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’ve found the opposite to be the case unfortunately. Plex “just works” while my jellyfin server had almost constant issues with subtitles (two of my frequent users need these because of hearing problems) and would frequently crash requiring docker restarts.
I adopted jellyfin very early, used it for many (maybe 6?) years and these problems only got worse over time.
I always prefer open source (often to a fault) but I am glad I switched to Plex a few months ago. I got the lifetime pass for cheap for black Friday. I still leave jellyfin running for a few users, but everyone else has already switched over.
Jellyfin is so underrated
I don’t know about using the jellyfin client but as a backend for Kodi, it’s amazing
I actually prefer the Jellyfin client to the Kodi client by a lot. Using Kodi on top just adds more unneeded complexity and reloading libraries in my experience.
I disagree, as kodi syncs jellyfin DB without issue for me and I much prefer its UX.
The nice part of jellyfin is that they support both kodi and a “jellyfin on kodi” experience natively. Plex has neither, with both being 3rd party apps where the support is hit or miss. I used “plexkodiconnect” for years and was glad for it, but it was a journey to keep working at times.
Jellyfin is awesome.
I use Jellyfin for music mostly and it struggles with metadata. For example, if a song has two artists on it and I edit to correct it, it won’t update correctly and I’ll edit up with the artist “Artist A; Artist B”.
Finamp keeps creeping towards Plex amp and functionality. I don’t love how Plex treats music either but the client seems to bridge the gap.
I would probably be using Jellyfin if it were just me.
The handful of people in my family that use my Plex server though are all non-tech people. When I hear that random smart TV apps aren’t nearly as good, that is what gives me pause.
That, plus the fact that a lifetime Plex pass was a one-time purchase on sale several years ago. It may be a proprietary product instead of FOSS like it should be, but at least they aren’t trying switch me to $1.99/month or some BS like that. But they’re probably smart enough to know they’d really start the Plexodus!
Maybe I should run jellyfin alongside Plex to keep better tabs on it.
I’m a bit biased as I started with Jellyfin, but the Roku Jellyfin app works flawlessly on the family TV.
I’d advise at least becoming mildly familiar with how you’d go about it, since corpos suddenly rug-pulling existing users and forcing subscriptions is pretty common, basically expected, behavior of American business now.
That way you have an “out” and your service can have minimal downtime. :)
On the other hand, you might just find you like how sleek and functional Jellyfin is. I can only see wins for you here. :p
Yeah I suspect I’m going to like it.
I think I’m going to set it up to run in parallel, then I’ll be ready to try it on people’s various devices as I get access to them.
If the apps don’t work for you then I’d stick to plex. But I had the opposite experience, especially with the Plex Android TV app, it is so shitty… And the Jellyfin Android TV app is rock solid
I guess it’s worth trying rather than relying on vague internet comments. I’ll set it up for myself, then I can try apps on the various platforms as I visit people, etc.
Absolutely run them together.
Especially in light of Plex trying to keep tabs on what everybody’s doing and probably resell that data.
Ugh, yeah. I guess I’ll definitely have to try it!
It’s less painful than it sounds. You install the server pointed at your media files set up the same shares as you have for Plex. There’s not a lot of finagling there
Oh yeah sorry for the tone. That wasn’t my intent. I am not dreading Jellyfin whatsoever. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and I’m pretty sure it installed the WebOS app on my TV several months ago assuming the switch was coming.
No worries just attempting to put you at ease.
So uh, what’s your favorite way to enable secure remote access?
It needs to be something that people can use with smart TV apps.
I looked at some of the instructions out there, but my head is killing me so I’m not in a “figure out computer thing” mood. Otherwise I’d be at work, lol.
Tailscale has a generous free account and runs on windows, mac, IOS, android, apple TV, firestick, and shield. You just set it up on your media server and every client, and just use to 100. address for your server in each client.
If you need Roku,LG,Samsung, it’s no longer fun. The tailnet can be forwarded from a routed device on the network, but that’s deep in the weeds for random people.
You could install HAProxy and run let’s encrypt, forwarding your JF to an external port (ISPs usually block 443, but it’s not hard to tell the client what port you need. Then your users can just specify your home IP and a specific port.
Or you could forgo the SSL and just open JF up on a high port. Maybe fail2ban on logins. it’s REALLY not ‘good’ at remote access :)
Well for better or worse, I am off sick from work today so I just set up the server!
That was fast.
I could never get Plex to work the way I wanted it to, so I’m actually someone who moved to Kodi and then to Emby. Once I got into Emby, I’ve yet to leave it. My biggest problem now is that I want to leave it for Jellyfin, but the lack of many things I love about Emby have never been moved to Jellyfin.
