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.
You must log in or register to comment.
All the folks saying “just buy the lifetime pass” gonna be in for a big disappointment in about 5 years
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.
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.
If we got 5yr it’s more than paid for itself. Even FOSS needs support - stop whining and support good things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 …
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.
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!!!
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.
Thanks this looks great!
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 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-domainto 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
oh no, this is the first im hearing about this.
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.
Not the answer to your question but thanks for the reminder to cancel
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.
Bad advice to be paying them after they chose to go this route IMHO
Agreed. It encourages that behavior.
Yeah, at this point they just think we are stupid as, as if they were taking a huge toll with the bandwidth by capping the remote playback option… They are not hosting the files ffs.
I don’t agree. They’re only affecting people who haven’t been paying and it’s an excellent service. They’re even giving you a heads up so you’re not caught offgaurd. It’s not even 9 months of Netflix and it’s valid for lifetime. If you can’t afford it, that’s one thing. If that’s the case move to JF and move on. I find Plex is very much worth the cost.
deleted by creator
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)
