Text:
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plexās advertising partners. This data is used to deliver personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Your consent applies to all devices on which you have Plex installed. You can withdraw your consent at any time in Account Settings or using this page.
Soure: https://www.plex.tv/vendors/ (Might have to clear cache)
Can also read about the changes here: https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/
Yes, it is.
People keep answering the question of āwhy would anybody still use Plexā in this thread much better than I ever could.
Also, āit works on my machineā doesnāt mean itās not a bug or a legitimate performance issue inherent to the software. Itās always crazy to me how holier-than-thou, not-the-developerās-job people can get without heeding even the most basic, ground-level software development principles.
Also, also, spare me the condescension, I self-host a dozen different things, including other open source libraries for non-video stuff, closed source libraries for other other non-video stuff and increasingly more-trouble-than-itās-worth networking.
But even if I didnāt, Plex was one of the first things I hosted because all you have to do is installing like you would any local application and it just works. By the time itās living in a container inside a dedicated home server or whatever you are well past the entry level for this stuff. If thatās the gap you find acceptable between Plex and Jellyfin you have, again, found your answer to why a whole bunch of people would consider one and not the other.
I just donāt think you need to make your whole personality about your pet home server or that it needs to be finicky and annoying to work. Self hosting has tons of potential and itās one of the few areas where open source solutions dominate the field. Somebody should take some time to make it actually accessible before the commercial hounds smell blood in the enshittified waters and turn it into a product all the way.
Kudos to Home Assistant for soooort of doing that, although I still think itās a bit overcustomizable and overengineered. Still the closest to a good self-hosted open application out there by a mile, though.
Of course not, but when thereās an issue thatās limited to certain users, the immediate question is āwhat is different about this installation thatās causing this issue here and not elsewhere?ā. It would have been just as easy for you to start with Jellyfin instead of plex, but then you would have likely run into the same issue when trying to add plex to the same shared media volume. That isnāt an uncommon issue, but when youāve already said āitās not worth my time to troubleshoot this applicationā, I can only assume you also didnāt have the time to read the documentation. Thatās fine - most of us here understand that homelabs are a niche hobby interest and not everyone is willing to maintain a server that requires technical knowledge and time to keep running smoothly. Some people just want something that works out of the box and donāt care about it being open sourced or customizable, and thatās fair. If thatās why you prefer plex thatās fine. But it isnāt the developerās fault if you choose to go down a more complicated deployment path and find that youāre out of your depth.
Containerized applications are simply not designed to work like native applications - they are very much built with the assumption that those people who are deploying them have - at a minimum - a cursory knowledge of VMās and shared volume ACLās and a willingness to troubleshoot their configuration if there are conflicts. It isnāt because theyāre shirking responsibility as developers, itās because theyāre providing source code thatās designed for remote service developers to plug into other services/environments and customized. If you canāt be bothered to do basic troubleshooting thatās very common with shared volume deployments, then maybe youāve reached your personal threshold for how much self-hosting youāre willing to do. Again, thatās not āholier-than-thouā, thatās just an acknowledgment of what remote application deployment requires.
Plex and jellyfin can be run together if you really wanted to do it, but if you canāt be bothered to do basic troubleshooting then I wonāt be bothered to soothe your ego.
Lmao, idk what to tell you bud. Some people actually enjoy working on their cars, but I donāt hear you getting mad at them because all youāre willing to do yourself is change your oil.
You are actually wrong about that first assumption, I did try both at the same time and the problems with Jellyfin moved me over to Plex. Plex never had an issue handling my remote library at any point, and in fact ran just as well in a container in the NAS holding the files as it did natively on both Windows and Linux, so it was surprisingly easy to see what combination of placing files and software worked better for me.
Which I guess is a good segue to your second point, because hey, turns out there are plenty of applications that are pretty agnostic about running inside of a container or not, Plex included. And there are several implementations of easy self-hosted apps that will set up a container for you. Unfortunately most of those are commercial software trying to monetize self-hosting, and snobbish hobbyists seem to have no particular urgency for beating corporations to that particular punch.
And yes, you can run Plex and Jellyfin together. I donāt know what that point is supposed to add to this. You can mostly run any software alongisde any other software. Frankly, the biggest issue of doing that, besides how redundant it is, is that Jellyfin will insist on writing a whole bunch of garbage all over your library if you want to set it up its way. Plex will mostly tolerate this and keep chugging along, though, so itās not a dealbreaker if you donāt mind.
And absolutely you can make a hobby out of self-hosting or whatever else, but the point is car nuts typically donāt hold the opinion that nobody should be having cars but them. I mean, thereās plenty of car snobbery, and a bunch of people will say they prefer a manual transmission car over an automatic, but itās a pretty extreme position to hear someone say if you canāt drive stick you shouldnāt have access to cars. Let alone say that if you didnāt build your car yourself you arenāt skilled enough to have one, which is the actual equivalence here.
