https://jellyfin.org/ Great alternative to Plex!
This might be a good time to remind everyone that Jellyfin is open source, free (as in beer) and is, at this point, a better media streamer than Plex. No fees, no ads, no constant pushing of their streaming content, and still has the watch together feature that Plex went and removed.
The is just better rhetoric gets a bit frustrating tbh, it’s a great bit of software do not get me wrong, but sure still has a lot of issues with more exotic codecs and various colour space conversions. Among some other tech issues
free (as in beer)
wut
There are 2 types of “free”. Liberty, and price. “Free as in beer” means they mean the price version of the word. It’s a really old saying now.
Isn’t this confusing, though? It’s free, as in libre (open-source AND costs no money). “As in beer” implies some sort of restriction.
I installed Plex a couple years ago and when I found I actually had to sign into their servers to access my own content it was immediately uninstalled. It was only a matter of time before they pulled this kind of shit.
you can disable authentication on your local network.
This was my exact experience as well. I’ll never know how Plex compares to Jellyfin because I immediately noped out when I ran into the account creation.
Frankly baffling to me that anyone with the wherewithal to self host thought that was okay.
I have a lifetime Plex pass.
I tried out Jellyfin last month.
Now Plex is uninstalled.
Even if we ignore the differences when it comes to matters of FOSS, cost, corporate control, privacy, etc, Jellyfin’s performance is just so much better.
Setting it up to run over https while fully self-hosted was a learning process for somebody who isn’t a web dev, but holy crap was it worth it.
It’s just not the same. If all you need is local access or tailscale to your instance it’s fine, sure you can cancel Plex. If you’re sharing with friends or family or like the easy access to it that doesn’t require being part of the private network. Also I like subtitles and Plex handles this way better than Jellyfin. At least last time I played with it
There were some hoops for me to jump through in order to get secure remote access working for sure. Fortunately for my family that connect remotely, it’s transparent for them and doesn’t require any kind of VPN or tunnel. They just need URL, user, and password.
And for subtitles I’m not sure what the differences are between the two, but I’ve used them plenty on jellyfin and they seemed to work well and render nicely.
I tried Jelly Fin last month based on a thread here and it was a damned dumpster fire. As bad a Plex is for remote streaming, JF is far worse for the average person.
Hard disagree. I think jellyfin is much better than Plex.
Plex still has more features and is a more mature product. However, the Plex ship is on fire and people should be looking to move away before it sinks.
Fuck Plex.
Why not try emby it works fine no?
I’ll take a look.
How else would they continue developing their social features that no one fucking asked for?
Meanwhile they remove the social features that people DO like and use like watch together
People gotta justify their jobs!
There’s enough work without them going all social.
Todays word of the day is…Enshitification!
That’s the word of this decade.
i’ve been struggling with what i thought was depression/anhedonia for a few years now. after multiple psychiatrists and meds accomplishing nothing i am starting to think i’m chemically just fine; the world is actually going to shit around me.
… with 3 Ts
Jellyfin is free. Your own domain is like $10 a year or less.
There’s always other free options like duckdns, etc.
Duckdns is not stable enough. You’ll have downtime multiple times a year.
It was my go to dynamic DNS provider for years, but after noticing that it would take a good few seconds for my Jellyfin instance (among all the other stuff I self host) to load, I traced the issue down to duck DNS taking too long to resolve.
I switched to using ddclient in docker which updates my own domain’s records on Cloud flare with my dynamic IP. Now things load instantly.
It’s a free service, I think that’s fair.
I didn’t say it wasn’t, but it does not make for an acceptable user experience when you are hosting things for friends and family. Most people expect web services to just work.
I felt it was worth people knowing before setting it up. Cloudflare is also free and all you have to do is pay yearly for a domain. It also has much better uptime.
Tailscale is also free.
Possibly a bit annoying for family members used to just logging in though. It’s an extra step.
Think I’d rather pay that towards the development of Jellyfin
I used to curse and scream at my jellyfin software and apps, now I swear by them.
I took a day out of my life, not even a full day lol, and just watched countless YouTube videos on how to set it up and how to customize it how I like.
Now it’s my absolute favorite. I’m learning about building a home server and all that jazz now and I feel nostalgic, like a kid building his first computer lol!
New USD prices as of April 29, 2025 will be:
Monthly: $6.99
Yearly: $69.99
Lifetime: $249.99
Oof I paid $75 in 2013 for lifetime lol.
I like how no one is mentioning that they removed the one time fees for their mobile apps to be able to play media at all. Also, only the server owner needs Plex Pass and anyone they share with can stream for free.
They are removing it to make money from a subscription instead. You’re making it sound like they are doing something good!
Before everyone had to pay for the apps. Im not saying this change is good but it’s also not all bad.
How do you work that out?
I paid for the app so that I can play media on the go. Now that payment meant nothing and now they want me to pay a monthly fee instead.
Anyone new to Plex who doesn’t want a subscription can only play media when they are at home. Whereas before it was a one time payment.
Jellyfin is the future. Plex is dead to me.
How so? My friends need to use my account or else they need to pay to watch my movie? Did that change?
Read the article
The US$75 Lifetime price has traditionally been their Black Friday deal, regardless of the usual price.
Anyone’s guess if that deal will still be a thing, given their recent behaviour, though.
Me too 🫢
Paid 99, worst investment i did till now.
So the media that I host is now no longer streamable when I am outside my home network? The fuck?
That’s my server, my bandwidth, my electricity and they are blocking it?
