Plex Security Incident

Not necessarily related, but I'll take the opportunity to share my dislike of this company. Like others, they built a loyal following around a set of features provided, no questions asked, to stream your content to your own devices.

Over the last couple of years, Plex has continued to strip functionality, add paywalls, make deals with publishing companies, and take other actions that firmly put them in the 'enshittifaction' phase. They've capitalized on the community that gave them their success, so I've cashed out as well.

At this point there is little need for those of us with some technical ability to use this software and all the bloat that comes with it. Jellyfin[1] is an excellent alternative that I've fully switched over to this last year. I will not let a company take ownership of my media library, ever.

[1] https://jellyfin.org/

Do I still need to mess with filenames in order to have jellyfin pick them up to create the library?

I have a “lifetime pass”. I’ve noticed some of these “features” creeping into the ecosystem (bloat), but I haven’t actually seen any stripped functionality. For the most part, it works as advertised.

That being said, a lot of my mates are moving to Jellyfin. Nothing but good things from them.

They removed mobile device playback rights from users who paid for this feature specifically. Nobody in their right mind will do business with Plex.

I haven't noticed this issue any more than Plex, seems to be more about having all the files in a clear folder for a show/season than the specific individual file names. But YMMV

Not if:

* they already have peer filename.nfo files with TVDB | IMDB | TMDB ID's

* not if they have scene standard names AND are not ambiguous media names (eg: Utopia - which of the 5 possible series do you mean?)

But these are issues all media libraries face.

Group series episodes in per series (or even per season) folders and include a tvshow.nfo file with any IDs.

eg:

  <episodeguide>{"tmdb":"328","imdb":"tt0983200","tvdb":"82616","tvrage":"7565","wikidata":"Q6805564"}</episodeguide>
  <id>82616</id>
  <imdbid>tt0983200</imdbid>
  <tmdbid>328</tmdbid>
  <uniqueid default="false" type="tmdb">328</uniqueid>
  <uniqueid default="false" type="imdb">tt0983200</uniqueid>
  <uniqueid default="true" type="tvdb">82616</uniqueid>
  <uniqueid default="false" type="tvrage">7565</uniqueid>
  <uniqueid default="false" type="wikidata">Q6805564</uniqueid>
  <premiered>1989-05-08</premiered>

is over kill for Media Watch https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/328-media-watch

which just leaves the issue of TheMovieDB being weak on metadata for that series .. but can be completed from theTVDB https://www.thetvdb.com/series/media-watch

For lifetime pass owners, I think you've dodged the features they've put paywalls up for. The big one is preventing free accounts from streaming to shared user libraries. So if you have your pass + 5 buddies sharing their plexes (and they don't have Plus), you cannot view their content I believe.

Soemtimes I have needed to rename files, but to me it is both sensible (how else to recognize a show, maybe a metadata file) and totally worth it.

I don't want to need to have a centralized account to access my media library on my device.

I don't want to have to pay monthly to enable hardware transcoding.

Yes. This is the flaw in Jellyfin that makes it a non-starter for me. One time I spent like two hours updating all the metadata, and then some strangely worded button reset it all. Haven't used it since.

I like Jellyfin, but I keep using Plex for two reasons.

First is subtitle support is quite limited in comparison. It fails more often than it works for me.

Second is the lack of skipping.

This is with the Android TV client, haven't really tried the others.

One thing I'll note is that while I've found every device surface I've come across has a Plex app, that isn't true of Jellyfin. YMMV.

Fair, I handle subtitles in my ingestion pipeline and so those are ready to go by the time Jellyfin gets involved.

Skipping, do you mean skipping intros and such? Or something else?

>then some strangely worded button reset it all

"Reset universal entropy"

If you categorize your libraries into their correct directories (i.e. TV into TV, movies into movies), then no.

Their metadata lookup is quite solid.

> but I haven’t actually seen any stripped functionality

Plugins, the watch later list, the up next/playback queue, Plex Cloud/Cloud Sync, photo backup (this one hurt), privacy preferences were badly nerfed.

Those are just the ones I miss, I'm sure there are more (like the short lived arcade thing).

Some Plex clients will fail to direct stream DTS + PGS.

Jellyfin somehow just works on all my devices.

I can't because most of my media is in an off-site server and the mount point is readonly

> I handle subtitles in my ingestion pipeline

What do you do? Separate file? Not sure if I've noticed a pattern other than "mostly doesn't work well".

> Skipping, do you mean skipping intros and such?

Sorry, I meant jumping back and forth. On Plex I can just press left/right arrows on the remote, and it jumps a few seconds. On Jellyfin I have to press ok/confirm to actually do the jump. Very annoying.

Watch Together is also being removed

Jellyfin clients are the weakest aspect imo. Sort of hit or miss, and the ios client is inferior to a 3rd party paid offering (infuse)

You first post said "built a loyal following around a set of features provided, no questions asked, to stream your content to your own devices" and now you're saying they removed the ability for people to share content with each other if they are not paying customers.

Will give it a try, thanks

Which got a lot of people (including me, also a lifetime subscriber) in this thread absolutely livid: https://forums.plex.tv/t/allow-watch-together-for-tv-shows-m...

(We were begging for them to fix the functionality of watch together for almost 5 years)

> First is subtitle support is quite limited in comparison.

I always watch with subtitles, but haven't noticed worse support in jellyfin vs plex, really. Granted, I mostly use srt/ssa (text based subtitles).

> Second is the lack of skipping.

You just need to install the intro skipper plugin :)

https://github.com/intro-skipper/intro-skipper

You need to sometimes suffix the folder/file name with {imdb-tt1234} to make it match the correct movie/show.

This is the same deal with Plex tho, although I found plex internal metadata engine to auto-match better than jellyfin currently does.

You can help here though. Just come to https://www.themoviedb.org/ and help us add metadata.

Hm, I too primarily have srt's. No idea why just says "failed to load" or somesuch and I haven't been arsed to figure out why when I can just hop over to Plex and watch.

That said, I've had a few HDR movies which Jellyfin handled a lot better, so it's a bit here and there.

As for skipping, I primarily skip backwards when I miss dialog (so much mumbling these days), or forward when it's a TV show which has segments I don't care too much about, like say some irrelevant love subplot.

Changing files isn't really an option for me because my media stays in an off-site server and the mount point is readonly.

I'll setup jellyfin and see which titles I'm unable to add and try to collaborate on metadata. It's always important to favor opensource. I can always have both services running side by side.

You can also manually match each movie from the jellyfin frontend, but the issue with going this path is that if you need to rebuild your jellyfin instance for some reason, you would need to redo all of this manual matching.

So, the recommended path is to clean up the media files:

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/

The *arr stack is what people usually use.

Bazarr specifically in this case, it can search multiple locations for missing subtitles automatically.

Then rename them at the off-site server?

There are very specific and common standard on renaming video files to contain "metadata" so that every single tool doesn't have to use ffmpeg to investigate and try to guess the exact movie/tv show from the title.

The Plex naming guidelines are pretty good: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-...

Some people like to add resolution and audio track information to the file name too.