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 Plex’s 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/

  • Luca@feddit.itEnglish
    544·
    2 days ago

    Can someone clue me in on the reason why anyone would prefer Plex instead of Jellyfin?

    • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
      571·
      2 days ago

      There are a LOT of pros and cons.

      Pros:

      • Developed by a professional, multi-disciplined full-time team with some security oversight.
      • Hosted caching of The Movie DB for faster lookups
      • Provision of SSL communication to and from your server without any special setup
      • FREE EPG data caching
      • Centralized server management from the web
      • Low-speed relay for those stuck behind CGNAT.
      • A REALLY solid mobile audio*** player (sorry, but plexamp beats the pants off the JF alternatives)
      • Centralized Login for your friends and family with email-based password reset
      • 2FA already set up
      • A nice reflector gauge to see if your* ports are open and what your limits are
      • Great client support on a LOT of devices
      • Search is fast out of the box, even with extensive collections
      • Their clients tend to do a better job supporting all the decoding features on every player
      • Very reasonable Tuner support (but somewhat ugly) **

      Cons:

      • Not free
      • Not Open
      • They have a lot of your historical data and will eventually sell it when they sell the company. This is not going to be optional. That data is worth a lot and they likely already have enough EULA rights to sell it to whoever asks. Imagine if the MPAA gets in on the fun.
      • Their security history is quite dicey
      • The lifetime membership will eventually be enshitified as it’s not economically sound in the long run
      • They constantly change the terms of the agreement.
      • They constantly remove features people are using
      • They constantly push to share data between users
      • They constantly push Ads
      • They are making previously free features pay.
      • Their investors are starving, which makes them a liability.
      • Their clients are generally slower.

      edit: * a word ** forgot to shout out for the tuner support *** replaced media with audio for clarity

    • Muffi@programming.devEnglish
      182·
      2 days ago

      I am a die-hard Jellyfin user, but I still haven’t found a proper way to index and stream my music library with it. As far as i know, Plex is still better at that.

      • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
        82·
        2 days ago

        I dropped my library in, Jellyfin indexed it and streamed first try. What didn’t work for you?

          • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            I don’t think jellyfin does any tagging for you. Pretty sure you can edit it, but it’s not automatic. I use lidarr and mp3tag for that. Maybe musicbrainz picard on a rare occasion, if I’ve got a bunch of files that need to be identified first.

            • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
              5·
              2 days ago

              Not OP, I’ve kinda had a middle of the road experience with it.

              I run JF and Plex on the same shares.

              I dropped 10k tracks on it and a bunch of audiobooks, my stuff is 100% tagged.

              I use tailscale to get to the server because here’s no Nat Holepunching going on.

              I try to use it as much possible for audio, but some days, I just give in and use plexamp (like a guilty pleasure)

              cons:

              • It has issues with displaying some of the songs, they’re tagged right but you just can’t find some of it. They’re all Discogs coded, so there’s not even a lot of extra characters.
              • It doesn’t always remember where in a book I am,
              • It has no idea about collections of book files.
              • Search is very slow, (yes there is a plugin for this, yes it’s complicated enough I haven’t tried it yet)
              • Scrolling a large list is stupid low, it should just stream everything text into ram and bring thumbs in on demand
              • Finamp: Finamp is barely a wrapper for the JF engine to the point that they can’t implement effects or crossfade without the feature being added in JF first. But JF is just using a ready-to-go library to play music, so changes to JF require upstream library updates. Audio development feels stagnant.
              • Finamp scrolling loads one letter at a time. Scroll to Z? you get to wait, A…B…C…D…E…F…G…H…I…J…K…L…M…N…O…P…Q…R…T…U…V…W…X…Y…Z, no skipsies. It literally takes me a couple of minutes to go to songs that start with Z.
              • Plugin installs are complicated and poorly documented, and compatibility with versions is dicey
              • Finamp: If you lose the network in the middle of a song, you can soft-lock the app.
              • Finamp: occasionally crashes if left for a long play session on my late-model Android phone.
              • No options to cast.
              • No listening through a NAT without port forwarding (which is dicey without a security team)
              • No 2FA
              • Finamp?: Shuffle is too random, you can get the same song to play twice in a couple of minutes. it needs to pull at least a couple of hours of list and shuffle that, rather than random play.

