I have spun up Jellyfin to run alongside Plex and I'm ready to switch over full time in case Plex ever goes after the old life time users. You just never know with these days.

And tbh, Jellyfin is pretty awesome. It seems to run lighter and faster than Plex. Nobody should be buying a $700 pass to watch your own content.

[–] acosmichippo@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I also have lifetime plexpass but plex has pissed me off too much with recent changes that make the experience worse. the enshittification is inevitable, so i just cut my losses and am riding the upswing of Jellyfin. It's objectively not as good yet but i have found some temporary workarounds for the biggest omissions.

[–] Steve@startrek.website 5 points 1 day ago

Its way too hard to make plex work without internet

[–] NekoKoneko@lemmy.world 1 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

I need to do the same thing, but how did you do it alongside Plex? Meaning, can it just point to the same library and neither Plex nor Jellyfin gets confused (because of one generating files or paths that messes up the other installation)?

[–] mintiefresh@piefed.ca 1 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Yeah exactly as you said. They point to the same media folder and both run at the same time. Seems to work fine for me fine.

I basically use Jellyfin when I'm at home right now and for anything remote I still use Plex.

I honestly think Jellyfin is nicer. It's faster and it isn't always shoving other libraries in my face. It just has my content the way I want and that's it.

[–] dcbuchan@aus.social 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

@NekoKoneko Neither should get confused. If you’re using Docker there is a sync for watched positions. I think it’s called jellfyfin watched or the like. Not at home to check.

I have Plex lifetime but yes it smells bad. Also frequently have issues. Common lip sync. For a while back not playing 4K. You can’t charge so much and not have a perfect product.

[–] NekoKoneko@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago

I have Plex Lifetime too, but at some point it just feels gross and I'd love to have an open source stack. I'd like to have Jellyfin running in parallel if it's possible so I can switch over at a moment's notice.

But yeah, that's good to know.

[–] Carrot@lemmy.today 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I paid $100 a handful of years ago, and it felt worth it at the time. Jellyfin has improved tremendously in that time, adding intro/outro skip, a tizen app, better collections support, and is super snappy comparatively. I thought my streaming server was to blame for the long buffer times at the start of media, but clearly not because Jellyfin starts almost as soon as the player loads in. Plex has gotten worse, more invasive, more expensive, and more sluggish since then. I'll never look back to Plex. What value they offer on top of Jellyfin's functionality (which is shrinking year by year) isn't worth the $2 per phone per month for my new users. I made the switch for ~20 family/friends, and other than the name, people only had praises for Jellyfin.

[–] FreedomAdvocate 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Your users don’t have to pay anything if you have a Plex pass…….

Also I doubt you have other users, externally, if you switched to jellyfin as it’s not made for that, nor should it be used for that.

[–] Carrot@lemmy.today 1 points 16 hours ago

As far as I know they do for remote streaming on phones, if they weren't part of my server at the time they introduced the monthly remote streaming subscription. I tried to add a new user after it was introduced, and to use Plex to access content from my server on their phone they no longer had the option to pay the $5 or whatever, they had to sign up for a $2 a month subscription. I don't know if this may have been walked back in the last few months, but at the time it was true.

I don't sell access or anything like that, I've just got friends and family with access. It fluctuates, but right now it's sitting at 17 external accounts. I host on the public internet. Despite it being not recommended in general, it's actually safe to do so if proper precautions are taken. (Correct firewall settings, force https, reverse proxy, scheduled updates, etc.) There are a few extra things I do, but just those should be safe enough if your users aren't reusing passwords.