Where’s Jellyfin failing the spouse test? My spouse preferred it to Plex because she could turn off all the crap on the home screen.
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cm0002@lemmy.world 2 months agoWith Usenet, Plex* (Streaming Server), Radarr (automated movie downloading) and Sonarr (automated TV downloading and management) it’s never been easier!
*Plex is currently on a slow path of enshittification and the only other good alternative, Jellyfin, still has some ways to go before it can pass “The Spouse Test”. I myself have only had Jellyfin in testing and not yet replaced Plex with it. But that day is coming. Jellyfin is well under active development and I have no doubt it will get to feature and stability parity with Plex
SirDerpy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 months ago
After looking at this list I’d like to pre-qualify what I’m about to say: I have jellyfin and like it, I use jellyfin regularly. I have it pointed to the same catalog as Plex and if Plex ever gets thoroughly enshitified I will leave it for jellyfin
The biggest things I’ve seen (in decreasing order of pain):
transcoding can fail on media that Plex has no problems with
Jellyfin is significantly worse at detecting names and properly assigning metadata. Jellyfin does not have the same ease of fixing that when it happens that Plex has.
I’m not going to go through all the work to reverse proxy it. Nor do I trust opening it to the internet. So for her to access it outside the house she’s going to be using tailscale. Kind of just extra steps for the sake of extra steps.
Finamp is a poor replacement for Plexamp, Don’t get me wrong I love the fan project but it’s not anywhere near as good, and it becomes quite painful to use on large audio catalogs.
The Roku client doesn’t have any method to mark things as watched or unwatched or modified playlisted items.
I dislike the sections being static one row high and then having to rotate left and right through multiple things when they could just wrap.
I am super amazed that the project runs as well as it does. It’s a monumental piece of open source work, but there’s a lot of polish problems and I’m not qualified to help them fix them.
LovingHippieCat@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Quick notes from an avid jellyfin user. When you have a show or movie or whatever you want, not get identified, there’s a simple identify option you can do on the client on a computer or phone by clicking the 3 dots on the media. You get to search and label it. The only time this hasn’t appropriately assigned metadata for me was for shows with duplicate episodes in one mkv or whatever. That did take a lot of renaming, which did suck and is reasonable to not want to have to do. Especially for massive libraries.
I definitely agree about the roku client not having a marked as watched feature, that should be added.
There’s a lot of work to be done but it’s not just being done in the basic edition. For instance, there’s plugins that allow the skip credits and skip intro functions you want. And there’s ones for fanart, and allowing other databases of Metadata to select from. There’s a lot of plugins and more are being actively developed rather often. Even I’m trying to develop a “continue watching” feature like from Netflix, but it’s going slowly.
Jellyfin definitely takes more finagling than plex, i switched at the beginning of the year, but I’ve had multiple times since where my internet is out and because jellyfin is local network I’m still able to stream my media.
So yeah. Just some info about jellyfin. I get wanting the ease of plex, but I’ve personally really enjoyed adding the plugins and fucking around with everything it has.
linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I want to go and look at the plugins I wasn’t aware that some of that stuff was available. I was an avid plug-in user until Plex pulled that from me.
cm0002@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Just general glitchiness, odd UI design choices etc. Def needs more polish
When I say Spouse Test I mean from the context of a spouse who just “doesn’t do computers”, if your spouse is technically inclined at all, say as a PC gamer or something and has dealt with sometimes-kinda-annoying software and has some patience, then they’ll probably be fine with it
SirDerpy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This makes sense. I had to poke around the UI to figure it out. And, the client occasionally needs rebooted or the cache cleared. I can see how some users would have trouble.
I’d suggest that teaching those users is probably easier than setting up Plex today and then setting up Jellyfin as an emergency service when Plex inevitably begins ad injection or introduces a paywall for local streaming.
dil@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I dipped my toes in the self-hosted route and would recommend Stremio + Torrentio + RealDebrid as a much simpler alternative.
Here’s a guide I used - you can probably have it up and running in less than an hour.
Major points:
- Easy setup, easy to use
- Low cost at <$35/year
- Can not share accounts (specifically, RD limits to one ongoing stream at a time)
- Limited customization
I have very limited self hosting experience, and between getting my first hello world service running, problems with my ISP, sorting through the different ways to get content, and not already having TBs if hard drives sitting around, I found it to be pretty challenging.
If you’re already experienced in self hosting (or want to learn) and don’t mind the storage costs, then I’d recommend the Plex/Jellyfin route, but if you just want an alternative to the existing streaming services then I’d suggest looking into Stremio.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Seconded. I’ve used this exact setup for years. I understand it isn’t “pure” from a piracy perspective, not the most ideal, in-the-weeds setup, but it sure does just work.
Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
You can always use the older, well established, actively developed, and stable project that Jellyfin is built from; Emby. (Jellyfin is literally Embys code from 10+ years ago)
cm0002@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yea no. FUCK Emby and their bullshit, Emby is the next Plex and not in a good way. I was there 10 years ago when Jellyfin split off, so AFAIC there are only 2 viable streaming software, Plex and Jellyfin. Emby is dead to me.
Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I’m curious to know why you think/feel that way.
I found/started using personal streaming solutions around 8 years ago; so post-Emby/MediaBrowser split into Jellyfin.
While I started with Plex, I very quickly came to despise their always online/centralized authentication system and moved to Emby as the only alternative I’d seen/heard of at the time. From there I learned of Jellyfin and (at least some of) it’s origins; though I’ve had 0 reason/need/desire to actually install Jellyfin as Emby works fantastically.
I’ve been really quite happy with Emby; particularly with their stance of not tracking/collecting userdata and maintaining Emby as a private company focused on their customers instead of investors/partners. I understand some people don’t like the Premiere licensing model they use; but I think it’s a good way for the developers to ensure stable income for their work; and TBH, especially with the lifetime purchase option, I think it’s undervalued. Unfortunately that model is not compatible with opensource (as users just fork it to remove the paywall), which is why Jellyfin exists from what I understand.
cm0002@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This is going to go back quite a ways, and much of knowledge is old at this point so some details might be off.
~15 years ago Plex as we know it started out as an OSX fork of the 0G Xbox homebrew software XBMC (Later renamed Kodi (For those who don’t know, XBMC was XBox Media Center and would turn the 0g Xbox into the cheapest Home Theater PC you could get at the time, man those were the days lol))
Plex was only briefly open source and then was quickly closed when they incorporated a year or so after they had something functional. They never made any promises about not charging or being open source or anything, so that’s why I’m generally fine with Plex
Sometime around 2012ish Emby came along as THE open source alternative to Plex and things were good. MOST of it was supposed to stay open source as was promised. From the beginning they kept build scripts n such closed source, probably should have caught on them, but heh ya know hindsight and all that.
Then around 2014/5 they took it all closed source, relicensed it and introduced their paywall including locking away already existing features. This is what pissed me and many others off and this is when and why Jellyfin split off promising to be truly fully open source forever. (There was a ton of drama about it at the time, but it looks like Embys Q&A thing a bit back doesn’t even bother to mention it, imagine that lol)
I don’t have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself, but the way they went about it…yea. fuck em
linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Jellyfin pased my spouse test for local network.
I put her on tailscale for remote access but she’s not a big fan of that.
Petter1@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Why not having your own wireguard endpoint at home? Then you could additionally filter ads using adguard at home and on the go.
linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I have tailscale at home I could use an exit node. My family doesn’t want ad blocking because then they don’t get their ads for their free to play games.
Honestly the biggest reason not to use VPN home for everything as every time you swap cell phone towers your IP changes and you renegotiate. It’s not so bad when I’m using something that buffers, so it’s also not so bad when I’m driving, but when a passengers loading a website or playing a game with ads and the ads which are already 30 seconds take an extra 30 seconds to load they get all grumpy.
It’s good thinking though I have totally tried to sell people on that
Petter1@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I am constantly connected to my VPN at home if my iPhone is not connected to a WiFi in white list, and I use an IP white list, including DNS, to go through the tunnel and I play no adware games 😂I guess that is why it works so well for me. But nice to know why VPN on phone behaves like it does if you route everything through it. I think have experienced that before, when I forgot to disable the third party VPN I use to spoof location.
freeman@feddit.org 2 months ago
Same. Wish the world had already adopted ipv6
Petter1@lemm.ee 2 months ago
That is a meme by now😂do it!
AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.social 2 months ago
Is it not safe to expose externally with ssl yet?
linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m not worried about SSL. I’m worried about a rapidly developed open source project with lots of changes and lots of cooks in the kitchen. All it takes is a buffer overflow and one of a thousand libraries they’re using. I don’t know that they have a dedicated security team or even anyone really looking at that.
I wouldn’t be so worried but it needs to have access to my media which is outside of my DMZ.
And I don’t want to put my media into my DMZ.
Damage@feddit.it 2 months ago
I put through the reverse proxy and so far I haven’t had any issues
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
Same, mine passed the test. But used only locally.