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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 16th, 2024

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  • Can I guarantee? There are no guarantees in self hosting. By this logic you can never move away from Plex. There’s always unknowns. There’s always new issues to trip over. Plex is hardly without it’s own warts, but because they’re ‘known’ to you and your users nothing else will ever be able to measure up.

    It’s a logical fallacy and a trap.

    I set up Jellyfin basically overnight when the Plex pass changes occurred. Reverse proxies are trivial, as are docker containers, don’t let the anecdotes about things being hard or VPN being needed intimidate you.

    There were absolutely bumps in the road. I had to make users for each person and email them customized sign-up links. Yes, that kinda sucked, but that’s the price for running and controlling the authentication yourself instead of though a 3rd party service that can and absolutely will eventually use that data to snoop.

    Most of the time, once sent the link the users were fine, 9/10 of my users had no further issues and quickly adapted. For the last 1/10, I had to trouble shoot a few things and eventually ended up recommending a different device to connect with (it was an old TV with a really old version of Plex for TVs, they ended up buying a $40 Google TV device from Walmart and got set up that way).

    The whole time I was running both Plex and Jellyfin so the migration process could happen at my speed.

    My point is this: no, it wasn’t painless to switch. Yes, some tech support was required. Yes, the user who was getting hundreds of dollars (annually) of streaming services effectively for free had to shell out a paltry sum to upgrade and actually enjoys their experience much more now. No, that didn’t make it impossible or not worth doing.

    I’m not saying what’s best for you and your users, and I’m absolutely not guaranteeing you’ll have no issues beyond these, but I hope you understand your hands aren’t actually tied, you’re just boxing yourself in.



  • I think it’s at least partially a cultural thing. I used to participate in the ZFS ecosystem. ZFS got kinda burned by having it’s spread limited due to it’s pre-existing license, but found a home in the BSD ecosystem.

    Once burned twice shy. So add-ons, extensions, etc were defacto BSD 3 Clause licensed in that community to avoid that issue moving forward.

    I could only speculate why MIT is used a lot in the rust community, but if you’re taking inspiration from a half dozen other successful projects and you see them all MIT licensed, you’re probably going to lean towards MIT when picking your own.











  • The streaming was easy, just declared I wasn’t paying for it anymore lol. We still have a crappy version of Spotify for free because of another service (ISP or phone plan something like that), but it’s purely used as a backup.

    Jellyfin’s interface is a bit clunky as a music client in my experience. FinAmp looks cool but it’s still early on.

    Navidrome does smart playlist, crossfading, gapless, flac streaming, and flac to opus transcoding. Those are sorta my core requirements, and Navidrome + the clients we use handles them all with aplomb.

    And actually that’s another great feature I enjoy for Navidrome, there are dozens of excellent clients, so if one of them falls short for someone they can find one that they enjoy.

    As for the user playlist thing… I haven’t seen anything like that but maybe I’m misunderstanding.