I have to thank Plex for changing their cost model. It motivated me to setup Jellyfin, something that took slightly more effort than Plex. And by getting that inertia going, I then followed up with Navidrome, a local OSM service with routing, and finally my own mediawiki copy that has a starting point from the pre-AI days as well as an annual content refresh so my "compare" history is short and simple on all articles.
That inspired me to build a homelab finally, which then became a NAS, which then became an OCIS server to replace my commercial cloud storage.
I finally got proxmox setup, OPNsense, with Caddy for reverse proxying the externally facing services and tailscale for access to those services I want to keep only for me and not others in my family.
So yeah, all of this big massive avalanche of work started with the little tiny snowball of Plex deciding they wanted to charge me to use my own media while away from my house.
Thanks Plex!
And thanks Jellyfin for being a fantastic alternative for video.
I sort of went the opposite way. I had a giant homelab already and paid for Plex lifetime (just because I thought it was good software after years of use, not because I really needed the features or anything) but then I ended up consolidating all of my media to just being a bare metal Linux standard PC case running a plain NFS share (I guess that's still a NAS, but perhaps more spartan than the usual connotation) which clients like Infuse or a local media player app can just load directly.
I used a SMB share with Infuse for awhile and it worked well, but adding Jellyfin in the middle made it much easier for the kids/wife to understand how to find things.
(For awhile I was VLC off a ram SMB share but that was confusing even to me sometimes.)
I would also like to thank Jellyfin and the other software packages in its orbit for motivating me to keep my homelab in good running order. That and Home Assistant.
When compared to the current breed of streaming services it really shows the difference between something designed to drive up engagement and revenue while driving down cost vs something designed to actually be useful and pleasant.
Also I hadn't heard of OCIS, but it looks like something I want. So thanks for that.
I had a rough time with Jellyfin like 6-7 years ago, with media not populating/playing properly, and metadata being lost on upgrade, etc.
Tried again a few months ago and couldn't be happier. The whole thing is very stable and reliable. I think my only annoyance is that the HW I have it running on isn't beefy enough for transcoding, and my LG C4 can't play some of the 4K codecs natively (particularly around DV). Obviously this isn't Jellyfin's fault, but this kind of thing is just one more item for the list of stuff to have randomly be a surprise when setting up this kind of thing.
Transcoding generally isnt about raw power and is really just a function of having hardware transcoding support. Minipcs with 'recentish' intel chips handle it with ease for a couple hundred dollars all in (pre-DRAM price increases at least)
Which app are you using on your TV? I've had success direct-playing 4K content with the jellyfin Android TV app. On AppleTV, Infuse works well. Infuse isn't free, but it is worth the money to me.
What does Navidrome add over streaming music via Jellyfin, is it just better more tailored client apps? The music client apps for JF are a bit bare bones, although the streaming itself I've found to work perfectly.
The Subsonic API is pretty fantastic and the apps that support it are full-featured. The Jellyfin app, while completely capable of streaming music, is far far less feature-ful.
Personally I use Gonic rather than Navidrome, because I don't care about a web UI, but if you go to the Navidrome website and look at the "Apps" page it lists every Subsonic API compatible app. There's a lot.
The streaming works well, but I like the focus on audio and performance of Navidrome. I've cycled from Plex/Plexamp to Jellyfin and am happiest with Navidrome.
I've written a client for Navidrome however, so I'm biased by the investment in time that required.
I've also spent time working with several of its private APIs to track my own listening activity.
Can Jellyfin (or Emby, for that matter) get the interface half as slick as Plex? I keep checking every few months, and it leaves me underwhelmed. I've got the lifetime license from Plex so I'm less motivated maybe... but even ignoring that, there's the issue of badgering 20 or 30 other people to switch clients. It'd literally take me years to plan out such a project and I'm hoping someone can talk me into it.
