This is the year of the Jellyfin desktop
Year of the enshitification, more like.
It feels like every company just decided 2023 was the year they finally pulled the trigger and tried to cash-out and bail.
With Plex adding “Live TV” and all the other shit for the past 6 years, their enshittification isn’t new. Most people I know still on Plex are only doing so because they paid for a lifetime pass. They’re full on sunk-cost-fallacy.
I’m still on Plex because the app experience just isn’t there on Jellyfin yet. It’s close, but switching audio/subtitle tracks is not as intuitive or straightforward as I want yet. I’m thinking it will probably be ready for my server in a year or two.
Tech has always been geared towards losing money to provide a valuable service but the understanding from investors who don’t loan for free is that at some point you turn on the profit engine. Some tech companies are able to generate revenue without necessarily making their product awful for users, but the more pull and pressure investors have, and the more driven by impatience, the enshittifier things become.
The Fed turning off the free money tap last year by starting to raise interest rates was an inevitable wake up call for investors that they needed to change their model to start profiting or at least lose less. Many, many companies, users and products are experiencing US’s investors-first-and-only capitalism’s inevitable end; it destroys the good it created. Companies without long-term investors or leverage to hold off investors willing to kill the golden goose either enshittify, or if they don’t have a way to enshittify, go under.
There seems to be a pattern in services like this where they launch as a good idea that’s under priced and take off like a rocket, then growth levels off as everyone is either already using the service or never will regardless of what they do. Once you reach that point, however, you still need to show revenue growth because capitalism, so if you can’t get more users you either have to make the service more expensive for the users you have, or cheaper to run. The former we see happening all over the place, and the latter is actually a good thing in limited amounts as unnecessary parts are trimmed off, but will almost always also result in useful features being axed. Hence why everything seems to be getting more expensive and worse.
It’s great. Clean, minimal. Love it. Plex is like a titanic. Way too much heft for me. It’s also corporate, so hard pass
I’ve got gigs of music and rip all my Blu-rays. Jellyfin was a shock! Runs so much smoother, streaming faster. I had no idea streaming over my network can be effectively lag free. It’s also nice having a choice of players, some work better for Android Auto, some better on my Windows desktop etc.
The scrubbing in Jelly is insanely snappy to me. My existing player hooks right into and even has a sync extension that makes it all even snappier.
I was running a samba share before but moving to a proper media server opened up another world. Also love how easy it is to edit metadata and even add to it (I’ve opened a moviedb account adding missing covers and other art).
Lack of an official tvOS app and Plex being easy to set up for my family keeps me from switching.
I made the switch this week. Jellyfin took about 10 minutes to set up and left it overnight to scan my files. I only had to make a few corrections.
You can always try it out in a VM or container or even run both at once.
You can cast it onto a chrome cast though I haven’t tried this yet.
I would love to switch but there’s two things stopping me: Less support (if any?) for multi-users and remote access, and less app support especially when transcoding is needed. Also would be nice to not lose Overseerr when switching, I’m sure there’s a fork of that though.
Putting Jellyfin behind a reverse proxy and making multiple users are both well supported features.
And wait until you hear about Jellyseer!
I suppose it might be time to try! Last I tried Jellyfin, multiuser wasn’t really a thing.
Can I make an account for someone without knowing their password?
Last I tried, literally the only way to create a user was to enter a password. Without something like an email or link to create an account remotely, it’s a non-starter for me.
This is virtually akin to banning AWS or DO. Hetzner are a legitimate and widely used cloud platform.
This is akin to Google blocking Verizon because of some spam calls. A ridiculous premise that shows huge immaturity on Plex’s part.
Nah, actually we as the plex community need to pull our heads out of our asses and remember that the internet was doing just fine before cloud service providers came along.
If you’re not self-hosting, it’s not your server.
Pirates will move to self hosted if they can still turn a profit, which they can.
Self hosting is easy and convenient and doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge. Plex are literally harming their own business model by driving away non-technical users with a sledgehammer solution that no one likes.
Feels like plex are heading towards removing sharing media altogether. I wouldn’t use it if they removed that functionality.
Jellyfin is Emby minus the cost. Literally a fork of Emby that has far surpassed it at this point. Emby did that thing where they took an open source project and locked it behind a paywall for access, and I won’t support the Rent-your-software model.
Does Jellyfin allow you to bring in your music libraries?
Also, does Jellyfin have Samsung TV clients, or do you need to cast from your phone? I’ve been trying to de-Google myself and I don’t want to have to keep investing in Chromecasts, and part of the reason why I’ve stuck with Plex is because their app is everywhere.
I’m legitimately curious as to what has changed with Jellyfin, with comparing to Emby, that would make this statement true: “that has far surpassed it at this point”
Are there any current major limitations compared to plex? Remote access ok?
Okay so serious question here.
Why does Plex get to make this decision?
I don’t use Plex. But if they CAN do this, it seems to me there must be some unnecessary cloud dependence in Plex.
A good media server IMHO does not need a cloud connection, it should just work on your local network.
yes, they have a centralized login system. It’s my biggest issue with plex and why i am experimenting with switching to jellyfin.
I’ve been running Jellyfin since around it’s inception - highly recommend! Not quite as feature heavy as Plex yet, but an excellent community.
Do you also have experience with Emby? Not sure yet on what to choose. Guess I’m going to try them both.
And that really bugs.
I keep all my media sorted in folders (old school I know). I went to try Plex once a few years back. It launched right into making an account and setting up remote access. Never was clear what if any access Plex mothership has to my media library- does that include filenames, file contents, everything? Sorry but do not want. I VPN back home, don’t need the cloud BS.
While I can totally sympathize with a company needing to take measures to curtail piracy and appease property owners, this is like burning down a house to put our a candle.
I personally self host so this won’t be a problem for me, but they’re gonna hit a lot of people who hosted at this domain, that weren’t participating in illegal activities.
I guess Plex must have saw it as prevalent enough to warrant a total ban, it was either really bad, or they’re being overzealous.
To be frank, how do you even use Plex without pirating? Ripping your own DVDs and Blurays? And if so, isn’t that sort of considered piracy by the powers that be?
Yes, and no. In theory, you could absolutely “back up” any physical media you have to prevent wear and tear to the disc, which is a completely legitimate use case. And it’s not considered piracy because by buying that media, you purchased the legal rights to use it for personal viewing. However, if you ever gave a copy of that rip to another person (or gave that disc away to someone else without deleting your rips), you would be commiting piracy.
In fact, I believe that even viewing the media alongside another person is technically not allowed, although clearly that’s not enforced unless you’re doing some sort of public showing.
In the USA at least, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act made circumventing copy protection mechanisms illegal. Basically every DVD and Blu-ray disc implements those, so every backup copy we make is illegal even though it should be covered by fair use.
They stripped us of our rights and made protecting our purchases illegal through the back door, so we have the moral obligation to ignore that law.
I use it for my own dvds/blu-rays, yeah. This is technically still considered piracy, but my personal view is that I’m fine paying for something once because the people who made it deserve to get paid, but I’m not fine paying for the same thing multiple times when the effort on their end to make the new version was basically zero. It would be one thing if there were physical costs like going from vhs to dvd, but that’s not the case here.
There is free content on Plex now. You could never pirate a single movie and still have content.
