Despite all of this, I haven’t completely abandoned Plex.
Plexamp remains one of the best self-hosted music applications I’ve ever used.
Lyrion, Music Assistant, and Navidrome are all solid options. And Jellyfin also supports music hosting, along with FinAmp, which has similar functionality to PlexAmp (maybe not as good, but download functionality works).
Personally, I abandoned PlexAmp. Wasn’t worth keeping with the rest and it has been downhill since the loss of Tidal integration. Navidrome clients work great, have solid radio and discovery features for large collections, and support local downloading for on the go.
And for local listening, I’d argue that Lyrion with Blissmix or LastFM “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins are as good and sometimes better than PlexAmp. And Navidrome and/or Music Assistant with AudioMuse-AI plugin utterly destroys PlexAmp’s radio/DJ functionality. Install AudioMuse, scan your library and go, it just works. Especially with recent builds having native Linux, Mac, and Windows now (I deployed with Docker compose before these options were available).
mpd server. Although mainly, so I can use the beautifully named ncmpdcpp client
Does Volumio suit your needs? I haven’t used Plex audio to compare
Not for me, but I could see the appeal for some.
I have Wiim Pro and Wiim Pro Pluses in every room in my house that I’d stream to, and send via Squeezelite or DLNA (with Chromecast and AirPlay as available, but IMO inferior options). Plus virtual squeezelite software allows for local PC play the same way if needed (wife uses this on her Mac Mini, I don’t generally play music on my PC, just direct via the Wiim to my amp).
I predominantly use Lyrion, but my wife convinced me to try Music Assistant and it’s growing on me. MA has a lot of options for sending the audio, as well as various DSP, normalization, and crossfade functionality.
FinAmp and its beta rewrite don’t really come close to PlexAmp in terms of functionally or polish, but if anyone switched from Plex to Jellyfin and wants a nice aesthetic music player app Discrete has done the job for me. It’s essentially an Apple Music clone so it looks nice and navigates well.
TBH I don’t recommend FinAmp, but it’s an option if you only want to deal with Jellyfin and not run multiple servers.
Lyrion (LMS) and Navidrome server/clients though, absolutely. They’re great.
If anyone goes with finamp, sign up for the test version as it’s UI is significantly better than stable.
The UI is objectively better but it still looks like a 10 year old material UI student project. I’ve been keeping an eye on it but it might not be worth giving up the stability for
Lol ‘i didnt rage quit and post about it’
‘I rage quit amd wrote a blog about it’
This article doesn’t mention the limitations of remote access for Jellyfin, which requires some tricks like reverse proxy or Tailscale. I think Jellyfin is a great option if you only watch/listen on your home network, but if anyone wants to replicate the remote access capabilities of Plex, I typically warn them they are going to have to roll their sleeves up.
Don’t selfhost if you think a reverse proxy is tricky.
If you can spin up a podman container, you can use a caddyfile. Hell, if you can nano and read, you can set uo a caddyfile.
Tailscale truly could not be easier/simpler.
Not for all clients, like Roku for example.
Yes the solution is different hardware, like a Google TV, older firestick, raspAP, or flash openwrt on a router. But that’s no longer plug and play and may have other caveats. Besides costing money.
No shade, it’s just not QUITE that simple every time.
You’re right, I missed that.
I personally use a reverse proxy and Wireguard setup to access remotely.
Not something that unfortunately works as easily for me to connect my ailing mom’s TV to, and do NOT want to manage the reverse proxy + cert + etc setup for a number of reasons
Yeah it can be more limiting. Personally I got lucky and my mom’s TV runs Android so I could just install a wireguard client.
I will probably at some point bridge her network with mine since I want to install a TrueNAS box at her house for remote backup. So the VPN client will be moot at that point.
How do you go about doing that?
Which part? For the TV there was literally a wireguard app. I just had to install it on the TV and configure the connection to my wireguard server.
For the bridging I gave her my old router which I haven’t tested but I believe should support VPN bridging. I already have her on a subnet that won’t conflict with my network for that reason.