I haven't logged into Plex in a while but did decide that the next time I need it will just setup Jellyfin instead. Nice to see they support all my devices iOS AndroidTV FireTV
Ehhh, it’s a backup if, you know, the internet dies right when I need some routing. Seems to only be once every year or two. It’s not a good primary tool though.
There are a few approaches to tile generation, and the routing engine I used offers 2 alternate routes.
Claude Code whipped up a new front end for me that switches between various tile sets and provides a turn by turn instruction overlay.
Eh, I was happy to pay Plex a one time fee of ~$120 for a lifetime license. I'd rather just set up Plex in a docker container and expose that port than deal with a bunch of services constantly needing doctoring in my homelab.
I've run both and Jellyfin is actually easier to run IMO, since it is in package managers. Also has free android/iphone app. What do you think you have to do in Jellyfin you don't in Plex?
I too have the lifetime pass. A group of us collectively manages >1PB of content via Plex. But we need an offramp to derisk enshittification, and Jellyfin is that readiness capability. If you have no option to switch to when the time comes, you are SOL. Even if I did not use Jellyfin today (I do for a music catalog, but it is not primary), I am willing to provide them recurring donations to make sure they are ready when I need them.
(ymmv, I work in risk management, a component of which is vendor risk management, so the professional mental model gets applied to home systems when applicable; rug pull? not on my watch, and the rug pull will happen eventually)
I understand your reluctance, I was not very optimistic when I started installing Jellyfin.
Turns out it is pretty straightforward and I never had to deal with the hassle of maintenance. The two non-mandatory configuration steps I had to make were:
- the file permission to share Jellyfin's library with my torrent daemon.
But IIRC this is the same with Plex.
- the nginx reverse-proxy with WebSocket for the "watch together like" feature to work
I was happy to buy a lifetime pass many years ago, but as they've removed many of the features I cared about (offline auth, plugins, photo backup, watch together, etc.) I have come to realize that I directly funded enshittification. I wish I could've bought a lifetime pass to the version of the software at that time instead of a lifetime of downgrades.
Jellyfin is also a single docker container, by the way. That would've been an easy thing to verify before making this comment.
Most of that stuff isn't necessary just to replace Plex, the OP's saying them Jellyfin started them on a journey they're presumably enjoying, not that they needed everything there to replace it.
I think you're right the bar is still too high for most folks, although I will note that I think it's dramatically lower than it used to be. A lot of the tools are all-around way easier to deal with, tailscale makes a lot of "personal cloud" use-cases much more feasible, and then coding agents (I'm using claude code) dramatically reduce the labor costs of getting this stuff all working and fixing it when something goes wrong.
The only two of those you actually need to have a Plex-like setup are Jellyfin and Tailscale, both are trivial to setup and will run on basically any hardware you can imagine wanting to use for this.
It is hard to beat the polish that Plex has. I setup Jellyfin to try it out and I couldn't find a client that was smooth or had the polish of the Plex apps. The AppleTV app was close but then I go down the rabbit hole of codec support. Wanted to like Jellyfin but without a nice looking front end it was a non-starter for me. Good news is you can have the side by side and if a time comes it gets parity with Plex I will be happy to change over.
It's very interesting to see Plex users slowly turn against the platform primarily due to costs being imposed. Plex has better client software than Jellyfin but the 'proprietary vs open source' debate for NAS/video streaming software seems to be reversing. Jellyfin is catching up to Plex and in a few years despite Plex having a first mover advantage here -- I expect it to surpass Plex in monthly active users.
It's about more than just costs. Plex started out as a home media server (a direct port of XBMC/Kodi in fact), but over time due to its success the creators decided they wanted to turn it into Netflix instead. So using Plex to stream your own media to your own local or remote devices is being made harder with every update.
This was the point that made a bunch of people (me included) absolutely furious with Plex. Like I gladly pay for services and donate to open source projects. But it hits differently to pay for my very own hardware being used.
