Text:
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners. This data is used to deliver personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Your consent applies to all devices on which you have Plex installed. You can withdraw your consent at any time in Account Settings or using this page.
Soure: https://www.plex.tv/vendors/ (Might have to clear cache)
Can also read about the changes here: https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/
Until jellyfin adds better user log in plex will still thrive. I do the self hosting I don’t want a call every few days about they can’t log in. The one click Gmail login with plex is amazing.
I don’t share videos with people using google to log into any site.
The whole anti Google holier than thou is annoying at these levels.
Ok fine, don’t use Google. But telling your friends and loved ones to switch email providers over your crusade is worse than vegans telling you about their diet.
I’m all for kicking Google to the curb. I’m not for shoving my beliefs down other people’s throats.
It’s not “shoving my beliefs down other people’s throats” telling them that these are the options for signing in the service I’m hosting
Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?
No ma’am, this is a Wendys drive thru.
But really, I think you misunderstood the intended inference from OP, it has nothing to do with email and everything to do with data collection, algorithms, and not quite fair use media access that get’s logged to Google (a third party) ad infinitum.
I don’t know that Google gets to log your access in that scenario, Plex is just using their login system.
Plex sure does know, though, whether you log in via Google or not, so “I don’t share videos using google to log in” is still a bit of a weird statement and not the reason you’d be worried about your piracy habits.
Incidentally, if a friend or family member is hosting a service and “tells me these are the options to sign in to the service I’m hosting” I’d tell them to go away, which is something my own relatives have done to me a bunch when my proposed self-hosted alternative isn’t perfectly smooth and just as convenient as the corpo alternative.
Not surprisingly, the only two selfhosted things my family has ever used are Plex and Home Assistant.
Come on, you’ve got a password manager that saves passwords and usernames. It couldn’t be more convenient to login.
Why would you give the responsibility to google for your logins?
Why would you lock yourself into the vendor google by using their login system for every other service? You can’t migrate anywhere easily.
I’m just not enabling such a method. It’s not implemented. People who don’t think about it and hence don’t care usually still use the service eveb if they cannot use xlogin with google"
I have a password manager.
My parents do not.
They do have a Gmail account and know how to use Netflix, so they know how to use Plex.
I mean, that’s not the dealbreaker, there are plenty of bigger issues with Jellyfin than not having a Google authentication integration. They definitely can log in with a password and do for other self-hosted services, but the fact is that Plex having the option does remove one annoyance from the process.
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.
Yeah, you kinda got to the breakdown in this conversation. Google sure knows that you’re using Plex.
That is not a concern, though. Plex is a perfectly legal piece of software.
I think people are taking me saying “Google doesn’t know what you’re streaming with Plex, but Plex does, so that’d be a bigger issue” as irrelevant because they assume Plex is itself a liability, which it isn’t.
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.
What
:)
Agreed. I have a dozen or so people using my Plex. There is no conceivable way I’m going to get my less tech literate friends and family to use jellyfin, much less am I going to find a way to set it up for remote access with my limited knowledge. Plex is just too convenient right now.
All of my less tech literate friends are getting a warning to abandon their computers entirely.
Ok but there are a million SSO options out there - just because someone doesn’t want to allow google as a SSO provider doesn’t mean they’re telling anyone they have to switch fucking email services.
If you want a remote service to handle your authentication you don’t have to use google. I feel like that’s something I shouldn’t have to point out in a self-hosting community on an open-source and federated social media platform.
It has nothing to do with email
It’s not a personal crusade. Everyone should be trying to get people away from Google. They are an absolutely fucked corporation who makes a fortune spying on you and everyone you know.
I’m vegan and it’s my diet!
Hello vegan, I’m vegan as well
Hello vegan, I’m vegan as well as well
Hello vegan, I’m dad.
ITT: bunch of nerds with literally no friends or family to share media with lol
So you don’t do a lot of tech support. Nice.
Damn, I was with you until the unnecessary vegan bashing.
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i dont get this… im technically still usin emby, but user management is beyond simple and requirs no upkeep. no one has asked me to reset their passwords and ive got a few dozen people usin my instance.
Not forgetting Emby allows either a local or a federated account!
You can install a plugin to add SSO.
https://github.com/9p4/jellyfin-plugin-sso
Did you notice that they’re using a local connection? Still requires VPN/reverse proxy to get it outside the home.
They didn’t mention it in the post I reacted to.
But both of your suggestions are excellent solutions to the problem.
Sounds more of an user problem than a jellyfin problem? If they can’t remember their login I’ll just not add them to jellyfin.
And this is why people use Plex.
I mean, all joking aside, I wish FOSS alternatives paid enough attention to UX and didn’t unironically run on this sort of mentality, because I do want good open source alternatives I can use without getting annoyed or having the other people I’m trying to give access telling me that they’re actually just gonna use the other thing if you don’t mind.