              pros:

              • It’s free
              • It works good enough-ish for a daily car ride.
              • It has some form of limited home-grown fail2ban
              • The developers are super nice people.
              • I exported my Plex playlists and used some Python to turn them into m3u lists, which worked fine. (Would be a cool feature to import from Plex)
              • Playlist and Shuffle work mostly fine.
            • SupremeDonut@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              2 days ago

              Can this edit the metadata in bulk? I’ll have to give it another shot. I’m pretty sure the album artist was the the problem, and I couldnt just delete that bit.

        • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
          11·
          1 day ago

          I dropped my music library into Jellyfin just as an extra. I’ve built up quite a collection over the years of CDs and always rip and tag them as I acquire new CDs, so while the collection is a little messy it’s sizable and mostly correctly tagged

          Jellyfin’s music playback has been buggy but getting better with updates. At the current rate of improvement it’ll probably be really good in a 2-4 years, but right now it’s kinda meh. It exists but it’s buggy enough that I don’t use it much

      • RyeBread@feddit.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        I’ve recently had really good luck with Finamp on Android at least. With the recent support of time lyrics in Jellyfin and Finamp’s redesign I’ve been using that to stream my Flac audio files. Works quite well with separate collections as well. Though, to this day I still have to force close it more times than I like to get the UI to refresh after closing it. Plexamp was tough to lose when I swapped many years ago, but the third party space has slowly been closing that gap over the years.

    • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
      151·
      2 days ago

      I think it mostly comes down to sharing stuff with others.

      There’s a lot of stuff in Jellyfin you wouldn’t want to expose to the internet.

      No idea if Jellyfin even has a client for my dad’s shonky old 4K TV, but I certainly wouldn’t be able to set up Wireguard or anything on it.

    • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      Sunk cost. It took me loosing my Plex watch history to say fuck it I’m going to Jellyfin.

      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        I saw several solutions on Github that could migrate it.
        Assuming you use/-d trakt you could use that to re-import the watch history

    • rothaine@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      Years ago, I tried out Jellyfin (Emby at the time) and it couldn’t do chromecasting with subtitles (probably fixed by now, this was a long time ago). Since I wanted to watch anime, I bought a Plex lifetime subscription instead, and I’m too lazy to switch.

    • LiveLM@lemmy.zipEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      People commonly cite more polished clients and clients available on obscure platforms like legacy smart TVs and such

    • Zoidsberg@lemmy.caEnglish
      123·
      2 days ago

      The lack of a PS5 app makes Jellyfin useless to me. We have a dumb TV with no casting ability so the PlayStation is out media box.

      • Xanza@lemm.eeEnglish
        11·
        2 days ago

        Chromecast. Regular is cheap, and grab the 4K one if you wanna stream higher quality movies. Cost you less than $100.

        • PieMePlenty@lemmy.worldEnglish
          61·
          2 days ago

          I generally agree with you and its what I did, but why do i need yet another device plugged in, draining power all the time? I dont want to leave an even larger co2 footprint and software support on existing hardware could aid in that. The android box is a workaround, not a green enough solution in my opinion.

          • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pubEnglish
            31·
            2 days ago

            Because of proprietary garbage, copyright law and enshittification. Sony wants you to use the software its bribers pay it to support, another symptom of our dystopian, profiteering world.

            I sometimes think Jellyfin gets on Roku devices because none of the little snots at Roku’s corporate office have taken notice, fallen through the cracks and forgotten about.

            If it’s any benefit to you, the Android box being Android allows it to sip power at an LED bulb’s level of efficiency when it’s idle.

            • 1hitsong@lemmy.mlEnglish
              3·
              2 days ago

              I sometimes think Jellyfin gets on Roku devices because none of the little snots at Roku’s corporate office have taken notice, fallen through the cracks and forgotten about.

              🤫

    • DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      113·
      2 days ago

      They’re going to sell the data to movie companies so they can find out what is being pirated

      I fuckin guarantee it.

