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Plex is a third party that needs to only look to know what you stream. Imagine that subpoena.
"They're all paid users, lmao, we have their billing addresses and names for you, Uncle Sam."
but Jellyfin!
-can be used over a private wireguard home VPN that only you can see.
but my friends
Teach a man to fish.
I could barely get my 78 year old mother in law to use Linux for web email after theming it like Windows.
How the heck am I going to get her to understand getting her roku to be VPN into my house for jellyfin when we're 1000+ miles away and trying to troubleshoot over her home phone?
(She doesn't even have a cell phone - for pictures she digs out her 20 year old digital camera, snaps a few pics, uploads them to her laptop, attaches them to an email, and only then do I get to see what she's seeing.)
Assuming you can remote into her laptop. Setup the vpn on it, set up a portforward rule to point back to your jellyfin over the vpn, set the roku to connect to the laptop.
Although technically possible - I can't imagine trying to troubleshoot that remotely. Or explaining that she can't watch Escape to the Country because her laptop battery died.
The alternative is to preconfig a mini pc and ship it to her have her plug it in and forget about it.
Or you could setup a proxy service and allow list her ip address block. Many ways to acheive remote access without much fuss from non techinals.
Cloudflare zero trust tunnel to your Plex server pointed at some domain.
I still use Plex, I have a lifetime pass and everything "just works" for my end users. Including Plexamp. Someday I expect to switch but it'll have to be when the end-user experience is just as easy and accessible.
Edit: Reading the article, even its author admits to sticking with Plex for now for similar reasons
Same yeah, I've even got jellyfin set up in parallel in case Plex ever goes to shit, I still end up going for Plex 99% of the time currently
I completely understand anyone that doesn't want to buy into it today, but the $75 I spent a decade and a half ago has been pretty good value for me
A private company that knows you pirate media has your name and billing address and you're calm as a cucumber?
Man.
A private company who's entire use case is facilitating streaming pirated media. The only time Plex blocks or exposes it's customers is the time the company completely implodes
All they know is what metadata is attached to the file. If you tag your home movies with metadata for the new Odyssey movie, you haven't broken any laws.
It literally plays through Plex's proxies and redirect network to get from A to B. Pretending they don't know is willfully ignorant. They need only take a peek, which they very well can.
This is fair. I'm not super comfortable with it. I really do hope to migrate away.
I thought people abandoned Plex years ago...
Plex uses a centralized auth system? Why would anyone even use this, it seems like a huge privacy issue.
The time to move is as soon as you learn about Jellyfin. I made the mistake of waiting 2 months.
Why the hell are you still on Plex.
Haven't found the thing yet that I couldn't just do with Kodi and a cobbled together NAS.
But all I use it for is making a local network to watch local and streamed content seamlessly on all the televisions and PCs in my house.
Jellyfin works beautifully on my Nas
Only reason I’m using Plex instead of Jellyfin is subtitle management. With Plex I get to just choose from the list instead of setting up the whole god damned ARR-stack.
You don't need all that in Jellyfin, there's a plugin for searching for subtitles. Although I use Bazaar to automate the process its not strictly necessary.
I don't think it's as complicated as setting up an arr stack (I know it was hyperbole, dw :p). Maybe it's because most of the films I aquire already come with subs, but surely there are plugins that make getting them fairly easy?
OP and Author here and didn't realise this had gotten so many comments here as I'd been busy at work and catching up today but want to thank you all for reading and have seen a few people in other places mentioning Emby but I guess it's really a full split between Plex and Jellyfin with the Emby faithful just chugging along with what they have. I'm still using Plex as I mentioned in the article, mainly for ease of use and PlexAmp. I still have Jellyfin running side by side testing out free IP TV streams online I found on GitHub as Plex seemed to choke and not really set up for doing that kind of thing. Once Jellyfin gets a bit more mature especially for metadata which people I know who use it seem to have a lot of trouble I may be closer to moving over but for now Plex just pips it to the post for my usage at least.
Has anyone used Plex in this decade?
Reading all the comments, apparently Makeshift0456 uses it a lot, and touches a lot of grass while doing it.
Please don't feed the troll.
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2026
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