Plex has announced a massive price increase on the service’s Lifetime Plex Pass. On July 1, the lifetime subscription option will go from $249.99 to $749.99, an increase of 200%. The price hike will only apply to new subscribers, with no changes to monthly or annual subscription pricing.
A gentle reminder that Jellyfin exists to those thinking of alternatives.
A gentle reminder that Jellyin more or less requires you to set up a reverse proxy and a secure VPN to use it outside of your home.
Why would you not do that anyway?
Because if I’m watching locally I dont need them, and if I’m watching remotely Plex already offers secure remote viewing 'out of the box`. They give every user an SSL certificate and a public accessible URL at app.plex.tv. They also handle secure user authentication. The new price is stupid, but Jellyfin is not a 1:1 replacement.
For free (FOSS), and is way better than Plex
If you use it weekly it shouldn’t be free to you, certainly if you use it more frequently than that. Give money to the projects you depend on or they will disappear.
You find a place on jellyfin.org where they take donations? I was looking last night and only found a link where you could contribute your time.
If you click through some of the options on this page: https://jellyfin.org/contribute/
It links to a donation option here: https://opencollective.com/jellyfin
Thanks!
Supporting software that you use by paying for it?
Ew.
/kidding
I’m a very happy lifetime membership owner and have zero problem with them removing features from the free version. Free doesn’t pay the bills unless you want to become the product.
If you ignore the mostly horrendous UI, the security problems, the worse transcoding performance, the harder setup, the difficulty to access it remotely in a safe way,… Yeah sure, way better
Plex doesn't have hardware transcoding unless you pay almost 800 euro
I, and I assume everyone on this forum who has one, paid around 50-100€ for their lifetime pass. My hardware encoding works great and doesn’t need me to tell it about each and ever codec in existence and how to handle each one.
The new price is insane, but that was not the topic of this thread.
You are right,. that is fair. You can also pay 230 euro currently for it.
The ui can be improved with community addons like moonfin but i agree it would be nice if they improved these out of the box
I couldn’t care less about the client design, since you have free choice there. If only the devs could be arsed to fix the issues that prevent me from just putting it behind a reverse proxy. If I could let people use it without exposing what is essentially an open door or forcing them to install a vpn, I would probably do that and slowly ween off Plex
This is a good illustration of the tradeoff of free software.
Jellyfin is core software, its mission is serving media, not providing auth or secure access. Those can be handled by other projects.
When you say “the devs can’t be arsed”, I think you’re misunderstanding that they won’t ever work on this, because that isnt the model.
The tradeoff with “free” (both in terms of free speech and free beer) is that work you need to do yourself to connect those pieces.
Lol, what an insane take. EVERY project that exposes an API is responsible for securing that. Its not rocket science, its server software 101.
Being free is not an excuse, especially when there are perfectly valid migration strategies, that don’t force them to abandon legacy clients.
Fans like you are the reason they get away with disregarding their basic responsibility
“Fans like you”?
Fuck off.
What an eloquent response
How are other projects going to handle using the Jellyfin app to log into Jellyfin? I don’t understand this. I see sentiments like this pretending Jellyfin is perfect like they don’t understand why people use Plex. I want to give my mom a URL that she can login to (or even better she gives me a code) after she downloads an app. What is the point of Jellyfin itself not handling this? It’s pointless. If I’m going to have a half baked server app, I might as well just use Kodi. They can be as stubborn as they want with this but people need these very basic things. I’d actually donate money to the project if they didn’t stubbornly REFUSE to do the main thing every Plex user wants. Other projects don’t need to do this. The Jellyfin developers need to. I first tried Jellyfin 6 years ago and this is STILL an issue and so I just stay on Plex because I’ve already got lifetime. I WANT to move to Jellyfin but I need to give normies access to my stuff and apparently that’s a wontfix for them?? I can host all this shit myself. I just need it all built in and for the apps to support it. I don’t think anyone is crazy to want this right?
You just give those people the name of the app your recommend (Jellyfin, Moonfin etc) and give them the URL and their username, then they create a password.
It’s not that difficult for most and if it is you help them once with it.
The problem with this imo is that having each individual user needing to login with a password every time is kind of just cancer. I don’t get why they can’t just password protect logging into my server and then each user doesn’t need a password every time. Now it’s been a while but my understanding is it’s still basically that way? No one wants to type in a password every time on a TV. That sucks. And if they’re in a multi user household, that’s even worse.
What the hell.
This is self hosted and you’re screaming about not having an easy button.
As I mentioned, jellyfin is not an auth platform, nor a reverse proxy. And they will never be. Build your own, there are many products out there. Or hire someone, Christ.
Either way, quit bitching, put on your adult pants and either add auth to jellyfin, use Plex, or shut the fuck up.
Why are you being such a raging dickhead at this point?
Like you’re right, but you’re being a a massive jerk to someone who wasn’t even the same dude you were arguing with before. Calm down breh.
It’s not about what I can do. It’s about me having a gigantic headache ever getting this access on a TV. Please tell me exactly how that works for my users? Once this system leaves your house and needs normies to use it, everything is a headache I can’t host the TV app on my server. It needs to integrate with this authentication. I know how to run a reverse proxy. I’m not a moron. I do it for all my other services. That’s not a valid solution when the app CAN’T LOGIN TO IT. Lol. I don’t think this is that complicated. You seem to be willfully ignorant of how people actually use these apps. Once we’re outside my house, Jellyfin is useless outside a web browser. Period. It’s too much hassle for my users and all the self hosting magic in the world doesn’t fix that.
It’s not better in any way other than cost. That cost comes with massive drawbacks.
As someone who picked up lifetime for like $45 or whatever it was (I think a 50% off sale?) what must have been 15 years ago…
I run jellyfin. Its just a better experience IMO.
I’m sorry but you can hate Plex and prefer jellyfin all you want, but you don’t have to lie. Nothing about jellyfin is a “better experience” than Plex.
What are some examples?
Jellyfin is easy to prove you are the owner off. While Plex has issues with that on systems like TrueNas when you don’t have full access to the server
It doesn’t cost $750.
…to stream your own media, hosted on your own server 😅
Neither does Plex.
No you are right, it is 800 euro.
Don’t have to make an account, for starters. Gives you more detailed control of transcoding options, audio playback and whatnot.
The UI is worse, that much is true, but that’s not the end all be all of user experience.
Making an account is what allows the easy library sharing and remote streaming, something that Plex is significantly better than JellyFin at.
What transcoding options does it have that Plex doesn’t?
How is Plex significantly better than Jellyfin at those things? I can just create a user in 2 seconds on the admin dashboard for Jellyfin, set a temporary password and my friend can log in and change it to whatever they want.
I can even limit the streaming bitrate to the account if I need to avoid bandwidth issues.
Unless your user comes and logs in on your network, and only streams when they’re at your house, then you’ve just opened your server to the world.
Plex has bandwidth controls.
Tailscale and IP whitelisting are both viable options
No they’re not. No one is connecting their tv to Tailscale, especially not your parents or grand parents, and ip whitelisting is still dangerous and insecure on networks you don’t control.
They mentioned remote streaming which jellyfin doesn’t have a secure way to do by itself
Does Plex? Have they ever been security audited or are we just taking the word of closed source software because they make it easier? Like Microsoft who just got caught adding backdoors into billions of computers and (pick one) closed source software company who has had major security breaches in the last decade.
No, but that’s easy to setup with Tailscale or a myriad of other solutions for free.
Which is not within the bounds they mentioned