Feels like only a matter of time with Plex doesn't it!

I've got the lifetime pass, but it really does feel like a Sword of Damocles situation...

Yes it really does, and I intend to switch eventually but from what I heard the last time I looked into it, the end user clients are a big area where plex still beats Jellyfin. Since that’s where my non technical friends and family mostly interact with the system, it’s the area I need to be the most polished and hands off.

Performance was also a big issue for me the last time I tried running Jellyfin on the same hardware as my Plex server. I’m happy to see that has been their focus.

Yes, this is the big one for me. Seemingly unlike a lot of folks, Plex is my main music server. Years ago I ripped all my CDs (1800+, IIRC) and Plex + Plexamp is really, really, really good for listening. I haven't yet found anything else that works as well.

I use Plexamp on desktop/laptop computers and then the Android and iOS apps for on-the-go music. I tried Symfonium [1] because it seemed promising and would give me a Jellyfin path, but it was weird and kinda buggy and ate my phone's battery.

I'm hopeful there'll be a good replacement available eventually, but for now, I just have to stick with Plex.

[1] https://www.symfonium.app/

Yeah PlexAmp is amazing. Feels like it's the only music client around these days that has a functional "shuffle by album" option, instead of treating my library as only a collection of individual songs.

woahhh this exists? I have an Apple Music playlist called Sunday Albums and have always wanted exactly this.

Lyrion (fka Logitech Media Server ) does album shuffle

Another up-vote from me for Plexamp.

I find the mainstream subscription players to be excruciating to use to play what I want at the time.

Yeah me to... Also I love plexamp for the android auto support.

> Feels like it's the only music client around these days that has a functional "shuffle by album" option

foobar2000 has this!

After trying dozens of music clients (including PlexAmp) I eventually settled on simply using foobar2000 pointed to an smb share - nothing else seems capable of properly handling playback by folder structure. (e.g. I've got all my Led Zeppelin albums in the "Led Zeppelin" folder, and I want to just select it and play their discography in album release order.)

yeah I'm in a boat of similar shape. plex and plexamp is very simple and plug and play - it handles the IP stuff for remote play, which is the tough part for me.

I don't mind lacking features in the server or the client honestly, if I can find and play an album or playlist I'm good. But the connectivity piece can be hard if you're not familiar with self host stuff. I tried to do Jellyfin and Tailscale and some client and it... kind of worked? But it was definitely not as seamless.

I do hope every year that it's my last year paying for Plex. Maybe this year!

I'm fortunate that somehow I ended up with a lifetime PlexPass for... I want to say like $50 a bunch of years back?

Because yes, the remote stuff -- and PlexAmp just working the same wherever I am -- is the huge part of it. Music sits on my NAS and things... just work.

I also really like how easy the caching and offline mode is, because I frequently find myself driving in areas without mobile data service. I keep a couple favorite albums downloaded to my phone, then knowing the app will cache the next ~2 albums of queued tracks generally makes it Just Work.

I use (and contribute to) Finamp the Jellyfin PlexAmp alternative and it's just done a 1.0.0 release which brings it up to parity with PlexAmp for me. I've previously been a long time PlexAmp user but FinAmp now does everything I want it to.

That 1.0.0, and 1.0.1 is in Beta. Is that ready to be moved into stable? Or am I looking at the wrong project? https://github.com/finamp-app/finamp/releases#release-1.0.1-...

This is promising. Thanks! I'll check it out. I hope it gets the major features and works well.

Looks like it isn't on the android play store though? Any info on this? Play tells me there is a version for a prior version of android, which is won't let me install. Not helpful...

My audio needs have been satisfied for many years with subsonic, then airsonic, and now navidrome. They all expose the same subsonic API, which gives quite some flexibility on the audio player client to use. At the moment, Tempus (Android) seems well maintained, but I miss from DSub the lower clarity as to what is cached for offline consumption.

This gave me an idea, what if I let an agent make a proxy for Jellyfin to act like Plex? Best of both worlds!

