Plex
There's your problem. Here's the solution: Kodi.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
104 points (91.3% liked)
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
69557 readers
268 users here now
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
Rules • Full Version
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
Loot, Pillage, & Plunder
We heartily recommend visiting the free port of freemediaheckyeah (aka FMHY) while you sail the high seas, for all the freshest links the ocean has to offer.
📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):
🏴☠️ Other communities
FUCK ADOBE!
Torrenting/P2P:
- !seedboxes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !trackers@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !qbittorrent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !libretorrent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !soulseek@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Gaming:
- !steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !newyuzupiracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !switchpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !3dspiracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- !retropirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com
💰 Please help cover server costs.
 |
 |
|---|---|
| Ko-fi | Liberapay |
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Kodi will not be better at this.
Jellyfin just works.
As someone who meticulously organises media... this was not a problem for either Plex or Jellyfin.
The one thing that gets both of them fucked up for some reason is Ghost Stories, even with the TVDB tag, which should make it a non-issue. Still, it's easy to fix, on both platforms.
My media looks like this:
Movies: [decade][Title as it appears on TVDB] ([Year]) ([Special things like Directors Cut or whatever]) ([Resolution]).mkv
Shows (including anime): [Show Title][Show Title] S[season]E[episode] [Episode title].mkv
Music: [Artist]([Year]) [Album title][Track Number] [Track title].m4a
Oh, another issue you will run into, with shows, is "fan ordering." A good one for this is Sword Art Online. Some very vocal fans hate that there's a fourth season. They don't actually hate the content of the fourth season, they just think it should be combined with the third season for whatever dumb ass reason people on the Internet get incensed about stupid shit. They tried to plead their case on the TVDB forums and got shot down. So if you go by their order, the latter half of the episodes won't be named and won't have descriptions. Then, whenever the fifth season comes out, if you try to call it the fourth season, it'll get the titles and descriptions of the actual fourth season that's out now. So you can't do that.
If you're having issues with TV shows, get an app called Rename My TV Series. It's on Windows, it's on Mac, and it's on Linux. And it's free. Or you could pirate FileBot, I guess. Or pay for it. I'm not your dad. But I'll use free software over warez any day, as long as it does what I need. Why pirate when the free version does just as good? Just like Plex and Jellyfin, RMTVS uses TVDB, so you know your filenames will comply with your media server. And, if you're on Plex (not sure about Jellyfin on this specific one), you can rename the seasons, so you could call Season 4 "Season 3, Part II" and everything will still work. However, I named my SAO seasons "Sword Art Online," "Sword Art Online II", "Sword Art Online: Alicization," and "Sword Art Online: Alicization: War of Underworld." It looks really cool, since that anime doesn't use seasons, each season actually has a slightly different name for the show. (It's probably, if we're being that nit picky, several shows in one franchise, but that's not how TVDB wants it, and Plex won't let you do it that way, either.)
😑 how did you know that was one of my problem files
50 upvotes and yet half the comments here are "it worked for me OP must be using it wrong" and the other half are "Using Plex is worse than bombing Palestinian children "
The full lemmy exprience!
Amen 🙏
Oh you think bombing Palestinian children is wrong? Antisemite.
Eh, it's a meme. If people interacted hopefully it gave them a chuckle if nothing else
I used to have VLC as my media server (easier to setup than Plex or Jellyfin)
Yo, stop fucking using Plex and switch to Jellyfin. I switched over months ago, and it just works.
Plex became the enemy when they forced their users into a subscription model. Support bullshit-free open-source software instead.
My grandparents cannot access jellyfin via vpn and it’s not safe to expose it to the web because the devs don’t take security seriously
I put mine behind a reverse proxy, like any sane person would. Configure an original sni and you are basically invisible. (Tls1.3, doh/dot make it even better, depending on your threat model, but most likely overkill)
While you are (probably?) correct, this is significantly beyond what is required to deploy Plex for a standard home server chump like me.
