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.
Tired of the reports about this post. Locking.
Does jellyfin do any kind of library sharing? Because that’s the killer feature that Plex has for me.
I have three friends who have Plex servers and between the four of us, I think we have all the content anyone could want.
Yeah, it does
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.
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:
I genuinely do not understand the issues people are having with Jellyfin subtitles. I just have Bazarr set up to automatically download and they play on every device (web, android, iOS, roku, android TV) with zero issues.
Sounds like it’s mostly with embedded subs inside the media files already. Thats where all my subs are so I’m going to test soon but haven’t played anything on jellyfin needing subs in a while
I now extract all my subs, but for the first 2 years using it I left everything embedded and it always worked normally. Even with some advanced ones like Jujutsu Kaisen and One Pace, which both use stylized ones.
Just tested and with Findroid on my phone, no subtitle options appeared at all, though it had 4 languages embedded. On my roku they showed up but as soon as I picked it it loaded until it said Error During Playback
I’ve never used Findroid, but they work on my regular Jellyfin app. I think on Roku transcoding is required, but afaik that’s on Roku not supporting the subtitle format.
I don’t use it for myself but my experience with Jellyfin is the subtitles UX kind of sucks. It got a lot better on the Android TV app recently (ty to the maintainer!), particularly with improved subtitle support, but because of ExoPlayer it still can’t play bitmapped embedded subtitles easily, only .srt subtitles.
The experience on iOS/appletv with Jellyfin/Swiftfin was so bad that I ended up recommending Infuse. Infuse is a great app, but it’s not a libre app, which kind of clashes with the rest of Jellyfin in that regard. And, once again, it needs massaging: unless you want to be popped up with a buy Infuse Pro pop-up your video and audio has to be in certain codecs.
As I said, I don’t use these things, myself. I don’t even have a TV. But every now and again, I will put a file up for some relatives, and I want it to be totally directly playable, because my server is just an old laptop. So I have to spend a lot of manual time making sure the files are juuuuust right. If there comes a day where there’s direct playback with embedded PGS or SRT subtitles on all platforms that will be the day the Jellyfin suite of software becomes 10/10 software for me.
Embedded subtitles definitely work, and I’ve used bitmap ones before, although I generally avoid them so I’m not sure if they consistently work well. Directly playback also does work with those subtitles, so if you had issues it was likely related to codec support.
Unfortunately I can’t play around with it anymore because I live a thousand miles away from everyone I support who actually uses Jellyfin. My experience with the Android TV app was embedded SRT subtitle support is now 100% good as of late last year, but embedded PGS trips things up so much that I cannot use them.
Fair enough, not saying you should bother with it, just surprised to hear it happening.
I still maintain that Emby is better than Jellyfin. I try it again maybe once a year and every time I end up back on Emby. It just runs better, works pretty flawlessly and doesn’t lose my libraries every so often. Music playback is better by far on Emby and that’s my main usecase.
Hardware decoding would be nice, but I don’t have a system I could use this on for either and I’ve not had trouble without it.
What do you mean library losses. I’ve been using jellyfin twoish years now and have never had this happen.
Same. The only issue I’ve had is it not finding my TV shows, but once I figured out how it wants them stored, no issues whatsoever.
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?
Yes. You set hardware encoding to QSV, then you’re mostly set. You can choose which formats it should work on, which for an Arc card will probably be all of them. I got an Arc A380 and its worked flawlessly with many streams at once.
Yeah, I’m really glad I found out about Jellyfin. I switched to Jellyfin because Plex doesn’t let you disable Passout Protection (automatically stopping playback after something like 3hrs) without Plex Pass. I was just about to fork over $95 for a lifetime license when I looked into Jellyfin and discovered continuous playback was the default. I switched that very day and never looked back.
That’s so weird. I’ve been using Plex for years and had never heard of “Passout Protection” until looking it up just now, nor does it ever stop playback on its own for me unless it reaches the end of the queue. I’m using the free version via web browser on my computer. Maybe it’s a setting that only affects apps? Continuous playback on Plex is one of the reasons why I’ve always preferred it over Netflix, etc.
Yeah, I don’t think it effects browsers.
Plex was always terrible, anyone that uses it is an imbecile.
Another case of user matching tag
It’s still terrible for music. There’s not even user-based star rating…
Plexamp being behind a paywall stopped me from using Plex for music. Went with Navidrome and it works great.
True, also no support for cue sheets, search is bad and no lyrics.
Lyrics work :)
It always says there is no lyrics, do I need to do something for it to work?
if there are none locally, you can use the lrclib plugin to find lyrics
Wrong tool for the job ! Use Navidrome with your music library. There’s even a new scanner rewrite in the working which will even further improve how good it is !
I used to use it. But I had so many services running it was a pain to maintain. It didn’t have a TV app aswell. And Navidrome looked kind of abandoned at the time. Maybe I should go back though. Is there a way to migrate my playlists? I think that’s the one thing holding me back.
It really depends on your metadata/ directory structure. Even though navidrome doesn’t care of your directory structure it’s better to have everything neatly separated !
You can spin a docker compose (if you’re a bit acquainted with it) and simply point to your external drive containing your media, just to give it a try and see how it performs with your media files.
Just give it a try and see how it works, however I would wait for the new scanner update before upgrading fully to navidrome which would give some new long awaited functionalities like VA list of all artist.
But I had so many services running it was a pain to maintain.
