My experience was also that Plex is better at working around the limitations of Apple TV, compared to Jellyfin.
E.g., the native, built-in Apple TV video player expects everything in an MP4 container, and Plex appears to seamlessly repackage content into MP4, whereas you need to dig into the settings to force an MP4 container and force the native player on Jellyfin. Otherwise, Jellyfin will try to use VLCKit or some other player that has other issues (like with HDR content).
Apple TV also has very limited subtitle support in the native player, and Plex does better at accommodating that.
I'm assuming Jellyfin is closer to parity on hardware with more capable native players, though.
If you haven't already, check the CPU usage on your Jellyfin server during laggy playback. It could be transcoding on the fly, which can noticeably affect performance.
The plex app refuses to play 4K and says my connection is too low. Doesn’t matter if it’s wired or an ap 5 feet away, my iPhone gets almost 850mb down in the same room. If I play the 4K file directly from VLC I see absolutely 0 stuttering or glitches. I really don’t understand why plex has issues direct streaming (no transcoding). The computer has 16 cores so it’s not the problem, only plex has the issues.
Plex has a much better UI and UX than anything else.
That sucks, I was about to do the same (Jellyfin on the Synology, Apple TV for streaming). Seems there is no alternative to Plex that works with an Apple TV...
The lack of a corporate entity behind Jellyfin makes a big impact on the quality of their streaming clients. On some platforms they work flawlessly, on others there are excellent third party clients, and some platforms don't attract a lot of open source devs and provide a lacking experience.
Jellyfin split off from Emby years ago, which does have a commercial side. Perhaps their Apple TV client is better?
Seconding Jellyfin. I installed Tailscale on all my devices, including the media server, to achieve free remote playback without worrying about trying to secure the server against the whole Internet.
My biggest frustration with Jellyfin is mostly related to using custom or self-signed SSL certs, the clients can't seem to cope with that (especially on Google TV).
As plex got more annoying to use I switched to Jellyfin on my Roku. It's been great. Reading the threads it does seem like there's some issues on the Apple TV, but on the Roku it's great.
Same here - and you can still buy Plex Lifetime Pass for the current rate of $119.99. If you're on the fence it goes up to $249.99 on April 29th.
From the blog:
"The price increase applies to new and existing subscriptions, with the exception of existing Lifetime Plex Pass holders. The good news is that you can still purchase a Lifetime Plex Pass subscription at the current price of $119.99 USD* before the increase goes into effect on April 29, 2025." [0]
Also with respect to streaming costs - as long as you have a Pass there's no cost:
"IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CURRENT PLEX PASS HOLDERS:
For users who have an active Plex Pass subscription, remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media Server, after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge—not even a mobile activation fee." [0]
Had they changed that they'd probably be experiencing additional lost revenue. Either way, glad I got Lifetime back when it was sub $100. I think it's worth it for those of us who enable family members to leverage our deployments.
Exactly, plus they're announcing the removal of the fee for mobile apps. So if the server owner has Plex Pass, the remote experience is now totally free.
I don't understand "Plex is no longer going to offer remote playback for personal media as a free service"
What cost does Plex incur when I watch something from my friends server? They're not footing the bill for bandwidth that I can tell, so why is there going to be a cost associated with this beyond "we can"?
The special thing about plex for me is it is effortless. I run the server, and without any port forwarding it just works. Then my in-laws can sign up, and just like that they can stream that movie I totally own legitimately... And I don't need to walk them through entering my IP, a port number. They just sign up and it works.
All of that has a cost. It costs money to maintain, it costs money to develop, it costs money to host.
It's a commercial product. They have been inching more towards monetizing their product for a long time. Being able to pay for a lifetime is a huge win imo. I wish more companies offered that.
Before folks get the wrong idea, this isn’t true. Plex uses universal plug and play to open ports in your firewall, unless you explicitly configure plex manually. At that point you still have an open port but you get to pick it.
