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I tried to setup Plex and it was just about the most god-awful experience I've ever had. It was unnecessarily complex to accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup.
Installing Jellyfin took like.. 2 minutes and I've had no issues since.
Only thing I don't like about Jellyfin is the metadata engine, which I have disabled and just use TinyMediaManager and save everything to .nfo which is picked up by Jellyfin immediately. Works great.
Hm. I gave Jellyfin a try and the UX was a turnoff, so I ended up in Plex. The separate management of metadata does sound like a pain to me, too, but maybe there's a bit of sunk cost fallacy to that.
Either way it seems people are mostly fine with their choices and there is a viable free alternative, so... all good there.
You can change the UI design to whatever you want with a custom CSS. Can make your own or there's a plethora of themes on GitHub. I remember trying one that replicated the Netflix app, and don't hold me to it but I think I saw a Plex one as well.
Also, regarding the metadata, there are options that auto populate it for you. Idk how it does it, but my haphazard library of torrents all had accurate metadata AND it downloaded the subtitle files as well.
Not the UI, the UX. The UI may be editable, but if I have to make my own UI to be happy with what it looks like or works like, then that's bad UX.
I get that sometimes those terms are used interchangeably, but they're not the same.
Sorry, I misread. What is bad about the UX exactly? You don't need to customize anything if you don't want to; "it just works". And I dont follow you on how having the option to customize things makes it a bad user experience. You're assuming the native UI is bad for some reason.
I've used Plex a lot too back in the day but there's nothing it provides that Jellyfin doesn't do out of the box + self-hosted + for free.
Sorry, I misread. What is bad about the UX exactly? You don’t need to customize anything if you don’t want to; “it just works”. And I dont follow you on how having the option to customize things makes it a bad user experience. You’re assuming the native UI is bad for some reason.
Being given the tools to customize something by hand is not the same as being offered enough option to simply choose what you want. Having a good UX means that there was a UI designer who alread did the customzing for you and you simply have click a button to apply it.
It was unnecessarily complex to accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup.
Please elaborate how you needed to "accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup".
When I set my server up years ago all I did was log in on the web interface. Literally as simple as any other service.
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?
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.)
Plex is closed source and gradually being enshittified. You might not leave today, but you should have an exit plan.
gradually
Yeah nah. It's going pretty fast tbh.
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.
Jellyfin is still not up to snuff with where Plex was pre-enshittification, but Plex is enshittified. For everyone in between, there’s Emby, which I have been very happy with.
I'd have to agree with this, there was a time where Plex was amazing. after like the 3rd time I was forced stop it from hiding my library and them pushing services in my face I made the switch to Jellyfin. It's been long enough now that I don't recall the features I miss, and overall Jellyfin is fine, and seems to get better pretty consistently.
After having been shafted by sublime text I will never believe anything called a "lifetime subscription" is such.
A "lifetime subscription" is just a "until we decide otherwise" subscription
I don't mean to be glib or upset you, but you still have lifetime access to the versions of Sublime Text for which you paid; you just don't get free updates to the next version. AFAIK, that's been the way they've done things for years.
After having been shafted by sublime text I will never believe anything called a "lifetime subscription" is such.
Care to elaborate?
AFAIR SublimeText licenses are always only for a specific major version. And they sometimes might work for the next major version. So, I guess you’ve just installed a newer version for which your lifetime license isn’t valid anymore.
There's a really strong bias on Lemmy for OSS projects. I'm glad they get so much love here, but everything people say here about Jellyfin has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. It works and you can use it. Depending on your needs, it may even work perfectly for you. There are tons of rough edges though.
Here's a few:
Jellyfin is improving all the time, and I hope the recent EFCore update improves performance and development velocity. I'm also holding out hope it will eventually lead to externally hosted databases and active-active servers.
Disclaimer: I run Plex and Jellyfin and regularly check in on the state of things in Jellyfin. I donate to Jellyfin. I want Jellyfin to be better than Plex. I don't think any objective measure bears this out yet.
I tried Jellyfin two years ago and was so fed up troubleshooting the installation that I swore it off. Tried it again a few months ago and it worked flawlessly! Now I host movies, shows, music, ebooks, and audiobooks for a handful of friends and family. My jellyfin instance is probably siphoning $120/month from Netflix's subscription revenue lol
Jellyfin is so underrated
Jellyfin is awesome.
I've been using Kodi with Jellyfin for around 10 years now. I tried Plex now and then because everyone uses it but I could never get behind why everyone is using it. It has always been worse in every aspect for me.
It's curious that I'm almost in the opposite boat, have been using Jellyfin without issues for around 5 years, but recently was considering trying Plex because Jellyfin is becoming too slow on certain screens (probably because I have too much stuff, but it shouldn't be this slow).
