You may (half) joke, but MPAA attention on Jellyfin would suck.

Which doesn’t have half the features and crap security compared to Plex/Emby.

That serves the purpose too. It’s harder to pin Plex as an “illegal distribution service” when you have to pay for access. Either the streamer or “distributor” can’t be very anonymous, which makes large scale sharing impractical.

On the other hand, the more money they squeeze out, the more they risk appearing as if they “make money from piracy,” which is exactly how you get the MPAA’s attention.

Remote access via their servers.

Dynamic DNS does cost money. But not $8 a month. Development also costs money which falls under the $8 a month, but really not my problem, which is why I use Jellyfin. I used to run Plex off of my Nvidia shield, which was a cool gateway drug to self hosting and I'm grateful to them for that, but I like handling the technical stuff myself.

I'll have to look into that. Last I remember they removed that and local simple pin. Because it could be used to bypass security even from outside network. You are running current version right?

I do that sometimes but I like the morning news and I feel it should be current so not a great solution for me. Jellyfin just needs a bit more polish. Its great I like it but also at the same rate the appear to fix some things like their security bugs I'm not going to hold my breath. I do hope they push through though like Immich.

In the US there is still a thing ad broadcast TV. Stick a TV antenna up in the air, free TV. Get a tuner card for PC and TV for your PC before streaming was ever a thing. Used it on my laptop when I traveled more. But with setting it up in jellyfin it works but is janky and needs polishing, and setting it up to download the TV guide is kinda a nightmare. With Plex life pass ( this is the feature that made me get it and dropping Comcast cable TV) it just works auto scans for channels and auto downloads TV guide, easy to flip throughout channels even my mom does it.

In case this helps, for me when I use it on Android TV with said TV's remote, the arrow buttons on the direction pad for anything require pressing play/OK button after. But if I use the fast forward buttons, it does seek and then just keeps playing.

For me I just want a fast forward button. They have something they call fast forward, but it seeks instead.

Yes-ish, it's harder for you than the users. But you will have to secure a URL and they will have to remember that URL. Also there's some security issues with some unsecured endpoints on Jellyfin. That said I have mine out there exposed to the net and am comfortable enough with it.

You could just get a domain and set up a reverse proxy. Or use Cloudflare tunnels.

I moved away from plex as well. I do have remote access but had to set up Tailscale on the accounts that access it. It’s a bit of a hassle initially but works well.

no, tailscale is still the easiest option.

I set mine up with HAProxy for TLS offloading and ACME for the server cert. Restrict your access to just your country/region by GeoIP and you are pretty good to go.

Dude, yeah. Plexamp had me keeping my server up far longer than I should have.

Thats how I describe Jellyfin, it works fine, its just inconvenient to use.

That's why I use Emby. Paid for lifetime within a day of switch from Plex (which I also have has lifetime for like a decade) because it has a ton of plugins that have been useful and has a cloud server switch function.

For the love, as a Plex alternative, they don’t even have a native app on all major tv stores. It should be a P1 feature.

Are you really bitching this hard about a completely free and open source project?

It's not technology or finances that kill most FOSS projects and burn out the devs. It's this kind of shitty entitled unappreciative demanding attitude from users.

As others have pointed out, there are fully functional and good quality frontends available, such as Swiftfin.

I haven't used apple tv in a few years, but like, swiftfin worked just fine for me??

Swiftfin?

I believe Infuse has Jellyfin support on Apple TV. But they want like £100 for a lifetime license or £2 a month / £13 a year.

Enshitification has entered the chat

Individual user accounts, so multiple people can use the same device without needing to log into a new account each time. For example, User A watches a show on the TV. Then User B opens the TV, and has to log in to be able to access their own watch history. Then User A returns, and has to log back into their account.

Braindead remote access. I use a reverse proxy so it’s not a need for me, but plenty of people don’t understand how to properly set something like that up.

Single Sign On. It flies in the face of what Jellyfin stands for, because it would require a centralized authentication server that everyone’s servers phone home to. Just like Plex. With Plex, you log into one account, and can see all of your available servers, because they’re all tied to the same account. With Jellyfin, every server requires its own authentication, because there is no central server to manage all of the “Account XYZ has access to libraries A, B, and C” stuff. If I want to watch something, I can’t easily just search all of my servers at once; I need to individually log into and search each one to see if it has the content I want to watch.

not sure your logic here. Why would Jellyfin have the same features as Jellyfin?