I want to unlock the ability to view content on my mobile device. I can do that with a one-time purchase (payed with google opinion rewards) or with a subscription. I want to unlock the ability for my entire family though, across multiple devices. Do I have to pay the “one-time payment” for every device? If so, the plex subscription might be worth it. Is there any other major benefit to having a plex subscription?
The dealbreaker about plex for me was having to use their auth servers and having to route traffic through them.
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You create logins on your server which is authenticated through them. I don’t think it routes traffic, just sends login tokens.
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This is problematic because if Plex suffers an outage (which has happened before) users are suddenly unable to sign in. Even if your media server is running fine, through no fault of your own your content becomes inaccessible.
Jellyfin does not have this issue because authentication is handled locally.
However, Plex has too many nice features so I’ll be staying with them for the time being. Credits/intro skipping and Plexamp are a godsend, and the UI is in my opinion way better than what Jellyfin has.
It also means if Plex ever goes under then remote access will stop working for you, your service only works as long as the company still exists. If jellyfin ever goes under, nothing changes. I realize this isn’t a selfhosting sub, so I won’t go too in depth on my tirade, but persnally, I want to selfhost everything, and I don’t want to rely on any cloud based services that are outside of my control like Plex.
You can specify networks that don’t require authentication at Plex.tv. When our internet is down at home, we can still use Plex.
The catch is that you need to set this up ahead of time as it can’t be done while in the middle of an outage. Also you’ll only be able to access the main server owner account.
Outages don’t happen too often these days, but I run Emby alongside Plex and it comes in handy in situations like this.
There is a plugin which will hopefully be incorporated in the future, for intro skipping. Just google jellyfin intro skipper, its on github. Works ok, some series may beed manual intervention which I am not sure how well it works on Plex. But the point is, does exist for Jellyfin too.