Selfhosted

A gentle reminder that Jellyfin exists to those thinking of alternatives.

I've gotten my money's worth out of the $74.99 I paid for Plex Pass Lifetime several years ago. If they ever get rid of my Plex Pass and try to say "Lifetime didn't actually mean Lifetime", I'll be gone.

I know that whales exist, but seriously... Who is into self hosting but also into dropping $750 on a service that can end on a whim?

Jellyfin has lots and lots of tutorials, fyi. it’s not as intimidating as it seems once you get going with it.

Never used Plex. Jellyfin has always met my needs, so I never bothered to try it.

The company's blog post also described a number of improvements they plan to make

After you pay: "oops, we won't"

So basically, they just want to phase our the lifetime plan, but they know removing it outright would cause outrage so they "just" increase the price to massively lower interest and then say: "Well nobody wanted it so we removed the product".

I swear to god plex and the profiteering sons of bitches behind it can go fuck themselves.

I wish jellyfin and the apps could ship with something like wireguard setup by default so people that use the jellyfin apps could instantly watch media outside their house without learning what wireguard/tailscale is

The Jellyfin vs Plex thing always struck me as odd. As in - why are we holding JF to a different standard to (say) Immich, Syncthing, Pi-hole or any one of a thousand different programs people self host?

Yes, JF ships multi-user accounts and client apps etc. I get it, "multi-use" is implied, so the comparison isn't totally unfair. But there's a difference between 'this feature exists' and 'this is the primary purpose of the tool'.

The fact that you CAN share it externally doesn't mean everyone running JF is doing that, or that it should be the benchmark the whole project is judged by.

To me, self host means "I host it, myself" not "I host it and then pretend to be Netflix for family and friends". If that's the use case, then of course, Plex away.

It's cool that you CAN share JF externally, and it's cool that Plex does that differently / better. We shouldn't hold one to the standards of the other.

there are a lot of us still on Plex that hadn't reached the threshold of issues vs effort that would motivate us to migrate to something like jellyfin.

looks like we've arrived.

I never thought those leopards would eat MY face.

are they insane?

Just out of interest as someone who has recently set up a Jellyfin server - what's the main "value add" of using Plex compared to Jellyfin?

It seems to do everything I want, so I'm not sure why people would pay for Plex over the FOSS version.

I got this on Black Friday many years ago for ~70 and despite the pass I am slowly moving over to Jellyfin. I really don't see how they came up with this valuation, seems like a last money squeeze before abandoning ship.

I “defend” plex against silly complaints, but jesus christ that is one giant leap for no gain. That’s stupid, no one will pay that - though I tend to think that’s the whole point.

they must be tired of running that company.

Is the whole world right now like me at the very end of a SimCity 3000 game, when it's time to just turn on all the catastrophies?

Seems funny that they continue to increase the price as that value sharply declines with the limited life left in it.

Jellyfin isn't great, but it sure doesn't have this problem.