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.
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 just tried it and it does have a folder view for each library.
Yeah I can’t see a file / folder view on the new client. Not that I saw one on the old android client either.
Must admit the new app is more responsive than the old version on my P7P however having “new on XYZ” service that I don’t have is a shit addition to the new client.
I don’t think it ever did?
Been using Plex 5 years now and all I had to do was click the view drop-down and select “folder view” instead of “collection view” and boom, done
Well, Jellyfin is right over there, and it’s FOSS too. Consider switching, it’s pretty great.
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.
crashing on start
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.
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.
The big thing for me is privacy and control.
Plex requires Cloud access via accounts.
This is a sitting duck for subpoenas to mass punish media libraries once copyright holders get a more friendly government that cares less about citizens rights (which is coming up here soon).
Nothing about my jelly fin instance leaks my information to anyone else’s servers.
You can’t say the same about Plex.
I agree with you, however Jellyfin is not intrinsically more secure than any other piece of software. You have to be very careful how you go about deploying it if you open up external access, as you are dependent on the Jellyfin devs to fix vulnerabilities and they aren’t actually being paid to do this. If you’re paranoid about privacy, you should be paranoid about this too; the people sending subpoenas aren’t above port-scans on ISP subscribers, they did it back in the early days of torrents.
You get control and privacy, but you also get responsibility. It’s a trade-off, and one I’d certainly make if Jellyfin were more mature. That’s just me though, I’ve been hosting my own stuff for about a decade now and I can set up an isolated environment for Jellyfin to run within. Plex is a lot more newbie-friendly and I’d still recommend it for most folks unless they for sure know what they’re doing.
As an aside, these concerns are common to all FOSS software that don’t have deep-pocketed backers. Jellyfin is likely never getting those, unfortunately. I hope they can find some other way of sustaining themselves, they’ve not got much money for the scale of development needed and it’s all volunteer-driven today.
https://opencollective.com/jellyfin
I want them to keep going, and I’ve even donated to them. I still don’t think it’s at a place to replace Plex for most people yet though.
The way I do it with webservices is that I serve them all from virtual hosts. Scan my IP on port port 80? 301 moved permanently to same host port 443. 443? Welcome to nginx! Which webservice is actually served depends on the hostname being requested. The hostnames are just part of a wildcard subdomain with a matching wildcard certificate, so you can’t derive the hosts from the blank landing page’s cert. Though one option would be to disable https when no matching virtual host is found.
I know this isn’t protection against sophisticated attackers, but nobody uses my home services except me when I’m not home so the exposure is very limited.
Anyhow, with Plex you have a central provider who, if I’m not mistaken, knows a lot about how their customers use their product. The angle of attack is different.
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
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
What about Emby tho?
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby.
But better.
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.
This is a new vs old chromecast discussion. The new chromecast that relies on apps has no jellyfin app. Old chromecast only works for android users or computer users using a chrome browser.
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.
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.
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 jumped to linux and downloaded jellyfin… shit is too complicated I havent got time to get to terms with it
Guy who runs Plex on a Ubuntu container on Proxmox.
Are you using the LSIO docker image, or did you install it manually via the official website instructions?
That’s too bad, but it sounds more like you bit off too much rather than Jellyfin being bad. Once it’s set up, it’s fairly smooth, we just drop movies in a folder on the NAS, name them somewhat appropriately, and Jellyfin frequently recognizes it, though sometimes I’ll need to help it out a bit. Setup wasn’t much more complicated than other self-hosted stuff I run, but I’m also a full-time Linux user for some 15 years and a SW dev by trade, so I guess I’m blind to issues I take for granted.
Yeah absolutely it is a me problem, but the imsinuation is that these jumps are easy. Plex works easier and windows in mpre intuitive, I hate microsoft and will push on with Linux and hopefully jellyfin but it isnt an easy move.
Windows is only intuitive because that’s what you have experience with. If you grew up on macOS or Linux, you would probably find it as confusing as you do Linux right now.