Maybe worth a try.

I don’t think it’ll work because Plex gates everything with a sign in to their online accounts, so auth would have to go through them and there might be server-to-Plex stuff going on too.

That said, I’m very interested in this space - I’ve been building a music server that provides compatible APIs for Synology and QNAP mobile apps, with a few more on my todo list. I’d love to include Plexamp so if it is possible please let me know!

> I don’t think it’ll work because Plex gates everything with a sign in to their online accounts...

That isn't true. You can configure the server with which subnets are trusted, and do not require auth.

I would be interested to hear from anyone who set it and can still access Plex over their LAN in a network outage. I have set this multiple times according to docs, and it worked only once ever, thereafter apparently resetting to online login. Of course, they do not make this an easy setting to change!

You need plex pass to do this now. They changed it recently you didnt used to need it.

I have had lifetime pass about ten years.

The mobile apps require signing in through the Plex website before you can do anything?

I’m interested in helping with this. Let me know if you start a repo. I was considering the same approach, though I’m not sure how feasible it is.

Jellyfin's Android clients seem to be fine. Android TV and smartphone at least. Have been fine for at least five years.

Can't speak to other platforms though.

I have a lifetime pass as well, but switched to Jellyfin years ago.

really is just the normies access to it via samsung and LG TV's that hold me back.

There is a nice Jellyfin app for LG now

I am currently on vacation and used jellyfin via the browser on all the smart TV. And it just works great. I didn't expect it to work this good.

Sign in via key is easy, not stuttering. I can recommend it.

Newer TiZEN models has a jellyfin app now in the appstore!

Maybe I'm naive, but I feel like if Plex was going to do anything to existing lifetime subscriptions, they would have done it by now. I think we're fine for now.

they'll eventually come out with a completely new overhauled version of plex that's sub only but your lifetime pass will still be good for "plex classic" which they'll stop supporting

Or just end the lifetime tier and make people pay like fastmail did. If even the HN beloved fastmail would do it I pretty much expect it from everyone.

I think this already happened. They increased Plex lifetime to 750 bucks. That’s effectively an end.

I mean, I have a lifetime license for Plex, but even I would happily pay some nominal amount every year if Plex stopped making their software worse intentionally.

Fair, I mean, I still use fastmail :)

Or if like PlayOn, they’ll simply replace your legacy lifetime license software with their new version that no longer does the core functionality that has to be kept up to date — recording different providers — without upgrading to their new extra-special monthly cloud licensing that replaces your “lifetime” license you bought to support their fledgling business. One thing is almost certain, any software claimed to be “Lifetime” will become a lie if given time and one should assume “lifetime” in software almost never means more than 5-10 years before a new executive has a bright idea to generate more revenue.

The Plex rug-pull is just around the corner. I've been running Jellyfin pointed at the same content as Plex for some time now. I still find some rough edges on Jellyfin but they smooth out a few more with each release so I'm confident I'll be just fine when I need to switch. The clients are getting better too, I'm using Infuse on Apple TV and Moonfin for everything else.

> The Plex rug-pull is just around the corner.

I've been hearing that for as long as Jellyfin has existed :-)

Until they handle OTA (along with its EPG), and DVR properly, it's the inferior option for me.

Its hard to tell if the folks at Plex understand the position they're in. They definitely are dancing right up to the line of pushing people too far. I could see them trying to boil the frog with stuff like putting their garbage free streaming stuff front and center more. Like so there won't be one specific thing they do that makes everyone realize its time to leave.

I think one silver lining is that whenever it does reach a tipping point there's going to be a ton of support for projects like Jellyfin, so hopefully we see more feature parity - in particular for shared access for friends and family.

I left this year when they told me I'd have to re-buy my lifetime pass. I suspect they rolled it back, but as you said that was the last straw. All of these streaming nonsense that keeps getting re-enabled, totally troublesome to help friends with the same settings

I couldn't help but think with all the ads they were serving me directly, that they must be selling my data as well. That's not the point of self-host. No thank you.

