- cross-posted to:
- plex@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- plex@lemmy.ca
Fuck me for wanting to watch movies with my friends I guess.
You must log in or register to comment.
It was destined to fail. Ever try to add friends on Plex? It’s a shitshow just to find where in the UI to add a friend or accept a request. And you can’t use Watch Together until everyone watching is friends with everyone.
It crashes like crazy anyway. I don’t think it’s worked well for me in over a year.
So what’s the alternative? Jellyfin?
Yup! You can do it and works perfectly
Have you heard of our lord and savior https://fmhy.pages.dev/ ?
Forgive my dumbness dumb but whats the difference between https://fmhy.net/ and https://fmhy.pages.dev/?
Probably the same content hosted on different domains?
That was my first thought, no idea
Heck yeah!
Heck yeah
Genuinely surprised how people still stick with Plex at this point.
It’s way easier to setup and way easier to get people who are not into tech to use it
Well… Was
Still is by a landslide. Especially when you want to share you stuff with other people
Stop using proprietary software. It will always betray you, sooner or later.
That goes double when a serviceable Free Software alternative exists and you lose little by switching.
That just sounds like use whatever works best at the time and switch as needed. Plex worked well for me for many years. But now it looks like the alternatives have caught up or beat it. That doesn’t mean the years I’ve enjoyed it are somehow erased.
People do tend to feel frustrated when announcements like this one come out, and I’m sure it was a hard decision for the dev team, but Plex really still just works so well for me. They do a great job.
I’m sure someday a better platform might come along, and when it does I will give it a try, but for me it just wasn’t jellyfin. Plex 4
lyfenow.Ah FFS, I use that all the time with my wife while we’re an ocean apart.
still works through the browser client
I use this all the time on my
Jellyfinserver.I just moved to jellyfin instead of using Plex on my NAS, and I’m so glad that I did.
Bluh. I installed both but went with plex because it was a super easy setup. I’ll take another look at jellyfin.
Also question: can I access stuff remotely via phone like with the plex app without any additional configuration?
Not without additional configuration. You’ll need to forward jellyfins port in your router and get a dynamic DNS address. That’s not hard to setup though and there are good free dyndns providers like duckdns.
Don’t expose Jellyfin to the internet
This should not be downvoted. You should not expose anything straight to the internet unless you know what you’re doing. Use a simple service like Tailscale to create a locally accessible VPN.
Why not? Have had it accessible via the Internet for 4+ years without incidents
What makes you so sure you haven’t been breached? There have been major security flaws over time.
Proper precautions and monitoring.
Why not? What precautions would you need to take before doing so?
The easiest and most secure solution is probably tailscale. Just VPN into your local network instead of exposing Jellyfin to the internet.
An alternative I am using is Caddy reverse proxy with Authelia for authentication. So I have to log in to Authelia before I can access Jellyfin. Beware though, it took me like 2 days to properly configure Authelia. It is rather complicated.
Also you could use SSH that’s been properly secured
Well, I do want to actually use it though and have my friends be able to use it just as well.
You really don’t. There are plenty of other solutions. If nothing else you could whitelist there ISP instead of allowing all traffic.
What solutions? Especially what solutions that don’t cost me money and are not overly difficult to implement?
What if I’m using my pi hole with a static DNS address?
That’s only local (unless you‘ve set up your pihole to be accessed from outside your home network already). Locally you can easily access jellyfin from any device
For remote access to Jellyfin you will need your public ipv4 address or a domain that points to it. Since in most cases your public ip isn’t static (unless you specifically pay for that), you’ll need a dynamic DNS address that regularly updates the ip address your domain points to. In case of duckdns you’d have a url like example.duckdns.org that always points to your ip.
If you are unlucky however and only have a public ipv6 address (Dual Stack Lite; highly depends on where you live and what provider you have). I haven’t found an easy free solution to still getting remote access. The easiest I’ve found is getting a domain from cloudflare and using their tunnel. Worked well and I happened to have a domain already. Streaming media via Cloudflare’s tunnel is technically against their tos though.
There are probably more elegant solutions but I have switched to a different provider since, which does offer an ipv4 address so I didn’t need to look into that any more.
there is a very easy to set up alternative using nordvpn (not free) + meshnet.
Tailscale is a great option for this if your user count is low (1-3).
I prefer ZeroTier but both work.
Never used them before. Looks like more business oriented. How do they work out?
Not built into jellyfin but you can use net bird or tail scale to access jellyfin from anywhere you have those apps without exposing jellyfin to the public
jellyfin has this :)
I’ve tried it a couple times and it’s never worked for me. It’s the only thing keeping me on Plex. I couldn’t find much about this online as apparently not many people watch stuff with other people online???
