Do you use paid features of Plex and if yes, which ones? Im using Plex daily to stream shows stored on a SSD connected to Windows laptop. I think I would not miss on any paid features they provide. Initially when I decided to try to watch less mindless tv stuff, I thought there will be a plethora of solutions for home streaming but it turned out that the only one that actually works is Plex

emby and jellyfin work just great

and jellyfin is free & OSS

Jellyfin is nice. It doesn't work great though. I've had and have way too many issues with it.

I run it next to Plex to keep an eye on how it develops. I still have issues with pretty much all clients, from losing server connection information, to jankiness on changing users, or subtitles just not rendering properly, crazy high CPU usage for certain transcodes, etc.

Plex just works most of the time. Clients are better (even though the thing about them pushing crappy streaming and live tv stuff bothers me a little), subtitles mostly just work, rendering is ok and most video formats work well on most clients, and so on.

I want to like Jellyfin. I have high hopes that one day it will be great and I won't want Plex anymore. That day is not here yet.

> crazy high CPU usage for certain transcodes

The reason I stopped using it for hosting my collection on a PI.

Overall decided its just easier to have a public NAS accessible from anywhere.

No point to open stuff in a browser when you can simply open a video from another side of the world like a regular local video on my laptop.

So much better an easier.

I do both - have it on my NAS exposed as SMB shares but also Jellyfin both on the internet without vpn/tailscale and of course with.

Sometimes I want to use a local media player, sometimes, when I am unsure what to watch I browse the media gallery and just watch from the browser.

I don't trust Plex. I don't like its media server, all of the dark patterns, the subscription, unknown telemetry (although firewalled.) I liked that it was available as an app on my TV but I solved that a different way.

The only premium feature I'm using is hardware encoding personally.

hardware en/decoding for sure. im not sure if it is still the case, but prior to pruchasing the liftime account playing back media remotely from a phone/tablet was limited to 10 minutes. i have 3 kids, and we regularly take long drives. 10 mins would not cut it. i also share my content with family, which again i think is harder without a subscription.

Plexamp and Wireguard have revolutionized music in my car.

Downloading onto devices is my only real feature

Sure there are other ways to do it, but Plex just makes it easy, so I paid

Skip intro feature is only available on paid version and works really well.

Jellyfin is a good alternative

Does it perchance have a plugin for replacing Plex's "search various streaming services at once" feature?

Not sure, I don't have this use case.

I haven’t seen a plugin with that functionality so I doubt it exists.

Does Jellyfin have user friendly clients for iOS, Android, Roku, AppleTV and various SmartTVs?

Every time I've asked them about an app for Samsung or LG tvs - the two most popular brands they've pushed back "we're volunteers, we don't use those TVs, it's not on our to-do list but feel free to code it yourself". They aren't open to being paid to develop it either.

Interesting, I have a Samsung TV but I'v never even considered running Jellyfin as a native app. I keep the TV off the internet so it can't be a spy box. The Chromecast with Google TV is so affordable and so great, I just use that everywhere. To be clear I'm not telling you you're wrong for wanting to do it on the TV, that's a personal preference, I'm just sharing how I do it in case it helps.

Are you not concerned about the Chromecast being a spybox?

But you’re not concerned about ChromeCast - sold by an adTech company - being spyware?

I ultimately ended up getting an nvidia shield, but at that point it solved my biggest gripe with plex so I just switched back to plex and have been happy with it.

A Roku is what? $50? Cheaper than a new tv and probably a better experience than lgos or tizen…

iOS

Yes: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jellyfin-mobile/id1480192618

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swiftfin/id1604098728

Android

Yes: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.jellyfin.m...

Roku

Yes: https://channelstore.roku.com/en-gb/details/cc5e559d08d9ec87...

AppleTV

Yes: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/swiftfin/id1604098728

various SmartTVs

Depends. The Android ones, yes. There's one for Samsung but it isn't officially packaged yet - works quite well from what I've seen tho.

LG has a good one

yea - I have a fair number of friends and family who have access to my server. they're gonna be super bummed if it turns off

Plex has a touch business model. It’s hard to make money from the pirates.

I don't know the percentage, but an enormous number of Plex users aren't pirates.

What else do people even use Plex for?

Maybe Linux ISOs encoded as lossy video.

I heard there's a hidden message from Linus if you play Jaunty Jackalope backwards.

My Plex server hosts rips of my (quite large) DVD/Blu-ray/UHD Blu-ray movie and digital/CD music collections.

Buying DVDs/Blu-Rays, ripping them, and then getting a personal Netflix-like experience instead of the horrible DVD/Blu-Ray player experience.

Isn't that just expensive piracy?

How is it piracy if you bought the movie?

Because you're not allowed to break the encryption to copy it to hdd.

I am in my jurisdiction. [0]

You might not be in yours, but that doesn't make me a pirate.

[0] https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...

That looks similar to how it is in the US. But here it's not the copying that's disallowed, it's the breaking of the encryption to enable you to get a useful copy. So unencrypted but copyrighted material can be copied, but encrypted copyrighted material cannot. And blu-rays are all encrypted.

Illegally breaking the encryption in order to do legal things with the video does not make you a pirate.

I had it running as a DIY TiVo. But since I canceled cable it's mostly an unused interface for a copy of infocon.org on my NAS and rips of a few dozen DVDs I own.

I probably gave them more money with the lifetime deal than if I paid monthly for the period I used it heavily.

I connect Plex to my TV tuner so I can watch local NFL games from anywhere.

It’s easy if you’re selling them hardware. Even pirates are fine with paying for something you can actually touch.

Pirates spend tons of money on legit content. Movies https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/06/piracy-fi... music https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-spend-much-more-money-on-mu... and books https://bookriot.com/book-pirates/

A lot of "pirates" don't pirate movies and music because they don't want to pay for them, they do it because they want to own them and want an actually good and respectful user experience.

The biggest Plex users I know don't really pirate anyway. They mainly buy DVDs/Blu-Rays and rip them for use on Plex.

I pirate because a lot of content is not available in my country. I pay for all the services that are available to me. Plex serves me well for the ones I can't buy and I bought a lifetime subscription last year. If they asked for money for future updates I'd probably pay if the amount was reasonable.

emby is a great alternative that allows more control with easy local accounts and no ad supported content

jellyfin is also great but lacks apps on some devices and is a 100% free OSS alternative

I have been a paying supporter of Emby for a while now, and I feel like I bet on the wrong horse. Development is quite slow. It feels like only a skeleton crew is working on it compared to Jellyfin.

Neither Emby or Plex are perfect, but Plex seems to handle transcoding better. Emby still has the advantage over Jellyfin of a native Samsung Tizen app, even though Samsung TVs are slow as shit and it's a horrible experience.

well jellyfin is OSS so if the community is large its going to be hard to match that internally.

i went with emby because it has better app support and i know eventually jellyfin will catch up and surpass it at which point it'll be real easy to just switch over. plex was a non starter because they make local accounts hard to use to better push their ad supported crap on users.

ie your parents create a plex account to use your server the defaults will mean they see all that ad supported plex content until you walk them through removing it

I pretty much have to be on-site for any family member to get them on Emby/Plex anyway.

I just renewed my year.