Plex

If you're completely new to self-hosting and want to take your first step, perhaps by repurposing any old devices into media servers, Jellyfin is absolutely the way to go. It doesn't hide its best features, which are also essential to media streaming, behind a paywall. I might be staying put for now, since my entire setup is tuned exactly how I like it, and more importantly, my Plex setup works without asking anything from me. At this stage, the convenience is hard to walk away from. And yet, Jellyfin now has me considering that I could. Jellyfin is no longer the scrappy alternative you recomm

The decision really comes down to hardware transcoding. The Plex package on a Synology NAS does not support hardware transcoding, which means if you’re streaming media that needs to be transcoded (different format, lower quality for bandwidth, etc.), the CPU has to do all of the work. On most Plus series devices, that’s fine for one or two streams. Beyond that, you’ll start to see buffering or quality drops. Docker is the only way to get hardware transcoding working on a Synology NAS, and it only works on devices with an Intel CPU that supports QuickSync. Any Ryzen-based Synology will not supp

Before installing any update, ask yourself if you actually need to. Media servers are designed to stream media to client devices, so if everything is working and you’re not looking for new features, there might not be a reason to update. If you’re exposing Plex outside of your local network, you have more of a reason to keep it updated for potential security fixes. But if you’re only using it for local network streaming, you can introduce new bugs that you weren’t experiencing before, so updating “just because” isn’t always the right call.

At $250, lifetime Plex Passes aren’t too much of a gamble. Compared to paying $70 per year, the lifetime option would pay for itself by year four. But at $750, you’d have to use the Plex Pass for more than a decade to break even. A lot can change in that timeframe. Ten years ago, Plex was still primarily in the media server business. Its biggest launches of that era were ambitious things like over-the-air DVR support and cloud-based media servers. (The latter feature was sadly discontinued in 2018.) A whole bunch of major streaming services didn’t even exist yet. Since then, Plex has shifted i