The biggest problem with Plex (I’m a user) is that you need a network connection just to use it with your local media unless you do a little research to figure out how to bypass this.
Why is this a problem? You don’t notice it until there’s a network outage and you want to watch something. Or if the Plex servers are glitching. It’s needlessly complicating the process of watching your media.
Not really sure what you’re getting at here. I’ve had a network outage for the past 2 days and was able to watch stuff on my local NAS just fine. I haven’t done anything special to make it do that.
I believe what they’re getting at is an issue if they’re not already authenticated prior to the outage. Then they’d have no access to their media unless they look into the workaround for that beforehand. It has been an issue in the past, especially when Plex’s auth servers go down. I remember plenty of Reddit threads complaining about it.
i wouldn’t say wrong… it’s SSO. i have multiple servers on my plex account, and i much prefer to have a single login for all of them than different for every server. it also allows things like login with plex for overseer etc
it’s a trade-off for sure, but i’d argue a very worthwhile one
perhaps you could argue that you should be able to run the auth server yourself, and sure… maybe… but i think that’s the worst of both worlds
Yeah this is pretty much it. When it first happened to me I had no idea and just wrote it off as a glitch. Then it happened again or the Plex servers were out so everyone was talking about it. There should never be a reason for your home media server to need access beyond the local LAN.
Ehhhhhh. I don’t think anyone expects to be setting up their Plex server with an Internet outage. As long as you have been setup prior and you lose Internet you can still log in with the last local profile you used. It’s not perfect but you’re not locked out. No workaround (at this point in time) is necessary, assuming you’ve already authed and added your server to your “whatever” device.
And ultimately you just keep Kodi for the apocalypse. This complaint about “not being able to access your media” if the internet is out is misleading. Of course you can access your media if the internet is out, it just might not necessarily be with Plex which is ultimately an online service. Sure we can call it a limitation but that’s just nit-picking since most everyone has their Internet up almost all the time, offline does work, and there’s plenty of other ways to access your media.
You need to specifically set it up to work offline. It’s not out of the box. Either the setup guide you followed included that step, or you went out of your way to enable it, and forgot about it. It’s been that way for 5+ years, at the very least.
Yeah, one of the reasons I love plex is I don’t actually need to be connected to the internet for it to work. Just my home network. All my devices work fine when the internet goes out, which is frequently does during storm season
It’s just a setting like so many other things. You can put in individual IPs you trust or IP ranges.
It seems Plex has figured out lots of Plex ‘server admins’ are just normal Windows users and click OK on everything w/o reading any change logs or checking any settings. So it’s easier and saver to enable a lot of things right away. Admins can just go into settings and adjust it.
Could you provide a few examples or point me in the right direction to bypass the always online or call home features.
Currently my Library is shared with a reverse proxy and only accessable through CloudFlare. My firewall and pihole block my Plex server from sending anything to the Plex analytics address. Within Plex settings I have it set that Plex is not accessible online.
the idea of signing up at plex is somewhat antithetical to a lot of selfhosters… theres nothing plex is doing that cant be done for free with better software.
To be fair that’s a pretty recent development. Jellyfin apps for smart tvs are only just becoming stable enough for real use. Plex was the only option for a long time.
The Jellyfin for Kodi add-on has been out for 3 years. I use the Jellyfin app for content when I’m away from home, but I use Kodi for a front end for all my home based clients. Works great.
There’s always the software Jellyfin was forked from: Emby.
It does have a paid model to support development, but with single-purchase lifetime options instead of requiring a monthly subscription.
I’ve been quite happy with it for the last 7 years. Their apps are pretty stable, hardware accelerated transcoding works great, it does a great job identifying content then managing/fetching metadata, and the developers and their community are responsive and helpful.
A gatekeeper is a person who controls access to something, for example via a city gate or bouncer, or more abstractly, controls who is granted access to a category or status. Gatekeepers assess who is “in or out,” in the classic words of management scholar Kurt Lewin.
im not saying what is in and out, im point out a single, terrible product.
plex is a shitty gatekeeper, and broadcasting o everyone the many, many, many alternative products to plex sure doesnt sound like a gate
Sage was a DVR app and live TV guide for a tuner and is ancient, hardly a competitor to plex. Xbmc and Kodi - while great - are not at all parity for Plex. Emby or Jellyfin might let me share my media with my parents in their 70s but Plex just works. Unless you live somewhere with highly unreliable internet there still is no parity to Plex.
