From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server | Hacker News Reader

From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

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333 pointsindigodaddy344 comments

> "My media content had been pushed aside into a submenu while the app promotes its own streaming media and premium services instead."

This is my biggest pet-peeve coming from Linux world. In Linux the music players you find bundled with different distros are simple, but they just work.

However since moving to MacOS, I have to either use iTunes or Music, and in Android the default music player and the latest updates of the alt music player I installed the author problem is true; they expect me to use their services and that's front and clear, while my local music is hidden away in a menu button.

This is a fairly ridiculous situation IMHO (well, solitaire in Windows getting ads/online is slightly more, but I'll never go there) since a music player that fulfills my needs is pretty easy: show a list of artists, play either the whole artist or a single album in shuffle mode.

Attempt 1: https://twitter.com/FPresencia/status/1364892370509127681

Attempt 2: https://twitter.com/FPresencia/status/1578720636645826560

on mac what about iina?

also, with brew or macports you can install pretty much any audio player you want

The biggest problem with IINA is that it regularly hangs on the legacy part of my vid collection (you know, mpg files and such), so I had to use it with mpv on standby. Mpv is absolutely stable, so the problem I guess is in some components that IINA added (GUI?).

Besides I am not sure if IINA video collection capabilities cover author’s demands (can’t say, I use it strictly as a player).

I've not managed to install Lollypop using mac ports. It's written in python but I think it's ui library doesn't work on mac.

There are a lot of music players for the Mac, here are a few of them:

https://swinsian.com/

https://colibri-lossless.com/

https://cog.losno.co/

https://vox.rocks/

and there is foobar2000 for Mac[0]

[0] https://www.foobar2000.org/

Swinsian is excellent for large libraries too.

Yes. I have about 2.5 TB of music and Swinsian does not break a sweat.

If everything else fails, there's always ncmpcpp: https://rybczak.net/ncmpcpp/

I find https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org to be great across Linux and macOS alike.

Woah, this looks like a fork of Clementine! I didn't know it was still around. This was my go to back when I actually kept a local music library.

Which in turn, Clementine is a fork of the original Amarok. :)

Awesome, I thought clementine was just dead without successor

I'm using https://www.navidrome.org which support streaming listening on mobile clients.

I recommend VLC - works well on windows, ios, macos, and android and frankly improves over the native players in each without unnecessary frills.

I think GP's issue is not lack of technical solutions but that most OSs and BigTech are increasingly user hostile to extract more revenue.

I alsobfind it concerning that they are succeding. We now have whole chunks of the world's demographic that don't even know it doesn't have to be that way.

Expecting that the typical user wants to use a streaming service, and deprioritising development of tools/components that target other workflows, is not user-hostile. It is clearly the way things are, and the nerds are being dragged kicking and screaming.

Amen. I'm 100% in the old-school, self-managed local media camp, but I'm well aware that I'm an extreme minority and can't expect mass-market companies to cater to my use case.

I'm probably one of the last 1,000 people still using Apple Home Sharing, but honestly I can't even believe it's still working. There must be someone on the inside that uses it at home and keeps fixing it whenever the architecture shifts around it.

> I'm 100% in the old-school, self-managed local media camp, but I'm well aware that I'm an extreme minority and can't expect mass-market companies to cater to my use case.

We are now the Eloi and mass-market companies are the Morlocks.

Stay strong brother. I still use and prefer local-everything.

There's dozens of us! Dozens!

I completely disagree:

- Removing the concept of files, folders, and folder paths

- Removing the concept of URLs and URL resolution

- Saving files directly to a cloud based storage without local offline representation

This is not deprioritising, this actively removing features and being hostile.

More worrying is how exceedingly fragile all of this is. One company bankrupcy, one government embargo, one anti-government protest in an opressive regime and all of your online self is gone.

VLC’s UI and shortcuts make it a poor macOS citizen. IINA, which is custom-made for Mac, is a much better fit.

MacOS dumb UI choices like a global menu make it a a poor UX OS. VLC has it right.

I love VLC. I've got the follow alias to shuffle what's in my music directory from the command line, very convenient:

alias music='find /home/me/music > /tmp/tunes.m3u; vlc -I rc -Z --no-auto-preparse /tmp/tunes.m3u'

> However since moving to MacOS, I have to either use iTunes or Music, […]; they expect me to use their services and that's front and clear, while my local music is hidden away in a menu button.

I'm not sure what you are referring to here. Listening to your own music in the macOS Music app is as simple as dragging (importing) the music into Music.app and selecting any of the options ("Recently Added", "Songs", etc.) in the Library sidebar.

Most media players I've used work like that. The application reopens where you last left off, so it is not like the Apple Music "Explore" or "Listen Now" page is shown on every launch to push the service on you.

I think the complaint makes sense in relation to the Apple Music sidebar items, but considering that there are users who want to use Apple Music, how would you surface it without having an easily discoverable item in the sidebar? I think having the option to hide it would be enough to alleviate it, but apparently one cannot, so that's a point against Apple here.

But on OSX, there are TONS of choices for music apps. You just need to bother yourself to explore the landscape a bit. Nobody will force you to use Apple's apps.

On Android, PowerAmp is still there and still the best.

If anyone ever forced you to use Windows, then MusicBee is the best.

Try Dopamine on Windows. It's very simple and light https://github.com/digimezzo/dopamine

Why would you use Dopamine instead of Foobar 2000?

> How would you surface it without having an easily discoverable item in the sidebar?

There are many ways!

- The "music player" plays your local music, the "music shop/service/itunes/spotify" can handle music stream/buying/etc, which gets incorporated into your music player. Or you'd have all your local and streaming music (IF you subscribe) mixed all together seamlessly.

- Allow to easily change the default music player in the system. They make it impossible now, you have to fiddle with 3rd party software and scripts.

- Only require agreeing with the terms if you are going to buy music, not for playing your own music. Don't analyze my local music for your algorithms, thanks.

And TBF, Apple Music is still one of the best closed source music players I've tried, but pushing for their service hard is a no-go, I don't want to feel like I'm being sold at every time I'm using a simple app.

> Listening to your own music in the macOS Music app is as simple as dragging (importing) the music into Music.app and selecting any of the options ("Recently Added", "Songs", etc.) in the Library sidebar.

This was not true in my experience. Sure it worked most of the time but I had tracks in my collection which were apparently incompatible with the Music.app and would not play. This led to me migrating to Plex about 4 years ago.

As someone else who has moved from Linux (Ubuntu budgie) to MacOS this doesns't make sense.

Load your music into "Music" and it is all there and not "hidden in a sub-menu". ITunes is terrible, but "Music" isnt bad.

Has items on the left for "recently added, or "Songs" can sort by ratings, search, etc.

> and in Android the default music player and the latest updates of the alt music player I installed the author problem is true; they expect me to use their services and that's front and clear, while my local music is hidden away in a menu button.

For Android, give this one a try:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ch.blinkenlights.android.van...

Tell it which directories to search (if its defaults are not to your liking) and all your local music is front and center -- and no "streaming services" anywhere in the player.

Poweramp is alive and doing fine still as well.

I suppose I understand the reasons people prefer Jellyfin. But on the small chance of liking a commercial product, Plex is truly dead simple for my parents. They have an AppleTV. They signed up. I share it with them via their registered email address. And they’re in. It was as simple a process as I could hope for.

That being said, do I like everything they’re pushing for? No. But they at least allow users to opt out.

I understand the sentiments here, truly. I just don’t have a compelling reason to change since it does what I want, is simple to set up and use, simple to share, and gets refined all the time.

This is heresy, but not all commercial software is the devil. I suspect RMS would hate me for this.

Not all commercial software is the devil, but money is the root of all evil. Rember Big G's old slogan before they were beholden to shareholders? Given Plex already employs multiple dark patterns in an attempt to obtain your email address, it's hard to imagine they wouldn't slide down the same slippery slope if they got bigger.

> Not all commercial software is the devil, but money is the root of all evil.

I have a book of Chinese fairy tales which touches on interesting topics like the creation of the world and the beginning of civilization.

On that second topic, it says that shortly after human societies came into being, the men started fighting with each other over the women.

I imagine the mythology is correct that fighting over women predates concern with money.

Makes sense. Was it Nick Fury who said something about as soon as the third human was born a plot formed against one?

Definitely feels like we are the root of all evil, we always find a reason to kill one another.

Hopefully we are a young species and will grow out of it eventually.

> For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil...

1 Timothy 6:10 NRSV

So, just for random theological context, money itself isn't good or bad - it's just a convenient token of value... But it's the love of money, ie, the desire to possess and control value that you can use to get things from others, and somehow find security and worth in your possessions that is the big problem. And not "the" root of "all" evil, but "a" root of "all kinds" of evil...

This is true, to expand a bit I would say that love of money is greed and greed is a sin which taints the soul.

In Christianity the two most important commandments are the love of God above all and your neighbour second (Matthew 22-35) so following this you should use your earthly processions to feed the hungry and help the poor as Jesus would have (remember how the bread multiplied when it was shared..)

As a side note - the original quote isn't in fact 'money is the root of all evil' rather the quote says 'it is the lack of money that is the root of all evil'.

A subtle difference I'll grant you but one that makes a huge difference to understanding and empathy imo.

[Edit to Expand] The original Hebrew text says it is the 'desire to possess money' that has somehow become mistranslated into 'love of money' rather than the original meaning of 'scarcity of money'.

Wrong. deckiedan and swat535 have it correct. Scarcity of money isn't evil, being poor isn't evil. People survived fine for thousands or hundreds of thousands of years before the concept of money existed. It's about the evil of coveting what your neighbor has so bad it can lead to evil actions.

I think we must be thinking of different things - the quote from Timothy is originally Greek, not Hebrew: "ῥίζα γὰρ πάντων τῶν κακῶν ἐστιν ἡ φιλαργυρία..."

"Root for all the evil is the love-of-money..." Word for word (ish).