I'm using jellyfin and a few others, but am consciously putting off exposing these services to the web until I can learn enough about security to do so. Given life, this will probably take me the better part of a year...
you are right to be careful here. But it certainly is also not a "requirement to deploy jellyfin" either. It's just a good practice to minimize attack surface, no matter what you expose. Unless it's meant for the general public and advertised, then this makes little sense :-)
Also, most selfhosters have at best one IP to use. This helps with the one-IP-multiple-webservices problem anyway.
I use tailscale when I'm in these situations. It even works behind the most cursed CGNAT like starlink where it's impossible to even port forward.
As long as your tunnel is running you just use the private IP address for your jellyfin machine and your parents will access it like it's local.
Old people don’t understand mesh network vpns
You set it up for them and make a bookmark? That's what I do with my grandpa
Lol Plex.
Instead of memes maybe post the issue you are having so we can help? Plex is usually pretty great at importing media if you name it correctly.
Oh. Thanks, I wasn't actually wanting help today. I just wanted to post memes to blow off some steam
load more comments
(6 replies)
I have gotten pretty good at understanding what jellyfin wants from me. usually just english movie title (release year), and for tv series series title (release year) / season 1 / s1e1, s1e2, etc. be sure to check thetvdb ordering.
some shows have multiple orders, and jellyfin seems to randomly decide one fits better than another. had that recently with pokemon, which doesn't have a fully mapped tvdb order at all. still managed to finagle it somehow, and now I've got literally 1337 episodes (not everything but also not nothing. I'm happy with it) sorted.
Have you heard of our load and savior "Automatically renaming and organizing with sonarr and using symlinks to preserve the naming of the torrent downloads so you can seed without using twice as much storage"?
Sonarr makes a symlink from the torrent download folder to a new folder where it renames and reorganizes the file, but the pointer for that file and the file in the downloads folder point to the same file on your hdd so.you have two copies with different names but only one "file". Now you have a perfectly organized media folder to feed into Plex while all of those files also live in your completed downloads folder with the original naming conventions. And it's all automagic.
The one main thing that has stopped me from setting up Sonarr is that I want my media server and torrent server to be on two different machines. Can Sonarr handle symlinks or whatever over the network or something?
Currently, I manually add torrents to Qbittorrent on Server A, which downloads the file to the hard drive on Server A. When downloading has completed, I use SFTP to transfer the files to a much larger hard drive pool in Server B, which runs Jellyfin. Then I may use SSH to rename the files to something Jellyfin-friendly, if necessary. I end up with two copies of the files this way, but most likely eventually end up deleting the files from Server A when I need to free up space and decide to no longer seed them.
When I tried to have one server running both programs, having a lot of activity in Qbittorrent made Jellyfin move sluggishly. Running them on different servers like this allows them to not bottleneck each other at all, and they can run at full speed at all times. I could see myself using Sonarr if I can still keep those two main programs segregated to separate machines.
Yes that is absolutely something you can do. All you would need to do is set up a network share on the download box and then mount that share as a drive on the jellyfin box and then you should be able to do anything to it you would be able to do to folder sitting on its own hard drive. However, if you then use that to copy all the data to a second drive on the jellyfin system this leaves you hosting 2 copies of every file you want to see and manually renaming them over SSH or in a file explorer. But we can already access the download systems drives over the network right? So... Cant we just read all the data right off the download system over the network instead of storing two copies of it? You bet your ass we can...
What i would suggest is that you pick a single computer to be your storage system, and store ALL your data there. This will allow you to use sonarr to automatically create symlinks between the downloads and media folders, so that it can rename and organize your stuff for you without you doing anything, while also seeding the torrent in perpetuity and only using the data of a single copy of the file. For the same reason that you could use a network share to copy the data from the torrent box to the media server, you could also just use a network share to read all the data directly off a single storage box. At enterprise scale the storage is often an entirely seprate machine from the machine doing the compute, and the data all flows over network shares, allowing many compute servers to all access data from a single machine to prevent data duplication. I would strongly consider moving to a system where all your mass storage is centralized in one location, removing the need to duplicate production files across multiple machines (outside of the context of backups, which are a good thing). You can hook as many compute nodes as you want up to that single "Network attached storage" device and read the files off it to all those computers, none of which require more than a small ssd to run their os. This will give you twice as much storage on the storage node, becuase your not duplicating it on the jellyfin node.
