Goodbye Plex Media Server

I've been using Plex Media Server (on FreeBSD of course) for several years. I had even signed up for the premium product... Plex Pass to support their work. Sadly a lot has changed in the past few years regarding Plex, and not all of it good. For about a year or two, it's no longer possible to even manage your server without signing into a Plex Account.

It seems now that your locally hosted Plex server is now nothing more than a front end to Plex's cloud service. Sure, you can whitelist your local network IP's to bypass login. Even with that your Plex server is tightly integrated into the Plex's services. It's very insulting to say the least.

Way to betray your users Plex!

Replacing Plex

I finally got around to taking care of the problem. I've uninstalled Plex and removed it's massive Metadata and Cache folders.

pkg delete -y plexmediaserver && rm -rf /usr/local/plexdata/Plex\ Media\ Server/{Metadata,Cache}

What will I use now? There are several options thankfully. In addition to Plex I was using two other self-hosted media servers. Emby and Serviio.  There are two other media servers that are currently under development, Jellyfin and Olaris Server.

Emby is okay but has some minor annoyances. My main issue with Emby (besides the fact it uses .NET/mono) is the way it organizes content.  Even over DLNA there seems to be no way to have Emby present content by it's folder structure. Emby thinks it knows best and decides on it's own how to organize stuff.  It does this very badly, often mixing up TV series and episodes.

Jellyfin is a fork of Emby, but re-implemented in .NET Core (yeesh!).  Jellyfin so far seems to be the most open and free of them all.  I plan on using it once they get it running on FreeBSD.  Until then I can't really say much about it.

Olaris is a new media server built with Go.  I guess it's better than .NET? It's still too early in it's development to know for sure if it's a viable alternative to Plex.

Serviio is Still the Best

Still after many years Serviio remains the best option for a self-hosted media server in 2021.  Serviio was the first media server I tried and it just seems to do just enough while not going too far to keep me happy.  If I had to complain about Serviio, it would be the lack of a decent app for mobile and TV.  It's not too much of a problem.  Serviio is primarily a DLNA server, and it does it very well.

It's mostly the fault of Google, Amazon, etc.  To this day none of their products have a DLNA client out of the box.  VLV media player fills that gap, but it's UI for locating DLNA content isn't very intuitive for non-technical users.

Still, I would recommend Serviio for anyone looking for a Plex alternative.  It's managed to stay simple and useful.  The cost for a pro license is worth it, if only to support it's development.