Jellyfin doesn’t have an app on every App Store. On some, you have to sideload it, by enabling developer mode and connecting to a PC that is running an App Store server. Then the TV downloads it from the PC.

Lots of those issues have been blown out of proportion, and would never be a real concern for the “just a dude running a server in his closet for his friends” setups. Which, to be clear, is the vast majority of setups.

For instance, virtually all of the worst issues require that the attacker already has a valid login token. So unless they stole your buddy’s credentials, the only one to truly worry about would be your buddy directly. But yes, Jellyfin has some gaping holes, and letting it touch the WAN at all is always a risk. You’re giving attackers a new potential vector of attack that didn’t exist before, so that’s worth noting.

I disagree; Self-hosting is for a variety of things, and plenty of people (in fact, I’d say probably the majority of Plex users) just want to be able to pirate Netflix without a ton of setup.

Is learning some networking inevitable? Yeah, probably. But I also think this xkcd is apt. The reality is that what may be simple for you and me actually requires a lot of studying for a complete novice. Plenty of people will need to google what a port is, let alone how to forward one. And that’s assuming they even know the word “port” to google. Plenty of people won’t even know where to start.

And true novices are hopefully going to be extremely wary of any info they find online. It’s easy to fuck something up without even realizing it, and leave your entire system exposed; especially when the braindead “lol just forward your Jellyfin port and use your public IP” advice is posted somewhere in every single advice thread.

To set it up “correctly”, yes. It’ll require owning your own domain, being able to configure it properly (with either a static IP, or DDNS to point to your server at home), knowing how to automate https certificate refreshes, and a few other things. Plex just requires forwarding a port in your router.

2. It’s also the most complex to set up, and for many people the threshold is “walking your tech-illiterate mother-in-law through side loading it over the phone, because she lives 100 miles away… She’s afraid to touch her computer for anything except email and Facebook. And then resetting her password every 30 days, because she keeps locking herself out of it.” Suddenly the “just fucking sign into Plex and it automatically discovers your server” option becomes a lot more appealing.

Yeah, the move from software to hardware processing is what will make the biggest difference. Software processing is very resource intensive.

This is the best answer tbh. You’re either playing as a girl or as an egg a future femboy a twink programmer who hides behind the pretty girl and lets her do the fighting 90% of the time.

And the secure “lockdown” mode on iOS disables push notifications for exactly this reason. But the vast majority of people don’t use lockdown mode in their day to day, because it kills a lot of the functionality of the phone. Lockdown mode is intended for people who may actually be targeted by laser-focused hacking attempts. Politicians, celebrities, people with high security clearance, etc… It’s not something that the average person would use.

Apple even publishes this as a known vulnerability. It’s due to the way push notifications work. Similar to SMS, push notifications default to unencrypted because there isn’t a single unified system. Each carrier and cell manufacturer handles push notifications differently, so they’re kept unencrypted so that the public encryption key doesn’t get lost during transit; That would just result in scrambled junk messages.

I’ve found that my players tend to prefer Fight Club instead. The mobile interface and easy editing means they can easily track whatever the hell they want. Hell, I used to track 3 separate characters on my iPad, and just swap between them depending on whose turn it was.

But that’s for in person gaming. Remote is more difficult, because Fight Club doesn’t publish rolls to anything. If you’re looking for online play, maybe Foundry or Fantasy Grounds for a VTT?

Yeah, if you’re 100% local, that’s basically the ideal use case for Jellyfin. Plex really shines when it comes to remote access. But if you never use that, then there’s very little reason to use it over Jellyfin.

Yup, just spin up a second Docker image for your porn Jellyfin server. Copy your transcoding settings over from the existing image, and point the new image at different media folders.

It literally gives you a gigantic “hey we want to sell your data. Do you want to allow that” prompt when you open it. They didn’t even make the “no, don’t sell my data” button grey and tiny like so many cookie prompts do. Plex went out of their way to put it up front and center, instead of quietly burying it in an obscure opt-out. There are plenty of perfectly valid complaints about Plex… But if a company wants to sell my data, (and here’s a spoiler warning: They all want to) this is how it should be handled.

Yeah, my Flint 2 has been a workhorse for about a year and a half now. They just recently released the Flint 3, but I don’t feel any urgency to upgrade. And even when I do, I’ll probably repurpose my current Flint 2 to be an access point on the other side of the house.

My only real complaint is that since it only has 4 LAN ports, (3 if you switch the first one to be a second WAN port) you basically need to run a dedicated switch as well. Not a huge issue in the grand scheme of things, (unmanaged switches are super cheap, after all), but I run a small Dante audio-over-IP system, which requires low latency. So I try to avoid having a bunch of switch hops in between my devices, as each switch hop adds some latency. I basically split each of those four LAN lines to a separate room, and each room has its own switch. So I’m never more than three switch hops (room 1 switch > router > room 2 switch) away from any other device.

