Jellyfin in, Plex in the bin

Jellyfin Media Server has taken the place of Plex for my media streaming.

With Plex Inc. recently implementing their new “features” in the way of a new tier system, which includes charging you to stream your own media from outside of your network, I decided to jump ship to Jellyfin.

Plex Media Server has been churning away on my server for some time now without any major issues. I’ve never had a need for a Plex Pass subscription. The media on there is a combination of ripped CDs, DVDs, etc. allowing the family to listen/watch from their mobile devices and smart TVs.

This post is link heavy. I’ll list them all at the end.

We’ve happily paid the one-off cost of a couple of quid for the iOS and Android apps, on each device, but now Plex Inc. have done away with that in favour of yet another subscription service. The available options appear to be:

• Free to watch if you’re within the confines of your own local network; no external streaming.
• Each client pays a few quid a month in the form of a subscription to continue accessing content from the media server.
• The media server owner pays a monthly, annual, or lifetime subscription fee for a Plex Pass to allow clients to continue streaming.

What’s my problem?

Some might say that’s not really a bad thing, but the Plex Pass has doubled in price to £198 for a lifetime subscription. Here are my issues with that:

• Besides doubling the price, Plex Inc. have now changed the terms under which they provide their software. What’s to stop them doing that again any time they feel like it?
• How long do they consider to be a “lifetime”?
• Why would me, or my family, pay to access our content, on our media server, on our devices, streamed through the internet connection we pay for, which all works because of the electricity we get billed for?

No, we’re not doing that.

For those that have used Plex, Emby, or even a Kodi frontend, Jellyfin will look very familiar. Jellyfin is a fork of an earlier version of Emby, but with the code changes over time plugin compatibility is practically zero.

Installation and configuration was a breeze thanks to some great plugin work from TMDB (The Movie Database), TheTVDB (The TV Database), and MusicBrainz (with some assistance from the MusicBrainz Picard & MP3Tag software).

Jellyfin seems to be a lot smoother than anything else I’ve run up to this point. There’s a lot of other variables to consider in that opinion though.

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