Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?!
from aeharding@vger.social to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 23 Feb 03:49
https://vger.social/post/13667430
from aeharding@vger.social to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 23 Feb 03:49
https://vger.social/post/13667430
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.
threaded - newest
Has been for a long while. Also there are tons of unofficial apps as well.
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?
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.
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!
Plex is closed source and gradually being enshittified. You might not leave today, but you should have an exit plan.
Yeah nah. It’s going pretty fast tbh.
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?
Yeah, I don’t 100% love that’s on my default but I also don’t think it’s a huge deal
That’s the one!
They changed their logo gasp
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.
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 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:
ytdlpvideos from my Youtube Watch Later folder to a deletion folder if they’ve been watched.==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.Plex has been terrible for a long time if it weren’t for Jellyfin I would’ve just not bothered with a media server for a few years until they got their shit together. That reminds I should throw some money at the Jellyfin team.
Yeah, I’m really glad I found out about Jellyfin. I switched to Jellyfin because Plex doesn’t let you disable Passout Protection (automatically stopping playback after something like 3hrs) without Plex Pass. I was just about to fork over $95 for a lifetime license when I looked into Jellyfin and discovered continuous playback was the default. I switched that very day and never looked back.
That’s so weird. I’ve been using Plex for years and had never heard of “Passout Protection” until looking it up just now, nor does it ever stop playback on its own for me unless it reaches the end of the queue. I’m using the free version via web browser on my computer. Maybe it’s a setting that only affects apps? Continuous playback on Plex is one of the reasons why I’ve always preferred it over Netflix, etc.
Yeah, I don’t think it effects browsers.
Yeah! It’s been great for me. No detection issues or weird bugs. The mobile and TV apps are also great!
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. Works great.
Hm. I gave Jellyfin a try and the UX was a turnoff, so I ended up in Plex. The separate management of metadata does sound like a pain to me, too, but maybe there's a bit of sunk cost fallacy to that.
Either way it seems people are mostly fine with their choices and there is a viable free alternative, so... all good there.
You can change the UI design to whatever you want with a custom CSS. Can make your own or there’s a plethora of themes on GitHub. I remember trying one that replicated the Netflix app, and don’t hold me to it but I think I saw a Plex one as well.
Also, regarding the metadata, there are options that auto populate it for you. Idk how it does it, but my haphazard library of torrents all had accurate metadata AND it downloaded the subtitle files as well.
Not the UI, the UX. The UI may be editable, but if I have to make my own UI to be happy with what it looks like or works like, then that's bad UX.
I get that sometimes those terms are used interchangeably, but they're not the same.
Sorry, I misread. What is bad about the UX exactly? You don’t need to customize anything if you don’t want to; “it just works”. And I dont follow you on how having the option to customize things makes it a bad user experience. You’re assuming the native UI is bad for some reason.
I’ve used Plex a lot too back in the day but there’s nothing it provides that Jellyfin doesn’t do out of the box + self-hosted + for free.
Being given the tools to customize something by hand is not the same as being offered enough option to simply choose what you want. Having a good UX means that there was a UI designer who alread did the customzing for you and you simply have click a button to apply it.
I barely even remember what the specific dealbreaker was, honestly. I was just dabbling, considering expanding my NAS and maybe getting the gear to dump my 4K BluRays. I gave Jellyfin a try first, I went through the setup process and I remember it being a) confusing to set up directly on my NAS, and b) very ugly.
I gave Plex a try to cover my bases and that looked better and got me up and running faster, so I just stuck with it. Easier remote access was a feature for me there, too, but the choice was made purely on the onboarding process, there was nothing activist to it. It's maybe the most user-level, unresearched decision I've taken on software in a while, honestly. I was already trying to figuring out the ripping and encoding at the same time, so I didn't want to put any additional attention on library management.
If anything I gave Jellyfin a bit more of a chance than I otherwise would have because I had heard a lot of angry chatter from people about Plex. I guess I came in after they made the changes that pissed people off and didn't mind the state of the current product without a frame of reference. I would have bailed if there was a subscription, but they do have a one-and-done purchase, so now I'm set up, it's working and I've paid them as much as I'm going to, so I'm fine with it. I do appreciate a free alternative existing, though.
I don’t know if it’s bad UX or UI, but I do agree there’s something really disturbing with jellyfin’s options and tweaks… More than once I lost my way and had to click on every option button again to find a specific thing to disable/enable something?
Now It’s easier after I have passed some time in the options/user menu, but some tweaks and options are not very intuitive.
Other than that, Jellyfin is awesome and I can’t believe something as good as Jellyfin is free and open source. Thanks to all devloppers behind this, I hope they will stay true to open source and jellyfin will last forever !! But I doubt it.
It’s really not, but I guess it depends on how you do it. You can even automate it.
I tried Jellyfin out on my most recent build - don’t think it’s quite as good as Plex so far. Still using it though - I think either is perfectly fine for a simple home media server.
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.
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 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.
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 app.plex.tv to manage your local server.
It’s all unnecessarily confusing and difficult.
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: i.xno.dev/mqWFZ.png
I was then immediately routed to app.plex.tv and see this: 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! 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.
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…
It’s not. There’s no server configuration options at all. There’s nothing to indicate it’s local content…
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.
These are the same thing…
Soon as you share it over the Internet it is. You need a license from the IP holder to do that.
I mean yeah, it doesn’t demand anything because it doesn’t give you an option. lol
And I’m not saying that you should prefer Jellyfin. But to call Plex “easier” than jellyfin is verifiably an incorrect statement–which is what I’ve been saying since the beginning here. The way Plex forces you to do things isn’t easier at all.
I feel like this conversation does a very good job of explaining why FOSS alternatives so often have terrible usability. "Not how most people would do it in a selfhost environment" is effectively "not how a tiny, teensy, borderline irrelevant proportion of users would do it".
Selfhosting is moving towards being accessible to the average user in some areas. Not coincidentally, I suspect, mostly in areas where someone is trying to make money on the side (see Home Assistant increasingly trying to upsell you into their cloud subscription and branded hardware, for instance). This idea that structuring the software for the average phone user as opposed to the average home server admin is "bad" or "complicated" is baffling to me.
Oh, and for the record, no, that's not the line for legality when it comes to watching the media I own. I am perfectly within my rights to access the files in my hard drive in any way I want. At least where I live. I make no promises for whatever dystopian crap is legal in the US. If anything there is a gray area on my using a specific type of drive to be able to rip commercial optical media that is theoretically DRMd in ways that my drive just happens to ignore. But remotely accessing my legal backups in my local storage? Nah, even if I was more worried about piracy than I am I'd feel fine on those grounds.
But also, copyright as currently designed is broken and not fit for purpose, and I suspect you don't disagree and your pearl clutching here may have more to do with disliking Plex and not wanting to acknowledge an actually useful feature they provide than anything else. Maybe I'm reading too much into that.
Has Jellyfin improved its subtitle fetching?It’s been awhile since using Jellyfin. I stayed with Plex because downloading subtitles on the fly wasn’t available in Jellyfin, and no extensions for it either.
