Last shit they pulled I moved to Jellyfin. Today I deleted my Plex account.
Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Can someone clue me in on the reason why anyone would prefer Plex instead of Jellyfin?
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.
Emby rugpulled their users, that's why jellyfin exists at all.
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.
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.
I dropped my library in, Jellyfin indexed it and streamed first try. What didn't work for you?
People commonly cite more polished clients and clients available on obscure platforms like legacy smart TVs and such
So expected. Now anyone who's able to support the non exploitative alternatives like Jellyfin please do. It's how you keep the good things going.
The more services you have depending on a 3rd party which can do whatever the fuck they want, either directly or by changing the rules when the feel like it (i.e. not bound by rules they cannot change, such as root DNS providers are) and then doing it, the less your system is actually self-hosted, IMHO.
For me the whole point of self-hosting is exactly being as independent as possible of 3rd parties that can just fuck you up, be it on purpose (generally for $$$) or because they go bankrupt and close their services.
This is why I've actually chosen to run Kodi on my home server that doubles down as TV Box even though I can't easilly use it from anywhere else (it's possible but it involves using a standalone database that is then shared, which can only be safelly done through customly setup ssh pipes) rather than something like Plex.
It's kinda funny to see people into self-hosting still doing the kind of mistake I did almost 3 decades ago (fortunatelly in a professional environment) of trusting a 3rd party to the point of becoming dependent on them and later getting burned when they abused that trust, and which led me to avoid such situations like the plague ever since.
Mind you, I can understand if people for whom self-hosting is not driven by a desire to reduce vulnerability to the whims of 3rd parties (which includes reducing the risk of enshittification) and is instead driven by "waste not" (for example, bringing new life to old hardware rather than throwing it out) or by it being a fun challenge, don't really care to be as independent as possible from such 3rd parties.