Edit: this made me want to check in Plex, so I'll leave my story for people amusement:
My experience with Plex:
It's now been 1 hour of trying to set this up and I give up. Jellyfin is much more easy to setup, and even if Plex was instantaneous I could have loaded my TV library hundreds of times in the 1h I just wasted trying to get this to work. Probably every other time I tried I got similar results which is why I have an account there even though I don't remember ever using Plex.
Edit2: after some nore more fiddling managed to get it working, not sure what I changed, so now:
This is more about familiarity than difference in ease of use. I've used both, they are both super easy.
It is…..if you use a computer. Their AppleTV app still looks like some random coder’s pet project with random playback issues.
I've been using both for ages.
For remote access to friends plex is easier and cleaner.
For offline viewing in Android plex is cleaner
I'm running tailscale with jellyfin for personal use and it's wonderful, But I wouldn't ask my relatives to do that and I don't trust to surface the port. Plex has a dedicated security team and 2FA.
The Roku client for jellyfin is also a futureless husk of a client.
I have lifetime Plex so I'm in no hurry to do a full conversion. I would love to drop plex all together though
I've found the opposite to be the case unfortunately. Plex "just works" while my jellyfin server had almost constant issues with subtitles (two of my frequent users need these because of hearing problems) and would frequently crash requiring docker restarts.
I adopted jellyfin very early, used it for many (maybe 6?) years and these problems only got worse over time.
I always prefer open source (often to a fault) but I am glad I switched to Plex a few months ago. I got the lifetime pass for cheap for black Friday. I still leave jellyfin running for a few users, but everyone else has already switched over.
I randomly tried using Jellyfin today instead of Plex, but Jellyfin kept crashing my browser and logging me out, so I wasn't in the mood to troubleshoot, so I just gave up and went back to Plex.
In the past, I've been annoyed that Jellyfin didn't seem to have an option to sort media by "Last Episode Date Added", nor did it seem to have a way to build a queue of episodes from multiple different shows. I think I was also having trouble figuring out how to add multiple sources... I have my "long term" library on a local hard drive, plus anything "new" on a seedbox.
I theoretically want to fully switch over eventually, but so far, Plex is still good enough for my use case.
The applications aren't that good. That's the only thing keeping me from switching completely. Subtitles, aspect ratio, audio track selection just don't work as expected. In some cases I can only pick the aspect ratio and no subs and sometimes the other way around? Also if I have no subs for a movie, I can't search for them on the fly - good feature of plex. As it stands, jellyfin video player is not up to my standards and I can't switch yet. I use it for porn though. That works fine.
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.
Not having to pay for hardware transcoding/tonemapping is the biggest „selling“point for Jellyfin. I used to have plex before. It worked well but I didn’t want to pay 100€ for transcoding. Never tried emby for the very same reason.
Honestly ever since Plex started going the enshittification route and hocking their fucking bullshit instead of just being a home server it's been irritating the shit out of me. The only thing they aren't doing at this point is adverts live vids.
Plex is unbelievably slow to start and navigate through my huge library on my TV. Jellyfin flies.
The search is also much better on Jellyfin on my TV, because I can use the system keyboard which supports voice to text via the remote. Plex on the other hand has no debouncing, so pressing each key just makes a new search and it's slow as sh—.
I also had it outperform Plex when Plex couldn't play an audio language track where Jellyfin could.
However, it doesn't seem like Jellyfin is as good at figuring out duplicates/versions of the same media? It shows up as two identical posters of the same thing without any discernible info until you step into the media page of the thing (movie/episode).
All in all, a very good complement to, if not replacement for, Plex. 8/10. I'm proud of them!
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!
Has been for a long while. Also there are tons of unofficial apps as well.
It's not proprietary, so it could be shit on a shingle and still beat plex. I'm not installing anything proprietrary on anything I own.
Yeah! It's been great for me. No detection issues or weird bugs. The mobile and TV apps are also great!
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.
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.
I would probably be using Jellyfin if it were just me.
The handful of people in my family that use my Plex server though are all non-tech people. When I hear that random smart TV apps aren’t nearly as good, that is what gives me pause.
That, plus the fact that a lifetime Plex pass was a one-time purchase on sale several years ago. It may be a proprietary product instead of FOSS like it should be, but at least they aren’t trying switch me to $1.99/month or some BS like that. But they’re probably smart enough to know they’d really start the Plexodus!
Maybe I should run jellyfin alongside Plex to keep better tabs on it.
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.
Recently I tried it again because of Plex restriction on more than one user.
What do you mean by this? I don’t recall seeing anything about a change like this.
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 only problem I'm having with jellyfin is around subtitles, but it's getting better all the time. I bought the plex lifetime license a few years ago, but we've moved our whole house to jellyfin now.