Honest question, because I know multiple people who are not looking to jump ship since they already have the Plex Pass.
Jellyfin doesn’t have a client/app for my Samsung Frame TV
People who are staying on Plex, have you tried Jellyfin? What about it do you not prefer? (real question)
Submitted 1 month ago by kiol@discuss.online to selfhosted@lemmy.world
Comments
jsnfwlr@lemmy.ml 1 month ago mrnarwall@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I started with jellyfin, and eventually let my partner convince me to pay for a lifetime pass for Plex. Plex just has better functionality. Not only can I access my library from anywhere, the subtitles work without fiddling with different srt files, the error messages are much more descriptive, and I find the documentation for adding OTA antenna and DVR functionality much more comprehensible with Plex.
I like jellyfin for what it is, but Plex makes it all work with far less headache and much better support. So Plex wins, in my mind for now.
And with all that being said, I got my Plex lifetime pass a few years ago, so the value I have will not be the same as yours if you are just now starting to consider Plex, so I can understand why you might have a different opinion
BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
I just want Findroid to support transcoding. I hate that the official app is very obviously just a webview - I mean if I couldn’t tell then I wouldn’t care, but it doesn’t feel very native and behaves slightly glitchy when navigating around. Sometimes instead of scrolling, the webview does the little “stretch bounce” overscroll thing. I wish they could get an experienced android dev to make a polished native-feeling app.
I honestly feel like 99% of my aesthetic issues with jellyfin would be solved by having the Overseer devs do a redesign. Overseer looks amazing and I tried to make a jellyfin theme to copy it and Plex, but found that not enough elemts had classes for me to select with CSS so I gave up. Jellyfin vue looks pretty good but suffers the same problem as third party apps - being under heavy development with lots of missing features (last I checked I couldn’t get subtitle selection to work)
Here’s a bonus one: why does the Plex search results look so much better??
TedZanzibar@feddit.uk 1 month ago
I tried Jellyfin once about a year ago and it was… OK I guess? Certainly nowhere near as polished as the rabid fan base would have me believe, and there was something in my library that it flat out refused to play.
If I didn’t already have a lifetime Plex Pass, and it was just me hosting my own media for a user count of one, then sure, I’d use it. But none of those things are true. I need something that “just works” and Plex fits that bill.
Like most people here, I bought a lifetime pass when it was $75 and it’s paid for itself over and over again in the time since. I honestly think I’ve had more than $750 worth of value from my purchase. Sure they’ve made some odd decisions recently, but until they start actively taking away functionality or rescind existing lifetime subs then I will continue to use it.
Meanwhile, not to belittle you personally, but the fact that every thread that mentions Plex in any way, good or bad, is guaranteed to be dominated by people circle-jerking over their beloved Jellyfin has put me completely off the project, to the point that I’ve had to add the word to my blocklist. Obviously that’s not working too well or I wouldn’t have seen this post!
melsaskca@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
I use Plex to save money on plumbers because I cannot solder. Plex gives me the ability to exact repairs myself.
cmeu@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I like Plex.
When I bought my Plex lifetime pass I saw it as an investment. So far, it’s paid off handsomely.
I’m still getting great experiences, able to access it from anywhere in the world, on basically any device, seamlessly and simply.
I get it that the jellyfin community is really excited about their thing - I just am not.
I’ve run jellyfin, it was kind of cool I guess, but there was nothing compelling about it. So I uninstalled it. What is jellyfin’s “must have” feature, anyway?
I wouldn’t go out and build a new car when I’m perfectly happy with my 10-year old sedan. If you’re expecting me to go through that just because the new ones cost more than I spent years ago, you’re insane. I wouldn’t go and re paint my house just because the old company now charges new customers more for their paint.
I paid for it, it works well. There’s no reason (except all the FUD I keep seeing on lemmy,) to even think about dismantling and recreating it with something new.
Keep building your dream tool Jellyfin people - Godspeed, but your community should target acquiring net-new users instead of trying to scare and poach happy users away from what they already have.
CriticalMiss@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I use JF for movies/shows. I feel where JF falls short is music, and sadly for now, without a paid solution which I don’t feel like playing since I bought lifetime pass a decade ago plexamp just does it better. Will it always be like this? God, hope not. The writing is on the wall and the quicker we are off Plex the better.
jjlinux@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
I see so many here with the argument of 'I already have a life time pass, so this increase doesn’t affect me". And in all honesty, that’s a mostly logical take on this if you already have it.
