After 14 years with Plex, I finally moved my video library to Jellyfin. Why rising costs, feature restrictions and digital ownership pushed me towards FOSS.
There is a third option, the program that Jellyfin was originally forked from back in 2018, Emby.
Sort of the middle child between the two. Nearly identically to Jellyfin for obvious reasons, several third party apps for Jellyfin work with it as well like Jellyseer, it has apps for nearly every device, and easy external connections via their servers like Plex does.
They do however have a premium subscription system like Plex to support things like those servers. It’s not as expensive as Plex, even before the recent rate hike, but it is there and some stuff is locked behind that premium license.
So all the bad things of both, still a proprietary product that you can funnel your cotent through servers you don’t control while simultaneously not being plex.
I can’t recommend emby because their business practices are pretty scummy. After accepting open source contributions for years, they went closed-source in 2018 and took all those contributions with them (they had a CLA). The very next update, they added hardware acceleration and locked it behind a paywall. They had a pretty big ‘security incident’ a few years ago, which probably would have been averted if they were still open source, as users in the community flagged it as an issue long before the devs took action.
At this point if I were to switch from Plex I would go with Emby just because a bunch of sweaty nerds don’t simp over it every time Plex comes up in the news.
There is a third option, the program that Jellyfin was originally forked from back in 2018, Emby.
Sort of the middle child between the two. Nearly identically to Jellyfin for obvious reasons, several third party apps for Jellyfin work with it as well like Jellyseer, it has apps for nearly every device, and easy external connections via their servers like Plex does.
They do however have a premium subscription system like Plex to support things like those servers. It’s not as expensive as Plex, even before the recent rate hike, but it is there and some stuff is locked behind that premium license.
So all the bad things of both, still a proprietary product that you can funnel your cotent through servers you don’t control while simultaneously not being plex.
I can’t recommend emby because their business practices are pretty scummy. After accepting open source contributions for years, they went closed-source in 2018 and took all those contributions with them (they had a CLA). The very next update, they added hardware acceleration and locked it behind a paywall. They had a pretty big ‘security incident’ a few years ago, which probably would have been averted if they were still open source, as users in the community flagged it as an issue long before the devs took action.
At this point if I were to switch from Plex I would go with Emby just because a bunch of sweaty nerds don’t simp over it every time Plex comes up in the news.
Look at me guys, I’m contrarian! Look! Look!
Ironically, this kind of response is exactly what I’m talking about.