Why the fuck are you not using Jellyfin?
Seriously, the setup is really easy and it just fucking works.
Because it fucks up subtitles on their Nvidia Shield and firestick apps, and has issues with transcoding too. If you’re purely using the desktop app, or browser then it’s better. But Plex just works in every aspect. Subtitles, transcoding, sharing libraries. Have had no issues or weird bugs. Anytime I try JF I have to dive deep into resolving bugs, some of which are unsolvable by me.
I’ve been using Jellyfin on both the Fire Stick and Sheild for over 2 years and haven’t encountered any issues with transcoding, subtitles, or anything else. You just launch the app and everything just works. And I’ve got a couple of very non technical remote users who have been using it flawlessly.
It failed the spouse test when I last tried last year
I wonder how? Plex is actually worse to navigate and filled with ads and shit.
The issue I had: Jellyfin experience is a better on Firestick and Chromecast than it is on Roku, but the difference has been shrinking fast due to contributions from someone named 1hitsong on GitHub. That person has absolutely hammered patches out over the past few months.
Genuine question - what aspect of it didn’t work for them?
Does it work out the box with Chromecast yet? I gave it a go a while ago and it seemed incredibly convoluted, where as Plex just works.
Setup is easy, but sometimes an episode I got plays with no subtitles even though they are there on the video when I watch it on my PC, already tried the subtitle extractor extension but it didn’t seem to work.
Set up ease is highly variable. I spent hours of videos and guides and fiddling and couldn’t get it running on anything except the desktop it was installed on.
I started using NixOS and it has been ridiculously easy.
In your /etc/nixos/configuration.nix:
services.jellyfin.enable = true;If you need more options, just search.
It’s now no longer possible to manually refresh libraries from the app. Amazing. Less functionality.
I was in a previous update wave, and it made me switch to Jellyfin too. I cast from my phone to my TV, and they did something that made subtitles basically impossible to load via Chromecast. Even trying to automatically burn in subtitles didn’t work for this mode.
Also, while a “minor” nitpick, Chromecast used to show random movie/TV show posters when you connected and also show the media details when you selected something, now it just shows a big PLEX logo all the time unless playing something.
Man it’s a real shame that Kevin Spacey being Kevin Spacey ruined that great show for me
He’s a great actor and he’s a piece of shit person.
Plex amp is still better than finamp for now. But it’s catching up that’s for sure.
Like many others, I switched to Jellyfin years ago. It is way, way better for me. It does what it says on the tin, sometimes more, but not less.
You mean you don’t like recommendations by default of the media you downloaded because you know exactly what you want to watch?
I really never understood that.
My assumption is that it’s a bridge to some sort of legitimacy like a movie rental deal or something. Like inserting ads into your self hosted media.
That’s the thing - we just can’t know. Sometimes a feature is just a feature, but with commercial software there’s always more risk it’s going to change under you for the wrong reasons when they find some way to monetise it.
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This is why I have Plex, emby, and jellyfin running in tandem. Plex still makes my life easier than the other two in a lot of ways, but it’s been slipping for years. Once I’ve finally had enough, jellyfin all the way.
I’m running jellyfin, can’t recommend it enough. It’s been catching up quite steadily to Plex and I still control everything. Can’t complain about that.
Welcome to Jellyfin friend
I recently tested Jellyfin again and still miss a lot of features I like with Plex. I am a former Emby user and I don’t see why Jellyfin got so popular. I really want it to succeed, though
Jellyfin is 100% free and open-source, it may miss some features but nothing behind a paywall. We made the choice of open-source over features (I can understand people going with plex, but I’m happy with jf)
All good and if you are one of the contributors, you earn all the respect. By now, Emby will have a hard time to keep up with the development speed of Jellyfin. I just miss a few very important QoL features. I truly believe it is only a matter of time until they are added.
Like?
A Netflix-like login screen, where you can see all the users and they are just protected by a simple PIN.
You have a login screen with all users showing with their profile picture. For a while now. You can even make it look Netflix-like with Skin Manager plugin. And there’s Quick Connect but it’s for people already connected on another device.
But tbf it’s not on every login.
