Jellyfin is not just good... but better than Plex now?!

I tried to switch from plex to jellyfin 2 months ago, running both at the same time in containers, but I removed jellyfin after a week

The main issue was the CPU usage, on idle Jellyfin was using about 1vcore while plex used only 0.3, no background tasks seemed to be running and after a week my 4tb of media should have been indexed

Also a feature that I use regularly with plexamp, starting a radio from a song, was not giving me good results on finamp

The addons are great too. The intro/outro skip is slick and nearly flawless, background subtitle download is seamless, on and on.

Plex has recently started applying a green filter to certain content.

The files Plex has a problem with work just fine in Jellyfin.

I've been using both for ages.

For remote access to friends plex is easier and cleaner.

For offline viewing in Android plex is cleaner

I'm running tailscale with jellyfin for personal use and it's wonderful, But I wouldn't ask my relatives to do that and I don't trust to surface the port. Plex has a dedicated security team and 2FA.

The Roku client for jellyfin is also a futureless husk of a client.

I have lifetime Plex so I'm in no hurry to do a full conversion. I would love to drop plex all together though

any reason to use this over real debrid + stremio?

I've been running plex since 2016 and jellyfin since 2019. I'm slowly moving users over to jellyfin with the plan to cut off plex at somepoint in the next couple years. Jellyfin is missing some quality of life features but nothing super crazy

Am I the only one here using emby? I’m pretty happy with it honestly.

I tried Jellyfin years ago, it is in my test for later todo since then, it was pretty vanilla compared to my Plex Media Server (for instance I couldn't get to work the transcoder to use quick sync to lower the CPU load if needed, meanwhile Plex worked fine with the Docker container even).

With that said, I stopped using Plex daily in order to give some use to my Real Debrid account (so Stremio and Kodi are the next logical alternatives for me) and because I only have a two bay NAS with 10 TB in total, and I like to hoard so I struggle every time I need to delete something, since I knew about Riven/Zurg/Rclone/DMM combo I have returned using Plex without worrying each day about my drives, keeping it updated and enjoying the thinkering process of this new experience, also sharing the love with a couple of friends, I see no need to try Jellyfin, even after that many years.

Jellyfin seems solid.

The only issues I've had are with dodgy media files. Obviously better player hardware gets you better performance, but transcoding eliminates some of those issues.

Jellyfin is so underrated

I use Jellyfin for music mostly and it struggles with metadata. For example, if a song has two artists on it and I edit to correct it, it won't update correctly and I'll edit up with the artist "Artist A; Artist B".

I would probably be using Jellyfin if it were just me.

The handful of people in my family that use my Plex server though are all non-tech people. When I hear that random smart TV apps aren’t nearly as good, that is what gives me pause.

That, plus the fact that a lifetime Plex pass was a one-time purchase on sale several years ago. It may be a proprietary product instead of FOSS like it should be, but at least they aren’t trying switch me to $1.99/month or some BS like that. But they’re probably smart enough to know they’d really start the Plexodus!

Maybe I should run jellyfin alongside Plex to keep better tabs on it.

Yep

Welcome to the future

It is…..if you use a computer. Their AppleTV app still looks like some random coder’s pet project with random playback issues.

Been using jellyfin for a few years now, never had a problem vs constant problems with plex

I genuinely do not understand the issues people are having with Jellyfin subtitles. I just have Bazarr set up to automatically download and they play on every device (web, android, iOS, roku, android TV) with zero issues.

I don't use it for myself but my experience with Jellyfin is the subtitles UX kind of sucks. It got a lot better on the Android TV app recently (ty to the maintainer!), particularly with improved subtitle support, but because of ExoPlayer it still can't play bitmapped embedded subtitles easily, only .srt subtitles.

The experience on iOS/appletv with Jellyfin/Swiftfin was so bad that I ended up recommending Infuse. Infuse is a great app, but it's not a libre app, which kind of clashes with the rest of Jellyfin in that regard. And, once again, it needs massaging: unless you want to be popped up with a buy Infuse Pro pop-up your video and audio has to be in certain codecs.

As I said, I don't use these things, myself. I don't even have a TV. But every now and again, I will put a file up for some relatives, and I want it to be totally directly playable, because my server is just an old laptop. So I have to spend a lot of manual time making sure the files are juuuuust right. If there comes a day where there's direct playback with embedded PGS or SRT subtitles on all platforms that will be the day the Jellyfin suite of software becomes 10/10 software for me.

