A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
Any recommendations about how to install all this jazz?
I'd like to build a music box controllable by the family, eventually centralising videos so anyone (or at least me) can just pick up their phone and watch an episode of star trek without the hassle of copying. Automatic subtitles would be magic.
Cheers!
If all you want is a local media server. It's very easy.
You pretty much just have to install Plex or Jellyfin, setup a "library" in the software.
You usually set up one library for movies and one for TV shows. You then point these libraries to their respective folders on your hard drive and assuming you have some half decent organized media with proper naming it usually just works.
Plex doesn't have automatic subtitles per say but mostly Plex players allow you to download new subtitles from the player. I don't know about Jellyfin.
If you want to have external access it's a bit harder if you use jellyfin as you will have to setup a reverse proxy but I'm guessing that there are a lot of guides for that online. Plex should work for external access out of the box assuming you have a public IP, and even if you don't you can use their automatic relay services to get it to work anyway although in very low quality.
Proper naming is honestly the hardest part but that's very dependent on how much existing media you have and how the naming is today. Luckily Plex and Jellyfin are fairly good at recognizing and finding media with subpar namin (you should still fix the naming to comply with the documentation)
If you want to have automatic torrent downloads, fully automatic subtitles and all that it's quite some work to set it up properly and have it working without any input from you. If you want to tackle it (or are just curious), I recommend checking out https://trash-guides.info/
I could never get Plex to work the way I wanted it to, so I'm actually someone who moved to Kodi and then to Emby. Once I got into Emby, I've yet to leave it. My biggest problem now is that I want to leave it for Jellyfin, but the lack of many things I love about Emby have never been moved to Jellyfin.
For example, I have a very specific organization of my music libraries I use to navigate what I want to listen to much quicker, since I'm into all kinds of genres of music. Emby allows me to navigate by folder structure, so if I'm in the mood for heavy metal one day, go to that folder. If classical another day, go there. Jellyfin on the other hand didn't have folder structure view and even though it's one of the top requested features for the past few years when I last checked, it's never been added...
I think the day Jellyfin does fill in these gaps, assuming new ones aren't introduced due to Emby also improving, I'll finally jump over.
I guess to the original topic, I do think Jellyfin exceeds Plex though lol.
I'm also on emby and it works well for me. My main grievance is setting up a new device is a chore, "emby connect" is far too clunky to use so I end up configuring via URL every time - and on some devices that's a real chore.
Does jellyfin do any kind of library sharing? Because that's the killer feature that Plex has for me.
I have three friends who have Plex servers and between the four of us, I think we have all the content anyone could want.
Yeah, it does
I’ve been running plex for a few years no. No real issues to complain of.
Until today. I just upgraded my server with an Intel ARC. Was looking forward to enabling qsv for streaming. Turns out you need plex pass to do that.
Can jellyfin do it?
Yeah, I'm really glad I found out about Jellyfin. I switched to Jellyfin because Plex doesn't let you disable Passout Protection (automatically stopping playback after something like 3hrs) without Plex Pass. I was just about to fork over $95 for a lifetime license when I looked into Jellyfin and discovered continuous playback was the default. I switched that very day and never looked back.
That's so weird. I've been using Plex for years and had never heard of "Passout Protection" until looking it up just now, nor does it ever stop playback on its own for me unless it reaches the end of the queue. I'm using the free version via web browser on my computer. Maybe it's a setting that only affects apps? Continuous playback on Plex is one of the reasons why I've always preferred it over Netflix, etc.
Yeah, I don't think it effects browsers.
I knew basically nothing bout jellyfin except it existed and this thread inspired me to finally set up my own server and client on the tv cause the chromecast has just become so unbearably bad.
I had it up and running in 5 minutes. Hardest part was remembering the auth key while running between rooms. I don't buy into the atmos meme, for music I have bt amplifier or vinyl and it has everything I need: Watch content from my tv.
I feel like 20 years ago someone made a similar realization with Linux vs windows
Edit: i remember people telling me how good Linux was in 2010ish (so maybe 20 years was wrong), so idk…
Yeah! It's been great for me. No detection issues or weird bugs. The mobile and TV apps are also great!
Has been for a long while. Also there are tons of unofficial apps as well.
Plex has been terrible for a long time if it weren't for Jellyfin I would've just not bothered with a media server for a few years until they got their shit together. That reminds I should throw some money at the Jellyfin team.
It's still terrible for music. There's not even user-based star rating...
Wrong tool for the job ! Use Navidrome with your music library. There's even a new scanner rewrite in the working which will even further improve how good it is !
I used to use it. But I had so many services running it was a pain to maintain. It didn't have a TV app aswell. And Navidrome looked kind of abandoned at the time. Maybe I should go back though. Is there a way to migrate my playlists? I think that's the one thing holding me back.
Plexamp being behind a paywall stopped me from using Plex for music. Went with Navidrome and it works great.
I've had both for a while now, but I find that subtitle playback is a bit spotty in Jellyfin. Is that fixed, or have I missed a setting somewhere? The other thing is that my libraries are alphabetical in Jellyfin, so "Anime" comes before "Kaiju", and I truly can't stand the idea that Godzilla gets sent to the back of the bus. Is there a way to customize the order of libraries?
I actually had the opposite experience, better subtitle support without transcoding the video track with Jellyfin
The other thing is that my libraries are alphabetical in Jellyfin, so “Anime” comes before “Kaiju”, and I truly can’t stand the idea that Godzilla gets sent to the back of the bus.
If you mean the order the libraries are listed in the web interface, you change that from "User settings" -> "Home".
Anime and .ass subtitles are a bit funky but that's not due to jellyfin but the player used while streaming in direct play. (In my case)
I had the issue where on my mobile/laptop some subtitles just disappeared or where strangely formated. After some digging arround I found out that VLC was the culprit and changing the default player to MPV or alternatives like Findroid (which uses MPV as default player) everything went butter smooth in direct play !
No idea about transcoding though :/
Can Jellyfin handle symlinks? That's all it would take to sell me at this point.
Yup.
My media folder is a symlink to my NAS mount if that's what you're asking.