Obviously they got outside pressure to remove this because of muh ease of piracy sharing
Honestly I really don’t like how self hosted streaming services have been lumped into the same category as piracy. I have no issue buying media. If the law says I can’t share it outside my household I will comply without arbitrary software locks.
My concern is that media companies will go after Jellyfin. They don’t really need to win all they need to due is bankrupt everyone involved.
Don’t worry, there are countries where it’s perfectly legal to rip your own physical media and use it in a digital library. There are some countries where it’s even legal to download a pirated digital copy of your owned media.
Jellyfin will remain, and even if the capitalist pigs try and go after it - which is already close to impossible - they’ll find shelter in a country with moral values.
Yeah that’s not how that works.
That’s exactly how it works.
I’ll sadly have to keep using Plex until jellyfish makes library sharing simple.
I have like 10 different family members using my server. If I have to do anything beyond just letting them log in to a plex account on the app to get access, they just won’t.
Isn’t it trivial to run both? You just point them at the same library right?
Is adding a URL too much? Jellyfin is also just login in addition to enter the server URL.
Yes. Even with Plex I’ve had people just never log in. Or after I log them in and set it as a favorite they just never go to the unfamiliar icon.
Most of the problem isn’t even Plex/Jellyfin/etc.'s fault, it’s that the UI of smart tvs is a nightmare hellscape running on underpowered hardware and people just want to interact with it as little as possible. The absolute best thing would be to copy Netflix/Disney/etc and throw a QR code on the screen to sidestep that by throwing authentication to the phone.
I mean fuck yeah, probably. I share with my family and I had to check their email for them to prove that they received it.
Yes. Anything harder than Netflix is too much
But it’s easier. Instead of “Netflix” you type “yourdomain.com.” And no payment or whatever needed, and it has the same login process as Netflix.
That’s it. I call mine “media.mydomain.com,” and my domain is really easy to remember.
I have like 10 different family members using my server. If I have to do anything beyond just letting them log in to a plex account on the app to get access, they just won’t.
Umm that is all you need to do with jellyfin. You can setup wizarr and give them invites to create an account or just manually make them and give out the info to people.
Yup, took my SO like 10s to get on our Jellyfin server. No issues here.
I haven’t tried Plex but Jellyfin is super easy. Type in IP, username and password and you’re done. Only need to setup port forwarding on the router to make it work.
You need a network level solution. You could pickup a few cheap single board computers and setup Tailscale or Netbird to route traffic back to your server.
What hell is wrong with these idiots?
They took private investment.
Don’t spend time maintaining niche features seems smart.
I would agree if the features they did work on made sense.
How come every time I open Plex there is another social media integration, yet device downloads haven’t worked for literal years.
Plex itself is niche software, offering niche features is why Plex gained popularity, watch together is a great feature, I often use when I’m cleaning house so I can watch a show even as I move around rooms, same thing when cooking, which let’s the person in the kitchen watch while others may be in the living room.
Dang that’s sucks, I never used it but it’s neat in concept
Jellyfin is love, Jellyfin is life.
It’s bad. But it’s the best we’ve got.
Speak for yourself, Jellyfin has been awesome for me. Fantastic piece of software.
Extremely slow and clunky UI on Android. Music has no star rating as every other software including Plex and Navidrome has. It sometimes starts transcoding for no apparent reason.
Not perfect but the best we’ve got.
Jellyfin is the sever bro. You can implement your own client and choose from a pretty decent variety of clients on Android and most platforms. Only Android TV really suffers from required first party support, but the api is documented and we encourage you to make your own or port it to whatever front end you’d like.
Why are there official clients then? Better not to provide any client at all than bad clients based on the web UI.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of open source. This is something someone made for the community out of the goodness of their heart and a desire to create. You can build on top of it or use it as a base and completely remake it if you want, but they’re not making money off this… So your attitude towards them and what they’re offering to everyone for free is honestly quite rude and entitled.
I understand the purpose of open-source. I can voice my opinion and say the software isn’t good in some ways. The developer should be able to handle criticism.
I have had a plex instance but when they started adding their own movies and crapola into it, and requiring logins and etc etc etc I started keeping a Jellyfin instance live as a hedge. I still use Plex primarily, but use Jellyfin and keep it patched just in case. If there’s any kind of ugly action with Plex, I feel like my bets are pretty well hedged. Plex definitely has a lot more polish than Jellyfin, but I wouldn’t doubt if there is a rug-pull in some way or another. After all, Plex sold a bunch of lifetime subscriptions ONCE but they still end up paying to support those. Sooner or later they are going to want more money again.
