This is the year of the Jellyfin desktop
Year of the enshitification, more like.
It feels like every company just decided 2023 was the year they finally pulled the trigger and tried to cash-out and bail.
With Plex adding “Live TV” and all the other shit for the past 6 years, their enshittification isn’t new. Most people I know still on Plex are only doing so because they paid for a lifetime pass. They’re full on sunk-cost-fallacy.
I’m still on Plex because the app experience just isn’t there on Jellyfin yet. It’s close, but switching audio/subtitle tracks is not as intuitive or straightforward as I want yet. I’m thinking it will probably be ready for my server in a year or two.
Tech has always been geared towards losing money to provide a valuable service but the understanding from investors who don’t loan for free is that at some point you turn on the profit engine. Some tech companies are able to generate revenue without necessarily making their product awful for users, but the more pull and pressure investors have, and the more driven by impatience, the enshittifier things become.
The Fed turning off the free money tap last year by starting to raise interest rates was an inevitable wake up call for investors that they needed to change their model to start profiting or at least lose less. Many, many companies, users and products are experiencing US’s investors-first-and-only capitalism’s inevitable end; it destroys the good it created. Companies without long-term investors or leverage to hold off investors willing to kill the golden goose either enshittify, or if they don’t have a way to enshittify, go under.
There seems to be a pattern in services like this where they launch as a good idea that’s under priced and take off like a rocket, then growth levels off as everyone is either already using the service or never will regardless of what they do. Once you reach that point, however, you still need to show revenue growth because capitalism, so if you can’t get more users you either have to make the service more expensive for the users you have, or cheaper to run. The former we see happening all over the place, and the latter is actually a good thing in limited amounts as unnecessary parts are trimmed off, but will almost always also result in useful features being axed. Hence why everything seems to be getting more expensive and worse.
It’s great. Clean, minimal. Love it. Plex is like a titanic. Way too much heft for me. It’s also corporate, so hard pass
I’ve got gigs of music and rip all my Blu-rays. Jellyfin was a shock! Runs so much smoother, streaming faster. I had no idea streaming over my network can be effectively lag free. It’s also nice having a choice of players, some work better for Android Auto, some better on my Windows desktop etc.
The scrubbing in Jelly is insanely snappy to me. My existing player hooks right into and even has a sync extension that makes it all even snappier.
I was running a samba share before but moving to a proper media server opened up another world. Also love how easy it is to edit metadata and even add to it (I’ve opened a moviedb account adding missing covers and other art).
Lack of an official tvOS app and Plex being easy to set up for my family keeps me from switching.
I made the switch this week. Jellyfin took about 10 minutes to set up and left it overnight to scan my files. I only had to make a few corrections.
You can always try it out in a VM or container or even run both at once.
You can cast it onto a chrome cast though I haven’t tried this yet.
I would love to switch but there’s two things stopping me: Less support (if any?) for multi-users and remote access, and less app support especially when transcoding is needed. Also would be nice to not lose Overseerr when switching, I’m sure there’s a fork of that though.
Putting Jellyfin behind a reverse proxy and making multiple users are both well supported features.
And wait until you hear about Jellyseer!
I suppose it might be time to try! Last I tried Jellyfin, multiuser wasn’t really a thing.
Can I make an account for someone without knowing their password?
Last I tried, literally the only way to create a user was to enter a password. Without something like an email or link to create an account remotely, it’s a non-starter for me.
