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.
There’s a really strong bias on Lemmy for OSS projects. I’m glad they get so much love here, but everything people say here about Jellyfin has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. It works and you can use it. Depending on your needs, it may even work perfectly for you. There are tons of rough edges though.
Here’s a few:
- A bunch of basic functionality most people are used to is missing by default. You can get things like intro detection and subtitle downloading to work with plugins, but you have to work at it.
- Hardware acceleration still kind of sucks. You can get it to work, but the Jellyfin port of ffmpeg doesn’t work anywhere near as well as Plex’s.
- The variety in app experience is bewildering sometimes. Apps look and feel very different between platforms.
- Android TV app support sucks. The app is difficult to navigate and has a bunch of weird edges, like subtitle defaults not working. I have no idea what OP is talking about here, it sounds like they’re only judging the app on its animation speed.
- Public network support is finicky. This is hard to quantify, but I’ve been on several remote networks where my Jellyfin connection dropped in and out and Plex did not. I suspect this is due to the Plex Relay service making up for bad routes between my house and the network.
Jellyfin is improving all the time, and I hope the recent EFCore update improves performance and development velocity. I’m also holding out hope it will eventually lead to externally hosted databases and active-active servers.
Disclaimer: I run Plex and Jellyfin and regularly check in on the state of things in Jellyfin. I donate to Jellyfin. I want Jellyfin to be better than Plex. I don’t think any objective measure bears this out yet.
One thing Jellyfin is way better at is offline viewing. I have frequent internet outages at my house and I’ve run into issues multiple times where Plex wouldn’t stream my own local media because it couldn’t connect to the internet. For this, Jellyfin has always just worked.
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.
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.
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 have no idea what OP is talking about here, it sounds like they’re only judging the app on its animation speed.
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.
Hardware acceleration still kind of sucks. You can get it to work, but the Jellyfin port of ffmpeg doesn’t work anywhere near as well as Plex’s.
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.
Public network support is finicky. This is hard to quantify, but I’ve been on several remote networks where my Jellyfin connection dropped in and out and Plex did not. I suspect this is due to the Plex Relay service making up for bad routes between my house and the network.
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.
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.
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.
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Hardware acceleration works just fine? Unless there’s some hardware specific issue?
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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.
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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?)
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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.
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I tried to setup Plex and it was just about the most god-awful experience I’ve ever had. It was unnecessarily complex to accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup.
Installing Jellyfin took like… 2 minutes and I’ve had no issues since.
Only thing I don’t like about Jellyfin is the metadata engine, which I have disabled and just use TinyMediaManager and save everything to .nfo which is picked up by Jellyfin immediately. TMM runs on a schedule, every 30 minutes, so I just have to drop my media into the folders and the metadata is grabbed, updated, custom naming functions are run, and everything is moved all automatically. Works great.
It was unnecessarily complex to accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup.
Please elaborate how you needed to “accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup”.
When I set my server up years ago all I did was log in on the web interface. Literally as simple as any other service.
When I set my server up years ago all I did was log in on the web interface. Literally as simple as any other service.
They make you register with their own website to login to your local instance… That’s you jumping through hoops to accommodate their cloud bullshit;
It’s important to understand that Plex Media Server does not have its own graphical user interface. When you run the server on your computer, NAS, or other device, you won’t see a window open with a “server UI” or similar. Instead, you use our web app to manage your server.
It’s so fucking unnecessary.
Wait, isn’t Jellyfin the same way? Pretty much every self-hosted app I run uses some web interface you log into so you can use it anywhere on the network. Sure, Plex also has some pre-set remote connection thing, but from the end user perspective it’s the same set of steps. I also had to make a login for all the stuff I fully self-host.
Is there no account management on Jellyfin? I would probably want that as a feature.
Wait, isn’t Jellyfin the same way?
Jellyfin has a native web-ui, yes. But not a proprietary one, like Plex uses. When I installed a Plex server I had to go to plex.tv and setup a user account there to be able to log into my own damn server… Then they strongly encourage you to use https://app.plex.tv/ to manage your local server.
It’s all unnecessarily confusing and difficult.
Is there no account management on Jellyfin?
Yes. Local accounts. Not some cloud based PAMd system.
You made me feel like I was crazy, so I just downloaded Plex Media Server and installed it. Ran it, and was immediately presented with this: https://i.xno.dev/mqWFZ.png
I was then immediately routed to app.plex.tv and see this: https://i.xno.dev/cLPfw.png
There’s no option to not use a plex account. You must either use an existing account or sign up for one. You cannot use local users. Then it forces you to use the app.plex.tv so it can display content you don’t even have, or have access to…
How in any possible way is any of this easier than Jellyfin?
EDIT: Oh, don’t forget the sales pitch! https://i.xno.dev/79WBs.png
Okay, but… how is it confusing from the front end if what you’re doing is going through the same steps of creating an account? You punch in a login and password in both.
