Given the recent news about Plex soon charging for remote access, I wanted to finish up my switch to Jellyfin.
What tools/methods have you all used to migrate watch history to Jellyfin?
I have a few family members in there, and would like to get everything switched over without resetting their watch history.
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All the folks saying “just buy the lifetime pass” gonna be in for a big disappointment in about 5 years
Yep. Enshitification behavior doesn’t cease once you’re technically a paying customer. If they hadn’t made a habit of enshitification. Clawing features away to put behind a paywall I’d give them some support. But I prefer foss anyhow. And for myself, I’m not missing anything.
I got the lifetime pass 5 years ago. I’ve switched to JF because of the disappointment so far about a year ago.
JF is exactly what I wanted and needed plex to be, and everything added since is a worsened product. The lifetime pass was an attempt at getting the peace of mind of “then you just have it”. If anything, only FOSS can give that.
Won’t take that long before the enshittification is complete.
If we got 5yr it’s more than paid for itself. Even FOSS needs support - stop whining and support good things.
I don’t get the people down voting you… It’s not like services are free. I’ve been paying for Plex since 2019, and I just recently got a lifetime pass. It’s only fare to pay for it to use it …
Thing is, Plex turns out to be less and less of a good thing with each passing day. Bloat, spying, removal of features, price hikes etc.
If you want to pay for software that is good, there’s always Emby.
Already paid for Plex and it works. Im not in favor of every change they’ve made, but it’s still damn solid and takes money to run.
The point being these whiners aren’t going to run off and support FOSS/alternatives… Just leech.
Yeah but you could pay for Emby and not deal with all the bloat and removed features and such. Or use Jellyfin for free and have the same experience. Plex’s value proposition is shrinking by the day.
One day I may. For now I’m not whining.
Cool. Other people are perfectly justified to though.
I never argued that any option is better. If one doesn’t like it, move on. Most of those whining aren’t supporting any project - it’d be better for the FOSS projects to not have to deal with them.
PLEX is not FOSS, plex is a proprietary fork of XBMC.
My point is that in 5 years a lot of these plex users will wish they made the switch to jellyfin sooner.
I just upgraded to lifetime and also use jellyfin but right now it only does 80% of what Plex does in my workflow so gonna use it until I can’t anymore.
I know it’s not FOSS. These whiners aren’t going to support any project - FOSS or not- just whine.
If it takes 5 years to reach that conclusion… A) it’s an easy switch, B) probably saved Jellyfin devs a bunch of moans, C) no regerts.
Yes, do donate to FOSS projects. At least that money will go to people who do the actual work and not to pad corporate profits.
Point being the whiners won’t.
I think this is the tool you are looking for: https://github.com/luigi311/JellyPlex-Watched
I haven’t used it myself but I plan on it eventually when I do make the switch.
Thanks! Looks like it will work.
I sync my watch history with trakt.tv – I believe there are plugins for both Plex and Jellyfin which can transfer those watch histories via that service. I don’t know of any other way.
Yeah this is what I did when I spun up a Jellyfin instance to play around with. For plex I used PlexTraktSync and the jellyfin trakt plugin to sync from trakt to jellyfin.
oh no, this is the first im hearing about this.
If you have Plex pass you dont have to worry about it. Others can still remote play from your server free. Actually more so because the mobile app is free for them too now.
But if you don’t already have lifetime and are paying monthly or annually then that price is also almost doubling
Just buy the lifetime Plex pass before the price goes up then.
Just did that, honestly didn’t know lifetime was always available, thought it was only during sales or certain times, should have gotten it years ago
spend money to pirate now before you have to spend even more money to pirate later
🤦♂️
pLeX iS aWeSoMe!
This is like complaining that you have to spend money on HDDs or a VPN.
Really I think we are going to see an increase in jellyfin uptake given the changes which is great for that project
It’s not the same at all.
Plex practically doubled their prices to access features that users previously had for free.
Can’t remember the last time a HDD manufacturer put previously free features behind a paywall or when a Mullvad doubled its prices.