The greater context being seeking contentment with your current lot in life, and focusing on becoming good, not rich

It'll get worse and worse until you wish you left sooner. Hang in there. They'll cross your line eventually

I’ll take that bet.

Oh, I hope not. Still, at best let's hope it happens really slowly.

Plex crossing some “line” doesn’t suddenly invalidate all the previous value one has gotten from it.

Of course not, and that wasn't the point. Did you think it was?

How do I opt out of everything but my locally stored media?

You can disable Online Media Sources in the settings and unpin any section you're not interested in from the main menu.

I've done this and the only things that I see in my Plex app are locally-stored contents and my TV channels (delivered over IP by my ISP).

How are you watching IPTV on Plex? I thought they only allowed that through an actual tuner (+ a Plex Pass)

You need to run a local m3u/epg proxy like xTeVe[1] to emulate a DVR. But you still need a Plex Pass I think.

[1] https://github.com/xteve-project/xTeVe

I built a thing that integrates with my ISP's TV API and makes it look to Plex like an HDHomeRun tuner. It also generates XMLTV EPG (again, based on my ISP's data) so that I don't have to faff around with third-party EPG providers and with channel matching.

So as far as Plex is concerned, this is an HDHomeRun tuner + XMLTV EPG.

I can also tune directly into any of the TV streams using VLC, in one of three ways:

1. raw MPEG transport stream over UDP multicast

2. same stream over HTTP (via udpxy)

3. my ISP's transcoded HLS stream (lagging by a few seconds and missing certain features)

The major annoyance with that is that you have to explain to your parents/friends how to do that when you give them access otherwise they won’t find your stuff in the ocean of media plex is trying to push at them.

You also have to now trust that they have a secure password and don’t share/get them compromised.

I picked Emby for many reasons and one being local accounts I control. Plex pushing you to use their accounts (and then pushing streaming content like this) just wasn’t an option.

I’m not sure I understand. With Emby you still have to trust that they have a secure password and don’t share/get them compromised.

You can pick the password and not let it be changed.

Also plex suffered a hack that compromised online account user logins.

Emby also had a dead simple Apple TV app and none of plex’s streaming content nonsense or burying your content in a l menu.

He would make you eat his toe nails for that comment.

Gross. But true.

Plex is dead-simple for everyone!

Yeah, sure, it's a mild annoyance that they keep trying to enable features I don't need or want. I guess I could stop upgrading. But still, it's pretty easy to go to Settings -> Online Media Sources and set them all to 'Disabled.' With that done, it does exactly what I want it to and no more.

How do you handle the default quality on their devices? I believe Plex defaults to 720p which forces unnecessary transcoding, and this is a per-user per-device default setting. I have to continuously remind my users how to update their default quality to maximum available.

First off I have hardware transcoding so that’s not an issue. Second, all of my 1080p direct stream to my AppleTV and do not transcode. I changed no default settings for this.

As for remote users, it doesn’t seem to impact them either way.

Plex is one of the reasons I now always choose open source over closed source but free as in beer. They start out great but as financial constraints creep in the compromises are made that create a very unpleasant experience. For example, I'd love to use Obsidian, which is an amazing app, but who knows what will happen to it in the future.

With Obsidian the thing that made me ok with this was it's all just markdown. I have all my data stored locally in an ubiquitous file format

This is the primary motivating factor for why I like https://prose.sh

You store your markdown files locally and then copy them to your hosted blog.

Just like Obsidian, right?

Yep except instead of it being a note-taking app, it's a blog platform.

But there's an entire workflow embedded in the use of Obsidian. It's not "just markdown". That's like saying you could move from vscode to notepad because it's "just text".

Yup and that is my problem with startups like supabase too. I have just started using pocketbase for that reason.

How does supabase not qualify as open source?

Their stack is primarily comprised of other independent open source projects. The one component that isn't is their "realtime" server that serves updates from postgres' WAL over websockets, but that is open sourced[0] under Apache 2.0. From my understanding the primary part that has not been open sourced is their database browser / web UI. There are plenty of alternative management tools for postgres though. As you can export your database what else would you need to ensure your portability and independence?

Granted they make their docs fairly opaque for trying to self host. Presumably to encourage you to just use their hosted service. Hosting open sourced projects seems like a very ecosystem friendly way of monetizing.

[0] https://github.com/supabase/realtime

> From my understanding the primary part that has not been open sourced is their database browser / web UI.

FYI, this is also open source: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/studio

It’s not unreasonable to say I could build my own without having to reverse engineer the data format though.

I only lose the convenience of Obsidian, not the data I spent years building.

Yeah this. Would it suck? Yes. Would I be as fucked as some other platforms? No.

What's the workflow beyond opening up the app and starting to type in a new or existing document?

Your question is the equivalent to "how does Obsidian differ from a minimalist Markdown editor."

I don’t use Obsidian, but their bustiness model seems simple and honest. Hopefully, I think the worst that can happen is that they will get acquired by a larger company to be sunset.

lol, wasn't it the same with Plex? They just built lots of features around locally stored data.

Exactly. Actually, this blog post is about how it’s not very painful to migrate.

I posted about Foam, an open source alternative to Obsidian that run in VSCode, just yesterday [0]. It can work interoperable with Obsidian on the same files and folders, if that's your preference.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33561876

> I now always choose open source over closed source but free as in beer.

> They start out great but as financial constraints creep in

Funny how you talk about financial constraints, and still refuse to pay for software.

Paying won't guarantee you the soft you pay for won't switch business model for subscription, or sell to a bigger company that will extinguish it.

Not paying for software all but guarantees that it will be abandoned at one point. People want to eat, after all.

(The dichotomy between "I must earn a gazillion dollars because I'm a senior dev" and "I will not pay money (that pays those salaries) for software" that's so prevalent on HN is mind boggling)

Yes Linux and Vim are dead. There are also no other examples of long lived open source projects that are free.

Linux is primarily developed by large corporations.

And there are significantly more projects that have stagnated and disappeared than those that survived.

Whether a project is free or not is not the only consideration as to whether I adopt it for my workflow, just a core one.

I paid $75 for plex 9 years ago and have gotten way more than my monies worth. Their shift to monetization In my opinion is over blown. You can simply go and turn that crap off. Having my media on any device at any time is a life changer. Especially with small kids.

From what I've been told a lot of the frustration is that you can't simply turn it off for your server, all your users have to do it individually. If you've set it up for non-techie people who don't live nearby I can see how that'd be pretty annoying to deal with.

I have some copy pasta with screen shots on how to turn that stuff off I spent a bit making. Just send that out and let people know respectfully that I’m not providing tech support and I hope they enjoy the service. I don’t have anyone bug me ever.

For all we know, OP is donating to all the projects they use that accept donations.

That's a non sequitur. I was talking about financial constraints of the company, not the user. I'd have no problem paying for a piece of critical software if they contractually guaranteed that they wouldn't break the functionality and/or litter it with ads, or at least make it open source if they do. It has nothing to do with my personal financial constraints. That's a misinterpretation on your part.

"Financial constraints" of a company, any company, are such that:

- development costs money

- workplaces cost money

- people want to eat

You can pay for Plex with money (Plex Pass). And while I sort of dislike them pushing their own content and monetization, it can be easily switched off in settings.

Apparently a free model works perfectly well. I am using Jellyfin happily. Why should I use Plex when Jellyfin works without all the cruft? The developers working on Jellyfin are doing perfectly fine in their endeavors. Is your suggestion that a project is deserving of more use if it is paid for rather than free? Are free projects poisoning the well for all of us trying to make money off of software? Not sure what point you are trying to make.

> The developers working on Jellyfin are doing perfectly fine in their endeavors.

As long as they have something to keep them above poverty line: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html (among other articles, the question of how free open source isn't sustainable is discussed often)

Logseq is what I use for that reason. https://logseq.com/

Org Roam calls to thee. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyhPmypHDEw

Plex seems to regularly add new features which I really have no use for but makes it relatively easy to turn them off if you want.

Every month or three when I login to the web interface there's Some New Thing which I need to disable.

Recently I needed a 100% offline-capable media player (and while Plex would probably work, it's not 100% reliable) and tried with Kodi.

It's a very unfluid experience, requiring multiple plugins and a setup process which was complicated even for me. It wasn't terrible, and it did work and I'm glad it exists but it's not something I would ever use on a daily basis, Plex just works better.

I'll admit I haven't tried Emby or Jellyfin (yet), and, I'm sure I will some day. Plex will probably add something which is truly objectionable or otherwise not disableable and I'll be compelled to switch but for now I'll stick with the fluid experience, even if it requires me to occasionally disable their new "features".

I really liked the original homebrew xbmc on a modded original xbox (both plex and kodi are forks)

I would appreciate a simpler batteries included media center software in that theme.

Kodi isn't a fork of the old school XBMC on Xbox, it's the direct continuation of the project. After they migrated their focus onto PC and other platforms the Xbox version was actually forked off into a separate codebase and dropped from the main project, but Kodi is the direct descendent/inheritor of the original XBMC.

I've been using it since it was still called XBMP, it really hasn't changed that much UI wise.

I tried Kodi for the PC. I turned on UPNP broadcast. It locked up. I had to kill it with task manager. I turned UPNP on on the Xbox XBMC a few weeks later. I had to reboot the OG Xbox. Both of these were about three months ago, they still have the same bugs.

I remember the Boxee Box and loved mine.. while it lasted. The interface was slick, simple, and had the basics that I needed at the time.

The thing with Kodi is you set it once and then you pretty much forget about it. I'm not sure what plugins you need because for playing media off a SMB share or local drive it has everything included out-of-the-box. There is some configuration but, once again, its a one-time thing.

I've installed it on dozens of devices over the years (OG xbox, windows boxen, an nvidia shield, raspberry pi clones) and it is and has been amazingly consistent and low-maintenance.

These kind of threads always bring mostly negative comments out.

