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Comment by stuckinhell | Hacker News Reader

Yikes, just use jellyfin. I find it far superior in just about everything.

This is laughably false. JF has very bad matching, bad UI, no theme music (the third party plugin is awful) and any Plex feature equivalent is supplied by a random third party plugin that barely works. I spent 3 weeks trying to migrate to JF from Plex and I found it vastly inferior on every metric including playback where I had to play around with each client SEPARATELY just so it plays content.

This makes it out to be so much worse than it actually is.

It's good at what it does - serving media to all your devices. No online accounts, no phoning home, no advertisement, no BS. I've had no trouble with either the web UI or any of the apps available on android/TV. Admittedly I've never used Plex but I can't imagine it doing any of that much better.

It's not hard to miss what you don't know. But take intro skipping. Awesome feature. JF still doesn't have it. It's not necessary, but hard to give up. And frankly you shouldn't have to give it up. The swiftfin client still is missing features. Oauth is still a "won't support" feature. The devs abandoned and locked their subreddit in a fit of pique. There's a litany of reasons the project won't replace plex.

>no theme music

oooh BIG selling point for me.

It has it, the plugin works fine.

no you miss my point. I hate that feature. I may move to JF just so i dont get it :-P

Oh haha, I guess I did. I don't use Plex, but surely you can just turn it off in preferences somewhere?

I set up a local streaming server for the first time about two months ago. I'd initially intended to use Plex because it's the option most people I know use. I was shocked when it prompted me to setup an account with a third-party (PlexCorp or whatever) during the install process. I did a quick web search about this concern, found Jellyfin and haven't looked back.

I have Jellyfin setup alongside Plex, and the one thing that's keeping me from moving fully off Plex is Plexamp [1]. It works flawlessly on my phone/laptops, includes a ton of features and is a pleasure to use - especially compared to Spotify or Apple Music.

I am aware of FinAmp [2] and music players for Jellyfin, but they aren't comparable to PlexAmp yet.

1. https://www.plex.tv/plexamp/

2. https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp

I just use the jellyfin app for my music

In my opinion if your use case is watching your small collection of your own tv shows and movies on your computers use jellyfin, for anything else use Plex.

I love and have used both and while Jellyfin is great at that one thing if you need good mobile support or Roku/Apple TV support or similar it just fails miserably. If you want to have a music or audiobook collection it does even worse.

My understanding is that the Jellyfin team is working hard on the clients story. But yes, right now, the story is a bit lacking. Note that there are third-party alternatives that can fill the gap such as Infuse on iOS/tvOS.

We all know the workarounds and bypasses and the "pay infuse so you don't pay plex". But come on, it's a tacit admission that plex is on a better position: which is all the op said.

Are you responding to the right comment? I simply stated that Jellyfin is working on improving client support, but it's not there yet.

And yes, some people prefer using Jellyfin and paying for Infuse over using Plex. Different strokes for different folks.

I use a native client or browser on every device I use for it?

For reasons like this, it seems that none of the current media library packages are really excellent across the board. They’ve all got significant weaknesses/downsides which is frustrating.

It makes me wonder how difficult/involved implementation of the API that clients like Infuse use to communicate with Plex, Kodi, Emby, etc is, as the aforementioned frustration makes it tempting to try writing a media server myself, and I expect that API be the most challenging part.

Yea I have about 20 friends and family who use my Plex server. So at the moment I dont think JellyFin is a good alternative. But I did put out a big PSA to everyone to turn that newsletter crap off.

Web interface works perfectly fine on mobile? To the point where I haven't bothered to see if there is a native app.

Kodi plugin works great too and easy enough with LibreElec or similar.

Not sure what "anything else" could be.

I use Infuse for Jellyfin on Apple TV and it works wonderfully.

In my experience infuse only technically worked on about half my library, the other half caused crashes and the UI is definitively not streamlined for the media server use case (it feels like I should just be using VLC on iOS via DLNA or something at that point)

It's small compared to the collected works of every streaming service on the Internet, but it won't suddenly and mysteriously get deleted when a streaming license contract expires, and with 18 TB drives on the market, it certainly doesn't seem small.

I use Jellyfin on Roku and Apple TV and the Jellyfin apps work just fine. Sometimes the Roku app loses its credentials, but they’re working on these issues and the apps keep getting better. Although I only use Jellyfin on a local network.

Why not use both? I run both in LXCs, Plex has a little more hardware since its transcoded isn’t as good but I point them both at the same NFS share. Everybody happy.

Well, not the movie studios and music labels I guess.

I've seen jellyfin come up a lot in these conversations. Curious to hear some opinions on my situation.