I guess it depends on when you last used it. I opt for the CLI approach, but Jellyfin can install a plugin which allows (on library scan) to extract internal subtitles, which fixes 90% of issues with subtitle display for devices like Chromecasts.
Jellyfin also integrates with OpenSubstiles: i.xno.dev/gVee6.png
I’ve had both for a while now, but I find that subtitle playback is a bit spotty in Jellyfin. Is that fixed, or have I missed a setting somewhere? The other thing is that my libraries are alphabetical in Jellyfin, so “Anime” comes before “Kaiju”, and I truly can’t stand the idea that Godzilla gets sent to the back of the bus. Is there a way to customize the order of libraries?
If you mean the order the libraries are listed in the web interface, you change that from “User settings” -> “Home”.
So, I tried that a long time ago, and it didn’t work. Tried it again today, same deal. Then, I tried a third time and actually hit the “Save” button this time… Yeah, I think Jellyfin was never the problem.
😁 I think we’ve all been there.
This is still a little weird. I found that the web client (in a browser) handles this really well with default settings. However, if I try to use the desktop app or a mobile client, I have to force it to burn in the subtitles for them to show up reliably. Fortunately, there are per-client settings for this now:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/869f287f-0d34-45f9-928a-4b611688fafa.png">
I actually had the opposite experience, better subtitle support without transcoding the video track with Jellyfin
Anime and .ass subtitles are a bit funky but that’s not due to jellyfin but the player used while streaming in direct play. (In my case)
I had the issue where on my mobile/laptop some subtitles just disappeared or where strangely formated. After some digging arround I found out that VLC was the culprit and changing the default player to MPV or alternatives like Findroid (which uses MPV as default player) everything went butter smooth in direct play !
No idea about transcoding though :/
So glad people are dipping out of plex.
I tried Jellyfin two years ago and was so fed up troubleshooting the installation that I swore it off. Tried it again a few months ago and it worked flawlessly! Now I host movies, shows, music, ebooks, and audiobooks for a handful of friends and family. My jellyfin instance is probably siphoning $120/month from Netflix’s subscription revenue lol
How well do ebooks & audiobooks work on jellyfin? I’m an emby user, and while I love it a lot, it’s not great for audiobooks & there’s functionally no ebook support… you can see ebooks in their library but not even open them.
I have audiobookshelf too which handles both, but I’m also always looking for ways to cut down on excess stuff to have to worry about or maintain
Audiobookshelf is absolutely awesome for audiobooks. Tho it’s possible, Jellyfin isn’t really very audiobook friendly imo. Just run both.
Can Jellyfin handle symlinks? That’s all it would take to sell me at this point.
My media folder is a symlink to my NAS mount if that’s what you’re asking.
Yup.
It’s still terrible for music. There’s not even user-based star rating…
Plexamp being behind a paywall stopped me from using Plex for music. Went with Navidrome and it works great.
True, also no support for cue sheets, search is bad and no lyrics.
Lyrics work :)
It always says there is no lyrics, do I need to do something for it to work?
if there are none locally, you can use the lrclib plugin to find lyrics
Doesn’t seem to work, maybe I’m doing something wrong.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
what are the things i will miss from plex’s pre-enshittification?
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.
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
Plex was always terrible, anyone that uses it is an imbecile.
Another case of user matching tag
Does jellyfin do any kind of library sharing? Because that’s the killer feature that Plex has for me.
I have three friends who have Plex servers and between the four of us, I think we have all the content anyone could want.
Yeah, it does
If you’re on mobile, the app Streamyfin for Android and iOS is fantastic. Handles downloads, transcoding, great UI, and it even integrates with additional third-party tools that enhance it further, like Jellyseer.
I used Plex for a long time and was very tempted by their lifetime plan. I tried Jellyfin but at the time it just wasn’t a patch on Plex. I continued with Plex but always had that itch to get away from closed source. I eventually tried Jellyfin again and whilst it’s definitely not as feature rich as Plex, it does what I need from it which is a central store of media that any TV in my house can use. I’ve even given a few friends a login so they can watch content.
I do love that it’s completely self hosted. I run it behind Caddy so it has a Let’s Encrypt certificate. All run in a Docker container with the media from an NFS share from a Pi4 with an external HDD.
That said, I still have Plex running as I have one Samsung TV and there’s no official Jellyfin client for it. Yes there’s some long winded developer way to get one on but I just can’t be bothered.
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:
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:
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.
Oh no, a random on the internet who can’t read the list of issues to understand they are all service and not deployment related, with no qualification whatsoever and who reads like an angry teen thinks I don’t know about a technology I’ve been using since before he knew how to talk. I’m devastated.
lol yeah you are.
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.
You should not be using NAT to access your Plex externally, I will explain.
App.plex.tv and the apps use Plex services to generate a point to point connection from remote clients through your router to the server. This is important because you never need to expose a private IP to the Internet, and the authentication can be protected with something robust like a Google account which support 2FA and even phishing-resistant 2FA.
The combination of more advanced security and secure/convenient SSO authentication are one of the biggest benefits of Plex in my opinion.
If you enable the “remote access” in Plex you are essentially port forwarding you server to the internet using UPnP (by default. You can also port forward manually if you’d like).
It’s indeed a point to point connection but a point to point connection the same way your connection to normal websites are point to point.
If you knew the public IP of anyone that’s using Plex you can likely go to [IP]:[Random PORT] and access their server. You still need to login though.
Source: My own tests and …plex.tv/…/200931138-troubleshooting-remote-acces…
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
.
Weird. It has always worked perfectly fine for me. You must have something interesting going in in your setup.
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.
I’m also on emby and it works well for me. My main grievance is setting up a new device is a chore, “emby connect” is far too clunky to use so I end up configuring via URL every time - and on some devices that’s a real chore.
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.
I knew basically nothing bout jellyfin except it existed and this thread inspired me to finally set up my own server and client on the tv cause the chromecast has just become so unbearably bad.
I had it up and running in 5 minutes. Hardest part was remembering the auth key while running between rooms. I don’t buy into the atmos meme, for music I have bt amplifier or vinyl and it has everything I need: Watch content from my tv.
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
Works great. I use VLC as a player (personal preference).
Not sure how the internal player works.
I’ve been running plex for a few years no. No real issues to complain of.
Until today. I just upgraded my server with an Intel ARC. Was looking forward to enabling qsv for streaming. Turns out you need plex pass to do that.
Can jellyfin do it?
jellyfin.org/docs/general/…/intel/
Yes. You set hardware encoding to QSV, then you’re mostly set. You can choose which formats it should work on, which for an Arc card will probably be all of them. I got an Arc A380 and its worked flawlessly with many streams at once.
I’ve been using Kodi with Jellyfin for around 10 years now. I tried Plex now and then because everyone uses it but I could never get behind why everyone is using it. It has always been worse in every aspect for me.
A big one for me was user management. I don’t have to concern myself with that. So it helps. They also have apps for most things, I can just say go get Plex instead of what device are you using? Get x app. Here is the server information you’ll need to put in.
I didn’t have to put a lot of effort into managing the people using it.