The applications aren't that good. That's the only thing keeping me from switching completely. Subtitles, aspect ratio, audio track selection just don't work as expected. In some cases I can only pick the aspect ratio and no subs and sometimes the other way around? Also if I have no subs for a movie, I can't search for them on the fly - good feature of plex. As it stands, jellyfin video player is not up to my standards and I can't switch yet. I use it for porn though. That works fine.

I still maintain that Emby is better than Jellyfin. I try it again maybe once a year and every time I end up back on Emby. It just runs better, works pretty flawlessly and doesn't lose my libraries every so often. Music playback is better by far on Emby and that's my main usecase.

Hardware decoding would be nice, but I don't have a system I could use this on for either and I've not had trouble without it.

After having been shafted by sublime text I will never believe anything called a "lifetime subscription" is such.

A "lifetime subscription" is just a "until we decide otherwise" subscription

Although I have my issues with plex, jellyfin has its own problems:

• STILL can't clear out the TS transcoded files automatically. So if you watch a bunch of TV episodes on a weekend, your jellyfin container will run out of space and break.
• STILL can't handle subtitles properly. I swear, this must be jellyfin's Waterloo.
• jellyfin cannot demux 5.1 and present stereo sound on certain streams. I think this is a tooling issue. But it's low level enough that I can handle it manually with mkvtoolnix myself on the few cases it happens.

The only problem I'm having with jellyfin is around subtitles, but it's getting better all the time. I bought the plex lifetime license a few years ago, but we've moved our whole house to jellyfin now.

Not having to pay for hardware transcoding/tonemapping is the biggest „selling“point for Jellyfin. I used to have plex before. It worked well but I didn’t want to pay 100€ for transcoding. Never tried emby for the very same reason.

Jellyfin is awesome.

I've been using plex for several years and setup jellyfin a few months ago to tinker with it. Playing videos works fine for me locally but I have some family out of state who have access and jellyfin doesn't have a solution for that outside of me publicly sharing the URL and managing the passwords. Also a pain point for me is having multiple files of different quality for the same movie/episode, it always shows as two episodes that it will play back to back and seems to require a lot of manual work per show/movie to get it tracked as 1 piece of media with 2 files to choose from. Would love to ditch Plex eventually but for me and my family it just works without issue and they can manage their own remote login.

I use jellyfin for every device except for my android TV. I really like it and prefer it over Plex, but it was working fine until it suddenly stopped working a few months ago. I tried updating the app, the jellyfin container, reinstalling the app and clearing data and redoing my jellyfin instance entirely. Nothing worked, everytime I try to connect to the server via the android TV i just got an error unable to connect... and the rest is cut off. Regular android app works, idk what the problem is but it has to be client side, so I just gave up and now have plex running alongside just for the TV.

If anyone has had this Problem before I would love suggestions!

I never used Plex. Up until my kids were born I used to just watch my videos on my desktop, but now I find myself watching on my phone and TV more often. My Jellyfin server has been super stable for the last 6 months or so running on a super low powered machine and external hard drive. The only issues I have is with movies with Dolby digital, they tend to get out of sync when scrubbing the timeline. I am assuming that is due to the lower power of the machine. But, I have a 400watt desktop with a 7th gen i7 and a pascal Quadro P1000 that I am planning on migrating to. Then adding a 20tb internal drive for storage. Hopefully that will resolve the small issues I have seen with it.

Does anyone have any recommendations for migrating their Plex library over to Jellyfin? One day I fully expect to migrate over but when I do i want my full watch/listen history to come with me.

Been using Jellyfin along side the ‘ARR suite for about a year now, my biggest issue is with Subtitles.

On the IOS/iPadOS apps of Jellyfin subtitles seem to prevent media from streaming, tried utilizing Bazaar but have had no luck.

I've been using Kodi with Jellyfin for around 10 years now. I tried Plex now and then because everyone uses it but I could never get behind why everyone is using it. It has always been worse in every aspect for me.

I used Plex a while ago and didn't like how I had to look for my folders against the stuff they offered. And the upside of being able to get my stuff from a server install on another network had me wondering if they were looking at the movies I had to pirate. Once I installed jellyfin, I didn't have to worry. My only issue is if I want to use it on vacation, I have to do some vps hack-jiggery.

I tried to setup Plex and it was just about the most god-awful experience I've ever had. It was unnecessarily complex to accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup.

Installing Jellyfin took like.. 2 minutes and I've had no issues since.

