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.
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
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.
No Chromecast support was a dealbreaker for me.
The Android version at least has Chromecast support, not sure on other platforms.
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.
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.
Roku TV app store
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.
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.
I tried Plex and it had all kinds of shit that could not be turned off
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.
Right now, Jellyfin is still too buggy and feature-poor for my tastes. I can't imagine trying to convince my friends and family to use it instaed of Plex. Jellyfin shows a lot of promise though. Hopefully it won't be too long before I'm comfotable making the switch. I suppose Plex might force my hand before that.
I abandoned jellyfin shortly into my self hosting setup. Plex just worked, with Jellyfin I spent an hour trying to figure out how to get it to serve an acceptable to Firefox codec and never succeeded. I'm sure with more effort I could have figured out what the magic combination was, but it wasn't obvious and I had too many other things to set up.
There are some punctuation errors in your title. It should read:
Plex is "overhauling" its apps with a redesign and under-the-hood "upgrades"
Those who use Plex to access personal media will find that their libraries are in a ~~dedicated~~ [hidden] 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.
So they're hiding the entire point of Plex deep in the menu and promoting things that make them money. Enshittification.
Precisely. I don't want or use any of those features. I've disabled all the streaming service and friend stuff, I don't ever use the watchlist, and I use Tautulli for watch history. I don't even really care about watch history either. I mostly set up Tautulli because I like self-hosting stuff.
Oh no....
There are so many little fixes and changes they have done over the years. I expect so many edge cases that they kindly took care of not being taken care of anymore.
My exact reaction when I read that headline!
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.
Did a quick check of this in the iOS beta and there is no indication of additional enshitification as everyone fears.
The first tab is the home tab and the first few rows are from my library. I don't see any option to hide the random noise that comes after it.
The second tab is the library itself which has the normal rows of various groups, continue watching, recently released, etc.
There is also a tab for live tv, on demand and discover.
I'll probably only use discover because I use the watch list as one of many ways to feed my wanted lists.
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.
yeah, same. i hope it works out! doesn’t seem like it’s going to affect my library & might be easier for newer users. idk why everyone is so up in arms about it.
Only basic-ass bitches prefer Plex over Kodi or JellyFin.
A bunch of talk about UI and art, nothing about the unified code base. Will it stop sucking on Samsung TVs?
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 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.
If this turns out as bad as it seems then I'll probably finally be leaving my lifetime Plex pass behind for jellyfin once it rolls out to the Android TV app.
Good. Plex on Android is hot garbage
Link to the Plex blog announcement.
And a link to the Plex forum post.
What about TV and big-screen devices?
The initial preview release is focused on the mobile experience for users. We plan to share a similarly updated TV experience soon. Stay tuned!
If it's shit I'll jump to Jellyfin
It's 2024 friend. There are no such things as good upgrades. Enshitification dominates every damn time.
Looks like I'll have to give jellyfin a go. I've been pleased with plex and haven't yet had a good reason to transition (what can jellyfin do better than plex? )
None of the people I've added as friends ever use Plex. Feels stupid to have that in the UX, and I'm not even sharing what I'm watching with them.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