We have different requirements apparently. I don’t need user management and we only watch on our TV (plus myself using Jellyfin as backend for Symfonium).
Wife approval factor
My wife won’t use it if she can’t see an app for it to click on to start using immediately. Going through browsers is not an option. Not having a dedicated app on the LG TV is not an option. Not being able to find something instantly means instant rejection. She refused Plex, but now sometimes uses it and has learnt to find subtitles, etc by herself.
I don’t touch my self hosted apps. If something doesn’t behave properly on the first attempt then it gets rejected from our household. It’s only for us enthusiast nerds to put up with kanky UI and setup issues for the sake of superior functionality. Normie’s won’t tolerate it.
My wife uses the Kodi app on Android TV just fine.
There’s your first problem.
When was the last time you checked? Jellyfin has had an app on LG’s webOS store for a couple of years now, although older TVs didn’t get it until a few months later. I’d given up on it and bought a lifetime Emby Premiere licence by the time by TV was finally supported.
Are you using kodi as the streaming app on your tv/device? And jellyfin as the backend?
yes
Jellyfin is only 6 years old
I started with Kodi and added Jellyfin later
Any recommendations about how to install all this jazz?
I’d like to build a music box controllable by the family, eventually centralising videos so anyone (or at least me) can just pick up their phone and watch an episode of star trek without the hassle of copying. Automatic subtitles would be magic.
Cheers!
If all you want is a local media server. It’s very easy.
You pretty much just have to install Plex or Jellyfin, setup a “library” in the software.
You usually set up one library for movies and one for TV shows. You then point these libraries to their respective folders on your hard drive and assuming you have some half decent organized media with proper naming it usually just works.
Plex doesn’t have automatic subtitles per say but mostly Plex players allow you to download new subtitles from the player. I don’t know about Jellyfin.
If you want to have external access it’s a bit harder if you use jellyfin as you will have to setup a reverse proxy but I’m guessing that there are a lot of guides for that online. Plex should work for external access out of the box assuming you have a public IP, and even if you don’t you can use their automatic relay services to get it to work anyway although in very low quality.
Proper naming is honestly the hardest part but that’s very dependent on how much existing media you have and how the naming is today. Luckily Plex and Jellyfin are fairly good at recognizing and finding media with subpar namin (you should still fix the naming to comply with the documentation)
If you want to have automatic torrent downloads, fully automatic subtitles and all that it’s quite some work to set it up properly and have it working without any input from you. If you want to tackle it (or are just curious), I recommend checking out trash-guides.info
Many ways to install it officially nowadays (see their website) but most do it via docker. A very easy albeit unoffical way is via flatpak.
I tried Jellyfin a few weeks ago and didn’t have much luck with it. I only added a couple of shows and movies just to test it but half of them just didn’t show in the library (even though it detected them as they showed in other places). Will it only show stuff in the library if it can pick up the metadata for it?
it will still shows stuff in the library even if it failed to pick up the metadata.
for jellyfin, folder structure is kinda important for auto detection to work.
For shows, you can organises your files like this:
series-name-a/ season-01/ episode-01 episode-02You can check out the doc, it is more detailed
How long did you give it? It indexes the library. I had to rebuild my library once, and while I don’t have a huge collection - mainly just rips of my DVD collection, about 450 films, and it takes over an hour to index everything. Until it’s done, not everything shows up.
I didn’t give it very long but it was literally just 3 films and 1 TV show
How many episodes in the show? Depending on the hardware, that could take a few minutes. If it’s trying to index over a network mounted drive, it could take a long time. My material was mounted locally over USB3 on an older 16-core Ryzen machine.
Once indexing is done, it’s fast, but there initial indexing can be slow.
Not that many, 6 seasons with 6 episodes each and a few specials. Maybe I do just need to leave it longer though, I’ll try again at some point
Start it up before you go to bed. If it isn’t indexed when you wake up, it’s just not going to work for you.
Jellyfin is pretty good about preserving the index; you only really pay a cost during that first start up, or if you shuffle content around on the storage. Otherwise, it only indexes new stuff, which should be mostly not noticeable.
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
I mean, it naturally has to be something that they eventually find a way to charge you something for. If it’s a for-profit business, and if they only sold lifetime subscriptions, they would eventually go out of business.
Then they shouldn’t be called lifetime subscriptions. This seems like a really smarmy justification of a shitty business practice.
That makes zero sense.
Not lying makes zero sense to you?
Sublime never offered lifetime subscriptions. web.archive.org/web/20150928064400/…/sales_faq You can even see as far back as 2014 that if you purchased Sublime Text 2 when Sublime 3 was still in beta:
You can find that disagreeable, but it was not something they hid from us customers.
Licenses for sublime text 2 just said “and future updates”. I remember the “lifetime” thing being a selling point on producthunt. This was back in 2013 though, and the weird way the licensing change was handled made me switch to emacs.
Care to elaborate?
AFAIR SublimeText licenses are always only for a specific major version. And they sometimes might work for the next major version. So, I guess you’ve just installed a newer version for which your lifetime license isn’t valid anymore.
Before sublime text 3 all updates were included in the single license, not just major revision updates. This was back in 2013.
Hmm… I remember buying the license for ST2 back in the days and it specifically saying it’s for ST2.x only. However, it also worked for early ST3 versions but stopped working at some point. Which was when I’ve switched to something else.
It was over eleven years ago at this point so my memory may be hazy on the details but I remember something happening in the major version change that pissed me off enough to switch off of it. 🤔
I don't mean to be glib or upset you, but you still have lifetime access to the versions of Sublime Text for which you paid; you just don't get free updates to the next version. AFAIK, that's been the way they've done things for years.
Before the one license=one version switch in 2013 the license stated “and future updates” which they did, but they switched to needing to pay for new licenses for some reason. I remember that being the primary reason I switched to emacs.
I’ve been using it for 8 years and haven’t paid, is there any benefit for paying?
Jellyfin is awesome.
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.
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.
One thing jellyfin doesnt do well its anime content. But fortunately there’s Shoko Server, a metadata engine you can selfhost. Its awesome!
I need some explanation in the “Anime” part, I don’t get it ?
Well, jellyfin often doesn’t find the right metadata for anime episodes ecc, so theres this thing called Shoko Server that calculates a checksum of your files, compares it with the database over at anidb, and creates a virtual filesystem for jellyfin to make things easier! It’s pretty neat. Do you have additional questions?
That’s all for now, thanks
In my experience, jellyfin seems to think everything is anime for some reason.
I’ve had to go in to every single TV series and manually enter Metadata.
Not a huge deal I only have a few series’ but man it’s weird.
You can also change the directories names, appending [MVDB ID], so that for the future if you ever happen to have to reinstall jellyfin, it’ll automatically repopulate them how they were :)
It works pretty well for me but I separate anime and TV/movies, and make sure the anime library is only scraping data from anime-centric databases. But I’m also not watching too much new or obscure stuff.
Yeah also with shoko you have to create a library only for animes (only one for both series and films tho). Idk, last time I checked jellyfin sucked. Maybe now its better. Another thing that shoko does is automatically track your progress on anidb, so thats cool :)
Is just not as good*
What problems are you having with it?