However, the signs are clear. This is a first step. I don’t believe (and I’m very aware I could be wrong) for a second that the executives are actually expecting people to grab a pass for 750 dollars, but they expect a minimum amount of people to go ahead and do it anyway. Once they see this conversation is dying down, and that no money is coming in on that end, they will switch to another method of getting money (the investors need their money, right?).
From there, the sky’s the limit. Charge extra if your instance has more than 3 users, or charge the users that are not you. Cap your quality at 720p unless you fork over 2 dollars per month. Pay for this new AI feature that is not included in your pass. Pay to disable this AI feature that was forced into your pass.
For pass holders there is no problem with this increase, it’s what invariably happens when companies start moving towards the money grab path.
We’ll just watch from the sidelines and will be here to help you migrate once (not if) these things happen.
vodka@feddit.org 1 month ago
I use both, I have had my plex running since the lifetime pass could be had for 40 bucks on sale.
I still use plex because it Just Works™️ for my family members. But, the day when they suddenly unprompted blasted all family (and me) with emails about what everyone else watched this week, I decided I would never use it again myself. I also told my family that the next time that stupid ass plex database gets corrupted, I’m not restoring it and they’ll have to join me on jellyfin.
I started using Jellyfin for myself, and I absolutely love it. And settings up my own preferences for transcoding, and things like that giving me full control is fantastic. But jellyfin has issues for multi users imo, sure I can manually make accounts for people and all that. But just the idea of having to input a url for the server in an app is already way past the convenience threshold for a lot.
Also most of the exposed jellyfin endpoints are entirely unprotected, and there’s no native MFA.
Eideen@lemmy.world 1 month ago
When i have a plex lifetime pass from 2016, dam 10 years. Plex works fine, my biggest complaint is the other steaming service they are trying to sell (luckily you can disable it), offline viewing on mobile needs a lot of love.
Everything else works good enough. Why should i spend time on converting?
My next thing I want to replace is my good Nvidia Shield, sadly with Android TV that 1/3 of my main page is an ad , and i can’t easily turn if off. And have not found a good alternative launcher.
It is like Microsoft windows, enshittification.
sunbeam60@feddit.uk 1 month ago
Plex has clients for every single device there is. I arrive to some 2018 smart tv in a holiday cottage and the absolutely dreadful, measly App Store, now long abandoned, has a plex client.
Also I have a very old life time pass so current pricing means nothing to me.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago As a Jellyfin user that has lurked in past “Plex did bad thing X” threads and someone suggested jellyfin.
The usual reasons are
- Remote login (through their relay)
- Which also plays into remote streaming
- Plex Amp (their music player) is supposedly the absolute best of anything
- Very easy to sign up (both the admin and family and friends
At least that’s what I remember at the top of my hat.
horse@feddit.org 1 month ago 99% of my usage is on an Apple TV and the Jellyfin Apple TV client is just really bad. Last time I tried it didn’t even display “watched” markers and the UI looked terrible. None of the third party clients seemed decent either. The Plex client is much better (although I could do without the “suggested” sections).
gdog05@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I thought about replying to some comments but decided to make a top level comment instead. There are some valid points a few people have brought up that aren’t the easiest things to fix. Some are, actually pretty easy to fix. Some are issues where Jellyfin forces you to do things a certain way, like file naming convention, which I think is extremely smart to do anyway.
But the one reply I keep seeing is “until Plex stops working, I see no reason to switch”. With that, I mean, I guess we all agree you are going to get fucked by Plex at some point. They’ve been slowly cranking up the heat in the pot. I love my media library and I just couldn’t stand waiting for the rolling boil. I’ve been using Adobe products since 1999. I recognize an abusive relationship when I see it. If you’re happy where you’re at, I mean, by all means. I’m not going to yuck your yum. Many of the issues are exactly the kinds of things the Jellyfin community is happy to help fix with you. I do wish you all the best, but I’ve never gotten locked into a great deal that didn’t hurt when I needed to get out of it before.
falynns@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Lifetime pass purchased years ago and Plex manages sign-ins and connections for my less computer-savvy friends.
