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Plex is overhauling its apps with a redesign and under-the-hood upgrades
(www.engadget.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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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.
How does it not work for you? I use it on my phone, laptop, ipad, kodi, ... without issues
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.
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.
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
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.
Left a comment further down: https://lemmy.world/comment/13599910
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No Chromecast support was a dealbreaker for me.
The Android version at least has Chromecast support, not sure on other platforms.
Ah, "standards", you got to love them. I was also thinking in terms of using Chromecasting" and not the use of the physical Chromecast device. Thanks for the follow up.
You can open the Play Store on the Chromecast 4th generation (the one with Google TV), and from that you can indeed install the Jellyfin Android TV app (as Google TV is derived from Android TV apparently). However if you try to look for a Jellyfin app from the regular “Apps” menu there is nothing. Typical Google making it super convoluted.
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.
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. =(
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.
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.
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.
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.
Running as a socket container - I don't think there's a native Synology package for Jellyfin. This is an Intel Synology.
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.
What about Emby tho?
Quality is fine, sounds like user error. Features sure, but that's to be expected with a paid app.
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.
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
I’ll have to check out Infuse, thanks for the recommendation.
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.
They are effectively one and the same. You cannot use JellyFin without a client.
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.
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.
Yes, and it works pretty well.
But not so much with the consoles, though there is a UWP xbox app, but it's uh, not very good.
Roku, yes. Xbox as well. PS5 no, but not for lack of trying. That's apparently on Sony.
Idk, but there's one on my LG TV.
You could install kodi and connect with jellyfin from there
What type of device is the Xbox or PS5 hooked up to? If a TV ("smart TV") then there is a client for both Roku and Android TV. If they are using a monitor, could they use the web client? Or could they use the web client on either console (I never had an Xbox, and only PS was PS1 so I honestly have no idea)?
I've only used the Android/Android TV/web client versions from the Jellyfin team, but all seemed solid these days. On Linux I've also used a number of 3rd party clients, and there are plenty of 3rd party clients for most non-console platforms.
The UI for the Xbox app is rudimentary and a bit janky, but the performance is undeniably better than Plex. I have Plex and Jellyfin on the same machine, serving the same content, and Plex stutters often. It is especially bad when using subtitles. Jellyfin has no such issues.
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.
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