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.
I had the opposite. Jellyfin just works. Plex kept losing my movie folders, refused to play videos, wouldn’t screen cast, had problems with audio tracks, there always seemed to be a disconnect between app and server, they refused to connect despite both being the correct versions. It worked great initially, but got steadily more and more problematic over time. I gave up, even though I’d paid for it, and made a jellyfin server and have had zero trouble since.
Don’t know why two programs should have such radically different experiences, they should just do what they’re supposed to.
What are the issues you’re having with Jellyfin’s subtitles? Do you know if there is an open bug report or feature request that is tracking the same?
I used Plex a while ago and didn’t like how I had to look for my folders against the stuff they offered. And the upside of being able to get my stuff from a server install on another network had me wondering if they were looking at the movies I had to pirate. Once I installed jellyfin, I didn’t have to worry. My only issue is if I want to use it on vacation, I have to do some vps hack-jiggery.
Maybe when the merge transcoded downloads on the official clients. rn depending on streamyfin
The only problem I’m having with jellyfin is around subtitles, but it’s getting better all the time. I bought the plex lifetime license a few years ago, but we’ve moved our whole house to jellyfin now.
Can you describe the subtitles issue you’re having? Do you know if there is an open bug report or feature request open on github or Jellyfin’s website?
Not op but in my case it’s the client ignoring embedded subtitles
Which client are you seeing the issue on and can you provide more info on the type of embedded subtitle (run mediainfo on the file if on Linux)?
Android TV and any file with embedded subtitles. Only external subtitles, if present, are shown. I understood that is because I’m using AMD hardware encoding and I assumed it was unfixable. Didn’t investigate more as I’m going to switch to Intel soon
They both suck.
Long live Stremio.
I never used Plex. Up until my kids were born I used to just watch my videos on my desktop, but now I find myself watching on my phone and TV more often. My Jellyfin server has been super stable for the last 6 months or so running on a super low powered machine and external hard drive. The only issues I have is with movies with Dolby digital, they tend to get out of sync when scrubbing the timeline. I am assuming that is due to the lower power of the machine. But, I have a 400watt desktop with a 7th gen i7 and a pascal Quadro P1000 that I am planning on migrating to. Then adding a 20tb internal drive for storage. Hopefully that will resolve the small issues I have seen with it.
Hopefully it doesn’t require Docker?
What’s wrong with docker?
I guess nothing for those that like it — I’m old school and prefer to install apps on bare metal.
I don’t think you should be getting downvotes for having an opinion and I appreciate your reply.
However I do love a good debate - what’s the advantages for you for installing apps on “bare metal” (I’m assuming you mean a base OS install rather than actual bare metal). What about virtualisation?
I’m retired, so I do what I’m familiar with. You know the saying ‘can’t teach an old dawg new tricks?’, well, that’s me. LOL Learning systemd was rough on my grey matter, but I survived it. 😺
OK I’ve installed Jellyfin server. However when setting up my media directories via the web front end, Jellyfin keeps telling me they’re not valid paths. Don’t know why that would be as they’re directly on the server and valid. Checked permissions too, and restarted the server. Any ideas? I haven’t rebooted the server, that’s shouldn’t be required.
Hmm sorry not sure why it would be complaining about an invalid path. Is it all paths that are invalid, or just the ones to your media?
I have my media files in specific folders on a RAID5. It won’t take that as a valid path, nor even anything in the ~/ directory. If I use the server root, it will. I don’t like that - seems like a poor system design. No way I want it to scan my root directory. Christ it will take forever to scan my entire RAID of 200Tb.
It shouldn’t really matter where you’ve got your files as long as they’re mounted on a standard path. Maybe try creating a symlink from where your media is to a standard path like
/mnt/mediaor something?Yeah tried that. It doesn’t even recognize standard paths like ~/user directory
Don’t set it to your home path, set the path explicitly. That’ll be what it’s complaining about, the ~.
I’ve set the paths properly and explicit. This is on Debian Stable. Uninstalled, not going to waste anymore time on this.
Yeah I think your problem was trying to use ~ in a path. That’s a bash thing, not a linux thing - slightly pedantic distinction for many but worth knowing about in case future applications give you a similar problem.
No, I tried everyway with complete paths, I used that as one example. The software is a POS.
I’m an experienced user, I know what I’m doing. I’ve been using GNU/Linux since '96.
I feel like 20 years ago someone made a similar realization with Linux vs windows
Edit: i remember people telling me how good Linux was in 2010ish (so maybe 20 years was wrong), so idk…
Let’s not rewrite history, 20 years ago desktop Linux was an absolute shit show.
Although I have my issues with plex, jellyfin has its own problems:
.
I was replying to maybe share the wrapper script I wrote, but if you’re going to be a jerk about it…
So other people who might be considering Jellyfin vs Plex know that your problems aren’t universal?
I’m in the same boat as the other person. Ive had Jellyfin running for years, watch something on it daily, and have never had the container break due to transcodes not being removed.
Maybe its just you and your setup?
.
This last one is why I have to use Plex instead of jellyfin on my tv. The jellyfin roku app fuckin sucks and refuses to demux anything.
Not got around to trying it out properly yet. Waiting on new AMD GPUs, hoping for a low-end encoder or I may get access to a RX 480.
What does Jellyfin use .NET for?
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby which was written in .NET. The server backend and web page are all (or mostly) .NET is my understanding. It makes use of external programs like ffmpeg on the server or VLC on the apps.
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.
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.
Been using Jellyfin along side the ‘ARR suite for about a year now, my biggest issue is with Subtitles.
On the IOS/iPadOS apps of Jellyfin subtitles seem to prevent media from streaming, tried utilizing Bazaar but have had no luck.
I used to have similar issues, was due to my PC not being able to handle the transcoding. Enabling hardware acceleration with the correct settings fixed it for me.
I bought an 13th Gen Asus Nuc with an i7 running Debian headless and a hard-disk bay for my setup, previously all I was using was a Rasp Pi 4, I honestly don’t know if my Jellyfin instance is utilizing the CPU’s iGPU not really sure how to tell.
Running lspci in the shell does return
Easiest way to tell is to transcode something and see if your CPU spikes. If it’s offloaded to the GPU it shouldn’t.
Also make sure you have it configured correctly. On your Admin Dashboard under Playback > Transcoding, check that Intel QuickSync (QSV) is selected.
I have an N100 (Intel 12th gen) so I think your settings should be similar. For mine I have pretty much everything checked except for VP8, the two HEVC RExt options, and “Allow encoding in AV1 format”
I think I might be able to help with Bazaar settings if you still want to try it. It took a lot of playing around with things, there weren’t any guides at the time I set it up. But I can send you screenshots of my settings and highlight the crucial settings.
I still maintain that Emby is better than Jellyfin. I try it again maybe once a year and every time I end up back on Emby. It just runs better, works pretty flawlessly and doesn’t lose my libraries every so often. Music playback is better by far on Emby and that’s my main usecase.
Hardware decoding would be nice, but I don’t have a system I could use this on for either and I’ve not had trouble without it.
