this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024

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177

Plex is overhauling its apps with a redesign and under-the-hood upgrades (www.engadget.com)

submitted 20 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 hours ago

Did a quick check of this in the iOS beta and there is no indication of additional enshitification as everyone fears.

The first tab is the home tab and the first few rows are from my library. I don't see any option to hide the random noise that comes after it.

The second tab is the library itself which has the normal rows of various groups, continue watching, recently released, etc.

There is also a tab for live tv, on demand and discover.

I'll probably only use discover because I use the watch list as one of many ways to feed my wanted lists.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

There are some punctuation errors in your title. It should read:

Plex is "overhauling" its apps with a redesign and under-the-hood "upgrades"

Those who use Plex to access personal media will find that their libraries are in a ~~dedicated~~ [hidden] tab, while the Watchlist will take up prime real estate in the top navigation section. Plex says it also streamlined the user menu for quick access to things like your profile, friends and watch history.

So they're hiding the entire point of Plex deep in the menu and promoting things that make them money. Enshittification.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago

Precisely. I don't want or use any of those features. I've disabled all the streaming service and friend stuff, I don't ever use the watchlist, and I use Tautulli for watch history. I don't even really care about watch history either. I mostly set up Tautulli because I like self-hosting stuff.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 13 hours ago (4 children)

I used plex for years and years with my lifetime license, but a few years ago I felt Plex was way too bloated and swapped to Jellyfin. I don't think about Plex now unless an article mentions it. There's no feature of functionality I notice that's missing, and I have a low tolerance for dealing with troubleshooting when I want to relax.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

Right now, Jellyfin is still too buggy and feature-poor for my tastes. I can't imagine trying to convince my friends and family to use it instaed of Plex. Jellyfin shows a lot of promise though. Hopefully it won't be too long before I'm comfotable making the switch. I suppose Plex might force my hand before that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

What is feature poor about it?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Even my mother can use it.
The only issues I encountered so far is playback on my chromecast dongle with the embedded player refusing to play nicely with some files/subtitles.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I abandoned jellyfin shortly into my self hosting setup. Plex just worked, with Jellyfin I spent an hour trying to figure out how to get it to serve an acceptable to Firefox codec and never succeeded. I'm sure with more effort I could have figured out what the magic combination was, but it wasn't obvious and I had too many other things to set up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

How long ago was that and do you remember the codec?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Are jellyfin apps available on most devices yet?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

Yes

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

They finally added intro skipping within the last month that works with the web client. Now we just have to wait for clients to update.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

How about iOS downloads for offline viewing? Server transcoding?

I’m a lifetime plex user but this enshitification has been increasing a lot lately.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

I can't speak for iOS but for Android the official app allows you to download the files but you have to watch them in another app. There's a 3rd party app for Jellyfin that lets you download and watch in-app. It's peak open source fragmentation.

Server transcoding is there and works great though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Not sure, I don’t use Jellyfin myself. I use Emby. It’s the more feature rich and polished older brother of Jellyfin.

I’ve been following Jellyfin’s progress because I’d like to go full FOSS but it’s still just not there yet. UI, clients, performance, all too big a downgrade from Plex still.

I can definitely recommend you look into Emby. It’s still the best alternative to Plex’s enshittification.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

Thanks so much for the response. You understand. I want to go OSS but I’m just not quite willing to settle for a huge feature gap.

It’s funny, it’s a race to see if the OSS can get good enough or if the commercial software gets shitty enough.

Eventually I’ll switch but the loss in feature has to outweigh the shit.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I've liked the sound of Plex forever but after it taking years for the wife to finally be comfortable finding her way around Kodi I couldn't really try it.

Just last week I fancied a tinker & I'd heard Plex has potentially begun to enshittify so I ended up putting Jellyfin on our htpc just to test it. As well as all the usual groups, it was simple to create additional collections for stuff only the wife wants to see rather than things we'll watch together. Within a day or so she's already flying round it so we've pretty much moved to Jellyfin. It doesnt seem to like IR remote control like Kodi does which is a shame & I'm struggling a little with the live TV aspect which was also very straightforward on Kodi but I havent looked too closely into it yet.

Overall very impressed with Jellyfin.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

i use threadfin for managing m3u for jellyfin, if that's how you're doing live tv. as for the remote, I was looking into one of these FLIRC USB receivers recently... if i do it i'll let you know how well it worked

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

You made me do it, ive ordered one. Having spent money I guess that means we're all in on Jellyfin now ...but if its no good I'll be sending the boys round for a full refund lol.

Will keep you posted, might save you some money if you can hold out, cheers

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

Thanks for the info, I'll look a little deeper into the live TV side of Jellyfin. Ive not heard of FLIRC USB before. Very interesting, I'd love to know how that goes, thank you

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 132 points 20 hours ago (44 children)

Well, Jellyfin is right over there, and it's FOSS too. Consider switching, it's pretty great.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 20 hours ago (10 children)

The quality and features of JellyFin are nowhere close to Plex. I have used both for years.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 19 hours ago (5 children)

I'm in the same boat as you. I'd love to switch but the user experience of Jellyfin is still pretty bad outside the most basic cases. If you have a media center PC, it's fine, but if you want to be able to switch between several devices the way you can with Netflix, it's quite poor.

Plex is slowly trending down and Jellyfin is slowly trending up. I hope Jellyfin outpaces Plex before the enshittification is complete, but it's a steep hill to climb.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

The big thing for me is privacy and control.

Plex requires Cloud access via accounts.

This is a sitting duck for subpoenas to mass punish media libraries once copyright holders get a more friendly government that cares less about citizens rights (which is coming up here soon).