I inferred it from this:
And anyway, plex and jellyfin have different media library configuration requirements. Even if you did them at the same time, youād have to be kind of lucky to have configured them both on the same media volume correctly without reading any of the documentation or having experience with docker ACL rules.
Just as a for-instance (since I donāt see any specifics), sharing a media volume across separated docker containers on linux requires mapping the same users and usergroups to each container. Itās assumed you should know this, if youāre deploying a stack of services on a server, because containers are designed to be isolated and secure - containers are restricted to accessing files in their approved ACL, so that a bad actor canāt get access to a separate volume from a compromised service. One possible problem you were having (again, just a guess) is that jellyfin was assigning itself ownership of the files/folders on the media volume every time it did its scan, and Plex no longer had permission to access them. It actually doesnāt matter which service was there first - as soon as you had two services accessing the same volume you would have run into this issue. It depends on how you configured both services, and if you gave them privileged access or mapped users properly, ect.
If youāre running both services on a store-bought NAS, the problem could have also been a misunderstanding about the combined overhead requirement for the services. Without making any assumptions about how much thought you put into your configuration, Iād check that as a part of troubleshooting. But, again, seems like you donāt give a fuck about troubleshooting your customized service stack and would rather use a ready-made product. Thatās fine.
Jellyfin included also. Iām not sure what the point youāre making though.
I agree itās redundant, which is why I personally only deploy jellyfin now. As far as jellyfin writing to your media driveā¦ Yea, I guess that is a difference between the services. This isnāt really a problem if you configure your containers correctly, but if you donāt want to mess with that stuff I can see why it might be an issue for you. Plex may be storing those files on its container volume instead of the mounted media volume, or it could be storing them on their remote server (itās been a while since I had plex running), which is a fine way to do it too. There are advantages to writing it to the media volume, but I wonāt bore you with that
Good thing nobody is telling you not to have a homelab or use selfhosted services. If you want to use Plex and only want to drive automatic transmissions, go for it. Doesnāt change my preference or enthusiasm for jellyfin or manual transmissions, though. And given the opportunity, iāll still passionately debate the advantages to learning stickshift and open-sourced and customizable self-hosted applications. And if you give them a try and run into problems, iāll gladly help you try to solve them if youāre willing to engage with it - but if youād rather just complain about how much my preference sucks then iāll have no problem telling you to stick with what you know next time.
Man, youāre really itching to talk shop about specifics and complexities and it really isnāt about that.
The guy said āwhy does anybody still consider Plexā about the slightly misleading privacy policy excerpt and a bunch of us pointed out UX and accessibility are reasons. This entire tangent spawns from me claiming I had technical issues on top of the UX stuff and you being super excited to assume itās a skill issue and maybe get to troubleshoot a bit.
Except it wasnāt, Iām not particularly interested and the technical issues werenāt even the primary reason I moved to something else.
For what itās worth, I barely remember what the setup was when I messed around with Jellyfin because I move things around a bunch and despite this conversation suddenly hinging on it, I didnāt think much of it beyond āoh, this sucks, I guess Iāll just do Plex insteadā. It was almost certainly not Plex and Jellyfin running simultaneously on two containers sharing resources, though. I have way too many loose computers bouncing around the house for this not to have been some test run natively installing it on whatever I had lying around, which is also why the Plex server I have now has been on three different machines since then (and is still running natively because why the hell not, being adamant that everything needs to be on some overdone docker setup is just nerds being nerds).
Look, I respect your hobbies, but I reserve the right to find you extremely annoying when you try to patronize people who are actually trying to get shit done just because youāre excited at the opportunity to exlpain the difference between a bind and a volume at someone whether they need the explanation or not. The reality of it is if you want to be nerdy and all hobbyist about having a home server (I fully reject the term ālabā) that rabbit hole goes deep. You have tons of runway to go nuts about dedicated server hardware and networking software while letting people who just kinda want to be able to open their media without having to plug in a physical drive do their thing.
Jellyfin doesnāt HAVE to be complicated. Itās not good that it is. All this tier of software that does useful stuff to replace corporate subscription crap doesnāt need to be any harder to use and maintain than your average Windows application. Everybody would benefit from a concerted effort to take the faff out of it. And I pinky promise that youāll still have a lifelong hobby if and when that happens.
Youāre free to find me annoying, I wouldnāt try to deny that anyway.
You pointed to a ātechnical issueā, and iāve been pretty upfront about why that isnāt necessarily a problem with the software and more likely a user error. Youāre free to not use jellyfin for whatever reason you want but I donāt think itās accurate to portray that as an issue with the software. Sorry if you disagree.
I havenāt seen any issues with UX design personally, and honestly I havenāt seen anyone making a detailed case here about it, but if all you need is āto be able to open your media without having to plug in a physical drive do your thingā I donāt see anything wrong with jellyfin. Maybe if you really really like your google SSO and canāt figure out how to implement that yourself, great. Use plex, go nuts.
Iām very confused about why youād assume user error is more likely, given the setup.
