I’ve feel like I’ve used Plex forever. I also feel like every couple years I try Jellyfin to see how it’s going. Recently I tried it again because of Plex restriction on more than one user.
Well, I just tried it again and it’s substantially improved! This time it actually properly detected most of my library!
Also the Android TV app is AWESOME! No more glitches, lagging, and freezing trying to play my stuff like Plex did. It is butter smooth.
Wow! I’m impressed and I just deleted Plex. Good riddance.
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There’s a really strong bias on Lemmy for OSS projects. I’m glad they get so much love here, but everything people say here about Jellyfin has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. It works and you can use it. Depending on your needs, it may even work perfectly for you. There are tons of rough edges though.
Here’s a few:
- A bunch of basic functionality most people are used to is missing by default. You can get things like intro detection and subtitle downloading to work with plugins, but you have to work at it.
- Hardware acceleration still kind of sucks. You can get it to work, but the Jellyfin port of ffmpeg doesn’t work anywhere near as well as Plex’s.
- The variety in app experience is bewildering sometimes. Apps look and feel very different between platforms.
- Android TV app support sucks. The app is difficult to navigate and has a bunch of weird edges, like subtitle defaults not working. I have no idea what OP is talking about here, it sounds like they’re only judging the app on its animation speed.
- Public network support is finicky. This is hard to quantify, but I’ve been on several remote networks where my Jellyfin connection dropped in and out and Plex did not. I suspect this is due to the Plex Relay service making up for bad routes between my house and the network.
Jellyfin is improving all the time, and I hope the recent EFCore update improves performance and development velocity. I’m also holding out hope it will eventually lead to externally hosted databases and active-active servers.
Disclaimer: I run Plex and Jellyfin and regularly check in on the state of things in Jellyfin. I donate to Jellyfin. I want Jellyfin to be better than Plex. I don’t think any objective measure bears this out yet.
One thing Jellyfin is way better at is offline viewing. I have frequent internet outages at my house and I’ve run into issues multiple times where Plex wouldn’t stream my own local media because it couldn’t connect to the internet. For this, Jellyfin has always just worked.
Since you run both, I have a few questions if you don’t mind.
I don’t have a plex pass but, so the only feature I want is intro skipping and from what you mention I understand it needs tinkering. Acceptable for me.
My usage is pretty simple if I migrate to Jellyfin do I need to fuck around with my folder structures ? No special case just /movie/title | tv/title in my use-case with the usual arr stack for grabbing.
The client used currently is a desktop client on arch/windows and I don’t need hardware transcoding. The server and libraries are on Truenas.
I don’t need remote playback for movies/tvs but I have no idea how to replace Plexamp and if you have suggestions, feel free to mention it.
Intro skipping works pretty well once you set it up and give it time to scan. Functionally, it identifies common audio to determine likely intros, so it can get confused with shows that have different intro music between episodes of the same season.
Don’t have to change any folder structures unless you were storing optimized media alongside the original files in Plex. All the metadata for both Plex and Jellyfin lives in a SQLite database in your config dir.
You may wind up transcoding even if you think you really shouldn’t have to. Browsers are weird about supporting some encodings, and both Plex and Jellyfin will automatically transcode to satisfy the client.
Hardware transcoding is huge, don’t underestimate how impactful it can be. A single 4K CPU transcode could saturate my 72-core server, but one A380 can transcode 3-4 4K streams at the same time. This admittedly doesn’t matter much if you only have one user, but keep it in mind if you ever have to share. It’s so annoying to have a stream start hitching because 1-2 friends decided to start watching something at the same time as you…
I still don’t have a good replacement for Plexamp either. I think Jellyfin can play music too, but I haven’t tried it myself. I spent a lot of time getting the metadata right in Plex and just haven’t felt like trying to find a way to migrate yet.
I have a huge issue with this post.
You can get things like intro detection and subtitle downloading to work with plugins, but you have to work at it.
You install the plugin and run the routine. There’s literally nothing to setup…
Hardware acceleration still kind of sucks.
What are you even talking about? Hardware acceleration has worked absolutely flawlessly in Jellyfin since I’ve set it up. HEVC encoding is particularly great, and required nothing but a single click to enable it. Jellyfin re-encodes my videos using my GPU into HEVC without issues.
The variety in app experience is bewildering sometimes. Apps look and feel very different between platforms.
This is the only real valid criticism, but it’s not even an issue. It’s by design. Plex designs a single app and stretches it so it’s the same on every platform which may sound great, but it’s not… It’s only to save them development time. Jellyfin has an android app for phones, and android app for tablets, and an android app for televisions each of which play to the strengths of the different platforms… That’s not a bad thing, that’s a good thing.
