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Comment by jjcon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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)

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