So let me just add that I've been using Plex for years to play 4k HDR files for myself and transcoded versions for family and friends.

And it works beautifully!

No complaints really. There's clients for all devices family has, I have all my files, I can share to friends, etc...

Yes, they've also added a new streaming service. I really don't see the issue, just disable it if you don't want it.

For me Plex has always worked fine. Good product.

My pet peeve with plex is they aren't really focusing on the fundamentals.

Checkout this issue [1]. A 2 year old request to support a newer codec, AV1, with seemingly no support in sight.

Or you've got the fact that plex's transcoding STILL only targets h264 (and gives limited options for bitrate/resolution targets). Most hardware support H.265 (and some newer hardware supports H.266 and AV1).

It's a product that was originally built on serving a media library and it's pushed most of us to working around it while the business is clearly focusing on other priorities.

[1] https://forums.plex.tv/t/add-support-for-av1-coding-standard...

> Most hardware support H.265

But software support is lacking, especially in browsers. It's licensing scheme requires developers to pay for a licence to support it in their application, which means that no open source developer is going to get themselves burned on it. It's the singular reason that AV1 was developed.

Funnily, plex supports H.265 (just not transcoding to it).

How easily can your family/friends find your stuff when you first give them access? For me it’s always a session where I have to guide them:

1) go to settings -> online media sources and disable everything.

2) click the ‘More’ button at the bottom left then go to these libraries I shared with you and click three dots —> pin for every one of them

3) go to settings —> Quality —> Video quality and select original so you don’t transcode everything to 720p, 2mbps for no reason

4) go to settings —> Subtitles and enable subtitles so you don’t have to enable manually every time you play a video

I have a hard enough time with people getting Emby settings right and it’s all local accounts but it’s definitely easier then that: here’s your l/p, please check the quality settings as “auto” is often not great

It’s not hard for my parents. Just “search for X thing”. It doesn’t really matter what server it’s coming from.

3 & 4 aren’t issues for me. My home upload speeds suck (same for many people), so transcoding to optimize for this is unfortunately necessary. And I don’t even have subtitles downloaded.

The negative comments are well earned. Yours is misleading.

They have spent the last few years burying and neutering all of the features that you claim "work fine."

I’ve stopped using Plex-like stuff. I don’t really need it because transcoding isn’t as relevant as it was before. Pretty much every device I own can play h265 without CPU overhead.

What I’m doing is basically a Samba file share + Infuse/Kodi. Thats it. You pretty much get the same results. Infuse can sync between devices using cloud sync and trackt, which can be used through a hide-my-mail account. Kodi can sync watched shows through said Trakt account.

Infuse costs me a dollar a month and Kodi is free. I don’t need a NAS with a powerful CPU that can transcode. Anything that has disks and saturates the gigabit connection is enough.

I just use Jellyfin with transcoding disabled. It’s still nice having a web client and being able to watch anywhere. Plus it doesn’t cost me a dollar a month which is nice.

But Jellyfin web client can't play a lot of common media file formats, because the browsers cannot play them.

> I don’t need a NAS with a powerful CPU

I have a home server with i3 8100 desktop, I wanget to get Intel Quicksync transcoding to work

The amount of trial and error that took - linux situation is trully dire

> The amount of trial and error that took - linux situation is trully dire

out of interest, did you try it on another OS and did it work OOTB there?

Fwiw if your Linux install has the right drivers for the igpu it does just work (at least on debian)

Have a 10th? (Frost) gen nuc and debian buster was a pain while bullseye just worked.

So you're using four or five different things to replicate the functionality of one thing? This is sounding a lot like a certain Dropbox-related comment.

Not at all. There is a samba server and there is a media player in each device. I don't need to run .net or whatever code with a web server and a wrapper around ffmpeg. So it's totally the opposite of what you said.

I think the way I described how those devices get in sync gave you that opinion but to me as an user is basically just 2 things.

Samba, infuse, kodi, trackt, hide-my-mail. This sounds like five different things I have to set up plus a paid monthly subscription.

One major upside to plex is the ease of watching content over the internet though. There isn't a an easy way for me to give my friends access to samba over the net and then also 4k blu ray rips are a lot to stream over the internet

...and how secure is this?

Yeah, I haven't needed transcoding since I was watching stuff streamed from my PC to my PS2. The entire existence of Plex, I've been confused about why so many people thought they needed transcoding, because even low end devices can play most media just fine without it for many years now.

Maybe I can help with your confusion: zero percent of the reason I use Plex is for transcoding. It's a wonderful library-management tool with sharing for remote users and clients for every platform.

I use Jellyfin and my primary device for watching content is a Roku TV. It has to transcode quite a few different formats. Roku TCL TV apparently has issues playing certain MKV and AVI files. Regardless of transcoding settings in jellyfin, the Roku _refuses_ to play any MKV with S_TEXT/UTF8 subtitles. Errors out on playback. Using ffmpeg to JUST remove the subtitles via `-vcodec copy -acodec copy -sn`, the resulting copied codecs file plays just fine on the Roku.

Pretty annoying though.

Adding Jellyfin to the mix was the best thing I’ve done for my Kodi setup. I agree re transcoding - overused these days - I keep all that disabled

Jellyfin-Kodi gives fast and automatic library updates - no waiting 5 minutes for ‘update library’ on large collections - new content appears automatically. Also some nice QoL improvements like synced progress, slightly better metadata fetching, automatic subtitle fetching

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-kodi

I have used Plex for about 12-13 years but am very very far from a power user. I find it mildly annoying I need to login but other than that I've not noticed anything that annoys me. I admit this is most likely due to how little I use it and how non-advanced that usage is. Given this, is there any value add to Jellyfin for someone like myself?

My read on this article is that it gets back to an earlier, more raw state of Plex. For my use case my interpretation is that would mean extra work for potentially lower quality, and unlikely any value add given that nothing annoys me about current Plex. Does that sound right?

> For my use case my interpretation is that would mean extra work for potentially lower quality, and unlikely any value add given that nothing annoys me about current Plex.

Here's a positive example from my experience from switching to plex to jellyfin. When I drop files into my movie/tv folder jellyfin automatically syncs the files whereas in plex I always had to go to the page and click a menu icon and then click sync folder. Maybe there's a way to do it in plex that I don't know about but jellyfin did it by default.

I also find the web version of the media player better on jellyfin. I hated the google auth login to plex, and so far jellyfin feels lighter weight.

Like you, I don't need advanced sharing options and or anything beyond a private website that I can play my movies/tv shows so plex always felt overkill.

Both Jellyfin and Plex sync by default automatically but Plex’s default was a few hours or so.

Thanks for the info, didn't know that about Plex. A couple of a hours does not work with my workflow. I get a movie, add it to my media folder, and then I want to watch it, so I'm not surprised I missed it.

You can change the frequency to be as short as you want, fyi.

You can have the library update on change or at set time intervals if the auto detect doesn’t work.

See this article:

https://support.plex.tv/articles/200289306-scanning-vs-refre...

I believe config settings exist for Plex to be more aggressive. Alternatively if you use third party software like Radarr or Sonarr they can use webhooks to update instantly when media is added

as i said in my ancestor post i'm far from a power user. its quite likely i tweaked some setting several years ago and forgot about it. I put something in my flex drive and it's there within seconds.

Jellyfin syncs on changes if the media location is local, their regular sync is only there as fallback for network shares.

plex also syncs on FS change (It's never failed for me) but that might be an OS/FS dependent thing. Works great on ZFS + Linux for me.

If you don't want to pay for Plex then you don't have hardware transcoding. This is of course free in Jellyfin.

Who has hardware for transcoding any more, and what hardware is modern for that?

Last dedicated hardware encoder I used was bad old days of MPEG2 for DVDs, but that went the way of the dodo when MPEG2 went native to the CPU. Never used hardware for h.264/5. I guess there was a board for J2k doing realtime lossless, but that was 2010ish.

So I'm legit curious what hardware transcoding looks like today, and that Plex charges for the pleasure

GPU accelerated transcoding. Skylake and newer i3 or higher Intel iGPUs can do simultaneous transcode of 20x 1080p streams without breaking a sweat.

Sure, but I am never steaming more than one video at a time.

You'll need a beefy cpu to transcode pretty much any 4k video without hardware transcoding.

It would still be a waste of electricity.

I bought a GPU to get smooth 4k sources streaming to my devices.

Why are you having to do realtime transcoding for streaming to devices? Why not just have a streaming version? Transcode one time at whatever speed, then it's ready for you whenever you want it anytime after that? Not that you can't do whatever you want to do with your own gear or anything. I've just never understood the desire for realtime encoding for everything

It's simpler and more space efficient to just transcode according to the desired quality setting and device profile of the viewer. Unless you're a large streaming service or have an extremely uniform profile of users it's not practical to store all the possible variants you might need to cover the full range of devices and stream qualities.

It would be interesting for there to be the option to see what formats your historical clients do support, allow selection of a set of them to generate a best common format list for, and all configuring your server to automatically transcode new content to some of those formats. I suspect many of us have a few high-quantity or quality-outlier consumers that it would be useful to be able to pre-transcode newer content, that's the most likely to be consumed, for.

Are you talking about manually pre-transcoding to a more streaming-friendly format? Since anyone taking about issues with transcoding is almost certainly talking about 4K formats (anything else is almost no load even on 10 year old hardware), I'd be interested to know what format you're picking that retains 4K Dolby Vision and/or HDR10 with the Atmos audio and is supported for more efficient non-transcoded transfer by the Plex client and server software. Certainly some are better but only work on specific clients, I haven't heard of a good efficient format that works on the majority of client devices.

> Why are you having to do realtime transcoding for streaming to devices?

Because I don't want multiple copies of the same thing wasting space on my drive? Cloud storage might be endlessly cheap, but local storage is still very finite.

Also, both my CPU and GPU have enough spare compute that they can do it without stressing out too much. I also might not watch something multiple times, and I might watch it across different devices and networks (not all of which support 4k), so paying the cost of compute + storage to generate the transcodes ahead of time doesn't make a lot of sense, especially if a movie gets watched once every 2 years or something.

