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.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
Jellyfin crashes when living next to Plex in Docker, something about grabbing the same transcoder or something - I forget I’m pretty removed now.
But if I can’t run in parallel, I can’t eventually make the switch, since I can’t get started. And it’s not a great time to pick up a second box just for testing.
I got started with jellyfin and never used Plex but there's a bunch of rough edges:
I’m not switching at this time because I already bought a lifetime pass about 7 years ago. If ANY of my functionality gets changed by Plex then I’ll be switching
I'm not using Plex, but I feel like I can answer my complaints about using jellyfin.
My biggest complaint is the lack of clients. It is such a pain in the butt to install jellyFin on all of my products.
My second complaint is the security design. They've had open issues about unauthenticated endpoints for three or four years now. And whenever the issue gets so old that it starts to look bad, they refactor the issue into a newer issue abd bury it in the sand.
For a while this was done under the guise of maintaining legacy client support, but just recently it looks like they're starting to focus on more security, and I've noticed some of those security holes are being closed finally, but it's a major concern for me that they've been open for as long as they have.
My second complaint is the security design. They've had open issues about unauthenticated endpoints for three or four years now. And whenever the issue gets so old that it starts to look bad, they refactor the issue into a newer issue abd bury it in the sand.
You mean that one issue that is still open and linked in the "security and quality" tab on github?
WhatI've noticed is that people who prioritize privacy and just want to watch their downloads on their tv usually use jellyfin and people who prioritize ux slickness and want to run an IPTV service for their friends and family usually use plex.
Last time I tried it, it wanted my media in a specific file structure, so I ended up having multiple instances of the same show. I could reorder everything but I got a plexpass when it was dirt cheap so I'm not that inclined to reorder everything.
If I was just starting out, I'd probably use Jellyfin but haven't mostly due to inertia.
The client apps on Apple TV are just not good. I have tried swiftfin which is slow and I find it not very visually appealing. There there is infuse which does look better, but is missing features and requires a subscription for full functionality. If there is a app I'm missing I would be happy to try it.
I keep Jellyfin up to date and check in or it from time to time. Even have watchstate so my watched history stays updated. Hoping one day there will be a good Apple TV app and I could fully switch.
Same boat on Swiftfin and Infuse.
There’s one I recently found called Moonfin that does many things well. It’s my current go-to until official apps catch up.
I have a lifetime pass from many years ago when it was cheap. So I'm not in a huge rush to convert and want to do it right. But I am on the path to converting. I decided to make a major change to my home server infrastructure and it's still in an experimental stage. Moving from a really old standalone computer I've used for. HTPC purposes over the years, currently dedicated to Plex combined with a few raspberry pi's of various generations for the little stuff, and a single, good NUC for my router, to adding two additional NUCs and eventually upgrading the Plex computer with a more modern processor and video card for ML stuff for Immich and a few other systems that I plan to start using. I'm not just moving from Plex, but also a lot of Google and Nest products.
My dilemma has been Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes. I was trying to set up Kubernetes in a way that is easily repeatable and self documenting, but ended up with lots of manual steps required to install things and lots of things that I had to write my own helm charts for as well as the scripts to install and set up Kubernetes itself on each of the servers. Lots of custom stuff. Docker Swarm would be way easier, but the issue is I'm worried about Docker getting so proprietary these days and swarm mode getting so little attention, and Podman quadlets aren't self balancing across multiple small servers like swarm. So that's why I haven't switched to Jellyfin yet.
I wanted the same thing with Kubernetes and ended up using FluxCD. Highly recommend it. It basically syncs a git repo to the cluster, so you just push to github or whatever, and it auto applies the changes you pushed. Also, llm models tend to be good at teaching this topic and even writing yaml files for it, so the initial learning curve was not bad actually.
Now I'm exploring doing this even better with this template: https://github.com/onedr0p/cluster-template
I tried Jellyfin probably 2 years ago and it was fine but Plex is just "plug n play" in regard to my family setting it up themselves with little help from me.
Plexamp is the only way I stream music too so that's a big reason why I won't move yet.
Navidrome plus Arpeggi, Narjo or Symphonium are pretty much equivalent
Te kodi integration has nothing on plex4kodi. If they worked the same I'd switch in a heart beat. Jellyfin and Plex both have terrible interfaces and can't play media nearly as well as Kodi hence the requirement.
Agree with most of the other comments here, but number one for me is PlexAmp.
100%, Plexamp is amazing when you really get into it.
I have both. Plex is better with music at this time, which is a huge use for me. Jellyfin has a quicker UI and i swear looks better streaming to my TV, but could just be bias.
Jellyfin needs to fix their bugs around having the same artist listed multiple times in your library.
No free Apple TV app is kind of a deal-breaker. Even Emby has one. Also the Roku app still crashes fairly regularly for me just randomly either browsing or during playback.
I'd love to use it fulltime but I don't want to have to buy new devices just to use it. Plex already works and I picked up a lifetime pass when it wasn't insanely priced.
I only use my library with jellyfin and only locally. I left plex a few years ago. What I really want to set up next is a UI that uses a simple remote control and ditch the Roku interface so I can be seamlessly offline.
I use Emby instead of Plex or Jellyfin; mostly because it has an Xbox client, and I've already got a lifetime licence. One of my most active users only watches via Xbox.
Really don't like Plexs centralised user system or the overall direction they've been headed for years, so I moved away from that long ago (8+ years ago at least). Jellyfin wasn't up to par at the time (though they've made leaps and bounds of progress in that time), and Emby has always supported more types of devices\clients. Their device limit (the client count limit with premeir) has never come into play for me, but I know there are larger user bases out there where that is a problem.
Embys development is extremely slow though, taking YEARS to implement simple features or even address major concerns. Plus their support sucks without the community stepping in and providing it on behalf of the staff. Luke (the main dev) is better at copy+pasting candid responses than he is at actually interacting with human beings.
The lack of library sharing is what's keeping me on Plex.
The ability to watch media across servers, and even transparently pull it for local transcode when necessary is just an amazing feature.
I have both. Plex for family and Jellyfin for me. I still don't have hardware transcoding working (probably a permission thing. It's always permissions) and haven't had much time to tinker this year. Plex just... worked.
I can use Jellyfin without transcoding, but only one or two users at a time is all my CPU can handle.
Are you running it on baremetal or in a VM?
Both are docker containers. It can detect the card, but ffmpeg crashes with an error and that's as far as I got.
I haven't given up, life just got busy for a bit as often happens.
Okay, I haven't tried using docker, so I can't help directly, but I set up my Plex server with help from Jellyfin documentation. You could probably find something in there about setting up hardware acceleration on docker, if you haven't already. They should work with Plex, as well.