How have they doubled their prices? The monthly fee and lifetime license are still the same price and they’ve always charged for Android and iOS playback if you didn’t have the Plex Pass. I won’t argue that this change is a good thing but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as big of a deal as people are making it out to be. They aren’t changing anyone now who streams from a server that has the Plex Pass so now my users can watch on their mobile devices for free using a license I paid for once close to a decade ago.
HDD manufacturers have been increasing their prices as of late for the same products that were previously cheaper, and Mullvad is still charging you the same monthly fee even though they’ve removed important features like port forwarding, so what’s the difference? Hosting a server has costs associated with it and this is another one of those costs if you want to use their completely optional solution to use and share your library.
Not really. Or at all. Both of those are multi-purpose devices which you can use for other things. A plex license is singularly for Plex. It doesn’t do anything more for you than to stream your own media, something you can already accomplish for free.
Of all the examples you could have chosen you essentially picked the worst two.
It doesn’t do anything more for you than to stream your own media
Sure it does, which is why we’re not all using VLC to stream our media.
Furthermore, they do provide a simple way to share our media with friends and family via their authentication servers along with their relay servers if direct access to your server goes down for whatever reason which have associated costs. I have a lot of my own gripes about Plex, but this particular change is probably at the bottom of the list, and I think acting like this software has zero value is disparaging not only Plex but Jellyfin and the army of volunteers over there working hard to make their product better for you and everyone else at no cost. You’re essentially saying all their work is worthless since their product accomplishes all the same things as Plex.
Not the answer to your question but thanks for the reminder to cancel
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think jellyfin offers remote access to your media
The entire point of jellyfin is being able to remotely access media (with an good interface and functionality). What do you mean by remote access?
As in watch the media not on my own network or have other users do the same from their homes.
Music is another big one that jellyfin can’t compete with Plex with in its current state. I currently have 718 GB of music that I stream with plexamp when I’m driving.
You simply expose jellyfin to the internet like you would with any other service. Why did you think it specifically wouldn’t work over the internet for jellyfin?
You may have to use port forwarding or a reverse proxy but the end result is functionally identical to plex. IMO the server detection feature of Plex is overengineered for what it is, and I just sit it behind my reverse proxy and connect to it that way.
As for music and apps yeah Plex is pretty nice, but even for audio you could use other services if Jellyfin didn’t fit your needs like Navidrome
It does, just not thorugh their servers like Plex does.
Do you have a guide somewhere on how to set it up? I’ve poked around online and didn’t see anything short of tailscaling your container to a web browser which I don’t want to do for a few different reasons (opening ports / security mostly)
Tailscale doesn’t require any ports open, or using a web browser with a container, it’s just a VPN which is a good way of doing it.
Or you can just open it up with a reverse proxy like any other web server, but I prefer not to do that.
I get that it may be technically possible but that is leaps and bounds different than having my senior dad make a Plex account on his fire stick so he can watch movies with his niece, or my fiance’s boss is in the hospital with cancer right now and is watching things on his iPad.
I already have a hard time getting people to just make a Plex account and watch on my server and that’s the “easy” route.
Yeah I don’t bother with other people on my server unless they really want to, I’ve long ago given up trying to convince anyone to change their ways, it’s up to them.
I use nginx proxy manager and expose it behind a subdomain entry on cloudflare (though you can use any DDNS service i bet). NPM handles the security so I get HSTS and HTTPS on Plex and Jellyfin without either needing it set themselves.
From there anyone can access Jellyfin/Plex via my subdomains (plex.mydomain.com or watch.mydomain.com at the mo)
Just buy the lifetime Plex Pass before the price hike and you’re golden.
I thought about it, but remote access is just something I use so rarely that it doesn’t seem worth the cost to me.
Also I really distrust anything ‘lifetime’, historically those don’t work out very well on most services.
BuT I wAnT mY fRrrreEeeeEEeeee
These whiny people should stay with Plex if only to save FOSS devs the headache of dealing with them. They aren’t going to support them either.
(Thanks for helping clarify)
That would probably work, until Plex decides to introduce another subscription tier on top of the lifetime license, and/or demand more money from its paying users. I could totally see them doing that