Android TV app support sucks.
This is the fault of the television manufacturers, not the android app. This isn’t even valid criticism against Jellyfin.
The app is difficult to navigate and has a bunch of weird edges, like subtitle defaults not working.
- You can change the theme in any way you want. You can even download CSS directly from the web and change the TV app presentation in just about any way you want…
- The subtitle feature, again, is a limitation of the devices that display jellyfin, not a limitation of jellyfin. It’s also easy to get around by extracting the subtitles.
Public network support is finicky. This is hard to quantify, but I’ve been on several remote networks where my Jellyfin connection dropped in and out and Plex did not.
Yet another example of you blaming network devices on Jellyfin… My Synology NAS sleeps if it’s not used for 5 minutes–so if your buffer to jellyfin caches more than 5 minutes of media, then yeah, you’re going to have issues with buffering because you’ll run through your 5 minutes of media, and have to wake up the NAS to get more cache. This is again, not a jellyfin issue, it’s a configuration issue.
You can look at some of my other comments for more specifics, but from your language alone I don’t think you’re being objective here. OP states that Plex is flatly better than Jellyfin, and a bunch of Lemmy users hype it up because of a clear bias for FOSS. A reality check is a good thing, IMO; you can prefer a solution and acknowledge its faults, but people talking on the Internet tend towards extremes instead and that will disillusion anyone who tries Jellyfin expecting all the good parts of Plex but better.
I prefer FOSS everywhere it’s reasonable, but I think a reality check is healthy here. Jellyfin is full of jank that you may run into because a bunch of independent devs are all doing their own thing to make it. Plex is a for-profit entity pulling in the same direction, so the experience is generally going to be more seamless and supported.
I run both Plex and Jellyfin simultaneously. I use Jellyfin on my devices, except on Android TV because the app is painful to navigate. Plex is way better for sharing, but I usually offer both. I’ve yet to have anyone prefer Jellyfin, Plex tends to just work on their platforms of choice so they go with it. Unless they’re a technical person, it’s unreasonable to expect them to muddle through the edges of Jellyfin.
I don’t think you’re being objective here
I don’t feel that’s the case. I feel that you’re the one not being objective here. You’re holding things against Jellyfin which have nothing to do with it as a platform, but instead are either misconfigurations on your part, or involve your local setup…
I also run both. I don’t see what this has to do with anything. I’m not lambasting you for “choosing” Plex over Jellyfin. I’m saying you’re not being objective while pretending that you are, which is simply objectively untrue.
I use Jellyfin on my devices, except on Android TV because the app is painful to navigate.
Again, this is you not being objective. You personally don’t like the way the Android TV application is laid out (which is totally fine) and count that as a negative against Jellyfin–which is my issue. Objectively the Android TV design follows the current design schema for TV applications and is the same layout as most media platform applications for Android TV…
Plex is way better for sharing
Which is not what these applications are designed to do…so it’s not at all weird that this is the case. You’re inventing shit up as metrics to compare Jellyfin and Plex and it’s just so incredibly weird to do.
These are both media streaming platforms, which they both do relatively well. The main issue between the two is Jellyfin is FOSS and Plex is not. Plex incorporates a ton of proprietary bullshit that you have to wade through or disable to get a similar experience to Jellyfin. Like “shareability.” That’s not what these platforms are designed for. That’s what Plex was changed to provide. Comparing Jellyfin and Plex on the basis of “shareability” is like comparing a Ford Pinto to a Ford F-150 and comparing their towing capacity. It makes no goddamn sense because the Pinto was never designed to tow anything…
After having been shafted by sublime text I will never believe anything called a “lifetime subscription” is such.
A “lifetime subscription” is just a “until we decide otherwise” subscription
As a long time plex pass user, is there anything there that would make me want to switch? Plex has just plain worked for me for years. mobile apps, everything is just great. Why should I look around?
Plex is closed source and gradually being enshittified. You might not leave today, but you should have an exit plan.
I’ve been using Plex for over 10 years and I can’t say anything about it has changed for the worse honestly
Same. I think I had to go in once in the last few years to turn off a new setting. I didn’t recall what is was though. Probably data collection?
Maybe when Plex added the “Discover Together” feature that shares watch history with friends?
gradually
Yeah nah. It’s going pretty fast tbh.
Well you’re on Lemmy and it’s not FOSS. Not a great place to get unbiased opinions on the matter. It’s actively shitted on in the fediverse. They even bum rush the plex community here.
