Given the recent news about Plex soon charging for remote access, I wanted to finish up my switch to Jellyfin.
What tools/methods have you all used to migrate watch history to Jellyfin?
I have a few family members in there, and would like to get everything switched over without resetting their watch history.
I used this: https://github.com/arabcoders/watchstate
It works, really, really well. You just connect it to the servers, and it syncs them by user. You can even let it run regularly while you are in your transition phase as a docker container right next to Plex and Jellyfin.
Mine’s even a bit more advanced, as I used
samba-domain
to set up an LDAP active directory for my fam, then the above to sync the Plex users to those users in Jellyfin, and it still worked great.Edit: The WebUI is also pretty intuitive, but I did have to run it twice for my user the first time for it to get 100% in sync. Everything was fine after that.
Thanks! Sounds like the best option
All the folks saying “just buy the lifetime pass” gonna be in for a big disappointment in about 5 years
If we got 5yr it’s more than paid for itself. Even FOSS needs support - stop whining and support good things.
Yes, do donate to FOSS projects. At least that money will go to people who do the actual work and not to pad corporate profits.
Point being the whiners won’t.
PLEX is not FOSS, plex is a proprietary fork of XBMC.
My point is that in 5 years a lot of these plex users will wish they made the switch to jellyfin sooner.
Or Plex currently does everything they need it to, and $120 for 5+ years of keeping that going without any interruption of service is very reasonable. In the meantime, jellyfin will only get better and there might even be other options available by then.
Stop trying to make the issue black and white, one-size-fits-all. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for people to use both Plex and Jellyfin.
Or sunk cost fallacy, but whatever helps you justify paying $120 for software i guess. I dont think its a black and White one size fits all thing, i just have seen this patter before with other software, and it was already happening with plex before the price increase.
It’s not sunk cost, dude. We agreed that $120 will get them 5 years of service that meets their needs. Even if they switch to jellyfin after 5 years, they still got their money’s worth.
It’s only sunk cost if they are worse off than if they had switched earlier. I guess if you’re arguing that they would still have $120 if they switch today, I would argue they should still pay that $120 toward jellyfin’s development. And that’s assuming they have time to switch to jellyfin AND it fits 100% of their usecases, either of which could be untrue.
Thing is, Plex turns out to be less and less of a good thing with each passing day. Bloat, spying, removal of features, price hikes etc.
If you want to pay for software that is good, there’s always Emby.
Already paid for Plex and it works. Im not in favor of every change they’ve made, but it’s still damn solid and takes money to run.
The point being these whiners aren’t going to run off and support FOSS/alternatives… Just leech.
Yeah but you could pay for Emby and not deal with all the bloat and removed features and such. Or use Jellyfin for free and have the same experience. Plex’s value proposition is shrinking by the day.
One day I may. For now I’m not whining.
Cool. Other people are perfectly justified to though.
I never argued that any option is better. If one doesn’t like it, move on. Most of those whining aren’t supporting any project - it’d be better for the FOSS projects to not have to deal with them.
Won’t take that long before the enshittification is complete.
Yep. Enshitification behavior doesn’t cease once you’re technically a paying customer. If they hadn’t made a habit of enshitification. Clawing features away to put behind a paywall I’d give them some support. But I prefer foss anyhow. And for myself, I’m not missing anything.
I think you’re looking for https://github.com/arabcoders/watchstate Watchstate will pull from Plex and migrate it into a Jellyfin instance. Emby is also supported. Works with multiple users as well, just do yourself a favor and make sure all usernames match up!!!
I sync my watch history with trakt.tv – I believe there are plugins for both Plex and Jellyfin which can transfer those watch histories via that service. I don’t know of any other way.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think jellyfin offers remote access to your media
The entire point of jellyfin is being able to remotely access media (with an good interface and functionality). What do you mean by remote access?
As in watch the media not on my own network or have other users do the same from their homes.
Music is another big one that jellyfin can’t compete with Plex with in its current state. I currently have 718 GB of music that I stream with plexamp when I’m driving.
You may have to use port forwarding or a reverse proxy but the end result is functionally identical to plex. IMO the server detection feature of Plex is overengineered for what it is, and I just sit it behind my reverse proxy and connect to it that way.
As for music and apps yeah Plex is pretty nice, but even for audio you could use other services if Jellyfin didn’t fit your needs like Navidrome
It does, just not thorugh their servers like Plex does.
Do you have a guide somewhere on how to set it up? I’ve poked around online and didn’t see anything short of tailscaling your container to a web browser which I don’t want to do for a few different reasons (opening ports / security mostly)
I use nginx proxy manager and expose it behind a subdomain entry on cloudflare (though you can use any DDNS service i bet). NPM handles the security so I get HSTS and HTTPS on Plex and Jellyfin without either needing it set themselves.
From there anyone can access Jellyfin/Plex via my subdomains (plex.mydomain.com or watch.mydomain.com at the mo)
Tailscale doesn’t require any ports open, or using a web browser with a container, it’s just a VPN which is a good way of doing it.
Or you can just open it up with a reverse proxy like any other web server, but I prefer not to do that.