[Forgeties79]

I canceled all of our subscriptions about two years ago and set up a Plex server. I don’t love the direction Plex is going in so I’m teeing up to flip to Jellyfin, but still, it has been so much better than dealing with all of these companies and nonsense.

I feel like we can’t even call it “advertising“ anymore. It’s such a misnomer. It’s basically data fracking and psychological warfare to make us all into little addicts. This whole industry built around chasing “the attention economy” is a social blight.

[Imustaskforhelp]

Jellyfin is nice but I could never understand how to setup when all I wanted was to watch videos from server for example.

So I used copyparty[0] and used VLC and set a username and password.

I recommend copyparty if you just want something quick and easy actually. Just try it out on cheap VPS and just run it and forget it.

https://github.com/9001/copyparty

[RiverCrochet]

Jellyfin isn't a simple viewer over a filesystem, you have to make a library and give it folders to ingest. It enforces an artist-album-track structure of media, so if you don't like that structure you'll be fighting Jellyfin more than using it.

[Forgeties79]

The big thing is being able to stream outside of my home network. Running stuff locally is easy enough with basically any system luckily

[Imustaskforhelp]

Yes but you can actually have Copyparty run as a server similar to Jellyfin and have the same thing too?

Am I missing something that I am not looking at? But won't jellyfin have the same issue, I think that plex has servers that you can connect from outside but the GP wanted to move to jellyfin and I was talking about that.

And, you can even have plex like thing by just having Cloudflare Tunnels/Tailscale + Copyparty too.

[dpoloncsak]

Similar boat...I'd also like to swap off Plex but a few of my less techie friends use it and I'm worried about the compatibility/ease of setup of Jellyfin on their devices.

Thought about running both in parallel but that seems like a waste. Think I just need a migration day eventually

[devilbunny]

I've never run Plex, or Jellyfin for that matter. There's a video share on my NAS.

I point Infuse on Apple TV 4K's at it. It works, and cleanly.

Downsides: you have to pay for Infuse Pro to play some formats and deal with some audio codecs. It's IIRC $17 for a year, though, so pretty reasonable for continued development. Your non-technical friends and family can't do the initial setup themselves (it's shared over Tailscale, they can all use the same limited account on your plan), but anyone I'm going to let do this can ship me their Apple TV 4K and let me set it up for them.

[darkhorse222]

It's just weird that it's this complicated. We should get a static IP from our DNS. We should use standard open source streaming conversion mechanisms. It should go over basic video codecs.

Lately I've been working towards just using a webserver to host video files. Sure, it's not adaptive, but for goodness sakes it's simple.

[devilbunny]

Well, my ISP doesn't support IPv6 for home use, at all. My IPv4 is essentially static - I can't recall the last time it changed - but while Tailscale is a single point of failure for my home network security, it's also one that I can expect to be updated faster than practically any other package.

VLC will play anything I throw at it, but it's not going to go and fetch all the metadata for me and present it in a nice way to the non-technically-oriented users around.

[TremendousJudge]

yeah I'm on the same boat. I just have an old laptop hooked up to the tv, which can access a shared folder on my main computer that has all the media. I control it with a wireless mouse, and get an actual fast UI with a web browser instead of the usability nightmare that is a smart tv UI. this is all Windows though, I guess it's possible to have Linux access a Windows shared folder, I've been meaning to look into it for a while

[devilbunny]

> I guess it's possible to have Linux access a Windows shared folder

It is, and while it's not hard, this was really my first experience running Linux in a long while, and boy do I now understand why people did not like systemd when it came out. It's not bad, per se, but it's not just "stick a line in /etc/fstab". However, even Copilot can put together a couple of scripts for you.

[bombcar]

Jellyfin has been fine "around the house" but I don't know about remote access as I've not needed it.

Jellyfin + Infuse + AppleTV is basically bulletproof; however Swiftfin as a client has been working fine.

[Forgeties79]

Yeah nothing is as turnkey as plex, hard to give that up if you’re running a little streaming service for friends and family haha

[cityzen]

I had a lot of issues with plex on Apple TV and switched to Infuse. I haven’t tried jellyfin but figured I would mention it.

[Forgeties79]

Huh that’s surprising. So fer Plex has run on everything I’ve ever encountered