They're probably talking about Samsung TVs, not their android phones/tablets. Installing jellyfin on those things can be a chore. My experience with LG was similar. The official build was out of date and riddled with issues that didn't exist on other versions. It refused to play videos that worked well enough on other devices, transcode or no.
Speaking to #2, I'm surprised since I always use the "sign in from another device" feature, where I punch some numbers into the app on my phone and it signs me into the tv.
That said, the tv is running the desktop app.
Not seen that option, it.might be useful. However, If I move from Plex it needs to be familiar to everyone else in the house. Retraining them is tricky.
Echoing @Bronzie@sh.itjust.works, I downloaded the first party app right from the Play Store on my Samsung. Though I prefer the third party, Findroid, the first party app is good for the dashboard management.
When we launch Jellyfin, we are shown icons for what user, we select the user, and it opens the associated library. Similar to Netflix.
I started using Jellyfin about two years ago now, and have only encountered a codec issue here and there, but I've found it can be worked around by setting playback to another player, like VLC.
Not sure what you mean by that. Jellyfin has had an up to date version in the play store for years.
Yes every Profile is separated into its own account, that's by design and will most likely never change. An easy PIN option in the local network existed for years. Now you can even login with your phone app by entering a displayed PIN.
I remember very few media that i had issues with in the past. Depending on the transcode hardware you have some things can be tricky
I tried Jellyfin recently and for some reason it doesn't play any media at all when I disable hardware transcoding, even though my media all is 1080 h264/h265 and I don't want to scale. On Plex it always seemed like I could just play everything natively, but Jellyfin seems like it always wants to transcode.
Even if I enable transcoding, stuff won't play nicely because I'm currently on a Pi4 (going to switch in the coming weeks to a proper server), but Plex is fine.
Basically, when you do not run server side transcoding and instead rely on client side support you will run from time to time into issues. Jellyfin does not have the ppl to get every client to work with all the different formats on every hardware.
1080 h264/h265 does not say much about the media format. Those codec differentiate in things like Chroma (4:2:0; 4:4:4, etc) or in color depth like 8 or 10 bit. So not every h264 media file does run on the same hardware.
Audio codecs are even more complicated.
I think since i setup my hardware transcoding I ran into a not playable file once. But depending on the hardware it can be worse. On android TV you may have to play around with the settings.
I understand that this can be a deal breaker for some ppl.
For the not all media played successfully, I found it was primarily down to transcode settings trying to hardware transcode file types my server can't hardware transcode. It's something worth playing with