FYI, scrcpy can be an excellent tool for remote support, but you’d better trust the network the interface is on
There are a ton of reverse proxy options that manage the cert for you
The point is that you now have another app to manage or learn about just for remote viewing, and the general public can’t and won’t manage something like that. People like us, no problem, its easy, but my dad would never be able to, for example. He can install plex and just log in to an app anywhere to use it though.
Also, dont forget that many households have non-static IP addresses, so now you need more management for that issue (again, easy for us).
There’s lots of reasons I don’t want to set this up
But Jellyfin! It solves all your problems, you don’t have to pay for it (because fuck paying for software of any type even if it provides you some value), and did I mention Jellyfin‽
Why aren’t you using it yet? Are you a plex sympathizer? Get outta here with that!
What?
I don’t care if you have a good use case for using plex / Emby / Kodi / VLC / WMC / etc; you will assimilate and use Jellyifn!
JELLYFIN!!!11!1!1!1!1!. /s
This is like the 3rd thread I’ve seen you have a complete meltdown when someone mentions Jellyfin.
Jellyfin once located my lost puppy. Which Plex had stolen.
Damn, Jellyfin can swim through land, too.
I believe it! Emby probably kicked the dog whole plex stole it.
Just fucking yeet it online
expected advice from typical JF users.
What’s the worst that can happen. Someone watches your movies
Someone breakes in, then moves laterally to your home assistant running frigate to watch you sleep at night. Then uses your residential uplink as a proxy to resell on an open market.
After that, the possibilities are practically endless.
No reason to connect jellyfin to any sort of local network, router will still hairpin for local connection.
With that setup its honestly more secure than 99% of IOT devices, and like 50% of routers.
edit: and if youre running it in the pentagon or something just toss authentication like keycloak in front of it, plus a bit of crowdsec/fail2ban and an IP whitelist, I’d be surprised if you’d even get an attack, much less one violating that strict of a threat models.
Good grief. If you’re doing all that, just set up Wireguard
I mean containers make the networking pretty easy, everything beyond that is optional based on your threat model.
Same as hosting anything networked, you can do it easy or do it safe.
(but also wireguard is kinda an O(n) problem while exposing to wan is an O(1) problem - at least IT man hours wise)
It’s a rootless container. Chances are they are not going to do any of that.
Things are on the internet all the time.
Yeah docker isn’t the isolation sandbox some people make it out to be. It’s not meant for that. You very well may have a setup that’s meant for that but it’s more than I’m willing to expose.
Yup! That’s the worst thing that can happen. Now would you be so be kind as to send us the link to your private unsecured Jellyfin server?
I’m tempted to. But I’m not. Just because I dont want to fox my domain here.
Is running in a rootless podman container. I’m confident
A reverse proxy is a trick? That’s like standard practice for web servers.
How does Plex get around that? I’ve only ever used jellyfin.
Plex operates TURN servers
Can’t you just setup a dyndns and port forwarding?
Yes, and if that falls within your risk tolerance it’s rather easy to set up.
Most of the people in the discussion here don’t want to open a port to the internet.
To be fair Plex also requires open ports (or worse upnp) to remotly stream at full quality, without transcoding.
Oh, 100%. I was just trying to sum up the feelings in here.
Its just a pain in the ass to manage at home and easy to leave your ass open for attacks.
It’s just another attack surface. Threat tolerance is up to each person.
I found it annoying at first when I started because I didnt know about any management tools. I was updating the firewall rules everywhere myself to allow each remote IP at the router and machine level lol
That’s why I’m running both. I use jellyfin, everyone else uses Plex 🤣
There is a third option, the program that Jellyfin was originally forked from back in 2018, Emby.
Sort of the middle child between the two. Nearly identically to Jellyfin for obvious reasons, several third party apps for Jellyfin work with it as well like Jellyseer, it has apps for nearly every device, and easy external connections via their servers like Plex does.
They do however have a premium subscription system like Plex to support things like those servers. It’s not as expensive as Plex, even before the recent rate hike, but it is there and some stuff is locked behind that premium license.
