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Comment by vitally3643 | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood why anyone would tolerate paying any price to stream media they "own" from a server they own on a network they own to a device they own.

At this point a Plex subscription is on par with a Netflix subscription in price, but you have to bring your own media. The only value Plex provides beyond the software is a STUN proxy to connect remote devices to your server behind a residential NAT.

But Jellyfin is free and in a lot of cases it's trivial to get your server exposed to the internet. There's countless ways to do it that don't involve paying anyone anything, and more ways that cost far, far less than $750.

Perpetually gobsmacked that people are willing to pay a subscription to access their own media on their own hardware. Why not just use Netflix at that point?

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Convenience. Jellyfin is becoming better and better but still lacks proper support for certain (Apple) devices, while Plex mostly just works.

That being said, Plex apps also lack proper support for HW decoding of some 4K codecs and their AppleTV situation is just plain sad (2 years without an update, no proper HW decoding).

With the Pass being $750, I’m expecting Jellyfin to become a more popular alternative than ever. I’d personally never spend this kind of money on Plex.

> That being said, Plex apps also lack proper support for HW decoding of some 4K codecs and their AppleTV situation is just plain sad (2 years without an update, no proper HW decoding).

What does hardware decoding get me on an Apple TV? It seems plenty powerful enough to decode anything I’ve ever thrown at it.

The official Plex app hasn't been updated to take advantage of all the hardware decoding support available on the Apple TV. I moved to Infuse, a paid third-app, which I use to stream my Plex media content.

Jellyfin official apps are sporadic though, so Infuse is popular for Jellyfin users because it is well maintained and allows you to direct stream content without transcoding as often as possible.

I'm also the developer of Aviato Media Server (https://aviato.media), which I just released publicly last week and is available only as a beta, and I am an ex-Plex employee.

That doesn’t answer my question. What does it get me? Why do I care if it uses hardware decoding or not if I can stream pretty much any content without any issues? It’s not like it causes stuttering or wastes a bunch of power because it’s using software decoding.

Depends on the server you are using to host your media sever from. If you're using a Raspberry Pi, then you might not be able to support transcoding at all, definitely not for a 4K AV1 video and a lot of modern formats. So even if Apple TV can play it, the Plex app won't attempt it and will force transcoding from the server.

Even if your server can support transcoding, all transcoding results in quality loss, so if you want to enjoy your media in the best formats then you want to direct play. Just depends on the media you are playing and how much you care about the quality.

This has nothing to do with hardware decoding though, no? Hardware decoding generally is more restrictive in supported formats, not less restrictive. Unless you mean AV1 decoding is supported by Apple TV in hardware but not the Plex app itself…

Also, what modern formats for media typically used in Plex servers isn’t supported? Nobody uses AV1 for plex media, no offense. It’s universally h264 or h265. Or perhaps mpeg2 for super old stuff.

> certain (Apple) devices,

Guessing you’re not talking about iPhones - fwiw Finamp works pretty well.

AppleTV to be more specific

I imagine a lot of their users (like myself) use Plex because it was the best option 10 years ago and premium was $40 during sales

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