anarchiddy

a one week test run I did a while ago on a piece of software that didn’t do what I wanted.

Ok, well then why the fuck are you insisting that it's evidence of poor software design? Are you really bitching about it slugging your system without even looking at what the default settings were, let alone looking to see if they were appropriate for your setup? Like jesus christ, you can't even play a typical PC game without tweeking your video settings these days, and yet somehow a self-hosted open-source app is supposed to just guess what your setup is?

I’m not going back to Jellyfin just to verify that you’re obviously wrong about it all having been perfectly fixed up to Plex’s standards

yea, lowkey fuck plex standards. I'd sooner use a cheese grater as a razor than go back to that POS

No, the bans stem from the EULA.

Take another look bud.

But maybe you don't care about any of that shit, either? Idk man the list of things you're dismissing as unimportant is really adding up.

Plex already knows the stuff you are worried about. The SSO has nothing to do with it. Plex doesn’t need data from Google to know, they already have your personal information.

Jellyfin has zero idea who I am or what accounts/IPs access my server, nor do they know what's a part of my media catalogue or if they are legally licensed to me. If I were to use google's SSO, then google would know which accounts/IP's are accessing my server, which isn't a huge deal by itself, but if jellyfin were to have information about my entire account and library then it would suddenly be a very big issue.

But Plex does know what's on your account, and they do limit the number of authenticated users of the account as a part of their TOS and through limitations surrounding their paid plex pass, and they have exercised their right to terminate accounts and pass personal information of infringers along to law enforcement and copyright holders. None of which is even a remote possibility with a completely self-hosted solution. But hey, if you're happy then more power to ya.

Why should it be possible for the user to erroneously set the software so that scanning a library would grind the whole thing to a halt?

You've been extremely vague about what the actual issue was, and the details you HAVE given are often contradictory. I'm getting so tired of this cat and mouse game. Fine, yea. Maybe they should have anticipated your specific use case, and everyone else just got lucky with their config not causing the issue you're so sure is their fault.

Jellyfin’s interface to add live TV channels

It isn't designed for that but nice of them to enable you to do it anyway

its overcustomizable tools for skinning (which are needed because the base skin is pretty plain)

This is an outdated complaint, but also fuck them for giving you the option to customize the look, I guess?

the convoluted requirements for remote access

That's just what remote hosting entails, bud. Nice of plex to hand hold you through the process but it comes at the cost of privacy. It's easy enough to access via VPN though, or I guess you can expose your home network but doing that without knowing what you're doing puts you and all your data at risk. Idk how you're accessing any of your other services though.

the overly strict library parsing paired with the default choice being to keep data stored within the library

I have no idea what this means but I suspect it's an outdated gripe. Setting up library scans is as straightforward as plex, or at least it is now.

I briefly tried to get books working on it

It's not designed for that but good of them to make it so you could do that anyway

You can get as condescending as you want, but those are all major UX blockers for key use cases

Lmao, what?! Weren't you just telling me some people just want something that lets them stream their media to their tv without a hard drive plugged in? And now using it for ebooks is a 'basic UX block'? GTFO lmao

You are presenting a lot of great hypotheticals and I’ll be happy to stop using Plex if and when they stop being hypotheticals.

it's not hypothetical, Plex has already been banning users for various reasons, all of which stem from them having access to data about your account, connected users, and server data.

Especially because we’ve moved from “oh, maybe get your family to not use Google to log in” to “actually, get them to move to F-droid or install from source and do so under proper DNS filtering to stop telemetry gathering”.

• someone suggested they didn't trust google SSO
• you said 'why does that matter, they don't collect much info from it'
• I pointed out that it's still a big deal because of the potential abuses it enables
• you said 'why should you care, they'll know you use it from downloading the client app'
• I pointed out that there are ways to use it without them necessarily knowing, and...
• anyway the real risk is associating your identity with a specific host server, not that you have plex on your phone or tv

You're the only one making this complicated bud.

Oh, and while I get that you get a kick of repeating what your understanding of US law is at me, over here backing up to additional media is explicitly supported by the right to private copy. As is, implicitly breaking DRM.