I bought sage in 2003 to use with my hauppage TV tuner. I still have recordings made from it. But once I retired that htpc I stopped using it. Maybe they added functionality after that.
the funny thing is, i dont use DVRs … myth tv was the last one i really had setup as dvr, and that was back in 00-04… i realized the DVRing was a waste of time, i can just download that stuff… so i switched to SageTV because of its local file handling.
when google bought SageTV and shut that shit down i was beyond pissed… i had custom XML all over that bitch, which is why i made sure to grab the license the developers leaked on the way the door.
Jellyfin was forked from emby (emby is similar to Plex, jellyfin is open source) in 2018 when emby went closed source, and they implemented sync and remote streaming if I recall correctly.
It’s a principle thing mostly. Plex just keeps ignoring features users want and trying to push some monetization model.
They regularly implement what I’d say most would consider anti features.
For example, I remember the push back on the mandatory “recommended” tab. It’s the first thing you see when navigating to a library. Wow. Neat. Some bean counter at Plex is “recommending” what I should watch on my own library. No thanks.
There was also the fiasco with emailing your friends things you’ve been watching. Just what you want where you store all your legally owned DVDs with your legal streaming rights to your friends.
Then there was also a thing where they began collecting data on your media libraries to their servers.
There’s also mandatory Internet connection if you want to have local users :). Lots of people barked at this and they ignored it and tried to spin it as an ok thing. You cannot have other people in your family have different watched status and stats without connecting to the internet. Oh did your Internet go down? So did Plex. At that point how’s it different than Netflix. Not to mention we’re the ones doing the hosting. It’s in our network. This should not be reliant on an Internet connection.
The list goes on.
It works pretty well and I’ve thus far been too lazy to change, but jellyfin is open source, and doesn’t have evil people behind it.
Jellyfin is great and open source. I’ve never tried Plex, but I’ve heard that Plex has apps on more platforms.
Also, I’d recommend checking out Findroid if your on Android. Its UI is native instead of the usual web interface in the official apps. Iirc iOS has a similar project.
Plex is definitely more user friendly. I would like to try Jellyfin again but I host Plex for my parents back home and I don’t want to troubleshoot Jellyfin internationally when I know they can just install Plex and log in on their devices and I don’t have to deal with it.
Definitely different strokes for different folks but I understand Lemmy is very big on FOSS so it’s no surprise Jellyfin has such a positive following here.
Ah, thanks. I’ve been considering installing it on my Plex server so I can evaluate it but I have no issues with Plex whatsoever. But yes them getting bigger means more chances for things to get bad.
Depending on your server, and how you install you might have a bad experience. I’ve had issues where it wasn’t finding the film/series metadata, having plugin issues, and being incredibly slow (slow UI when anything is being done, slow scanning folders, slow loading saved metadata, etc). Jellyfin, like a lot of open source software, feels like jank. The devs know about a lot of issues, but they’re swamped with so much, with this big of a project.
People criticise Plex, rightfully so with some of their bad decisions, but it still works better. For me, Plex runs so much better, and without issues. I won’t be moving away to Jellyfin in the foreseeable future, but I’ll be glad when I am able to.
Can’t you just hide the paid movies/tv tab? Or is it a principle thing
Is jellyfin better? I’d never heard of it 'til now
The biggest problem with Plex (I’m a user) is that you need a network connection just to use it with your local media unless you do a little research to figure out how to bypass this. Why is this a problem? You don’t notice it until there’s a network outage and you want to watch something. Or if the Plex servers are glitching. It’s needlessly complicating the process of watching your media.
Not really sure what you’re getting at here. I’ve had a network outage for the past 2 days and was able to watch stuff on my local NAS just fine. I haven’t done anything special to make it do that.
I believe what they’re getting at is an issue if they’re not already authenticated prior to the outage. Then they’d have no access to their media unless they look into the workaround for that beforehand. It has been an issue in the past, especially when Plex’s auth servers go down. I remember plenty of Reddit threads complaining about it.
if you have to ask someone else to access your own [local] data, youre doing it wrong. ack
i wouldn’t say wrong… it’s SSO. i have multiple servers on my plex account, and i much prefer to have a single login for all of them than different for every server. it also allows things like login with plex for overseer etc
it’s a trade-off for sure, but i’d argue a very worthwhile one
perhaps you could argue that you should be able to run the auth server yourself, and sure… maybe… but i think that’s the worst of both worlds
Yeah this is pretty much it. When it first happened to me I had no idea and just wrote it off as a glitch. Then it happened again or the Plex servers were out so everyone was talking about it. There should never be a reason for your home media server to need access beyond the local LAN.