What do you mean library losses. I’ve been using jellyfin twoish years now and have never had this happen.
Same. The only issue I’ve had is it not finding my TV shows, but once I figured out how it wants them stored, no issues whatsoever.
I’ve been using jellyfin for like 7-9 years and have never had that happen lol.
edit: apparently jellyfin hasn’t existed that long so I must have been using it since the day it came out 😂 I know I started using it the moment Plex took apps or plugins or whatever it was and made them paid. I realized it was being enshittified and immediately left.
I don’t use it for myself but my experience with Jellyfin is the subtitles UX kind of sucks. It got a lot better on the Android TV app recently (ty to the maintainer!), particularly with improved subtitle support, but because of ExoPlayer it still can’t play bitmapped embedded subtitles easily, only .srt subtitles.
The experience on iOS/appletv with Jellyfin/Swiftfin was so bad that I ended up recommending Infuse. Infuse is a great app, but it’s not a libre app, which kind of clashes with the rest of Jellyfin in that regard. And, once again, it needs massaging: unless you want to be popped up with a buy Infuse Pro pop-up your video and audio has to be in certain codecs.
As I said, I don’t use these things, myself. I don’t even have a TV. But every now and again, I will put a file up for some relatives, and I want it to be totally directly playable, because my server is just an old laptop. So I have to spend a lot of manual time making sure the files are juuuuust right. If there comes a day where there’s direct playback with embedded PGS or SRT subtitles on all platforms that will be the day the Jellyfin suite of software becomes 10/10 software for me.
Embedded subtitles definitely work, and I’ve used bitmap ones before, although I generally avoid them so I’m not sure if they consistently work well. Directly playback also does work with those subtitles, so if you had issues it was likely related to codec support.
Unfortunately I can’t play around with it anymore because I live a thousand miles away from everyone I support who actually uses Jellyfin. My experience with the Android TV app was embedded SRT subtitle support is now 100% good as of late last year, but embedded PGS trips things up so much that I cannot use them.
Fair enough, not saying you should bother with it, just surprised to hear it happening.
I genuinely do not understand the issues people are having with Jellyfin subtitles. I just have Bazarr set up to automatically download and they play on every device (web, android, iOS, roku, android TV) with zero issues.
Sounds like it’s mostly with embedded subs inside the media files already. Thats where all my subs are so I’m going to test soon but haven’t played anything on jellyfin needing subs in a while
I now extract all my subs, but for the first 2 years using it I left everything embedded and it always worked normally. Even with some advanced ones like Jujutsu Kaisen and One Pace, which both use stylized ones.
Just tested and with Findroid on my phone, no subtitle options appeared at all, though it had 4 languages embedded. On my roku they showed up but as soon as I picked it it loaded until it said Error During Playback
I’ve never used Findroid, but they work on my regular Jellyfin app. I think on Roku transcoding is required, but afaik that’s on Roku not supporting the subtitle format.
The same movie works on the roku Plex app with the embedded subtitles just fine.
Also findroid is an android app that has more features than the native app
Depends on how you’re viewing Jellyfin. I use Chromecast and Chromecast doesn’t support embedded subtitles well with Jellyfin. So I usually just use ffmpeg to extract the subtitles to an srt file, and then they run fine;
pushd "\\nas\Media\Movies\" fd -e mkv | each {|x| ffmpeg -i $x -map 0:s:0 $x.srt }Temporarily maps my UNC network location to a usable drive, then using
fdand anelvisheach loop, iterate over all the mkv files, and use ffmpeg to extract the subtitles.Ez-pz.
I use jellyfin for every device except for my android TV. I really like it and prefer it over Plex, but it was working fine until it suddenly stopped working a few months ago. I tried updating the app, the jellyfin container, reinstalling the app and clearing data and redoing my jellyfin instance entirely. Nothing worked, everytime I try to connect to the server via the android TV i just got an error unable to connect… and the rest is cut off. Regular android app works, idk what the problem is but it has to be client side, so I just gave up and now have plex running alongside just for the TV.
If anyone has had this Problem before I would love suggestions!
My guess would be internal networking issue preventing the two from talking
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.
It is……if you use a computer. Their AppleTV app still looks like some random coder’s pet project with random playback issues.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Different devices. iOS, android, AppleTV. Most of it is likely Apple’s fault for the limited options in the ecosystem tho.
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.
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.
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.
In my experience, transcoding with subtitles becomes an issue when the subtitles are burned in to the video. I often get external subtitles from 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.
Jellyfin is so underrated
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well for better or worse, I am off sick from work today so I just set up the server!
That was fast.
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 :)
Yep
Welcome to the future
Been using jellyfin for a few years now, never had a problem vs constant problems with plex
Jellyfin seems solid.
The only issues I’ve had are with dodgy media files. Obviously better player hardware gets you better performance, but transcoding eliminates some of those issues.
Yep same. I got an Intel Arc card for transcoding and it plays on anything perfectly now.
btw intel QSV on iGPUs is actually crazy, you can put a little intel cpu from like 12th gen and it’ll decode and encode most content for you perfectly fine, unless you’re extremely picky about tone mapping and color space (idk in that case, i don’t have super strenuous content requirements lol)
the arc cards are even better, but not needing an entire GPU for decoding/encoding is SO nice for smaller homelabs.
I’ve been running plex since 2016 and jellyfin since 2019. I’m slowly moving users over to jellyfin with the plan to cut off plex at somepoint in the next couple years. Jellyfin is missing some quality of life features but nothing super crazy
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 :)
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.
Amen!
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 installed Mint last week and haven’t addressed media players yet… strokes chin. Thanks for the info!
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.
Am I the only one here using emby? I’m pretty happy with it honestly.
Nope, I still use Emby myself. Although I’m in the process of switching to Jellyfin I think. I have it running separately to sort of evaluate it. Jellyfin was a fork of Emby, so there are a lot of similarities.
any reason to use this over real debrid + stremio?
Storing media locally is great on the off chance your internet goes out, in addition if there’s shows that RD hasn’t cached yet and have no seeders.
Rd has no issues torrenting stuff? If it isnt cached it downloads it for me faster than my internet could lol. Thats a good idea tho, but typically if I lose internet, I’ve also lost power.
I tried Jellyfin years ago, it is in my test for later todo since then, it was pretty vanilla compared to my Plex Media Server (for instance I couldn’t get to work the transcoder to use quick sync to lower the CPU load if needed, meanwhile Plex worked fine with the Docker container even).
With that said, I stopped using Plex daily in order to give some use to my Real Debrid account (so Stremio and Kodi are the next logical alternatives for me) and because I only have a two bay NAS with 10 TB in total, and I like to hoard so I struggle every time I need to delete something, since I knew about Riven/Zurg/Rclone/DMM combo I have returned using Plex without worrying each day about my drives, keeping it updated and enjoying the thinkering process of this new experience, also sharing the love with a couple of friends, I see no need to try Jellyfin, even after that many years.
Plex has recently started applying a green filter to certain content.
The files Plex has a problem with work just fine in Jellyfin.