Jellyfin is so much better anyway. I used plex for years and it has steadily enshitified.
Honestly I’ve tried jellyfin and I have a hard time agreeing with this for a few reasons:
- UI generally more unresponsive than Plex;
- changes to correct a show/movie being assigned the wrong show/movie metadata very slow to propagate if at all, same for changing other library options like title language preference;
- generally slower to buffer and get into videos;
- very rough android lollipop UI;
- not as easy to set up tech illiterate friends for play together.
I’ll give you that morally jellyfin is less customer-adverse than Plex management is at the moment and it is more open in some ways so you can have more plugins and add-ons that Plex lacks, and sure it’s a free product so it should be given some leeway.
… but if I just listened to all of the people saying jellyfin is just so much better I’d think it was an objectively better offering, but it’s not. When it comes to what I care about, it fell short, so just giving my 2 cents. Still worth trying, considering you can just point it to the same media folders, and maybe there’s a good proposition if you don’t already have a Plex pass, but if you do and you’re looking to migrate it’s a tougher sell.
Thats fair. I haven’t really noticed any of those issues. For my use case of just organizing and streaming my desktop’s media library to my TV, its fantastic.
Oh don’t get me wrong it does the job and if I didn’t already have a lifetime Plex pass I’d highly consider it over Plex for being free, I just don’t think it does it better than Plex (with a Plex pass)
I agree with this. Add in also Apple TV options aren’t great. Swiftfin is just ok and Infuse is $
i’ve had none of those issues and i’ve been a jellyfin user for the past 5 years or so, but I do use containers for the server.
Android client is not great, but there are alternatives like Findroid, which is pretty great.
Last point is literally a couple of clicks. You just need to understand what libraries are and how to add them.
I tried jellyfin but didn’t like it. Currently using emby and it works well.
I used Plex before I got tired of it requiring a remote network connection to work in my home network (no remote). I switched to emby a few years ago, and I’m tired of it too: Subtitle is a pain, filtering is a nightmare, integration with sonarr/radarr and configuration is annoying…
I’ve started developing my own streaming server, playback is working nice through the browser from server to tvlaptop. I’m going to integrate Transmission UI into it, and show/movie management, to get rid of sonnarr/radarr and maybe I’ll manage to get rid of jackett too, so tired of this cumbersome stack. I want it all integrated into a single server with a single interface.
That sounds cool. You’ve got a much higher technical acumen than me.
Agreed. Started out in Plex when j knew nothing about self hosting, very quickly made the switch to Jellyfin and haven’t looked back. If I’m hosting my media, storing it locally, and running my own server, I’m much better off not integrating the software of some company that feels entitled to bleed some extra revenue from me.
Guess it’s time I listen to all those jellyfin Fanboys
I paid for a lifetime membership to Plex in 2012–$75. I stopped using it around 2015, mostly because I hated that I didn’t have access to software running on my server, meant to serve my media, without an internet connection. I knew that meant worse was coming in the future.
I don’t regret switching to Jellyfin.
You can access locally when the internet is down. You just need to set the login bypass for the local network. IMO it’s kinda a stupid step needed in setup but it is available.
I see Jellyfin suggested as an alternative to Plex here. I hope it is one day.
At the moment it’s nowhere close.
I’ve been running Jellyfin side-by-side Plex for two years and it’s still not a viable replacement for anyone but me. Parents, my partner, none of the possible solutions for them come anywhere near close to the usability of Plex and its ecosystem of apps for various devices.
That will likely change because plex is getting worse every day and folks can contribute their own solutions to the playback issues. With plex it’s more noise, more useless features. So one gets better (Jellyfin) and one gets worse (Plex).
But at the moment it really isn’t close for most folks who are familiar with the slickness of commercial apps.
Even from the administrative side, Jellyfin takes massively more system resources and it doesn’t reliably work with all my files.
Again, Jellyfin will get there it’s just not a drop in replacement for most folks yet.
And for context I started my DIY streaming / hosting life with a first gen Apple TV (pretty much a Mac mini with component video outs) that eventually got XBMC and then Boxee installed on it. I even have the forksaken Boxee box.
I’m not trying to be a dick, but in what ways is Jellyfin vastly inferior to Plex? I haven’t used Plex before but Jellyfin does everything me and my family need from a streaming service.
It’d probably different for everyone, but in my case, its smart collections and playlists. My family lives off the home screen and pretty much never venture beyond it. Jellyfin cannot do smart collections and the home screen is very bare bones and unpolished. In Plex I have smart collections and playlists that build automatically for them all pinned neatly to the home screen.
The Jellyfin clients are also unpolished in general and buggy. The server works great though. No problems with that.
I tried Jellyfin a few months back as a Plex replacement, but I can’t seem to get reliable playback on iPad/iOS. I’ve tried the native app, Infuse and Swiftfin to no avail. On the rare occurrence the app finds and connects to the server(over local network), they don’t seem to support transcoding of non-native formats such as x265. Can anyone confirm they have this working on iOS?
I mean, that’s like, your opinion man… I prefer Jellyfin.
But that’s exactly my point - we here in this bubble prefer Jellyfin - but it’s not ready for mass adoption. Even plex is a drop in the bucket.
I run jellyfin in a container and it is amazing. Give it a try.
I’ve found it hogs a bit of resources so I shut mine off until Plex crossed a line
Looks like that day came sooner than I expected
What run command did you use? Any resource constraints?
I just run it in default config basically. To be honest it’s just the normal docker container I hadn’t noticed any crazy resource usage but then in not able to compare that to Plex itself.