I have been using Jellyfin for over a year and have never seen this. I’ll have to look later! What client do you use?
SyncPlay.
It’s a people icon in the top right in most clients that support it.
Users can set up a group, and other users can then see and join that group. Any media played in the group is played on all clients in the group.
I tried getting this to work on my own server, but it apparently needs web sockets enabled to work, which I’m sadly too dumb to figure out. The button is there and I can see my friend in the group, but when I start something, nothing happens for them.
Why does sysadmin gotta be so haaaarrrrd???
It should just be a matter of forwarding the righ subpath in your reverse proxy.
There should be a page for most reverse proxy setups in the jellyfin docs.
I’m with you man :(
Oh wow, I thought I had to use syncplay once I build my server, but thats handy
To be fair, you will still be using Syncplay, cause thats how Jellyfin do. Just wish it would work with regular Syncplay clients. or if it does I havent figured out how.
Oh I see, hm oke. Might I’ll find out myself in ~1-2months
Lol, that’s what I always say… a year before I pick up a side project 😅
Lol, I get it😆
What is the „new experience“? Usually that means enshittification.
It usually comes with a price “update”
There is a beta, you can try it, it looks nice
if you aren’t trying to justify your lifetime subscription what are you even doing with Plex?
Lifetime plex sub here: Downloads for Offline viewing.
Please Jellyfin, that feature will allow me to transition the whole family away from Plex.
Don’t care that plex is paid for, I’d rather exclusively run Jellyfin instead of both just so others in the household can get their offline video fix while traveling.
it let’s you download. you’re talking about playback in app, right?
Both Android and iOS allow this. It depends on the user account settings in Jellyfin and a client that supports it.
But it just downloads to disk, you cannot click “play” in the app, finishing an episode doesn’t make it as watched, you do not retain the ability to “continue” playing,…
I guess that depends on the app. I know what you mean by it doesn’t mark the played episode as played, it’s like there’s no offline sync so it’s kind of half baked. I think that’s still wholly on the app side of things (aka the client), as I believe the server side functionality exists.
I mean it all cones down to what features you use. For example, my kids live off smart collections, and in Plex you can pin them right to the home screen, and that experience is unified across TVs and tablets. You can’t do that yet in Jellyfin yet.
I would absolutely switch if I didn’t have kids though. I already tried. So many complaints and we went back to Plex. One day I will switch though when Plex goes belly up or gets bought its an inevitability.
You can run both simultaneously. I have Plex, Jellyfin and an OSMC client (via NFS) running out of the same library.
I use Plex because it’s easier for my various family members to use on their strange devices and TVs. They can’t remember an e-mail and password but a jellyfin URL may as well be eldritch incantations to hear them talk about it.
I got my lifetime subscription so long ago there weren’t any viable options at the time.
And now I just use jellyfin (and occasionally toss them some dollars for dev because its awesome).
toss them some dollars for dev because its awesome
Thanks for reminding me. I should really donate to OSS tools I use more often.
I host a Plex server and only use it to stream video. I don’t use any other features built into Plex. I’ve never had a an issue that I haven’t caused myself, and have a dozen people that share my library remotely.
I haven’t read about specifics in a long time, but I thought at one point jellyfin didn’t support remote streaming, which immediately makes in not an option. At this point it will take something more significant to get me to take the hours required to migrate everything out of Plex to a different solution, but are there any drop dead reasons why I should move now other than not being able to use the watch together feature that I’ve never used, although I disappointed they removed it, because it’s a nice feature?
I spun up Jellyfin recently just out of curiosity and setup wasn’t difficult at all. You can point it at the exact same library folders that Plex uses, so there’s not really much to migrate. Jellyfin will take time to do its media processing on the first library import, but that doesn’t require anything but patience while it does its thing.
It definitely supports remote streaming - one of my friends in another state was able to successfully sign in and watch something.
Jellyfin’s support for plugins is nice as well - paired with JFA-GO, user account management is a breeze.
The main drawback it still seems to need work on is streaming support on a larger variety of devices, which is where you’d be likely to still run into issues since you share your library with others. A few of my friends have devices that don’t have Jellyfin apps, and it’s the only reason I haven’t transitioned everything off of Plex. I don’t recall exactly what devices they were using that didn’t work, but I’m pretty sure at least one or two were game consoles.
Jellyfin just does everything I need, and has done for a long time, so I find it funny when all I ever hear about Plex is how it’s constantly getting worse like that wasn’t always going to happen with a closed source platform.
if it still works for you I wouldn’t drop everything and migrate; but the day is coming.
