I’ve feel like I’ve used Plex forever. I also feel like every couple years I try Jellyfin to see how it’s going. Recently I tried it again because of Plex restriction on more than one user.
Well, I just tried it again and it’s substantially improved! This time it actually properly detected most of my library!
Also the Android TV app is AWESOME! No more glitches, lagging, and freezing trying to play my stuff like Plex did. It is butter smooth.
Wow! I’m impressed and I just deleted Plex. Good riddance.
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
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’ll have to check but I haven’t had an issue with the transcoded files filling up.
- Subtitles work as expected for me but all of my file names are in English, are the ones you’re having problems with file names in another language perchance?
- That last one I fixed myself by wrapping ffmpeg around a script I wrote that forces 5.1 to transcode to AC3 so it goes to my speakers properly.
deleted by creator
So other people who might be considering Jellyfin vs Plex know that your problems aren’t universal?
I’m in the same boat as the other person. Ive had Jellyfin running for years, watch something on it daily, and have never had the container break due to transcodes not being removed.
Maybe its just you and your setup?
deleted by creator
I was replying to maybe share the wrapper script I wrote, but if you’re going to be a jerk about it…
This last one is why I have to use Plex instead of jellyfin on my tv. The jellyfin roku app fuckin sucks and refuses to demux anything.
I used Plex a while ago and didn’t like how I had to look for my folders against the stuff they offered. And the upside of being able to get my stuff from a server install on another network had me wondering if they were looking at the movies I had to pirate. Once I installed jellyfin, I didn’t have to worry. My only issue is if I want to use it on vacation, I have to do some vps hack-jiggery.
I’ve been using plex for several years and setup jellyfin a few months ago to tinker with it. Playing videos works fine for me locally but I have some family out of state who have access and jellyfin doesn’t have a solution for that outside of me publicly sharing the URL and managing the passwords. Also a pain point for me is having multiple files of different quality for the same movie/episode, it always shows as two episodes that it will play back to back and seems to require a lot of manual work per show/movie to get it tracked as 1 piece of media with 2 files to choose from. Would love to ditch Plex eventually but for me and my family it just works without issue and they can manage their own remote login.
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.
I don’t have that restriction on Plex? I have 30+ remote users and 4 in home users not counting myself and there is no restrictions what so ever. All can strea 4k without issue. Could you explain more?
Jellyfin is still not up to snuff with where Plex was pre-enshittification, but Plex is enshittified. For everyone in between, there’s Emby, which I have been very happy with.
what are the things i will miss from plex’s pre-enshittification?
I’d have to agree with this, there was a time where Plex was amazing. after like the 3rd time I was forced stop it from hiding my library and them pushing services in my face I made the switch to Jellyfin. It’s been long enough now that I don’t recall the features I miss, and overall Jellyfin is fine, and seems to get better pretty consistently.
after like the 3rd time I was forced stop it from hiding my library and them pushing services in my face
Seeing shit like this makes me wonder what different Plex I’m using from everyone else. Pinned my local library at the top 4 years ago and now every device shows that tab first when logging in and hasn’t ever behaved differently except when the home server is down (it’ll still go to the tab but read OFFLINE)
You people do realize that you can use the Plex server without using the Plex apps right? I pretty much exclusively use Infuse to interface with my Plex server and have none of the issues I see mentioned here.
I mean you very much still have the privacy issues and online requirements. And if you’re not even using the plex web client or any of the apps, all Infuse is using plex for is the metadata, at which point you might as well just use the Jellyfin back end.
Does jellyfin do any kind of library sharing? Because that’s the killer feature that Plex has for me.
I have three friends who have Plex servers and between the four of us, I think we have all the content anyone could want.
Yeah, it does
Any recommendations about how to install all this jazz?
I’d like to build a music box controllable by the family, eventually centralising videos so anyone (or at least me) can just pick up their phone and watch an episode of star trek without the hassle of copying. Automatic subtitles would be magic.
Cheers!
If all you want is a local media server. It’s very easy.
You pretty much just have to install Plex or Jellyfin, setup a “library” in the software.
You usually set up one library for movies and one for TV shows. You then point these libraries to their respective folders on your hard drive and assuming you have some half decent organized media with proper naming it usually just works.
Plex doesn’t have automatic subtitles per say but mostly Plex players allow you to download new subtitles from the player. I don’t know about Jellyfin.
If you want to have external access it’s a bit harder if you use jellyfin as you will have to setup a reverse proxy but I’m guessing that there are a lot of guides for that online. Plex should work for external access out of the box assuming you have a public IP, and even if you don’t you can use their automatic relay services to get it to work anyway although in very low quality.
Proper naming is honestly the hardest part but that’s very dependent on how much existing media you have and how the naming is today. Luckily Plex and Jellyfin are fairly good at recognizing and finding media with subpar namin (you should still fix the naming to comply with the documentation)
If you want to have automatic torrent downloads, fully automatic subtitles and all that it’s quite some work to set it up properly and have it working without any input from you. If you want to tackle it (or are just curious), I recommend checking out https://trash-guides.info/
Many ways to install it officially nowadays (see their website) but most do it via docker. A very easy albeit unoffical way is via flatpak.
Also the Android TV app is AWESOME!
I dunno…
There’s a transcoding bug in the Android TV version of the Jellyfin client where transcoding a video with 7.1 audio breaks playback. Even with a Pull Request out there that fixes it (by matching the behavior of other Jellyfin clients), the issue got closed as “not planned”. The continued suggestion continues to be “just force everything to play in stereo”.
I don’t have unlimited bandwidth, so plenty of my stuff gets transcoded in Plex. I can’t, in good, conscience, switch my friends & family (most of who use Android TV) over to Jellyfin.
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
How well do ebooks & audiobooks work on jellyfin? I’m an emby user, and while I love it a lot, it’s not great for audiobooks & there’s functionally no ebook support… you can see ebooks in their library but not even open them.
I have audiobookshelf too which handles both, but I’m also always looking for ways to cut down on excess stuff to have to worry about or maintain
Audiobookshelf is absolutely awesome for audiobooks. Tho it’s possible, Jellyfin isn’t really very audiobook friendly imo. Just run both.
Plex has been terrible for a long time if it weren’t for Jellyfin I would’ve just not bothered with a media server for a few years until they got their shit together. That reminds I should throw some money at the Jellyfin team.
It’s not proprietary, so it could be shit on a shingle and still beat plex. I’m not installing anything proprietrary on anything I own.
Unless therer was some major update in the last 6 months I’ve missed, I’d say no … not even close.
Does anyone have any recommendations for migrating their Plex library over to Jellyfin? One day I fully expect to migrate over but when I do i want my full watch/listen history to come with me.
You might just be able to point jellyfin to your media directories and then let it scan them.
That won’t migrate watch history
This isn’t a complete solution, but trakt.tv covers a lot of ground. I started using it for getting a consistent history of watched shows between jellyfin on the road and kodi at home. It works okay enough for this, though at times it does seem that one or both of the plugins can fail to log a watched show. I would guesstimate a 90% success rate.