Really, I have multiple end profiles that are possible.

1. My phone 2. My wife's phone 3. My Tablet 4. My TV

They each have different screen geometries and even my tablet has two profiles really, local streaming at home or playing downloaded media on trips.

So I could transcode everything to 5 different formats and store it, or just transcode on demand and not worry about it.

Literally any GPU?

I use it all the time. It allows me to keep the highest-quality videos (4k HDR) for my own use while allowing family to stream it to less capable devices by hardware transcoding and tone mapping. A mid-range 11th gen i5 handles it without a stutter. Got a Plex lifetime pass many years ago and I’ve never regretted it.

I regret getting a Plex lifetime pass because it created the situation where Plex had no reason to listen to me as a customer and give up being the #1 home media server so they could be the #4312th gateway to all the off brand streaming services.

Not sure if you are trolling.

Hardware transcoding is available with modern GPU:s.

not trolling at all. i just don't think of the GPU as that. probably silly on my part, but as stated, i come from the world of expensive dedicated encoding devices vs generic parts of a computer you already have.

EDIT: Looks like QSV is the new transcoding api for Intel CPUs. My info was out of date.

VAAPI is in Intel chips: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

It represents parts of the CPU optimized to transcode video. The newer CPUs support HEVC/h265 which would otherwise introduce a huge load on a machine when done in a normal CPU.

Having the "hardware transcoder" as part of the chip means you can transcode huge videos without consuming huge amounts of system resources.

Jellyfin includes this, or more accurately exposes the ffmpeg implementation of this, whereas Plex charges for it.

Sure, it is available, but _why_? For years and years now, even low end devices are perfectly capable of playing media over a network without transcoding being required? Why do people think they need transcoding? Are they streaming to ancient video game consoles from their PCs? I mean, it was helpful when I was streaming to a PS2, but that's a long time ago, now.

Hardware transcoding includes your GPU doing the transcoding.

Most intel CPU's have an integrated GPU that is capable of transcoding.

I use hardware transcoding, and don't want to pay the 'Plex Tax' for doing so. It was pretty simple to configure Jellyfin with hardware transcoding. I use an Nvidia Quadro P400, which can transcode nearly anything thrown at it.

Plex lost me when they became obsessed with trying to put advertisements in front of my grandparents when all they want to do is watch Mash on my plex server.

I've only seen ads in Plex when watching the streaming services they have integrated, which is expected. Those services need to pay for their content somehow.

My media is completely ad-free.

Yeah is MASH also on their streaming services?

Yes, but they now show their catalogue by default on every new client you log into. So you (or whoever has access to your server) have to know to hide their rows in favor of local media collections. They don't differentiate them in any way, so I hope your media libraries are named something more descriptive than "Movies & TV". Really disappointing.

I agree with the author here - I've used Plex for 5 years now and have recently felt the heat of their drastic UI changes, and the way they are now forcing everyone to "signup" for their service. My servers have gotten incredibly difficult to find since they are now in a weird submenu, and whenever I see the homepage it confuses the hell out of me when I try to pick up my content where I left it off last time since now there is a lot of Plex's own promoted content carelessly interspersed everywhere.

Whenever I try to ask my wife or friends to use my Plex server, they end up getting confused while navigating to find our locally hosted content. All of this only proves that Plex as a company is trying real hard to push their own content and services and lost the touch of what they originally intended to make as a product in the first place. I am glad I never bought their lifetime pass. Goodbye Plex and hello Jellyfin.

Plex' Android TV app (ATV) is a travesty in regards to pretty much every feature that matters.

From broken playback state tracking, "currently watching" that just won't go away (obvious local state management issues), subtitles that randomly won't show up (no matter what you do), un-configurable +30s/-10s skip options, outright crashes (that toss the local state of whatever you were doing), fun with HDR playback (good luck, 0 handholding. You just have to make all the stars align yourself) and many, many more problems are routine.

Despite all this though, it is (or at least was 9~ months ago, when I made the switch) so much better than Emby (and sorta, by extension, Jellyfin -- which was much worse) on the same platform that it's astounding.

I remember being super impressed that metadata matching was mostly working for a predominantly ASPAC focused library. Library management in general is much better, now that I think about it.

The subtitle timing is also broken. Strangely when I cast the same video to my ATV I get better results than using the native app.

In general, on all Plex apps I've had a lot of issues with 4K content and Surround downmixing. You can configure an audio boost option for downmixing in the options but even then it's still barely usable.

Subtitles timing has been broken for a decade. I gave up trying to have that fixed.

For unrelated reasons, I switched my home devices to AppleTVs recently. The Infuse app works very well as a Plex client.

The only reason I still use Plex is that they have (native) apps on nearly every device me and my friends have (tv's, playstation etc.).

I remember starting with XBMC, which had the most beautiful theme's/skins that were really well optimised for the console experience, and there were many of them, all for free.

And now I'm paying for a Plex pass and everything is becoming more clunky and less usable each year, such a shame.

Jellyfin has it for my devices, which are cheap Roku TV's. but yes this is pretty critical that it be compatible with your devices for QOL.

This was the main factor that I checked when switching from Plex to Jellyfin. Was really happy they supported my cheapo Rokus. The apps are perfectly OK. They are less good for music, but the show/movie experience is better than it was for plex after they made it super annoying to get to your collection.

Wow, I did exactly this yesterday. Went super smoothly, and Android, Google TV clients work fine, as does Chromecast. Android Auto support not great but at least did play the music I told it to which is the main thing I guess.

Not any good desktop clients that aren't Electron garbage, but Plex is no better here.

First party docs for setting up Nginx in front of Jellyfin were Really Freaking Good. Like Arch Wiki levels of good.

Put the lot on a Tailscale IP and now I have access to my Jellyfin from anywhere - including, surprisingly, from my chromecast where the the Tailscale app installed without a hitch.

There's an interesting comparison actually between Plex and Tailscale.. both are sorta-in-the-universe-of-open-source-but-not-actually... but I know which one I trust and which one can go and get bent.

Plex has a rather good Desktop app with real HD codec support in both a desktop and HTPC interface flavors. https://www.plex.tv/media-server-downloads/#plex-app

I actually run Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin. I would like to only run Jellyfin, but unfortunately some devices will not have jellyfin, but will have plex and/or emby. The main reason I personally still use Plex (or sometimes Emby) even though I am running Jellyfin with all the exact same stuff -- is because Jellyfin sucks at live TV / iptv. It's interface is complete trash and I can't seem to get a good "guide" going like I can with Plex or Emby. If that can be resolved then I'd definitely only ever use Jellyfin.

How do you manage the metadata between all the services? Seems like a huge headache to keep them all correct and updated

Emby at the least has the option to write it to the media folder alongside the video files

It's all automated for each one, and yeah they write the metadata into the folder. I have Radarr/Sonarr/Prowlarr + Ombi + rtorrent, which pretty much automates everything. I just type in what I want and it shows up in all 3 a minute or two later. Sonarr also keeps track of TV schedules, so if it's a new show that is still airing it automatically shows up when a torrent of it becomes available.

This all feels like it should be 800x less of an issue because phones & tablets should just be able to connect over SMB & you should use whatever media player you want on your device.

Telling your home router to forward 445 is not that hard. Usinf minupnpc or just building in auto-port forwarding would be better. Alas I've seen some isp's block users from connecting to 445, which seems insane (my ispets me host there, but my parents isp blocks me from dialing home?!). So I often forward on another port (ex: 4445) and then everything works fine.

The main problem why the obvious "just use computers" problems doesnt work is... Android. Phones. These incressingly user-hostile anti-general-purpose-computing systems. Some of my media players still work with the 2017 code drom of the Android Samba Provider, but it uses old Android APIs so many media players wont work with it. I have no idea if Android still makes filesystem providers possible at all, but we havent seen any, and this one old one-time-drop artifact remains the only example I know of it ever having beem done ever on Android. But then again I really have had no interest in Box/Azure Drives/whatever... it'd be interesting/great to know if anyone does remote drives on android today. It feels wild that we have so much bespoke special software for remote media serving... when we have seemingly so little that does the general job.

https://github.com/google/samba-documents-provider

Ideally upnp/dlna should also somehow be an option too, but it assumes secure private networks I think? I'd love if it could be exposed publicly but locked down but it does all use mdns. And Tailscale's the only company on the planet who seemingly has the sense to extend our homenet's reach quickly/easily.

> phones & tablets should just be able to connect over SMB & you should use whatever media player you want on your device.

This does not provide the same feature set as Jellyfin and others like it provide. An important omission is server-side transcoding; if I upload 4K content to my instance I might want to be able to watch it from an Airbnb with a subpar connection.

Keeping track of things I've watched (regardless of which device), auto playing the next episode, automatically fetching metadata and subtitles, being able to share collections with friends are some other features I enjoy from Jellyfin that most players don't do out of the box.

Sure, you could rig up a bunch of different programs to do something more or less comparable, but that would be a bunch of extra work for the server operator and would ultimately provide a worse experience.

Phones and tablets can access windows shares just fine. You just need a file manager that supports it. Regardless, direct playing files from a share, doesn't come close to matching the UX a media server provides.

Also, don't expose windows shares to the internet.

> Also, don't expose windows shares to the internet.

Is this a problem? I feel like this reputation is 10 years out of date.

Personally I use smbd & I am not afraid for it. I'd like to tell Windows users the dame, provided I trust them to disallow all but logged in users.

Generally speaking unless you are prepared to (at a minimum)

1. Harden the operating system

2. Actively monitor logs, and apply updates upon release

3. Put a Firewall with IDS/IPS between the server and the internet (which most home "routers" do not provide)

you should not put anything on the wider internet, instead using something like tailscale (which you mention in another post) to create a secured private network across unsecured inet

That sounds way overblown on multiple levels. "Harden the OS"... why... if you are port forwarding samba? Firewall with IDP? Please. This kind of advice seems designed to intimidate & scare, and it's absurd & cruel to convince people self hosting is so impossible and terrifying. Geeks oversell their conservative paranoia & gate-keeping like this all the te but this naysaying is just posionous!