Plex was bought out by venture capital and has been enshittifing for years. “Free” media stream sources added riddled with ads that you have to opt out of, opt out “everyone can see what everyone is watching” features, nebulous “we need to upload hashes of your media to skip credits” privacy issues, abandoning apps for various platforms like kodi, on and on.
I have a lifetime pass, but no longer consider plex a viable platform. The issues are not baseless, but rather based on what plex has decided to do to make money.
Meanwhile, jellyfin is FOSS with no profit motive, no privacy issues, skips intros and credits with no issue, pulls subtitles down and indexes media flawlessly, and has native kodi clients with Database sync support so a show paused in one room can be resumed at the same point in another room.
Hard to beat “slick, private and free.”
I’ve been considering switching to Jellyfin for a while due to concerns about Plex either becoming worse or them peering into my library. Any idea how the apps work on Fire TV Stick? I have one for home and one I take away with me and it all works seamlessly with Plex
Jellyfin has an app for fire stick, it works flawlessly
I’ve been using both for ages.
For remote access to friends plex is easier and cleaner.
For offline viewing in Android plex is cleaner
I’m running tailscale with jellyfin for personal use and it’s wonderful, But I wouldn’t ask my relatives to do that and I don’t trust to surface the port. Plex has a dedicated security team and 2FA.
The Roku client for jellyfin is also a futureless husk of a client.
I have lifetime Plex so I’m in no hurry to do a full conversion. I would love to drop plex all together though
The Roku client for jellyfin is also a futureless husk of a client.
How so? What do you see as missing?
Should be able to * on a “watching” item and remove from from front page watching, you have to go all the way to it’s location in the share, find the move/episode and unset it from the sub,submenu. Should be able to see the file names and location of the items on the front page through submenus. None of the items on the front page can have their options viewed, they all just play on click.
I miss plex opensubtitles integration
Unable to unset watched/watching from any grid, it’s one item at a time.
Lack of Playlists.
No listing anywhere for filename or bitrate. Would love to see deeper info about the codec for a file hidden away on a submenu.
(which complicates:) If you have two copies of the same thing with different versions, you can’t tell which is which. (which complicates:) If you have a bad meta match on something, it’s REALLY hard to even tell what it really is. I really miss Plex: Play Version.
Usecase, I have futurama in both widebox and 4:3, they all just show up twice. In plex they all show up once with a 2 in the corner letting you know there are multiple versions. you can then context->playversion->4.3mbps
No folder view for unmatched content. When I was putting 1963 Doctor Who up, I could hardly tell what was what without having the meta 100% sorted. In Plex I could just hit folder view and navigate.
🤘 Right on! Thanks for posting these.
Several of these have never been brought up to the devs, so this is the first time seeing anyone ask for them.
Neat, I just figured Roku clients were just going to get just enough attention to work.
I run everything parallel and have the same shares. Unless I set up the video, the wife and kids always go back to Plex.
I get it, But at the same time, Samsung is trying to sell what I’m watching, plex is trying to sell what I’m watching, roku is trying to sell what I’m watching. I just want to watch some damn videos without being someone else’s payday.
anybody have a guide for an old laptop
edit thabks for responses, perennial topic
Depends on how old. I don’t recommend using vastly underpowered hardware to stream media content.
I tried to setup Plex and it was just about the most god-awful experience I’ve ever had. It was unnecessarily complex to accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup.
Installing Jellyfin took like… 2 minutes and I’ve had no issues since.
Only thing I don’t like about Jellyfin is the metadata engine, which I have disabled and just use TinyMediaManager and save everything to .nfo which is picked up by Jellyfin immediately. TMM runs on a schedule, every 30 minutes, so I just have to drop my media into the folders and the metadata is grabbed, updated, custom naming functions are run, and everything is moved all automatically. Works great.
It was unnecessarily complex to accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup.
Please elaborate how you needed to “accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup”.
When I set my server up years ago all I did was log in on the web interface. Literally as simple as any other service.
When I set my server up years ago all I did was log in on the web interface. Literally as simple as any other service.
They make you register with their own website to login to your local instance… That’s you jumping through hoops to accommodate their cloud bullshit;
It’s important to understand that Plex Media Server does not have its own graphical user interface. When you run the server on your computer, NAS, or other device, you won’t see a window open with a “server UI” or similar. Instead, you use our web app to manage your server.
It’s so fucking unnecessary.
