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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I tried to switch from plex to jellyfin 2 months ago, running both at the same time in containers, but I removed jellyfin after a week
The main issue was the CPU usage, on idle Jellyfin was using about 1vcore while plex used only 0.3, no background tasks seemed to be running and after a week my 4tb of media should have been indexed
Also a feature that I use regularly with plexamp, starting a radio from a song, was not giving me good results on finamp
The applications aren’t that good. That’s the only thing keeping me from switching completely. Subtitles, aspect ratio, audio track selection just don’t work as expected. In some cases I can only pick the aspect ratio and no subs and sometimes the other way around? Also if I have no subs for a movie, I can’t search for them on the fly - good feature of plex. As it stands, jellyfin video player is not up to my standards and I can’t switch yet. I use it for porn though. That works fine.
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
Works great. I use VLC as a player (personal preference).
Not sure how the internal player works.
Jellyfin has an app for fire stick, it works flawlessly
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?
Same boat! I paid monthly for ages, then got a lifetime pass and everyone was singing the praises of Jellyfin, at this point it works for me!
If Plex is just working for you, stick with it. I switched to Jellyfin when I got sick of having to reset my Plex library. (Even now, thinking of the “Plex dance” makes me shudder.)
Agree 100%. Most of the former Plex users turned Jellyfin users I have come across did so better Plex was broken in some way for them. For me it was the general lack of care in creating/maintaining a good Apple TV app. Over the past few years it’s just gotten buggier and buggier with a lot of complaints on the Plex forums where devs would essentially stop by to say they weren’t working on any fixes.
Jellyfin doesn’t fix 100% of the issues, but at least there is active development on Swiftfin that showed a desire to fully support all devices.
I have a lifetime Plex pass but am still annoyed at having to deal with “recommended” every time a device is setup or reset.
The recommended view is useless and there is no way to make library the default view. You have to reset every source. It makes it incredibly annoying helping my family remotely to get to family videos.
I was just thinking yesterday - when was the last time we server owners actually had a feature update? I think last one I noticed was credits skip, and that was… 3 years ago? About?
Meanwhile Jellyfin apparently has been developing full steam ahead, I noticed credit skips in my test instance yesterday.
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?
That’s the one!
Yeah, I don’t 100% love that’s on my default but I also don’t think it’s a huge deal
They changed their logo gasp
gradually
Yeah nah. It’s going pretty fast tbh.
I just made the switch for a few reasons.
For background, I was a Lifetime Plex Pass user since it launched, created the POC exploit for token theft (a couple of months before they implemented SSL), and built a clustering/sync application (a few months before they released sync, patterns much?).
I did not think Jellyfin was up to task a few years ago. It is now. All the missing features like themed visuals and audio, chapters, thumbnails on seek, all exist now.
Why I switched:
- API: I have scripts that do different things with different media and they were super easy to recreate with the API. An example would be moving
ytdlpvideos from my Youtube Watch Later folder to a deletion folder if they’ve been watched. - LDAP: I now have user control via my Samba AD.
- Privacy: I never wanted my media list stored with a third party to begin with.
- Plugins: I have a library I tag with filenames, like
==Tag--Tag==filename.ext. It took me a half day to make a Jellyfin plugin that converts these to Genres. It was a nightmare of DB hacking to do it in Plex. Not to mention there are waaaay more existing plugins that are supported. Jellyfin is where this happens now, not Plex. - Fine grain control: Transcoding settings, bandwidth settings, etc are are open and transparent.
- API: I have scripts that do different things with different media and they were super easy to recreate with the API. An example would be moving
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 agree mostly. I just see way more ignorant takes left and right on Lemmy. Yours is actually a better way of stating things. I’m also in the actively shitted on iOS side of things as well. Between plexamp and infuse… it’s highly polished for me.
My advice is always if you’re just now starting to definitely go to jellyfin. I bought lifetime plex pass maybe 16 or so years ago. One day I’ll probably give jellyfin a try.
I think the music experience with Plex + Plexamp is still far better. That’s the main thing I use Plex for.
I quit streaming services around 4 months ago, determined the exact maximum streaming quality every device I own can handle, used a $60 used office PC from craigslist, admittedly I haven’t fully figured out how to get subtitles to work without transcoding, but I just need to sit down and figure it out at some point. I direct stream all of my content from a 10+ yr old PC and it uses less than 5% cpu while watching a 4k movie. I could stream to easily 5-10 PC’s and still likely be able to do software maintenance on the PC at the same time. That and with how jellyfin looks like a streaming service, with no transcoding it’s better than any streaming service. Nearly every streaming service you use is transcoding on the fly instead of storing 20versions of each video for direct streaming, direct streaming a previously encoded asset will always deliver a higher quality viewing experience.
In my experience, transcoding with subtitles becomes an issue when the subtitles are burned in to the video. I often get external subtitles from https://www.opensubtitles.org and then stick the downloaded SRT file in the same folder as the movie. Make sure it has the exact same file name as the movie so jellyfin will associate the two together. Once I do that, it does not transcode at least for subtitle reasons.
Nearly every streaming service you use is transcoding on the fly instead of storing 20versions of each video
If you’re talking about commercial streaming services like Netflix, I highly doubt that. If you’re talking about self-hosted services like Plex, then you’re absolutely right.
Not having to pay for hardware transcoding/tonemapping is the biggest „selling“point for Jellyfin. I used to have plex before. It worked well but I didn’t want to pay 100€ for transcoding. Never tried emby for the very same reason.
