From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

I suppose I understand the reasons people prefer Jellyfin. But on the small chance of liking a commercial product, Plex is truly dead simple for my parents. They have an AppleTV. They signed up. I share it with them via their registered email address. And they’re in. It was as simple a process as I could hope for.

That being said, do I like everything they’re pushing for? No. But they at least allow users to opt out.

I understand the sentiments here, truly. I just don’t have a compelling reason to change since it does what I want, is simple to set up and use, simple to share, and gets refined all the time.

This is heresy, but not all commercial software is the devil. I suspect RMS would hate me for this.

Not all commercial software is the devil, but money is the root of all evil. Rember Big G's old slogan before they were beholden to shareholders? Given Plex already employs multiple dark patterns in an attempt to obtain your email address, it's hard to imagine they wouldn't slide down the same slippery slope if they got bigger.

It'll get worse and worse until you wish you left sooner. Hang in there. They'll cross your line eventually

> Not all commercial software is the devil, but money is the root of all evil.

I have a book of Chinese fairy tales which touches on interesting topics like the creation of the world and the beginning of civilization.

On that second topic, it says that shortly after human societies came into being, the men started fighting with each other over the women.

I imagine the mythology is correct that fighting over women predates concern with money.

I’ll take that bet.

Oh, I hope not. Still, at best let's hope it happens really slowly.

How do I opt out of everything but my locally stored media?

You can disable Online Media Sources in the settings and unpin any section you're not interested in from the main menu.

I've done this and the only things that I see in my Plex app are locally-stored contents and my TV channels (delivered over IP by my ISP).

How are you watching IPTV on Plex? I thought they only allowed that through an actual tuner (+ a Plex Pass)

Plex crossing some “line” doesn’t suddenly invalidate all the previous value one has gotten from it.

Makes sense. Was it Nick Fury who said something about as soon as the third human was born a plot formed against one?

Definitely feels like we are the root of all evil, we always find a reason to kill one another.

Hopefully we are a young species and will grow out of it eventually.

You need to run a local m3u/epg proxy like xTeVe[1] to emulate a DVR. But you still need a Plex Pass I think.

[1] https://github.com/xteve-project/xTeVe

> For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil...

1 Timothy 6:10 NRSV

So, just for random theological context, money itself isn't good or bad - it's just a convenient token of value... But it's the love of money, ie, the desire to possess and control value that you can use to get things from others, and somehow find security and worth in your possessions that is the big problem. And not "the" root of "all" evil, but "a" root of "all kinds" of evil...

I built a thing that integrates with my ISP's TV API and makes it look to Plex like an HDHomeRun tuner. It also generates XMLTV EPG (again, based on my ISP's data) so that I don't have to faff around with third-party EPG providers and with channel matching.

So as far as Plex is concerned, this is an HDHomeRun tuner + XMLTV EPG.

I can also tune directly into any of the TV streams using VLC, in one of three ways:

1. raw MPEG transport stream over UDP multicast

2. same stream over HTTP (via udpxy)

3. my ISP's transcoded HLS stream (lagging by a few seconds and missing certain features)

The major annoyance with that is that you have to explain to your parents/friends how to do that when you give them access otherwise they won’t find your stuff in the ocean of media plex is trying to push at them.

This is true, to expand a bit I would say that love of money is greed and greed is a sin which taints the soul.

In Christianity the two most important commandments are the love of God above all and your neighbour second (Matthew 22-35) so following this you should use your earthly processions to feed the hungry and help the poor as Jesus would have (remember how the bread multiplied when it was shared..)

You also have to now trust that they have a secure password and don’t share/get them compromised.

I picked Emby for many reasons and one being local accounts I control. Plex pushing you to use their accounts (and then pushing streaming content like this) just wasn’t an option.

Emby also had a dead simple Apple TV app and none of plex’s streaming content nonsense or burying your content in a l menu.

He would make you eat his toe nails for that comment.

As a side note - the original quote isn't in fact 'money is the root of all evil' rather the quote says 'it is the lack of money that is the root of all evil'.

A subtle difference I'll grant you but one that makes a huge difference to understanding and empathy imo.

[Edit to Expand] The original Hebrew text says it is the 'desire to possess money' that has somehow become mistranslated into 'love of money' rather than the original meaning of 'scarcity of money'.

Plex is dead-simple for everyone!

Yeah, sure, it's a mild annoyance that they keep trying to enable features I don't need or want. I guess I could stop upgrading. But still, it's pretty easy to go to Settings -> Online Media Sources and set them all to 'Disabled.' With that done, it does exactly what I want it to and no more.

How do you handle the default quality on their devices? I believe Plex defaults to 720p which forces unnecessary transcoding, and this is a per-user per-device default setting. I have to continuously remind my users how to update their default quality to maximum available.

Wrong. deckiedan and swat535 have it correct. Scarcity of money isn't evil, being poor isn't evil. People survived fine for thousands or hundreds of thousands of years before the concept of money existed. It's about the evil of coveting what your neighbor has so bad it can lead to evil actions.

First off I have hardware transcoding so that’s not an issue. Second, all of my 1080p direct stream to my AppleTV and do not transcode. I changed no default settings for this.

As for remote users, it doesn’t seem to impact them either way.

Gross. But true.

I think we must be thinking of different things - the quote from Timothy is originally Greek, not Hebrew: "ῥίζα γὰρ πάντων τῶν κακῶν ἐστιν ἡ φιλαργυρία..."

"Root for all the evil is the love-of-money..." Word for word (ish).

The greater context being seeking contentment with your current lot in life, and focusing on becoming good, not rich

I’m not sure I understand. With Emby you still have to trust that they have a secure password and don’t share/get them compromised.

You can pick the password and not let it be changed.

Also plex suffered a hack that compromised online account user logins.

Of course not, and that wasn't the point. Did you think it was?