Sure, Plex is doing this extra thing where it’s also bringing in centralized content along with your library and it will default to its remote access system if you log in from outside your network. But again, from the front-end that is transparent. You log in and you have your library. If anything they’re being a bit too transparent, I’ve had times where networking stuff got in the way and it took me a minute to notice that Plex was routing my library through their remote access system instead.
I can see objections to it working that way, you trade a (frankly super convenient) way to share content remotely and access content from outside your network without too much hassle for… well, going through someone else’s server and having their content sitting alongside yours. But “confusing and difficult” isn’t how I’d describe it. It seems to work like any other service, self-hosted or not, as far as the user-facing portions are concerned. I guess I just don’t see the confusing part there.
Okay, but… how is it confusing from the front end if what you’re doing is going through the same steps of creating an account? You punch in a login and password in both.
Because there’s zero difference between the app.plex.tv interface spawned from plex server, and one without. There’s zero indication that it’s actually your server and your content because it fucking displays everything by default.
It’s such an incredibly bad proprietary system…
But again, from the front-end that is transparent.
It’s not. There’s no server configuration options at all. There’s nothing to indicate it’s local content…
I can see objections to it working that way, you trade a (frankly super convenient) way to share content remotely and access content from outside your network
For 90% of the content people use Plex for, this is an illegal act. So I don’t see the advantage to providing this option let alone making it easier to commit a felony… I’ve never needed to “share” my media library with anyone and even if this was something I wanted to do, it’s a simple DNS record away from doing the same thing in Jellyfin. There’s no reason to lock people into your login system because 10% of people would “find it easier.” It’s just such a bad argument.
I am very confused here. You seem to have slipped from arguing that it was difficult and complicated to arguing that it’s bad to be able to share content remotely because it’s a felony, which seems like a pretty big leap.
For one thing, it’s not illegal and I do rip my own media. I will access it from my phone or my laptop remotely whenever I want, thank you very much.
For another, and this has been my question all along, how is it possibly more difficult and complicated to have remote access ready to go than being “a DNS record away”? Most end users don’t even know what a DNS is.
And yes, not having (obvious) server configurations up front is transparent. That’s what I’m saying. It does mix at least two sources (their unavoidable, rather intrusive free streaming TV stuff and your library), but it doesn’t demand that you set it up. The entire idea is to not have to worry about whether it’s local content. Like I said, there are edge cases where that can lead to a subpar experience (mainly when it’s downsampling your stuff to route it the long way around without telling you), but from a UX perspective I do get prioritizing serving you the content over warning you of networking issues.
I don’t know, man, I’m not saying you shouldn’t prefer Jellyfin. I wouldn’t know, I never used it long enough to have a particularly strong opinion. I just don’t get this approach where having the thing NOT surface a bunch of technical stuff up front reads as “complicated and difficult”. I just get hung up on that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recently I tried it again because of Plex restriction on more than one user.
What do you mean by this? I don’t recall seeing anything about a change like this.
I’ve been using both for ages.
For remote access to friends plex is easier and cleaner.
For offline viewing in Android plex is cleaner
I’m running tailscale with jellyfin for personal use and it’s wonderful, But I wouldn’t ask my relatives to do that and I don’t trust to surface the port. Plex has a dedicated security team and 2FA.
The Roku client for jellyfin is also a futureless husk of a client.
I have lifetime Plex so I’m in no hurry to do a full conversion. I would love to drop plex all together though
The Roku client for jellyfin is also a futureless husk of a client.
How so? What do you see as missing?
Should be able to * on a “watching” item and remove from from front page watching, you have to go all the way to it’s location in the share, find the move/episode and unset it from the sub,submenu. Should be able to see the file names and location of the items on the front page through submenus. None of the items on the front page can have their options viewed, they all just play on click.
I miss plex opensubtitles integration
Unable to unset watched/watching from any grid, it’s one item at a time.
Lack of Playlists.
No listing anywhere for filename or bitrate. Would love to see deeper info about the codec for a file hidden away on a submenu.
(which complicates:) If you have two copies of the same thing with different versions, you can’t tell which is which. (which complicates:) If you have a bad meta match on something, it’s REALLY hard to even tell what it really is. I really miss Plex: Play Version.
Usecase, I have futurama in both widebox and 4:3, they all just show up twice. In plex they all show up once with a 2 in the corner letting you know there are multiple versions. you can then context->playversion->4.3mbps
No folder view for unmatched content. When I was putting 1963 Doctor Who up, I could hardly tell what was what without having the meta 100% sorted. In Plex I could just hit folder view and navigate.
Futureless or featureless?
both, probably.
Yeah, first one, then the other.
In a side note, Google dictation is really getting bad these days :)
Jellyfin is so underrated
Jellyfin is great but, to be fair, anything is better than Plex.
Wait - what restrictions on Plex?
Multiple home users, hardware transcoding, media downloads on mobile…
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202526943-plex-free-vs-paid/
I use Plex BTW , but lurking Jellyfin for some time, just not so easy to setup or comparability for my shared users.
That don’t seem to apply to plex pass. Those limitations. I have a plex pass
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.
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:
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?
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.
