Plex Security Incident

I am a faithful Plex lifetime user and have never had problems.

That said, I shouldn't be blinded by convenience. I hear jellyfin is a good alternative. Can someone share

- how easy is it to administer for clients outside of my network or possibly even outside my country?

- how good is the app support? I transcode all of my media to AAC and h264 for compatibility

-what about for streaming music? I really like Plex amp

- what do you like the most about jellyfin

- what do you miss most about Plex?

Thank you.

I ran plex for years but gave up once they started tracking all activity.

Jellyfin is way to administer. Clients are rough and often crash. Influx is often the best choice for IOS but has its own... weird decisions on how to handle libraries.

The main thing I miss is being able to download transcoded media for mobile devices so I can watch on a plane.

I'll fill in what I can -

>- how easy is it to administer for clients outside of my network or possibly even outside my country?

Jellyfin is just the software, not a hosted solution. I use a simple server/seedbox, with sane configs (good providers have automated this), which results in a secure public-facing admin console with a username/password. They have basic user management features to include other users in your server.

> - how good is the app support? I transcode all of my media to AAC and h264 for compatibility

Jellyfin has a broad ecosystem of apps on a bunch of platforms, each with their pros and cons. I recommend poking around. When figuring my setup out, I downloaded 3 or 4 different Android apps to pick the one I liked (support for multiple servers which isn't a given in all the apps)

> -what about for streaming music? I really like Plex amp IMO Plex has always been substandard here since they hoisted the music interface into the same one they use for everything else, so it's really lacking in filters/administration features I depend on. That said Jellyfin supports music and has the same simple feature set.

> - what do you like the most about jellyfin

It's free and untethered to a company's whims. It also does a lot less of the social/DVR stuff that I have no interest in.

>- what do you miss most about Plex?

Their app experience was a bit more premium, and their support for multiple servers is better than Jellyfin since they own the servers/hosting to do it. I also really used to enjoy the 'remote' functionality where I could skip episodes by clicking next on the Plex app in my phone. This hasn't worked for a few years for me despite heavy troubleshooting.

Not sure about jellyfin, but I really dig Emby. Just as convenient as Plex. I can't even remember why I switched to Emby over Plex, but I never looked back.

Emby performs better than Jellyfin IME, at least if you need it to work on older TVs. Though IDK if they still offer a lifetime (pay once) subscription.

- just like any web service, reverse proxy with SSL, it has internal user management

- there are a variety of apps to choose from on ios/android, smart TVs might be limited or nonexistent (LG has a good one though)

- consider a separate dedicated tool for music, like Navidrome

- it's open source, its developers respect me and my users and do not abuse their access to them using dark patterns to extract revenue

- features that they have removed anyway (plugins, photo sync, plex cloud)

I've been a paid user of Emby for years and it's been well worth it.

I think the final straw was Plex artificially blocking transcoding on Raspberry PI, even though it would work with a ton of work arounds.

> how easy is it to administer for clients outside of my network or possibly even outside my country?

You can run Jellyfin in any docker container. If you want to run it on a NAS in your home office and put it on the internet through ngrok or tailscale, you totally can. But you can host it pretty much wherever.

> how good is the app support? I transcode all of my media to AAC and h264 for compatibility

The official clients are just ok. They'll support all the file types you'd expect, but they're fairly slow and not great at streaming 4K. I pay for a client (Infuse Pro) that addresses a lot of those pain points, but it's been relatively poor at auto-detecting tv show metadata, so I'm still in the market for an app I'm happy with. Ideally an open source one.

> - what about for streaming music?

Technically works, but whether it's a good experience depends on the client you're using.

> - what do you like the most about jellyfin

Easy to set up. Great plugins for finding subtitles/artwork/metadata. Open source with good docs. Works with lots of clients. Easy to create and share accounts, and has fun features like synced remote viewing parties.

- what do you miss most about Plex?

The ads. jk never used it.

Plex works on chromecast etc, not for jellyfin

The official jellyfin android app also provides 'remote' functionality (skip episodes, browse library, change volume etc.). It works well for me most of the time, but occasionally it can't find the remote session until I restart the jellyfin instance.

Huh? I’ve used jellyfin on my chromecast for years

> what do you like the most about jellyfin

I own the instance that's running on my own homeserver. It does what I want it to do. Stream my media for me, other directly in the same network, or transcodes when I'm away.

I don't understand. I run a Plex instance on my home server as well. Are you referring to jellyfin not needing a centralized Plex account? Or do most Plex users rely on a plex-provided server?

> what do you like the most about jellyfin

- Not selling off my watching history to third parties. This is a privacy disaster still about to blow up. Expect holders of large plex libraries with pirated content to be lined up in court in the near future.

- Decentralized.

- Not parasiting on FOSS such as ffmpeg. Plex famously took everything from ffmpeg and gave nothing back, while making lots of money in the process.

Plex mysteriously began refusing remote connections, so I couldn't share with my friend outside my home LAN. Manually port forwarding didn't solve anything, and my firewall isn't the problem. That's as far as Plex help goes...

I went to Jellyfin (plus Tailscale VPN). Some things are really nice, but others... well, it's an open-source project, and people only fix what they see as broken. So, I've tried restarting, only to lose every single customization I did. It's not worth my time to fill out their tickets and play that lottery, so I just accept the UI issues.

Then, mysteriously, Jellyfin also quit broadcasting remotely. A month later, its server wasn't even visible on my own LAN to my TV.

So I uninstalled BOTH Plex and Jellyfin, and reinstalled both. Jellyfin still doesn't connect right. And Plex works... until suddenly it doesn't, and I have to cycle through Off/On with "Allow remote connections", until it works again, mysteriously.

PRO'S OF EACH:

Plex: Much better support in TV libraries. No need for a VPN. Simpler UI.

Jellyfin: Ability to create Collections, which are basically filter-defined libraries. Without rearranging any files, you can build a Collection of Star Wars movies, or all movies directed by Scorsese, or any arbitrary bunch of media files at all, really. Optionally, you can reduce your library clutter with these Collections: a library named Science Fiction can have all of your Star Wars movies listed as a single item (that Collection). Basically, sub-libraries, but they aren't restricted to one library's contents (Star Wars might contain a documentary on "The Making Of" that isn't actually stored in Science Fiction).

> Plex mysteriously began refusing remote connections, so I couldn't share with my friend outside my home LAN.

Same issue for me. The client app used to have a "remote servers" configuration option. You had to manually set up port forwarding and get the configuration perfect, which I suspect was beyond your average Joe. But once you did it was rock solid.

They now have some automagic arrangement based on uPnP which anybody can use, when it works. But it doesn't always work and because they've removed the old manual option when it doesn't work, there is no remote access for you. You would hope they would add some debugging and doco to give you some visibility into what it depends on so you can isolate the problem, but no, they provide nothing.