I've gone through every CVE for Samba & there seemingly is 1 potential problem since 2007 that would possibly potentially be an issue for a basic non-domaim controller smbd fileshare that a random non-user could possibly exploit. If you dont trust your users, there's indeed some CVEs of real threat, but still, like... 4.. https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-102/...

Yes you probably should update fairly regularly, just in case. But more often than not, if you are a couple years behind, it's not a problem. Maybe someday that goes bad. But... so far... being super lax on updates generally hasnt had much impact. Maybe check logs every now and then, but honestly... once you have some confidence, it's fine. This stuff runs fine. It's easy.

One problem with (at least samba) is that the configuration is a PITA and it's easy to do a lot of unsafe things (which probably wouldn't get a CVE because "well you enabled anonymous users, which are often enabled by default by distributions...")

(at least compared to caddy or wireguard...)

A quick search shows Windows has had SMB specific zero days in 2017 and 2011.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/smb-zero-day-...

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2513099/new-windows-ze...

SMB has been a huge transmission vector for viruses over the years, that's why some ISPs block it by default (its security is terrible).

And as someone who used to watch over SSHFS for years... the biggest feature of things like Jellyfin/Plex is automatically remembering what I'm watching and where I am. Admittedly it's mostly an issue if you watch shows instead of movies (I'm never going to remember which episode of 52 episodes I'm on) but having the app remember is so much better than updating a wiki page/text file/whatever manually as to where I am so I know where to restart watching (which I've accidentally messed up before. Very fun to watch stuff out of order and be like "wut....").

Speaking of dlna... it's kind of awful (at least years ago when I tried to use minidlna with my TV). It's way better to just get a Linux mini PC and hook that up to the TV and let the TV be a monitor.

(Also yeah, I wish we had a better than Android option for phones... https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ exists if you want to throw a bunch of money at it, not sure if there's a whole lot better)

Dlna works really well for me... on linux with a PlayBin media renderer. Which will support essentially any media thrown at it. I've definitely found tv's and sticks to be very hit or miss eith codecs, need transcoding too oftenm But dlna worked pretty nicely when I used it with a competent media renderer.

The appeal is being able to have some network connections to other people's media servers too. Making the media server less of the primary focus is a shift, & handling media-providers as replaceable modular systems would be a step up, & is essential for group-usage to evolve; something we technically cant really do effectively now.

I do very much see your point that Jellyfin has a lot of good capabilities for media-watching. I'm stillfeeling strongly like media providing/serving is a different role tham media consuming, that many of these responsibilities could shift to a more local-centric android or tv app that expects you to have used general file sharing systems to coonnect up.

Good discussion thanks. Shout out to the other mention of transcoding, which definitely plays a part too. Setting up a fuse mount to transcode your stuff to a given quality & them file-sharing that too would be doable & still "generic" versus a specific media-sharing system like this, but yeah, it's more into the cobbling stuff together realm.

I feel like the better approach to what you want is "let Jellyfin/etc access other people's media servers (syncthing, torrent, smb, somehow)".

And there are FUSE filesystems that do transcoding, but they have really weird limitations because of FUSE and wouldn't let you change bitrate during a watch based on network conditions (if you're the kind of person to watch shows on a phone on LTE on a subway for instance).

Even though I selfhost (some things) I am very biased towards more "centralized" stuff (aka serve off the NAS in my house and let most stuff be web clients/thin clients) because of the seamless experience... I very commonly go from using an app on my phone to the same app on my desktop to on my laptop when I travel and even on my tablet or my TV and if everything just works the same it's all so much better then having to deal with weird oddities because maybe read status doesn't work or some metadata doesn't show up properly or whatever.

(or in other words just cobble stuff together ~once and then let all the other devices use the result)

>Telling your home router to forward 445 is not that hard

At first I thought this was sarcasm...

Dont do not... putting samba or any other SMB server on the wider internet is a bad bad idea. It is a good way to get your system compromised.

>>& tablets should just be able to connect over SMB

The draw of Emby, Plex, and jellyfin is not just to file browse and open up files

They Provide Meta Data about the Media, Play Series in proper order, Allow you to see rankings, Ratings, provides Art, etc and most importantly Keeps track of play history on a per user basis.

SMB would not do any of this.

>>Tailscale's the only company on the planet who seemingly has the sense to extend our homenet's reach quickly/easily.

Yes and no. VPN's have been used by home users for a long time, and tailscale is far from the only company / project doing what they do [1]. Tailscale was made possible do to a new(ish) VPN protocol (wiregaurd) that is very light weight and secure, previous VPN systems like OpenVPN would not be able to support something like tailscale

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/910766/

> At first I thought this was sarcasm... Dont do not... putting samba or any other SMB server on the wider internet is a bad bad idea. It is a good way to get your system compromised.

Fearmongering FUDdy advice thats a decade old now. There's nothing in this 10 year old post that seems relevant today, from what I can tell. People just cannot give up their fear! Get over it.

https://superuser.com/a/311664

Post a real reply if you have it but dont just shit up a topic with insubstantiated terrormongering.

> They Provide Meta Data about the Media, Play Series in proper order, Allow you to see rankings, Ratings, provides Art, etc and most importantly Keeps track of play history on a per user basis. SMB would not do any of this.

Have you never used a media player on a phone? They all do this. I should be able to do this with files on my phone, or files shared with my phone. I dont see ehy custom software beyond a regular media playing app is warranted.

Except transcoding. That alone is a harder problem.

Yes the entire cyber security industry is just one big con... One big FUD attemptinh to prevent you from playing your media on your phone. You got us... My 20+ years of professional networking and security is a just fear mongering scam....

In reality cve's only get you so far and chances are you have left something open for some one to exploit and are right now probably sending out Nigerian Prince emails from your network or part of a ddos swarm or something like that.

One day I will see a post from you about how to buy some Bitcoin to unencrypt your files

As to "media apps on my phone". Consume media on multiple devices the least used on is my phone. Even if the app on the phone did that it would not translate to my Roku's, FireTVs, and other media devices, and they would not sync

I am & I have seen a number of people run samba just fine & it took like 20 minutes to set up. Are there reports online of this going bad? Would I be the first ever to try this & to have it explode?

Clutching of pearls yo. It's so not a big deal. Dont be driven by fear, dont sell fear.

Moved from Plex to Jellyfin about a month ago. While it obviously isn't as polished as Plex (yet), it has come a long way in the last few years. I remember trying it about 2 years ago and the experience wasn't nearly as good.

Biggest problem for me was recognizing anime, Plex usually does a good job with it but Jellyfin doesn't. My solution is just to rename (or rather, create hardlinks with proper file names and structure) with Sonarr.

Second biggest problem has been the Android TV client. I find it clunky and the built-in video player doesn't support HDR. You can use external player (like VLC) or set up Kodi with Jellyfin add-on which I've done, but it's still not as smooth experience as with Plex.

Overall I find it better than Plex, with active community pushing new updates constantly.

If jellyfin is still like Emby which I use I would pick a different metadata server for you anime, tvdb is rubbish, themoviedb is great all around, and for anime you can point it at animelist which will figure out near anything

I've considered moving from Plex to Jellyfin (or some other offering in the space), but I don't think anything can really compete with Plex.

Plex, for me, required quite a bit of fiddling, but once you get it working it works _very_ well. There are decent-quality apps on every platform you want to use. There's a whole lot of software that integrates with Plex from things like requesting/adding new media to monitoring/analyzing Plex server usage.

Some of the things I appreciate about Plex:

- It does a very good job at matching media - It's very easy to share access with others - It supports many types of media -- TV, movies, music, live TV, and just plain ol' video. I store class lectures on Plex! - I'm able to stream very high bitrate movies (upwards 40mbps) without issue

Plex doesn't have the smoothest UX. You have to understand some technical concepts to use it effectively, e.g. sometimes I have to force a transcode when streaming an incompatible format. I have been very frustrated with Plex because of this.

I do wish that Plex would stop working on features that few use. I suppose this is a hard thing to do when they're working on a product that is so heavily associated with piracy.

I dunno, the things you say about Plex I would also say about jellyfin: requires a bit of fiddling, works very well, not always perfect. Jellyfin has bugs, but it's free and works for my use cases, and improves quickly. I like that I can, and have, compiled jellyfin from source when there was a bugfix for one of the features I use that hadn't made it into a point release yet.

I think all software comes with trade-offs and frustrations. It sounds like, for my uses, Plex would trade in a different set of frustrations plus cost money and be closed source.

So I guess it depends what you mean by "compete with" Plex, because for me, it's more like I haven't found anything that competes with jellyfin.

I moved from Plex to Jellyfin

>Some of the things I appreciate about Plex:

Jellyfin does this for free. I wanted to be able to create multiple accounts in Plex - but this needs a subscription or lifetime pass.

Jellyfin also does Movies, Music, and i have loaded a few training video's on it as well.

At the end of the day you can see where Plex is heading - Sell lifetime subs and then try to further monetize the customers to pay for monthly expenses Plex faces running the service... So i went to Jellyfin.

I used to love plex. Now I simply dread the quickly-approaching day when they move all my actual media under three submenus (from its current position of being two submenus away) and I am forced to migrate away. At this point in time, i am prepared to pay them to NEVER EVER change the ui, never shove another streaming shit in my face, and just update for new codecs and security fixes. Screw them for ruining such a useful tool!

I recently got my own server, and I installed Jellyfin. The payment part of plex would not have been an issue, but all the remote parts are. I’m not selfhosting because I want to login through a remote website. Let me buy the software and give me a license key, like with desktop software.

The Jellyfin Android TV app is pretty much okay for me. The browsing interface seems to default to a phone UI, but that was easily fixed.