Jellyfin still missing download w/ transcode, but with space getting so cheap I don't miss it. I do need to improve the music side though

The "vendor" page for their data collection is... impressive.

https://www.plex.tv/vendors-us/

> As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my *arr stack and it has helped tremendously. I used to have to babysit and manually intervene on maybe 10% of requests, now it’s near zero

Any more details here? I hit this a lot and it's not too much work, but still pretty annoying.

Step one is to just let Claude have ssh access to the machine you run plex from and let him do a full sweep. I had some conflicting profile rules and was not properly blocking malware and not properly marking failures so they were never retried. This fixed a big portion of the manual work needed, but the usenet account is really what got me to nearly 100% hands off. I think I am paying $3/month for the next fifteen months, and apparently if I pay attention during Black Friday there will be some pretty cheap deals. For more months of access at even less

EDIT: Claude was also able to look at my logs and noticed that nearly all of the exe or other malware was coming from 2 trackers so we just eliminated those.

Where could someone learn more about the usenet account method?

Claude will be able to help you with everything you need. If you don't have Claude code then the various self hosted subreddits are a good starting point. I had Claude do a sweep of the recent reddit posts to capture the current most recommended usenet accounts, he gave me two links, told me to sign up and paste in the API keys and he took it from there.

How long before they block this kind of work with ai.

I already had DeepSeek tell me "I cant help you with torrents or other copyright infringing uses".

You can get around the checks with careful prompting. You’re just interested and want to learn more about it.

All I did was create a wrapper script to pipe to the torrent client, then "pipe these torrent files to the script" - so easy to circumvent you wonder why they bother

weird, when I ran ds4flash it didn't complain about it at all.

They're already banning certain questions and workflows in the frontier models, but you can usually work around it with well structured queries. The ablated ("cracked") local LLMs will do whatever you want.

I second your Usenet recommendation. I also have the $3 deal which just rolls over each year.

I have had claude do the same, plus reorder nfs mounts, share templates, and do some init-container magic to start vpn/gluetun with port-forwarding, all in a k8s cluster. It's become so easy to manage and debug.

unrelated to your otherwise helpful comment, I just wanted to note that it is "demur" (i.e. hesitate or object) you want in this case; "demure" is an adjective meaning shy or modest.

Thanks, fixed

What are you using for audiobook requests? I also recently setup arr stack, but I saw readarr is depreciated and there doesn't seem to be a clear successor.

After reading a lot of reddit threads I settled on ReadMeABook[0] and it has been working great so far. One pretty cool feature is that it lets you connect an LLM API key and then you can have it make requests based on your library. I now have Fable 5.1 suggesting my next book.

[0]: https://github.com/kikootwo/readmeabook

Hello Mantis. Question: what do you do with the books? Is there kindle integration somehow?

I think most folks lean on Calibre for that. I've setup KOReader on my wife's Kobo and it looks at our local Calibre server for books.

I use it for audiobooks. They are served up by Plex and I use the Prologue iOS app which is a great audiobook listening experience.

It’s been a while since I used it but lazylibrarian has worked for me in the past.

I tried shelfarr as well with some success a while back, but haven’t needed any new books lately since I’m busy catching up on the books I’ve downloaded (the Bible is long lol).

If you don’t want to commit to one of the vibecoded no community arr clones for books then i recommend shelfmark. Lightweight grabber, easy to start with, easy to rip out later.

Chaptarr is great! Just had their public release after a long alpha testing phase

Could you share a link to source code/repo? I couldn't find it

https://github.com/Chaptarr/chaptarr maybe?

Claude and jellyfin and HASS is great. Now my phone has a “door lock” which turns off the kids user’s access, but lets the current playing finish. And another “door lock” unlocks playing for ten minutes.

What do you mean by door lock, where does the code show up?

Hass can make things appear like light switches, etc, but if you did that (they can run arbitrary code) then the kids will learn that "Hey Siri, turn on Kids Play" will work.