Wait, isn’t Jellyfin the same way? Pretty much every self-hosted app I run uses some web interface you log into so you can use it anywhere on the network. Sure, Plex also has some pre-set remote connection thing, but from the end user perspective it’s the same set of steps. I also had to make a login for all the stuff I fully self-host.
Is there no account management on Jellyfin? I would probably want that as a feature.
Wait, isn’t Jellyfin the same way?
Jellyfin has a native web-ui, yes. But not a proprietary one, like Plex uses. When I installed a Plex server I had to go to plex.tv and setup a user account there to be able to log into my own damn server… Then they strongly encourage you to use https://app.plex.tv/ to manage your local server.
It’s all unnecessarily confusing and difficult.
Is there no account management on Jellyfin?
Yes. Local accounts. Not some cloud based PAMd system.
You made me feel like I was crazy, so I just downloaded Plex Media Server and installed it. Ran it, and was immediately presented with this: https://i.xno.dev/mqWFZ.png
I was then immediately routed to app.plex.tv and see this: https://i.xno.dev/cLPfw.png
There’s no option to not use a plex account. You must either use an existing account or sign up for one. You cannot use local users. Then it forces you to use the app.plex.tv so it can display content you don’t even have, or have access to…
How in any possible way is any of this easier than Jellyfin?
EDIT: Oh, don’t forget the sales pitch! https://i.xno.dev/79WBs.png
Okay, but… how is it confusing from the front end if what you’re doing is going through the same steps of creating an account? You punch in a login and password in both.
Sure, Plex is doing this extra thing where it’s also bringing in centralized content along with your library and it will default to its remote access system if you log in from outside your network. But again, from the front-end that is transparent. You log in and you have your library. If anything they’re being a bit too transparent, I’ve had times where networking stuff got in the way and it took me a minute to notice that Plex was routing my library through their remote access system instead.
I can see objections to it working that way, you trade a (frankly super convenient) way to share content remotely and access content from outside your network without too much hassle for… well, going through someone else’s server and having their content sitting alongside yours. But “confusing and difficult” isn’t how I’d describe it. It seems to work like any other service, self-hosted or not, as far as the user-facing portions are concerned. I guess I just don’t see the confusing part there.
Okay, but… how is it confusing from the front end if what you’re doing is going through the same steps of creating an account? You punch in a login and password in both.
Because there’s zero difference between the app.plex.tv interface spawned from plex server, and one without. There’s zero indication that it’s actually your server and your content because it fucking displays everything by default.
It’s such an incredibly bad proprietary system…
But again, from the front-end that is transparent.
It’s not. There’s no server configuration options at all. There’s nothing to indicate it’s local content…
I can see objections to it working that way, you trade a (frankly super convenient) way to share content remotely and access content from outside your network
For 90% of the content people use Plex for, this is an illegal act. So I don’t see the advantage to providing this option let alone making it easier to commit a felony… I’ve never needed to “share” my media library with anyone and even if this was something I wanted to do, it’s a simple DNS record away from doing the same thing in Jellyfin. There’s no reason to lock people into your login system because 10% of people would “find it easier.” It’s just such a bad argument.
I am very confused here. You seem to have slipped from arguing that it was difficult and complicated to arguing that it’s bad to be able to share content remotely because it’s a felony, which seems like a pretty big leap.
For one thing, it’s not illegal and I do rip my own media. I will access it from my phone or my laptop remotely whenever I want, thank you very much.
For another, and this has been my question all along, how is it possibly more difficult and complicated to have remote access ready to go than being “a DNS record away”? Most end users don’t even know what a DNS is.
And yes, not having (obvious) server configurations up front is transparent. That’s what I’m saying. It does mix at least two sources (their unavoidable, rather intrusive free streaming TV stuff and your library), but it doesn’t demand that you set it up. The entire idea is to not have to worry about whether it’s local content. Like I said, there are edge cases where that can lead to a subpar experience (mainly when it’s downsampling your stuff to route it the long way around without telling you), but from a UX perspective I do get prioritizing serving you the content over warning you of networking issues.
I don’t know, man, I’m not saying you shouldn’t prefer Jellyfin. I wouldn’t know, I never used it long enough to have a particularly strong opinion. I just don’t get this approach where having the thing NOT surface a bunch of technical stuff up front reads as “complicated and difficult”. I just get hung up on that.
Wait - what restrictions on Plex?
Multiple home users, hardware transcoding, media downloads on mobile…
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202526943-plex-free-vs-paid/
I use Plex BTW , but lurking Jellyfin for some time, just not so easy to setup or comparability for my shared users.
That don’t seem to apply to plex pass. Those limitations. I have a plex pass