Green filter? Are you talking about the issue where you try to play Dolby Vision content on a non DV TV?
I’m not sure. I’ve only noticed it on my TV and have even noticed it with content that I personally ripped from DVDs or Blurays and encoded to x265 or AV1. Since it only affects the TV apps I’m wondering if it isn’t a lack of support for some color space or something by the TV hardware because when I’m encoding I don’t usually change anything about the dimensions, color space, frame-rate, etc., just the codec and quality. If the video is 10 bit, I encode it as 10 bit. If it’s HDR, I pass that thru. I’ve checked with the mobile and desktop app and the web player on content the TVs had issues with and those same files played fine everywhere else, so it’s something specific to the LG and Roku apps for Plex.
No, that issue can happen on Jellyfin as well, because it’s happened to me. But that was before I used the Trash guides to set up Sonarr/Radarr so that Dolby Vision files were never fetched.
I do my own ripping direct from disc and I’ve still seen it happen. So far it’s exclusive to the TV apps so I think it’s something to do with the lack of hardware support for certain things.
Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Some TVs can’t handle DV. There’s nothing you can do about it either, other than avoid anything with it.
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 addons are great too. The intro/outro skip is slick and nearly flawless, background subtitle download is seamless, on and on.
I gotta try those
Here’s a pretty good list to get started with:
Awesome Jellyfin
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:
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.
Yeah, that part about Plex has always bugged me. You can disable logins for your server with allow-listed networks, but most of the non-desktop apps have to log into the Plex platform to run.
jellyfin is quite literally seamless in this regard, the only thing that wont work is metadata scraping (which if like me you run a yt archive, can be relatively frequent, but often isn’t even a huge problem) I only notice network outages when other shit breaks lmao.
I have been looking at JellyFin as a replacement for my aging Emby install, but the over-the-air TV support is weak and mostly broken. I am a FOSS fanboy, but first and foremost TV has to work for my household, not just for me with glitches. I suppose the correct answer is to contribute to improving it, but like most folks, free time is not copious.
I think it sounds like you want a paid product that just works out of the box. Jellyfin has some rough edges sure, but it’s also a volunteer project for the most part.
I’ve got to disagree or clarify with some of these points. These points seem subjective and I feel the need to say something in case others are trying to compare plex/jellyfin.
Hardware acceleration works just fine? Unless there’s some hardware specific issue?
The difference in apps is because there’s two platforms. The web player (with CSS themeing) and the native (like on Android, which is a straight up android app, not a web page). There’s some capabilities that you can only get on Android if you build an app instead of a web player. There’s only like one guy building the android TV app.
Unfortunately just one guy working in his spare time on the android TV app. I’ve never had subtitle issues either (might be a good time to open a bug in report?)
Jellyfin “remote” is pretty rudimentary. You’d be better off just accessing it through a tunnel anyways – and then youd have access to your own just not your server.
This isn’t about want, it’s a reality check. OP said jellyfin is better than Plex now, and by objective measure it is not better for most people yet. False expectations hurt Jellyfin adoption, you need to try it with the expectation of jankiness or you’ll just be annoyed by the edges.
Op’s criteria wasn’t “is it a good product?”, it was “is it better than Plex?”. Stop taking valid criticism as if it were an attack. If we want software to improve we have to be honest about its shortcomings.
In the plex PLAYER, I constantly have to restart my tv, glitches, audio out of sync, black screen etc, stutters randomly. Incredibly annoying when I’m trying to watch something. I haven’t had a single playback issue yet with the jellyfin player. It just works
Edit: oh and how can I forget: in the plex player, sometimes “pause” just… didn’t fucking work?! Lmao. I had to exit the player and re enter. So annoying.
The Plex app for some versions of Android TV is way too chunky for the resources available. I’ve noticed it performs really badly with smart TVs and it seems to do worse the more background apps you have open, so I’m guessing it’s memory related. It generally seems to work better on dedicated devices like Google TV, although it does still wig out sometimes and need to be restarted.
My big beef with the Jellyfin app on Android TV is that they don’t include the fast scroll alphabetical bar the web UI has and the title layout is just posters. Everyone I’ve ever had use it complained that it’s just too hard to read. Plus if you have a big library, that leaves you with 2 navigation options: scroll a bunch or type something in with the on screen keyboard. Both of those kind of stink.
I’ve also run into weird edges with plugins in Android TV. I could never get automatic subtitles to work consistently. The skip intro popup just doesn’t appear sometimes or doesn’t skip correctly when pressed. I suspect there’s some translation error between the Android interface and the plugin interface.
pretty much just works for me on intel QSV. as long as you have drivers and hardware support it seems perfectly fine. Maybe plex has a cleaner implementation? Not sure, never used it.
depending on your network configuration, and routing of the network, this is most likely to be plex relays, this wouldn’t be a jellyfin issue, it would be a plex feature. You could easily fix this with a relay VPN server or something like that. (you probably shouldn’t publicly expose services these days anyway.)
The performance of hardware acceleration in Jellyfin is markedly worse in my experience. My A380 can handle 2-3x more streams in Plex than it can in Jellyfin. My theory is that it’s the jellyfin ffmpeg port slowing things down, but I admittedly don’t have much evidence to back that up beyond the fact that Plex’s transcoder is built on ffmpeg as well.
Plex Relays are a feature, but that’s sort of the point. You get that stability from Plex by default and it works on all clients. There is no realistic way you’re going to get all remote client devices on a VPN for Jellyfin. Maybe one day Jellyfin can offer that as a paid option, a la Nabu Casa for Homeassistant.
Media servers tend to get shared around with friends and family and these edges will start to drive you nuts if you have more than a handful of users. I do not want to try to walk a family member through setting up a VPN on their smart TV.
i’ve never used plex or benchmarked it, so it’s possible that it does, i wonder if anybody else has reproduced that behavior, i know a lot of people do plex/jellyfin benchmarks these days. Be surprised if that hadn’t yet happened. It shouldn’t be any faster or slower if you’re using the exact same transcoding settings, it’s all limited by the hardware physically, so it’s possible it was that. Could theoretically be bad drivers, or bad support i guess, but that would be a separate issue.
definitely a possibility, but then again there are several ways of solving this problem, in homelab universal manners, so maybe they should offer a more generic service instead.
That’s sort of the point, both are based on ffmpeg but neither is using vanilla ffmpeg. Plex’s seems to work a lot better on the same hardware for me, but more importantly it’s not something you have to fiddle with. You just check the box and it figures out a decent setting. Jellyfin has some basic defaults for Intel/nVidia but there are a ton of tweakable settings that you have to go figure out.
There’s probably some way to fix the issue but it’d take a ton of fiddling, and that’s the jank I keep referring to. A lot of people on Lemmy just ignore the rough edges and act like it doesn’t matter just because they can get past it or because it’s FOSS and they refuse to use anything else. Not everyone on here is a full-time software engineer, though; IMO it’s better to be honest about shortcomings and set expectations well. More people self-hosting their media is a net positive IMO.
