Well, Jellyfin is right over there, and it's FOSS too. Consider switching, it's pretty great.
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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The quality and features of JellyFin are nowhere close to Plex. I have used both for years.
I'm in the same boat as you. I'd love to switch but the user experience of Jellyfin is still pretty bad outside the most basic cases. If you have a media center PC, it's fine, but if you want to be able to switch between several devices the way you can with Netflix, it's quite poor.
Plex is slowly trending down and Jellyfin is slowly trending up. I hope Jellyfin outpaces Plex before the enshittification is complete, but it's a steep hill to climb.
How does it not work for you? I use it on my phone, laptop, ipad, kodi, ... without issues
Switching between wasn't seamless, it kept forgetting where I left off on the last device, which was pretty annoying. Also, mobile/remote connectivity was spotty for me. Never got to the bottom of that, but my best guess is Plex's relay system makes up for a lot of random network issues. My best work-around was to add my phone to tailscale, but obviously that's not a great solution and won't work for a lot of devices.
Overall, my impression was that Plex is a lot more polished. I also bought a lifetime membership years ago, so I have no incentive to switch to something that isn't better. Plex isn't perfect, but it was still better than Jellyfin as of a few months ago. I honestly hope that changes soon, I have zero faith in Plex as a company.
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The big thing for me is privacy and control.
Plex requires Cloud access via accounts.
This is a sitting duck for subpoenas to mass punish media libraries once copyright holders get a more friendly government that cares less about citizens rights (which is coming up here soon).
Nothing about my jelly fin instance leaks my information to anyone else's servers.
You can't say the same about Plex.
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Not asking this to be combative, but as Jellyfin convert I'm curious what quality/features you are missing? Also what platform are you using mainly?
I watch mostly using the Android app or Nvidia Shield, and the client does everything Plex did (in terms of just media watching - no DVR or other features ) without all the bloat the current Plex client brings.
There is a huge disparity in the quality, UX, and features of the clients. Many clients are missing basic features like scrubbing, subtitles, saving position, etc… Many platform-specific clients are people’s pet projects and quickly lose support or are half baked.
Furthermore my wife and kids are not technical the way I am—when things don’t work properly they can’t debug & diagnose, they simply can’t use it. And I personally don’t want to spend my time diagnosing why I can’t fast-forward a TV show and so on.
Interesting, again at least in the android/web/Linux client ecosystem I've not experienced any of those issues, and Jellyfin has caused me less family tech support issues than Plex or Emby. I guess it all depends on the platform, and how much outside of just media consumption you're wanting your server to do.
Thanks for the follow up.
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I use JF. It's ok but still rough around the edges and if we count as JF the apps, I have to admit that the Android TV app is pretty bad, it's chokefull of very basic bugs, like crashing on start, and missing very basic features like delaying subtitles and the navigation is pretty bad, especially for TV show, navigating between series, episodes and home is a hot mess.
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Is there a jellyfin app on the Xbox? The ps5? Roku TV app store?
I think no so it's hard to switch if you have family using many different devices to watch plex.
Roku TV app store
Yes, and it works pretty well.
But not so much with the consoles, though there is a UWP xbox app, but it's uh, not very good.
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I used plex for years and years with my lifetime license, but a few years ago I felt Plex was way too bloated and swapped to Jellyfin. I don't think about Plex now unless an article mentions it. There's no feature of functionality I notice that's missing, and I have a low tolerance for dealing with troubleshooting when I want to relax.
Right now, Jellyfin is still too buggy and feature-poor for my tastes. I can't imagine trying to convince my friends and family to use it instaed of Plex. Jellyfin shows a lot of promise though. Hopefully it won't be too long before I'm comfotable making the switch. I suppose Plex might force my hand before that.
What is feature poor about it?
Not OP but there were 3 things that made me switch back after about 2 weeks (around 5 months ago):
- Lack of intro and credit skipping (I think they're working towards it tho?). There was an add-on but it just wasn't a comparable experience
- Poor options to customize subtitle display (wasn't even looking for much, just a black outline and maybe bolder font). I forget the detail about what was missing at this point, just remember being annoyed with it.
- The android app on TV just felt like they never considered it may be used with a remote (some buttons and menus in annoying to reach places, like the alphabet for quickly jumping in a library). Also felt like there were 3-4 differently bad screens for browsing the library rather than 1 good one.