And a Samsung TV app. There’s an entire branch of Samsung TVs that require side loading to get a Jellyfin app installed.

Didn’t even need to dig. As soon as I opened Plex in my browser, it gave me a giant full screen “hey we want to sell your data. Do you consent” page. I disagree with data sale in general, but at least they didn’t go out of their way to bury the opt out. In fact, they actually went out of their way to present the notification in a way that was impossible to miss. If you’re capable of reading, you’ll know what the popup is for.

Yeah, being a novice in the FOSS scene can be extremely frustrating sometimes. It can very easily start feeling like you’re reading documentation for a plumbus, where every single sentence seems to introduce a new term you’re unfamiliar with. And it often assumes you’re already intimately familiar with how these new terms work. So even just reading the documentation for one specific thing often means having fifty different tabs open, as you also have to read documentation about a ton of dependencies or terms.

Yeah, the sad reality is that Plex’s setup experience is much smoother. And when you’re trying to convert people, the single largest obstacle is often social inertia. So lowering the barriers to entry is extremely important. My mother-in-law would need to sideload the Jellyfin app onto her TV, but Plex is available right on its app store.

Luckily, you can run both side by side. Jellyfin for me and my more tech-literate friends, Plex for those who don’t know/don’t care to learn.

My guess is that it also included things like the 12 year old hosting a Minecraft server for their friends. Which, to be clear, is a totally valid self-hosting use case.

It’s technically possible, if the drives were binned. Not likely, but possible.

Binning is a process where manufacturers take large drives and artificially reduce their size. Let’s say a company makes 1TB drives, but their manufacturing process only reliably works for 2/10 drives. They test each drive, and 8 have a bad sector. Rather than just throwing those drives out, they disable that bad sector. Now you have two 1TB drives, and eight drives that are a lower capacity. Maybe they test the remaining sectors, and another 2 test fine. So now they have two 1TB drives, two 512GB drives, and six lower capacity. They disable another sector on the remaining 6, and try again. They have three test good, and the rest test fine after disabling another sector.

So by trying to manufacture ten 1TB drives, they actually got two 1TB, two 512GB, three 256GB, and three 128GB drives. They’ll sell the 128GB drives at (or even slightly below) cost, just to recoup some of their expenses. They simply don’t want to write them off as a total loss. The 256GB drives get sold slightly above cost, to make a slight profit. The 512GB’s have more markup,!and the 1TB drives will have a high amount of markup to cover future R&D costs. So the 1TB drives are more expensive, not only because the company wants to cover future R&D, but also because they can’t be made reliably.

But then tech improves, and 1TB drives become easier to make. Reliability improves. Now the company is able to reliably make 9/10 functioning drives, and only 1/10 have a bad sector. But this introduces a new problem for the company… Their market research has found that 512GB drives sell the best, while 1TB drives tend to sit on shelves for a while. So if they just ship 9/10 drives as 1TB, the company will actually lose money as stores end up overstocked.

Instead, they bin the drives according to what will sell the best. They know 512GB’s sell the best, so they take 6 of those perfectly functional 1TB drives, and disable a sector to turn them into 512’s instead. Now they’re selling three 1TB drives, and seven (six of the functional 1TB drives, plus the one from earlier that had a bad sector) 512GB drives. To be clear, those six drives would be perfectly functional as 1TB drives, but they have been artificially limited by the manufacturer to boost sales.

So maybe a generic company buys those 512’s, re-enables the disabled sectors, and resells them as 1TB. It’s a gamble, because 1 of those drives for sure has a bad sector and will fail as soon as the user crosses past the 512GB mark. But the scammer doesn’t care about that, because they’re still making a profit on the remaining six. That’s likely what is happening here, with the seller buying binned drives and re-enabling disabled sectors. But the issue is that the 4TB drives are still likely difficult to make. They’re still in that 2/10 range, not the 9/10 range. So there’s a very good chance that all of the drives will fail before the 4TB mark. It’s not 100% certain… It’s possible you get extremely lucky and actually get a good drive that was artificially binned for sales. But the chances are much much better that you just bought a drive that will fail at 2TB, or 1TB, or even 512GB.

Any corporate fleet machines, really. Corporate C-suite executives always demand the best laptops on the market… They also demand the newest laptops on the market. Because they can’t be seen with a worse laptop than the graphic artists or the programmers. This means there’s always fresh stock of last year’s corporate laptop hitting the used market. And they’re almost always gently used, because they just sat docked on some executive’s desk for a year, and were only used to answer emails.

Those $2000 laptops often get dropped on eBay for like $250, because the random Accounting person who has to auction them off doesn’t really care how much they sell for; They’re just checking a “was sold to recoup costs” checkbox.