don’t have a compelling reason to change since it does what I want, is simple to set up and use, simple to share, and gets refined all the time.
This is heresy, but not all commercial software is the devil. I suspect RMS would hate me for this.
1 Timothy 6:10 NRSV
So, just for random theological context, money itself isn't good or bad - it's just a convenient token of value... But it's the love of money, ie, the desire to possess and control value that you can use to get things from others, and somehow find security and worth in your possessions that is the big problem. And not "the" root of "all" evil, but "a" root of "all kinds" of evil...
I have a book of Chinese fairy tales which touches on interesting topics like the creation of the world and the beginning of civilization.
On that second topic, it says that shortly after human societies came into being, the men started fighting with each other over the women.
I imagine the mythology is correct that fighting over women predates concern with money.
A subtle difference I'll grant you but one that makes a huge difference to understanding and empathy imo.
[Edit to Expand] The original Hebrew text says it is the 'desire to possess money' that has somehow become mistranslated into 'love of money' rather than the original meaning of 'scarcity of money'.
Yeah, sure, it's a mild annoyance that they keep trying to enable features I don't need or want. I guess I could stop upgrading. But still, it's pretty easy to go to Settings -> Online Media Sources and set them all to 'Disabled.' With that done, it does exactly what I want it to and no more.
I've done this and the only things that I see in my Plex app are locally-stored contents and my TV channels (delivered over IP by my ISP).
As for remote users, it doesn’t seem to impact them either way.
You store your markdown files locally and then copy them to your hosted blog.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33561876
> They start out great but as financial constraints creep in
Funny how you talk about financial constraints, and still refuse to pay for software.
Every month or three when I login to the web interface there's Some New Thing which I need to disable.
Recently I needed a 100% offline-capable media player (and while Plex would probably work, it's not 100% reliable) and tried with Kodi.
It's a very unfluid experience, requiring multiple plugins and a setup process which was complicated even for me. It wasn't terrible, and it did work and I'm glad it exists but it's not something I would ever use on a daily basis, Plex just works better.
I'll admit I haven't tried Emby or Jellyfin (yet), and, I'm sure I will some day. Plex will probably add something which is truly objectionable or otherwise not disableable and I'll be compelled to switch but for now I'll stick with the fluid experience, even if it requires me to occasionally disable their new "features".
I've installed it on dozens of devices over the years (OG xbox, windows boxen, an nvidia shield, raspberry pi clones) and it is and has been amazingly consistent and low-maintenance.
I would appreciate a simpler batteries included media center software in that theme.
I've been using it since it was still called XBMP, it really hasn't changed that much UI wise.
So let me just add that I've been using Plex for years to play 4k HDR files for myself and transcoded versions for family and friends.
And it works beautifully!
No complaints really. There's clients for all devices family has, I have all my files, I can share to friends, etc...
Yes, they've also added a new streaming service. I really don't see the issue, just disable it if you don't want it.
For me Plex has always worked fine. Good product.
1) go to settings -> online media sources and disable everything.
2) click the ‘More’ button at the bottom left then go to these libraries I shared with you and click three dots —> pin for every one of them
3) go to settings —> Quality —> Video quality and select original so you don’t transcode everything to 720p, 2mbps for no reason
4) go to settings —> Subtitles and enable subtitles so you don’t have to enable manually every time you play a video
3 & 4 aren’t issues for me. My home upload speeds suck (same for many people), so transcoding to optimize for this is unfortunately necessary. And I don’t even have subtitles downloaded.
Checkout this issue [1]. A 2 year old request to support a newer codec, AV1, with seemingly no support in sight.
Or you've got the fact that plex's transcoding STILL only targets h264 (and gives limited options for bitrate/resolution targets). Most hardware support H.265 (and some newer hardware supports H.266 and AV1).
It's a product that was originally built on serving a media library and it's pushed most of us to working around it while the business is clearly focusing on other priorities.
[1] https://forums.plex.tv/t/add-support-for-av1-coding-standard...
But software support is lacking, especially in browsers. It's licensing scheme requires developers to pay for a licence to support it in their application, which means that no open source developer is going to get themselves burned on it. It's the singular reason that AV1 was developed.
They have spent the last few years burying and neutering all of the features that you claim "work fine."
What I’m doing is basically a Samba file share + Infuse/Kodi. Thats it. You pretty much get the same results. Infuse can sync between devices using cloud sync and trackt, which can be used through a hide-my-mail account. Kodi can sync watched shows through said Trakt account.
Infuse costs me a dollar a month and Kodi is free. I don’t need a NAS with a powerful CPU that can transcode. Anything that has disks and saturates the gigabit connection is enough.
I think the way I described how those devices get in sync gave you that opinion but to me as an user is basically just 2 things.
Pretty annoying though.
Jellyfin-Kodi gives fast and automatic library updates - no waiting 5 minutes for ‘update library’ on large collections - new content appears automatically. Also some nice QoL improvements like synced progress, slightly better metadata fetching, automatic subtitle fetching
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-kodi
I have a home server with i3 8100 desktop, I wanget to get Intel Quicksync transcoding to work
The amount of trial and error that took - linux situation is trully dire
out of interest, did you try it on another OS and did it work OOTB there?
My read on this article is that it gets back to an earlier, more raw state of Plex. For my use case my interpretation is that would mean extra work for potentially lower quality, and unlikely any value add given that nothing annoys me about current Plex. Does that sound right?
Last dedicated hardware encoder I used was bad old days of MPEG2 for DVDs, but that went the way of the dodo when MPEG2 went native to the CPU. Never used hardware for h.264/5. I guess there was a board for J2k doing realtime lossless, but that was 2010ish.
So I'm legit curious what hardware transcoding looks like today, and that Plex charges for the pleasure
Here's a positive example from my experience from switching to plex to jellyfin. When I drop files into my movie/tv folder jellyfin automatically syncs the files whereas in plex I always had to go to the page and click a menu icon and then click sync folder. Maybe there's a way to do it in plex that I don't know about but jellyfin did it by default.
I also find the web version of the media player better on jellyfin. I hated the google auth login to plex, and so far jellyfin feels lighter weight.
Like you, I don't need advanced sharing options and or anything beyond a private website that I can play my movies/tv shows so plex always felt overkill.
My media is completely ad-free.