Plex has people they can pay to make their product better (and at least for the moment they’re still paying them), Jellyfin straight up doesn’t have those resources. I hope that changes because Plex is not on a good trajectory as a company. The Homeassistant model seems like a good one that gives people a good reason to contribute code and money, I really hope the Jellyfin guys do something along those lines.
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.
Not OP, but I can answer part of your questions:
I have Plex and Jellyfin running off the exact same media library no problem at all. So there should be zero need to modify anything–if anything Jellyfin seems a little better at catching “extras” folders than Plex.
The Jellyfin app plays music–but it’s definitely NOT a music app. I always hear Symfonium highly recommended, but have not yet given it a whirl myself.
I think I’ll give it a try then.
Is there any consensus which client is better for desktop and android ?
Thank you.
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.
Iirc the feature used to be an add-on with module and I read here somewhere it now baked in out of the box, is that the case ?
I thought there’s an edge case somewhere but from your explanation I don’t think I need transcoding for video. Not that I don’t want it.
My NAS is old, like, i3 2100 old. So I just make sure the media can be played directly on my 2 client locally, so I don’t know how much HW transcode improve the performance but if it’s usable, that’s a nice bonus. Maybe if I ever get a 4K display but that’s a problem for future me.
Pretty much yeah, I really don’t wanna mess with the music library
Thanks for the answer.
I have a huge issue with this post.
You install the plugin and run the routine. There’s literally nothing to setup…
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.
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.
This is the fault of the television manufacturers, not the android app. This isn’t even valid criticism against Jellyfin.
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 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.
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…
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…
I think the music experience with Plex + Plexamp is still far better. That’s the main thing I use Plex for.
My biggest complaint about jellyfish is any file upgraded with the arr stack is readded as a new media. 2nd is lack of smart collections and playlists.
For me, Plex would often end up having audio drift lag and it was annoying as fuck. It’d start fine, then the lag would gradually increase until you changed encoding back and forth, then gradually increase again.
Jellyfin just works.
That was enough to get me to switch and not look back. I’m also rid of the bullshit plex login that I never cared for, and also of their push for whatever “recommended” stuff is supposed to be about.
YES
It’s not proprietary, so it could be shit on a shingle and still beat plex. I’m not installing anything proprietrary on anything I own.
Idk PlexAmp is the killer app that I can’t stop using. Does jellyfin have something similar?
Symfonium is pretty good as a one time purchase.
Really from what I hear the only thing Jellyfin is missing is a Plex amp alternative!
I personally would never go the Plex route at this point.
there’s finamp. and i think jellyfin is just running a sonic server? Not sure, but that’s basically what it is under the hood, so.
Honestly ever since Plex started going the enshittification route and hocking their fucking bullshit instead of just being a home server it’s been irritating the shit out of me. The only thing they aren’t doing at this point is adverts live vids.
Been using Plex for a couple years now, and the experience is mostly unchanged for me, once you disable the online media sources.
Genuinely curious, what are some enshittified dealbreaker features for you that they’ve introduced?
The ‘Plex suggestions’, the constant return of rental prices when doing a search instead of just my media library. I had to remove a bunch of menu items they automatically added without my cosent during their last major update which seems to be when it all started. The search bit is especially angering because it’s lagging load times as it’s searching these online sources for rentals I don’t want instead of just pulling up the returns on my local media server. If there’s a setting disabling it I must have missed it because when they introduced the garbage I immediately scoured the settings to try and turn it off. Those are the main two off the top of my head.
Agree with the search load times, and the TV app is a little frustrating to navigate. But I don’t see that as enshittification, just lacking polish.
As for the suggestions, I know you mentioned you don’t Plex anymore, but leaving this here just in case it helps: Settings --> online media sources --> disable everything. You’ll have to save each setting though, it’s annoying design. But once I did this I didn’t see any of that crap on my app.
Thanks! I appreciate it. I actually do still use it, my comment was just more toward the changes they’ve made and my perceived inability to remove or change it.
i only wish jellyfin would add chapter titles and hover cards (maybe thats in the new thumbs now? I haven’t yet migrated because lazy lmao)
and that they fix the weird UI shenanigans from it’s emby days. Some QOL shit would be nice, auto sorting so that its not manually default to the stupidest setting ever. and the other usual shit.
I’m still having issues with my client freezing on playback of high bitrate video (like heavy 4K content) but transcoding down fixes that, im not sure what causes that, something gets caught up i guess, a refresh fixes it though.
Plex is unbelievably slow to start and navigate through my huge library on my TV. Jellyfin flies.
The search is also much better on Jellyfin on my TV, because I can use the system keyboard which supports voice to text via the remote. Plex on the other hand has no debouncing, so pressing each key just makes a new search and it’s slow as sh—.
I also had it outperform Plex when Plex couldn’t play an audio language track where Jellyfin could.
However, it doesn’t seem like Jellyfin is as good at figuring out duplicates/versions of the same media? It shows up as two identical posters of the same thing without any discernible info until you step into the media page of the thing (movie/episode).
All in all, a very good complement to, if not replacement for, Plex. 8/10. I’m proud of them!
Out of curiosity, which Plex client are you using?
I use the one for WebOS on my LG TV.
The web client and Android client are lighting fast compared to the TV. Like normal apps loading normal content.
The TV app on the other hand takes like 20 seconds just to get past the splash screen, and then another maybe 10 seconds to show first content. And navigation is laggy af. Just absolutely brutal.
Someone once said this is intentional to get you to buy new TVs. I don’t know. Not all apps do this. Jellyfin e.g.
Unfortunately the preinstalled old clients suck and there is no way for Plex to update them (this is on the TV manufacturers). If you are otherwise happy with your TV, you can get a better client via a HTPC or streaming box (such as nvidia shield or apple tv). Jellyfin clients might work better on those as well, e.g. you would get less transcoding.
I think that is incorrect in my case. Plex did not come preinstalled on my TV – I installed it via the LG app store on the TV itself. Same with Jellyfin. I have both, and they both update when there are updates available. I have the latest versions.
My TV supports direct play, both in Jellyfin and Plex, so I am streaming 4K HDR with Dolby 7.1 over WiFi 6 without any buffering issues ever. Streaming is not the issue. The navigation lag and startup time for Plex only is the issue.
I might have to check out Jellyfin. Can you run both at the same time?
I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t with default settings. Beware of enabling any setting that stores data next to the media like nfo metadata storage, as those could maybe cause conflicts.
Absolutely. They are not going to share metadata or things like played status, but I have been using both simultaneously since almost the first day I spun up my media server.
I definitely prefer Jellyfin overall, but Plex is more convenient for sharing with less techy family so I keep it spun up. Jellyfin also requires some finicky network configuration (so I have heard) to cast media to a Chromecast, so Plex wins out there.
Yup.
anybody have a guide for an old laptop
Depends, does it have a gpu? What OS do you use? Do you want to run it in docker or are you ok with just installing the server app?
For Plex or jelifin. Either way you can install ready made distro like Truenas, unraided, Hexos(it has an easier interface for Truenas but got no idea how usable it is) or use a Linux distro like Debian and install docker then jelifin/plex. There are a lot of guides if you just search.
Depends on how old. I don’t recommend using vastly underpowered hardware to stream media content.