So it’s not really multi-user friendly.Right. I understand now, I’ve not used Netflix in 7 years. Yeah you have the user login screen before entering the password. I guess there’s a workaround by autodeleting cookies but you’d have to re-enter the password (and it’s not doable easily by grandma)
Jellyfin simply doesn’t work as well as Plex unfortunately.
In what way?
The apps don’t work well at all. If you’re just desktop based, its fine. But Nvidia Shield app, firestick app, mobile app, all have issues with hardware transcoding, and also somehow doesn’t handle subtitles properly. I have had both Plex and Jfin set up side by side multiple times, trying to test if I can make the swap. But JF just has too many bugs on their apps, which is what I use primarily, as do my users.
Sharing and remote streaming, plain and simple. I have no problem setting up accounts for friends, but choosing your server is a pain for some. But the bigger problem is that the first thing anyone will say is: Don’t expose Jellyfin to the Internet. That’s a bit of a problem.
And they’ll then say, “Oh it’s not so bad just set up wireguard and…” This is the ramblings of a lunatic. I’ve been working with tech a long time. Tech is my job. It is my hobby. I do all of it from repairing my own hardware to administering servers to running my own home lab to doing open source development. Wireguard is not friendly. It is not something I’m going to set up at every friend and family member’s house so I can share my library.
I’ve got a more secure but imperfect setup in sticking Jellyfin on the Internet behind a proxy that requires login. But this is not something most people are going to want to deal with. They want to stand up their server and then share it with people.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Very Give a Mouse a Cookie vibes when talking to someone explaining how Jellyfin is a drop in replacement for Plex when they’re on step 6 of setting up remote access
Realistically what could the jellyfin devs do to make this easier?
One thing is prioritizing security. There’s a number of known flaws, of varying severity, which is why most people would recommend not exposing Jellyfin to the Internet.
Perhaps they could set up a second project, a Jellyfin meta-library, whose whole goal is to be exposed to the Internet. You stand that up, give it access to other Jellyfin servers, and it handles the work similar to STUN of connecting you to media on those servers. This would make it so people could share easier.
Interesting. It would still be complex I guess but mean that it’s less risky to expose.
I’m still a bit out of my depth on networking I just use jellyfin locally. Ive set up websites and stuff but never had to play with reverse proxies.
I would have done this, but set up ‘meshnet’ to make the remote computers look like they’re all on the same network, but nordvpn just pulled the plug on meshnet and are decommissioning it in December. Goodbye
How so? I have way less issues with jellyfin than I did with Plex. I think with jellyfin you just need to RTFM and find some plugins to expand the functionality if you need it
I spent hours trying to set up jellyfin to watch somewhere else in my home and despite doing all the guides I just couldn’t get it to work. Plex is just so much easier. It has hiccups and the new update is horrible (still holding out on updating) but it still works 9/10 times for me
Literally just the basics of choosing audio/subtitles/quality settings
I’m so glad that I changed to Jellyfin. So much better.
I have a server but it’s still a bit rough around the edges
Lol that’s pretty much how it went for me. One day it pissed me off for the last time. Switched to Jellyfin and never looked back. Should have done it so much sooner.
I bailed on Plex a while ago, went to Emby, now Jellyfin.
I forgot what happened to Emby, but I do recall some enshittification, and bounced. Jellyfin seems pretty solid.
Jellyfin forked from Emby when it went partially paywall.
Seriously, why are we still even mentioning Plex at this point?
Because it’s easier, in a lot of people’s experience better, and has more users. Why wouldn’t people mention it?
I have Jellyfin in parallel now and I had to face the family during summer with questions like “why I cant do this with the app anymore “ “ why did you change it” sigh 😔 so I started to put energy on jelly because that was unacceptable way to rollout a botched change.
The thing about the redesign that irks me the most is that browsing your own personal library is unnecessarily convoluted the way it’s now organized. It’s a big step backwards in terms of navigation.
this is because your own personal library does not make them money.
Oh dude this pisses me off SO MUCH!!! MY DAMN content should be front and center, not your stupid ads.
And now we are on jellyfin and scrapped plex. Fuck them.
I switched off like 2 years ago because of how many clicks it took to get to my things.
Cant imagine how bad it is now.
Need context …what’s happening here?
Plex did an update that took the perfectly good UI and fucked it hard, removed features, and generally is shit
What did they remove??
