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.
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.
Although I have my issues with plex, jellyfin has its own problems:
- STILL can’t clear out the TS transcoded files automatically. So if you watch a bunch of TV episodes on a weekend, your jellyfin container will run out of space and break.
- STILL can’t handle subtitles properly. I swear, this must be jellyfin’s Waterloo.
- jellyfin cannot demux 5.1 and present stereo sound on certain streams. I think this is a tooling issue. But it’s low level enough that I can handle it manually with mkvtoolnix myself on the few cases it happens.
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.
Not got to try it out properly yet. Waiting on new AMD GPUs, hoping for a low-end encoder or I ma get access to a RX 480.
What does Jellyfin use .NET for?
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 had the opposite. Jellyfin just works. Plex kept losing my movie folders, refused to play videos, wouldn’t screen cast, had problems with audio tracks, there always seemed to be a disconnect between app and server, they refused to connect despite both being the correct versions. It worked great initially, but got steadily more and more problematic over time. I gave up, even though I’d paid for it, and made a jellyfin server and have had zero trouble since.
Don’t know why two programs should have such radically different experiences, they should just do what they’re supposed to.
I never used Plex. Up until my kids were born I used to just watch my videos on my desktop, but now I find myself watching on my phone and TV more often. My Jellyfin server has been super stable for the last 6 months or so running on a super low powered machine and external hard drive. The only issues I have is with movies with Dolby digital, they tend to get out of sync when scrubbing the timeline. I am assuming that is due to the lower power of the machine. But, I have a 400watt desktop with a 7th gen i7 and a pascal Quadro P1000 that I am planning on migrating to. Then adding a 20tb internal drive for storage. Hopefully that will resolve the small issues I have seen with it.
I feel like 20 years ago someone made a similar realization with Linux vs windows
Let’s not rewrite history, 20 years ago desktop Linux was an absolute shit show.
Is just not as good*
What problems are you having with it?
Maybe when the merge transcoded downloads on the official clients. rn depending on streamyfin
I used Plex a while ago and didn’t like how I had to look for my folders against the stuff they offered. And the upside of being able to get my stuff from a server install on another network had me wondering if they were looking at the movies I had to pirate. Once I installed jellyfin, I didn’t have to worry. My only issue is if I want to use it on vacation, I have to do some vps hack-jiggery.
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.
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
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.
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.
I mean, it naturally has to be something that they eventually find a way to charge you something for. If it’s a for-profit business, and if they only sold lifetime subscriptions, they would eventually go out of business.
Then they shouldn’t be called lifetime subscriptions. This seems like a really smarmy justification of a shitty business practice.
That makes zero sense.
Jellyfin is awesome.
Hopefully it doesn’t require Docker?
What’s wrong with docker?
I guess nothing for those that like it — I’m old school and prefer to install apps on bare metal.
One thing jellyfin doesnt do well its anime content. But fortunately there’s Shoko Server, a metadata engine you can selfhost. Its awesome!
It works pretty well for me but I separate anime and TV/movies, and make sure the anime library is only scraping data from anime-centric databases. But I’m also not watching too much new or obscure stuff.
Yeah also with shoko you have to create a library only for animes (only one for both series and films tho). Idk, last time I checked jellyfin sucked. Maybe now its better. Another thing that shoko does is automatically track your progress on anidb, so thats cool :)
In my experience, jellyfin seems to think everything is anime for some reason.
I’ve had to go in to every single TV series and manually enter Metadata.
Not a huge deal I only have a few series’ but man it’s weird.
You can also change the directories names, appending [MVDB ID], so that for the future if you ever happen to have to reinstall jellyfin, it’ll automatically repopulate them how they were :)
I need some explanation in the “Anime” part, I don’t get it ?
Well, jellyfin often doesn’t find the right metadata for anime episodes ecc, so theres this thing called Shoko Server that calculates a checksum of your files, compares it with the database over at anidb, and creates a virtual filesystem for jellyfin to make things easier! It’s pretty neat. Do you have additional questions?