That being said, the remote access functionality plex provides is very nice. The shocking bit but to me is that they are pricing remote play at 20$/yr. As far as I can tell you only use plex infrastructure when a direct connection can’t be made. I’m my experience that’s seldom.
Plex does operate a few services that 'free' (or any) streaming may rely on depending on circumstances. Aside from auth, Plex clients that aren't able to discover the server instance locally rely on a Plex-hosted webservice to enumerate available servers. Additionally, there is a client-side config option that allows low resolution streams (720p is the ceiling, I believe) to be proxied via Plex's infrastructure. This setting is referred to as 'indirect connection', if I recall correctly.
They also provide the HTTPS certificate allowing for secure communication, along with the DNS infrastructure for that.
That is, your host gets a DNS entry along the lines of 1.2.3.4.something.plex.com, where 1.2.3.4 is your Plex server's public IP, and they have a deal with a cert issuer so they can get valid certs for that hostname.
edit: It's Let's Encrypt these days[1], was sure it wasn't that when it started, but it's been a while.
Whatever it is, it's too much. I remember experiencing my first "Plex outage" and wondering why Plex is architected in a way that a failure on their end can stop me from streaming local media on my own PC to the same PC hosting the files, and store my watch history/metadata in a local database on my own PC.
That almost made me switch to Jellyfin, but every time I look into Jellyfin I hear people saying it's not quite fully cooked, but that's been years now they've been saying that. So I stick with the devil I know.
Without any other experience with this feature of Plex, I would've assumed that they'd proxy the data so it would work seamlessly with NAT and CGNAT setups without additional user config, but I have no idea if that's actually the case.
They're not really proxying it, but they do assist with NAT hole-punching and you're probably using their authentication system for managing permissions.
That this is absolutely a "because we can" situation. If it is using any significant resources of their own to serve it remotely, that's because they engineered it that way.
> What cost does Plex incur when I watch something from my friends server? They're not footing the bill for bandwidth that I can tell, so why is there going to be a cost associated with this beyond "we can"?
Agreed. The article says:
> Plex says that it needs to raise prices to keep up with rising costs, and that the added funds will ensure that Plex is able to keep developing new features.
and yet they also offer a lifetime pass. If I were considering paying a company that just did this, then I'm not sure I'd have much faith in the lifetime value of that lifetime pass.
Just as a reference point. I bought Plex Pass Lifetime in 2014 (June) for $74.99. So I've already had just shy of 11 years of value for $74.99 which is an absolute steal (~$0.50/mo and it only gets better as time goes on).
"Past performance is not indicative of future results." and all of that but just wanted to provide an example.
Plex is in a tough spot. Their main market is likely people who have large libraries of copyright-infringing media, but they can't officially acknowledge that. They want to get revenue somehow to fund the development. My guess is that this is trying to get some money out of folks who have substantial sharing networks but are not paying for plex pass, which seems fair? I think Plex's software is only so-so and I don't love how they make money, but I do love having a streaming server that's actually maintained and understand the weird spot they are in revenue-wise.
I think they also try to provide their own content, blending your library with what they can license for you. It would be cool if they combined your library with a catalogue similar to Netflix in one app.
My pet peeve is that they focus too much on that side of the business (adding new content) while ignoring the streaming experience. There are feature requests on the forum that are being ignored. For example, I would like music artwork per song instead of per album so kids can find their songs more easily. I would also like offline content to be available in the standard catalogue without going through "Downloads". The device that plays the content should prefer that downloaded copy instead of fetching it again via a network when you play it. And so on...
As someone already said, this is probably intended to squeeze some money from the illegal content streaming farms before they close them. They are probably forced to suspend anything suspicious by the legal departments, and this way, they get a bit out of it.
Yah - they just announced they are ceasing to maintain their "watch together" feature, which I love and use often. I get that they are a small company and must focus their attention but their priorities do not feel like those of a company that's funded by their users. That said, their fees are quite low so I suspect they are in a situation where most people won't pay more - kind of a tragedy of the commons for a free-at-point-of-service product.