      Trakt did the same thing I bet

    • MaggiWuerze@feddit.orgEnglish
      52·
      2 days ago

      User sharing without opening my Plex server to the public internet. For Jellyfin I would have to become a VPN provider and allow people into my private network to share it safely, since you wouldn’t want to have Jellyfin available to the internet with their stance on security

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
      96·
      2 days ago

      Because Jellyfin et al are all still very much “open source projects” in terms of UI/UX and it is still “missing” so many features.

      For me? The big reasons why I just use plex boil down to:

      1. Maybe 80% of the time, I can cache an episode or a movie locally on my tablet when I am going on travel. This is great if I am doing a rewatch of something or don’t super care about The Experience and just want to watch the next few episodes of a show in the evening. With Plex, this is trivial. With SOME of the third party jellyfin apps, this can be sort of worked around but then becomes a hassle to sync watch statistics (which episodes were watched or even where I left off because a buddy wanted to go out for drinks).
      2. Remote watching is similarly a mess. Plex has pretty okay-good systems to treat my home server as a “cloud” resource with a single forwarded port. While even that is very questionable security wise, Jellyfin is still “figure it out yourself”. Which can be done with setting up a vpn or using Tailscale but adds additional complexities.
      3. Plenty of other “quirks” along similar lines

      My personal opinion? For something that only “tech savvy” people are using more or less locally, Jellyfin is fine. For something that “just works”? There is no competition with Plex. And considering how many of the Jellyfin workarounds end up being “just download a copy of the file locally and watch it in VLC”… why would I use Jellyfin at all in that case when I could otherwise just mount a samba share or use Kodi (that is the latest incarnation of XBMC or whatever the samba share frontend we all used to watch porn on our playstations was, right?).

      To be clear. I check in on Jellyfin probably every other year at this point? I WANT an alternative to Plex. But… Jellyfin ain’t it.

      • ginopilotino@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        I feel exactly the same as you, but i’d like to add a number 4 point: Plex has an offical app for every system/SO

    • moseschrute@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      2 days ago

      I’ve been a Plex user. Honestly it was mostly because I chose Plex years ago before a lot of the recent controversy. Plex always seemed like it had a nicer interface, though I never really gave Jellyfin a try. As of late, Plex has started to add a lot of bloat to their interface, so at this point Jellyfin’s UI might actually be a pro.

    • scottywh@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      2 days ago

      I’ve tried Jellyfin and the Live TV / tuner interface sucked so bad I didn’t want to bother with it any further. Maybe I could have found plugins or some shit to make it more usable but I’ve had a lifetime Plex pass for almost a decade and it still works great

      Yes, they’ve made a number of decisions that truly suck in that time but it’s still better than the experience I had with Jellyfin or Emby, even recently.

    • NotKyloRen@lemmy.zipEnglish
      31·
      2 days ago

      Can I ask why nobody recommends Emby? I’ve been using it for years with zero issues. The only thing I can think of is that Jellyfin exists and is free. Emby is sort of a middleground between Plex and Jellyfin; it has a paid license (lifetime option exists), but it’s closer to Jellyfin than Plex on the whole.

        • NotKyloRen@lemmy.zipEnglish
          5·
          2 days ago

          Do you mind elaborating on that? It sounds like I got in on Emby after the rugpull. It works fine for me and I use it without the Connect (online account) feature.

            • NotKyloRen@lemmy.zipEnglish
              11·
              2 days ago

              Thanks for the info. I’m sure it’ll also be useful to others reading the comments.

              This sucks because, functionally-wise I have zero issues with Emby. But morally, this bothers me a lot. I thought it was going to just be because of the license (I think I paid $99 around Christmas a few years ago for a Lifetime license).

              Guess I’ll be switching to Jellyfin then and donating to the project. If I paid for Emby, there’s no reason I can’t donate to a free, open-source project being developed and maintained by volunteers.

            • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
              1·
              1 day ago

              Seeing the person chewing out folks for calling for a fork is pretty funny in hindsight. They aren’t wrong, but now they’re the recorded naysayer in a pivotal moment for a major open source project. It’s like anyone who said Open Office shouldn’t be forked when Open Office was purchased by Oracle. Now Open Office is abandonware with only functionally useless commits and multiple unpatched security issues and Libre Office has completely replaced it

      • Luffy@lemmy.mlEnglish
        74·
        2 days ago

        If you are advanced enough to run a docker image with Plex, you can do the same with Jellyfin

        • Luca@feddit.itEnglish
          2·
          1 day ago

          You don’t even have to use docker for Jellyfin, you can install the server as a regular program

        • Nutteman@lemmy.worldEnglish
          42·
          2 days ago

          My first time fucking around with Plex did NOT include docker. I googled what docker was like 9 times over the course of stupid few months cause I just didnt understand it. Now I do, and I run it via a docker stack but very very few beginners are gonna go for docker.

            • infinitesunrise@slrpnk.netEnglish
              3·
              2 days ago

              You can run plexserver as a service outside of docker. That’s how I ran it years ago, before I got comfortable with docker.

            • Nutteman@lemmy.worldEnglish
              4·
              2 days ago

              Since I originally started using it on my everyday use Windows PC via an exe, no I did not hahahaha. Now I have it running in Open Media Vault on my NAS.

      • golden_zealot@lemmy.mlEnglish
        42·
        2 days ago

        I went to the Jellyfin landing page, went to the install instructions, copy pasted and ran literally one command, opened it in a browser, made my local account, clicked a button to point it at my media folders and then I was done.

        What isn’t easy?

        • JordanZ@lemmy.worldEnglish
          21·
          2 days ago

          Sharing it with people outside your house. Added hardships if behind CGNAT.

          I’ll edit this…sharing it securely outside of your house. Just port forwarding to the box and saying have at it isn’t really a great idea.

          • golden_zealot@lemmy.mlEnglish
            12·
            2 days ago

            UpNp or port forwarding is the same way both Plex and Jellyfin work.

            I don’t know what makes Jellyfin less secure since they both work the same way for this as far as I can tell…

            Can you be more specific about what makes Jellyfin less secure when it comes to UpNp/port forwarding?

            In the case of port forwarding at least Jellyfin is open source and has more eyes on it so it’s less likely for someone to zero day it and have at it unless I have misunderstood how each can connect off-network.

            Furthermore the hash for your password is stored along with many others at a single (or relatively few) attack point/s on a Plex business server since it’s a centralized business whereas this is never the case for Jellyfin.

            Also this thread is about Plex literally selling your personal data so I don’t really consider Jellyfin worse for exposing your personal data.

            I’ll take my chances with a single idiot who want’s to compromise my poor asses tiny network versus an actual hacker who wants to compromise an enterprise businesses network that is storing thousands or hundreds of thousands of user credentials, data, and payment information (Which Jellyfin doesn’t store even half of).

            If someone hacks Jellyfin on my network -> They have my… media files? Maybe the hash of the one password I use there?

            If somone hacks Plex on my network or anywhere - or the people they sold that data to -> They have my password hash, credit card number and probably my name that is associated to it, personal data that Plex is selling, etc.

            TL:DR I think Plex is more likely to be hacked rather than myself and the outcome of Plex getting hacked is worse than if my personal Jellyfin server gets hacked.

            • JordanZ@lemmy.worldEnglish
              32·
              2 days ago

              With a fresh install of Plex you can still connect to it remotely…with no ports open. It will use Plex’s relay service to make the connection. That has limited bandwidth so it’s rarely anybody’s long term choice but it works right out of the box.

              If you do choose to open a port then Plex partnered with Let’s Encrypt and Digicert to setup and maintain all the certs for you. So at least your connections are encrypted provided you use one of the many apps that support secure connections.

              Is that the most secure way to run Plex? No. But it’s a couple steps in the right direction for basically zero effort on the server admin and users part.

              You might not like the centralized auth of Plex but I don’t have to manage user accounts/passwords for people and deal with distributing them. Just send an invite to their email, they set it all up, and I never need to know about it. They forgot a password?…I never need to know about it.