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.
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.
JellyFin is an open source project and is community driven and motivated by open source principles.
Plex is a VC funded project, they've raised some $50m to date. Crazy what money can buy, isn't it?
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.
Plex misjudged their market bigly. They’re turning into a streaming company, when what people paid for is a media server.
They've done so badly you would think the Mozilla Corp had bought them.
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.
The Android app does let you download files but with music you'd have to click one track at a time. Finamp is the app to use for proper offline playback/sync of music (go for the beta version, it's far ahead of stable and works well).
I feel like they did a somewhat recent update to the downloader which fixed things. I had issues before as well but not anymore.
The streaming issue is another matter though :/
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.
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.
Swiftfin is the tvOS app: https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin
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.
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.
JFC just write a proper Samsung client.
[I'm aware there is one I can muck around with and install via Samsung developer portal]
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 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.
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 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)