Accurate. I'd pay for Plex if I was supporting the development of software designed for watching your personal media collection. Genuinely I considered it not long ago, until I found out that they'd shifted away from caring about local media.
I paid for Plex, but then they broke the the downloading features from the server to the Android client, and never repaired it to work reliably.
Meanwhile most of their updates were about streaming support, and then they started cramming their streaming service into it, and pushing it, and I just got sick of all of that. Eventually I just switched to jellyfin. It is far from perfect. The music player isn't as good as plex's, there is no download feature. But at least it hasn't turned on me yet.
Jellyfin's Android app does let you download files but having to do music tracks one by one isn't very useful.
Finamp is the app to use for proper offline playback/sync of music from your Jellyfin server. Go for the beta version, it's far ahead of stable and works well.
It's not just that. It was great for all of us with large media archives, but every "big" release is making things better for those who don't run their media libraries at expense of those who do.
Syncing (a paid feature) was broken for years. It might download video, it might fail. You will find out on the plane.
When internet goes down, Plex becomes weird...my home network still works just fine.
Library navigation follows netflix pattern, but netflix pattern is to let me browse for hours without finding anything.
Not to pile on, but the reason we're pissed at Plex is because they did a classic rug-pull: advertise to nerds like us who own our servers + media, then slowly make deals with publishers, requiring them to police _my_ content. Then start adding subscriptions and limiting how I can share (again) _my_ content - what are they offering me anymore?
The irony is they won't have a customer base from my mom/dad. Why in god's green earth would a layperson pay for Plex when they can get streaming bundles? I just don't get it. And that's why I got rid of my ~10 year plex instance and replaced it with Jellyfin in maybe ~1 day.
For me it wasn't even about cost, it was the fact that logging into my self-hosted Plex server required an auth flow that went to Plex's servers for some reason.
Agree with others it's not solely about cost. For me it was about the very clear monetization drive Plex started doing years ago, while remaining nominally free to use for your own media. At some point, and I've already switched off it so maybe it's already happened, they will monetize tracking/meta data about what is in your own collection.
I have a lifetime subscription to Plex. I hate everything they've been doing over the past few years. They're completely ignoring their existing users in the quest for growth.
* Social sharing stuff that shows what you watch to others by default.
* Adding their streaming services and other paid services.
* Changing the UI layout to hide self hosted content, promote paid services, with poor UX for changing it back.
* Ignoring bugs that have been known and unfixed for years.
* Ignoring user feedback, doubling down on their poor decisions.
Are they that terrible, or is it the market and those of us with our own media are becoming more of the minority? I do question, at times, the amount of effort I put in to curating and backing up and maintaining our media.
I too have a lifetime subscription, I don't mind a lot of what they do, but it feels like our media has become less centric, they want to stream pluto.tv channels and stuff like that.
The biggest thing I dislike was how I had a single app to all my media and then they blew that up and I need multiple apps. It's not that big of a hassle; I just wish I had more heads up to when it was going to happen. And while I'm not aware of them having any music-streaming media, the music app ever only streams my own media and feels like it might be on life support. Maybe music streaming is "done" but it feels kind of neglected.
I've never paid Plex a dime because I don't need any of the paid features. But its usability gets worse with every update, which is an underappreciated reason to want off the platform.
Totally. I'm not into politics and basically all I want is a local streamer and I'm running Plex (on an old HP EliteDesk NUC) but... I already tried Jellyfin (and trial was successful with a few movies), so I'll very likely be switching my entire setup from Plex to Jellyfin soon.
I never even looked into Plex, I don't want to run proprietary software I have to pay for on my own computer to serve my own music. I've only ever used Jellyfin and it works more or less ok for my use cases.
We run a plex server and I hate it. Hiding "timer" functionality (turn off in x minutes) behind a paywall feels like a shit move to me as a parent for whom this is a pretty basic functionality.