I can’t recommend emby because their business practices are pretty scummy. After accepting open source contributions for years, they went closed-source in 2018 and took all those contributions with them (they had a CLA). The very next update, they added hardware acceleration and locked it behind a paywall. They had a pretty big ‘security incident’ a few years ago, which probably would have been averted if they were still open source, as users in the community flagged it as an issue long before the devs took action.
So all the bad things of both, still a proprietary product that you can funnel your cotent through servers you don’t control while simultaneously not being plex.
But also benefits of both, reduced cost with easier remote setup, while simultaneously not being plex
Wait, does emby do remote access similar to Plex? And without VPN like JF? That’s literally the only thing keeping me on Plex.
Side question here: how big is your storage pool for those of you that runs a jellyfin server?
I just started a Jellyfin server, but with the current hdd prices, it fills up fast and I need to manage my library a lot more than I’d like
4x18TB in RAID5. I went with 18s because it was the best value for $/TB when I bought them, which was just before prices spiked. That gives me almost exactly 50TB of usable space after formatted capacity and space lost to RAID. If I bought drives today for the same price as what I paid earlier this year, that 50TB shrinks to 35TB. I’ve only got DVD and Blu Ray rips on it; Jellyfin counts 120 movies (105 of which are Blu Ray, 15 DVD) and 1166 episodes of TV (10 series on Blu Ray, but number of episodes per show varies wildly). This is the full fat rips with MakeMKV, all special features, no video compression via Handbrake or anything; almost exactly 11TB used. So I’ve got a lot of room for expansion, and I plan on also using this NAS for other things that will probably be a rounding error compared to my Jellyfin library.
I would only ever buy new HDDs tbh. But also, I bought a stack of 8TB HDDs in 2023 for €180 a piece and those same models are now €300… Thanks, Obama.
Anyway, I have 4 of those, 1 is parity, so 24TB of actual space. I started with a 2TB collection from my laptop harddrive and I’m now at 7TB used. I used to be more cautious with my space and I still have my *arrs set to stingy profiles now, to make downloads faster, but I also download and keep a lot more.
I do sometimes go through and delete stuff that I won’t watch (either watched and didn’t like or never watched). But that’s more so I won’t get tempted to watch it than for the space currently.
You can get refurbished HHDs for much cheaper
As long as they have a 2 year warranty you are good
6 x 4 TB HDDs, got them used for $40 each
How many hours when you got them?
The one I find have a high number of hours
a random collection of NVMEs, SSDs and HDDs in my desktop PC, totallying about 12TB-ish I think. That’s for TV and films, I keep my music in navidrome since Jellyfin has (used to have?) serious issues streaming music, in particular only ever being able to play the first track of an album, no matter what the client.
3 x 16Tb Seagate disks. One is for parity. So around 29Tb of space. Got them used about 2 years ago.
When you got them, how many hours were they at?
The HDD I see around me have 60k hours ++ so I am a bit frisky considering what they ask for
lol that’s almost 7 years? Insane they lasted that long to begin with
deleted by creator
1TB HDD, 80% full :') Although I’m using a laptop as a server, so my options are a little limited
I mean, I’ve been running lots of services on 256GB, but none of them were media servers haha.
My current ARR stack is a share of 1TB on a 2TB SSD, so I get you.
I have a 5 TB NAS (technically 4x2 TB of SSDs in RAID5, plus float space for backups of my servers), but it’s shared for music, video, books and audiobooks, and retro game ROMs, plus other necessities (personal documents and such). Those disks were $600 at the time total, $150 each in 2024. Now would cost $2k ($500 each), it’s insane.
I mostly enjoy older stuff, and don’t bother with 4k. I let the TV upscale it, don’t really care. Looks like I’ve got about 1.5 TB worth of video (movies, TV, and anime) at the moment, plus another 1.4 TB of music.
If I need to, I can add some additional storage via dual NVMe slots on the NAS, but I don’t think it’s currently worth it at today’s prices. I still have a bit over 1 TB free, will keep it that way likely.
