Nope. You're just brainwashed by capitalism.

You pay, that shit's proprietary, you didnt make it, you can't see the insides. Why would any self respecting sociopath give you something without including a backdoor, data logging/tracking, and a string to pull it back?

You steal something, or download more anonymously, it isn't immediately connected to you, it may not have the backdoors activated, and you probably cut that string when you acquired it. You might even have to fuck around in the guts and modify shit so it can't be remotely bricked tracked etc.

Applies to housing too. The state wants me out, I'm out. Can happen for a lot of reasons, and no amount of obedience keeps you 100% safe. In a squat, ive already defended myself, proven their power, at least what they're willing to exercise, cannot dislodge me. The place is truly mine.

You buy from the company store, you don't own shit.

it required me to leave my laptop running at all times or buy a dedicated pc for it.

Yeah, that's not exactly a software issue ... you can't stream data out of thin air.

find it infinitely easier to just Pirate what I want and put it on a usb stick or hdmi the laptop to the tv.

That's pretty cute, but get's kind of tedious when you have thousands of movies and tens-of-thousand TV show episodes. That's when you'll see the need for a software like plex.

If it’s paid, you do not own it.

Did you meant to say "free" here? Because that makes no fucking sense.

I never once found plex to be user friendly for me, it required me to leave my laptop running at all times or buy a dedicated pc for it. I find it infinitely easier to just Pirate what I want and put it on a usb stick or hdmi the laptop to the tv. For me plex was always a thing I felt I never had a use for

There's no Jellyfin app for my TV, and it's shit in the TVs browser

Find a proxy?

Plex's remote play works for me when I'm away from home - which is on starlink. Jellyfish does not, because starlink uses cgnat. 🤷

wasn't able to migrate so much metadata and polish assets

Yeah, that's what you get for taking the corpo solution.

If you paid for it, you don't own it.

What kind of moron uses a paid service in 2025?

If it's paid, you do not own it.

Edit: lol power tripping asshole sad I criticized the decision they know was shit looking for an excuse to ban me. But we both know why.

Idk why so many people are afraid to share jellyfin servers. Mines been open to everyone and anyone for over a year with zero problems.

Jellyfin is fully open source, and GPL licensed. If the current maintainers start making it worse, the community can just fork it and keep going. They also have no control over what you do with it, unlike Plex which has centralized auth servers they could ban you from.

I have moved my library to Jellyfin as of a few weeks ago. It's really a step backwards in terms of polish and feature parity. It's extremely annoying because Plex was such a set and forget app for me, especially because I was only using it to host content locally on my home network for streaming. I wasn't able to move any of my metadata, poster images or subtitles over so I'm starting from scratch on over three thousand media files.

I'm glad there's an alternative but what's gonna stop Jellyfin from doing this same problem once their user base has grown and is firmly entrenched?

The march towards enshittification rolls on.

there’s no Apple TV app

SwiftFin

Then, SenPlayer promises Jellyfin support in the description (which seems to be borrowed from Infuse Player).

And Infuse is the go-to of many, AFAIK.

Interesting. Jellyfin doesn't have something exactly like that afaik, but it does have genre categories. I don't think a more robust category feature is really something I need personally though, so I don't think I'm missing out.

Some people are using their media servers way more intricately than I am hahaha. Wild to know what features are being implemented to enhance these services.

BUT I'm not sure I'm comfortable opening Jellyfin to the internet, even behind nginx, and I don't want to have to spend time setting things up for them or troubleshooting their issues w/ Jellyfin. I put enough labor into this thing already.

This is still where I'm at too. It's a great service, but the fear of messing something up when opening it up to the internet is too worrying. I'm usually pretty good picking up new tech with easier setups, but when there are 4 different networking techniques with their own pros and cons, at that point it's just easier to just run as a local service.

If you own a DVD and rip it - that itself is a grey area

In some countries. In others it is legally protected.

The title of this article is vague.

Here is the important part

Under the new rules announced in March, a server owner needs to have a Plex Pass subscription, which starts at $7 per month, to grant users remote access to their server. Alternatively, someone can remotely access another person’s Plex server by buying their own Plex Pass

TLDR; there has to be at least one pass in the chain

I can write my own iptables so the learning curve isn't really a problem, but making it easy for users is a lot more important.

The tons of bugs, there’s no Apple TV app, remote streaming is janky, the entire interface feels rough and cheap compared to Plexes shine and polish.

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that jelly fin is nowhere nearly as mature a piece of software as Plex is, and it really really shows. I’m not interested in “roughing it“. I’m sure I’ll try jelly fin later, maybe when it’s much more mature, but for now, I’m not interested.

Plex meets all of my needs, and I have a lifetime Plex pass, so I don’t have to worry about subscriptions.

I’ve basically warned the people who use it that if they enshittify further I won’t be doing anything to try to maintain it.

I gave them a PSA not to get a subscription, because I got a lifetime pass ages ago, but if they do much else I’m out. I’ll maybe, depending on the changes, keep hosting it in case they want to keep using it, but I won’t maintain it properly (it auto-adds stuff from my folders, ofc, so that’ll still happen, but I won’t fix any mismatches and stuff). I’ve already stopped giving new people access to it, as the writing is on the wall.

I’m in the process of setting up jellyfin, but I have zero intention of making that available to anyone other than my partner (in IT, and already has access to my home VPN) because I’ve read how risky that is, and how you need to VPN them back to it or some shit and I’m just not willing to do any of that. Too risky and too much work cuz I don’t have a clue what I’m doing.

I’d love a middle ground, but I’m not sure I’m willing to pay for another closed-source platform, and Idk if any open source platforms are ever going to be particularly good for remote sharing for non-techie users.

You can essentially create a filter of any media type and then save it as a collection, as new things are added if they meet the criteria they are auto-added to the collection. So an example could be if you want documentaries to be their own collection you could create a smart collection with a filter of genre=documentary.

That is what I thought, until this article. I'd be pleased to find out I misinterpreted.

Yes! I'm glad you mentioned the crime! If you own a DVD and rip it - that itself is a grey area that is mostly acceptable now. However, sharing it digitally is another grey area that providers have been skimming under the radar, but by requiring a subscription that is 100% illegal. You cannot pay for shared content. I think they're trying to get around it but personally, I just want to avoid the whole thing. Jellyfin was a no brainer from that aspect.

I'm in the open, but have a proxy and a nested domain so it can't be automatically port scanned. It's a tradeoff I made for simpler setup for my family, and so far it's been fine. I could do tailscale, but there's no way my family would be in favor of it.