MSids@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I already own a lifetime Plex pass, so I have no reason to stop using it. They are high thinking that anyone will pay $750 for lifetime. I paid under $100 but frankly I would have paid more, I use it every day. I’m glad that the devs there were able to get paid and provide for their families while making Plex. Plex works incredibly well for me and my family, I will use it for as long as I am able to.
I struggle to understand why JF users seem to want Plex users to convert so badly. I used JF for a while but things are great on Plex. If I thought JF was better I would switch and my metadata is well prepared for the day I need to.
pachrist@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I have both and run them side by side through Docker in UNRaid, but Jellyfin hardly ever gets used unless there is a problem with Plex and I don’t feel like fixing it immediately. I’ve had the Plex lifetime pass for forever.
I have young kids and really like Plex’s system for moderating content for their accounts. I’ve never explored this on Jellyfin though. As a person with crappy laptop speakers, subtitles are important to me. Plex does subtitles better than Jellyfin in my experience.
corbindallas@fedinsfw.app 1 month ago
Well now I can sell my account for 500
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Plex doesn’t charge to just stream locally so I haven’t bothered switching or looking into switching yet.
GasMaskedLunatic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Lifetime Pass holder here. Used to run Jellyfin alongside Plex. Had crashing issues and had to shut Jellyfin down for quite a bit. Came back after a while and started Jellyfin from scratch. None of my users ever chose Jellyfin over Plex.
- The UI is slower (at least on Windows), clunkier, and uglier. Hopefully this gets fixed in the upcoming big update they have planned for the desktop client. Their Roku app is actually on par with Plex’s though.
- The admin dashboard is confusing and in my opinion awful.
- Downloaded content is not viewable within the app on Android. This is the complaint I’ve heard the most from my user who made a significant effort to switch. Ironically, after the New Experience update this became less of an issue since Plex ruined downloads.
- Plexamp’s UI, radios, and sonic similarity feature were, last I checked, unmatched by a long-shot. I use my music library heavily. If I make the switch fully away from Plex, I’ll probably opt for something more specialized like Navidrome.
- Manually setting the edition of a movie is so much easier on Plex, and for someone who likes to have multiple editions, it’s less confusing for the user to see each edition individually labelled in the library than selecting the movie and being expected to know which file name they should pick. Not every file is named to Jellyfin’s standards because that would make them harder to add to my torrent client, and some don’t have their editions in the file name at all and I just have them hand-labelled in Plex based on run time.
- I’m still trying to setup my DVR in Jellyfin and can’t get it to work. Plex works fine, Jellyfin just won’t. It’s a moot point at the moment, but once I do get it to work, unless things have changed over the years, the channel guide is a whole other set of challenges.
I’m willing to deal with this personally simply because Plex creates just as much, if not more of a headache for me as an administrator and the bloat is ridiculous, but not a single one of my users has switched, and I don’t blame them. They don’t have to deal with the administrative difficulties, so there’s no benefit to them except being able to download files to their system instead of just in the app, which none of them care about. If nobody is going to use it, my focus ends up being on Plex anyway. I have been pushing Jellyfin for a year and a half. None of my friends or family want to use it unless Plex borks something, and even then they want Plex back.
Jellyfin just isn’t on par with Plex, no matter how much I wish it was. It’s death by a thousand cuts on both the user and administrative ends. It would be one thing if I were a free user or actively paying for Plex, but as a Lifetime Pass holder, I just can’t justify it yet.
CarrierLost@infosec.pub 1 month ago
I bought a Plex lifetime pass in 2014 when it was $75. I’ll keep using it until they make it stop working.
Windex007@lemmy.world 1 month ago
4 people host libraries that my tech illiterate boomer parents access.
One login, many servers, singular interface.
That is very specifically the situation I’m in. Jellyfish, emby, you wanna whip up a persona… that’s a pretty damn clear-cut one for ya
MuttMutt@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Tried Jellyfin. It puked when it saw my library.
I bought plex lifetime years ago when it was like 125.
I still hate the new plex app ui on roku. It’s clunky and sucks. The alternative is to break my library in sections and hope something else will maybe work.
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 1 month ago
No because you can’t easily and securely share your library and remote play.
I have a lifetime pass so there’s no need to switch to a worse product.
german@pawb.social 1 month ago TL; DR: UX, UI, and memory.
