I've considered switching but I have a very large and disorganized media library that Plex does a great job of organizing. About 10TB worth
Edit: NVM, this is pretty neat. Just loaded it up alongside Plex and it's surprisingly good. Going to use it for awhile and see how I like it.
Linuxserver.io hosts containers for Plex, jellyfin, and a bunch of related apps, with example compose or shell scripts.
I had no idea this was there :/
I have a smallish 100TB library I'd really love to move away from Plex, I regularly test out Jellyfin to see if they've finally made it usable. But sadly Jellyfin is still very far from being a good Plex replacement, it's just janky as fuck.
Constant playback errors, terrible client support, significantly higher resource usage.
I still think Jellyfin is interesting and I'm going to keep it running alongside Plex to trial it.
The internet went out, but I had some tv shows I wanted to watch already downloaded and indexed by my Plex server. So I tried loading Plex locally from my phone and it kept trying to "phone home" to have me login to the Plex website, which failed due to not having any internet access.
(I say "feature" but of course what actually happened is that the plex developers decided to block requests from outside the LAN unless you sign up for their SaaS offering, which is kind of the opposite)
Had to enable hot spot on my phone briefly when I had an internet outage. Annoying but now just works.
Getting plex pass is a must if you use it regularly in order to support hardware encoding.
My main complaint with Plex is local searching is hit and miss - a little while back I typed in a string I knew was in the title of a file (confirmed using 'locate' in CLI) and it returned 'no results'
I used extf4 as storage, but changing to NTFS (yuck) has caused less issues. With the last version the search for subtitles is broken, but at least I can add them manually. I bought Plex Pass for life, but stayed with the free version because it's more stable.
I'm on the monthly plan because I wanted to play with GPU transcoding - despite what a lot of folks say it does work in Windows on an AMD iGPU, although I've switched to discrete now (previous server was Ubuntu, but Linux GPU fan control seems to be a mess and we all know the Nvidia driver saga)
Jellyfin is a much nicer alternative.
I'm still annoyed that by default it requires a login to their cloud to stream locally, which I found when my Internet failed and Plex refused to stream locally. Also the useless third-party stream channels, and the insistence on enabling DRM on Firefox when none of my media needs it to play.
I've installed Jellyfin in parallel, and I agree it lacks polishing compared to Plex, but it gets the job done without getting in your way.
Settings | Network | List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth
And add your local LAN range, like 192.168.1.0/24
As the person who owns and operates the service, I should have the control to set default configuration for my users. Just like I should be able to shut off all the ads for everybody, I should be able to set the default quality setting to max.
I can't do either.
I never asked for the support burden of content that I'm not interested in offering MY users of Plex. They're not Plex's users, and it speaks volumes of their motives that they think it's appropriate to Trojan horse monetization services onto my users.
If you're not running it in docker, that'd probably still work, if you track down those two directories. Just a bit less clean, and a little chance there's some important stuff configured to be saved other places in the non-dockerized version, so it's a little riskier.
This is exactly why I run everything in docker :-) One shell file or docker-compose file per service, and each concisely documents exactly what's running and where all the important stuff is.
Now, if I have to touch zfs for any reason at all... that's half a day of sweating bullets, worried that one of those arcane commands will wipe out the whole volume. The UI is like Git, but what's at stake is all your stuff instead of one easy-to-restore code repo. "Oh you want to do what must be one of the five most common things someone might want to do to a zfs pool? Sure just run these six arcane commands in order. Don't mess any of it up or all your stuff is gone."
Jellyfin is more a network player - your jellyfin server does the heavy lifting, like transcoding etc. so your client basically just needs a web browser (though there are native apps too).
Plex continues working if you disable local auth if the plex main server goes belly up.
Also, while I know what the movie is about, my SO wants to see what year and genre the film is, and if it passes that first hurdle then she wants to read what the film is about before deciding if it's a pass or a go.
Finally, I enjoy being able to quickly find related movies by clicking on the director or actors and see what other works I have with them. I know I could do this in IMDb but it's nice having it right there.
I've had issues with some stuff getting the wrong metadata and it became annoying enough to fix that I now use MediaElch to tag my files before uploading them to my server.
Afaik I am not sure anymore who forked who but I've seen convos on IRC back then and the issue was solely the fact that emby devs wanted to be paid
I also need to be able to set a language preference for both audio and subtitles since I am one of those subs>dubs weirdos. If I have to set the audio track every single episode I am just going to hook up my laptop and play it in mpchc.
Whenever I look at open issues for emby or jelly I get the impression that anime is annoying to deal with so I'll just stick with the plex plugin that already works.
They have a plugin for JellyFin, ShokoFin. And I believe they do have a integration with Plex.
This replaced my previous setup and it works amazing with my Kodi.
All good options. Although some are trying to push a yearly subscription now. I bought one time licenses for all 3 when they were 20 a pop.
You also used to be able to log into "your" Plex server with a local account, but some years ago it was changed to require authenticating with Plex, Inc. to log in.
After multiple internet issues resulted in me not having access to my local Plex server and not being able to fix that, I decided to drop it. Maybe tons of backlash prompted them to fix this? I don't care, I'm a happy Jellyfin user now.
They're looking to push it official via LG though.