Selfhosted

I am very fortunate in that before Plex I found and used ps3 media server/universal media server. Because of that, it always felt odd paying just to stream my own content on my own hardware. I am certainly not against paying developers, but Plex always felt like paying for another service, not donating to an awesome Dev cause I love what they do. Another reason I stopped using Plex, I couldn't get anyone but myself to give a dam and use Plex, (suddenly, when NETFLIX gets The Last Air Bender, NOW my sibling wants to binge watch it. 🙁). Jellyfin has served me just fine so far, it fucks up only in the same situation plex did, when I try watching with someone else.

I am also a Plex pass person. Multiple times over in fact. I actually have a dedicated account for my server administrator that's separate from the account I use to watch content. Both have Plex pass lifetime.

I've been familiar with this coming down the pipeline for a while and because I have Plex pass, I too, am unaffected, as are my users.

At the same time: here is a piece of software that I paid for. It's "server" software, sure, but it's just a software package. What it does isn't really relevant. The fact is that it processes data stored on my systems, processing by my systems, using my hardware, and sends that data over the Internet, using the Internet connection I pay for separately, and delivers that data directly to the people I've designated as capable of doing so.

The only part of this process that Plex, the company, has any involvement in, is limited to: issuing an SSL certificate, managing user accounts and passwords, and brokering where to find data (pointers to my systems).

You can get a free SSL certificate from let's encrypt. User accounts, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), is a function of pretty much everything that you remotely connect to, whether a Windows SMB/cifs share, your email, even logging into your own local computer regardless of OS..... And honestly, brokering the connection isn't dissimilar to how torrent trackers work, DNS or a goddamned IP address punched into a browser.

They're offering shockingly little for what they're asking, and the only thing that's on the list that would be costly in the slightest is having a DNS name for the server (registration of the domain, DNS services, etc). And given the scale that they're doing these things at, the individual costs per name is literally pennies per year.

This is not a good look at all.

I have domain names coming out of my ears. I'm tempted to buy one more and just offer to anyone that wants it, to have a subdomain name under that to run their Plex alternative on, so you can get a let's encrypt SSL certificate, and stay safe on the Internet. I don't want the feds snooping into what totally legal Linux ISOs are being shared.

I just don't know how to program at all, so I have no idea how I would go about setting up a system for that. The concept would be to automate it, and have people create an account, then request a DNS name under one of my DNS domains, and have a setting if you want it to have an A record, AAAA record, or cname (if you have a ddns setup). Once the request is in, it would connect to be DNS provider and add the record for you.

The part I'd want to have as a check on the system is to make sure that you're hosting jellyfin or something from the address you submit, to prevent people from using it for unrelated purposes; but even with that.... Do I care of people do that? Probably not. I would limit how many addresses you can have per account.

Indeed, no need to have Plex anymore. Will probably set up a family VPN and we can all stream directly from my harddrives, bandwidth is not an issue anyway.

I switched to Jellyfin recently and I mostly prefer it over Plex, except for lack of organization tools and the goddamn roulette wheel that is seeking. Why is it that seeking defaults to 30 second intervals, requires a click to confirm, and occasionally just jumps to some random point near the beginning of the file? Great software overall, but it's wild to me that this basic playback functionality is so hit or miss.

Do you guys know a way on jellyfin to download media to the phone in lower quality/ less storage intense? This is the only thing I miss in my jellyfin instance

I've used it briefly in the past but with all the streaming services popping up and prices going up I thought it will be a matter of time for Plex to follow suit. So I moved to Jellyfin and never looked back. I kept account (ok I forgot about it) but when I saw that email today in my mailbox I just logged in and deleted it.

People use Plex?