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this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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Plex is more polished, jellyfin is basically functional but we use Plex in our household because we watch movies all the time. I have my own personal jellyfin server on an old computer
How much more polish you need to watch a movie? Jellyfin has everything you need. I keep seeing these discussions and for the life of me I cannot figure out what is missing from jellyfin that people use Plex after all they have been doing for years
Currently my biggest complain with Jellyfin and the reason I can't switch to it completely is the bad subtitle support. There's a bunch of clients and some subtitles work on one, but not the other and vise versa. It's annoying to jump clients depending on what you watch. Sometimes subtitles just don't want to load by default and you have turn them on for each episode. And even though I have Bazaar, sometimes I still need to download subtitles, and Plex has that built-in.
Either way, I already have lifetime subscription, there's no point in switching. At this point I'll only switch if JF becomes better or Plex becomes worse.
🤞. Hopefully it's just JF getting better, of course, but that last app redesign on Plex was really rough. I had to downgrade the app to make it work well again.
Of course I can put extra work into formatting my subtitles to make them work everywhere. Sometimes they are embedded, sometimes they are an .srt file next to the video file. And I don't want to spend time normalizing all of them. It already just works all the time on Plex, so I'll simply wait until JF fixes the support.
I don't think Jellyfins focus is currently to support irregular naming schemes. Naming media correctly with a proper scheme is the way to go.
Just so you know I wouldn't hold my breath.
I'm not talking about naming schemes. The subtitles are detected, but they either crash the client or render improperly or just don't show up despite being selected. I guess I'm really waiting for a decent multi-platform client that just works.
That's odd because the clients are just web apps I think. That should work without crashing on a stable OS. I use them on Android mobile and Android TV with extensive subtitle usage and haven't seen instability.
A funny thing I noticed is that the client distributed in F-Droid is extremely old even though it says it's updated recently.
I think the official client might be a webapp, but other clients on iOS are mostly native apps. Honestly, maybe it's better on other platforms, but since my gf and I do most of our watching on iPads we don't see the full picture.
You can also try Wholphin, it's a jellyfin client with subtitle search like Plex.
Thank you for your suggestion. That seems like a very nice JF client, but unfortunately it's Android-only, and we do most of our watching on iPads.
I will definitely try it on my Android TV though.
Yeah, I would love to use Jellyfin over Plex but the ability to reliably select subtitles on Apple TV is crucial. I can’t do this currently.
Working "watched" labels on the Apple TV client would be nice. Not having those is a deal breaker for me considering 99% of my use case is streaming media to my Apple TV over LAN.
I have Jellyfin running along side Plex in case I want to do remote streaming, but I never use it and generally just copy the files for what I want to watch to my laptop if I'm going to be watching something away from home. Or I can just VPN in to my home network.
I switched from a heavily used Plex server with about 10 users to Jellyfin with the samw usage patterns abour half a year ago. So far it's been pretty smooth sailing. A better world is possible!
I don't think it is that is more polished, it's just you pay for them to do the stuff you need to do yourself with reverse proxying, opening ports, securing stuff. This is only an issue if you are sharing outside your network of course.
This is why mesh vpn technology is so exciting, all of the nonsense that we've developed to cope with broken Network standards that develops because ipv4 didn't have enough addresses to accommodate the end-to-end principle just melts away. Tailscale works wonders for me, And the technology is only going to get better from there