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.
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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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.
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.
I've just tried it and it does have a folder view for each library.
I don't think it ever did?
Been using Plex 5 years now and all I had to do was click the view drop-down and select "folder view" instead of "collection view" and boom, done
Yeah I can't see a file / folder view on the new client. Not that I saw one on the old android client either.
Must admit the new app is more responsive than the old version on my P7P however having "new on XYZ" service that I don't have is a shit addition to the new client.
Well, Jellyfin is right over there, and it's FOSS too. Consider switching, it's pretty great.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How does it not work for you? I use it on my phone, laptop, ipad, kodi, ... without issues
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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.
crashing on start
My main issue is that my TV occasionally decides to kill the network, which causes Jellyfin to crash on startup, clearing the server. It's annoying, but I think the bigger problem is the TV, not Jellyfin.
I think the navigation is fine. I like the scroll by letter thing for movies on the right, and I don't have so many TV shows that it's an issue (maybe like 5-10 series? We don't watch a ton of serials), and my kids seem to navigate it just fine. I did spend some time naming everything properly, so maybe that's the difference? We rarely navigate though. My kids watch one show start to finish (however much time we give them), we generally watch one movie as a family and are done, and my SO uses it for exercise videos.
I've reported my fair share of bugs but the main issue with the android app is that the code is amateurish and poorly tested. Lots of the crash bugs are just devs not checking for non existent values and relying on perfect network conditions.
But yeah, It gets the job done, it's just not a great app.
Hmm, I haven't used it much. Maybe I'll take some time this holiday season to go bug squashing. I did a little of that with the Jerboa app here some time back, so maybe I'll lend a hand here as well.
That said, I've only used it to show my collection to friends or test a new network tweak.
I tried Plex and it had all kinds of shit that could not be turned off
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.
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I jumped to linux and downloaded jellyfin... shit is too complicated I havent got time to get to terms with it
Guy who runs Plex on a Ubuntu container on Proxmox.
Yeah see I barely understand that
Are you using the LSIO docker image, or did you install it manually via the official website instructions?
Ahh think I did the website
That's too bad, but it sounds more like you bit off too much rather than Jellyfin being bad. Once it's set up, it's fairly smooth, we just drop movies in a folder on the NAS, name them somewhat appropriately, and Jellyfin frequently recognizes it, though sometimes I'll need to help it out a bit. Setup wasn't much more complicated than other self-hosted stuff I run, but I'm also a full-time Linux user for some 15 years and a SW dev by trade, so I guess I'm blind to issues I take for granted.
Yeah absolutely it is a me problem, but the imsinuation is that these jumps are easy. Plex works easier and windows in mpre intuitive, I hate microsoft and will push on with Linux and hopefully jellyfin but it isnt an easy move.
Windows is only intuitive because that's what you have experience with. If you grew up on macOS or Linux, you would probably find it as confusing as you do Linux right now.
But yeah, it's a learning curve, and self-hosting on Linux generally requires a mental shift from thinking of things as "apps" and moving to "clients" and "servers." On Windows, the two tend to be mixed, because managing servers on Windows kinda sucks, but the opposite is true on Linux.
But yeah, do one thing at a time. Get comfy with Linux first, and then learn about self-hosting stuff (including Jellyfin).
I dont know what to do with linux to get comfortable. Outside of doing something like jellyfin, which is basic to most people, I would just be browsing.
Tbh I cant even get my ps5 controller to work properly to play games.
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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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I just want to use my local library in peace
Fuck you, Subscribe.
I grabbed Plex lifetime for peanuts a few years ago and pretty happy with it. They do Cyber Monday discounts as far as I remember.
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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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