Nothing about my jelly fin instance leaks my information to anyone else's servers.

You can't say the same about Plex.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I agree with you, however Jellyfin is not intrinsically more secure than any other piece of software. You have to be very careful how you go about deploying it if you open up external access, as you are dependent on the Jellyfin devs to fix vulnerabilities and they aren't actually being paid to do this. If you're paranoid about privacy, you should be paranoid about this too; the people sending subpoenas aren't above port-scans on ISP subscribers, they did it back in the early days of torrents.

You get control and privacy, but you also get responsibility. It's a trade-off, and one I'd certainly make if Jellyfin were more mature. That's just me though, I've been hosting my own stuff for about a decade now and I can set up an isolated environment for Jellyfin to run within. Plex is a lot more newbie-friendly and I'd still recommend it for most folks unless they for sure know what they're doing.

As an aside, these concerns are common to all FOSS software that don't have deep-pocketed backers. Jellyfin is likely never getting those, unfortunately. I hope they can find some other way of sustaining themselves, they've not got much money for the scale of development needed and it's all volunteer-driven today.

https://opencollective.com/jellyfin

I want them to keep going, and I've even donated to them. I still don't think it's at a place to replace Plex for most people yet though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago

The way I do it with webservices is that I serve them all from virtual hosts. Scan my IP on port port 80? 301 moved permanently to same host port 443. 443? Welcome to nginx! Which webservice is actually served depends on the hostname being requested. The hostnames are just part of a wildcard subdomain with a matching wildcard certificate, so you can't derive the hosts from the blank landing page's cert. Though one option would be to disable https when no matching virtual host is found.

I know this isn't protection against sophisticated attackers, but nobody uses my home services except me when I'm not home so the exposure is very limited.

Anyhow, with Plex you have a central provider who, if I'm not mistaken, knows a lot about how their customers use their product. The angle of attack is different.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

How does it not work for you? I use it on my phone, laptop, ipad, kodi, ... without issues

[–] [email protected] 11 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Switching between wasn't seamless, it kept forgetting where I left off on the last device, which was pretty annoying. Also, mobile/remote connectivity was spotty for me. Never got to the bottom of that, but my best guess is Plex's relay system makes up for a lot of random network issues. My best work-around was to add my phone to tailscale, but obviously that's not a great solution and won't work for a lot of devices.

Overall, my impression was that Plex is a lot more polished. I also bought a lifetime membership years ago, so I have no incentive to switch to something that isn't better. Plex isn't perfect, but it was still better than Jellyfin as of a few months ago. I honestly hope that changes soon, I have zero faith in Plex as a company.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 19 hours ago (9 children)

Not asking this to be combative, but as Jellyfin convert I'm curious what quality/features you are missing? Also what platform are you using mainly?

I watch mostly using the Android app or Nvidia Shield, and the client does everything Plex did (in terms of just media watching - no DVR or other features ) without all the bloat the current Plex client brings.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 16 hours ago

There is a huge disparity in the quality, UX, and features of the clients. Many clients are missing basic features like scrubbing, subtitles, saving position, etc… Many platform-specific clients are people’s pet projects and quickly lose support or are half baked.

Furthermore my wife and kids are not technical the way I am—when things don’t work properly they can’t debug & diagnose, they simply can’t use it. And I personally don’t want to spend my time diagnosing why I can’t fast-forward a TV show and so on.

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[–] interurbain1er 8 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

I use JF. It's ok but still rough around the edges and if we count as JF the apps, I have to admit that the Android TV app is pretty bad, it's chokefull of very basic bugs, like crashing on start, and missing very basic features like delaying subtitles and the navigation is pretty bad, especially for TV show, navigating between series, episodes and home is a hot mess.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

Anyone that has tried the new version, does plex still make it really difficult to view your library by folder/file rather than by meta data?

I use jellyfin because I can get a folder view.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 16 hours ago

I don't think it ever did?

Been using Plex 5 years now and all I had to do was click the view drop-down and select "folder view" instead of "collection view" and boom, done

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

I just want to use my local library in peace

[–] [email protected] 12 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Fuck you, Subscribe.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 15 hours ago

I grabbed Plex lifetime for peanuts a few years ago and pretty happy with it. They do Cyber Monday discounts as far as I remember.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Oh no....

[–] [email protected] 12 points 20 hours ago

There are so many little fixes and changes they have done over the years. I expect so many edge cases that they kindly took care of not being taken care of anymore.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

I installed the beta. It’s not that bad. My server was the first thing I saw when I opened it. So it wasn’t pushing the other stuff.

It’s missing a bunch of little things tho, like checking the file properties for an episode or movie.

This overhaul might live up to their pitch. I hope it does.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (6 children)

Those who use Plex to access personal media will find that their libraries are in a dedicated tab, while the Watchlist will take up prime real estate in the top navigation section. Plex says it also streamlined the user menu for quick access to things like your profile, friends and watch history.

Wait, does this mean that personal media is in a single "tab" that we now have to navigate from the main page, instead of currently where the main page and personal libraries are broken out? That would be a pretty awful change.

Also, who cares about the friends and watch history? Does anyone use that?

The watchlist (assuming this is your "bookmark to watch" section, not the recent content section) is in "prime real estate" now, even though I never use it?

It sounds like - as with the last few major updates - they're building apps for the users they want, not the users they have.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 20 hours ago

another step in their enshitification journey

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[–] rc__buggy 14 points 20 hours ago

A bunch of talk about UI and art, nothing about the unified code base. Will it stop sucking on Samsung TVs?

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