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.
All the folks saying “just buy the lifetime pass” gonna be in for a big disappointment in about 5 years
I’ve had a lifetime pass for years, but have considered making the switch several times. So far I’ve held back because, and correct me if I’m wrong, there are tools to transfer watch state, but not ratings, and while there’s a plugin for dynamic collections, it’s based on tags, so you can’t just have a collection based on something like rating. My library also contains “custom” shows where there’s no match for it online, so I’ve manually assigned it some details.
I got the lifetime pass 5 years ago. I’ve switched to JF because of the disappointment so far about a year ago.
JF is exactly what I wanted and needed plex to be, and everything added since is a worsened product. The lifetime pass was an attempt at getting the peace of mind of “then you just have it”. If anything, only FOSS can give that.
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.
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.
Is there any evidence that Plex has been spying? Genuinely curious. Sure they are closed source so we cant prove they are not.
There was the time that users started receiving emails from Plex telling them about other users and the shows they’ve been watching on their personal server, without permission. Spooked the hell out of me. There was allegedly a pop up that explained this new “feature” that was supposed to function as an opt-in. Problem was it worked more like an opt-out, as many of us never received the pop up, and weren’t even aware of the feature until people reached out to us to let us know Plex was sending them Emails about our library content.
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.
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.
I know it’s not FOSS. These whiners aren’t going to support any project - FOSS or not- just whine.
If it takes 5 years to reach that conclusion… A) it’s an easy switch, B) probably saved Jellyfin devs a bunch of moans, C) no regerts.
I just upgraded to lifetime and also use jellyfin but right now it only does 80% of what Plex does in my workflow so gonna use it until I can’t anymore.
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.
whatever helps you justify paying $120 for software
Does that sound like a lot to you?
Considering the use I got out of it, even if I switch to something else tomorrow, the cost for the lifetime pass was peanuts. I’m sure others making that decision based on the situation today will feel the same in a few years. If Plex seems like the best solution today it’s not going to fall off the cliff before $120 were worth it.
Not like FOSS projects are immune to bad decisions, and then you either fork it yourself or depend on unpaid volunteers to keep the version you like alive. There’s always some risk.
I don’t get the people down voting you… It’s not like services are free. I’ve been paying for Plex since 2019, and I just recently got a lifetime pass. It’s only fare to pay for it to use it …
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.
And those lifetime subscriptions are also a trap. They know that you have the money and are willing to pay and that you’re using their service. Do you really think that some business suit will be satisfied by your onetime payment back in 2022?
Won’t take that long before the enshittification is complete.
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!!!
Thanks this looks great!
I just used this to migrate from Emby to Jellyfin, works really well. I already have trakt setup on my main account but for my kid nothing goes out to the cloud so their account was all done with watchstate. It was also handy to keep Emby and Jellyfin in sync during the transition.
This tool is neat for updating watched status live amongst backends AFTER it’s been set up, but have never gotten it to work to bring a new back end in line with an existing one. I moved from Plex to Jellyfin, then again from Jellyfin to Emby and both times it only marked some of my watched content as played on whatever the “new” system is. And not even on a show by show basis either. If you go from Plex where you’ve watched every episode of a season of a show that has 10 episodes, when it exports that status to Jellyfin or Emby, it’ll mark episodes 1,2,6,9, and 10 as played but not the others. It’s remarkably consistent in this behavior and even after scrapping the DB and starting over it always behaves the exact same.
I think this is the tool you are looking for: https://github.com/luigi311/JellyPlex-Watched
I haven’t used it myself but I plan on it eventually when I do make the switch.
Thanks! Looks like it will work.
I recently made the switch, worked pretty well :)
If someone wants my Lifetime Plex account they can have it.
I’ll take it if you haven’t already given it away. This Plex change is not great for me, since I’m using remote access. I’ve got a Jellyfin server too, but I’m finding it less convenient for me, mostly for various nitpick reasons
You get it? I have one too, never going to use it again.
Just buy the lifetime Plex Pass before the price hike and you’re golden.
I thought about it, but remote access is just something I use so rarely that it doesn’t seem worth the cost to me.
Also I really distrust anything ‘lifetime’, historically those don’t work out very well on most services.
BuT I wAnT mY fRrrreEeeeEEeeee
These whiny people should stay with Plex if only to save FOSS devs the headache of dealing with them. They aren’t going to support them either.
(Thanks for helping clarify)
That would probably work, until Plex decides to introduce another subscription tier on top of the lifetime license, and/or demand more money from its paying users. I could totally see them doing that
oh no, this is the first im hearing about this.
If you have Plex pass you dont have to worry about it. Others can still remote play from your server free. Actually more so because the mobile app is free for them too now.
But if you don’t already have lifetime and are paying monthly or annually then that price is also almost doubling
Just buy the lifetime Plex pass before the price goes up then.
Just did that, honestly didn’t know lifetime was always available, thought it was only during sales or certain times, should have gotten it years ago
spend money to pirate now before you have to spend even more money to pirate later
🤦♂️
pLeX iS aWeSoMe!
This is like complaining that you have to spend money on HDDs or a VPN.
Not really. Or at all. Both of those are multi-purpose devices which you can use for other things. A plex license is singularly for Plex. It doesn’t do anything more for you than to stream your own media, something you can already accomplish for free.
Of all the examples you could have chosen you essentially picked the worst two.
It doesn’t do anything more for you than to stream your own media
Sure it does, which is why we’re not all using VLC to stream our media.
Furthermore, they do provide a simple way to share our media with friends and family via their authentication servers along with their relay servers if direct access to your server goes down for whatever reason which have associated costs. I have a lot of my own gripes about Plex, but this particular change is probably at the bottom of the list, and I think acting like this software has zero value is disparaging not only Plex but Jellyfin and the army of volunteers over there working hard to make their product better for you and everyone else at no cost. You’re essentially saying all their work is worthless since their product accomplishes all the same things as Plex.
It’s not the same at all.
Plex practically doubled their prices to access features that users previously had for free.
Can’t remember the last time a HDD manufacturer put previously free features behind a paywall or when a Mullvad doubled its prices.
How have they doubled their prices? The monthly fee and lifetime license are still the same price and they’ve always charged for Android and iOS playback if you didn’t have the Plex Pass. I won’t argue that this change is a good thing but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as big of a deal as people are making it out to be. They aren’t changing anyone now who streams from a server that has the Plex Pass so now my users can watch on their mobile devices for free using a license I paid for once close to a decade ago.
HDD manufacturers have been increasing their prices as of late for the same products that were previously cheaper, and Mullvad is still charging you the same monthly fee even though they’ve removed important features like port forwarding, so what’s the difference? Hosting a server has costs associated with it and this is another one of those costs if you want to use their completely optional solution to use and share your library.
Really I think we are going to see an increase in jellyfin uptake given the changes which is great for that project