It's very impressive how good they made jellyfin with volunteer effort, it's just very tough to compete with paid staff (in terms of how much time can they put into each feature and part). I do hope it gets there, cuz plex has been circling the drain for a while for me now.
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I abandoned jellyfin shortly into my self hosting setup. Plex just worked, with Jellyfin I spent an hour trying to figure out how to get it to serve an acceptable to Firefox codec and never succeeded. I'm sure with more effort I could have figured out what the magic combination was, but it wasn't obvious and I had too many other things to set up.
This was my exact experience as well.
I'll keep an eye on it for sure and will most likely try to set it up again in another year or so. But right now, I have no time to fiddle to make things work.
How long ago was that and do you remember the codec?
About a year ago, and I don't recall the specifics. I remember combing through trancode logs and not being able to figure out a path forward. I'm sure I could have solved it given enough time, but failing to play on Firefox or provide a clear solution was enough to convince me that the Wife Approval Factor was going to be too low.
Very understandable.
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There are some punctuation errors in your title. It should read:
Plex is "overhauling" its apps with a redesign and under-the-hood "upgrades"
Those who use Plex to access personal media will find that their libraries are in a ~~dedicated~~ [hidden] tab, while the Watchlist will take up prime real estate in the top navigation section. Plex says it also streamlined the user menu for quick access to things like your profile, friends and watch history.
So they're hiding the entire point of Plex deep in the menu and promoting things that make them money. Enshittification.
Precisely. I don't want or use any of those features. I've disabled all the streaming service and friend stuff, I don't ever use the watchlist, and I use Tautulli for watch history. I don't even really care about watch history either. I mostly set up Tautulli because I like self-hosting stuff.
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they should call this new update jellyfin
Lmao, JF is not better than Plex.
Hard disagree.Plex inserts itself I to everything, and dear god is it slow by comparison.
Well, it's free, and it's private. Everything else about it is serviceable
Good. Plex on Android is hot garbage
Did a quick check of this in the iOS beta and there is no indication of additional enshitification as everyone fears.
The first tab is the home tab and the first few rows are from my library. I don't see any option to hide the random noise that comes after it.
The second tab is the library itself which has the normal rows of various groups, continue watching, recently released, etc.
There is also a tab for live tv, on demand and discover.
I'll probably only use discover because I use the watch list as one of many ways to feed my wanted lists.
Oh no....
There are so many little fixes and changes they have done over the years. I expect so many edge cases that they kindly took care of not being taken care of anymore.
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Those who use Plex to access personal media will find that their libraries are in a dedicated tab, while the Watchlist will take up prime real estate in the top navigation section. Plex says it also streamlined the user menu for quick access to things like your profile, friends and watch history.
Wait, does this mean that personal media is in a single "tab" that we now have to navigate from the main page, instead of currently where the main page and personal libraries are broken out? That would be a pretty awful change.
Also, who cares about the friends and watch history? Does anyone use that?
The watchlist (assuming this is your "bookmark to watch" section, not the recent content section) is in "prime real estate" now, even though I never use it?
It sounds like - as with the last few major updates - they're building apps for the users they want, not the users they have.
another step in their enshitification journey
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I installed the beta. It’s not that bad. My server was the first thing I saw when I opened it. So it wasn’t pushing the other stuff.
It’s missing a bunch of little things tho, like checking the file properties for an episode or movie.
This overhaul might live up to their pitch. I hope it does.
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finally is all I can say
I've liked the sound of Plex forever but after it taking years for the wife to finally be comfortable finding her way around Kodi I couldn't really try it.
Just last week I fancied a tinker & I'd heard Plex has potentially begun to enshittify so I ended up putting Jellyfin on our htpc just to test it. As well as all the usual groups, it was simple to create additional collections for stuff only the wife wants to see rather than things we'll watch together. Within a day or so she's already flying round it so we've pretty much moved to Jellyfin. It doesnt seem to like IR remote control like Kodi does which is a shame & I'm struggling a little with the live TV aspect which was also very straightforward on Kodi but I havent looked too closely into it yet.
Overall very impressed with Jellyfin.
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Anyone that has tried the new version, does plex still make it really difficult to view your library by folder/file rather than by meta data?
I use jellyfin because I can get a folder view.
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A bunch of talk about UI and art, nothing about the unified code base. Will it stop sucking on Samsung TVs?
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