Ig they’re rolling it out in waves, they decided to overhaul their app UI…for the worse IMO
Do you have any links? Plex Blog has nothing about this and all my stuff looks the same as it has for months now. (Although to be fair I use the Plex Preview app on Roku, so maybe I’ve just had what you’re all seeing now?)
My wife likes the new UI, personally I’m indifferent
What did I miss?
They like completely overhauled the UI lol
So?
It’s very bad
Please help me understand why. Why is it very bad?
Much less intuitive organization, more focus on Plex provided content rather than self hosted, features were removed, pretty much if you are thinking of a possible downgrade then they downgraded
That overhauled UI is buggy as shit, slow to do anything and is objectively worse as features that were already present were removed.
Feature removal might e been excused if the UI was simplified and fast and responsive. But slow and buggy UI to replace relatively well functioning UI angered almost all users. I’m had to force install an old version of plex client exactly to avoid the non-sense.
seconded?
Probably like 2–3 years ago I switched from Plex to Emby because the Plex app on my TV was becoming bloated and slow.
Even back then my TV was hitting 5 years old and still working great. Why the hell should I be forced to scrap a perfectly good television just because some corpo wants to ship overly bloated apps with too many animations?
Crap, I still haven’t logged ba k in since they asked me to log out because of the security compromise. I’m gonna have to lose a day and figure out this whole jellyfin thing I guess.
Credit where due, how they handled the breach was appropriate.
For what it’s worth jellyfin is really not that hard to set up
I spent hours and couldn’t get it to show up on any device except the desktop it was installed on so I think your mileage may vary.
Fair enough.
Opening ports to the network seems to “just work” or be hours of forum diving.
What OS where you using?
+1 to that. I’m not very tech savvy and I could figure it out with a couple YouTube tutorials.
I switched to Emby. Which I now access via SenPlayer. Am I doing this right?!?!
Am I doing this right
Well if you ask me, not really, I disavowed emby years ago and afaic its just Plex and Jellyfin in this space to me
Ok, you’re gonna have to unpack that one for me! Plex was always messing things up with transcoding, and I hate the Jellyfin UI and always had trouble getting it working and keeping it working.
How was Plex messing up transcoding?
It kept trying to transcode things when I just wanted direct uncompressed streaming
Likely a codec issue with your client player. The client couldn’t play the file (either video or audio) natively, so the server transcoded the file so it could.
Transcoding is a feature. I understand why you would rather it direct stream, but you’ve got to make sure the client can play the file natively.
It’s an AppleTv 4k. It shouldn’t have had a problem, and it works fine with Emby.
You’re right, it shouldn’t have a problem. I know substances can sometimes force transcoding.
Here’s a comment I wrote on it about a year ago
Tldr; they are an early example of open source enshittification before enshittification was even coined (iirc)
This is going to go back quite a ways, and much of my knowledge is old at this point so some details might be off.
~15 years ago Plex as we know it started out as an OSX fork of the 0G Xbox homebrew software XBMC (Later renamed Kodi (For those who don’t know, XBMC was XBox Media Center and would turn the 0g Xbox into the cheapest Home Theater PC you could get at the time, man those were the days lol))
Plex was only briefly open source and then was quickly closed when they incorporated a year or so after they had something functional. They never made any promises about not charging or being open source or anything, so that’s why I’m generally fine with Plex
Sometime around 2012ish Emby came along as THE open source alternative to Plex and things were good. MOST of it was supposed to stay open source as was promised. From the beginning they kept build scripts n such closed source, probably should have caught on them, but heh ya know hindsight and all that.
Then around 2014/5 they took it all closed source, relicensed it and introduced their paywall including locking away already existing features. This is what pissed me and many others off and this is when and why Jellyfin split off promising to be truly fully open source forever. (There was a ton of drama about it at the time, but it looks like Embys Q&A thing a bit back doesn’t even bother to mention it, imagine that lol)
I don’t have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself, but the way they went about it…yea. fuck em
Fair. And I agree with your stance. But I don’t feel like setting something else up again, especially if it’s a thing that has caused me problems in the past, like Jellyfin. I miss XBMC.
Kodi (formerly XBMC) is still there as far as I’ve seen. So if you liked XBMC give it a try maybe.
