this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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[–] gianni@lemmy.ca 95 points 1 month ago (4 children)

The quality and features of JellyFin are nowhere close to Plex. I have used both for years.

[–] thundermoose@lemmy.world 84 points 1 month ago (3 children)

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.

[–] thisfro@slrpnk.net 32 points 1 month ago (1 children)

How does it not work for you? I use it on my phone, laptop, ipad, kodi, ... without issues

[–] thundermoose@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] thisfro@slrpnk.net 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The switching thing is really weird, for me it is always saved across devices and I can just play from where I was on the other device. But maybe that is a newer feature that wasn't yet there when you tried it.

Overall, my impression was that Plex is a lot more polished

That I can understand, but with plex trying to be a streaming provider themselves, it makes it very confusing for not so tech-savvy people

I also have a plex lifetime pass beacuse it was really the only option like 10 years ago and it was pretty solid. I run plex and jellyfin in parallel now and some of my friends use jellyfin, others plex. I myself almost only use jellyfin at the moment and it works pretty well for me

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 22 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] thundermoose@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I agree with you, however Jellyfin is not intrinsically more secure than any other piece of software. You have to be very careful how you go about deploying it if you open up external access, as you are dependent on the Jellyfin devs to fix vulnerabilities and they aren't actually being paid to do this. If you're paranoid about privacy, you should be paranoid about this too; the people sending subpoenas aren't above port-scans on ISP subscribers, they did it back in the early days of torrents.

You get control and privacy, but you also get responsibility. It's a trade-off, and one I'd certainly make if Jellyfin were more mature. That's just me though, I've been hosting my own stuff for about a decade now and I can set up an isolated environment for Jellyfin to run within. Plex is a lot more newbie-friendly and I'd still recommend it for most folks unless they for sure know what they're doing.

As an aside, these concerns are common to all FOSS software that don't have deep-pocketed backers. Jellyfin is likely never getting those, unfortunately. I hope they can find some other way of sustaining themselves, they've not got much money for the scale of development needed and it's all volunteer-driven today.

https://opencollective.com/jellyfin

I want them to keep going, and I've even donated to them. I still don't think it's at a place to replace Plex for most people yet though.

[–] Laser@feddit.org 6 points 1 month ago

The way I do it with webservices is that I serve them all from virtual hosts. Scan my IP on port port 80? 301 moved permanently to same host port 443. 443? Welcome to nginx! Which webservice is actually served depends on the hostname being requested. The hostnames are just part of a wildcard subdomain with a matching wildcard certificate, so you can't derive the hosts from the blank landing page's cert. Though one option would be to disable https when no matching virtual host is found.

I know this isn't protection against sophisticated attackers, but nobody uses my home services except me when I'm not home so the exposure is very limited.

Anyhow, with Plex you have a central provider who, if I'm not mistaken, knows a lot about how their customers use their product. The angle of attack is different.

[–] priapus@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Can you elaborate on how it's poor in that regard? That's how I and many of my friends use it, and none of us have had any issues relating to that.

[–] thundermoose@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] priapus@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

I see. I've never had an issue with it forgetting my spot in a show, and as far as I know my friends haven't either. Haven't had connectivity issues either.

[–] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 15 points 1 month ago (4 children)

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.

[–] gianni@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 4 points 4 weeks ago

That's why I gave up on Plex. I couldn't get it to play over Chromecast reliably and it kept forgetting my media library information. I haven't had those issues with Jellyfin.

[–] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 2 points 4 weeks ago

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.

[–] Fergie434@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No Chromecast support was a dealbreaker for me.

[–] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The Android version at least has Chromecast support, not sure on other platforms.

[–] Dhar@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

For me, Plex works great on my Synology while Jellyfin is completely unusable - video payback simply crashes. Running Jellyfin on my desktop machine gets it to work, but it takes over 24 hours to scan my media library and doesn't automatically add new media when I add new files.

[–] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So the server part runs worse from your NAS? That seems odd but I have never run either from a NAS so no idea how to help. =(

[–] Dhar@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yep. I'm guessing it insists on transcoding the video but doesn't have the horsepower. Plex either has a superior transcoder or detects it doesn't need to transcode it.

[–] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 3 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I think the transcode part is decided by the client, but in the Jellyfin server admin you can control if a client can request a transcode (which may not be actually needed - and if you know what client they are running it's probably easier to decide). This could just be client setting though, because I know on Jellyfin you can change the "backend" in the client that it tries to use and can make the difference on things like x265/HVEC playing back or not.

[–] Dhar@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Hmm, I'm not sure that's the case here. I tried this with two different browsers (Firefox & Chrome) on two different computers, plus the native client on an Android phone, Android TV, and Android tablet, with various server settings - none of them worked.

[–] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, sounds like the more mature Plex backend might just be better for your use case. But just because I'm curious are you running Jellyfin as an app or in docker? And is your Synology Intel based or AMD, as the latter will only do software transcoding and probably easily overwhelm a NAS CPU.

[–] Dhar@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 weeks ago

Running as a socket container - I don't think there's a native Synology package for Jellyfin. This is an Intel Synology.

[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 1 points 4 weeks ago

For me, the DVR functionality is basically non-existent. Having to pay a third-party for channel programming is just lol. The UI too, it is one that a programmer thinks is peak, but any outside user sees era Windows 2000.

Those were the two killers; I know there was more but without /complete/ DVR functionality ootb, it's doa for me.

[–] timestatic@feddit.org 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Jellyfin is a fork of Emby.

But better.

[–] verdigris@lemmy.ml -5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Quality is fine, sounds like user error. Features sure, but that's to be expected with a paid app.

[–] gianni@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Show me an AppleTV JellyFin client that “just works”. Something my mom & dad could use to watch a movie. Something that can do normal media player things like seeking or subtitles.

There is a huge disparity in the quality, support, and features of the various clients.

[–] DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I set my parents up with infuse and it works fine with no issues. To be fair apple doesn't seem to be very supportive of foss development on their devices

[–] gianni@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago

I’ll have to check out Infuse, thanks for the recommendation.

[–] verdigris@lemmy.ml -4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't use Apple products so I can't speak to the AppleTV support.

But your criticisms seem to be of clients for Jellyfin rather than Jellyfin itself.

[–] gianni@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

They are effectively one and the same. You cannot use JellyFin without a client.

[–] verdigris@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

Right, but the clients I use don't have these issues. Maybe there's an issue with the AppleTV client, that's fair criticism, but saying that Jellyfin has inferior quality is not accurate.