What do you mean by this? I don’t recall seeing anything about a change like this.
It’s because they don’t have PlexPass. I tend to forget that the restriction even exists, because I bought my lifetime pass like a decade ago.
The only thing about jellyfin is the damn subtitles. Subtitle sync is horrible. They added a subtitle offset feature last year which was a good workaround and then removed it a few months ago on androidtv and android. Now the subtitle offset on the web player doesn’t do anything anymore either
Even Subgen generated subtitles, which are pretty perfectly in sync in reality, are sometimes played back at an incorrect speed so it will progressively get more and more out of sync, but there is no way to tell what speed the subtitles are being played at.
Also it just ignores themes a lot of times or only displays themes on the admin console and nowhere else.
That said, jellyfin is still amazing!
subtitles offset works here even on latest version, both android tv, android and browser
if you don’t have the option on android, check that the player used is the right one, you will find that in settings
Using the integrated player. That is the only player option on android TV. On android I am also using the integrated player. If I use the web player, the same UI as the web shows up WITHOUT the subtitle offset option that is in the web player in a web browser. Not sure what the difference could be. Always burning in subtitles isn’t enabled either.
So weird, I guess I have it on my phone with webui
Subtitles are the biggest non-issue it’s crazy… Some devices don’t support internal subs, so you just extract them for your entire library using ffmpeg;
pushd "\\nas\Media\Movies\" fd -e mkv | each {|x| ffmpeg -i $x -map 0:s:0 $x.srt }Once it’s done, it’s done forever for the files you have. As you add them, just run it again.
Crazy how that doesn’t at all even address the problem of subtitle sync! It just pastes subtitles as-is in there. What if the subtitle files are at a different framerste? What if the subtitles have the wrong starting offset for the media? What if the subtitles have 1-2 mistakes in them as far as timing?
Hence why there are a dozen subtitle syncing tool projects supplementing ffmpeg like ffsubsync, subsync, alass, autosubsync, srtsync, etc…
As I said, this isn’t even an issue with Jellyfin. It’s an issue with the device that’s playing the media–your television (or chromecast). This workaround makes an exact copy of the internal subs, and dumps them to an SRT which allows your television (or chromecast) to play the internal subtitles as external subtitles…
It has nothing to do with subsync, it’s not syncing subs. There are no “mistakes” because you’re pulling the internal subs exactly as they are internally, externally…
Unless therer was some major update in the last 6 months I’ve missed, I’d say no … not even close.
Wait - what restrictions on Plex?
Multiple home users, hardware transcoding, media downloads on mobile…
support.plex.tv/…/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
Yeah, the biggest reason I use Plex is because of the wife/mother-in-law factor. Basically, how easy is it to get the people around you to use it? If it’s more difficult to use than Netflix or Hulu, many will immediately throw up their hands in learned helplessness, claim it’s too confusing, and refuse to try any more. Plex is the only self-hosting option that actually provides an elegant user setup experience. With Plex, adding a new user is as simple as having them make an account and then sending them the server invite.
Jellyfin is great but, to be fair, anything is better than Plex.
This thread is fucking blowing me away. It’s half people who realize that Plex is hot goddamn garbage, and the other half that are sucking its pp so hard it’s about to fall off.
Absolutely mindblowing to me that anyone would defend Plex and their proprietary garbage as “good.”
Maybe I need it give it another chance, but 3 months ago it was still hot garbage compared to plex
I’ve noticed it definitely varies depending on how you access it. The web version is flawless as long as the software has the resources it needs to run (my server is slightly very over-provisioned and gets crazy IO delay pretty frequently from running too much on too little).
The official Android and IOS apps are pretty good but do glitch and hitch from time to time, but apps on other platforms are less perfect. Also the third party Streamyfin and Swiftfin apps both seem to work a bit better than the official one but have their own quirks to be aware of.
The Roku app only just got consistently usable around 3-6 months ago, and still prefers to crash without displaying an error when fed media it can’t direct play, and for some reason some user profiles just don’t work on it. I don’t have anything else to try other apps on but that’s my experience so far
I haven’t really used Plex so I don’t know how clean of an experience it provides, but Jellyfin is very usable and honestly at this point most of the problems I have are specific to my media or my setup and not so much problems with the software itself
What do you run Android TV on? Raspberry Pi? My cheapo solution has been to use an old Android phone that supports DP alt mode (USB-C to HDMI adapter) combined with a USB hub + generic air mouse/remote + customized launcher.
It actually works surprisingly well. I installed FCast on it, so it even works like a Chromecast. If I’m watching a video on my phone using Grayjay, I can just cast it to the phone and it will start playing automatically. The only thing stopping it from being perfect is that it can’t turn the TV on automatically. As a plus, since the phone has a battery, it’s always powered on so I don’t have to wait for stuff to boot, and it uses relatively little power.
… but overall it’s janky and finicky, and the OEM bloatware is probably spying on me, so I’ve been looking for alternatives that can match the good parts of this setup.
I don’t like Raspberry Pis for this because they’re overpriced. I have a couple that I could use for this, but I’m hoping to find a cheaper solution, and one that I can recommend to friends/family when they ask. (the Android phone I’m using cost me a total of $15 on ebay)
Android is inside my TV, nothing external
I don’t have that restriction on Plex? I have 30+ remote users and 4 in home users not counting myself and there is no restrictions what so ever. All can strea 4k without issue. Could you explain more?
OP probably doesn’t have a plex pass.
Ahhh, good call-out I forget I have that since I bought it so long ago. Much appreciated
Yeah, I have 31 remote users (though less then 10 are actually active). If you’re running a server setup to the point of supporting that, the plex lifetime pass is just a piss in the wind.
But the lemmy FOSS crowd is strong, we’re severely outnumbered here :D
I love jellyfin! I’ve been using it for a few years and it has definitely gotten better. Every once in a while, it will incorrectly detect a show and I’ll have to manually add it. Usually on obscure or older shows and movies.
I dunno…
There’s a transcoding bug in the Android TV version of the Jellyfin client where transcoding a video with 7.1 audio breaks playback. Even with a Pull Request out there that fixes it (by matching the behavior of other Jellyfin clients), the issue got closed as “not planned”. The continued suggestion continues to be “just force everything to play in stereo”.
I don’t have unlimited bandwidth, so plenty of my stuff gets transcoded in Plex. I can’t, in good, conscience, switch my friends & family (most of who use Android TV) over to Jellyfin.
It’s worth noting that that not planned was a stalebot close, the issue is valid to remake.
I’ve been on Jellyfin for years, and I was using Emby before they forked it to create Jellyfin. Prior to Emby I was on Plex.
It hasn’t always been smooth sailing but I’ve been using it in a docker container for about a year now and it’s been great. The family love it, which is the main thing.
I was on emby some time ago and got sick of user issues, I tried jellyfin before that but it was worse. Very interested to know how both compare to Plex now (since maybe 4ish years ago) as I’d be very open to switching back.
I think I’d avoid emby though as I found the developer to be an annoying weirdo at times when trying to communicate.
Tired of the reports about this post. Locking.