I know it's not possible due to licensing bullshit but I'd pay a premium for TV/Movies that I owned (DRM free downloads). I have no issue paying for content, but it's a sad state of affairs that Plex is the best experience you can get for TV/Movies and a legal alternative does not exist.
I would guess a good number of plex setups cost more than "all streaming services" x "lifetime of plex server", I know some people where this is the case. They could have paid for every streaming service for over a decade for what they put into their Plex/media server.
I was on the Jellyfin train for a while. It has enough frustrations (absolutely forsaken anti-support for subdirectories, trashfire Chromecast sync/control issues) that I switched back to UPnP/DLNA.
It's been pretty good! Gerbera has worked pretty well as a MediaServer. Every TV I have has a builtin MediaRenderer, and some of my controllers like BubbleUPnP on my phone let me cast to Chromecast. I love that gmrender-ressurect is a really good MediaRenderer I can run on laptops and desktops. Bubble also has a media transcoder that as part of their pro package, which was pretty affordable & an easy to use proxy.
Apparently, this is not just putting Plex's own proxy/DNS service behind a paywall -- they will also gate some small features (such as the "custom server access urls") that are necessary for one to run their own reverse proxy and DDNS.
As in, Plex will prevent you remotely accessing your own server, even if you're not using Plex's services for that remote access. So this is purely extractive move, and not really based on their costs at all.
It has gotten consistently better for years, the core product of streaming from server your own content from server to device is and has always worked great, and the lifetime pass is an absolute steal at $120. I paid $75 a long time ago and have gotten so much value for my money.
There is a thread of anti-Plex talk all over the place that I really don't understand. I don't think there is even any XBMC/Kodi code in it anymore.
I am a longtime user of Kodi/XBMC back to the soft-modding an OG Xbox days, and I eventually moved to Plex for the client-server model. It was and still is a great piece of software
For my family using Tailscale + Infuse (AppleTV/iOS/MacOS) works fine. I run a TrueNAS machine as my SMB target, point Infuse there and I can stream from anywhere.
Plex might have more features, but I found not having to install (plex/jfin/etc) server software worth it. To each their own.
Readit News
But here is the thing: It is a wired Ethernet network between the server for both and the Apple TV, so there is absolutely no justification.
Jellyfin is going to be THE answer one day, but still has some growing to do.
E.g., the native, built-in Apple TV video player expects everything in an MP4 container, and Plex appears to seamlessly repackage content into MP4, whereas you need to dig into the settings to force an MP4 container and force the native player on Jellyfin. Otherwise, Jellyfin will try to use VLCKit or some other player that has other issues (like with HDR content).
Apple TV also has very limited subtitle support in the native player, and Plex does better at accommodating that.
I'm assuming Jellyfin is closer to parity on hardware with more capable native players, though.
When that happens, I open up Handbrake and re-encode the media as H264 (8-bit), which Jellyfin can direct-stream to all clients. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/
0 issues, InFuse is much better at doing the playback correctly.
Plex has a much better UI and UX than anything else.
Jellyfin split off from Emby years ago, which does have a commercial side. Perhaps their Apple TV client is better?
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/done
I have plex pass lifetime and have for almost a decade, best $70 I ever spent.
EDIT: It has been over a decade (June 2014) and it was $74.99
From the blog: "The price increase applies to new and existing subscriptions, with the exception of existing Lifetime Plex Pass holders. The good news is that you can still purchase a Lifetime Plex Pass subscription at the current price of $119.99 USD* before the increase goes into effect on April 29, 2025." [0]
Also with respect to streaming costs - as long as you have a Pass there's no cost: "IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CURRENT PLEX PASS HOLDERS: For users who have an active Plex Pass subscription, remote playback will continue to be available to you without interruption from any Plex Media Server, after these changes go into effect. When running your own Plex Media Server as a subscriber, other users to whom you have granted access can also stream from the server (whether local or remote), without ANY additional charge—not even a mobile activation fee." [0]
Had they changed that they'd probably be experiencing additional lost revenue. Either way, glad I got Lifetime back when it was sub $100. I think it's worth it for those of us who enable family members to leverage our deployments.
