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.
Been using Plex for a couple years now, and the experience is mostly unchanged for me, once you disable the online media sources.
Genuinely curious, what are some enshittified dealbreaker features for you that they've introduced?
The 'Plex suggestions', the constant return of rental prices when doing a search instead of just my media library. I had to remove a bunch of menu items they automatically added without my cosent during their last major update which seems to be when it all started. The search bit is especially angering because it's lagging load times as it's searching these online sources for rentals I don't want instead of just pulling up the returns on my local media server. If there's a setting disabling it I must have missed it because when they introduced the garbage I immediately scoured the settings to try and turn it off. Those are the main two off the top of my head.
Agree with the search load times, and the TV app is a little frustrating to navigate. But I don't see that as enshittification, just lacking polish.
As for the suggestions, I know you mentioned you don't Plex anymore, but leaving this here just in case it helps: Settings --> online media sources --> disable everything. You'll have to save each setting though, it's annoying design. But once I did this I didn't see any of that crap on my app.
I might have to check out Jellyfin. Can you run both at the same time?
I don't see any reason why you couldn't with default settings. Beware of enabling any setting that stores data next to the media like nfo metadata storage, as those could maybe cause conflicts.
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 have no idea what OP is talking about here, it sounds like they're only judging the app on its animation speed.
In the plex PLAYER, I constantly have to restart my tv, glitches, audio out of sync, black screen etc, stutters randomly. Incredibly annoying when I’m trying to watch something. I haven’t had a single playback issue yet with the jellyfin player. It just works
Edit: oh and how can I forget: in the plex player, sometimes “pause” just… didn’t fucking work?! Lmao. I had to exit the player and re enter. So annoying.
I think it sounds like you want a paid product that just works out of the box. Jellyfin has some rough edges sure, but it's also a volunteer project for the most part.
I've got to disagree or clarify with some of these points. These points seem subjective and I feel the need to say something in case others are trying to compare plex/jellyfin.
Hardware acceleration works just fine? Unless there's some hardware specific issue?
The difference in apps is because there's two platforms. The web player (with CSS themeing) and the native (like on Android, which is a straight up android app, not a web page). There's some capabilities that you can only get on Android if you build an app instead of a web player. There's only like one guy building the android TV app.
Unfortunately just one guy working in his spare time on the android TV app. I've never had subtitle issues either (might be a good time to open a bug in report?)
Jellyfin "remote" is pretty rudimentary. You'd be better off just accessing it through a tunnel anyways -- and then youd have access to your own just not your server.
This isn't about want, it's a reality check. OP said jellyfin is better than Plex now, and by objective measure it is not better for most people yet. False expectations hurt Jellyfin adoption, you need to try it with the expectation of jankiness or you'll just be annoyed by the edges.
Op's criteria wasn't "is it a good product?", it was "is it better than Plex?". Stop taking valid criticism as if it were an attack. If we want software to improve we have to be honest about its shortcomings.
One thing Jellyfin is way better at is offline viewing. I have frequent internet outages at my house and I've run into issues multiple times where Plex wouldn't stream my own local media because it couldn't connect to the internet. For this, Jellyfin has always just worked.
jellyfin is quite literally seamless in this regard, the only thing that wont work is metadata scraping (which if like me you run a yt archive, can be relatively frequent, but often isn't even a huge problem) I only notice network outages when other shit breaks lmao.
Yeah, that part about Plex has always bugged me. You can disable logins for your server with allow-listed networks, but most of the non-desktop apps have to log into the Plex platform to run.
I have been looking at JellyFin as a replacement for my aging Emby install, but the over-the-air TV support is weak and mostly broken. I am a FOSS fanboy, but first and foremost TV has to work for my household, not just for me with glitches. I suppose the correct answer is to contribute to improving it, but like most folks, free time is not copious.
Hardware acceleration still kind of sucks. You can get it to work, but the Jellyfin port of ffmpeg doesn’t work anywhere near as well as Plex’s.
pretty much just works for me on intel QSV. as long as you have drivers and hardware support it seems perfectly fine. Maybe plex has a cleaner implementation? Not sure, never used it.
Public network support is finicky. This is hard to quantify, but I’ve been on several remote networks where my Jellyfin connection dropped in and out and Plex did not. I suspect this is due to the Plex Relay service making up for bad routes between my house and the network.
depending on your network configuration, and routing of the network, this is most likely to be plex relays, this wouldn't be a jellyfin issue, it would be a plex feature. You could easily fix this with a relay VPN server or something like that. (you probably shouldn't publicly expose services these days anyway.)
The performance of hardware acceleration in Jellyfin is markedly worse in my experience. My A380 can handle 2-3x more streams in Plex than it can in Jellyfin. My theory is that it's the jellyfin ffmpeg port slowing things down, but I admittedly don't have much evidence to back that up beyond the fact that Plex's transcoder is built on ffmpeg as well.
Plex Relays are a feature, but that's sort of the point. You get that stability from Plex by default and it works on all clients. There is no realistic way you're going to get all remote client devices on a VPN for Jellyfin. Maybe one day Jellyfin can offer that as a paid option, a la Nabu Casa for Homeassistant.
Media servers tend to get shared around with friends and family and these edges will start to drive you nuts if you have more than a handful of users. I do not want to try to walk a family member through setting up a VPN on their smart TV.
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
Really from what I hear the only thing Jellyfin is missing is a Plex amp alternative!
I personally would never go the Plex route at this point.
there's finamp. and i think jellyfin is just running a sonic server? Not sure, but that's basically what it is under the hood, so.
My biggest complaint about jellyfish is any file upgraded with the arr stack is readded as a new media. 2nd is lack of smart collections and playlists.
Jellyfin is so underrated
The addons are great too. The intro/outro skip is slick and nearly flawless, background subtitle download is seamless, on and on.
I tried to switch from plex to jellyfin 2 months ago, running both at the same time in containers, but I removed jellyfin after a week
The main issue was the CPU usage, on idle Jellyfin was using about 1vcore while plex used only 0.3, no background tasks seemed to be running and after a week my 4tb of media should have been indexed
Also a feature that I use regularly with plexamp, starting a radio from a song, was not giving me good results on finamp
i only wish jellyfin would add chapter titles and hover cards (maybe thats in the new thumbs now? I haven't yet migrated because lazy lmao)
and that they fix the weird UI shenanigans from it's emby days. Some QOL shit would be nice, auto sorting so that its not manually default to the stupidest setting ever. and the other usual shit.
I'm still having issues with my client freezing on playback of high bitrate video (like heavy 4K content) but transcoding down fixes that, im not sure what causes that, something gets caught up i guess, a refresh fixes it though.
It is…..if you use a computer. Their AppleTV app still looks like some random coder’s pet project with random playback issues.
Plex has recently started applying a green filter to certain content.
The files Plex has a problem with work just fine in Jellyfin.
Green filter? Are you talking about the issue where you try to play Dolby Vision content on a non DV TV?
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.
Idk PlexAmp is the killer app that I can't stop using. Does jellyfin have something similar?
Symfonium is pretty good as a one time purchase.
I've been running plex since 2016 and jellyfin since 2019. I'm slowly moving users over to jellyfin with the plan to cut off plex at somepoint in the next couple years. Jellyfin is missing some quality of life features but nothing super crazy
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
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