I was simply telling you that the US has a similar carve out for breaking DRM, but that it didn't include the use case you are describing. Just giving you a heads-up that it's a common misconception here, and it could be misunderstood wherever you are too. Chill out. BUT, even if it IS legal where you are, Plex is bound to US law and can and will ban you for breaking it.

Not that it matters because nobody is enforcing these at individuals for private use anyway

Except Plex is enforcing it because it is excplicitly against their terms of service, and have already done so.

but don’t act like anything else is insanity. It’s kind of obnoxious.

I'm not saying it's insanity you dipshit, i'm saying there are good and valid reasons to avoid a cloud-hosted service not within your control. You're free to disagree but fuck off with this incredulousness

You're free to find me annoying, I wouldn't try to deny that anyway.

You pointed to a 'technical issue', and i've been pretty upfront about why that isn't necessarily a problem with the software and more likely a user error. You're free to not use jellyfin for whatever reason you want but I don't think it's accurate to portray that as an issue with the software. Sorry if you disagree.

I haven't seen any issues with UX design personally, and honestly I haven't seen anyone making a detailed case here about it, but if all you need is "to be able to open your media without having to plug in a physical drive do your thing" I don't see anything wrong with jellyfin. Maybe if you really really like your google SSO and can't figure out how to implement that yourself, great. Use plex, go nuts.

Well, if you have an issue with people knowing you use Plex at all, then… tough luck, because I hate to tell you this, but a media server needs a client and it’s a vanishingly small group of people that will use either Plex or Jellyfin clients and not let Apple, Google, LG, Samsung or whatever other device is running the client software that this is happening.

First:

• not if you install these applications through fdroid or install from source
• not if you block dns queries that report to those servers
• not if you access the service via webURL

but also, it's not just that they know you use plex or jellyfin, it's that they know which plex server you use and from what devices you stream from. If, for example, plex decides they want to limit the number of households can stream from a single server (like they've already done), all they'd have to do is lock or limit people's google SSO to that server. They could also report which users are associated with servers engaged in illegal activity when requested, or they could region lock their services or specific media IP's by request from copyright holders..... There's a ton of abuses that are made possible by even that tiny bit of information they share/collect.

You might not care about it, but a lot of us do. Nobody is trying to convince you to stop using Plex, we're just trying to explain why we really do not want to use it ourselves

And for the record I do not live in the US and the way their absolutely idiotic copyright loopholes apply here is very much in question. It doesn’t get tested in court much because the times it has been it didn’t go particularly great for copyright holders. Private copying owned media is a right regulated by law here and I will continue to do so.

I have no idea where you live, but plex is an american company. Plex will 100% be forced to comply with copyright takedown requests, and could absolutely penalize you for infringing on american copyright law. Could you be arrested? Maybe not. But there are still a ton of ways you could get fucked because Plex has enshittified their service and has made zero commitments to protecting you or your identity.

we are allowed to back up movies

small thing, but in the US this is technically allowed, but as soon as you format-shift the media (e.g. rip a dvd into a digital format) it is no longer protected. It's assumed that 'backing up movies' is literally 'duplicate the media in exactly the same format it was originally purchased in'. On top of that, it's also doubly illegal to then share that media, even as a direct stream via a home server. Idk where you live but I'm actually am not aware of any country who allows for your stated use (unless you're somewhere without extradition or trade relations with the US like Russia or Cuba, because they don't give a fuck about US legal claims). Not that it's commonly prosecuted even in the US, but US companies routinely get takedown requests for that shit and Plex will absolutely throw you under the bus.

You are actually wrong about that first assumption, I did try both at the same time and the problems with Jellyfin moved me over to Plex.

I inferred it from this:

Plex was one of the first things I hosted because all you have to do is installing like you would any local application and it just works

And anyway, plex and jellyfin have different media library configuration requirements. Even if you did them at the same time, you'd have to be kind of lucky to have configured them both on the same media volume correctly without reading any of the documentation or having experience with docker ACL rules.