But yeah, it’s a learning curve, and self-hosting on Linux generally requires a mental shift from thinking of things as “apps” and moving to “clients” and “servers.” On Windows, the two tend to be mixed, because managing servers on Windows kinda sucks, but the opposite is true on Linux.
But yeah, do one thing at a time. Get comfy with Linux first, and then learn about self-hosting stuff (including Jellyfin).
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.
The Xbox app is a UWP app, and has basically been abandoned.
That’s unfortunate to hear. Jellyfin does definitely suffer the from the problem of not having a teams developing apps under a unified banner. You can make your own, provided you’re determined enough, but guidance from the core Jellyfin team is not to be expected.
No, No, and Yes – Consoles are notoriously difficult to work with. Not for actual programming, no - Consoles are difficult to navigate POLITICALLY. Xbox, understandably doesn’t like F/OSS software, and PS5 has tons of rules and regulations you must meet.
You could install kodi and connect with jellyfin from there
Idk, but there’s one on my LG TV.
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.
I tried Plex and it had all kinds of shit that could not be turned off
I tried to switch from Emby to JF but I am grandfathered into free premium Emby and if I switch to JF I would have to pay for live TV guide.
Maybe in a decade, when it has a feature set close to Plex. Jelly fin is just a cheap knock off. No thanks.
It’s a FOSS alternative, and that’s a pretty important feature for me. It has worked well so far for me.
Compared to Plex? It being FOSS does not make up for it being severely lacking and features in comparison. If your standards are much lower than mine, so be it. That’s your choice.
FOSS ≠ better. Just look at GIMP. It can’t even come close to what Photoshop can do, and the interface is an absolute nightmare.
It being FOSS does not make up for it being severely lacking and features in comparison
It does for me. I apparently don’t need all those extra features because Jellyfin completely meets my expectations. I don’t even know what I’d want to add.
GIMP
GIMP is an exception. It’s usable (I made my wedding invitations using it), but you’re right, it’s pretty awful to use. There are tons of related software that’s pretty high quality, such as Krita (drawing) and Blender (3D modeling). I’m not sure why GIMP has such bad UX, but there’s still plenty of good stuff in the FOSS landscape.
That said, I’m not a FOSS purist, I just tend to prefer FOSS for things that I’ll be relying on for many years to come, and self-hosted platforms absolutely counts there. If I decide to bail from Jellyfin to something else, I know there will be a way to export my data, even if I have to build it myself. I don’t know much about Plex (maybe it’s easy to export too?), but if I don’t need the features, I’ll tend to stick w/ FOSS.
Here are some of the distinguishing features I see (looking at this site):
- hardware transcoding - I think Jellyfin supports it, and it’s an extra fee for Plex; not sure how “good” it is though since I don’t need it, it works fine on my devices
- app support - works on my TV, tablets, phones, and desktop; honestly, I can’t think of anywhere else I’d need it
- TV shows + DVR - looks like Jellyfin supports this, but I don’t watch live TV, so I have no use for this; maybe I’ll look into it at some point
- access more movies/TV shows - I’ll just get a streaming subscription to Netflix or something instead
I’m probably missing a ton though, and I’m guessing Plex has an overall smoother experience. But Jellyfin has been fine so far, so I haven’t had any reason to try others. I only want it for playing my ripped DVD and Blu-ray collection, and it works well for that.
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You admit that you’re “missing a ton of stuff” after listing a couple of features
No, I was curious what I was missing, so I looked for a comparison between the two. I’m not “contradicting myself,” I’m trying to compare the merits of both so I’m fair, despite not ever using Plex.
Jellyfin was the first one I tried, and it did everything I needed it to do. So I stuck with it. I heard about Plex and Emby, but I never got around to trying them. I did try Kodi years ago, but I didn’t like it at the time (mostly used it to get Netflix working on my Raspberry Pi connected to my dumb TV on my RetroPie box).
My argument is that I didn’t feel like Jellyfin was lacking anything once I got it set up. If this UX update pisses people off, try Jellyfin, because it does largely the same thing, and it being FOSS is also a pretty neat feature.