For example, I have a very specific organization of my music libraries I use to navigate what I want to listen to much quicker, since I’m into all kinds of genres of music. Emby allows me to navigate by folder structure, so if I’m in the mood for heavy metal one day, go to that folder. If classical another day, go there. Jellyfin on the other hand didn’t have folder structure view and even though it’s one of the top requested features for the past few years when I last checked, it’s never been added…
I think the day Jellyfin does fill in these gaps, assuming new ones aren’t introduced due to Emby also improving, I’ll finally jump over.
I guess to the original topic, I do think Jellyfin exceeds Plex though lol.
Is there a reason that you don’t organize your music by artist\album and leverage tags? It’s been some time since I tried Jellyfin, but Plex does an excellent job of tagging (not directly written to original files) and categorizing. It’s a good experience.
Yeah, in my example, I have various genres of music I listen to and some days I’m in the mood for one and not another. Some of those might have subgenres I am in the mood to listen to. For example: Metal might break into subfolders called black metal, thrash metal, melodic metal, etc. Based on where I feel they belong the most. If I’m in the mood for some melodic metal today, I’ll go there. Or EDM, I’ll have a folder for Psytrance, another for House, etc…
Rather than trying to edit the metadata on thousands and thousands of files every time I change media systems as I’ve done over these years, it’s 100x simpler for me to just navigate to the folders directly and not care about how the system “wants” to organize it. Every media system wants to organize differently and I’m kind of tired of having to spend hours editing all my music just to get it to organize the way that works for me, so that’s where I’ve gotten to the point of just using folder structures.
Jellyfin is still not up to snuff with where Plex was pre-enshittification, but Plex is enshittified. For everyone in between, there’s Emby, which I have been very happy with.
what are the things i will miss from plex’s pre-enshittification?
I’d have to agree with this, there was a time where Plex was amazing. after like the 3rd time I was forced stop it from hiding my library and them pushing services in my face I made the switch to Jellyfin. It’s been long enough now that I don’t recall the features I miss, and overall Jellyfin is fine, and seems to get better pretty consistently.
after like the 3rd time I was forced stop it from hiding my library and them pushing services in my face
Seeing shit like this makes me wonder what different Plex I’m using from everyone else. Pinned my local library at the top 4 years ago and now every device shows that tab first when logging in and hasn’t ever behaved differently except when the home server is down (it’ll still go to the tab but read OFFLINE)
You people do realize that you can use the Plex server without using the Plex apps right? I pretty much exclusively use Infuse to interface with my Plex server and have none of the issues I see mentioned here.
I mean you very much still have the privacy issues and online requirements. And if you’re not even using the plex web client or any of the apps, all Infuse is using plex for is the metadata, at which point you might as well just use the Jellyfin back end.
It’s still terrible for music. There’s not even user-based star rating…
Wrong tool for the job ! Use Navidrome with your music library. There’s even a new scanner rewrite in the working which will even further improve how good it is !
I used to use it. But I had so many services running it was a pain to maintain. It didn’t have a TV app aswell. And Navidrome looked kind of abandoned at the time. Maybe I should go back though. Is there a way to migrate my playlists? I think that’s the one thing holding me back.
It really depends on your metadata/ directory structure. Even though navidrome doesn’t care of your directory structure it’s better to have everything neatly separated !
You can spin a docker compose (if you’re a bit acquainted with it) and simply point to your external drive containing your media, just to give it a try and see how it performs with your media files.
Just give it a try and see how it works, however I would wait for the new scanner update before upgrading fully to navidrome which would give some new long awaited functionalities like VA list of all artist.
But I had so many services running it was a pain to maintain.
Are you talking about docker containers? You should take a look at what’s up docker to maintain and keep track of your containers. I have approximately 20 containers and It was easier to keep track this way. If you’re more in the 50/100 range… Yeah this sounds a lot ! :o
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
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.
Plex was always terrible, anyone that uses it is an imbecile.
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
Futureless or featureless?
both, probably.
Yeah, first one, then the other.
In a side note, Google dictation is really getting bad these days :)
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.
I just want to watch some damn videos without being someone else’s payday.
Amen!
Neat, I just figured Roku clients were just going to get just enough attention to work.
Nope. We have a team dedicated to working on the Roku client. They’re constantly working on not only bug fixes, but also improvements and new functionality.
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
It’s curious that I’m almost in the opposite boat, have been using Jellyfin without issues for around 5 years, but recently was considering trying Plex because Jellyfin is becoming too slow on certain screens (probably because I have too much stuff, but it shouldn’t be this slow).
Edit: this made me want to check in Plex, so I’ll leave my story for people amusement:
My experience with Plex:
- Write the docket compose
- leave out the claim because it’s optional and I have no idea what it is
- launch it
- asks me to create an account
- not really comfortable creating an external account to access my local server, but okay.