8 GB
80TB array here. I’ve recently started using Maintainerr to delete things my friends and family request via seerr if it goes unwatched. I deleted over 15TB of things that was requested but never watched, a lot of entire shows of multiple seasons where someone only watched 2 episodes. (this was years of request history it ran over)
It was that or spending money on more 20TB drives and I just don’t have it in me to spend that money with current prices.
I just have a 2TB server, for all my services, so I allocate 1TB for the ARR stack and the rest for my other services.
80TB would be nice haha.
I should probably add maintainerr to my services, would help me keep my files space low.
10TB. 80% full. I have 2TB that I can add if I need. At this point I’ve maintained 80% for about 1 year.
10TB was pocket change not too long ago, now it’s so expensive. Unreal.
I’m lucky because my TV is 1080p so i can download lower resolution movies and series.
Even with a 4k TV, 1080p is fine. Most TVs these days will upscale 1080p and 480p content, and even if not, 4k is an exact integer scale of 1080p (3840x2160 is 2x 1920x1080).
4k content is a bit sharper, but I can barely notice the difference, in games or video content at TV viewing distance.
Yeah, personally, I’ve noticed that I notice and appreciate very high quality streams when they are there but don’t notice lower quality ones in a bad way (where “lower quality” is still like 1080p, 720p is more noticeable).
Like 4k looks great but 1080p still looks normal.
40TB, but that’s way more than I would realistically need if I was better about deleting old content. I have shows saved that I haven’t watched in years. With the *arr stack, there is very little reason to keep a lot of media saved, because reacquiring it again in the future is dead simple.
I have about 35TB. The movies are the hardest for me as it’s nice to have lots of options without having to download. With a show, it’s easier to make a decision to grab a season. Movies choices are more spontaneous
40TB is wild.
My plan is to pile a bit of money and try to buy used lots of HDD and test them for health and create a JBOD storage.
Do docker files handle all the setup of these or do I have to learn stuff?
I just setup the ARR stack and you can use a docker compose file to manage all the services. Then you need to create individual account for the services but that is straight forward.
2TB, but I’m also new to this. I am literally running ffmpeg on some of the shows to compress them a little or dropping unnecessary audio streams
Use mkvtoolnix and handbrake. You can quickly drop and add elements of a file with mkvtoonix and handbrake will convert most anything to H265. Its pretty fast with gpu encoding.
I have a 2TB ssd for my whole server. I had 2x 2TB SSD in my pc that were collecting dust, so I took them out and used one for my server and one for my backup server.
So I can allocate about 1TB for Jellyfin
I got the Plex lifetime pass like 10 years ago, but just switched to Jellyfin over the weekend. It felt like every week Plex was asking me to re-pick my home page list and just insisted on re-adding their live streaming junk. Got tired of it. Reverse proxy is not hard to set up, and while there’s some encoding kinks to work out, it’s not like Plex was immune to those problems either.
The best part is that, if you’re on the fence, you can just run both. That’s what I did at first, but I’ve since let plex die.
I ran both for a while as well. Then decided I preferred Jellyfin.
I only use it locally though didn’t have to set up remote access.
At least Jellyfin let’s you work out the encoding kinks, and set stuff up the way you want.
Meanwhile if plex has central issues transcoding stops working because they force check plex servers for new profiles every time a transcode starts, and if the check fails it just hangs forever (assuming it has Internet access but specifically can’t access the plex url with the transcode profiles. Also this might be solved now but it was a problem just a few months ago)
I agree that the rest of plex is undergoing enshittification. But the core features are kinda the same? I use it outside my home a LOT, so I don’t know how jellyfin would work for that. I know Cloudflare tunnel has a bad relationship with streaming video. Does Tailscale too? How do you access jelly outside your home?
Most of the plex enshitification can also just be turned off in the settings. I’ve got all the ad stuff and suggestions off and its just the core plex experience left.