But door locks refuse to unlock from Hey Siri, so you have to unlock and use your phone.

So I made them appear as door locks (my idea, heh, AI didn't come up with that).

Understood, so you have a virtual “home lock” on your phone that is actually a media unlock or whatever. Clever :) I also didn’t know HASS = home assistant

Yeah, home assistant is super powerful once you break out of the mold of "a light is a light, right" and realize that ANYTHING can be represented as state changes, and you can run arbitrary code based on it.

And with lights, locks, and brightness/color being able to be modeled in Hass's interface to HomeKit and Siri, you can basically do ANYTHING that can be turned into on/off, lock/unlock, or a slider.

You could probably build a remote paintball turret with it, camera for viewfinder, sliders for elevation, rotation, and azimuth, lock for arming, switch for fire.

I just like the confirmation that AI is happy to be a Boatswain.

Claude is perfectly happy to do it and gives great suggestions. I can't imagine it will last, I did run into one situation where I wanted to archive all the media on a subscription site before my subscription expired, and it refused. But splitting it into one session to collect all URLs and a second session to plug them into yt-dlp with the right arguments worked just fine.

I like them both, but I can never give up plexamp. I’ve tried navidrome and various jellyfin clients but I keep going back.

For music, I use Navidrome + Symfonium. Not quite as smooth as Plexamp was (and there's nothing on par with Symfonium on desktop), but I disliked having my music and video commingled so it's been worthwhile for me.

For what it’s worth, I am very happy with Jellyfin and the *arr suite. It took a bit of agent prodding to get them all playing nicely together and bypassing Cloudflare CAPTCHAs. However, it's pretty sweet when you get it all working.

> bypassing Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

Can you say more about this? I've never encountered this problem in nearly a decade of running the same stack.

With the *arr stack, some of the trackers it uses to search for a torrent will present a captcha when Prowlerr queries it for a search. If you integrate FlareSolverr and set up Prowlerr to submit queries through it for the trackers that have CAPTCHAs, it won't get blocked by them.

Yep. It really isn’t nefarious or abusive. I keep mine slowed down to not scan often to be considerate. Even private trackers can require it now.

Ah - I use Usenet, not Torrents, that'd explain it. Thanks!

I (also a lifetime Plex Pass user) decided to try it out ~6 months ago, and I've switched over. I haven't had any gaps in functionality yet, though YMMV of course. While it isn't better than Plex (which is still fine for now), it isn't worse either, and I trust the Jellyfin devs a lot more than the Plex devs at this point.

I switched to jellyfin about 6 months ago and I can say it is definitely worse. I’m constantly fighting to fix thumbnails, fix episodes to be in the same show, force rescans to get it to even recognize a show that already exists. I never had any of these problems with plex. Plex also defaults to transcoding which fixes a lot of gaps with clients that don’t support certain codecs. I’m often running into issues where infuse can’t play DTS so I need to reencode before I can play the movies.

Also in the process of ditching plex I switched to audiobookshelf for my audiobooks and I have to say it’s also crap. It’s constantly refusing to start playing, or pausing for a really long time before playing.

All that being said I’m not switching back. It’s been a pain but it was worth it.

The default recommended folder naming settings are different for jellyfin from plex if I recall correctly. Personally I just let the arr app download metadata and let jellyfin scan local nfo files only for metadata so have not had a problem for a long time.

I moved from plex to jellyfin and got 10% of the way through organising the films the jellyfin style and then just moved the rest of the video files into a folder called 'ok' and it worked fine. try the lazy way first and see how it goes

I don't recall the folder names being different, but by default Jellyfin uses different metadata providers than Plex. That means that things like numbering of specials (think BSG and the webisodes), or shows which have a different aired vs DVD order (i.e. Futurama) might differ between the two. For those, you have to either tweak your episode numbers or just tell Jellyfin to use the metadata provider Plex does (which is what I did for those edge cases).

That's fair. It got most of my stuff without issues, but there were a fair few I needed to fix.

