Remember when Plex tried to sell you a subscription to use outdated versions of open source game console emulators?

Plex wants to be a profit-driven company, but their business model is piracy. They'll squeeze you for subscriptions, while making your experience worse to try and broker a peace deal with content owners.

So glad I installed jellyfin years ago and never bothered to set up Plex.

I got the Plex lifetime pass over 10 years ago for pretty cheap and Plex has served me well over the years. But it's just so damn bloated now and the biggest recent change to their android app is atrocious. The app is so laggy and slow now. And downloading movies to watch locally on a tablet is just painful.

So I decided to start experimenting with Jellyfin this month and I am blown away at how fast and snappy everything is. It still isn't as refined as Plex but there's something to be said about privacy and using FOSS apps.

I'll be using Jellyfin going forward now.

I know it's fashionable to shit on Plex here, but OP either has his server misconfigured or is just trying to stir the pot:

https://support.plex.tv/articles/202526943-plex-free-vs-paid/

Free to Use: Video (movies & TV) streaming of personal content on the same local network as the Plex Media Server

Longtime lifetime Plex Pass holder here.

FOSS is important. Having control over how you use your own hardware and files is important.

But even if none of that mattered, once I actually used Jellyfin for a few days the snappy bloat-free feel of it won me over. Switching between Plex and Jellyfin felt like switching between windows and linux.

Ah the weekly "Plex should be entirely free even though it's commercial software!"

y'all don't use jellyfin???

for music: navidrome

Something that's getting glossed over in these comments is the ability to easily watch or listen to friends' media.

I have my own library with about 1k movies, a bunch of anime and TV, and 10k albums. But I have like 6 or 7 friends with libraries even larger. My one friend has 37k albums, they all have thousands of movies I never even heard of, etc. It really makes it like my own mini streaming service, and I love throwing on a huge music library on shuffle via plexamp while driving to/from work.

I paid like $70 for a lifetime pass years ago, so I'm along for the ride I guess. I really rely on the music aspect of it, I haven't had a spotify subscription in like 7 years.

I know they changed a lot lately, and particularly what pisses me off is how vague and how they intentionally obfuscate how their model works now. I have friends that for years used my library, and recently have been like "I saw Plex started charging now so I stopped using it" and I have to be like "no it's still free because I have a lifetime pass". It's definitely just to trick people into getting monthly subscriptions.

Imagine wanting to charge to stream your own media with your own hardware and resources... Hey wait, we don't have to imagine it anymore, Plex already did it.

I forgot as I am a Plex Pass Lifetime user, and oh boy I'll be sure to milk that out (actually after all these years I think I have already done that) just to keep being an annoying stat for Plex and nothing else 🤣

Plex recently switched the remote watch thing to be behind a paywall. If your PC/App was also on the same local network it would probably work.

I know Plex is a business that has to make money, but if I hadn't bought a lifetime pass for $50 a decade ago, I'd have dropped them at this point.

Aaaand that’s one of the reasons why I got rid of Plex. “Bought” it, then they found some other feature to paywall. Bought that, then another feature. Then it stopped playing files of certain extensions through chromecast. Fuck that. Put together Jellyfin and moved my collection over. Zero trouble since.

I jumped ship early on. They didn't include skipping intros (or removed the plugin or the capability to use plugins, I don't remember).

Went to Jellyfin, took like 2 hours to figure out what's different. I don't even remember, are there any features worth it staying on Plex? At least I'm not missing anything.

Also for watch together you start a watch group and can watch a show episode for episode. Instead of having to open each episode separately and having everyone join again (but maybe Plex fixed this already, I wouldn't know).

Fellow jellyfin user 😍

For a perfect pairing, Jellyfin + Tailscale.

I don't get this? is this because I have a lifetime pass?

its pretty fucking easy to use jellyfin on any device after you have it set up. most platforms have it in their app store.