I used to use Plex as well but similar to your remarks, they started doing a lot more updates that added a “corporate” feel to it such as adding their own movies/tv. Nothing inherently wrong with that but in my opinion, when a platform has the option to add features such as that, that costs money. And they’re gonna want to get that money back somehow. Yeah they offer subscriptions but to me this all was a redflag that I could see them taking further in the future. Where as Jellyfin is completely free at the cost of a little extra work to setup.
Lame. I’ve used this feature a lot. It feels like such a basic thing to include.
SharePlay is a standard feature in Apple devices, and it handles it. But only in supported apps.
The pandemic showed how nice such a feature can be for a lot of people.
Switch to jellyfin, it’s really at the point where it’s ready for everyone
I run both Plex and Jellyfin. Jellyfin is ready for everyone who doesn’t have to deal with the Mother-in-Law Factor. Plex has an easy setup process, and I could walk my MIL through it on my phone. In 5 minutes, her TV was connected to my server.
Jellyfin isn’t to that point yet, and likely never will be. Since there’s no centralized server for an app to phone home to, there’s no way to create a unified account creation/login experience. Jellyfin is nice as a “just for me” server. But as soon as I have to help others use it, it becomes a nightmare. Walking my MIL through setting up Jellyfin on her TV was the reason I re-installed Plex in the first place.
I had finally converted my wife away from using paid streaming apps, and dealt with all of the “Why do I have to use three different apps to access it on my three different devices? They all look different and are harder to use” complaints. By the time it got around to my MIL, I was tired of dealing with it and just reinstalled Plex so people could have a consistent experience.
I still use Jellyfin for my personal viewing because I prefer it. But saying “just ditch Plex, Jellyfin is ready now” is a little disingenuous. Jellyfin is ready for the people who want to use it. But if you’re trying to convince people to ditch their streaming apps, you’re fighting a lot of social inertia. You need to be able to provide a consistent experience across their different devices, with a decent login experience. And Jellyfin definitely isn’t there yet.
I dunno, I found it easier to move my family to JF.
I made them a bunch of accounts and sent them via signal.
For my mum I logged in as her and configured everything how she would want.
I didnt have to explain to anybody that remote stream needs to be unlimited bandwidth for better performance.
If mum forgets her password I can reset it.
To log her TV in we used quick connect where I had her enter the 6 digit code on the tv.
We used SyncPlay to watch a movie together.
I’m in the same boat, I use Jellyfin where I can but Plex is still so much better for sharing, especially with non-technical people so I run both. Really hoping the Jellyfin folks realize they can sell a relay service to make some money and fund their development to improve the app. Seems to be working well for Homeassistant!
Thank you for being a voice of reason. People here are completely out of touch from reality
Lemmy has a lot of really outspoken FOSS enthusiasts. It sort of goes hand in hand with the whole “anyone can spin up their own instance” idea that Lemmy is built upon. Same reason there are so many Linux users here. But that also means you need to take any sort of “just switch to the FOSS version it’s basically the same thing” posts with a grain of salt.
I tried spinning up my own Lemmy instance. Everything was configured properly, but I could not get it working. Mind you, I run lots of things that take more than a drop-in compose.yml, so I’m not sure what I was doing wrong 🤔
Jellyfin is not there yet but it definitely can be. It can be done pretty easily without any centralised server.
- Sending people magic links to their accounts on their phones that auto log them into Jellyfin.
- Make IP dictionary to have people type “cat mug door end” which pings the server with a login from an IP.
- Show QR code.
- Scan with an authorised app which pings the server to authorise the device on behalf of the user.
It’s passwordless 4 word input + phone scan that can be optimised for TV pretty heavily since you only need make something 10^12 unique to account for all IPv4.
It will take around 15-30 hours to code though for a person familiar with Jellyfin on android TV and server.
It’s really not hard though, it’s just entering a domain name. If you pick a decent one, it can be very memorable.
All of my stuff is at “thing.domain.com.” For Jellyfin, it’s “media.mydomain.com.” Nextcloud is “cloud.mydomain.com.” Actual Budget is “budget.domain.com.” Enter that, then you’re good. Repeat on any device.