However, compared to Plex, I've found the remote experience (through Tailscale) to be a lot easier and better performing than the Plex equivalent for me personally. I never have any issues connecting externally now, whereas I did all the time with Plex. Maybe I just needed to get Plex running over Tailscale but it seemed to fight that a bit.

Fair enough, but I honestly have not had a single issue with Jellyfin. It really has been on par with Plex for me.

My only beef with Jellyfind when I used it some time back was inability to resize subtitles, which were huge on a large TV. Could have been lack of knowledge on my part though.

> Plex also defaults to transcoding which fixes a lot of gaps with clients that don’t support certain codecs.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but as far as I can tell, Plex defaults to direct play enabled, and will direct play unless it's not supported by client. (Or other constraints, like limited bandwidth settings, etc.)

Don't have any of those library issues, something wrong in your setup? My tv also doesn't support DTS, but don't have to do any manual work, jellyfin should do it on the fly for you.

Are your files named to the Jellyfin spec? Haven't had any of those issues

I must be old school. I never got on board with Plex, because my "lifetime" licenses for PlayOn, TVersity and Twonky all ended up completely useless. Yes, those licenses still work, but you can't get the latest versions which provide support for the latest codecs, features, etc. There's a cutoff on the versions that "lifetime" license allows you to upgrade to, and some of those licenses were not that cheap at the time.

So of course, Plex is going to engage in the fuckery that they are. JellyFin on the other hand, for the amount it costs is surprisingly low on janky behavior.

Yes, eventually, all of them will end up this way. But the attitude lacks nuance. I paid $120 for Plex 8 years ago, and if it becomes utter crap tomorrow, it's been totally worth it.

Don't think of any such thing as "lifetime". Just ask: "For the amount they are charging me, how long does it need to last for it to have been worth my money?" With the price I paid, one year would have been enough.

Also a lifetime pass Plex user, I'll leave as soon as someone has a good solution for identifying raw Bluray rips automatically. Why do I have to manually name the episodes? We had CDDB last century, why isn't there an equivalent for raw video rips? The ripped data should be identical, a simple hash should uniquely identify it.

Are you describing a plex feature? I was under the impression they required the media to follow certain naming conventions. [1]

Maybe mkv-renamer is of use to you? [2]

1: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-...

2: https://github.com/ssanj/mkv-renamer

I'm describing a hypothetical feature that I want. Essentially an automatic version of mkv-renamer that can identify series, episodes, and special content based on the signature of the ripped files. For whatever reason, such a service doesn't even exist.

Does Filebot not do this for you? A quick glance suggests it does, but I'm not overly concerned with its decision-making; name matches are close enough.

That may actually be what I need, I'll give it try.

Thank you for starting this thread. Another lifetime plex pass user, interested in my choices. For now, I am happy on plex/plexamp. Good to know what jellyfin is at.

If there is one thing that needs to be re-written and consolidated it is the arrs ecosystem. Replacing/consolidating the arrs themselves is pretty straightforward. The trap that quickly becomes a token incinerator is incorporating the downloader into the library manager itself. A lot of learned lessons in that sabnzbd codebase.

As someone with coding projects in the is area would you care to elaborate on "a lot of learned lessons"?

sabnzbd is basically packaged decades of domain specific knowledge about deobfuscating media files

Things like when to cancel early, how to handle par2, obfuscation, rars within rars, decoding articles. Just a mountain of "huh, didn't think of that being a complex problem" that was resolved over time.

I was able to replace the arr suite + sabnzbd with my own rust+ts frankenstein but had I known how complex the usenet piece was going to be I would have separated it into two phases.

I agree. In particular, I think it needs declarative configuration, and it needs to stop storing configuration in a database.

It's insane that the current setup options are:

- Click through dozens of pages importing JSONs from TRaSH Guides, then do it all over again on the other app.

- Run an app that basically does the same thing but over the REST API.