Well, luckily I don’t have a lifetime subscription with em…
it’s the only reason I can see that anyone still uses it.
PlexAmp is bar none the best app for selfhosting music. The movie and TV stuff is nice too
Prologue is also pretty fucking fantastic for audiobooks. I initially tried Audiobookshelf, but Docker refused to play nice with my NAS libraries. And ABS refuses to ship an installable program outside of Docker, so I was just up shit creek until I found Prologue.
Plex doesn’t natively support metadata and chapters for m4b files. It just tries to fucking play them like a 4 hour long music track. Technically it works, but it’s not very helpful for audiobooks. But Prologue does support m4b files. Prologue just uses Plex to remotely access your audiobook library (set up as a music library in Plex) and then it does all of the actual metadata and bookmark stuff locally.
ABS is soooooo good, holy crap. I just loaded everything into it once it was live, which took a long while, but it works amazing. You could also sftp into the docker location I’d guess, but I’d have to look up the commands to get it right
Yeah, I think it was a permissions issue. ABS seemed to be working properly, but it couldn’t read or write anything on my NAS. It would appear to work when it was running, but nothing was permanently saved; Everything got wiped when the machine rebooted.
After some googling, I found some others having similar issues. And the only real answer I was able to find was basically “lol don’t use a NAS”. But that doesn’t work for my setup, because my server only has a small drive for the OS.
Watch together is… Was genuinely great, it work… ed so well but I guess we just can’t have nice things
Never used it
It sucks 😞 I use the feature a lot. Luckily you can still use it for the foreseeable future in the web app… But I don’t really use the watch together feature on the web app when I use it. They’ve sent an e-mail which is more confusing. They mentioned the watch together feature was quickly implemented on the current version. (Was it because of COVID? I don’t remember) So it means the feature should be relatively straightforward to implement in the new version? Right? Especially since they mention they spent two years rewriting their apps “from the ground up” to enable them " to bring new features to you more efficiently, across more platforms, with much higher quality than ever before"
Also if they developed it from the ground up they could have taken into account the watch together feature to rewrite as well. They either did not want to implement it from the start. Or noticed it wasn’t compatible with the new tech they wanted to use in the new versions.
The mail
It was the year 2020. Life had gotten very different, very fast. Then, at the request of a fan named Joe, Plex Labs quickly put in some long hours creating a way for the world to watch together when circumstances kept us apart. It wasn’t perfect, but this experimental feature created human connection in a time when we needed it most. Now, five years later, we are nearing the official release of our new Plex experience that will bring us closer together than ever before. We’ve spent two years rewriting our apps from the ground up to boost our development speed, which should enable us to bring new features to you more efficiently, across more platforms, with much higher quality than ever before. However, this release also means ending support for some features that we’ve grown to love, like Watch Together. Though support for Watch Together will not be available in the new Plex experience for most devices, you can still continue to use the feature in our web app for the foreseeable future. And because we’ve seen your love and tremendous response to this feature, we don’t preclude the possibility of offering similar functionality again in the future, using new tooling. We know that this decision will impact many of you, and we appreciate your support and understanding. Sincerely, Your Friends at Plex
Would be easier to give “support and understanding” if they actually explained why they didn’t reimplement it in the new “experience”.
They already took out the option to watch playlists together like six months ago.
Plex experience
Fuck you right in your marketer whore mouth.
Sorry. I kinda lost it for a sec. I’m absolutely done with this marketing speech where everything’s an experience or the spend on actioning the ask is the goal of our synergy win. I feel dirty using those whore words, and I feel people are cheap skanks when they use them as well.
I hate thinking people I don’t know yet are just filthy whores, even if the signs are there in full stereo sound. Like somewhere, I hear a shitty saxophone and a porn bass, the jungle drums of cheap sleazy late-stage porn star fucklumpdom.
And I should be better. The whores should be better, bimbos and jimbos, also. Maybe if they all died of syphilis right now I’d be happier.
Yes. Yes I would. I would be happier if everyone who said ‘experience’ like that, or ‘the ask’, or ‘the spend’, or ‘action this’ like they’re too fuckknuckled to choose a fitting verb, or a sales ‘win’, or synergy outside a bio lab; I would be happier if they all died of syphilis.
And then cluster migraines every time someone says ‘emails’. Wait. No, that’s mean. Just a game misconduct penalty of some kind.
-fweet- illegal construction. Penalty! 10 yards. Repeat first grade. (‘yard’ here is a junk punch)
Yeah. Now I’m smiling.