Unless therer was some major update in the last 6 months I’ve missed, I’d say no … not even close.
Yep
Welcome to the future
It is……if you use a computer. Their AppleTV app still looks like some random coder’s pet project with random playback issues.
I just sucked it up and paid for Infuse Pro and now my Apple TV experience with Jellyfin is great
I’ve had Infuse Pro for about 6 years and it has been an absolutely perfect app for me. I’ve used it across many different iterations of home media servers (Emby, Jellyfin, NFS, SMB, etc…)
If you use Apple devices it’s the best way to go.
Huh, it works great on my android os Nvidia shield
The TV/mobile apps vary wildly in their capabilities and performance. Swiftfin is better for iOS devices, but not sure about AppleTV. That’s my main gripe with Jellyfin overall.
I mean, just like everything else there’s an optimal setup. I have a NAS with an extensive media library and running Jellyfin on it was a terrible experience. The NAS simply isn’t powerful enough to make Jellyfin usable.
I fixed that issue by running the server on my PC, and the libraries point to my NAS library locations. It’s the perfect setup. I get access to my GPU for HD video transcoding, and an overpowered CPU with the advantage of not having to worry about storage.
I feel like it’s the perfect setup for me.
It’s not a transcoding power issue. It’s a UI consistency and usability issue. With every device having a slightly different UI, with some apps having issues if playing back natively and some needing transcoding, the experience is inconsistent and frankly doesn’t pass the “wife acceptance factor” test, or the “let your friends use it without needing to handhold them through regular troubleshooting for their particular device” test.
I still don’t use Plex and exclusively use Jellyfin, but it’s still a hard sell to non technical users. Plex has much more polish.
With every device having a slightly different UI, with some apps having issues if playing back natively and some needing transcoding, the experience is inconsistent and frankly doesn’t pass the “wife acceptance factor” test, or the “let your friends use it without needing to handhold them through regular troubleshooting for their particular device” test.
This is a configuration issue, then. Because I have no idea what you’re talking about. The UI is exactly the same across devices, and profiles (which can be cloned) once setup, don’t require any user intervention to do transcoding. You literally click a video and it works…
Not sure what you’re doing over there, but you’re making it harder than it has to be.
There are definitely UI inconsistencies across devices, especially smart TVs. Jellyfin on Firestick looks different from Jellyfin on Roku which looks different from Jellyfin on WebOS. Some devices deliver Jellyfin through a thin browser client, and in those cases you get access to a unified design. Outside of that it’s a crapshoot as what the app will let you do. Of course, it’s a volunteer project (and all my thanks to any maniac willing to develop TV apps), so I don’t expect that everything can be easily and neatly unified.
I can’t deny that it’s sometimes hard to support my users because of this. Someone complains that they’re getting movies dubbed in an unwanted language: I can’t guarantee that the button to select audio track will look the same on their end when I talk them through it.
Different devices. iOS, android, AppleTV. Most of it is likely Apple’s fault for the limited options in the ecosystem tho.
The app on my LG TV is acceptable, but does have random problems, like it can’t connect over TLS, and it’s kinda slow to navigate. But it works, and my kids know how to work it.
I also use it on an LG TV and sometimes it can’t run at its normal framerate with subtitles on. I haven’t figured out why yet, but it might be embedded files like someone else says in this thread. Other than that it works like a charm.
Yeah, I did have a to transcode a bluray rip, but I think that might be a network limitation rather than a processing one. 1080p transcode worked fine, so it’s not resolution.
One of these days I’ll DIY a HTPC, but for now, the Jellyfin app works acceptably well.
I’ve been using plex for several years and setup jellyfin a few months ago to tinker with it. Playing videos works fine for me locally but I have some family out of state who have access and jellyfin doesn’t have a solution for that outside of me publicly sharing the URL and managing the passwords. Also a pain point for me is having multiple files of different quality for the same movie/episode, it always shows as two episodes that it will play back to back and seems to require a lot of manual work per show/movie to get it tracked as 1 piece of media with 2 files to choose from. Would love to ditch Plex eventually but for me and my family it just works without issue and they can manage their own remote login.
I might have to check out Jellyfin. Can you run both at the same time?
I installed Mint last week and haven’t addressed media players yet… strokes chin. Thanks for the info!
I randomly tried using Jellyfin today instead of Plex, but Jellyfin kept crashing my browser and logging me out, so I wasn’t in the mood to troubleshoot, so I just gave up and went back to Plex.
In the past, I’ve been annoyed that Jellyfin didn’t seem to have an option to sort media by “Last Episode Date Added”, nor did it seem to have a way to build a queue of episodes from multiple different shows. I think I was also having trouble figuring out how to add multiple sources… I have my “long term” library on a local hard drive, plus anything “new” on a seedbox.
I theoretically want to fully switch over eventually, but so far, Plex is still good enough for my use case.
ui is not intuitive but there is nothing stopping you from having multiple folders for a library
Does anyone have any recommendations for migrating their Plex library over to Jellyfin? One day I fully expect to migrate over but when I do i want my full watch/listen history to come with me.
You might just be able to point jellyfin to your media directories and then let it scan them.
That won’t migrate watch history
This isn’t a complete solution, but trakt.tv covers a lot of ground. I started using it for getting a consistent history of watched shows between jellyfin on the road and kodi at home. It works okay enough for this, though at times it does seem that one or both of the plugins can fail to log a watched show. I would guesstimate a 90% success rate.