Lifetime pass user long before the ridiculous price hikes for it and the direction for the service going down a path I didn't want to support. You can run Plex and Jellyfin on the same server concurrently pointing to the same media files. My Plex server was still running until I was able to transfer everything over and their mobile app ecosystem got up to parity.

Both for simplicity and portability, I am a very happy user of https://firecore.com/infuse.

I guess it's less full featured as Plex or Jellyfin (it still more than covers the bases for video: format support, different video/audio/subtitle tracks, tv series recognition, skip intros, Trakt.tv etc.); but then again all it requires is any online storage, and the Infuse app (either on iDevice or AppleTV).

Yeaah, second that! I use it on the AppleTV and across the rest of my devices! Works like a charm, and coupled with Tailscale I can access everything on my Nas everywhere :) I have it configured to use Jellyfin as the source, runing on said nas

You should try this: https://neptuneplayer.com/

Does it do bitstream DTS and DV on Apple TV? If so maybe I’ll have to try. Also am I going old or is the whole join our discord to see what it’s about/download is the new norm on the web? My click through rate on that is about 0.

Oh my, this immediately looks so much better UX-wise than Swiftfin!

Looks good...but having to join Discord to try it is one step too many, if I have to be honest.

It's still in beta unfortunately but this is Hacker News and it's okay to share software before it hits prod. People want to be ahead of the curve and it looks promising.

Absolutely, I never said it's not :) I'm just not a fan of the Discord distribution channel - but the reply above you said it's on AppleTV, and I might try that!

FYI: it is GA for Apple TV (so no Discord required) - it’s only iOS/iPad that’s still in public beta.

(Source: was in the Neptune tvOS beta, still am for iOS - it is a fun squad though)

Thanks for the heads up, I'll give it a try on the tv!

huh, yeah I should start an xbmc fork/reimagining. the limitations with the tools of the day are imagination. a LOT of the software I use these days are things I facilitated the creation of and a media player is definitely supposed to be on that list

I left Plex for Jellyfin + Infuse a couple of years ago, and I'm not looking back.

But the sore point right now is outside access, which Jellyfin really isn't made for. I set up Tailscale so I can connect Infuse to Jellyfin remotely. But that's not exactly as smooth as Plex. I can't give friends and family access, either, which was dead easy with Plex.

In terms of the UX, Infuse isn't very good, but it does the job okay. The built-in subtitle fetcher is amazing; that stuff never worked for me with Plex.

I use port forwarding on my home router to open up jellyfin to outside access. it's not as pretty, but it works.

For people that don’t know, Infuse lets you use Jellyfin on Apple TV and it’s very helpful for day purpose

Crazy expensive though. It's basically a Plex subscription, just for the player.

Isn’t it something like $10/yr or something?

Yep. Worth every cent. The Apple TV experience of Infuse is night and day with Plex. I used to constantly struggle with Plex buffering and crashing on my local network with the Apple TV app. Infuse just points to a file share on my NAS and streams beautifully, even at larger 4K files.

I used Plex for years. I’d never go back from Infuse now, and I’m happy to pay that subscription to support its excellent development.

It's not as bad as I thought/misremembered. $23/year here in Denmark, and $140/lifetime.

I just bought a lifetime pro access , I think it was around 200$ but really worth it. I get all the updates for free.

Whenever I can, I buy my software now these days instead of renting it.

It seems like a strange juxtaposition to talk about buying vs. renting while getting updates for free.

Not as expensive as a Starbucks habit

There is also an open source tvOS client called Swiftfin. The experience isn't as good though.

You can also transcode your files to formats that the free version of Infuse supports if you are a miser.

Best to specify the formats you can play in the *arr tools than rely on client transcoding. I aim for media I can direct play and the filters in radarr and sonarr make that pretty easy. I also use tdarr to clean up / convert things I couldn't get a direct play file for.

... and is awesome even without Jellyfin - I have it installed on all devices including Apple TV, connected to family NAS through webdav.

tailscale + cloudflare for lets encrypt support. can then give family tailscale access

Has cloudfare become any more strict with passing large amounts of video data through them? I heard they were kind of against it, but haven't enforced anything.

