this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025

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730

Jellyfin is not just good... but better than Plex now?! (vger.social)

submitted 1 day ago by aeharding@vger.social to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

348 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] Mikelius@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] MSids@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] paequ2@lemmy.today 11 points 1 day ago

Yeah! It's been great for me. No detection issues or weird bugs. The mobile and TV apps are also great!

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 12 points 1 day ago

Has been for a long while. Also there are tons of unofficial apps as well.

[–] keyez@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] coffeetastesbadlikecoffee@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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!

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[–] Holistic@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago

Been using jellyfin for a few years now, never had a problem vs constant problems with plex

[–] eskuero@lemmy.fromshado.ws 3 points 1 day ago

Maybe when the merge transcoded downloads on the official clients. rn depending on streamyfin

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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!

[–] pipes@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] lud@lemm.ee 3 points 1 day ago

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 https://trash-guides.info/

[–] M137@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Is just not as good*

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[–] ch00f@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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?

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[–] normonator@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] endeavor@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[–] tabular@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] notfromhere@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

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.

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