This article doesn't mention the limitations of remote access for Jellyfin, which requires some tricks like reverse proxy or Tailscale. I think Jellyfin is a great option if you only watch/listen on your home network, but if anyone wants to replicate the remote access capabilities of Plex, I typically warn them they are going to have to roll their sleeves up.
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You're right, I missed that.
I personally use a reverse proxy and Wireguard setup to access remotely.
Not something that unfortunately works as easily for me to connect my ailing mom's TV to, and do NOT want to manage the reverse proxy + cert + etc setup for a number of reasons
There are a ton of reverse proxy options that manage the cert for you
Tailscale truly could not be easier/simpler.
Not for all clients, like Roku for example.
Yes the solution is different hardware, like a Google TV, older firestick, raspAP, or flash openwrt on a router. But that's no longer plug and play and may have other caveats. Besides costing money.
No shade, it's just not QUITE that simple every time.
There are literaly zero limitations by Jellyfin to remotely access your media. You are free to access your instance in any way you want. Fuck plex
Agree. I went directly with Jellyfin because I joined late the party, but never regret it.
So can't comment on Plex, because I never used it. But I see the news and see the enshittified path it's going on with Plex
I understand that they need revenue, specially if they actually provide the bandwidth to let you access your media from outside home. I also understand why people is mad, but I guess convenience come with a price, of you don't want to pay for it, there are alternatives I don't see anything bad in switching to jellyfin.
They don't provide much in terms of bandwidth for you to access your own media. Just a few bytes through their web services. Their bandwidth usage comes from their desire to be their own streaming service. They provide access to a whole bunch of other media you may have no interest in.
specially if they actually provide the bandwidth to let you access your media from outside home.
Why would Plex need to do that? I can access my Jellyfin and outside of my home just fine without someone else acting as a middle man.
I don't know much about Plex but I guess because it is not easy for the average guy. Setting up a remote connection without a VPN is definitely not something I would recommend to someone who is just a media enthusiast.
I got the Plex lifetime pass like 10 years ago, but just switched to Jellyfin over the weekend. It felt like every week Plex was asking me to re-pick my home page list and just insisted on re-adding their live streaming junk. Got tired of it. Reverse proxy is not hard to set up, and while there’s some encoding kinks to work out, it’s not like Plex was immune to those problems either.
The best part is that, if you're on the fence, you can just run both. That's what I did at first, but I've since let plex die.
I agree that the rest of plex is undergoing enshittification. But the core features are kinda the same? I use it outside my home a LOT, so I don’t know how jellyfin would work for that. I know Cloudflare tunnel has a bad relationship with streaming video. Does Tailscale too? How do you access jelly outside your home?
I use Tailscale and it is absolutely fine. The problem is with other non tech savy people - the setup process is not straightforward so you need to help them a bit. They can't just "connect". But after that, Tailscale is great.
Controversial opinion and I say that as someone who started with Jellyfin and keeps that local Wifi only, so I admit a certain bias: going with Tailscale and Jellyfin over using Plex isn't much better. Instead of enabling remote access via one company that wants to make money, you go via another company that wants to make money. How long is the free tier of Tailscale going to work out? How much do you trust them with your traffic? But I know it is a popular setup, so I am aware saying that here will not earn me any points.
Why let perfect be the enemy of good?
"tailscale might enshittify in the future" is honestly a poor argument against "plex is enshittified right now"
Why let perfect be the enemy of good?
You must be new here (Lemmy).
Nah man, this is self hosted, your points are valid and should be discussed. It is true that tailscale may enshittify, however it is only one out of many solutions. Like the other comment said there is head scale, and in the end you still have the possibility to go the way of a reverse proxy server and pipe Jellyfin through the open internet, which will be hard for many in the sense of configuration and hardening. But the underlying software which is Jellyfin is FOSS, that is the most important aspect.
I have a dedicated VPS with reverse proxy connected to my network via Wireguard. It acts as the front door to my network so I don't have to port forward or rely on Cloudflare etc. I used to use Tailscale as the go between but switched to WG recently. Both work fine for streaming content whilst self-hosting all other services including my website.
Side question here: how big is your storage pool for those of you that runs a jellyfin server?