If you don't proxy or tunnel the connection, it isn't an issue. I assume they are using Tailscale for the actual connection.

One does not need cloudflare for letsencrypt. The tooling has become really simple to use.

You do need a DNS service with API access for automatically creating/renewing the certificates for things that are only served over tailscale though, since they aren't publicly accessible for the letsencrypt servers to talk to.

I've got a Caddy instance setup which proxies my traffic and has dead easy integration for domain DNS registration. Super handy

Same, it's fantastic. As long as you don't need to support as many requests per second on your hardware as something like NGINX could, Caddy is the way to go.

Caddy is great, but doesn't solve the problem I was talking about on its own.

Caddy will get SSL certs automatically if it is exposed to the internet and DNS for that domain points to it, but if you are routing over tailscale exclusively Caddy can't automatically validate the domain names over ACME. There is a Caddy extension for doing DNS based validation, but that puts you back to needing a DNS provider with an API.

> There is a Caddy extension for doing DNS based validation, but that puts you back to needing a DNS provider with an API.

Yea, for clarity this is what i was describing. I use Porkbun's API and the Caddy instance isn't reachable from the internet, only local and over tailscale

I think you overestimate the technical capabilities of my family or their eagerness to install software. When I ran Plex, and nobody ever installed the Plex app like I recommended to them, even though it's one click away in all the app stores.

I mean, if they aren't even willing to download the one app that actually gets them the content they want to see, then *no* software will ever be something that this type of user will be interested in. Not everyone has to use an app, so why try and cater to an audience who clearly has zero interest? You're not gonna magically make it somehow even easier than "go to app store, download app" to the point that they'll use any piece of software.

No, the browser version of Plex is much simpler because you can just send a link. The receiver only needs to go through a simple "type your email and password" sign-up process, and that's it. Nothing to install, works everywhere.

Tailscale is exponentially worse, though. Not only would I have ask them to go to Jellyfin and sign up and log in, I would have to explain that they can't do that until they've installed the Tailscale app (which I have to explain because most non-techies do not know what a VPN is). Tailscale requires its own account, so they have to first sign up to that, and I have to add them as an external user first.

Jellyfin works just fine with remote access and multiple users.

I don't trust Jellyfin to be secure enough to be put on the public Internet.

Why is that? Did you have an issue with how it's set up? Or does it not do enough out of the box and leaves security for the administrator?

Is Plex/jellyfin even necessary for Infuse? I've been using Infuse for years now and it has direct access to my NAS to look for media content and just directly plays it. It's a such an amazing app and it plays everything I throw at it without any buffering or transcoding issues. The Pro version pretty much has all the necessary codecs, including all the dolby things for hdr/atmos. It just works so well.

Yeah I have Infuse only, and am happy with it. No need for jellyfin or whatever else. Honestly Infuse may be one of my best app purchases of these past 10 years…

>But the sore point right now is outside access, which Jellyfin really isn't made for. I set up Tailscale so I can connect Infuse to Jellyfin remotely. But that's not exactly as smooth as Plex. I can't give friends and family access, either, which was dead easy with Plex.

I'm confused about this bit. I installed jellyfin to provide outside access to me and my family/friends.

It wasn't difficult to make it available on the 'net, setting up new users is pretty simple and jellyfin has clients (both first and third party) for most platforms.

In fact, I went from never having used jellyfin to giving external access to friends/family within a few hours.

I'm sure I'm missing something, so if you wouldn't mind, I'd be very interested to hear your experience.

I don't believe in Jellyfin being secure enough to put on the public Internet. In my case, Jellyfin is on my home network, and the box has access to a lot of files and devices.

>I don't believe in Jellyfin being secure enough to put on the public Internet. In my case, Jellyfin is on my home network, and the box has access to a lot of files and devices.

Fair enough. IME, Jellyfin and (just as importantly -- at least for me) the distribution (Fedora) I use have been very good at patching/releasing updates to both the clients and servers when vulnerabilities are found.

