Important Notice of Security Incident
We have recently experienced a security incident that may potentially involve your Plex account information. We believe the actual impact of this incident is limited; however, action is required from you to ensure your account remains secure. What happened An unauthorized third party accessed a lim...
You're viewing a single thread.
Meanwhile I made a post asking if plex is bad now and most people on it said "no it's great I paid for my lifetime pass years ago and its been the best!" Yeah, we know the truth now.
Jellyfin all the way.
Seems unlikely that this happened. Most people on Lemmy despise Plex and forgive all the shortcomings of Jellyfin
Thats what I thought too. But I posted on ask lemmy, not here.
What are the 3 biggest shortcomings of Jellyfin ?
Well it's just generally buggy firstly. Glitchy UI for me especially for hours after I started scanning my media library.
Also it has no built-in system for connecting from somewhere outside your home. You have to manage that yourself.
Then there's the fact that it's got lots of security issues.
What do you mean with glitching UI ? Is it more than just not responding while scanning ?
I left the scan running for an hour or so, came back and it showed, maybe all, of my shows and seasons. However, on certain views, it would not list episodes that definitely exist. The page looked kind of broken. I thought "okay I'll give it more time". An hour or two later, same deal. Cleared browser cache multiple times. Nothing worked. Came back the next day and it was "fixed". But that experience felt pretty janky.
I had something similar when I used XMBC (I think it's called kody now) and it seems it was because there was some confusion with the scrapper to imdb and it needed some manual override file. You had to create a .nfo file or something like that, that told the scrapper the right imdb number or other exact identifier for it. I wouldn't be surprised if the people at plex have some way to know of all the custom fixes people do and with that, when you have some issue recognizing some content, they can figure out what most people do.
I would be surprised if jellyfin has any way to to know what the users are doing so that wouldn't work
That's not what this was though, because it eventually fixed itself. I couldn't begin to diagnose the bug, but the way I have my stuff organized works in jellyfin, but something about it's scanner and/or database seems to have issues.
Ironically, security.
So you didn't care, just wanted to downvote. Cool.
I haven't installed jellyfin, I'm never installing plex, I would just use samba shares over vpn instead of that.
I wanted to know what's the problem with jellyfin ?
Is it more than the weekend-destroying linux-jankiness ?
Because I can deal with that
I listed three things. I didn't have the patience to suss out what might be wrong with it because Plex required no fiddling and afaik does not have any open security issues.
I'd love to switch. I would do it right now, but the problem is that Jellyfin's security isn't better if you open it up to the internet. For example, I'd have to set up a VPN for my remote users for proper security, and most of my users are in other states, not technically inclined, and watch on their TVs. I'd have to at least support a raspberry pi for them, or some sort of site to site VPN, and if it goes down, I'll be expected to fix it. On top of that, if I do a simple raspberry pi based VPN, it would be made even more complicated since they'd want it to work with their smart TVs.
Again, I really want to switch. But Jellyfin needs to fix their security issues before I can. I'm also happy with the way Plex is reporting this, it's above the standard "your data is lost" notifications.
Edit: here's a link to the related GitHub issue I've been following: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
And @Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com has a great thread explaining more: https://lemmy.today/comment/18923504
Jellyfin is great... As long as you're the only one who needs to access the server. I've switched to using Jellyfin myself, but I still run Plex for others to access.
I've found that I get a smoother playback experience on Jellyfin, but even outside of potential security issues, there are a still couple of features I miss from Plex.
What are those features?
One was automatic collections, but the plugin for this has since been updated, and the bug I was experiencing has been fixed. The one remaining feature that I'm missing is user ratings for media. On Plex I have automatic collections of movies that I've rated four and five stars, and it's quite useful.
Most of these require some form of random id to exploit, which leaves you either brute forcing ids or brute forcing a user account
I mean, that's fine, but it's still an issue and a risk that would cause me to want to use VPN for remote viewing. It doesn't seem like security is Jellyfin's priority at the moment, not that it's Plex's either, but it's not to a place where it's worth it to switch from a security standpoint, personally.
Plex has a whole team dedicated to security. It's obviously not perfect and it is a larger attack surface than Jellyfin, but I'll take that any day over devs who treat security as an afterthought
You mean the security team that got pwned here?