Memory usage is a significant concern. It immediately made my NAS completely crash when attempting to scan the (not even very large) library. Plex, right now, as of writing, when idle, uses 30MB, compared to the 3.1GB reported by Jellyfin when I last tried it, which was the last reading before my NAS died a tragic death of RAM starvation.
The apps are bad. A browser isn’t a good solution - see HDR, 10bit, 5.1, Atmos, and bit-perfect support. Remote access is complex, particularly for those behind CG-NAT, and encryption for remote access is even more convoluted; Plex does it in one checkbox. Some of that is architectural, some financial, but the end result is a worse experience for me.
The UI design is such that any server slowdown affects responsiveness severely, even for simple actions, which unfortunately speaks volumes about how much of a priority the actual user experience is - that’s not something I’m compatible with as a person in general.
Third-party apps are not good either for my platforms, I deemed them to be unusable unstable and amusingly poorly designed - that’s including the Swift and Flutter versions, the latter of which’s design and UX I found incredibly obtuse. Stretching a phone app for desktop use feels a bit like stretching your ballsack into a wind sail - maybe just get a sail mate.
I genuinely wanted to like Jellyfin, I hate proprietary software, let alone paid software, LET ALONE paid piracy software. But JF still has so many areas like these that are just incredibly frustrating to deal with. Plex’s dogshit decisions are not impacting me much (Lifetime), I have established custom setups around the desktop Plex clients to make them usable, so I see no immediate reason to switch until Jellyfin addresses its memory usage and considers using a non-skid language for an application that’s essentially a file server, set of ffmpeg scripts and a metadata database.
grumpo_potamus@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Just passing by from all, not much of a self-hoster myself, but I do have Plex running in my home. I just never really do much with it these days…it runs, I log into it and access my media. I’m not sharing with other people. I’m not using the other streaming services it tried to show me, etc. It works for now and I’m not invested enough to put in the work to switch to something else.
I will say/ask this though, I have a ton of music (video is secondary for me). I use plexamp on my phone all the time as my primary source of music. Does jellyfin do well with music + mobile pretty well out of the box?
I don’t have PlexPass btw
PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
I got Jellyfin working on my network and found that it didn’t have a nice UI, it didn’t match shows to their IMDb titles consistently, it showed duplicates, and I wasn’t able to access things remotely as easily as Plex.
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 1 month ago
no I have not tried it.
the jellyfin community is toxic af from my personal interactions. they’re always far more concerned with trying to one-up Plex users or just attempting to be always “right”.
not every member is this way, but the loudest among the community certainly makes me think the opposite.
I don’t plan on using jellyfin until it’s my last option.
zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Jellyfin people who constantly ask “have you tried Jellyfin?” have never used Plex and don’t know what they are missing out on.
I have Emby lifetime. I have Plex lifetime. I try Jellyfin every year.
Plex wins always. Emby is second. Would not recommend Jellyfin.
victorz@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I have used Plex for over a decade, and I’m now fulltime on Jellyfin.
Plex works trash on my TV (LG from 2019). Jellyfin with the exact same library just flies. The performance is just god awful while browsing your library.
- startup takes minutes
- moving between posters takes seconds
- searching is not debounced between key presses so searching takes ages
- Plex on my TV cannot seem to play different audio/language tracks correctly. I select my preferred language, I explicitly select language, I set it to default in the container, nothing. It just plays English no matter what. Trash.
- The developers don’t care about their users. These issues have been reported for literal DECADES, and they responded years ago but have since ignored them. I reported it more recently, have been ignored for years now, despite keeping the thread alive from auto-deletion.
Fuck Plex, they don’t care, I don’t care. Hail Jellyfin, it does all I need it to do. Performance is great. It handles multiple language tracks.
The only thing Plex did better was duplicate merging. 👍 Not worth it though. Strictly unusable on my TV in general.
ITGuyLevi@programming.dev 1 month ago
I’ve still got my Plex up, I only use it for Plexamp though, and my brother watches stuff on it (lifetime pass since forever). I quit watching stuff on it because in order to log in you have to hit Plex’s servers (even when logging in directly to the self hosted server); that doesn’t work for me because we block them at work. If they would let me use my own IdP, I’d probably stay. At least with Jellyfin I can authenticate how I want.