Tried Jellyfin, but it doesn’t seem to have the capability to stream directly to my TV, it always wants to transcode it which strips away all the 4K and HDR niceties. While Plex would try its best to preserve the original stream and only transcode what the TV can’t support.

Also Plex’s clients are more polished, it actually feels like I’m browsing my own Netflix.

You can always turn off third party content in Plex (by unpinning them). I only use Plex locally so maybe that’s why I’ve been missing all the cloudy bloat lol.

Use a fire TV stick that costs virtually nothing and install the Jellyfin app. You are done.

“Buy an entirely new streaming device to use this service” is never ever a good answer. “Buy an ad-infested, Amazon tracking streaming device” also feels entirely antithetical to Jellyfin’s open source mission so there needs to be a better answer than that.

> “Buy an ad-infested, Amazon tracking streaming device”

You don't even need to use the amazon services. Just run the Jellyfin app and that's all you need to keep alive as a service, the rest you can blacklist. There are also ways to root those devices if you want to remove ads and more.

Yeah these sticks tend to use low powered SoC that chokes on anything higher than 1080p, not to mention missing codecs (Dolby Vision, ATMOS, DTS etc.) and lack of compliance.

If you don’t care about any of those or have a TV that don’t do 4K then yeah an Android box and lower fidelity source will do.

>Yeah these sticks tend to use low powered SoC that chokes on anything higher than 1080p

Is this the case on the "4k" version as well? i have both the original (1080p) and 4K version on my newer TV's and havent noticed it "choking"?

You have the 4k version of the stick these days that's still super cheap.

Emby has direct streaming but I've had problems with it. But it's free and the TV app is alright.

I had issues getting it to stream directly to my TV. It wasn't easy to find but what solved it for me was changing the DLNA profile settings like this example: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-docs/issues/233

Does it do partial transcode? My TV doesn’t support DTS and Plex would transcode it to AC3 and remux with the original video stream before feeding it to my TV.

Sorry, no idea

I need to make this jump at some point. I can cope with the money-grubbing UI changes but the Plex App for smart TVs and consoles is by far the worst piece of trash software I've ever used and certainly the worst I still use. It crashes constantly, it displays my progress in a video yet still restarts it from the beginning when I hit Resume, and it has absolutely no idea how to regulate its own performance. It will happily get so bogged down trying to apparently use a bitrate that's too high it takes over thirty seconds for the Back button to stop the video and return to the menu. It's not 2002 anymore, your video player should be able to tell when it's locking up every five seconds.

Is that an Android smart TV, Tizen, WebOS? I have mine setup through an Nvidia Shield (Android), and it's worked flawlessly for years.

I've used it on a Roku TV, a Roku stick, a Fire stick, a Samsung smart TV, a Hisense android smart TV, and a Sony smart TV. All miserable experiences. Perhaps the Shield has enough raw horsepower to make up for the app being garbage.

I’d love to use Jellyfin someday. Right now it doesn’t have broad enough support or the app ecosystem that I need. I use every OS and tvOS under the sun in my family. I need music apps for my music and audiobook apps for my audiobooks, so far I have only found this in plex (in addition to the video/tv/movies app).

Emby is commercial/what jellyfin forked from before they went closed source and has all the apps for every device and none of the streaming/ads/pushed online account nonsense

But it has lackluster options for music and audiobooks last I checked - something that I need just as much as tv shows and movies

I have actually been happy with Plex's direction over time. The free ad-supported section of Plex is easy enough to ignore but adds legitimacy to the service and gives revenue to the devs. The last thing I want is for Plex to become Kodi and then get removed from app stores and tvs because it is synonymous with easy and accessible piracy.

Especially since it seems like everybody who wants plex pass already has it and just buy it once from their secret sale emails and then never give them a cent again.

I'm still waiting for the Plex Original Series to start being produced. (ok not that)

Don't need secret sale emails, the lifetime Plex Pass is right there on their page: https://www.plex.tv/plex-pass/

Lifetime Plex for goes on sale a few times a year instead of $120 it goes down to like $75. Everybody (including me tbf) just waits a year until a sale and buys lifetime. I don't know why they keep offering deep discounts on their lifetime pass because their userbase has an upper limit - there's only so many people interested in running their own illegal piracy server

> there's only so many people interested in running their own illegal piracy server

The upper bound is roughly anyone who enjoys watching TV/movies, and owns a computer.

Yeah, that's the theoretical limit but you also need to understand VPNs, torrenting, local networks, etc. Plex/Jellyfin/Emby make it super easy on the network/port forwarding/GUI side but it doesn't help with the media itself.

Or you could go with ripping dvds you legally purchase at Goodwill.

If all you want is a server-based DVR for OTA TV, you need to understand none of those things, but still need Plex Pass for guide data.

Because their lifetime pass is a good way to increase their customer base, who they'll then have to monetize... because they sold an ongoing service requirement for a lifetime price...

Depending on how long you're willing to wait, their emails regularly have 20-50% off discounts on the lifetime pass

> The Jellyfin Android TV app is slightly worse than Plex’s, but they’re both dreadful to navigate with a remote control.

I don't really agree. I've been using Jellyfin for a while now (basically as soon as Emby went commercial) and I find it definitively nicer to browse than Plex. I just prefer the way the UI is structured, and my collections are still manageable enough that navigating with arrows is usable. I admit it probably could be improved, for larger collections, but it doesn't seem unusually bad to me personally.

Agreed, I'll take limited but straightforward over full featured but obfuscated any day.

I just switched to InFuse on my Apple TV, it provides a better experience than Plex, with just a SMB share. Everything is done locally and synced over iCloud. Not going back.

I also tried this. But I could never figure out why my windows 10 box couldn’t do a proper samba share.

Still use infuse, but through Plex server only.

I think it may have to do with the fact that Win10 disabled Guest access for SMB. Got bitten by this.

I use Jellyfin because I like to have everything in docker containers and be able to always access the service via a browser. It works great on a PC and on my Android (where I have an app as well).

This makes it also easier to secure the service via a proxy.

Where Jellyfin is abysmally bad is Amazon Firestick. I tried to use it but it would always crash after some time, I gave up and am using VLC + SMB on the TV. This is not sexy at all but at least I can watch a movie.

I use Plex server in Docker, it works fine.

Unless you don’t want to use their online accounts and want to bridge. If your client ip is not on the same subnet as the server it doesn’t allow you to use local accounts (at least when I last tried years ago)

Plex lost their best users by missing the point of self hosting entirely. Nobody wants to deal with third party downtime, even if it is rare and intermittent.

I think most products go through phases like this. Plex has some diehards that have stuck around (I think it's just buyers remorse for the Plex pass) but I think they are at a 5th or 6th tier of "customer" at this point, seeing the continuous churn spiral they are fighting.

> Nobody wants to deal with third party downtime

Not only that, I don't want my adblocker to have to block services running on my local network (they have some analytics + sentry).

Does this require any special set up?

I’m asking out of laziness.. my local server has pi hole set up, and the other devices use that for DNS thru Tailscale, but I’m not sure what gets blocked for stuff running on the server. I recall some Tailscale setup involved a flag to disable some DNS thing. Hmmm

In my case not really. There is server side scanning in which plex shares data about your media with their backend. Not sure if there is any setting to disable that.

As far as the web client goes ublock origin handles it for me.

Ok. As per my above comment, it should be possible to filter out the analytics/sentry via DNS using pi hole. In theory, you'd just have to set up your Plex machine to use pi hole DNS ad blocking, and ensure that the pi hole domain list includes analytics domains. And Tailscale MagicDNS with the primary DNS server being your Plex/pi hole server, with your other devices configured with Tailscale, should block everything.

The only potential blocker I can see is whether the HDMI streaming device makes HTTP requests, in which case it would need to use the Tailscale proxy, and I'm not sure if that's supported.

I haven't really encountered any issues besides the downtime that has occured maybe twice since I bought the yearly two years ago.

Everything just works and I never really notice those three submenus except when I'm logging into a new device and it takes like ~10 seconds to unpin them. Everything has been basically perfect for me.

> I haven't really encountered any issues besides the downtime that has occured maybe twice since I bought the yearly two years ago.

> I never really notice those three submenus except when I'm logging into a new device and it takes like ~10 seconds to unpin them.

Maybe it's just me, but the way you've written these sentences makes it sound like you have buyers remorse. Doesn't sound like things are "basically perfect."

FWIW, I left Plex two years ago for Jellyfin, and haven't looked back. Never even bought the garbage Plex Pass.

How does that sound like buyers remorse? Twice over two years is essentially nothing, and I do the ~10 seconds unpinning like twice a year. It's so close to basically no issues I consider Plex to be perfect for me.

Because if it was actually perfect that's the only feedback you'd give...?

> It's so close to basically no issues

There are issues. You can keep contradicting yourself by explaining how perfect means there are still problems. I'm enjoying it.

> It's so close to basically no issues

I don't think you understand what I mean. Plex has worked perfectly for two years straight. These 2 issues have taken up less than ~2 minutes of my life. That is equivalent to perfect from my point of view. Stop being unreasonably pedantic about my own words.

> Stop being unreasonably pedantic about my own words.

I'm taking your words at face value, you can communicate more clearly but it is your choice to do so.

Don’t forget about 3rd party security, they were recently hacked exposing customer accounts details. thier push for online accounts is what ruled it out for me.

You can’t auth directly to your server from a Plex app with a local account anymore? I thought you could still at some point in the past but haven’t tried it in awhile. I know you can still do that from a web browser (I believe)..

it's not officially supported so there's a workaround but that has its own limitations.

I started using plex when my synology nas stopped supporting smb1 and Sonos doesn’t support anything newer.

Do any of the competing solutions work with Sonos and have iOS and webOS (LG TV) apps?

Any Subsonic music server works well with this: https://github.com/simojenki/bonob

I guess I'm not one of Plex's best users. Huh.