Is that really a barrier for people? Surely this is sufficient:
- Install Jellyfin app
- Enter domain.com
- Login
Do that once and you’re good pretty much forever.
I’ve used the website, android app, and WebOS app, and they all work pretty similarly, not sure what’s confusing there.
Is the Plex experience significantly different?
My friends and I use syncplay + mpv for this. It works well, and even though it’s designed around local file playback, you can add https URLs to the playlist. So this with nginx serving the files has been a great solution.
You can even play YouTube videos by adding yt-dlp to mpv, but that doesn’t reliably work right now as far as I can tell.
Jellyfin has much better Syncplay than plex
release announcement:
Is there some trick to get it to work properly? Everytime I tried to use it, it works fine for like 10 minutes and then everyone desyncs to hell.
It’s still better than Plex’s which didn’t work at all though.
I personally had really huge problems in the beginning with this feature, it depends on the file format, if it needs to be transcoded, if the subs are external or in the video container and what your users are watching it on.
I can give you some advice on what to look for, but it will come down to just tinkering with the settings until you find something that works for you the best.
Hardware acceleration is quite important, especially when there are like 6 people watching at once and 4 of them just refuse to watch it using the jellyfin desktop client that actually supports direct play feature (video does not need to be transcoded).
Switching languages of subtitles sometimes mess things up, especially when the subtitles need to be extracted from the video container and then sent separately. Sometimes it just lags the video for up to two seconds. It usually just messes with one person that then is a few seconds behind so not a big deal. Although I recommend setting languages in the very beginning so it does not break sync mid-way.
I also limited the thread count of the single ffmpeg stream to just one. Then i also limited the stream buffer to like 5 minutes so it just won’t try to prepare a 4k movie for one person for the next several minutes. From my experience anyways, when we were watching some movie that is quite big, the jelly went bananas and a single user just maxed out the CPU and GPU. Ever since I set those limits, while also having the hardware acceleration enabled, the sync-play feature caused me little to no trouble. — One of my friends has a slow internet that sometimes likes to drop things on the way and when his net drops out totally, it usually causes some issues and he then has to restart the browser tab. Although rare, it still happens from time to time.
I have an Intel i5 8400 and a UHD Graphics 630. The performance is good enough for my uses and movies play without issues even when 6 people are watching while my dad sits on tv while also watching something else.
Oh yes, now there are also a few other things to worry about. Make sure to check the maximum per-user bitrate the jelly will enable the users to watch. It’s 40Mbps by default, I think. And you do not really need anything above it anyways, especially if streaming over the public internet.
The second thing is having a Nvidia GPU. From what I heard, the consumer graphics card can have up to 3 consecutive video streams running at once. But since I do not have anything Nvidia, I can’t really care, tho I would strongly recommend you checking the GPU limitations including both the encoder/decoder limits and the codec support. This will help you set the buffer limits and codec support.
So full wrap, you’ll just have to monitor your server’s vitals and see if there is a bottleneck. Check your users client compatibility, see if the GPU or CPU is maxed out or if your ISP just isn’t giving you a big enough pipe. It just comes down to tinkering.
It’s not currently my own jellyfin server but I am looking to set up one soon. Thanks for the huge write up though, it’ll be very helpful when I eventually get to it. So far whenever I searched it up, I just found a lot of complaints on GitHub with not much solutions, so I really appreciate it.
Well I’ll just hope you’ll find something that works for you.
Ah, strange.
I’ve never had any issues, but I also haven’t used it in a while.
Might be related to transcoding/sub-burning? https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/issues/6210
It was a cool idea, but I could never get it to sync everyone’s playback properly without constant buffering for all involved. We just sync manually by counting down from 3.
I never used that feature. Sometimes less is more. Anyone actively using it in plex or Jelly?
Probably around 40% of my watching is via syncplay on Jellyfin, as I like watching with buddies.
Sans jellyfin you have to find a way for both of you to access the same file/stream and manually sync across snack/bathroom breaks or use the external and separate syncplay app.
I do like the external syncplay app but if I’m going to have to get the file to them anyways, why not just stream it synced? In my mind this is a really convenient feature.