Still better to have a team to react to this incident than just have them shrug and ignore it for 5 years
What about the pwned users of Jellyfin that have unknowingly had security holes for 5 years because Jellyfin doesn't care enough to even put a banner in their settings to say it's not secure?
What security holes? I think the bigger problem here is relying on a media platform to also maintain security protocols. Use authelia or plug some other well maintained and hardened security mechanism on top of jellyfin. Then put it in front of everything else like the arrs, etc. Its weird to me to just setup jellyfin, make it Internet facing, and believing everything is just gonna be safe and secure with no issue. Frankly id prefer if all these services came without security. Its a royal pain to bypass it for localhost or proxying with something like authelia.
Huh? Did you even read the whole thread? They're linked above.
Again, its not random. It's not a UUID. Its an md5 hash of the filepath. Which is easily guessable since most people have a very similar if not identical folder structure, especially since a lot have it managed by the *arr suite. take that plus the publicly available release names for movies and you're done
Put your files in a randomly named root folder and it's fixed. Even still, isn't the worst they could do pirating your service?
No, the worst is that a company like Sony or their lawyers can find my server and create a list of movies I offer and then sue me over it. I live in a country where lawyers make a living doing nothing but that.
Besides that, security by obscurity is the worst possible form and barely qualifies as security at all. It's also another place where the Jellyfin devs leave their users to their own devices when it comes to securing the server against malicious actors.
And none of this is clearly communicated by the project. The unauthenticated endpoints are not disclosed, the issues with the filepath is not disclosed. Jellyfin fans treat it as a drop in replacement for Plex, but people using it as such basically throw an unauthenticated server onto the open web
Besides that, security by obscurity is the worst possible form and barely qualifies as security at all.
In fact security by obscurity is not security at all. In this case it should be authenticated or to the very least to actually use a random string like a uuid. But, changing the root path does prevent it from exploiting. Not perfect but a temporary solution.
It's also another place where the Jellyfin devs leave their users to their own devices when it comes to securing the server against malicious actors.
Another place? What else? You mean setting up you own server? That is in fact your responsibility.
I live in a country where making copies of movies and having them for private consumption isn't illegal.
I wouldn't blame the Jellyfin devs for this situation, they inherited a lot of bad code from Emby and are still cleaning it up.
The Jellyfin devs have quite clearly outlined some of the issues in the setup guides, and others are detailed in issues on Github. They do work on it, but most bad code was inherited and they have limited time on their hands to fix it, preferably in a way that doesn't instantly mess up everyone's setups.
They could put a banner in the network settings warning users about these security issues while they get them fixed, that doesn't require fixing any inherited code. In the GitHub issue linked, there's at least one upset user because they had no idea this was even a problem.
If you hand wave those away then you can’t possibly have any issue with Plex.
I don't have an issue with Plex. I don't use it
My big complaint with Jellyfin is that their documentation showed a “fast forward” hotkey that convinced me to switch from Plex, and when I started it up it was a misnamed “jump forward five seconds” button instead.
It’s still better for my needs, but I remain angry.
This is the same reason I haven’t switched. My parents use it to watch the local OTA channels and I have zero intention of supporting a site to site VPN on their home network and multiple mobile devices.
Thank you for that issues link. I keep trying jellyfin every now and then and I run into issues with general bugginess so I haven't been able to switch. Seeing that it's kinda full of security holes makes me even more reticent.
Plex followed best practices and made sure that in the event of a data breach your accounts were safe, and alerted us promptly to the breach and reassured us that nothing private/of value was compromised.
JellyFin knowingly leaves multiple API endpoints with zero authentication.
I know which one I prefer, and it’s not the one with gaping security holes marked as “won’t fix”.
People don't seem to understand that no-one can reasonably stop a breach today.
The question is whether the attackers got anything of value and how easy they got in.
This breach was, in fact, very preventable. Plex didn’t need to force users to authenticate with a central server to access their own self-hosted media in the first place.
That’s not how “preventable” works.
Even is plex is "bad" now, it's still years ahead of jellyfin.
Leave Plex
alone!
Plex hasn't been getting better, but it still does what I need. I have a lifetime pass from years ago. If I was starting today I would be a lot less inclined to pay for Plex though. They keep adding things I don't want.
Plex has been getting better and better actually, but if you don’t want to pay for it then your experience will have gotten worse.