I bought a 4k projector recently to use for a home theatre which came with AndroidTV. I have a small collection of 4k movies and shows that I wanted to enjoy, but my PC was on a different floor from my projector. I had used Plex a long time ago, and looked for an open source alternative and found JellyFin. It took like 20 minutes to get set up and start watching my content on my projector. The JellyFin AndroidTV app auto-discovered the server running on my PC, and it also supports streaming HEVC encoded content natively, which the web browser client on Firefox and Chrome doesn't seem to yet [1]. When I streamed HEVC content in the web browser client, the server was transcoding it on the fly, which was nice but it was sending my PC to 100% CPU. The library organization features are probably not as good as Plex's, but they are good enough for me.

[1] https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/

Chrome actually added HEVC support a couple of weeks ago.

As did the latest version of Plex in its web player.

FYI transcoding often borks HDR. Always try to direct play if possible.

Is it just me or has plex slowly become less stable? Everything from random crashes which can be solved by exiting and reentering the stream through to subtitles just not working at all?

On the fire tv client, every time I load up the client and watch the 1st video, none of the ui/buttons respond. If I back out and go back in then it all works fine. Started a few months ago after working perfectly for years.

I have that also, using a chrome cast, as well as the inbuilt chrome cast on another tv.

> Recently, I opened up Plex and couldn’t find my own content. My media content had been pushed aside into a submenu while the app promotes its own streaming media and premium services instead.

It's an annoying (but understandable from a business persepctive) default - but a few minutes digging in the settings and I figured out how to configure Plex back to how it was.

My issues with Plex run deeper - the music metadata handling has some serious issues and that's 50% of my usage.

And if that's ever fixed I won't be able to use it because I'm stuck on an older Pleax version.

This is so I can it on an older Mac Mini. Surely Plex should be embracing running on older hardware?

(I would need to update MacOS which makes the box unusuable because of limited soldered-on RAM)

From a practical point of view, if you’re already “just” using it as a media-server, wouldn’t a more realistic approach be to just install Linux on it?

That way you can dedicate almost 100% of the limited RAM to Plex and it should keep running fine?

I can't stream to a HomePod speaker with Linux that I'm aware of. There's other MacOS conveniences I use as well.

Is your Mac mini serving and playing your music, or serving only? The server wouldn’t stream directly to a HomePod speaker, and your player (perhaps on an iPhone or iPad?) would stream to your speaker equally whether the server runs on macOS or Linux.

I am interested in migrating to Jellyfin for most of the same reasons, but the apparent lack of an Apple TV app is a bit of a deal breaker.

They link to a commercial app for the AppleTV. It’s totally worth the $0.99/month until they get the official Swiftfin version working.

Someone else in this thread mentioned "Infuse" as a useable frontend.

I have used infuse with emby, it works pretty well however I still prefer the Emby app to it for ease of navigation.

Infuse is great, but they have a subscription if you want to play some media format. Quite cheap IMO and they have great apps for all Apple devices.

Swiftfin works fine. It was a little clunky to set up because you need to go through the apple beta software app, but I’ve been using it months with no major issues.

Pay for Emby, it’s a more polished jellyfin.

Plex sometimes annoys me, but it looks like Jellyfin doesn’t have the clients I need.

I use Plex on my XBOX, iPad, chrome cast, and computer. Plex has apps for all of those, but it looks like Jellyfin doesn’t have an XBOX player.

For what it's worth, the jellyfin web player worked fine for me on my ps4 web browser - never tried on my Xbox but would expect the same there.

For me, the main thing that's lacking in Plex is good support for audiobooks.

The storage and metadata backend are good, but I'm on Android and just couldn't find a good app that would:

1. work with Plex

2. play books both online and offline (by pre-downloading)

3. not require the Plex server to be exposed to the internet

4. (nice to have) sync reading position across devices

I played with the Plex app (doesn't remember where I left off), Chronicle (buggy to the point of unusable), Bookcamp (very fiddly to set up, requires the Plex server to be remotely accessible even when on the same LAN).

How's the Jellyfin ecosystem in this regard?

Jellyfin is just a dumb server, as in you can do the routing to it in any way you like. (Wireguard VPN, Tailscale, etc)

Offline playback is rather rare still. I know of Finamp and S2 [1] for music that support offline playback. You can download media in the official app, but you'll need a different player for playback. If you do offline playback, I don't think the reading position is synced to the server when you go online later.

Jellyfin's support for Audiobooks is still fairly rudimentary. Most of the features mentioned depend on the client app's level of support.

There's a feature request that details some of the support already in place: https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/243/audiobook-support

Support for resuming Audiobooks appears to have been added: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/2084

Sadly offline playback isn't really supported. The app can download files to your phone's Downloads folder but you'd have to play them elsewhere. There's no way of so through Jellyfin at the moment.

I have Apple devices and I use Infuse as my Jellyfin front end. It is excellent!

+1 for Infuse, well worth the price!

Don't you have to pay monthly for it unless you splurge for the hundred dollar lifetime? that's a lot of money for an iOS app.

99¢/mo or $10/yr iirc. Can't remember how much the lifetime is but I don't mind the annual sub as long as it keeps it maintained.

It’s pretty usable without a subscription.

Is there DVR support and, if there is, how does it compare to Plex?

For Plex, I built a thing that exposes my ISP's multicast TV as an HDHomeRun-compatible tuner, with EPG. This works fairly well.

The main thing that's missing in this setup is support for DVB teletext subtitles in Plex. I end up having to post-process TV recordings to extract subtitles and convert them to SRT. This is all a bit messy, since we get TV from multiple neighbouring countries and there are often multiple languages and different teletext page numbers. Also, the timing tends of be out of whack. This means that the text needs to be re-synchronised with the audio; the thing I have generally works OK, but tends to fall apart when the audio in one language and subtitles, in another.

It would be all much simpler if Plex had the ability to show teletext subtitles when playing MPEG transport streams. Unfortunately, it doesn't.

I wonder if Jellyfin would be an improvement in this regard?

Emby has a native Samsung Tizen app and Jellyfin doesn't. That's a bit of a dealbreaker for me.

I almost went the direction you did, but I got frustrated enough with Tizen and garbage ads in Samsung's UI that I went the Android TV stick direction. It's an extra $40-50 per TV, but I feel a bit more in control; now I just don't allow any of the smart TV functionality to be enabled, and keep the devices disconnected from the network. Thanks to HDMI CEC, the integration with the Samsung remote is fine, though I typically use the Google TV remote instead.

Edit: also, last I checked, Tizen still has no Twitch app, which is a bigger problem since Twitch had Samsung remove the unofficial one. I don't really like Twitch much, but still. YouTube's Android app is also better than it's Tizen app, even on low-end Android TV sticks.

Totally agree. It's an issue of getting it to work for family.

I have an old Samsung (2015). I stream jellyfin via DLNA. Works for me

Jellyfin doesn't have an official native app, but there's a quasi-official version [1] you can run. That said, it does require putting the TV into dev mode so you can sideload the app.

I've been running it for a while now and it's actually pretty good, I haven't had any major issues except one freeze when searching, but I'm pretty sure that was the fault of the raspberry pi running jellyfin

[1] https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-tizen

Yeah this is rough. Not the kind of thing you can easily do on a relative's TV. I would rather buy them a Roku/Chromecast at that point.

There are docker builds which are trivial to run from your laptop.

It requires some terminal stuff, but only for installation.

https://github.com/e7d/docker-jellyfin-for-tizen-installer

I wish the jellyfin android tv APK supported dolby vision. I use Kodi with the jellyfin plugin and this is great as it allows for 4k DV with Atmos on an Nvidia shield with jellyfin quarterbacking the whole thing. It also seems to work better than my previous shared library via MySQL as it will force an automatic library update on all devices with new content and sync watched state.

My server is headless only has an embedded graphics card so I wish I could disable transcoding outright as I can never get it to play high def content via a browser despite trying different settings (debian).

I don't really understand storing lots of common media. Storing your own photos I get, since only you have them. But how many times do you watch the same movies/shows over again?

Storing music makes a bit more sense, at least if you had the original media and it was ripped well. But that doesn't take much space at all; nowdays you can easily fit a huge music collection on a small storage device or even just in your phone+cloud drive+computer.

For me, it’s a nostalgia thing. I want to be able to watch obscure shows from my youth reliably. Having a funny moment from an old episode of Committed pop into my brain and not being able to show others is a major frustration.

It’s about having reliable access to the media that has been important to me.

Some things aren't available for streaming, so you have to find a way to download it. Sometimes you have a bunch of DVDs you want to store and watch digitally without buying it again.

And then sometimes there's shows that just aren't worth paying Amazon $25 each for 15 seasons so you pirate it.

Now you have video on a disk somewhere and want to watch it on your TV and phone and tablet and grandma's computer. Systems like this are arguably the least painful way of doing that.

Will you watch any of those videos multiple times? Probably not, but it will always be there if you want it. It won't randomly disappear on the whims of a third party just when you want to show a new friend this cool show they definitely need to watch.

You might not have noticed how many shows and movies have disappeared from streaming services over the last few years, but many people have.

At the end of 2016, Netflix has 4335 movies, in May 2021 they had 3622. If what you wanted to watch was one of those 713 movies, you might have been inspired to think, hey, maybe I don't want to rely on byzantine licensing agreements.

In addition, while several people are fixated on transcoding on this page, for reasons unclear to me, one hugely popular feature of Plex is sharing libraries with others, so you can grant your parents access to your library. It's not necessarily just "you" watching movies and show over again.

True story: Friday night I was at happy hour with former coworkers, and I brought up the movie _Attack the Block_. Turns out it's not available on any streaming service. Not a single one! You know where it is available? My Plex sever.

And that movie is worth watching again.

Also recently made the switch. I don't like that there isn't a Jellyfin app for my Samsung TV. Everything else about Jellyfin is 100% superior. Hands down.

