Welcome to Jellyfin friend
Lol that’s pretty much how it went for me. One day it pissed me off for the last time. Switched to Jellyfin and never looked back. Should have done it so much sooner.
I’m so glad that I changed to Jellyfin. So much better.
I recently tested Jellyfin again and still miss a lot of features I like with Plex. I am a former Emby user and I don’t see why Jellyfin got so popular. I really want it to succeed, though
Jellyfin is 100% free and open-source, it may miss some features but nothing behind a paywall. We made the choice of open-source over features (I can understand people going with plex, but I’m happy with jf)
I bailed on Plex a while ago, went to Emby, now Jellyfin.
I forgot what happened to Emby, but I do recall some enshittification, and bounced. Jellyfin seems pretty solid.
Jellyfin simply doesn’t work as well as Plex unfortunately.
How so? I have way less issues with jellyfin than I did with Plex. I think with jellyfin you just need to RTFM and find some plugins to expand the functionality if you need it
Literally just the basics of choosing audio/subtitles/quality settings
Oh 🤷♂️ I guess I never have issues with that.
In what way?
Sharing and remote streaming, plain and simple. I have no problem setting up accounts for friends, but choosing your server is a pain for some. But the bigger problem is that the first thing anyone will say is: Don’t expose Jellyfin to the Internet. That’s a bit of a problem.
And they’ll then say, “Oh it’s not so bad just set up wireguard and…” This is the ramblings of a lunatic. I’ve been working with tech a long time. Tech is my job. It is my hobby. I do all of it from repairing my own hardware to administering servers to running my own home lab to doing open source development. Wireguard is not friendly. It is not something I’m going to set up at every friend and family member’s house so I can share my library.
I’ve got a more secure but imperfect setup in sticking Jellyfin on the Internet behind a proxy that requires login. But this is not something most people are going to want to deal with. They want to stand up their server and then share it with people.
I would have done this, but set up ‘meshnet’ to make the remote computers look like they’re all on the same network, but nordvpn just pulled the plug on meshnet and are decommissioning it in December. Goodbye
Tailscale has this same functionality, and is free for something like 100 hosts. Uses wireguard as the backend tech. It also has apple tv and android clients, so you can setup the Tailscale app on an end client for a user, then setup the jellyfin client and they should be good to go. That client device will just “see” your jellyfin server as a local client on the same network, albeit a tailscale wirrguard overlay network.
I haven’t actually deployed it as I don’t share my media server currently, but I was investigating it a bit ago.
Realistically what could the jellyfin devs do to make this easier?
One thing is prioritizing security. There’s a number of known flaws, of varying severity, which is why most people would recommend not exposing Jellyfin to the Internet.
Perhaps they could set up a second project, a Jellyfin meta-library, whose whole goal is to be exposed to the Internet. You stand that up, give it access to other Jellyfin servers, and it handles the work similar to STUN of connecting you to media on those servers. This would make it so people could share easier.
The apps don’t work well at all. If you’re just desktop based, its fine. But Nvidia Shield app, firestick app, mobile app, all have issues with hardware transcoding, and also somehow doesn’t handle subtitles properly. I have had both Plex and Jfin set up side by side multiple times, trying to test if I can make the swap. But JF just has too many bugs on their apps, which is what I use primarily, as do my users.
Sounds more like you had transcoding issues.
Using the Jellyfin Android app and the Android TV app on my Chromecast.Besides .ssa subtitles I usually never need to transcode. And usually the transcoding reason is me using an incomptaible audio/video source (TrueHD audio and HDR)
Oh so it’s my fault somehow? Sorry but if I use the same library on Plex vs. JF and one works fine, the other doesn’t. That’s not my fault lol. It was set up to hardware transcode, and still didn’t work for many files. Plex did. Same with subtitles. I watched the same file with Plex and JF side by side. Same directory. Subtitles worked with Plex, all fucked up with JF. JF also crashed all the time on my Nvidia Shield.
Listen…
Some weeks ago I had trouble transcoding some anime files. Didnt really work amd had a low processing framerate using VAAPI. Switched to Intel hardware transcodig and suddenly it worked.I don’t know your setup or when exactly you tried out JF, but theres absolutely no need to be offended.
