Plex; Introducing Plex Photos Beta

Plex will do anything other than make their player easy to use.

My only real complaint is their app is laggy.

Do you have other complaints with it?
- Biggest issue I and my friends have with my Plex server is the constant buffer-play-for-a-minute-buffer issue with certain anime subtitle formats. Although the little bit of searching I’ve done with that indicates that may be more of an issue with the device being streamed on than with Plex itself. I dunno.
- My main complaint is when it decides to just stop casting to Chromecast in the middle of episodes randomly - then I have to open the app, reconnect, and resume.
  
  Also I find the Chromecast controls stop responding frequently making it so I can't pause what I'm watching - it'll like disconnect from the Chromecast but keep playing.
  
  My partner also complains about lots of bugs on the iOS app.
- My biggest complaint is that it defaults to "recommended" instead of "library" which means for new users (family members you are trying to help remotely) don't see the videos in your collection but instead a random unordered list to scroll sideways.
  
  After you select library to see everything, it doesn't save that view as default unless you go into settings and change it to remember changes.
  
  A new annoying feature they added is when setting up a new account, the default is to send every video you watch to all friends/family unless you select disable. So you can't even setup quickly by putting in a user/password and being ready to go. You have to talk family members through setup or everyone with access to your Plex will get email spammed with everything that person watched.
  
  I have home videos on my server and this means lengthy phone calls to family so they can actually see the videos.
- It’s terrible with direct streaming lossless Dolby Atmos (TrueHD) streams, not only where it’s not possible but there are workarounds (AppleTV / Infuse), but also on each and every platform it’s being done by other apps (Android, Xbox, PC / Kodi).
  
  I only use it because I paid peanuts for lifetime premium and alternatives have egregious UX that I can withstand but my extended family cannot.
Yes I'm absolutely hating the Android app. The core player experience is so much better on iOS. No need to worry about direct play/transcode, it just works. It's rubbish on android

all my homies use jellyfin...

Was going to say the same. Why use plex, when jellyfin exists.

Edit: spelling
- Because jellyfin has less device compatibility, worse transcoding performance, and still struggles with media matching. Oh and still had memory leak issues.
  
  I have it installed, regularly update and test it, i want to ditch plex. But it's just got to many basic issues. Anime matching in particular is rough and yes even after adjusting match sources some anime just outright fails till i manually match, matches incorrectly, won't work either way.
  
  No it's not the filenames. I use Sonarr, they are all very clean.
  
  Series name(year) | Season folder (001) | SxxExx episode title
  
  Edit: i give up figuring out how to make this stay treed, fucking hate reddit/lemmy formatting
- i use Jellyfin but a big thing that Plex has is the ability to easily stream remotely. Its doable with Jellyfin but requires a lot of manual configuration that a non technical user just can't/won't do.
- I find the Jellyfin UX to be unbearable. It frequently shows the metadata for completely different movies, despite perfect file naming. Nearly every time I use it I have to restart it due to some weird UI bug or another.
- The only reason that Plex has survived every service purge on my system is because Jellyfin doesn't have a PS4 app. Every other device that accesses my media is going through Jellyfin. I have my PS4 connected to Jellyfin via DLNA, but asking my wife to give up the polished (turd) Plex app for the file-picker front end in the media player app isn't a viable option for me.
- Right now for me its smart collections and playlists and the fact that you can pin them to the home screen. My family lives off the home screen and smart collections.
Is there a good walkthrough of how to set up Jellyfin on Linux? If I'm breaking away from a shit OS, I may as well try breaking away from an increasingly crummy Plex
- depends on your distro.
  an internet search like "debian jellyfin install" should point you into the right direction.
  
  if in doubt or having trouble: there's a friendly linux community around the corner.
- The official documentation has some guides on setting it up in a few different ways, although they assume the user is decently familiar with Linux/terminal commands and such. There might be some more beginner-friendly guides out there, though.
  
  https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/container/
  
  I switched from Plex to Jellyfin a while back and I've been very happy with it.

So still not addressing the myriad problems the player has, especially on AppleTV where it’s been reported for nearly half a decade to not work well. But hey you get yet another place to do photos things (which they admit literally no one wants or uses, they’d be better off dropping support for photos altogether).

This is super frustrating because plex is very polished despite its clear bugs and misdirection. I just switched over to JellyFin and it’s faster and much more focused but just still has a lot of rough edges. I’m not sure which will be my long term solution but plex needs to attract folks to subscribe and focusing on features that 1/5 of a percent of users utilize is not how you do that.

As a longtime Plex user, I also hate their lack of focus and tendancy to priorotize bad features (like paid streaming and VR). But this one feels more like a way to re-focus on video by removing photo code from the main (video) app's codebase, making it easier to maintain.
Can Jellyfin and Plex point to the same libraries and coexist?

I haven’t tried it before but maybe I should. I don’t have huge complaints with the Plex AppleTV app. I just find it laggy at times.
- They can, I turned off my plex VM to save resources but no real reason they can’t both point to the same libraries at once.
- Yes I do this. Same exact library folders so I can let my friends use whatever they prefer. If everything is named in a Plex friendly way it should just work in jellyfin.
- I don't use it much but haven't had too many issues with plex on apple TV. I do have infuse too and a lot of people with plex servers prefer infuse on apple products.
I switched to Emby earlier this year and never looked back. All the core features are solid. And it works great on my AppleTV.

I don't care about the photos. But glad to hear they are taking photos and music out of the main app and making it less bloated.

I genuinely love PlexAmp. I’m curious about the photos thing and might give it a try.

K. You lost me years ago when your photos and camera upload function were total shit forever. I since moved all my crap to nextcloud camera upload and photoprism. Not gonna change any time soon

At this point the only thing holding me back from switching to Jellyfin is Plex’s transcoded download function.

I've found emby to be a good compromise.
- Yeah that’s a good point. I think the appeal of Jellyfin is it being an open source project.

I only recently started using Plex because they added the Drew Carey Show. I didn't know they were anything other than a streaming service.

Their main product is a server that you run on a computer and lets you stream your own content.
- Their main product is telemetry and selling your watch history to advertisers.
  
  That's why Plex doesn't work without an active internet connection.

I wish there was a way to hide the synopsis.

I like watching movies and TV without knowing the plot of what I'm about to watch

Nice! The old photos feature in the main app felt too bloated so I stopped using it. Hopefully this one’s snappier cause I’ve been looking for a good way to access my old photos again.