I use Tailscale and it is absolutely fine. The problem is with other non tech savy people - the setup process is not straightforward so you need to help them a bit. They can’t just “connect”. But after that, Tailscale is great.
Controversial opinion and I say that as someone who started with Jellyfin and keeps that local Wifi only, so I admit a certain bias: going with Tailscale and Jellyfin over using Plex isn’t much better. Instead of enabling remote access via one company that wants to make money, you go via another company that wants to make money. How long is the free tier of Tailscale going to work out? How much do you trust them with your traffic? But I know it is a popular setup, so I am aware saying that here will not earn me any points.
If you don’t trust Tailscale there’s like 3 different FOSS self-hosted alternatives. Setting one up is actually not that much more complex than setting a reverse proxy and you control the tunnelling network end to end.
Why let perfect be the enemy of good?
“tailscale might enshittify in the future” is honestly a poor argument against “plex is enshittified right now”
Why let perfect be the enemy of good?
You must be new here (Lemmy).
Nah man, this is self hosted, your points are valid and should be discussed. It is true that tailscale may enshittify, however it is only one out of many solutions. Like the other comment said there is head scale, and in the end you still have the possibility to go the way of a reverse proxy server and pipe Jellyfin through the open internet, which will be hard for many in the sense of configuration and hardening. But the underlying software which is Jellyfin is FOSS, that is the most important aspect.
FWIW, Tailscale is a private company that’s been doing well, so it hasn’t been going down the enshittification route yet. There’s also headscale, which they support and which will serve as the canary in the mine if they ever start souring the deal.
Meanwhile, I see no reason not to use a perfectly good service just because it might be gone someday.
Headscale will still work if Tailscale guess to shit.
Yeah I just set up Headscale via YuNoHost recently
So far so good. Might actually consider setting up Jellyfin now that I have a better, and freer remote access solution in place.
Plex is just so goddamn convenient sometimes
I also want to make sure that people connecting can ONLY access jellyfin. And I keep hearing about its own security flaws.
I don’t trust people connecting to themselves not be compromised by someone else, for one thing.
I tailscale in to my jellyfin. No probs.
Same here. The Tailscale app also easily passes the wife test which WG unfortunately does not.
I have a dedicated VPS with reverse proxy connected to my network via Wireguard. It acts as the front door to my network so I don’t have to port forward or rely on Cloudflare etc. I used to use Tailscale as the go between but switched to WG recently. Both work fine for streaming content whilst self-hosting all other services including my website.
So you have wireguard connecting to the VPS and a port open on the VPS for the jellyfin client to connect to?
Dedicated PC on LAN talks directly to VPS via Wireguard. The local machine acts as an exit node so when I add a local IP and port to my reverse proxy the whole thing acts like a local network.
I wrote about my setup last month; https://the.unknown-universe.co.uk/home-lab/wireguard-vpn-two-vps/
I access it via NPM the same as I access most of the rest of my services. As far as I’ve been able to tell, unauthenticated viewing can happen on Jellyfin, but the person trying to access it will need to know the path that Jellyfin uses to access the media. If you already know my internal file paths, you can watch it from my server I suppose.
I quit using Plex for my own enjoyment a year or two ago when my work decided to block Plex.tv, I can still reach my personal server as it’s accessible to the internet, but I cannot login as that requires being able to access Plex’s authentication servers. At least with Jellyfin I can use my own Authentik instance for auth.
What’s NPM in this case?
Nginx Proxy Manager, really any reverse proxy would be fine, but I’m partial to Nginx.
Ah! Yes, I’m partial to nginx too. Lovely stuff 🙂
nginx proxy manager if I had to guess
Cloudflare tunnel has a bad relationship with streaming video
From their standpoint I can understand why, tho if you had just one user you might be able to get away with it. When you have 10 users streaming large files at a sustained rate, that eats up some bandwidth. However, I stream audio from Navidrome daily and I’ve had no issues. I am the only user of my network.
I use Zerotier, free tier, fairly easy to set up.
Oh nice! I have that. Haven’t touched it in a while. But I’ll check it out!
