That inspired me to build a homelab finally, which then became a NAS, which then became an OCIS server to replace my commercial cloud storage.
I finally got proxmox setup, OPNsense, with Caddy for reverse proxying the externally facing services and tailscale for access to those services I want to keep only for me and not others in my family.
So yeah, all of this big massive avalanche of work started with the little tiny snowball of Plex deciding they wanted to charge me to use my own media while away from my house.
Thanks Plex!
And thanks Jellyfin for being a fantastic alternative for video.
(For awhile I was VLC off a ram SMB share but that was confusing even to me sometimes.)
When compared to the current breed of streaming services it really shows the difference between something designed to drive up engagement and revenue while driving down cost vs something designed to actually be useful and pleasant.
Also I hadn't heard of OCIS, but it looks like something I want. So thanks for that.
Tried again a few months ago and couldn't be happier. The whole thing is very stable and reliable. I think my only annoyance is that the HW I have it running on isn't beefy enough for transcoding, and my LG C4 can't play some of the 4K codecs natively (particularly around DV). Obviously this isn't Jellyfin's fault, but this kind of thing is just one more item for the list of stuff to have randomly be a surprise when setting up this kind of thing.
Personally I use Gonic rather than Navidrome, because I don't care about a web UI, but if you go to the Navidrome website and look at the "Apps" page it lists every Subsonic API compatible app. There's a lot.
I've written a client for Navidrome however, so I'm biased by the investment in time that required.
I've also spent time working with several of its private APIs to track my own listening activity.
Woah cool! Does it work well? Google Maps is the only Google service I really rely on these days.
There are a few approaches to tile generation, and the routing engine I used offers 2 alternate routes.
Claude Code whipped up a new front end for me that switches between various tile sets and provides a turn by turn instruction overlay.
It’s a tool worth having for me at least.
(ymmv, I work in risk management, a component of which is vendor risk management, so the professional mental model gets applied to home systems when applicable; rug pull? not on my watch, and the rug pull will happen eventually)
Turns out it is pretty straightforward and I never had to deal with the hassle of maintenance. The two non-mandatory configuration steps I had to make were: - the file permission to share Jellyfin's library with my torrent daemon. But IIRC this is the same with Plex. - the nginx reverse-proxy with WebSocket for the "watch together like" feature to work
Jellyfin is also a single docker container, by the way. That would've been an easy thing to verify before making this comment.
- Plex
or...
- Jellyfin
- Navidrome
- Homelab
- proxmox
- OPNsense
- Caddy
- Tailscale
Plex is not worried about people like you, because you just described an insane amount of effort just to avoid a one-time cost. Most will not.
I think you're right the bar is still too high for most folks, although I will note that I think it's dramatically lower than it used to be. A lot of the tools are all-around way easier to deal with, tailscale makes a lot of "personal cloud" use-cases much more feasible, and then coding agents (I'm using claude code) dramatically reduce the labor costs of getting this stuff all working and fixing it when something goes wrong.
This was the point that made a bunch of people (me included) absolutely furious with Plex. Like I gladly pay for services and donate to open source projects. But it hits differently to pay for my very own hardware being used.
But damn if it wasn't magical having all those movies at your fingertips in the early 2000s.
Meanwhile most of their updates were about streaming support, and then they started cramming their streaming service into it, and pushing it, and I just got sick of all of that. Eventually I just switched to jellyfin. It is far from perfect. The music player isn't as good as plex's, there is no download feature. But at least it hasn't turned on me yet.
Finamp is the app to use for proper offline playback/sync of music from your Jellyfin server. Go for the beta version, it's far ahead of stable and works well.
The streaming issue is another matter though :/
Syncing (a paid feature) was broken for years. It might download video, it might fail. You will find out on the plane.
When internet goes down, Plex becomes weird...my home network still works just fine.
Library navigation follows netflix pattern, but netflix pattern is to let me browse for hours without finding anything.
The irony is they won't have a customer base from my mom/dad. Why in god's green earth would a layperson pay for Plex when they can get streaming bundles? I just don't get it. And that's why I got rid of my ~10 year plex instance and replaced it with Jellyfin in maybe ~1 day.
Happy to help others do the same!
Plex is a VC funded project, they've raised some $50m to date. Crazy what money can buy, isn't it?
* Social sharing stuff that shows what you watch to others by default.
* Adding their streaming services and other paid services.
* Changing the UI layout to hide self hosted content, promote paid services, with poor UX for changing it back.
* Ignoring bugs that have been known and unfixed for years.
* Ignoring user feedback, doubling down on their poor decisions.
I too have a lifetime subscription, I don't mind a lot of what they do, but it feels like our media has become less centric, they want to stream pluto.tv channels and stuff like that.
The biggest thing I dislike was how I had a single app to all my media and then they blew that up and I need multiple apps. It's not that big of a hassle; I just wish I had more heads up to when it was going to happen. And while I'm not aware of them having any music-streaming media, the music app ever only streams my own media and feels like it might be on life support. Maybe music streaming is "done" but it feels kind of neglected.
If Jellyfin was a comparable product (in user experience and ease of use for my extended family's platforms) I'd switch tomorrow.
Spoken as the person hosting a jellyfin instance for my extended family. I switched years ago and it's only gotten easier.
You can find things to complain about if you want to, but generally speaking - Jellyfin just works. The idea that it's not comparable is pretty silly.
I'm old, I ripped all my CDs in the 1990s and early 2000s, but abandoned all of it when Apple Music replaced iTunes in a disaster of product launch. After a decade of streaming, I'm trying to head back to curated media files, at least for video. Music is far harder to obtain in ways that compensate the musicians, at least for the stuff I'm looking for.