I also want to shout out to Emby, which is almost identical to Jellyfin. It seems a bit more polished, and works very well. I've been using it for over 2 years. It does have a paid tier and nags me to upgrade for 10s on my TV, but that doesn't bother me. I have it running in a freebsd jail and it's been rock solid.
Jellyfin was super easy to get running on Arch a few months ago. With a Tailscale network, I have all my media devices connected to my very small but growing collection of DVD and Blu-ray media.
I'm old, I ripped all my CDs in the 1990s and early 2000s, but abandoned all of it when Apple Music replaced iTunes in a disaster of product launch. After a decade of streaming, I'm trying to head back to curated media files, at least for video. Music is far harder to obtain in ways that compensate the musicians, at least for the stuff I'm looking for.
That's pretty much exactly what happened to me. At the very least, I wish I had stored all the DVDs away somewhere. :(
I cancelled all my subscriptions this year and working on getting JellyFin up and I was thinking of paying for GameFly or some other DVD service and start putting a library back together. Torrenting just seems icky to me and I am not convinced I could find good copies.
The fact that Jellyfin lacks a AppleTV/tvOS app seems like it continues to make it a dealbreaker... at least for my setup.
I hear people recommending clients like Infuse, but it feels odd to swap out Plex at this point if I can't go all in on the open source side of things.
Am I missing something here wrt Jellyfin clients? I guess I could try running it side-by-side with Plex and see how it goes.
There Swiftfin, Jellyfin Mobile, and Streamyfin at least. My forthcoming iOS-only music player has first-class Jellyfin support (beta sign-up: https://forms.gle/AGLePh9RtaYEfDH6A) if you're looking for a dedicated, offline-capable music app.
> Am I missing something here wrt Jellyfin clients?
Unfortunately, I don't think so. I had many issues with playback on ATV using Swiftfin. Infuse works very well, so it is worth the ~$15 yearly to me. I am hopeful that Swiftfin will improve over time, they have a few dedicated developers working on it.
I have Kodi running on a raspberry pi plugged into my Google TV. The Jellyfin plugin for Kodi works flawlessly so far for me. It’s just great! Sure if I could put Jellyfin directly on the TV, that would save me the RPi. But not a big deal for me.
Jellyfin has Swiftfin, I’ve been using it for a few years now.
There are some small bugs that you can work around. The rework to the new version has been in progress for about two years but it works just fine right now.
Small bugs? May be. But there’s a lot of lack of functionality and stability. I’d recommend InFuse if anyone is hitting those problems. If it has been running fine for you then there’s no need to switch.
The problem is related to source codec. Depending on that you’ll have difference experience. So that’s why the experience varies because there’s vast differences in source formats.
A good client not only handles well on some sources, but many if not all.
But they have a very long way to before they reach feature parity with even just the stuff I use. Let alone everything Plex can do.
I think this year I’m going to try and find an issue or feature I can contribute on. I’d like to end up moving to Jellyfin based on it being good and not Plex being bad.
For anyone with a Radar/Sonarr/Jellyfin setup - do yourself a favor and set up Jellyseerr too. It's a request system for other to request library additions. Install moonfin on your firetv/androidtv and downloads can be initiated straight from your TV!
> We have been moving quickly to address these issues, delivering four additional point releases with over 100 changes since the initial 10.11.0 release. To date, most point releases have focused on resolving general and migration-related issues. The remaining migration issues are largely isolated, one-off cases and are unlikely to be resolved.
I guess that's my cue to finally try and upgrade. I dragged my feet given how widespread the friction of the upgrade, but if this is as good as it's going to get, I might as well pull the bandaid off now.
I'm in the same boat, still on the older version and monitoring the new updates. There's an issue list on github for the .11 release, and while aaalot got resolved, theres still some big things open (#15045). But the jellyfin team is doing amazing work and I'm thankful.
A few of my users already messaged me that with the next version, the android tv app will cease to work with the old jellyfin version, so I guess I have to upgrade soon
Readit News
That inspired me to build a homelab finally, which then became a NAS, which then became an OCIS server to replace my commercial cloud storage.
