Selfhosted

For free (FOSS), and is way better than Plex

As someone who picked up lifetime for like $45 or whatever it was (I think a 50% off sale?) what must have been 15 years ago...

I run jellyfin. Its just a better experience IMO.

They dont want you to buy lifetime they want you to pay month to month.

We've seen other companies pull this move by saying "lifetime" only applies to X version.

The fact that's needed at all is the problem. Developers need to stop making monolithic structures that have access to everything ever and putting it on the user to maintain to maintain a VPN network for security.

There's no reason I should not be able to just use an nginx reverse proxy for remote access to my jellyfin and have that be safe. It should at worst give people a copy of my media if there's a security issue.

Personally I went out of my way to make this be the case, i have my instance locked into an unprivileged lxc whitelist only on syscalls which took a while to figure out the minimum needed for function but I got there. The host System is using the hardened kernel from Upstream and a series of sysctl lockdowns for example P Trace is not allowed even if you are the root user.

So I do indeed just nginx reverse proxy my instant because the worst case scenario even if they got complete shell access to the system they would be locked into an unprivileged container that had no access to any files other than my media files but the fact that I have to go to this level is already ridiculous

I already have a lifetime Plex pass so this isn't an issue for me. 6 months from now when Plex decides my lifetime pass has a new expiry, then I'll be motivated.

I have the lifetime pass, bought it for like $80 many moons ago.

looks like we’ve arrived.

Agreed, this is the tipping point. This is where we will see Plex start to abandon the lifetime pass in favor of "imaginary money line go up forever" subscriptions.

From a purely profit-oriented perspective, no. They're setting up a pretext to eliminate the lifetime license plan due to a lack of interest. No sane person would pay that kind of lump sum for the service (and the insane ones will bring in triple the revenue), so they'll claim that there is no market for it. After that, they're free to crank up the periodic subscription prices.

Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by profiteering opportunism.

Not really. Their plan for a while now is to convert all to subscriptions and this is just their latest salvo. Next up is getting rid of it completely due to "no demand" and then kicking existing lifetime accounts to some static version that won't be supported.

Yes.

Are you accessing your media from outside of your network?

I have heard that you need to set up a VPN for Jellyfin to securely use your media library remotely. Plex handles all of that for me so that I don't need to deal with it.

Realistically the only advantage of Plex is being able to watch it over the internet without a VPN. Which means it makes it easier to get friends and family access to your server or to access it yourself from random smart tvs outside your house.

If you only watch at home or have a fire stick that you take with you to watch abroad or your friends/family members have one and can setup a VPN on it it's not needed.

For me, the killer app for Plex is Plexamp, the music client. It's superb, and AFAIK Jellyfin doesn't really have an equivalent (there are 3P options, but they're lacking).

Ease of use, and actual secure and usable external access.

Friends/family make an account and tell you their account name or email address, you invite them to your library and that’s it, they can watch/listen to your media on pretty much any device they have. No vpn needed.

Jellyfin is not meant to be exposed to the internet for remote viewing. It also doesn’t have a client on most devices people use to watch tv/movies.

Could they at least send the fun ones like Godzilla and aliens?