Only thing I don't like about Jellyfin is the metadata engine, which I have disabled and just use TinyMediaManager and save everything to .nfo which is picked up by Jellyfin immediately. Works great.

One thing jellyfin doesnt do well its anime content. But fortunately there's Shoko Server, a metadata engine you can selfhost. Its awesome!

Jellyfin is still not up to snuff with where Plex was pre-enshittification, but Plex is enshittified. For everyone in between, there’s Emby, which I have been very happy with.

Not got around to trying it out properly yet. Waiting on new AMD GPUs, hoping for a low-end encoder or I ma get access to a RX 480.

What does Jellyfin use .NET for?

Maybe when the merge transcoded downloads on the official clients. rn depending on streamyfin

It's curious that I'm almost in the opposite boat, have been using Jellyfin without issues for around 5 years, but recently was considering trying Plex because Jellyfin is becoming too slow on certain screens (probably because I have too much stuff, but it shouldn't be this slow).

Edit: this made me want to check in Plex, so I'll leave my story for people amusement:

My experience with Plex:

• Write the docket compose
• leave out the claim because it's optional and I have no idea what it is
• launch it
• asks me to create an account
• not really comfortable creating an external account to access my local server, but okay.
• discovered I already had an account. Huh? I wonder why I don't remember ever running Plex then.
• login to that account
• shows me a bunch of stuff
• find it weird that it already scanned everything, especially because I didn't pointed it to my media
• proceed to try to watch something
• can't play due to DRM
• WAT?
• go back and discover there's a bunch of content that's not in my library
• ok, so this must be some free content
• how do I configure my local library?
• spend 15 min navigating the UI trying to find it
• open the docs, they say to click the settings icon
• that icon is nowhere to be seen
• click a similar one
• can't find anything the docs say I should
• maybe I'm not on the right site? site is <IP>:<port>/web/yaddayaddayadda so it seems correct
• try to go to <IP>:<port> get to the same page
• look at the docs on how to access the web app says to go to <IP>:<port>/web
• try that, get a message about not being authorized
• WAT?
• read some more docs discover I need that claim
• spend some time trying to find that in the UI
• google it up, find the link
• go to that page, grab the claim, set it up on the server and restart the server
• I'm able to get to the web app now
• Do you want to access it from the internet? If this works it would be great, so yes!
• setup my library
• let it scan and try to watch something from it
• UX sucks, video plays in a sort of popup in landscape on my phone.
• Ah, dumb of me, I probably have my browser set to desktop mode
• No, I don't.
• Ok, so the web is maybe only expected to be used on desktop, let me install the app
• Install the app, login to my account, only have the Plex provided content
• Look around trying to find the media I scanned, find a thing saying my server is disconnected
• WAT?
• Go back to the web app via IP, try to look into settings
• "You are not connected directly to the server"
• WAT?
• everything else seems okay, I even enabled remote access there and it says it's working
• Every few minutes the page says my server is not available for a few seconds then comes back
• It's now been 1 hour and I haven't been able to watch anything.

It's now been 1 hour of trying to set this up and I give up. Jellyfin is much more easy to setup, and even if Plex was instantaneous I could have loaded my TV library hundreds of times in the 1h I just wasted trying to get this to work. Probably every other time I tried I got similar results which is why I have an account there even though I don't remember ever using Plex.

Edit2: after some nore more fiddling managed to get it working, not sure what I changed, so now:

• Open the app, see my content there
• Try to watch something
• "You're watching in indirect mode, quality might be bad"
• Ok, so it's not connecting directly to my server, anyways, let's ignore this for now, maybe it's getting confused because it's in a docker container
• "Activate Plex"
• Ah, ok, it's the "pay or not now" screen, not now
• No subtitles play
• Try different subtitles
• Still nothing
• Plus quality seems shit
• Confirmed, it's reproducing at 720x300 even though it's a 4K video
• Look at docs, figure out the direct play is about converting the video
• Select maximum quality which according to docs should use the original file
• Still get a 300p video
• Figure out maybe it's the android app that's the problem, go to the TV, install Plex and connect to it
• Video takes forever to load
• Give up again after a couple of minutes waiting for the movie to load

I feel like 20 years ago someone made a similar realization with Linux vs windows

Edit: i remember people telling me how good Linux was in 2010ish (so maybe 20 years was wrong), so idk…

I don't know about using the jellyfin client but as a backend for Kodi, it's amazing

Hopefully it doesn't require Docker?