I just started a Jellyfin server, but with the current hdd prices, it fills up fast and I need to manage my library a lot more than I'd like
80TB array here. I've recently started using Maintainerr to delete things my friends and family request via seerr if it goes unwatched. I deleted over 15TB of things that was requested but never watched, a lot of entire shows of multiple seasons where someone only watched 2 episodes. (this was years of request history it ran over)
It was that or spending money on more 20TB drives and I just don't have it in me to spend that money with current prices.
10TB. 80% full. I have 2TB that I can add if I need. At this point I've maintained 80% for about 1 year.
10TB was pocket change not too long ago, now it's so expensive. Unreal.
I'm lucky because my TV is 1080p so i can download lower resolution movies and series.
40TB, but that’s way more than I would realistically need if I was better about deleting old content. I have shows saved that I haven’t watched in years. With the *arr stack, there is very little reason to keep a lot of media saved, because reacquiring it again in the future is dead simple.
I am hoping that jellyfin gets better over the next few years. I keep trying it and it keeps feeling broken to me. Lots of people have the same experience it seems but then there's also always a few people that act like I'm crazy. Nah, it's still not there, unless things have changed a lot in the past year.
If you mean limitations in the client, I discovered that there's a Jellyfin for Kodi plugin.
Kodi has had decades of development. It's super customizable, has every feature you can think of, direct plays every video format, and is fast.
Having it act as a Jellyfin client has been amazing and given me the best of both worlds.
I had Kodi installed for a few weeks as my television media front-end, but it has:
- the worst UX that you could possibly imagine, with menu after menu arranged seemingly at random, and buttons doing different things at every level
- functionality delivered via plugins, at least half of which do not work
- directory scans failing seemingly at random, with the errors hidden away in log files that you have to shell in to retrieve
- terrible documentation, inevitably consisting of forum pages about how it used to work a decade ago
It may well have a huge amount of functionality, but configuring and using it is the exact opposite of slick. Have uninstalled in favour of KDE with VLC installed, and manipulated via the KDE Connect mobile app, which is somehow a much better big-screen experience.
What about it feels broken? I've been running Plex and Jellyfin together for a long time and always find myself using Jellyfin. I'm curious what problems people run into to see if I have the same problem or maybe I'm just overlooking something.
Despite all of this, I haven’t completely abandoned Plex.
Plexamp remains one of the best self-hosted music applications I’ve ever used.
Lyrion, Music Assistant, and Navidrome are all solid options. And Jellyfin also supports music hosting, along with FinAmp, which has similar functionality to PlexAmp (maybe not as good, but download functionality works).
Personally, I abandoned PlexAmp. Wasn't worth keeping with the rest and it has been downhill since the loss of Tidal integration. Navidrome clients work great, have solid radio and discovery features for large collections, and support local downloading for on the go.
And for local listening, I'd argue that Lyrion with Blissmix or LastFM "Don't Stop the Music" plugins are as good and sometimes better than PlexAmp. And Navidrome and/or Music Assistant with AudioMuse-AI plugin utterly destroys PlexAmp's radio/DJ functionality. Install AudioMuse, scan your library and go, it just works. Especially with recent builds having native Linux, Mac, and Windows now (I deployed with Docker compose before these options were available).
Lol 'i didnt rage quit and post about it'
'I rage quit amd wrote a blog about it'
I understand the authors reasons, but for me personally, having paid for the app, I’ll use it until it no longer suits my needs. Right now it does early what I need and does not cause me any issues. As soon as the enshittification hits me though, I’ll abandon it for something else. I also would not recommend someone purchase it, given the new pricing, and the availability of free alternatives. Had they been there when I paid for Plex, I’d be using them instead.
To think that right about a year ago I was jumping into the deep hole of selfhosting and was thinking to get Plex perpetual license. Happy I didn't.
I’ve already had a Plex pass for ages, so I’ve just been running both concurrently.
Plex is a lot more accessible for my friends and family that are less tech inclined.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NVMe | Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
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I started with jellyfin a month ago and I miss nothing. Total newbie, used free chatgpt to set everything up. I can access from anywhere.
The only thing I haven't done is to get the app to the Hisense tv so I use through a browser. Just didn't have time yet, not sure how that works.