It is actually possible, if complicated to get Jellyfin running in Tizen (Samsung TV OS): https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-tizen

The Jellyfin web interface is much better than the Android TV app. You’re not missing out.

I've given up on media server front ends - VLC or Infuse (iOS/MacOS/Apple TV) with an SMB endpoint is what I've migrated to.

I have experienced similar issues with Plex (feature bloat), and I just tried out Jellyfin. It seems to do everything I want, with one big exception: I can't get subtitles to render. I did some searching, and it looks like this is a known problem and has not been fixed. Happy to be proven wrong, since everything else about this software looks great. But I need subtitles.

Agreed, this is also mentioned in the (1.5 year old) article. As a hard of hearing person I thought they would prioritize accessibility, but that hasn’t happened yet.

My biggest complaint with Jellyfin and Emby is feature parity across platforms. Most everything works well in a web browser, but I almost never watch films on a laptop. My household uses Roku TV’s and there’s subtitles that just don’t work consistently, transcoding issues that cause entire films to be unplayable (despite working fine in plex).

I really want to switch off plex but with these two issues / core functionality not working I cannot consider it.

> The Jellyfin Android TV app is slightly worse than Plex’s, but they’re both dreadful to navigate with a remote control. Neither apps do a good job with subtitles and subtitle customization. Instead of the apps, I watch media via the Jellyfin web player instead of in a web browser on my home theater computer (HTPC).

My question is how easily can you share a library or folder with someone else by just getting their email address? That’s a great feature of Plex

There’s no cloud services in Jellyfin. You have to set up a VPN on your server, and an account for them on the VPN, plus create a user account for them on Jellyfin. It’s not impossible, but it’s more work.

I tried to switch to jellyfin from plex, but the TV app is not yet good enough. The subtitles looked ugly, there was no way to customize it. They are huge, almost covering up a quarter of my 55 inch screen.

Apart from this one issue, I didn't feel anything missing. It's quite good. I don't see a reason to use plex over jellyfin unless you want some of their paid features.

I use Jellyfin’s web interface on the TV. It’s way better than the Android TV app.

I'll try it!

Is Jellyfin yet able to actually keep up with auto scanning for new files without taking an entire day? I don't want to have to manually tell it to update all the time, and I don't want to have to wait over night if I let it auto scan.

I keep wanting to use Jellyfin, but there just keep being unacceptable flaws like the above (from earlier this year).

Jellyfin should update immediately for local changes by watching the filesystem.

If you're talking about for network shares, that's just a scheduled task. You can set the timer yourself to whatever you want.

Jellyfin is awesome. I just wish the default client would allow music playback without stuttering when screen is off on android https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-android/issues/39

As soon as there is an Apple TV app I will switch. Infuse is... "fine", but I want an official app.

Here is the beta app for Apple TV: https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin

It‘s a bit unstable for me, so I switched to the web app on my iPad and beam it with AirPlay to my Apple TV.

Weirdly Plex has gotten good at music. Which it used to suck at. But Plexamp and sonic analysis is cool.

Unfortunately Jellyfin is nowhere close to feature parity with Plex. It may be a perfect replacement or it may be borderline useless, it depends completely on your use case.

In general, my experience is that Jellyfin works fine as long as you’re willing to use a browser to stream the video.

I don't understand why I'm the only one connecting a real low power NUC linux computer to the TV instead?

Wireless keyboard and mouse and you solve ALL media problems!

You can even play Minecraft on the TV, can Jellyfin do that?

That said linux has vsync issues still, but it's mostly unnoticable.

I’ve had jellyfin deployed from a helm char allong with the servarrs for a few years.

Just want it to randomly play stuff as getting through big library is problematic.

My NAS did celebrate 365 days uptime and I posted on Twitter and now the TrueNAS team is sending me some swag

I check on Jellyfin every few months. So far I still prefer the Plex UI, apps and feature set (especially all the AI based music playlist stuff in plexamp) but I'll switch over as soon as I think the alternatives are competitive.

I like Kodi.

I have a NAS with a bunch of movies, and Plex was fine but it had a lot of features around streaming to friends and I don't have any desire to share content outside of my living room. Kodi meets all my needs.

When I looked into Jellyfin last year, the main problems were:

- Can't connect to people's existing Plex servers.

- Can't just invite someone without storing their password on my server. No support for (e.g.) OAuth2.

>Can't connect to people's existing Plex servers.

Right, Jellyfin has nothing to do with Plex other than competing with it. It's not a Plex client.

> - Can't connect to people's existing Plex servers.

This is such a weird thing to write.

I was shocked to learn that very nice seat from my ex-wife's Lexus wont fit in my Hyundai?

Is the opposite true, can the plex client connect to jellyfin?

Plex and Jellyfin are competitive, why is there some implied compatibility?

I'm not shocked, I was highlighting that Plex has network effects that make switching more difficult.

> p1mrx 10 hours ago | undown | prev | next [–]

>When I looked into Jellyfin last year, the main problems were: >- Can't connect to people's existing Plex servers.

that isnt what you wrote is it?

you looked at jellyfin last year and listed that it did not support connecting to plex as a "problem". Why would you think that jellyfin not connecting to plex is a problem?

> Why would you think that jellyfin not connecting to plex is a problem?

A problem can have no obvious solution, yet still be a problem. If you want to use existing Plex servers, then that makes migrating to Jellyfin problematic.

Yup, I switched to Jellyfin from Plex for the same reasons. It’s great.

I've never had luck getting Jellyfin's metadata matching to work as well Plex. I feel like I'm doing something wrong. To me it's almost unusable.

Biggest selling point of Jellyfin for me is that it has a Roku app. It still needs some work and some polish but it's very usable. Also the dev community is huge.

I use https://www.directorylister.com/ to share my media files.

My NAS came with Twonky media server and with Plex ... Twonky was easier to setup so thats what I use. Anyways I doubt a NAS can transcode 4k movies)

An open-source (and charityware) software I wrote: Video Hub App - shows screenshots from inside each video as you scroll across the thumbnail (scrub). I didn't like the interface of various video browsers / launchers - perhaps others will find what I created to their taste:

https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

https://videohubapp.com/

I paid for Plex and have never seen any ads. I tried Jellyfin and required too much tinkering. If you spend more than an hour tinkering with Jellyfin it's worth it to pay for Plex lifetime and be done with it. A good example of this is using it say on an Apple TV or more niche devices.

That being said, I do like Jellyfin and it's fine for tinkerers. Things like sharing, watching together, etc are a huge pain with Jellyfin.

Does Jellyfin do title skips / variable speed playback?

There is a plug-in for title skips. Not sure ab variable speed playback

I think it's funny everyone is complaining about Plex forcing you to sign in... and the first thing Jellyfin does when you click "see it in action" is force you to sign in. Just saying...

There is a piece of text just below that reads:

TO LOG IN: User "demo", empty password

Thanks, honestly I missed this. Kinda funky UX. https://i.imgur.com/GwNED5K.png

This is some sort of joke right?

you are comparing jellyfin's online demo and its requirement to "login" to show you how it works and how it supports multiple accounts vs plex's inability to use the app if you dont login to servers hosted by Plex?

Once i install jellyfin, the only "login" is to my own server, and this is because by default jellyfin supports multiple users unlike Plex which requires a membership to enable this feature.

nonsense.

im pretty happy with jellyfin. shame it cannot load external subtitles when playing movies on my Samsung TV via DLNA :(

I fell like infuse on iOS and Apple TV is way ahead in simplicity.

Share network folder, and done.

Does it have subtitle support?

Yep.

I love open source and free stuff, but I also understand that there is nothing for free.

This thread is packed with people wanting a free service, better open source for their (hopefully legal acquired) media. The code of the services is written by programmers in (mostly) their free time, the movies are produced by professionals and all you want is it even more cheaper! I wonder if you see that most of this "free stuff" you and I use every day was not accidentally "here" but financed by ads via Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, etc.

Accept that sometimes ads are ok because it enables this freedom.

I myself use a pihole in my network to reduce the ads which works quite well to block annoying stuff.

Normally I dont explain my downvotes but i will do this here.

> Accept that sometimes ads are ok because it enables this freedom. > I wonder if you see that most of this "free stuff" you and I use every day

I've used Linux for decades but never saw a single ad yet this is "free"?

I also use a lot of opensource software (Libreoffice, Opera, you get the idea) none of these have ads.

As you said the code is written by people in their free time, if they want to support it via ads they are free to do so, but very few do.

If I pay for something I'd rather not have ads on top of this. They should have charged more instead of getting me as a customer and then putting ads into things.

Jellyfin is free and lacks ads. Plex charges a fee and has ads?

Open software is important as it enables developer to learn and to value the community around the ecosystem. But please think about not just the software part. You use open software, but where was it stored? Who paid for the infrastructure to reach you home so that you can download it? Where was it built, was it a free service like github actions? Who pays the hundred of people to build the service and who pays the guys who maintains the servers and avoid the DDoS? Look, I don't want to fight nor was it my intention. I wanted to raise the awareness that the free software is not free and the people shouldn't take it granted just because they have the access to the stuff.

My time in front of a TV screen is 10 minutes per year, basically the count down of new year at Times square that is. I use my computer(streaming services, e.g. prime video, netflix,etc) and youtube for entertainment needs. For big movies I went to theaters. From the comment here I realize there are still lots of TV watchers, even though TV is probably just acting as a big screen.

I'm guessing you're mostly watching alone? If you want to watch with others then watching on a TV is really the only possibility.

Watching Netflix, etc is watching TV.

You should buy a TV. They’re cheap and great.

I had two TVs(47", not that large) for like 10 years, but rarely anyone in the house ever used them, everyone stares at their smaller screen these days somehow.

Where do people watch TV shows and movies? On their phones?

https://youtu.be/wKiIroiCvZ0

or your 27"/32"/42" computer monitors

So people are watching stuff on monitors?

You are surprised families aren't gathering around a 14 inch laptop screen to watch films?

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