All that being said, i am also going to assume your operating at a pretty small scale here and likely dont need very much compute, certainly not two computers worth. You should ABSOLUTELY be able to run jellyfin sonarr and qbittorrent off a single box that also acts as your NAS / central data storage location, without any performance issues, unless you have dozens of users or are transcoding like every single file your family is playing. On the jellyfin end, make sure you are set up to be direct playing the files at native resolution and not asking your server to trasncode them to another resolution, this uses lots of resources if you dont have a gpu or a intel cpu with quicksync. On the hardware side, what are you using? I run about 45 docker containers with no performance degradation and stream to up to 4 simultainous plex users WITH transcoding to lower the bitrate cuz my internet sucks and I do all that on a old 8th gen i5 i got out of the garbage. You should be able to get a used bussiness computer off ebay for 100 dollars that will run jellyfin and a sonarr stack with LOADS of overhead left, all on one device so you dont have to worry about network storage and getting bottlenecked by your networking equipment. If you tell me what it is running on i can maybe give you a better idea of if you have some kind of configuration issue, or its just antiquated hardware. But all this shit runs on a toaster. People use raspberry pis. I would imagine there is some kind of config issue leading to performance degradation.
As for performance, I doubt processing power has anything to do with the sluggishness issues I experienced. I figure the bottleneck was the hard drives. With both programs on the same machine, if Qbittorrent is constantly searching around the hard drive for the next bit to seed, when I go to play something with Jellyfin, that hard drive is going to take a longer time to find that file I want. I definitely noticed an increase in performance when I stopped torrenting to the same hard drive that was serving my media.
With that said, I doubt symlinks (even over the network or something) would actually fix that at all. Qbittorrent would still be actually reading off of my media server's hard drives, limited by their speeds.
That makes sense. Ive got 25Mbps up and an array of 8 drives so i dont ever get anywhere close to being limited by the drive speed when seeding, ive got to set the upload limit well under what a single 7200rpm drive can saturate. I manage to get lots of torrents up to a pretty high ratio and keep a good ratio on all my private trackers with a 1.5 MB/s upload limiter though, so maybe you could just turn your limiter to... lets call it 20MB/s? A 7200 rpm drive should be able to do atleast 80MB/s, so if you just set a reasonable limit you will still be able to seed out more than your fair share of data without messing up your viewing experience. Then you can put all your drives in one pool in the storage server and de-duplicate everything.
load more comments
(8 replies)
What isn’t working? It’s usually pretty flawless for me as long as it’s not anime and that’s what shoko is for
load more comments
(18 replies)
Rename things. Plex is very good at detecting stuff. The extra information in torrent filenames messes with it.
Yep. That's how I spent my afternoon
cool thing is Jellyfin is free and you can switch right now
if you have android TV clients, give Wholfin a go, it's a FOSS jellyfin client that looks and behaves like the Plex client, it's fantastic and makes transitioning users over so much easier.
It's not better at this.
You will also not find as good of a support of Jellyfin by many devices like Smart TVs, game consoles, etc. Also, it just doesn't work as reliably in many ways, like identifying media, transcoding it and sorting it correctly. It is an alternative to Plex in the same way that Gimp is an alternative to Photoshop: Superior in terms of licensing, but not as an actual piece of software.
load more comments
(4 replies)
I have zero issues. You can change the metadata of your obscure files if plex can't pull the metadata on it's own. Really no issues importing my 24 TB's of media.
load more comments
(6 replies)
My entire library is pirated, never had any issues apart from when ab fab was named as some Arabic horse show
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next ›