If it’s just you using it setting up VPN is an easy solution. I just use wireguard. If you have a pic you can run pivpn which is just wireguard.
My router (GLI.net Flint 3) makes it really easy to set up Wireguard servers on it, and from there all I needed to do was get a domain name to use. Set up Wireguard on my phone, and I can access my local network remotely without needing to pay for a VPN subscription. I still use Mullvad, but that’s for privacy not remote access.
I use NetBird and have zero issues.
NetBird is… VPN?
Yeah. Zero trust VPN, akin to tailscale or cloudflare tunnels.
I am hoping that jellyfin gets better over the next few years. I keep trying it and it keeps feeling broken to me. Lots of people have the same experience it seems but then there’s also always a few people that act like I’m crazy. Nah, it’s still not there, unless things have changed a lot in the past year.
What about it feels broken? I’ve been running Plex and Jellyfin together for a long time and always find myself using Jellyfin. I’m curious what problems people run into to see if I have the same problem or maybe I’m just overlooking something.
Same. Have run both for a while. Find the jellyfin customisation preferable to plex.
I use a 3rd party client called Wholphin and it works great.
Also it helps to set up profiles in sonarr/radarr to make sure you’re getting media thats compatible with the devices that will interact with Jellyfin, and filter out formats that cause problems. I use Profilarr to load in community made quality profiles to sonarr/radarr and then i copy them and tweak them for myself.
Before i started doing this i had loads of problems with Jellyfin not being able to play stuff, and now everything runs perfectly.
The biggest discovery I made that was causing a lot of my problems was HDR formats. HDR10+ only really works on Samsung TVs for example. I dont have a Samsung TV, so anything I had that would try to play that content would come out a weird green/purple colour. Content with Dolby Vision Profile 5 would flat out not play on devices that don’t support Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision Profile 7 falls back to regular HDR10 when the device doesnt accept DV, so that works, but DV Profile 5 doesnt do that.
I was able to filter out HDR10+ and DV Profile 5 using quality profiles and all my playback issues disappeared immediately.
I appreciate these tips. I’m gonna save this comment for the next time I circle back to Jellyfin.
I’ve already had a Plex pass for ages, so I’ve just been running both concurrently.
Plex is a lot more accessible for my friends and family that are less tech inclined.
Yeah thats the main problem for me, Ive run both Jellyfin and Plex in the past when plex used to charge users to watch on mobile. but Jellyfin Id always have to help create their account, show them how to add my domain and stuff, only for them to need help again a month down the line when they want to use it.
Now that plex got rid of that whole mobile charge stuff if the server owner has a plex pass it made it much simpler.
it is still annoying when adding a new user showing them how to disable all the ad supported stuff but usually its a one time thing, after that if they forget their password or whatever its between them and plex. plus plex is much simpler as far as I know when your users also start to run servers, they just invite you back and you have access to everything on one account
To think that right about a year ago I was jumping into the deep hole of selfhosting and was thinking to get Plex perpetual license. Happy I didn’t.
I started with jellyfin a month ago and I miss nothing. Total newbie, used free chatgpt to set everything up. I can access from anywhere.
The only thing I haven’t done is to get the app to the Hisense tv so I use through a browser. Just didn’t have time yet, not sure how that works.
hmm I wonder if it’s because of the recent subscription hike … hmmmm
intense HMMMM
I was using Synology’s video server software. They had an app for android and IOS. Then Synology killed it and the only options were plex or Jellyfin. I bought into Synology because of their remote connection options. When I tried Plex they were making me pay per connected device. No way! Jellyfin became my only option at that point.
There’s also Emby. And some other options.
You dont have to pay Plex per connected device, but you do have to pay something somewhere for remote streaming.
You used to have to pay for the mobile apps (though, not per device but per apple/google account) a while ago, maybe the previous poster was talking about that.
Presently “continue watching” is gone for me in android. I can’t seem to avoid all these stupid “recommendations”, and lately I find I’ve been using jellyfin more and more. I have run them in tandem for years.