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/
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.
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. Plex never had an issue handling my remote library at any point, 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, so it was surprisingly easy to see what combination of placing files and software worked better for me.
Which I guess is a good segue to your second point, because hey, turns out there are plenty of applications that are pretty agnostic about running inside of a container or not, Plex included. And there are several implementations of easy self-hosted apps that will set up a container for you. Unfortunately most of those are commercial software trying to monetize self-hosting, and snobbish hobbyists seem to have no particular urgency for beating corporations to that particular punch.
And yes, you can run Plex and Jellyfin together. I don’t know what that point is supposed to add to this. You can mostly run any software alongisde any other software. 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. Plex will mostly tolerate this and keep chugging along, though, so it’s not a dealbreaker if you don’t mind.
And absolutely you can make a hobby out of self-hosting or whatever else, but the point is car nuts typically don’t hold the opinion that nobody should be having cars but them. I mean, there’s plenty of car snobbery, and a bunch of people will say they prefer a manual transmission car over an automatic, but it’s a pretty extreme position to hear someone say if you can’t drive stick you shouldn’t have access to cars. Let alone say that if you didn’t build your car yourself you aren’t skilled enough to have one, which is the actual equivalence here.
I inferred it from this:
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.
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.
Jellyfin included also. I’m not sure what the point you’re making though.
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
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.