Just as a for-instance (since I don't see any specifics), sharing a media volume across separated docker containers on linux requires mapping the same users and usergroups to each container. It's assumed you should know this, if you're deploying a stack of services on a server, because containers are designed to be isolated and secure - containers are restricted to accessing files in their approved ACL, so that a bad actor can't get access to a separate volume from a compromised service. One possible problem you were having (again, just a guess) is that jellyfin was assigning itself ownership of the files/folders on the media volume every time it did its scan, and Plex no longer had permission to access them. It actually doesn't matter which service was there first - as soon as you had two services accessing the same volume you would have run into this issue. It depends on how you configured both services, and if you gave them privileged access or mapped users properly, ect.

and in fact ran just as well in a container in the NAS holding the files as it did natively on both Windows and Linux

If you're running both services on a store-bought NAS, the problem could have also been a misunderstanding about the combined overhead requirement for the services. Without making any assumptions about how much thought you put into your configuration, I'd check that as a part of troubleshooting. But, again, seems like you don't give a fuck about troubleshooting your customized service stack and would rather use a ready-made product. That's fine.

turns out there are plenty of applications that are pretty agnostic about running inside of a container or not, Plex included.

Jellyfin included also. I'm not sure what the point you're making though.

Frankly, the biggest issue of doing that, besides how redundant it is, is that Jellyfin will insist on writing a whole bunch of garbage all over your library if you want to set it up its way.

I agree it's redundant, which is why I personally only deploy jellyfin now. As far as jellyfin writing to your media drive...... Yea, I guess that is a difference between the services. This isn't really a problem if you configure your containers correctly, but if you don't want to mess with that stuff I can see why it might be an issue for you. Plex may be storing those files on its container volume instead of the mounted media volume, or it could be storing them on their remote server (it's been a while since I had plex running), which is a fine way to do it too. There are advantages to writing it to the media volume, but I won't bore you with that

Let alone say that if you didn’t build your car yourself you aren’t skilled enough to have one, which is the actually equivalence here.

Good thing nobody is telling you not to have a homelab or use selfhosted services. If you want to use Plex and only want to drive automatic transmissions, go for it. Doesn't change my preference or enthusiasm for jellyfin or manual transmissions, though. And given the opportunity, i'll still passionately debate the advantages to learning stickshift and open-sourced and customizable self-hosted applications. And if you give them a try and run into problems, i'll gladly help you try to solve them if you're willing to engage with it - but if you'd rather just complain about how much my preference sucks then i'll have no problem telling you to stick with what you know next time.

That is not a concern, though. Plex is a perfectly legal piece of software.

There are a bunch of reasons why it might be a concern, and only the least of them has to do with the legality of copyright use.

they assume Plex is itself a liability, which it isn’t.

Except plex has already proven themselves willing to ban users based on their use and streaming practices, so it clearly is a liability

It’s weird how corporate copyright assumptions have seeped to the mainstream and people assume that anything you do with your owned media is illegal unless you’re paying somebody.

If you live inside the US (or a state with trade agreements with the US) and are ripping physical media to store on your server and stream digitally, you are absolutely breaking the law. Doubly so if you are sharing that media with others outside your household.

'It's not a problem because I have nothing to hide' <- you are here.

I think most of the people complaining about jellyfin being difficult either haven't tried it for at least a year or are trying to use it alongside their plex service without knowing how to configure them properly.

Which is fair, I just didn't realize how many people were using plex that didn't have an interest in learning remote service deployment.

I'm actually fascinated/frightened by the number of people here who are apparently comfortable running an exposed remote service on their personal network without enough tech knowledge to manage user auth themselves or maintain a stack with shared volumes....

I actually think most of them do, it's just that the simple designs aren't universal enough to gain much traction in a FOSS community.

I don’t know that Google gets to log your access in that scenario, Plex is just using their login system

Huh? Google would, at a minimum, know what service is requesting authentication, and plex would know which google user account is being used to authenticate. Maybe they hash that information, but why would anyone trust that? Even if you're not breaking any laws with what you're hosting on your plex account, I totally understand why someone might not like the idea of google or plex having data about the identities of users accessing your server and what services are being run from it.