Are you talking about docker containers? You should take a look at what’s up docker to maintain and keep track of your containers. I have approximately 20 containers and It was easier to keep track this way. If you’re more in the 50/100 range… Yeah this sounds a lot ! :o
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!
I used Plex for a long time and was very tempted by their lifetime plan. I tried Jellyfin but at the time it just wasn’t a patch on Plex. I continued with Plex but always had that itch to get away from closed source. I eventually tried Jellyfin again and whilst it’s definitely not as feature rich as Plex, it does what I need from it which is a central store of media that any TV in my house can use. I’ve even given a few friends a login so they can watch content.
I do love that it’s completely self hosted. I run it behind Caddy so it has a Let’s Encrypt certificate. All run in a Docker container with the media from an NFS share from a Pi4 with an external HDD.
That said, I still have Plex running as I have one Samsung TV and there’s no official Jellyfin client for it. Yes there’s some long winded developer way to get one on but I just can’t be bothered.
As a long time plex pass user, is there anything there that would make me want to switch? Plex has just plain worked for me for years. mobile apps, everything is just great. Why should I look around?
Well you’re on Lemmy and it’s not FOSS. Not a great place to get unbiased opinions on the matter. It’s actively shitted on in the fediverse. They even bum rush the plex community here.
Plex was bought out by venture capital and has been enshittifing for years. “Free” media stream sources added riddled with ads that you have to opt out of, opt out “everyone can see what everyone is watching” features, nebulous “we need to upload hashes of your media to skip credits” privacy issues, abandoning apps for various platforms like kodi, on and on.
I have a lifetime pass, but no longer consider plex a viable platform. The issues are not baseless, but rather based on what plex has decided to do to make money.
Meanwhile, jellyfin is FOSS with no profit motive, no privacy issues, skips intros and credits with no issue, pulls subtitles down and indexes media flawlessly, and has native kodi clients with Database sync support so a show paused in one room can be resumed at the same point in another room.
Hard to beat “slick, private and free.”
I agree mostly. I just see way more ignorant takes left and right on Lemmy. Yours is actually a better way of stating things. I’m also in the actively shitted on iOS side of things as well. Between plexamp and infuse… it’s highly polished for me.
My advice is always if you’re just now starting to definitely go to jellyfin. I bought lifetime plex pass maybe 16 or so years ago. One day I’ll probably give jellyfin a try.
Plex is closed source and gradually being enshittified. You might not leave today, but you should have an exit plan.
I’ve been using Plex for over 10 years and I can’t say anything about it has changed for the worse honestly
Same. I think I had to go in once in the last few years to turn off a new setting. I didn’t recall what is was though. Probably data collection?
Maybe when Plex added the “Discover Together” feature that shares watch history with friends?
Yeah, I don’t 100% love that’s on my default but I also don’t think it’s a huge deal
That’s the one!
They changed their logo gasp
gradually
Yeah nah. It’s going pretty fast tbh.
I just made the switch for a few reasons.
For background, I was a Lifetime Plex Pass user since it launched, created the POC exploit for token theft (a couple of months before they implemented SSL), and built a clustering/sync application (a few months before they released sync, patterns much?).
I did not think Jellyfin was up to task a few years ago. It is now. All the missing features like themed visuals and audio, chapters, thumbnails on seek, all exist now.
Why I switched:
- API: I have scripts that do different things with different media and they were super easy to recreate with the API. An example would be moving
ytdlpvideos from my Youtube Watch Later folder to a deletion folder if they’ve been watched. - LDAP: I now have user control via my Samba AD.
- Privacy: I never wanted my media list stored with a third party to begin with.
- Plugins: I have a library I tag with filenames, like
==Tag--Tag==filename.ext. It took me a half day to make a Jellyfin plugin that converts these to Genres. It was a nightmare of DB hacking to do it in Plex. Not to mention there are waaaay more existing plugins that are supported. Jellyfin is where this happens now, not Plex. - Fine grain control: Transcoding settings, bandwidth settings, etc are are open and transparent.
- API: I have scripts that do different things with different media and they were super easy to recreate with the API. An example would be moving
Same boat! I paid monthly for ages, then got a lifetime pass and everyone was singing the praises of Jellyfin, at this point it works for me!
I have a lifetime Plex pass but am still annoyed at having to deal with “recommended” every time a device is setup or reset.
The recommended view is useless and there is no way to make library the default view. You have to reset every source. It makes it incredibly annoying helping my family remotely to get to family videos.
I was just thinking yesterday - when was the last time we server owners actually had a feature update? I think last one I noticed was credits skip, and that was… 3 years ago? About?
Meanwhile Jellyfin apparently has been developing full steam ahead, I noticed credit skips in my test instance yesterday.
If Plex is just working for you, stick with it. I switched to Jellyfin when I got sick of having to reset my Plex library. (Even now, thinking of the “Plex dance” makes me shudder.)
Agree 100%. Most of the former Plex users turned Jellyfin users I have come across did so better Plex was broken in some way for them. For me it was the general lack of care in creating/maintaining a good Apple TV app. Over the past few years it’s just gotten buggier and buggier with a lot of complaints on the Plex forums where devs would essentially stop by to say they weren’t working on any fixes.
Jellyfin doesn’t fix 100% of the issues, but at least there is active development on Swiftfin that showed a desire to fully support all devices.
So glad people are dipping out of plex.
