How to Setup a Plex Media Server on Raspberry Pi

Plex is, without question, better. It works better, it looks better, it was easier to set up (iirc).

Jellyfin looks and feels like your typical mediocre open source project. The core functionality is there, and it does 90% of what it should 90% of the time. It's okay. I have many minor and major annoyances, but it works good enough.

The reason I don't use Plex is simple: I refuse to make an account to access my own media. I refuse to be advertised to by software on my own server. I don't like their business model, so I politely refuse them and use the inferior alternative.

I'm at a point in my life where I find these kinds of practices objectionable and I just don't want to expend any mental effort dealing with it. I'm hosting media that I own, on a physical box in my actual house. Having software require an account on a remote server, or "premium" features, or ads and nags is just beyond unacceptable to me. I don't care that it can be turned off or worked around, it doesn't matter. Plex just isn't better enough for me to justify dealing with a business in any capacity.

Jellyfin is free, and it works well enough. Knowing that I control the software at every stage between my sever and my couch is much more valuable to me than the relative minor convenience of Plex.

I periodically try jellyfin, usually after plex does something else annoying to its userbase, and keep coming back to plex.

Jellyfin’s menus experience, particularly the cover art and metadata matching, seems to be worse than plex’s and I haven’t bothered to figure out what the difference is.

I’ve had tons of transcoding issues I’ve never had with Plex. Particularly with 4K. It was problematic with Plex, but Jellyfin on Android TV is often just completely broken, or has glitches in the video stream. I’ve tried different backend players, no dice.

I’ve had audio lag issues with Jellyfin that I’ve never had with Plex or other streaming apps.

Plexamp was awesome. Jellyfin’s music player is barely functional.

The item matching in Plex was sometimes strange. Jellyfin feels like it would rather pick an obscure stage production from 1947 than to pick a Disney movie from 2019. The music matching in Jellyfin is, for me, broken 50% or more of the time. I hope my tastes in Classical Crossover aren’t that obscure.

I don’t have an Apple TV; but for the love of Pete, I would pay so much if Infuse finally supported Music.

I ditched Plex after I couldn't watch my own media when I lost internet at my house.

I'm running the latest TrueCharts release on TrueNAS Scale with a CPU that supports Intel QuickSync (Xeon E-2324G) but no dice yet. Whenever 'Enable hardware encoding' is checked everything stops working. Not sure if the problem is with TrueNAS Scale or Jellyfin but there isn't an abundance of information/guidance out there just yet.

Simply map a volume to your local folder & bring up the service.

Jellyfin has been on the upgrade list for a while. I think what keeps me on plex is the level of integration.

i.e. home assistant, works on all my devices etc.

As much as its a little older, I find it just kinda works and I haven't really found any reason to upgrade yet.

also bought the lifetime pass so I get a bunch of extra features.

The company has been pretty decent with new apps and features.

I.e. the plexamp is amazing. Full poweramp like interface and feature richness from a self hosted music library. Feels like better self hosted spotify