Ehhhhhh. I don’t think anyone expects to be setting up their Plex server with an Internet outage. As long as you have been setup prior and you lose Internet you can still log in with the last local profile you used. It’s not perfect but you’re not locked out. No workaround (at this point in time) is necessary, assuming you’ve already authed and added your server to your “whatever” device.
And ultimately you just keep Kodi for the apocalypse. This complaint about “not being able to access your media” if the internet is out is misleading. Of course you can access your media if the internet is out, it just might not necessarily be with Plex which is ultimately an online service. Sure we can call it a limitation but that’s just nit-picking since most everyone has their Internet up almost all the time, offline does work, and there’s plenty of other ways to access your media.
Ah, makes sense. Thanks.
You need to specifically set it up to work offline. It’s not out of the box. Either the setup guide you followed included that step, or you went out of your way to enable it, and forgot about it. It’s been that way for 5+ years, at the very least.
You must have. Plex uses their servers to login and there is a setting to not require authentication when on this subnet.
Yeah, one of the reasons I love plex is I don’t actually need to be connected to the internet for it to work. Just my home network. All my devices work fine when the internet goes out, which is frequently does during storm season
No managed users then? I’ve never had them be able to use their profile when plex is down.
Just me.
I’m old and have very few friends, heh. Especially ones who would even know what plex is
It’s just a setting like so many other things. You can put in individual IPs you trust or IP ranges.
It seems Plex has figured out lots of Plex ‘server admins’ are just normal Windows users and click OK on everything w/o reading any change logs or checking any settings. So it’s easier and saver to enable a lot of things right away. Admins can just go into settings and adjust it.
Sure but if the severs are down managed users cannot login.
Could you provide a few examples or point me in the right direction to bypass the always online or call home features.
Currently my Library is shared with a reverse proxy and only accessable through CloudFlare. My firewall and pihole block my Plex server from sending anything to the Plex analytics address. Within Plex settings I have it set that Plex is not accessible online.
Is there anything else that I can do or missed.
Here’s one article that runs through it, otherwise just search for terms like “plex local network” or “plex local authentication”
https://www.howtogeek.com/303282/how-to-use-plex-media-server-without-internet-access/
the idea of signing up at plex is somewhat antithetical to a lot of selfhosters… theres nothing plex is doing that cant be done for free with better software.
To be fair that’s a pretty recent development. Jellyfin apps for smart tvs are only just becoming stable enough for real use. Plex was the only option for a long time.
The Jellyfin for Kodi add-on has been out for 3 years. I use the Jellyfin app for content when I’m away from home, but I use Kodi for a front end for all my home based clients. Works great.
There’s always the software Jellyfin was forked from: Emby.
It does have a paid model to support development, but with single-purchase lifetime options instead of requiring a monthly subscription.
I’ve been quite happy with it for the last 7 years. Their apps are pretty stable, hardware accelerated transcoding works great, it does a great job identifying content then managing/fetching metadata, and the developers and their community are responsive and helpful.
I would argue that they’re still not, until their UIs can be easily wrangled with just a TV remote.
ha, k.
most of us have been using some form of emby/jellfin, sage(defunct), xmbc, myth(defunct) for decades… i mean theres a huge list of not new software.
smart tvs are only used by people who cant setup their own stuff and are generally derided as garbage.
“tvs” for most of us are an hdmi input
If you look up gatekeeping in the dictionary it gives a link back to this comment.
then your dictionary is absolutely wrong
im not saying what is in and out, im point out a single, terrible product.
plex is a shitty gatekeeper, and broadcasting o everyone the many, many, many alternative products to plex sure doesnt sound like a gate
Sage was a DVR app and live TV guide for a tuner and is ancient, hardly a competitor to plex. Xbmc and Kodi - while great - are not at all parity for Plex. Emby or Jellyfin might let me share my media with my parents in their 70s but Plex just works. Unless you live somewhere with highly unreliable internet there still is no parity to Plex.
haw, wrong. it was great local front end to stuff. i directly replaced it with xmbc as a drop in
you are absolutely wrong about sage. i still own and have a license.