- discovered I already had an account. Huh? I wonder why I don’t remember ever running Plex then.
- login to that account
- shows me a bunch of stuff
- find it weird that it already scanned everything, especially because I didn’t pointed it to my media
- proceed to try to watch something
- can’t play due to DRM
- WAT?
- go back and discover there’s a bunch of content that’s not in my library
- ok, so this must be some free content
- how do I configure my local library?
- spend 15 min navigating the UI trying to find it
- open the docs, they say to click the settings icon
- that icon is nowhere to be seen
- click a similar one
- can’t find anything the docs say I should
- maybe I’m not on the right site? site is <IP>:<port>/web/yaddayaddayadda so it seems correct
- try to go to <IP>:<port> get to the same page
- look at the docs on how to access the web app says to go to <IP>:<port>/web
- try that, get a message about not being authorized
- WAT?
- read some more docs discover I need that claim
- spend some time trying to find that in the UI
- google it up, find the link
- go to that page, grab the claim, set it up on the server and restart the server
- I’m able to get to the web app now
- Do you want to access it from the internet? If this works it would be great, so yes!
- setup my library
- let it scan and try to watch something from it
- UX sucks, video plays in a sort of popup in landscape on my phone.
- Ah, dumb of me, I probably have my browser set to desktop mode
- No, I don’t.
- Ok, so the web is maybe only expected to be used on desktop, let me install the app
- Install the app, login to my account, only have the Plex provided content
- Look around trying to find the media I scanned, find a thing saying my server is disconnected
- WAT?
- Go back to the web app via IP, try to look into settings
- “You are not connected directly to the server”
- WAT?
- everything else seems okay, I even enabled remote access there and it says it’s working
- Every few minutes the page says my server is not available for a few seconds then comes back
- It’s now been 1 hour and I haven’t been able to watch anything.
It’s now been 1 hour of trying to set this up and I give up. Jellyfin is much more easy to setup, and even if Plex was instantaneous I could have loaded my TV library hundreds of times in the 1h I just wasted trying to get this to work. Probably every other time I tried I got similar results which is why I have an account there even though I don’t remember ever using Plex.
Edit2: after some nore more fiddling managed to get it working, not sure what I changed, so now:
- Open the app, see my content there
- Try to watch something
- “You’re watching in indirect mode, quality might be bad”
- Ok, so it’s not connecting directly to my server, anyways, let’s ignore this for now, maybe it’s getting confused because it’s in a docker container
- “Activate Plex”
- Ah, ok, it’s the “pay or not now” screen, not now
- No subtitles play
- Try different subtitles
- Still nothing
- Plus quality seems shit
- Confirmed, it’s reproducing at 720x300 even though it’s a 4K video
- Look at docs, figure out the direct play is about converting the video
- Select maximum quality which according to docs should use the original file
- Still get a 300p video
- Figure out maybe it’s the android app that’s the problem, go to the TV, install Plex and connect to it
- Video takes forever to load
- Give up again after a couple of minutes waiting for the movie to load
This is more about familiarity than difference in ease of use. I’ve used both, they are both super easy.
Some of it yes, the claim for example, but the rest is still pretty bad UX (and even that is stupid, I shouldn’t need a claim to watch locally), I’m an experienced self hosing person and I’m getting frustrated every step of the way, imagine someone who doesn’t know their way around docker or is not familiar with stuff… Jellyfin might be less polished as some claim, but setting it up is a breeze, never had to look at documentation to do it.
I set Plex up as an inexperienced selfhoster in 2020 and it was easy.
I would bet that the problem is with Plex being inside docker. Might be one of those situations where being more experienced causes issues because I’m trying to do things “right” and not run the service on my server directly or with root or on network host mode.
But being inside a container causes these many issues I can’t even begin to imagine how it would be to get it to do more complex stuff like be accessible through Tailscale or being behind authorization.
Bullshit. Docker Plex is easy af. You calling yourself experienced is the real joke here
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ what do I know, I only do this for a living plus manage a couple of home servers with dozens of services for almost a decade.
And you are still so bad? Wowzer. Fake it till you make it I guess. Try to overcome your fear of containers, it will help you with your work.
The quality was probably bad because you were routed through Plex Relay services which have a bandwidth limit. It is honestly quite a nice free service because it means it will work pretty much regardless how your network is setup but the quality will be bad. If you want to directly connect to your server you need a public IP so CGNAT won’t do you might also have to open some ports.
Even though they’re both on the same LAN? That sounds stupid, why would I need my videos to travel half across the globe to go from one room to the next?
No, that should work straight out of the box. Maybe you have some network configuration that stops that, like a firewall.
Nope, Jellyfin works directly same as always has
