this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
1172 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

45345 readers
1357 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Linux (Flatpak)

So, no, then.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 week ago

Ah, if you're allergic to flatpaks and can't convince your distribution to include it in their repository then you can always build it yourself - https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-media-player
Or just use their web based client with a browser of your choice. :)

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

No idea what Flatpak is, much? Jellyfin is open-source. If your distro isn't providing you a .deb or tarball to your liking, that's not on the Jellyfin project.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Why would you ever bother to use either option when you can just access it via the WebUI on Firefox?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Because that basically requires transcoding for modern codecs. H265? Transcode. Subtitles? Transcode. The JF client on the same hardware can usually direct play.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Oh fair enough, I'd highly recommend enabling transcoding anyway it just eliminates all sorts of issues like this.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Don't ask me? I'll ftp before I'll WebUI like so, but for online viewing, I'll take streaming please. My kids, wife, and mother-in-law find that a million times more convenient.

Meanwhile, there's a dude in these comments hating on the notion that Jellyfin's app will download the Raw file for offline viewing purposes. Please, do not ask me to pretend to care what is going on in that person's head. In my world, using VLC to play my files is a perk. Gimme that yummy 2x or slow-mo as I see fit, please.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I use Findroid for its great UI but also its ability to download and watch offline. It's a better experience and I was surprised Jellyfin Android didn't support it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

WebUI is streaming though on desktops though and I assume they're also using iOS/Android/TV which all have clients, so I'm trying to get at the difference there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I thought their implication was that they would use the WebUI for downloading videos for offline watching later. Beyond that, I don't really know or care; Their suggestion was weird to me, but I took it at face value and replied accordingly.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Flatpaks aren't the worst, at least it's not a snap only

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What do people have against flatpaks? I like them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Part of it is that Ubuntu/Canonical so aggressively pushed Snaps which became a huge culture war. So you have people who hate the idea of those style of packages because they hate Snap AND people who hate flatpak because they are Team Ubuntu for some reason.

And the other aspect is that it is incredibly space inefficient (by the very nature of bundling in dependencies) and is prone to "weirdness" when it comes to file system permissions and the like. And many software projects kind of went all in on them because it provides a single(-ish) target to build for rather than having a debian and an arch and a redhad and a...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Ah, I see. I've not tried Snaps, been avoiding Ubuntu because of Canonical's weirdly corporate angle. Once they baked in Amazon into Ubuntu I was out.

I like the bundling of deps. Sure it's inefficient, but it runs, and storage comes cheap nowadays anyway.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Storage is cheap until it isn't.

On my desktop where I have something like 6 TB of NVME storage because I am a sicko? The only thing that makes me think twice about a flatpak is if I need to give it access to devices or significant parts of my filesystem (yay permissions weirdness).

On my laptop where I can have one drive and replacing it involves opening the entire laptop AND reinstalling Fedora (or dealing with clonezilla/dd)? Yeah... I very much care about just how much bloat I am dealing with. And, as the other person pointed out, flatpaks can balloon REAL fast.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A lot of flatpaks early on wouldn't survive a major point release upgrade or worst case would hold on to dependencies and the user would end up with an unbootable mess after an upgrade.

I haven't seen that recently though.

However I regularly run appimages on my fedora silverblue system so take what I say with a grain of salt.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

If dependencies are articulated (and maintained...) properly, it is very doable and is intrinsically tied to what semantic versioning is actually supposed to represent. So appfoo depends in libbar@2:2.9 and so forth. Of course, the reality is that libbar is poorly maintained and has massive API/header breaking changes every point release and was dependent on a bug in [email protected] anyway.

Its one of the reasons why I like approaches like Portage or Spack that are specifically about breaking an application's dependencies down and concretizing. Albeit, they also have the problem where they overconcretize and you have just as much, if not more, bloat. But it theoretically provides the best of both worlds... at the cost of making a single library take 50 minutes to install because you are compiling everything for the umpteenth time.

And yeah... I run way too many appimages too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

The space inefficiency is definitely there.
I find that clients, such as Jellyfin, Moonlight and Signal, works just fine as flatpaks but with those three apps my /var/lib/flatpak/ lands on 6.4GB.
When I temporarily had Discord installed it grew to 6.7GB, so the inefficiency is frontloaded and lessens the more of them you use.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Just use the god damn browser