Fuck me for wanting to watch movies with my friends I guess.
Ah FFS, I use that all the time with my wife while we’re an ocean apart.
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.
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?
Tailscale is a great option for this if your user count is low (1-3).
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
Why not? What precautions would you need to take before doing so?
What if I’m using my pi hole with a static DNS address?
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 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 an join that grouo. 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???
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
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
Never used it
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.
Both Android and iOS allow this. It depends on the user account settings in Jellyfin and a client that supports it.
it let’s you download. you’re talking about playback in app, right?
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 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.
Watch together is… Was genuinely great, it work… ed so well but I guess we just can’t have nice things
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
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.
