Switched from Plex to https://jellyfin.org/ without much trouble

Tried switching, but on Apple TV the Plex app just streams flawlessly unlike Jellyfin which buffers continuously.

But here is the thing: It is a wired Ethernet network between the server for both and the Apple TV, so there is absolutely no justification.

Jellyfin is going to be THE answer one day, but still has some growing to do.

My experience was also that Plex is better at working around the limitations of Apple TV, compared to Jellyfin.

E.g., the native, built-in Apple TV video player expects everything in an MP4 container, and Plex appears to seamlessly repackage content into MP4, whereas you need to dig into the settings to force an MP4 container and force the native player on Jellyfin. Otherwise, Jellyfin will try to use VLCKit or some other player that has other issues (like with HDR content).

Apple TV also has very limited subtitle support in the native player, and Plex does better at accommodating that.

I'm assuming Jellyfin is closer to parity on hardware with more capable native players, though.

The lack of a corporate entity behind Jellyfin makes a big impact on the quality of their streaming clients. On some platforms they work flawlessly, on others there are excellent third party clients, and some platforms don't attract a lot of open source devs and provide a lacking experience.

Jellyfin split off from Emby years ago, which does have a commercial side. Perhaps their Apple TV client is better?

That sucks, I was about to do the same (Jellyfin on the Synology, Apple TV for streaming). Seems there is no alternative to Plex that works with an Apple TV...

The trick is to use InFuse for playback and Plex / Jellyfin for the backend.

0 issues, InFuse is much better at doing the playback correctly.

Yeah, Jellyfin is a fantastic server but their clients are very hit or miss, I just hook it up to kodi and have had basically no problems.

I am using infuse to play directly from a samba share - what do I get from adding plex / jellyfin?

Is there an Apple Watch app for Jellyfin yet? (Not saying there is one for Plex, there still isn't AFAIK.)

Seconding Jellyfin. I installed Tailscale on all my devices, including the media server, to achieve free remote playback without worrying about trying to secure the server against the whole Internet.

Same setup here, pretty nifty. I’d like to setup a reverse proxy inside the Tailscale network but I haven’t figured that out yet.

Tailscale offers a super basic reverse proxy called tailscale serve. Or baring that caddy has built in support. They have the full details for both in the tailscale docs.

I'm no expert, but I think you could have the reverse proxy node be the only thing whitelisted to be accepted by the nodes you want behind the proxy (via their tailscale IP). I believe this would all be done in their ACL JSON.

And for those not ready to make a full switch, they can reside side-by-side without issue.

I don't understand "Plex is no longer going to offer remote playback for personal media as a free service"

What cost does Plex incur when I watch something from my friends server? They're not footing the bill for bandwidth that I can tell, so why is there going to be a cost associated with this beyond "we can"?

Whatever it is, it's too much. I remember experiencing my first "Plex outage" and wondering why Plex is architected in a way that a failure on their end can stop me from streaming local media on my own PC to the same PC hosting the files, and store my watch history/metadata in a local database on my own PC.

That almost made me switch to Jellyfin, but every time I look into Jellyfin I hear people saying it's not quite fully cooked, but that's been years now they've been saying that. So I stick with the devil I know.

Plex does operate a few services that 'free' (or any) streaming may rely on depending on circumstances. Aside from auth, Plex clients that aren't able to discover the server instance locally rely on a Plex-hosted webservice to enumerate available servers. Additionally, there is a client-side config option that allows low resolution streams (720p is the ceiling, I believe) to be proxied via Plex's infrastructure. This setting is referred to as 'indirect connection', if I recall correctly.

They also provide the HTTPS certificate allowing for secure communication.

Without any other experience with this feature of Plex, I would've assumed that they'd proxy the data so it would work seamlessly with NAT and CGNAT setups without additional user config, but I have no idea if that's actually the case.

They're not really proxying it, but they do assist with NAT hole-punching and you're probably using their authentication system for managing permissions.

> What cost does Plex incur when I watch something from my friends server? They're not footing the bill for bandwidth that I can tell, so why is there going to be a cost associated with this beyond "we can"?

Agreed. The article says:

> Plex says that it needs to raise prices to keep up with rising costs, and that the added funds will ensure that Plex is able to keep developing new features.

and yet they also offer a lifetime pass. If I were considering paying a company that just did this, then I'm not sure I'd have much faith in the lifetime value of that lifetime pass.

Just as a reference point. I bought Plex Pass Lifetime in 2014 (June) for $74.99. So I've already had just shy of 11 years of value for $74.99 which is an absolute steal (~$0.50/mo and it only gets better as time goes on).

"Past performance is not indicative of future results." and all of that but just wanted to provide an example.

Uh, how about they want to make money? And they have to consistently pay their developers and other bills? Is this a serious question?

If the server owner has Plex Pass then non-paying members can still stream remotely for free.

I have plex pass lifetime and have for almost a decade, best $70 I ever spent.

EDIT: It has been over a decade (June 2014) and it was $74.99

Absolutely expected. I don’t believe in any attempts for smartness on server side anyway, I just expose my NAS (ftp/sftp/webdav), and install smarter client like Infuse that can handle playing from it.

Even stealing has become enshittified.