- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Plex has announced a massive price increase on the service’s Lifetime Plex Pass. On July 1, the lifetime subscription option will go from $249.99 to $749.99, an increase of 200%. The price hike will only apply to new subscribers, with no changes to monthly or annual subscription pricing.
Just out of interest as someone who has recently set up a Jellyfin server - what’s the main “value add” of using Plex compared to Jellyfin?
It seems to do everything I want, so I’m not sure why people would pay for Plex over the FOSS version.
Are you accessing your media from outside of your network?
I have heard that you need to set up a VPN for Jellyfin to securely use your media library remotely. Plex handles all of that for me so that I don’t need to deal with it.
I have a jellyfin server set up that you access like this:
https://my.servername/jellyfin
Username and password is all you need aside from that. Apps for most platforms or access in a web browser.
You should not expose a Jellyfin server to the open internet.
You should not expose a Jellyfin server to the open internet.You should not expose a Jellyfin server to the open internet if you don’t know what you’re doing.
FTFY
Please tell me, oh wise one, how do you fix the glaring security issues that are the reason even Jellyfin Stans admit that you should use a VPN?
Port forward, filter ips, take reasonable precautions on the trust of networks.
It’s not rocket science, as you mentioned in your other vitriol.
I think you don’t understand the nature of the exploit.
Anybody who can see the Jellyfin login page can use the Jellyfin server’s permissions to play media directly from your media library.
Port forwarding doesn’t matter. Jellyfin hosts on port 80/443 which you have to allow for the service to function. Most clients are on dynamic IPs or CGNATs so unless you’re going to manually change the IP filter for every single user every few days, IP filters are not a reasonable solution.
‘Take reasonable precautions on the trust of networks’ doesn’t even make sense. Your Jellyfin server is either available to the Internet or not available to the Internet. If you choose not to trust the Internet (the actual mitigation) then you obtain access to your Jellyfin server through a VPN.
No, I understand the nature of the unencrypted transport. I understand that the credentials are exchanged unencrypted (although the passwd isnt in plaintext, even on jellyfin). I also understand what is on the trusted network, my kid’s subnet.
The mitigations are the following:
Correct, that’s the idea and that’s why the IP is filtered. When my kid’s IP changes, his PC posts a notice to me about it, and I change the the fw rule. This happens once a year on average.
Also correct, it is available to the internet, which from jellyfin’s point of view is one single /32.
There is a body of suggested action to take in the interest of security that is repeated here and in other self-hosted spaces, and what you’re saying is valid and sound advice. I want to acknowledge that I don’t take your comment as wrong, it’s very prudent for someone just getting into managing their own stuff.
However, security is my job, and I do take it seriously. And there are more ways than one to get it done.
I keep my data back ends on encrypted channels, backups on another, and I control very tightly what has access to everything else. The model I use is something like “zero trust”, where I assume the clients even on my own network are malicious. In that context, extending my lan to a single remote lan on a single port isn’t really much different than allowing an iot device I don’t trust on my actual lan; it sees no other hosts but a gateway and whatever my acls allow it to.
So in the end, what can a device do at large on the internet to my jellyfin “network”? Nothing. What can a pwned device do on my kid’s network with jellyfin? It can watch TV and movies, because the api calls from jellyfin clients to jellyfin front end are nondestructive.
Ease of use, and actual secure and usable external access.
Friends/family make an account and tell you their account name or email address, you invite them to your library and that’s it, they can watch/listen to your media on pretty much any device they have. No vpn needed.
Jellyfin is not meant to be exposed to the internet for remote viewing. It also doesn’t have a client on most devices people use to watch tv/movies.
I’ve got a bunch of friends accessing my jellyfin server. It has clients for most devices now.
I didn’t say it’s not possible, I said it’s not secure and/or easy.
It’s definitely easy, and the secure part is debatable.
Doing it insecurely is easy.
The secure part isn’t debatable. Even the devs will tell you it’s not secure.
Secure isn’t a binary. Depending on your threat model, using Plex is impossible to use securely!
I was Osama bin Laden and I can confirm that this is true.
HDR, hardware transcoding, remote access.
My Jellyfin has all of these things.
Mine too. And I appreciates that.