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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

As someone who was late to the game, I never even considered Plex and have been totally satisfied with Jellyfin. Is there anything better about Plex?

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* Accelerated TV support - Jellyfin sometimes struggles to play media that plex has no problem with. This is across an old Apple TV and an oldish LG tv.

* general Tv support - no Jellyfin app on Samsung TVs (at least older ones)

* General challenges to get things to start - it never worked for me out-of-the-box

* slightly weird sign in flows because it’s all self-hosted (have to first install a mobile app to make signing in on TV app smoother unless you happen to have your computer and TV side by side)

* weird issues with things suddenly stopping to work: DLNA was working but without any changes I can think of on my end it no longer works

* weird dlna support - at least with iOS VLC it didn’t work smoothly - like VLC sometimes wouldn’t see the announcement or something and I’d have to reset. Could be a VLC issue but don’t recall similar problems with Plex

So basically Plex is a smoother, easier to use experience that typically “just works” without issues.

These are the pain points I experienced moving from Plex to Jellyfin a while ago:

- Jellyfin forced me to organize my files into Show/Season folders, whereas Plex just handled my original flat mess of scattered files.

- When playing video on Plex, I generally have to wait some time before subtitles show up, whereas the subtitles in Plex just show up immediately

- Plex has built in search for openly available subtitles matching your video that you can use if your video lacks subtitles (not sure if Jellyfin has it too)

That said, I still prefer Jellyfin for numerous other reasons, and I don't regret my migration.

yes it does, you can use the opensubtitles plugin

> Jellyfin forced me to organize my files into Show/Season folders

Regarding this, try out sonarr/radarr with hard links.

No don't, sonarr is definitely worse if you have a unstructured media folder. I currently use it and its good, but I remember when first starting out with pile of files in semi random folders it being a mess to start up. Like some of the restrictions of the bulk importer made very little sense. Also, sonarr is tied to a single metadata provider which sometimes makes very unpopular decisions about the naming of series and episodes. When pluribus was initally released, they insisted on naming the series "plur1bus" even though no other source, imdb or even AppleTV used that as the official name. This broke auto downloading for the season.

Does sonarr/radarr fix not having to use Show/Season structure?

> Jellyfin forced me to organize my files into Show/Season folders, whereas Plex just handled my original flat mess of scattered files.

You keep all your shows in a single directory? or just sorted into folders per show?

I haven't had any issues with files just sorted into show folders for shorter series, but even in general it's very un-particular about filenames as long as you have `<show name> (<year>) S<Season #>E<Episode #>` (and it accepts a decent number of formats for season/episode number, and year is usually only needed if you need to differentiate shows with the same name).

I'd say the biggest difference is Plex had years to get polish and mature. (After you turn off all the annoying features ...). So Jellyfin is missing little things, or has apparent bugs (especially on android tv). For example no way to remove a series from Continue Watching, or quickly reload metadata for one series.

Last I looked (perhaps some have changed?)

- plex has some fancy remote access thing so it can figure out your home network IP without DNS. You need to use VPN/Tailscale or self host something that advertises your IP if you want remote access with Jellyfin.

This is lame if your use case is “my parents remote play from my server from their smart TV” - getting VPN working on a smart TV can be a lot of hassle.

- Jellyfin iOS did not support continuing to play on app switch last I looked (it must have focus or playback stops). Plex app does not have this issue.

I will also say the new pricing structure is a non starter to me, if I wasn’t grandfathered into a lifetime pass from when it was cheaper I would not use Plex anymore. But I do have the pass so I’m not super motivated to change (for now)

Plex has better client support. But Jellyfin being open source client support is catching up quickly.

Not really.

Plex was the jellyfin of the 2010’s. Pirate-centric (or at least agnostic), hobbyist focused, a bit hard to use and ugly but super valuable.

Then they went corporate and yeah it’s weird and in decline.

I think that's put it maybe a bit better than I did. I moved from running XBMC then a bit of Kodi to Plex but was really stubborn about it. Once I made the move over because my new Smart TV had the Plex app I was sold. Jellyfin hits that sweet spot of being what Plex was but I hope they manage to weather the storm of losing a lot of their core team from the beginning.

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