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Comment by ironarm | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend Jellyfin. I've been running it as a front end for my media server for about 2 months. There's some slight hiccups, but it's not Plex.

The only real downside is there are not a lot of native apps available yet.

I also recommend the linuxserver docker images that are a great shortcut to getting it set up along with a suite of complementary software.

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> There's some slight hiccups, but it's not Plex.

Please elaborate -- is "it's not plex" supposed to be positive or negative?

I'm a heavy Plex user and I'd love to switch to an open source alternative. But Plex is really good, and I love the native Trakt.tv webhook integration (which means everything I watch automatically gets tracked on trakt.tv).

It uses FFMpeg vs Plexs proprietary transcoder. So, hardware/GPU transcoding can be done for free.

It also doesn't have the latest "free" stuff Plex has started adding in. Personally, I just want my movies or TV and that's it. If I want steaming or news, I'll go find it elsewhere.

PLEX’s is based on FFMpeg.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250377-transcoding-media...

Of all things to be concerned about I wouldn’t consider a media transcoder to be one of them.

I run both PLEX and Jellyfin in Docker containers on my homelab and I have found Jellyfin to "just work" better. The hardware acceleration from my Intel NUC just works for Jellyfin and was always a struggle in PLEX.

Hardware transcoding in Plex requires the paid Plex Pass or lifetime pass. I'm running Plex/Jellyfin on a 7th gen Intel CPU and until recently had a Quadro card in for hardware transcoding (Picked up a 7700 over the holidays and nixed the dGPU). The server also runs a few VMs and things as needed like PiHole.

Plex will default to a dGPU like the Quadro over Intel Quick Sync on the iGPU and on Windows can't be redirected.

Jellyfin has free transcoding out of the box and you can point it to a GPU of choice like Intel Quick Sync over Nvidia. I'm not 100% if that actually uses the Intel iGPU over the Nvidia card as I removed the dGPU before testing. So far both applications are happy with a few transcodes running on the iGPU with maybe 8-10% CPU usage for each.

It used to be a slightly modified fork of FFmpeg/libav. Is that no longer the case?

It's still ffmpeg https://files.plexapp.com/elan/ffmpeg/plex-ffmpeg-2019-08-23...

If you look at the transcoder in htop, you can see the ffmpeg commands it uses.

It IS a fork of Emby, however, which is quite similar to Plex in how it behaves. Crucially, Jellyfin does not make you log into someone elses website for your own content. Don't you find that kinda weird about Plex?

But yes, the downside is the lack of smooth integrations. When I tried Jellyfin about a year ago they did not quite have Chromecast support nailed down, however as of now they've got a fully functional Android app and proper Chromecast integration.

I'm pretty sure you can use plex without logging in for many use cases.

You can whitelist certain private local IP's, however for any remote access it must be done through their app.plex.tv website or whatever unless you're going to setup a VPN.

I think that change was made a couple of years ago. I have ran plex on my freenas server for years and had an older version of it. When i upgraded my freenas to use iocage instead of jails recently, i was forced to update plex, and had no clue about this change. I was shocked to say the least and it is absolutely annoying compared how it was. Emby went closed source around the time as well.

I guess as they say, everyone's gotta eat, and filet and caviar are the menu items.

I will have to check out the IPTV streaming. Plex handles it incredibly poorly and rarely works, while with Emby I have to do hardly any maintenance.

One of the things I found I really like is that Jellyfin is really good at what it does. It doesn't do nearly as much as PLEX, but I am OK with that as I just want it to catalog my movies and TV shows, show some pretty artwork, and crucially play them.

I don't use trakt.tv myself so never looked to see if it has any integration with that.

Both Jellyfin and Emby have Trakt plugins that I use to keep my watch status in sync between servers

main problem is that x265 playback is supported in almost no browser and not supported in the Android app either.

Nitpick: x265 is an encoder for the HEVC video codec. When you play back the video, you're playing back HEVC, not x265.

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