I had intel hardware transcoding turned on for both JF and Plex. Many files did not work on JF. I am offended and annoyed because people keep telling me it’s my problem - when it’s not. It’s JF issues that are not solveable by me. I even went to the discord and talked to the devs, and they literally said “oh yea we don’t have tons of focus on the mobile apps unfortunately”, and acknowledged that my issue was a bug. Yet people continue to tell me “IT WORKS FOR ME SO YOU’RE DUMB.”
I have not seen that. It is always plex that does something stupid. Jellyfin is extremely reliable. Plex is particularly pissing me off lately.
Both hardware transcoding, same file, same server and there is Plex making me wait, wait, wait. While jellyfin is nearly click and go.
Why the fuck are you not using Jellyfin?
Seriously, the setup is really easy and it just fucking works.
I’ve tried to use Jellyfin every year or two for the past six years to replace Plex, but it sadly just isn’t there. It’s not good in a lot of aspects, especially when it comes to full bitrate 4K HDR movies (100GB movie files), HDR tone mapping, and especially subtitles (which I always have on).
Also, I’m pretty sure on their GitHub page there’s like a huge list of some significant or moderate security vulnerabilities that have been known for many years and are never going to get fixed due to breaking compatibility with some old devices if their fixed.
Wait, Jellyfin had HDR tone mapping before Plex didn’t it?
In my case running them both side by side, Jellyfin is as least reliable and fast, which is a lot more important when I am thousands of miles away and just want to watch something.
I have it set up right along Plex but find it nearly unusable because the search is atrociously slow. Like 1+ min to query my library. The day that gets fixed is the day I’ll start using it.
That shouldn’t be. I run mine side by side with Plex and Jellyfin is much faster.
How big is your library? 1min is excessive but I also noticed jellyfins search getting slower with an increasing amount of shows and movies. There’s projects like jellysearch which improve search noticeably.
My library is roughly 40TB in size. I think the main issue is just the shear amount of files to parse when it comes to my music library.
I did add a meilisearch and that did help a lot, but still slow enough to find it cumbersome
Yeah, music slowing down jellyfin search was the reason I moved to navidrome.
Yeah, I have that set up too and searching on that is very quick and responsive. I still end up just using Plexamp because I like the automatic playlists and radios. I’m sure there are ways to add those into navidrome, but haven’t explored it very far
Yeah I was wondering that too. Mine isn’t huge, not tiny, but not huge either.
It failed the spouse test when I last tried last year
Genuine question - what aspect of it didn’t work for them?
I wonder how? Plex is actually worse to navigate and filled with ads and shit.
The issue I had: Jellyfin experience is a better on Firestick and Chromecast than it is on Roku, but the difference has been shrinking fast due to contributions from someone named 1hitsong on GitHub. That person has absolutely hammered patches out over the past few months.
Lol wut? I’ve never seen an ad on Plex. And it’s very easy to navigate, wtf you talking about.
Devil’s advocate, it’s missing a lot of features that aren’t available unless you want to spend 12 hours playing with add-ons.
Set up ease is highly variable. I spent hours of videos and guides and fiddling and couldn’t get it running on anything except the desktop it was installed on.
For me it was that it didn’t like how the NAS shares are mounted by default so it didn’t recognise their paths as valid.
Setup is not really easy. Plex takes 5 minutes.
moved to jellyfin after plex was an absolute nightmare to setup on linux.
jellyfin is just so easy to use and like you said, just works
Because it fucks up subtitles on their Nvidia Shield and firestick apps, and has issues with transcoding too. If you’re purely using the desktop app, or browser then it’s better. But Plex just works in every aspect. Subtitles, transcoding, sharing libraries. Have had no issues or weird bugs. Anytime I try JF I have to dive deep into resolving bugs, some of which are unsolvable by me.
I’ve been using Jellyfin on both the Fire Stick and Sheild for over 2 years and haven’t encountered any issues with transcoding, subtitles, or anything else. You just launch the app and everything just works. And I’ve got a couple of very non technical remote users who have been using it flawlessly.
