Finally, I discovered the combination of Jellyfin and Infuse App. It works really well.
I'm already paying for everything that incurs costs: it's my hardware, streaming my media, on my local network.
The only things left are users & developers donating time and energy to the project - and right now there are enough of us doing that to keep it alive.
This is absolutely not something that needs a subscription cost.
If you want to help - https://jellyfin.org/contribute/
Having a server you can stream from - you're right.
For the other features, you're likely wrong. As in - the open source space hasn't come up with a viable solution. I use Plex for DVR, and beyond the one time fee it works. For DVR you need to get the OTA channel guide, and all the reliable services out there charge a subscription fee - which over time will cost more than the Plex one time fee.
Also, how good is Jellyfin at skipping credits and ads?
As I pointed out in another comment - I'll happily use Jellyfin once it is there. As of now, every time I try it the experience is worse than Plex. So Plex it will be till JF gets there.
Or - and I know people don't love this answer - just host it publicly. Yes - it requires some monitoring and a little bit of attention, but at the end of the day it's not that hard, and the risks are fairly low (even if it gets compromised - the world is not over).
Jellyfin has apps (which do incur a bit of overhead for maintainers in actual dollars) but honestly, as long as you're not on iphone, you can just build them locally and sideload them. No store/publisher required.
I primarily use the android tv client on a nvidia shield running a custom ROM.
I tried using it again 2 years ago - and I simply couldn't find my media anymore. I logged in with my account, and the settings showed me that it was connected to my server, but it showed me a bunch of random media that I did not add to my server. I couldn't find a way to navigate to my media after a couple of minutes, so I uninstalled it, replaced it with Jellyfin, and never looked back.
Maybe I was too blind to find it, but showing me random media instead of my own is a no-go for a local media server.
If Plex kept my content frond-and-center and added useful features on top (e.g. Prime Videos additional information while pausing) I could even have seen myself subscribing to their service. But making the software annoying to use for its main purpose ensures I'll never spend a cent on it.
I think you're correct, and this is why I forgive Plex its annoying transgressions.
I don't think it's pushing you to them at all, if you're looking at a show or movie that's available to you via Plex, they're listed first.
Plex has always had some minor frustrations, but this is probably enough to make me switch.
If you don’t know which library on the list to click on or drag around, maybe you’ll have a hard time in general.
It's been a while since I last tried setting it up, but I can't remember anything during the setup talking about external streaming libraries. I tried setting it up in the way I expected it to work based on my previous knowledge.
> If you don’t know which library on the list to click on or drag around, maybe you’ll have a hard time in general.
I didn't see anything in the UI on my TV mentioning different libraries, or giving me the option to switch from the external Plex library to my own. At a certain point these things stop being user problems and become UX problems.
After you create a Plex instance, you still need to go and create a “Movies” library, a “TV Shows” library, maybe a “Music” library, an “Audiobooks” Library and so on. Those are the ones that show on the left panel in the Web UI, TV App etc. It’s how you manage your media in general
During initial setup, Plex will show you a list of “Default Libraries” that have names like “Discover”, “Web”, etc. You can unselect them. You can also remove them from your Library list later on.
<Response code="503" title="Maintenance" status="Plex Media Server is currently running startup maintenance tasks."/>
They respawn.
1. You have to use their login service to log into a server that's... self-hosted.
2. The Plex app has very limited codec support, at least on iOS. In particular, I rip directly from disc and Plex would require transcoding for UHDs, or Blu-rays with TrueHD/DTS/etc. audio. Infuse has support for all of that out of the box so my Jellyfin server doesn't do any transcoding at all, and AppleTV/iPad/etc. are more than capable of decoding even full bitrate UHD content.
I can watch my Jellyfin shows from a Flatpak local client on my desktop, pause and move to my phone, pause and move to my TV. That's three different operating systems, and at no point do they transcode, because it's not going through a browser.
Personally, my main beef is that as a client app, the streaming service stuff has bled into the personal library UI in obnoxious ways. For example, the default "tab" is called "Recommended". This shows some kind of algorithm-based feed of stuff they think you want to watch. This tab is the default even for your own private library. Why would it suggest stuff from a library that I curate? It's very strange. In the browser, it remembers your last active tab to some extent, but the native apps (like on AppleTV) does not. When I open the app and go to a folder, I just see recommended stuff. Similarly, if you go to the screen for a TV show in your library, it will show a "Related shows" section. It's my library, I know what is there, I don't want these spammy algorithmic things.
Occasionally I run into other parts of the app, which invariably try to steer me towards using their streaming service. It's just a constant reminder of how it's no longer designed for my purposes.
Mostly to try and help save time, eg to suggest you could resume a couple of recently watched episodes that you haven’t finished yet.
Or that you might want to watch something that was just added to the library in the last few minutes.
In most cases this has proved useful to me and I’ve found it to be a timesaver.
- "Recently released" and "Recently added", which I agree are useful — but don't belong in a separate tab, as I always sort by recentness.
- "Start watching": Shows it thinks I should start watching; why? I know what I have and what I intend to watch.
- "Rediscover": Shows I have started watching but not finished, pointless. I could just browse.
- "More in [random genre]": Pointless, I know my library, it's my library.
- "Top rated TV": Ditto.
- "Recently played": Never use this, doesn't belong under "Recommended".
It's all just pointless stuff, and not appropriate as a default view when I'm navigating into my own library.
For random episodes Plex decides it must transcode (even though they play just fine over DLNA). (I have transcoding disabled so it just refuses to play those.)
Randomly just a blank screen after the last episode in a deck is done playing.
Resuming from screensaver ends up in a broken user select screen half of the time. One time it was even showing the user select while the remote was still blindly controlling the UI hidden behind the logon, as the last user.
1) Adding new users is harder than it should be (the sharing tab takes me to ‘camera roll’ and ‘synced content’ on my phone. ‘Manage library access’ is the correct section to go to.
2) Getting new users to watch default res (not transcode) is not easy.
3) Deleting the pinned crap that gets added every so often is frustrating.
4) Finding a particular setting when you want it is way too hard - settings are too spread out.
5) Splitting out content is irritating (eg mine versus a library shared with me).
6) The server can end up chewing up an absolute mass of storage with its logs, and app data. This is hard (impossible?) to manage from the UI.
7) Probably not a UI bug, but Plex loses the sound/video sync sometimes. Making the show transcode is the only reliable fix I’ve found. I wish I could chose to advance or regard the audio in settings while watching. Or even better, just not break.
I looked at Jellyfin about a year ago and settled on just playing media from my NAS using Infuse but maybe I need to take another look
Recently checked the metadata cache which was about 1.9GB which felt a bit bigger than I’d have expected but I’m not sure what a typical value is
But the unfortunate flipside is it seems like the best clients (so far) do not support transcoding very well, they want to direct stream.