[0] https://www.plex.tv/blog/important-2025-plex-updates/
What cost does Plex incur when I watch something from my friends server? They're not footing the bill for bandwidth that I can tell, so why is there going to be a cost associated with this beyond "we can"?
All of that has a cost. It costs money to maintain, it costs money to develop, it costs money to host.
It's a commercial product. They have been inching more towards monetizing their product for a long time. Being able to pay for a lifetime is a huge win imo. I wish more companies offered that.
Before folks get the wrong idea, this isn’t true. Plex uses universal plug and play to open ports in your firewall, unless you explicitly configure plex manually. At that point you still have an open port but you get to pick it.
That being said, the remote access functionality plex provides is very nice. The shocking bit but to me is that they are pricing remote play at 20$/yr. As far as I can tell you only use plex infrastructure when a direct connection can’t be made. I’m my experience that’s seldom.
That is, your host gets a DNS entry along the lines of 1.2.3.4.something.plex.com, where 1.2.3.4 is your Plex server's public IP, and they have a deal with a cert issuer so they can get valid certs for that hostname.
edit: It's Let's Encrypt these days[1], was sure it wasn't that when it started, but it's been a while.
[1]: https://support.plex.tv/articles/206225077-how-to-use-secure...
That almost made me switch to Jellyfin, but every time I look into Jellyfin I hear people saying it's not quite fully cooked, but that's been years now they've been saying that. So I stick with the devil I know.
Jellyfin+roku works great for me.
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We all have bills to pay. Upping prices because I want more money isn’t a very understandable reason.
It’s not like we have any visibility into Plex’s costs. So it’s just as likely that the owner wants more profit than they have costs.
Agreed. The article says:
> Plex says that it needs to raise prices to keep up with rising costs, and that the added funds will ensure that Plex is able to keep developing new features.
and yet they also offer a lifetime pass. If I were considering paying a company that just did this, then I'm not sure I'd have much faith in the lifetime value of that lifetime pass.
"Past performance is not indicative of future results." and all of that but just wanted to provide an example.
My pet peeve is that they focus too much on that side of the business (adding new content) while ignoring the streaming experience. There are feature requests on the forum that are being ignored. For example, I would like music artwork per song instead of per album so kids can find their songs more easily. I would also like offline content to be available in the standard catalogue without going through "Downloads". The device that plays the content should prefer that downloaded copy instead of fetching it again via a network when you play it. And so on...
As someone already said, this is probably intended to squeeze some money from the illegal content streaming farms before they close them. They are probably forced to suspend anything suspicious by the legal departments, and this way, they get a bit out of it.
I would guess a good number of plex setups cost more than "all streaming services" x "lifetime of plex server", I know some people where this is the case. They could have paid for every streaming service for over a decade for what they put into their Plex/media server.
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It's been pretty good! Gerbera has worked pretty well as a MediaServer. Every TV I have has a builtin MediaRenderer, and some of my controllers like BubbleUPnP on my phone let me cast to Chromecast. I love that gmrender-ressurect is a really good MediaRenderer I can run on laptops and desktops. Bubble also has a media transcoder that as part of their pro package, which was pretty affordable & an easy to use proxy.
As in, Plex will prevent you remotely accessing your own server, even if you're not using Plex's services for that remote access. So this is purely extractive move, and not really based on their costs at all.
There is a thread of anti-Plex talk all over the place that I really don't understand. I don't think there is even any XBMC/Kodi code in it anymore.
I am a longtime user of Kodi/XBMC back to the soft-modding an OG Xbox days, and I eventually moved to Plex for the client-server model. It was and still is a great piece of software
Plex might have more features, but I found not having to install (plex/jfin/etc) server software worth it. To each their own.