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.

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.

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.

It’s not exactly difficult if you use Tailscale or really any VPN. So I really don’t see the value for the cost; if you’re even considering self hosting a Plex server/instance, there’s a list of basic knowledge you should have or learn (like what you mentioned).