It is not perfect, in my experience;
- on rare occasions, it gets ‘stuck’ and won’t sync correctly, so one will play but noth the other, pausing one unpauses the other, etc. Usually rebooting helps, but if not, I just manually sync
- there was 1 occassion which made no sense. I played a movie with a friend, we were watching together, but they were ahead of me by a whole ~15 minutes by the end of the film. Neither of us felt it was fast/slow or skipping anything.
- I haven’t had luck using syncplay on my TV. The feature exists but it doesn’t actually work.
But these are rare, minor gripes IMO. I’m glad Jellyfin has this feature.
Thanks for sharing
I never used it, but it was a popular third party add-on before the feature was integrated.
Yeah I don’t even used the SharePlay on Apple. Question for people using it: How do you start that? First do you start over phone/whatsapp/messengers? Or do you see people online in plex and propose to watch? For me either people are in different timezone so not practical or will be home and we watch it irl sync on the same tv.
I text my buddy, and say “hey do you wanna watch xyz, when you’re done with work?”. We hop on discord to chat and watch it. An hour or two timezone is not an issue, and for someone ‘local’ I’m probably not driving half an hour to their house after work. I do prefer watching together in-person, but thats not always as convenient.
“We’ve spent two years requiring our apps from the ground up to boost our development speed, which should enable us to bring new features to you more efficiently, across more platforms,”
… “and that’s why we’re deleting a bunch of features never to bring them back. Because we’re just so efficient!” Crazy how many companies use this awful excuse.
Also is that a misquote by the author or did they really write “requiring”?
Removing old features so we can bring them back as paid features later on.
Misquotes are unlikely thanks to copy-paste. The post from Plex has been edited, so I think it was to correct that typo.
More often than not that is corporate speak for “we fired the old team and replaced them with cheaper workers. And we didn’t want to pay them to learn the old code/they tried but failed, so we are dumping features now”
Ah, that makes sense. I didn’t realize we had asked for a new UI, here I was thinking we just wanted basic quality of life updates
It’s wild to me. I’ve been in software development for almost 8 years now. The number one thing that we’re told across both companies (one small company and one huge company) is to not remove existing features or APIs.
LoL. That feature is literally the only reason I also have a Plex docker pointing to my library. But they’ve definitely not been supporting it for a while, because I don’t think it’s worked well in forever. Last few times I tried it with friends, we ended up having to just try to hit play at the same time.
Oh well. One less container now.
I’m seeing a lot of love for Jellyfin in the comments. Seems like Jellyfin is finally mature enough to give a real shot.
Does anyone know how Emby is doing in relation to Plex feature parity?
I can confirm jellyfin is great… But I have moved onto burning onto physical Media (BD) to avoid HDD / SSD failure with data loss
Why not both? BD for backup, Jellyfin for convenience.
I have both currently but it’s an HDD so it won’t last forever
That’s what RAID is for. When a disk fails, hopefully you’re fast enough with the replacement so the array never fails.
It’s only a single extern HDd from western digital
Optical disks rot even in perfect storage conditions. There’s no failure proof storage solution easily available.
Yeah disc rot is a problem… But luckily it’s A LOT longer (50-100 years)
This is compared to HDD (6 years) and SSD (10 years)
Emby I feel is more mature then jellyfin in the sense of every device my family or I have just works on emby but has some issues on jellyfin. Also emby has features closer to plex that jellyfin doesn’t have, like offline downloads and, at least in the emby beta, smart playlists. Jellyfin gives you more settings options for things like transcoding and per user settings than emby or plex. Both programs do some things better than plex too, like scheduling individual server tasks or outright disabling them. Overall from my experience a direct competitor to plex right now is emby while I would say a few more features are needed for jellyfin to be a direct competitor.
That’s interesting, I wonder why no one in these comments mentioned it if it’s a bit farther along than Jellyfin. Maybe just good word-of-mouth marketing?
Jellyfin is actually open source and free. Totally self hosted. Emby is closed source and has a licensing model similar to Plex’s.
Ah, that would do it! Thanks for the information.
Maybe I’m not understanding offline downloads, but I’m able to download media on jellyfin and watch it offline.
Do you mean on an iPhone or android device or only on pc? And have it set to download x amount of episodes and when you watch an episode download the next one automatically? When I checked out jellyfin a few months ago that wasn’t a feature
I’m doing it on my android. Don’t have an iPhone to debug sadly. I click on the three dots next to the episode and it is an option there. Just checked and I can also do it by the season. I am on an administrator account