But to your other question, if it WAS user error, then itās Jellyfinās fault. Why should it be possible for the user to erroneously set the software so that scanning a library would grind the whole thing to a halt? I mean, it wasnāt user error, but in what world is allowing the user to set up a simple library scrape in a way that breaks the functionality of the entire thing an acceptable implementation? A bug I can understand, but thatās just bad.
Also just bad, from my recollection, Jellyfinās interface to add live TV channels, its overcustomizable tools for skinning (which are needed because the base skin is pretty plain), the convoluted requirements for remote access, the overly strict library parsing paired with the default choice being to keep data stored within the library (for portability, I suppose? Itās ugly and annoying and messy). I briefly tried to get books working on it before giving up and that also sucked, but it was a while ago and I forget the details.
You can get as condescending as you want, but those are all major UX blockers for key use cases. Googleās SSO is the least of it, but I guess itās an easy deflection if you donāt want to acknowledge any usability gaps at all despite all evidence.
And donāt get me wrong, I get that Jellyfin is free software and Plex will charge you and advertisers at any opportunity because it is not. But ultimately I use the software that works. I may prefer a free alternative, because who doesnāt, but thatās not a get out of jail free card. Particularly when the choice isnāt just for myself.
Youāve been extremely vague about what the actual issue was, and the details you HAVE given are often contradictory. Iām getting so tired of this cat and mouse game. Fine, yea. Maybe they should have anticipated your specific use case, and everyone else just got lucky with their config not causing the issue youāre so sure is their fault.
It isnāt designed for that but nice of them to enable you to do it anyway
This is an outdated complaint, but also fuck them for giving you the option to customize the look, I guess?
Thatās just what remote hosting entails, bud. Nice of plex to hand hold you through the process but it comes at the cost of privacy. Itās easy enough to access via VPN though, or I guess you can expose your home network but doing that without knowing what youāre doing puts you and all your data at risk. Idk how youāre accessing any of your other services though.
I have no idea what this means but I suspect itās an outdated gripe. Setting up library scans is as straightforward as plex, or at least it is now.
Itās not designed for that but good of them to make it so you could do that anyway
Lmao, what?! Werenāt you just telling me some people just want something that lets them stream their media to their tv without a hard drive plugged in? And now using it for ebooks is a ābasic UX blockā? GTFO lmao
Iāve been vague about the details because you are digging your heels into an argument about a one week test run I did a while ago on a piece of software that didnāt do what I wanted. āMy use caseā was āgo in there and scrape my video libraryā on a default install.
The reason I even tried to plug in live IPTV, by the way, is that people made a big deal of Plexās obsession pushing for it, since they plug it in by default and have their own default list of channels pre-baked. Even if I donāt use it much on Plex, and I really donāt, it was an interesting test case for how the two pieces of software handle their extra options. For all the crap Plex got for trying to become Netflix, and I do agree itās a foolās errand, it was a depressing reminder of how commercial software and OSS often handle UX differently.
Oh, and if the implication is that Jellyfin got itself a better default skin, then good for them, but I saw the interface not that long ago and it still looked pretty grim. And yeah, screw them for letting me customize it. Thatās bad. Entirely reskinning software is a bad feature that adds next to nothing but complexity if you have good designers make a good UI in the first place. Itās fine to have as an extra, but it should either be very well packaged or waaaay out of the way for power users. The average user shouldnāt have to think about it. Turning on dark mode, maybe, and even that would be a disappointing omission of a ātake system settingā option as a default. UX IS important.
And no, I refuse to concede that self-hosting entails annoying, convoluted setups. There are multiple commercial solutions to this that are different degrees of ābetter than nothingā. At ground level plenty of routers or self-hosted products will one-click set up a VPN for you, which is not great but at least works around the issue. On the other end itās a remote service provider managing your remote access and then yeah, thereās data form you leaking elsewhere, but that as an option is at least useful. Itās not just pure corpo closed source like Plex, either. Home Assistantās for-profit arm will gladly take your subscription money and handle remote access for you. Whether you trust them more or less than Google (or not at all and want to set up yourself) is up to you.
Also, again, I checked this a while ago, but given how many other people are up and down this thread claiming (and not being disputed) that Jellyfin is still less fire-and-forget for parsing, I donāt know how āoutdatedā that is. You should ping the two separate people who recommended third party software to scrub media libraries so theyād work with Kodi/Jellyfin and explain to them that this is now entirely unnecessary.
And I didnāt say that ebooks were āa basic UX blockā (although it sucking did make me go for a Plex/Komga setup, not a Plex/Jellyfin setup, soā¦ I guess it is on that front). I gave you a list. Iām not going back to Jellyfin just to verify that youāre obviously wrong about it all having been perfectly fixed up to Plexās standards, because Iām pretty sure the bunch of people saying the opposite all over this thread arenāt making it up.
UX matters. Jellyfinās UX is much, much worse than Plexās. I wish it wasnāt, but it was bad enough when I tried it to push me away and a whole bunch of people here are claiming the same thing. Being delusional about the quality of the implementation doesnāt make it better.