I finally got proxmox setup, OPNsense, with Caddy for reverse proxying the externally facing services and tailscale for access to those services I want to keep only for me and not others in my family.
So yeah, all of this big massive avalanche of work started with the little tiny snowball of Plex deciding they wanted to charge me to use my own media while away from my house.
Thanks Plex!
And thanks Jellyfin for being a fantastic alternative for video.
(For awhile I was VLC off a ram SMB share but that was confusing even to me sometimes.)
When compared to the current breed of streaming services it really shows the difference between something designed to drive up engagement and revenue while driving down cost vs something designed to actually be useful and pleasant.
Also I hadn't heard of OCIS, but it looks like something I want. So thanks for that.
Tried again a few months ago and couldn't be happier. The whole thing is very stable and reliable. I think my only annoyance is that the HW I have it running on isn't beefy enough for transcoding, and my LG C4 can't play some of the 4K codecs natively (particularly around DV). Obviously this isn't Jellyfin's fault, but this kind of thing is just one more item for the list of stuff to have randomly be a surprise when setting up this kind of thing.
Personally I use Gonic rather than Navidrome, because I don't care about a web UI, but if you go to the Navidrome website and look at the "Apps" page it lists every Subsonic API compatible app. There's a lot.
I've written a client for Navidrome however, so I'm biased by the investment in time that required.
I've also spent time working with several of its private APIs to track my own listening activity.
Woah cool! Does it work well? Google Maps is the only Google service I really rely on these days.
There are a few approaches to tile generation, and the routing engine I used offers 2 alternate routes.
Claude Code whipped up a new front end for me that switches between various tile sets and provides a turn by turn instruction overlay.
It’s a tool worth having for me at least.
(ymmv, I work in risk management, a component of which is vendor risk management, so the professional mental model gets applied to home systems when applicable; rug pull? not on my watch, and the rug pull will happen eventually)
Turns out it is pretty straightforward and I never had to deal with the hassle of maintenance. The two non-mandatory configuration steps I had to make were: - the file permission to share Jellyfin's library with my torrent daemon. But IIRC this is the same with Plex. - the nginx reverse-proxy with WebSocket for the "watch together like" feature to work
Jellyfin is also a single docker container, by the way. That would've been an easy thing to verify before making this comment.
- Plex
or...
- Jellyfin
- Navidrome
- Homelab
- proxmox
- OPNsense
- Caddy
- Tailscale
Plex is not worried about people like you, because you just described an insane amount of effort just to avoid a one-time cost. Most will not.
I think you're right the bar is still too high for most folks, although I will note that I think it's dramatically lower than it used to be. A lot of the tools are all-around way easier to deal with, tailscale makes a lot of "personal cloud" use-cases much more feasible, and then coding agents (I'm using claude code) dramatically reduce the labor costs of getting this stuff all working and fixing it when something goes wrong.
This was the point that made a bunch of people (me included) absolutely furious with Plex. Like I gladly pay for services and donate to open source projects. But it hits differently to pay for my very own hardware being used.
But damn if it wasn't magical having all those movies at your fingertips in the early 2000s.
Meanwhile most of their updates were about streaming support, and then they started cramming their streaming service into it, and pushing it, and I just got sick of all of that. Eventually I just switched to jellyfin. It is far from perfect. The music player isn't as good as plex's, there is no download feature. But at least it hasn't turned on me yet.
Finamp is the app to use for proper offline playback/sync of music from your Jellyfin server. Go for the beta version, it's far ahead of stable and works well.
The streaming issue is another matter though :/
Syncing (a paid feature) was broken for years. It might download video, it might fail. You will find out on the plane.
When internet goes down, Plex becomes weird...my home network still works just fine.
Library navigation follows netflix pattern, but netflix pattern is to let me browse for hours without finding anything.