I've been doing the self-host Plex server thing since long before it was anything else (late aughts). I don't use it for anything else. While I'm all for switching to something else, my tolerance to level of effort is quite low so inertia has been the thing keeping me on Plex.

How quick & easy would it be to convert to something like jellyfin for self hosting?

Potential gotchas: in terms of tech stack I run the server on a Synology NAS so would need something that runs there. And 99% of my streaming is to Roku sticks, so there'd need to be an app there.

I can't speak to the skills/effort required from you, but those two particular gotchas are covered. It's a fairly common use case.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/synology/

https://channelstore.roku.com/details/cc5e559d08d9ec87c5f30d...

Don’t need to switch, run both. They both run on Synology due to Docker as well. Point them at the same share and you’re good to go.

jellyfin absolutely crawls compared to something like stashapp but its branded for certain content ;)

Interesting. I found it to be compromised in almost every way, but it’s made substantial progress. Each time I try it I end up going back to Plex.

Is it? I've honestly been looking for alternatives lately, I've been a plex user for a decade but it feels like it gets worse every time they drop an update. Examples:

- I do not need or want a Recommendation tab for my own media library, and there's no way to remove it

- The web player is straight up broken on MacOS

- The Apple TV app is slow and sometimes doesn't play sound

- Demanding a registered account when you only use the app/server locally and it's absolutely not required, and wasn't always.

The main usage for me is via Apple TV and I see there's a SwiftFin app available, which sounds about right? Would you recommend Jellyfin to me?

I switched from Plex to jellyfin because the Plex Android TV app couldn't play 4K video, while VLC and jellyfin could do so reliably on the same device. All transcoding was disabled, so I know it was a client issue.

Jellyfish may not have some nicer finishes such as trailer fetching or better correlation of collections, but it's a reliable navigator of my media library.

I set up a Jellyfin instance on a surplus 1L PC a few months ago. It honestly works great. I use the Roku and Android apps. No reason to use Plex anymore.

I even set up a Raspberry Pi at my mother in law's house which exposed my Jellyfin instance on her LAN via Tailscale and an nginx reverse proxy, it works flawlessly.

> I do not need or want a Recommendation tab for my own media library, and there's no way to remove it

It's open source and recently called out for developers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37744114

Might be an easy change for someone on HN to add a toggle.

Oh I was talking about Plex, hopefully jellyfin doesn't add this, haha. Apologies for the confusion.

> The Apple TV app is slow and sometimes doesn't play sound. The main usage for me is via Apple TV…

You can try Infuse an an alternative client to Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin: https://firecore.com/infuse

You should try out the Infuse app. It’s a fantastic front end for jellyfin on Apple TV (and other Apple products)

It is a $1/month for some of the advanced encoding though

I wanted to try it but it seems there's no free usage on the Apple TV, at least for my HD and 4K library?

So in the course of trying Infuse I had to link it to Plex, which to do that they direct you to plex.tv/link (which to reaffirm what I said in my initial comment, this just shouldn't be needed, why can't I just add my plex server details in the app but that's not Infuse's fault) so I go to plex.tv/link and the form breaks immediately, with a box to input the code and a spinner saying it's checking the code I haven't entered, I enter the code and hit enter, I'm prompted to create an account, NOT sign in even though I was directed here by a link page which just strikes me as wrong, I have to click an extra thing to get a sign in form, which I do, then it takes me BACK to the link page, where I put in the code to the still broken form, hit enter, then it reloads the link page, now that's fixed at least, so I enter the code a THIRD TIME to accomplish this very straightforward fucking task, and it FINALLY links to my plex server.

And I only share this both to bitch my way to a small amount of catharsis and also this is such a handy encapsulation of the enshittification of plex I've witnessed over the many years I've used it. God fucking damn.

And to reaffirm: All the plex linking does is inform Infuse of my local server's settings which I could've just TYPED. THE FUCK. IN. With my iPhone. Sweet Baby Ray's.

These are problems you've been having with Plex?

I use it daily, and have no trouble with either the macOS web player (in Safari), nor the Apple TV app, in general.

That said, I do sometimes have trouble with certain media acting a bit squirrely when it tries to auto-convert them—in particular, one show we've been watching recently we had to start, then quickly scrub back to the beginning or it wouldn't play sound.

Then I re-encoded it manually using Handbrake and replaced the wonky copy with that, and it's been fine ever since. (And, of course, since I'm using a 2011 Mac mini to actually run Plex, there are some shows I have to preset to optimize or it won't be able to keep up with playback, but that's just the kind of thing one has to expect with this sort of setup.)

X2 for jellyfin. Run it in a container on my nas box.

Very glad I made the move as well. Fun to watch them dismantle it from the curb though.

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