I cancelled all my subscriptions this year and working on getting JellyFin up and I was thinking of paying for GameFly or some other DVD service and start putting a library back together. Torrenting just seems icky to me and I am not convinced I could find good copies.
I hear people recommending clients like Infuse, but it feels odd to swap out Plex at this point if I can't go all in on the open source side of things.
Am I missing something here wrt Jellyfin clients? I guess I could try running it side-by-side with Plex and see how it goes.
As my needs are quite simple, I currently just use VLC with a SMB share. Works quite well, VLC is able to play standard .mkvs just fine! http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-appletv.html
Even supports some of that *arr stuff
SwiftFin is what I use, and it is the free and open source option. Works great.
Before that stabilized I used Infuse, but it wasn't great.
MrMC is another one I haven't tried, but it definitely supports Jellyfin.
I wonder why the officially developed SwiftFin isn't shown as recommended? I guess maybe because it's still considered beta.
Unfortunately, I don't think so. I had many issues with playback on ATV using Swiftfin. Infuse works very well, so it is worth the ~$15 yearly to me. I am hopeful that Swiftfin will improve over time, they have a few dedicated developers working on it.
There are some small bugs that you can work around. The rework to the new version has been in progress for about two years but it works just fine right now.
But they have a very long way to before they reach feature parity with even just the stuff I use. Let alone everything Plex can do.
I think this year I’m going to try and find an issue or feature I can contribute on. I’d like to end up moving to Jellyfin based on it being good and not Plex being bad.
I guess that's my cue to finally try and upgrade. I dragged my feet given how widespread the friction of the upgrade, but if this is as good as it's going to get, I might as well pull the bandaid off now.
A few of my users already messaged me that with the next version, the android tv app will cease to work with the old jellyfin version, so I guess I have to upgrade soon
- server: my laptop. I manually download everything.
- clients: everything in LAN with a browser, plus Jellyfin android client.
- typical use: open android app, cast to big tv, watch on big tv.
next planned steps:
- move the server to a minicomputer. Still download everything manually from the laptop to the server
- convince myself it's time to use the *arr programs
- once Jellyfin has a Tizen client, ditch the android app + chromecast for good
I do have the benefit of a PC connected to my living room TV, but even if I didn't, most TVs these days can natively play media from a network share.
There’s wide compatibility with all sort of devices and you dont need to firewall tunnel vpn or do any setup. It’s totally grandma friendly.
Your approach works great for a single user with a tv connected PC. Lets say with your current system you want your parents, right now, to be able to view your movies files. How easy is that to do, and how much technical knowledge or assistance is required?
What is a little nicer about it is that we can hear about something, have it downloaded to the folder that gets indexed, and have it available to play near instantaneously. My NAS also does transcoding if necessary, so that eliminates a lot of hassles around codecs and such as well.
A lot of people take this a step further and avoid all paid services and just use tools like radarr and sonarr to get whatever content they are interested automatically off the high seas and play it when they want to.
The network share is the hard part- well really having the always on server that hosts it- plex/jellyfin/emby etc are just a little bit of sugar on top that make it a nicer experience. And IME, you install once and you are done, there is no maintenance to deal with afterwards so there is little downside.
Ultimately if you just want to browse a filesystem, network shares are fine, but if you want a nice looking front end for that with logos/artwork, descriptions or reviews from the internet, or features that require the files and metadata to be indexed in a DB of some kind, then these UIs come in handy.
Plus they look nice are generally easier for other less tech. savvy members of the househould to use.
Now I just get a pop-up on my phone that Plex has the latest episode. I sit on my couch, hit play on my nvidia shield, and watch on my giant OLED. It's great - and I've been doing this for years now.
Once you go through the initial set up, the UX is fantastic. Far better than anything Netflix, or any commercial provider has ever built.
And for music - Plexamp is an ode to Winamp and is worth it alone. It completely brought me back to the pre-Spotify world of music enjoyment.
And my content is always available from my NAS no matter where I am or what device I have with me.
I do both. But when watching with the family it's much easier to have them a media streaming server than to have to hook the PC to the TV (or projector) and use VLC.
Now at times for whatever reason some media file won't play over the network: dunno why... Maybe it's a blue moon, maybe there's a space in the filename, maybe I didn't respect the directory naming scheme or the file permission or whatever freaking bullshit. When that happens, I put the file on a USB stick, then on to a laptop, then HDMI cable. And that always work. (just had to make sure the TV wasn't using interpolation to 60 Hz or whatever otherwise every movie looked like a soap opera).
I have a weird setup where power isn't really a concern, have a bunch of ancient blades, access to a fast uplink, and am looking to set this up for a smallish collective of about 100 people.
A single node would definitely fall over, but a little cluster should be able to do a good job.
A game changing project that solved my streaming scenarios. It just works.
You mean to say dropping version 11 (and moving straight to 12)
The availability of clients (Roku, Apple TV, Android, Xbox) is good enough that I have no problem inviting friends and family to join mine. I've learned so much about the tech bubble I live in simply from getting them onto the server.
I think the biggest obstacle to adoption beyond simple home servers is the reliance on SQLlite. If it were possible to set it up with Postgres you could run a monster server on AWS with RDS, S3, a Kubernetes. Not sure about the business case for that... but I would enjoy setting it up and pushing it to its limits.
The take away is the app ecosystem needs some serious bolstering. That's the holdup for most people I know who are still sticking with Plex.
[I'm aware there is one I can muck around with and install via Samsung developer portal]
It is thankless work, but they are actually quite close!
