It's curious that I'm almost in the opposite boat, have been using Jellyfin without issues for around 5 years, but recently was considering trying Plex because Jellyfin is becoming too slow on certain screens (probably because I have too much stuff, but it shouldn't be this slow).

Edit: this made me want to check in Plex, so I'll leave my story for people amusement:

My experience with Plex:

• Write the docket compose
• leave out the claim because it's optional and I have no idea what it is
• launch it
• asks me to create an account
• not really comfortable creating an external account to access my local server, but okay.
• discovered I already had an account. Huh? I wonder why I don't remember ever running Plex then.
• login to that account
• shows me a bunch of stuff
• find it weird that it already scanned everything, especially because I didn't pointed it to my media
• proceed to try to watch something
• can't play due to DRM
• WAT?
• go back and discover there's a bunch of content that's not in my library
• ok, so this must be some free content
• how do I configure my local library?
• spend 15 min navigating the UI trying to find it
• open the docs, they say to click the settings icon
• that icon is nowhere to be seen
• click a similar one
• can't find anything the docs say I should
• maybe I'm not on the right site? site is :/web/yaddayaddayadda so it seems correct
• try to go to : get to the same page
• look at the docs on how to access the web app says to go to :/web
• try that, get a message about not being authorized
• WAT?
• read some more docs discover I need that claim
• spend some time trying to find that in the UI
• google it up, find the link
• go to that page, grab the claim, set it up on the server and restart the server
• I'm able to get to the web app now
• Do you want to access it from the internet? If this works it would be great, so yes!
• setup my library
• let it scan and try to watch something from it
• UX sucks, video plays in a sort of popup in landscape on my phone.
• Ah, dumb of me, I probably have my browser set to desktop mode
• No, I don't.
• Ok, so the web is maybe only expected to be used on desktop, let me install the app
• Install the app, login to my account, only have the Plex provided content
• Look around trying to find the media I scanned, find a thing saying my server is disconnected
• WAT?
• Go back to the web app via IP, try to look into settings
• "You are not connected directly to the server"
• WAT?
• everything else seems okay, I even enabled remote access there and it says it's working
• Every few minutes the page says my server is not available for a few seconds then comes back
• It's now been 1 hour and I haven't been able to watch anything.

It's now been 1 hour of trying to set this up and I give up. Jellyfin is much more easy to setup, and even if Plex was instantaneous I could have loaded my TV library hundreds of times in the 1h I just wasted trying to get this to work. Probably every other time I tried I got similar results which is why I have an account there even though I don't remember ever using Plex.

Edit2: after some nore more fiddling managed to get it working, not sure what I changed, so now:

• Open the app, see my content there
• Try to watch something
• "You're watching in indirect mode, quality might be bad"
• Ok, so it's not connecting directly to my server, anyways, let's ignore this for now, maybe it's getting confused because it's in a docker container
• "Activate Plex"
• Ah, ok, it's the "pay or not now" screen, not now
• No subtitles play
• Try different subtitles
• Still nothing
• Plus quality seems shit
• Confirmed, it's reproducing at 720x300 even though it's a 4K video
• Look at docs, figure out the direct play is about converting the video
• Select maximum quality which according to docs should use the original file
• Still get a 300p video
• Figure out maybe it's the android app that's the problem, go to the TV, install Plex and connect to it
• Video takes forever to load
• Give up again after a couple of minutes waiting for the movie to load

I tried Jellyfin two years ago and was so fed up troubleshooting the installation that I swore it off. Tried it again a few months ago and it worked flawlessly! Now I host movies, shows, music, ebooks, and audiobooks for a handful of friends and family. My jellyfin instance is probably siphoning $120/month from Netflix's subscription revenue lol

any reason to use this over real debrid + stremio?

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.

Am I the only one here using emby? I’m pretty happy with it honestly.

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.

I use Jellyfin for music mostly and it struggles with metadata. For example, if a song has two artists on it and I edit to correct it, it won't update correctly and I'll edit up with the artist "Artist A; Artist B".

I randomly tried using Jellyfin today instead of Plex, but Jellyfin kept crashing my browser and logging me out, so I wasn't in the mood to troubleshoot, so I just gave up and went back to Plex.

In the past, I've been annoyed that Jellyfin didn't seem to have an option to sort media by "Last Episode Date Added", nor did it seem to have a way to build a queue of episodes from multiple different shows. I think I was also having trouble figuring out how to add multiple sources... I have my "long term" library on a local hard drive, plus anything "new" on a seedbox.

I theoretically want to fully switch over eventually, but so far, Plex is still good enough for my use case.

Yep

Welcome to the future

I tried Jellyfin years ago, it is in my test for later todo since then, it was pretty vanilla compared to my Plex Media Server (for instance I couldn't get to work the transcoder to use quick sync to lower the CPU load if needed, meanwhile Plex worked fine with the Docker container even).

With that said, I stopped using Plex daily in order to give some use to my Real Debrid account (so Stremio and Kodi are the next logical alternatives for me) and because I only have a two bay NAS with 10 TB in total, and I like to hoard so I struggle every time I need to delete something, since I knew about Riven/Zurg/Rclone/DMM combo I have returned using Plex without worrying each day about my drives, keeping it updated and enjoying the thinkering process of this new experience, also sharing the love with a couple of friends, I see no need to try Jellyfin, even after that many years.