I remember being excited when it first came out, but then as we know capitalism happened and ruined it. Im all jellyfin now. But was plex originally starting out to be a good thing or was it just to trick us into being locked into their service after we all got on it?
Plex is still fine for me. I have Apple stuff (Mac, iPhone, Apple TV) so my options are basically Plex and Infuse, and Infuse is fine, but expensive to own. Or you pay $10 a year which is more than fair, I suppose. But Infuse can’t be used outside your network, and it doesn’t sync show progress with Plex. Used entirely on its own without Plex is how it’s meant to be used (as a server and client as opposed to client to a Plex server, though that way works too, albeit with weird limitations). But Infuse still can’t be streamed outside your network.
Jellyfin exists on Apple stuff but it’s not very good. The server seems fine, but the client takes a lot more to set up and it’s not as straightforward as Plex. And you have to jump through more hoops to use it outside your network.
That seems odd cause jellyfin on linux is dead simple. You’d think apple would also be.
macOS is “certified UNIX,” whatever that means. And I think Linux is a spinoff/knockoff of UNIX? I’m not clear on the history. I could find out if I were too concerned. But with as closely related as they are (Windows is the odd one out here, pretty much everything else out there is *nix), there’s a lot of stuff one does that the other doesn’t. Like Proton on Linux for running Windows games.
But yeah, the Jellyfin server works fine on macOS, but the apps are kinda hard to get working. Like it doesn’t auto detect your server and it’s not immediately clear what you need to put in to connect them. And the server app doesn’t just volunteer this information freely. So it’s not the kind of thing you can help people set up and share with them. Plex… is. Like seriously, I can say “just register for Plex and give me your account name or email.” I add you to my shared users. Bam, you got all my content. It’s that easy, and moving forward, anything put up as an alternative to Plex should be at least that easy.