No, I said remote…

Yeah but tell me about this tool for Plex remote streaming…

Attacked? No this post alone doesn’t make me feel attacked.

Though it’s about weekly that we see a post saying essentially “there’s no reason anyone should still be using Plex…”, or “jellyfin is superior to plex because of x and y”. And honestly, it’s tiring and it feels forced. Like if jellyfin were so perfect, would it really need this many posts propping it up?

Anyway, what bugged me about this post was the level of smugness. “Does Plex even count as self hosting?”, “is this really in the spirit of the community?”… God damn, that sounds like the least bearable person in the homeowners association.

I’m going to shame people for using something that used to work well. This will help me by making me feel superior, and it will help others by shaming them. What a good idea I’ve had!

I read “Alright let’s see pictures of your super nice rack”

And then I clicked before bothering to read the rest of the sentence.

Was not disappointed though.

Alright thanks, those are some good suggestions. And don’t get me wrong, the nas does technically work, I can do whole drive images, just not the differential file-level backups. What I really wanted was to be able to restore a single file quickly and easily. That was the dream 🙄

Ok, so I’m going to weigh in here because I have first-hand experience, but keep in mind I am a relative novice at self hosting.

I’ve been using a machine that has evolved over the years from primary gaming PC, to backup server, to Bitcoin rig, to Plex server, etc. Well I finally got tired of complex raid backup solutions and bought a 4 drive Synology nas. I figured I might as well just go with the name brand because I’d probably pay a bit more, but everything would work right away.

Everything did not work right away.

I fought so hard to get incremental backup working… So hard. But it just refuses to copy some files. It actually struggles with filenames! It can’t handle names that have too many characters or use certain characters. (Filenames that Windows and the MacOS have no problem with). So if I want that backup to work, it appears I have to rename hundreds of files on that PC and hope nothing breaks… While their hardware seems fine, I am thoroughly unimpressed with Synology’s software.

list of installed plugins.

Yeah, as you said, that’s a pretty serious security issue. That’s a data leak that explicitly lays out the shape of your attack surface. It tells the attacker exactly what additional software your server is running and if any of it includes known vulnerabilities, the attacker now knows how to gain access.

This is a big part of the problem. You can use Plex on PlayStation, xbox, Roku, apple tv, iPhone, android, etc…

The apps are ubiquitous, the coverage is complete. In just about any situation, Plex is a workable option.

Do you know how to rebuild your car’s engine?

Do you know how to remediate black mold spreading on the walls of a houseboat?

Do you know how to compile Linux to run on some custom arm hardware?

Do you know how to repair or rebuild a crumbling stone retaining wall?

There’s a good chance you may not know how to accomplish all of those tasks. There’s also a very good chance you may not care about knowing how to accomplish all of those tasks, as some of them may not be relevant to you. This is ok.

Finally, I know you’re posting on the Internet, but you don’t have to be an asshole, that’s a choice.

It does not, not at all.

I think I’m going to have a harder time fitting a threadripper in my 10 inch rack than I am getting any GPU in there.

Well, you could always use a closed loop CPU cooler. (Not necessarily that one)

With the radiator hanging out in back, this shouldn’t need much height.

Really you don’t want hackers using your random Internet appliance as a point of attack to access your whole network.

More IoT devices means a greater attack surface. And it’s an appliance you don’t actually want to spend time thinking about. You don’t want to waste time troubleshooting network issues with your dehumidifier… It just needs to work, or you use a different one.

I’ll switch to jellyfin as soon as it works nearly as well.

But for the moment it’s missing a lot of features compared to Plex.

I just looked up jfa-go, I’m not at all opposed to trying things if they’ll work.

It seems like jfa-go is a user account management system, which is indeed super useful. But it doesn’t handle the remote content part. I’m still not going to create a VPN to share content.

Meh, seems like a sensible take. Certainly better for your mental health.

Communities matter. There’s a reason I’m not on X, there’s a reason I don’t play pubg or overwatch, toxic communities can seriously make any experience suck.

It’s plain deceitful to say jellyfin is simply better. It’s simply less capable and less supported. I don’t know if you’re trying to deceive others or just yourself.

Here’s the difference: With Plex it’s trivial to invite other people to watch content from your server, they can view it on just about any device they have and it doesn’t take any complicated networking setup to achieve. Likewise, just as you share your server, you can view content from other people’s servers through the same interface. This is not a small feature it’s the primary feature of Plex, it’s what sets it apart from xbmc or any media center software.

I am totally on board with FOSS and I would absolutely use jellyfin in a second if it could do the things that Plex does. But it can’t.

As a side note, this new interface for Plex on mobile is absolute shit, a big step backwards. If I had my way I’d still be using the Plex app from 2016.

The real problem with Plex is that it’s a whole package, server and client. If it were instead a server and an open protocol, that anyone could make a client for, that would be vastly superior. I desperately want to use a more customizable 3rd party client with my Plex server.

Gross

Quickly now, make jellyfin better!

That’s what you have to do for sharing!?

Someone definitely told me that there was library sharing for jellyfin… Is this the only option?