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What features specifically?
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I have a Lifetime license to Plex, so I have used it, and oddly they do not have your exact requirements listed on the site that I can find. Can you link me, as Google is coming up blank also.
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Can’t go cheaper than free. They don’t even sell your data
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It’s basically infinity value for your money
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Hauppage TV tuner DVR capability, apps for more TVs and i could kill off Plex, personally
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.
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.
It’s a business. Hosting a service to keep connections up isn’t free or trivial. It’s cheap and easy to learn how to maintain though. Get jellyfin and a VPN and a tunnel.
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!
Those who use Plex to access personal media will find that their libraries are in a dedicated 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.
Wait, does this mean that personal media is in a single “tab” that we now have to navigate from the main page, instead of currently where the main page and personal libraries are broken out? That would be a pretty awful change.
Also, who cares about the friends and watch history? Does anyone use that?
The watchlist (assuming this is your “bookmark to watch” section, not the recent content section) is in “prime real estate” now, even though I never use it?
It sounds like - as with the last few major updates - they’re building apps for the users they want, not the users they have.
another step in their enshitification journey
I just installed it out of curiosity. The watchlist is the page that has your up next stuff in the first line, then like new movies added to your movies library, new shows in your tv library, etc. The discover section is what you’re talking about, and it’s still on its own discrete section.
Thank you for installing and reporting back.
I just tried the TestFlight preview. The main page was full of junk when I first loaded it, but I went to the library tab and set my personal libraries in the order I want and my main page is back to normal.
Thanks, that’s not too bad. I am used to spending 5-10 minutes at this point debloating/disabling junk on a new Plex install, I just hope it doesn’t keep getting much worse.
In this thread posted by Jesus himself: EleventhHour having a mental breakdown fighting everybody yo explain how Plex is better than everything else.
I don’t even have a take on this, it’s just funny.It is very funny, but also kind of sad. It’s just stupid elitism over what … the way you host your personal, probably pirated, media? I don’t understand why people take it so seriously. It’s such a 1st world problem.
Dang, removed by mod. I got here too late to see it :(
A bunch of talk about UI and art, nothing about the unified code base. Will it stop sucking on Samsung TVs?
Friendly reminder that Plex didn’t even use SSL until about a month after I wrote a POC exploiting login tokens.
Though I’m not sure why an overhaul is considered a bad thing.
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.
I feel you. I have close to 30 friends on plex, but only like 5 people use it regularly, another 4 sporadically … and most others either have never watched anything or just like seconds (probably just testing if it worked).
It’s not the easiest platform to adopt, especially if you just have an account to connect to a friends library and don’t know how to do the inital setup (hiding all the free crap). Most of my regular viewers are family members … and I setup their homescreen for them.
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.
as bad as it seems
Based on anything in particular? General consensus seems pretty positive from folks who have tried it.
Because it’s continuing the trend of focusing on live free channel streaming, finding things to watch on other streaming services, social media-esque interactions with other users, and other shit I don’t care about.
I just want something that will stream my media from my NAS to whatever I’m trying to watch it on, and do it well.
So, just because they added a few features, you’re not interested in, futures you don’t have to use or even see, you wanna switch to a far inferior alternative? And people are supposed to believe this is a reasonable argument?
If it does the basic things that I want it to do well without being surrounded by the bloat of useless profit-driven features, and it’s FOSS, then it isn’t inferior to me.
The only meaningful update (to me) Plex has had in the past few years has been forcing everyone to switch from using TVDB to their inferior metadata agent.
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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? )
It would need to physically slap you through the screen to be worse than it already is. How is anyone still using it? inertia? there’s literally no way anyone started using it after the subscription was added right?
I paid for a lifetime subscription 6 years ago… would definitely say I got my $80 worth.
Only complaint is that the streaming my own media files doesnt work great with my VPN, but I so rarely need that, so I havent spent much effort trying to figure it out. It’s on my list of things to do though.
Only basic-ass bitches prefer Plex over Kodi or JellyFin.