I bought sage in 2003 to use with my hauppage TV tuner. I still have recordings made from it. But once I retired that htpc I stopped using it. Maybe they added functionality after that.
the funny thing is, i dont use DVRs … myth tv was the last one i really had setup as dvr, and that was back in 00-04… i realized the DVRing was a waste of time, i can just download that stuff… so i switched to SageTV because of its local file handling.
when google bought SageTV and shut that shit down i was beyond pissed… i had custom XML all over that bitch, which is why i made sure to grab the license the developers leaked on the way the door.
Yeah when Google bought it and killed it I just forgot about it, definitely annoying…
I wasn’t aware that you could even BUY non-smart TVs anymore…unless you’re using PC monitors as a TV of sorts, that is.
“retail display panels” but ya gotta watch refresh specs
or what some of us do, just leave it on hdmi input 1, never connect to a network
Mind throwing a shopping link my way for retail display panels?
For the second thing, if I have to, that’s what I’ll do.
Jellyfin was forked from emby (emby is similar to Plex, jellyfin is open source) in 2018 when emby went closed source, and they implemented sync and remote streaming if I recall correctly.
It’s a principle thing mostly. Plex just keeps ignoring features users want and trying to push some monetization model.
They regularly implement what I’d say most would consider anti features.
For example, I remember the push back on the mandatory “recommended” tab. It’s the first thing you see when navigating to a library. Wow. Neat. Some bean counter at Plex is “recommending” what I should watch on my own library. No thanks.
There was also the fiasco with emailing your friends things you’ve been watching. Just what you want where you store all your legally owned DVDs with your legal streaming rights to your friends.
Then there was also a thing where they began collecting data on your media libraries to their servers.
There’s also mandatory Internet connection if you want to have local users :). Lots of people barked at this and they ignored it and tried to spin it as an ok thing. You cannot have other people in your family have different watched status and stats without connecting to the internet. Oh did your Internet go down? So did Plex. At that point how’s it different than Netflix. Not to mention we’re the ones doing the hosting. It’s in our network. This should not be reliant on an Internet connection.
The list goes on.
It works pretty well and I’ve thus far been too lazy to change, but jellyfin is open source, and doesn’t have evil people behind it.
I never messed with Plex but Jellyfin is pretty easy to muss with so it’s definitely worth giving it go.
Jellyfin is FOSS as well, I assume Plex isn’t since it’s doing…all this. lol
Jellyfin is great and open source. I’ve never tried Plex, but I’ve heard that Plex has apps on more platforms.
Also, I’d recommend checking out Findroid if your on Android. Its UI is native instead of the usual web interface in the official apps. Iirc iOS has a similar project.
Plex is definitely more user friendly. I would like to try Jellyfin again but I host Plex for my parents back home and I don’t want to troubleshoot Jellyfin internationally when I know they can just install Plex and log in on their devices and I don’t have to deal with it.
Definitely different strokes for different folks but I understand Lemmy is very big on FOSS so it’s no surprise Jellyfin has such a positive following here.
Ultimately I’m glad to have options regardless.
Why can’t your parents just login to JellyFin and browse from their profile? I don’t really see what extra work would be required on their end?
Does Jellyfin have you open the app, type in a 4 character code, and then just work? I’m assuming it doesn’t. So that is why.
If Jellyfin requires any more effort than that - EVEN if it’s simply entering a username and password with a TV remote, that is extra work.
It’s a 6 digit code.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/quick-connect/
But I’ve never used it so it may be more complicated to setup? Worth looking into for sure.
Ah, thanks. I’ve been considering installing it on my Plex server so I can evaluate it but I have no issues with Plex whatsoever. But yes them getting bigger means more chances for things to get bad.
How is a login screen less user friendly?
Eveny non-technical mother got the hang of it after I explained it to her one time.
Just the playback has some quirks with audio/subs sometimes.
Its not better, but its worth it for not being dependent on internet
Depending on your server, and how you install you might have a bad experience. I’ve had issues where it wasn’t finding the film/series metadata, having plugin issues, and being incredibly slow (slow UI when anything is being done, slow scanning folders, slow loading saved metadata, etc). Jellyfin, like a lot of open source software, feels like jank. The devs know about a lot of issues, but they’re swamped with so much, with this big of a project.
People criticise Plex, rightfully so with some of their bad decisions, but it still works better. For me, Plex runs so much better, and without issues. I won’t be moving away to Jellyfin in the foreseeable future, but I’ll be glad when I am able to.