Lucky you, I did the exact same thing and had plenty of issues. Switched back to Plex, with the exact same library, and had none of those issues.
Same here. I tried to setup jellyfin for an hour and nothing worked. I still had my plex server setup, so no harm.
Also, i am not forcing my friends and family to use another app that they can’t access or download easily.
I’m not sure I can switch. I have too many friends linked to my server and a decade-ish of watched data.
I know many people watch from TV apps and Chromecasts and I don’t know if there’s an app for every TV brand for jellyfin or emby or whatever.
People watch from all sorts of weird devices. I got push back when I forced SSL because at least one person had a TV so old that it didn’t support doing SSL for Plex. It took me a week to drill it into their brain that I’m not going to change it back and to go buy literally anything to make it work (Chromecast type thing). I think their ended up buying a Roku.
This is just the brainpower that most of the people I share with, have. They just want easy. I do all the hard work in the background and their life is easy.
I can’t imagine how many would have a fit if I forced them off Plex. Jellyfin looks cool and all, but it’s unlikely I’ll be able to move anytime soon.
You can run Jellyfin side by side and slowly migrate everyone, starting from the most intelligent users (so you can catch anything that might be wrongly configured, etc.).
In the meantime, I hope that so many users are switching that we’re going to get better native apps.
Why do you let other people dictate how you run your media server?
I don’t. There’s just a nontrivial number of people I care about that use Plex that don’t know enough about technology to handle something like jellyfin.
Losing years of watched data isn’t great, but ultimately it’s small potatoes.
A big part of the reason I wanted to set up Plex to begin with, was so that my friends and family didn’t have to waste their time downloading the stuff that all of us want to watch.
They don’t demand anything, I want them to be able to use it because I care about those people. If switching to jellyfin is too difficult for the non-techs I care about, then I’ll keep rolling with Plex.
This is why I have Plex, emby, and jellyfin running in tandem. Plex still makes my life easier than the other two in a lot of ways, but it’s been slipping for years. Once I’ve finally had enough, jellyfin all the way.
I’m running jellyfin, can’t recommend it enough. It’s been catching up quite steadily to Plex and I still control everything. Can’t complain about that.
I also love Jellyfin, but it needs more contributors.
Too many features need improvement, for example the watch party, or the native apps.
Yeah I use plexamp a lot too and finamp is rough and reminds me of Android apps from 2012.
I also had weird quirks in the past where shows would crash and stop streaming or it would forget my position I stopped watching at, among other things.
And the hardest one is the manual labour I put in to make lists and fetch missing metadata that was actually accurate.
Like many others, I switched to Jellyfin years ago. It is way, way better for me. It does what it says on the tin, sometimes more, but not less.
You mean you don’t like recommendations by default of the media you downloaded because you know exactly what you want to watch?
I really never understood that.
My assumption is that it’s a bridge to some sort of legitimacy like a movie rental deal or something. Like inserting ads into your self hosted media.
That’s the thing - we just can’t know. Sometimes a feature is just a feature, but with commercial software there’s always more risk it’s going to change under you for the wrong reasons when they find some way to monetise it.
100%, why I love my open source.
I’ve only ever used jellyfin and I’ve loved the experience. For me it was easy to set up and put media on, simple to put on TV, has been utterly reliable and stress free to manage.
The only issues I’ve had has been tailscale sometimes being wonky or I personally did something dozy on the server machine that I had to fix.
That said, I get why people stick with Plex. Not everyone wants to or are capable of setting things up. For those that have been saying it’s really easy, you don’t know the other person or their confidence/skill sets, don’t just assume, it makes you sound like a Linux bro.
Man it’s a real shame that Kevin Spacey being Kevin Spacey ruined that great show for me
What did I miss?
They like completely overhauled the UI lol
So?
Crap, I still haven’t logged ba k in since they asked me to log out because of the security compromise. I’m gonna have to lose a day and figure out this whole jellyfin thing I guess.
For what it’s worth jellyfin is really not that hard to set up
+1 to that. I’m not very tech savvy and I could figure it out with a couple YouTube tutorials.