The irony is they won't have a customer base from my mom/dad. Why in god's green earth would a layperson pay for Plex when they can get streaming bundles? I just don't get it. And that's why I got rid of my ~10 year plex instance and replaced it with Jellyfin in maybe ~1 day.
Happy to help others do the same!
Plex is a VC funded project, they've raised some $50m to date. Crazy what money can buy, isn't it?
* Social sharing stuff that shows what you watch to others by default.
* Adding their streaming services and other paid services.
* Changing the UI layout to hide self hosted content, promote paid services, with poor UX for changing it back.
* Ignoring bugs that have been known and unfixed for years.
* Ignoring user feedback, doubling down on their poor decisions.
I too have a lifetime subscription, I don't mind a lot of what they do, but it feels like our media has become less centric, they want to stream pluto.tv channels and stuff like that.
The biggest thing I dislike was how I had a single app to all my media and then they blew that up and I need multiple apps. It's not that big of a hassle; I just wish I had more heads up to when it was going to happen. And while I'm not aware of them having any music-streaming media, the music app ever only streams my own media and feels like it might be on life support. Maybe music streaming is "done" but it feels kind of neglected.
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If Jellyfin was a comparable product (in user experience and ease of use for my extended family's platforms) I'd switch tomorrow.
Spoken as the person hosting a jellyfin instance for my extended family. I switched years ago and it's only gotten easier.
You can find things to complain about if you want to, but generally speaking - Jellyfin just works. The idea that it's not comparable is pretty silly.
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I'm old, I ripped all my CDs in the 1990s and early 2000s, but abandoned all of it when Apple Music replaced iTunes in a disaster of product launch. After a decade of streaming, I'm trying to head back to curated media files, at least for video. Music is far harder to obtain in ways that compensate the musicians, at least for the stuff I'm looking for.
I cancelled all my subscriptions this year and working on getting JellyFin up and I was thinking of paying for GameFly or some other DVD service and start putting a library back together. Torrenting just seems icky to me and I am not convinced I could find good copies.
I hear people recommending clients like Infuse, but it feels odd to swap out Plex at this point if I can't go all in on the open source side of things.
Am I missing something here wrt Jellyfin clients? I guess I could try running it side-by-side with Plex and see how it goes.
As my needs are quite simple, I currently just use VLC with a SMB share. Works quite well, VLC is able to play standard .mkvs just fine! http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-appletv.html
Even supports some of that *arr stuff
SwiftFin is what I use, and it is the free and open source option. Works great.
Before that stabilized I used Infuse, but it wasn't great.
MrMC is another one I haven't tried, but it definitely supports Jellyfin.
I wonder why the officially developed SwiftFin isn't shown as recommended? I guess maybe because it's still considered beta.
Unfortunately, I don't think so. I had many issues with playback on ATV using Swiftfin. Infuse works very well, so it is worth the ~$15 yearly to me. I am hopeful that Swiftfin will improve over time, they have a few dedicated developers working on it.
There are some small bugs that you can work around. The rework to the new version has been in progress for about two years but it works just fine right now.
But they have a very long way to before they reach feature parity with even just the stuff I use. Let alone everything Plex can do.
I think this year I’m going to try and find an issue or feature I can contribute on. I’d like to end up moving to Jellyfin based on it being good and not Plex being bad.
I guess that's my cue to finally try and upgrade. I dragged my feet given how widespread the friction of the upgrade, but if this is as good as it's going to get, I might as well pull the bandaid off now.
A few of my users already messaged me that with the next version, the android tv app will cease to work with the old jellyfin version, so I guess I have to upgrade soon
- server: my laptop. I manually download everything.
- clients: everything in LAN with a browser, plus Jellyfin android client.
- typical use: open android app, cast to big tv, watch on big tv.
next planned steps:
- move the server to a minicomputer. Still download everything manually from the laptop to the server
- convince myself it's time to use the *arr programs
- once Jellyfin has a Tizen client, ditch the android app + chromecast for good