From Plex to Jellyfin
On April 29th, Plex increased the prices of its Plex pass subscription plans an d moved some key features behind that paywall. After that date, a Plex pass would be required to play video content remotely. The change was announced well in advance, and given I've been running a Plex media server since the start of this year, I knew I would have to do something about it: either cough up \$120 dollars for the lifetime Plex pass before it jumped to \$250, or switch to Jellyfin.
I chose Jellyfin. I'm a proponent of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), so I knew I would eventually ditch the commercial confines of Plex for Jellyfin, especially since Plex seems to be signaling a move toward some of the practices of the dominant streaming services. The whole point of spinning up a media server was to remove the middlemen between me and my content, to return to owning things again. I think of the controversial article put out by the World Economic Forum, Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better
Okay, let me cool it with the melodrama. Plex users can still own the content on their servers, the platform provided is top-notch and just works, and the software satisfies a very valid use case. I'm simply no longer in the target market.
Stuffy philsophical views aside, installing Jellyfin provided an opportunity to learn a few more technical skills. Its configuration is a bit more fussy than that of Plex. I used Dynu DDNS to make my router findable under a static domain, Caddy to spin up a reverse proxy for managing incoming traffic and enforcing HTTPS, and, of course, Jellyfin to organize and serve my content: I elected not to run Jellyfin in a docker container, but that may change in the future.
I wrote a guide of the whole install and configuration process. Looking back on it, it really is quite simple. However, I still had some difficulties. There were some key things I didn't know, and worse, I didn't know that I didn't know them. For instance, when first configuring the reverse proxy, I was trying to point my DDNS domain to the static IP of my server machine, 192.x.x.x, instead of the IP for localhost, 127.0.0.1. That silly error was one of several that dragged out the process.
Next time I configure a server in this way, i.e. with a reverse proxy, it will be much easier. Here's the guide I wrote.