The overall vast majority of everyone is completely tech illiterate. We can blame them for their lack of tech skills all we want but that won’t change anything. Jellyfin needs a better UX before it’s feasible to use over Plex when sharing libraries with other users.
Conversely, the average FOSS programmer has no idea how to either design for simplicity or document for the novice.
Yeah, being a novice in the FOSS scene can be extremely frustrating sometimes. It can very easily start feeling like you’re reading documentation for a plumbus, where every single sentence seems to introduce a new term you’re unfamiliar with. And it often assumes you’re already intimately familiar with how these new terms work. So even just reading the documentation for one specific thing often means having fifty different tabs open, as you also have to read documentation about a ton of dependencies or terms.
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.
Let’s not act like a user and password is some revolutionary new technical concept. They can remember it for their email provider if they can access the plex link. So why not jellyfin? I think the UX of Jellyfin is more than acceptable in this regard. Sure I wouldn’t mind they added this feature but i don’t see it as a must have.
I can tell you right now that something like a username and password is exceptionally difficult for most users. Many just have one password for every single application and if they need to use a different email or password, they will be stuck.
The vast overwhelming majority of users do not have password managers, do not know they exist, and will give up at the first sign of complexity. You’re too far into the weeds if you don’t conceptualize this.
Yeah, but since you basically need a VPN to share Jellyfin safely, you now also need to install and maintain that on their end
Username, password, and URL* Also the majority of users will be on a tv, where typing that in is a huge pain. Plex’s centralized auth makes it trivial to link with a browser or app on their phone so they can login.
Jellyfin has a sign in through the app for tv. Which I tell them to use first. And URL is also nothing new. All this stuff are 30+ year old concepts by now. But to each his own!
I’m starting to think it acts as a nice filter. If they can’t grasp an URL + login, it would save me from tech support down the line.
I have atleast a dozen family members on mine that are more than double the age that 30+ year concept that don’t and never will manage to understand it. You can keep complaining about your own marginal effort, and I will keep preventing hundreds of dollars a month of wasted money by the people I love :)
URL into bookmark, username and password onto paper. Dont tell me they can’t do handwriting anymore.
TV? how did they log into their google account to begin with?
but also: they can log in first on the phone or anywhere else, then use quick connect for the TV… added bonus: phone is now a remote.
@Decq @Jimmycakes ehh helping people every 6 months of so since they forgot their password. Isn’t that bad. I have 10 users and have had to tell people their password maybe four times over four years. Not that bad.
Well yes I know, but that kind of proofs a sign in link is not that important right? :) surely not a deal breaker as they postulated above.
Exactly, we dont add them to jellyfin, we add them to plex because its easier for them lol.
Fair enough, i just have very limited patience for incompetence. if they cant figure out how to remember their user and password. I don’t want to have to deal with them at all.
Cool story bro you’re such a big man telling grandma she’s cut off. Tough guy over here. Absolute unit of a guy.
@Jimmycakes @Selfhoster1728 they learn pretty fast and the calls stop. Everyone says it’s hard I have very tech illerate people using it and yes I get some calls but not alot. And they managed to login way easier then I thought. I think everyone is overblowing how hard Jellyfin is. I mean most people know how to login to a website.
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.
My family/friends uses it on TV all they do is scan the qr code on plex and it logs them in and basically keeps them logged in forever. On jellyfin it logs out randomly. I run a dedicated Nas with 40tb half filled with media. I started on jellyfin and switched over to plex and never looked back. Just the fact that half the people in my replies think the main use case is on a Pc tells you everything you need to know. It’s perfectly fine for tech literate people for everyone else plex is superior.
I would not let anyone access my self hosted stuff who is not using a password manager and secure passwords.
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…
Also the people that know how to set that all up and still expose a Jellyfin server to the public internet
I think most of the reason people are using Plex is that they don’t have to expose services. Plex handles all the nat traversal and whatnot for them.
Tailscale
I will not make myself the tech guy for half my friends and family, just because I can’t share Jellyfin safely without a vpn
That’s fair but tailscale isn’t a traditional vpn, it makes direct connections between two devices. it was also designed to be extremely easy to setup and it’s free for up to 100 devices.
Again it’s fair if you don’t want to mess with it
The overhead of the live library upkeep on Jellyfin is also quite insane, at least for me. I’m talking taking the whole thing down for many minutes at a time for every other service trying to run on the same machine bad.
What on earth does this even mean?
I’ve never had to take jf down while managing the library.
It means my last attempt to set up a Jellyfin server on the same machine where Plex is running fine ended up with any changes to my library bringing the entire thing to a grinding halt while Jellyfin tried to parse my media library again.