Initially, I stuffed jellyfin (and a bunch of other stuff) behind HAProxy[0], which was fine. Now I don't even bother.

It's been at least three years since I put up my jellyfin server and haven't had any issues at all.

All that said, I understand your trepidation and am glad you found something that works for you!

[0] https://www.haproxy.org/

I have the exact same setup. I found Infuse a PITA to begin with. Now it works pretty dang well, even remotely. One big irritation though is the subtitles are always on by default, on Apple TV it's an issue as I can't find a way to disable the default haha! Sometimes there is also a delay between when Jellyfin can play a new video in the browser and when Infuse can play it even though it can see the file.

I do find Infuse significantly better than the Jellyfin apps though.

I also have a lifetime pass, but I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with Plex. Why do I have to regularly turn off their "recommended" stuff that is just ads for movies I can buy online? Why does it appear and re-appear?

Also, the Plex app for LG TV has been buggy and broken for years: some content will not play at all, some will not play if you ff/rewind, and some will not play until you physically turn your TV off and then on. Very annoying.

I'm glad to see competition.

> As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my arr stack and it has helped tremendously.

LLMs have been AMAZING for home server maintenance and improvements. I have completed SO many of my "some day" tasks. I never have to read another fucking log file ever again. It has taken all of the friction out of the hobby. It's all* fun now.

I’ve set up literally hundreds of different self-hosted applications over the years on my homelab. I’ve configured the reverse proxy by hand, setup the docker containers, etc.

Now I can just tell Claude “Setup XYZ app on my server” and it does it all and leaves a note in my Obsidian vault documenting the service (setup instructions, backups, hostname, etc).

Trying out new things has never been easier now that the effort is near-0 to kick the tires.

I would caution against this approach. It's fine to have Claude write a setup script, or whatever you need, but don't run coding agents as your main user on your production machine with full access to your files or whatever your "homelab" consists of.

Yep. You should never let an LLM have access to the system. It's irresponsible as all get out.

Your personal computer? Eh. This afternoon Claude code diagnosed an issue I’ve had with my 4K displays since Tahoe, it would have taken me a week just to learn enough to try to figure it out. Now I have a cli tool which fixes it. I get a weekly report of Chezmoi drift across all my machines, including what I changed. This took me 30 minutes to set up. There are so many things it can simplify.

A production server with user data on it? I wouldn’t dare. My backed up MacBook? Truly valuable.

Next step: set up a scheduled job to read the logs to find any issues before they bite.

Being realistic, most of our home lab setups wouldn’t come close to “production ready” even without AI generated bugs. Relatively stable because they’re largely un-stressed, yes. Good enough for personal use because you can log in and fix anything, sure. Full of bugs, footguns and brain dead decisions because this is our hobby and not our 40 hour a week paid job? Also yes. Our new AI overlords will simply increase the number of buggy things we can deploy.

Hmm, I feel like I have a pretty decent … well, not production-ready, but it’s all in Ansible and I did have to rebuild it from that once, which ironed out most of the bugs in that and everything gets built according to the templates I have for Docker and non Docker setups.

Plus I have “itguy” now, a CLI that can deploy everything, check on status and show me logs. And it’s available via Slack and as an Alfred workflow. So yeah, I think that’s pretty close to production ready.

I still use the free version of Plex and got it set up in a jail on my FreeBSD server. Serves my needs for now, and also use Infuse like a lot of people here on my Apple TV 4K. I have no need to transcoding or anything because all my media consumption is at home these days. If Plex does shit the bed, I will have to rethink my setup for Jellyfin..

I've also got a lifetime Plex pass, but have moved on. I was tired of fighting Plex for what the home screen looked like. It seemed like every update there was more Plex bullshit and less of my actual media without digging through menus. I'd configure it to be just my media, and the next update ads and content from other streaming services kept showing up.

When you move to jellyfin you will then start watching the progress of kyoo for similar reasons lol.