It may have gotten better over time, but a quick search showed me I wasn’t alone in seeing that happen and I was already checked out due to all the other annoyances at that point, so I didn’t keep it running longer to see if it went back to semi-acceptable levels later.
It may have been a bug or a config issue, but the point is it absolutely happened to me.
That’s absolutely a config issue.
OK, so why can I mess up a config so that the whole thing grinds to a halt?
Plus, I’m not so sure. A bunch of the people I saw mentioning the same thing did so on bug reports that seemed unattended. It’s not like I had a byzantine deployment, all the thing was doing was parse library files held in a given location. I installed the software, pointed it to a location and all I ever touched afterwards were the files on the library folders.
I will opt out of a LOT of things on Plex before I troubleshoot that situation, I can tell you that.
I actually can’t tell if this is facetious or serious. There are a couple hundred (if not thousand) configuration options or reasons why your chosen setup might have caused the problem you’re describing - it isn’t really up to the developer to anticipate how every individual user has configured their home server, with every other application that might be sharing the same environment. It might have even been the plex service that was causing the issue.
I ran jellyfin and plex on the same library and machine for probably a year before migrating completely away from plex without any issues, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have to read a bit of the documentation to get the config right.
Fair enough, managing your own home server isn’t for everyone.
Yes, it is.
People keep answering the question of “why would anybody still use Plex” in this thread much better than I ever could.
Also, “it works on my machine” doesn’t mean it’s not a bug or a legitimate performance issue inherent to the software. It’s always crazy to me how holier-than-thou, not-the-developer’s-job people can get without heeding even the most basic, ground-level software development principles.
Also, also, spare me the condescension, I self-host a dozen different things, including other open source libraries for non-video stuff, closed source libraries for other other non-video stuff and increasingly more-trouble-than-it’s-worth networking.
But even if I didn’t, 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. By the time it’s living in a contianer inside a dedicated home server or whatever you are well past the entry level for this stuff. If that’s the gap you find acceptable between Plex and Jellyfin you have, again, found your answer to why a whole bunch of people would consider one and not the other.
I just don’t think you need to make your whole personality about your pet home server or that it needs to be finicky and annoying to work. Self hosting has tons of potential and it’s one of the few areas where open source solutions dominate the field. Somebody should take some time to make it actually accessible before the commercial hounds smell blood in the enshittified waters and turn it into a product all the way.
Kudos to Home Assistant for soooort of doing that, although I still think it’s a bit overcustomizable and overengineered. Still the closest to a good self-hosted open application out there by a mile, though.
Of course not, but when there’s an issue that’s limited to certain users, the immediate question is “what is different about this installation that’s causing this issue here and not elsewhere?”. It would have been just as easy for you to start with Jellyfin instead of plex, but then you would have likely run into the same issue when trying to add plex to the same shared media volume. That isn’t an uncommon issue, but when you’ve already said ‘it’s not worth my time to troubleshoot this application’, I can only assume you also didn’t have the time to read the documentation. That’s fine - most of us here understand that homelabs are a niche hobby interest and not everyone is willing to maintain a server that requires technical knowledge and time to keep running smoothly. Some people just want something that works out of the box and don’t care about it being open sourced or customizable, and that’s fair. If that’s why you prefer plex that’s fine. But it isn’t the developer’s fault if you choose to go down a more complicated deployment path and find that you’re out of your depth.
Containerized applications are simply not designed to work like native applications - they are very much built with the assumption that those people who are deploying them have - at a minimum - a cursory knowledge of VM’s and shared volume ACL’s and a willingness to troubleshoot their configuration if there are conflicts. It isn’t because they’re shirking responsibility as developers, it’s because they’re providing source code that’s designed for remote service developers to plug into other services/environments and customized. If you can’t be bothered to do basic troubleshooting that’s very common with shared volume deployments, then maybe you’ve reached your personal threshold for how much self-hosting you’re willing to do. Again, that’s not ‘holier-than-thou’, that’s just an acknowledgment of what remote application deployment requires.
Plex and jellyfin can be run together if you really wanted to do it, but if you can’t be bothered to do basic troubleshooting then I won’t be bothered to soothe your ego.
Lmao, idk what to tell you bud. Some people actually enjoy working on their cars, but I don’t hear you getting mad at them because all you’re willing to do yourself is change your oil.
I have no clue what you mean with having to take it down. But with the *narr stack and jellyseer i basically have no library upkeep. Except for one or two difficult shows
Huh? Like just sitting there?
Or is it running a heavy background task like trickplay generation? You can disable trickplay (scrobbling previews) if your system isn’t beefy enough to keep up with them.
I run video game servers on my system, and while stream transcodes used to interfere with them, even that was fixed my assigning JF and the games to run on separate CPU cores.