As a long time plex pass user, is there anything there that would make me want to switch? Plex has just plain worked for me for years. mobile apps, everything is just great. Why should I look around?

I tried Jellyfin a few weeks ago and didn’t have much luck with it. I only added a couple of shows and movies just to test it but half of them just didn’t show in the library (even though it detected them as they showed in other places). Will it only show stuff in the library if it can pick up the metadata for it?

I tried Jellyfin two years ago and was so fed up troubleshooting the installation that I swore it off. Tried it again a few months ago and it worked flawlessly! Now I host movies, shows, music, ebooks, and audiobooks for a handful of friends and family. My jellyfin instance is probably siphoning $120/month from Netflix's subscription revenue lol

I've been considering switching to Jellyfin for a while due to concerns about Plex either becoming worse or them peering into my library. Any idea how the apps work on Fire TV Stick? I have one for home and one I take away with me and it all works seamlessly with Plex

I randomly tried using Jellyfin today instead of Plex, but Jellyfin kept crashing my browser and logging me out, so I wasn't in the mood to troubleshoot, so I just gave up and went back to Plex.

In the past, I've been annoyed that Jellyfin didn't seem to have an option to sort media by "Last Episode Date Added", nor did it seem to have a way to build a queue of episodes from multiple different shows. I think I was also having trouble figuring out how to add multiple sources... I have my "long term" library on a local hard drive, plus anything "new" on a seedbox.

I theoretically want to fully switch over eventually, but so far, Plex is still good enough for my use case.

I used Plex for a long time and was very tempted by their lifetime plan. I tried Jellyfin but at the time it just wasn't a patch on Plex. I continued with Plex but always had that itch to get away from closed source. I eventually tried Jellyfin again and whilst it's definitely not as feature rich as Plex, it does what I need from it which is a central store of media that any TV in my house can use. I've even given a few friends a login so they can watch content.

I do love that it's completely self hosted. I run it behind Caddy so it has a Let's Encrypt certificate. All run in a Docker container with the media from an NFS share from a Pi4 with an external HDD.

That said, I still have Plex running as I have one Samsung TV and there's no official Jellyfin client for it. Yes there's some long winded developer way to get one on but I just can't be bothered.

Any recommendations about how to install all this jazz?

I'd like to build a music box controllable by the family, eventually centralising videos so anyone (or at least me) can just pick up their phone and watch an episode of star trek without the hassle of copying. Automatic subtitles would be magic.

Cheers!

They both suck.

Long live Stremio.

I’ve been running plex for a few years no. No real issues to complain of.

Until today. I just upgraded my server with an Intel ARC. Was looking forward to enabling qsv for streaming. Turns out you need plex pass to do that.

Can jellyfin do it?

I could never get Plex to work the way I wanted it to, so I'm actually someone who moved to Kodi and then to Emby. Once I got into Emby, I've yet to leave it. My biggest problem now is that I want to leave it for Jellyfin, but the lack of many things I love about Emby have never been moved to Jellyfin.

For example, I have a very specific organization of my music libraries I use to navigate what I want to listen to much quicker, since I'm into all kinds of genres of music. Emby allows me to navigate by folder structure, so if I'm in the mood for heavy metal one day, go to that folder. If classical another day, go there. Jellyfin on the other hand didn't have folder structure view and even though it's one of the top requested features for the past few years when I last checked, it's never been added...

I think the day Jellyfin does fill in these gaps, assuming new ones aren't introduced due to Emby also improving, I'll finally jump over.

I guess to the original topic, I do think Jellyfin exceeds Plex though lol.

I knew basically nothing bout jellyfin except it existed and this thread inspired me to finally set up my own server and client on the tv cause the chromecast has just become so unbearably bad.

I had it up and running in 5 minutes. Hardest part was remembering the auth key while running between rooms. I don't buy into the atmos meme, for music I have bt amplifier or vinyl and it has everything I need: Watch content from my tv.

Does jellyfin do any kind of library sharing? Because that's the killer feature that Plex has for me.

I have three friends who have Plex servers and between the four of us, I think we have all the content anyone could want.

Yeah, I'm really glad I found out about Jellyfin. I switched to Jellyfin because Plex doesn't let you disable Passout Protection (automatically stopping playback after something like 3hrs) without Plex Pass. I was just about to fork over $95 for a lifetime license when I looked into Jellyfin and discovered continuous playback was the default. I switched that very day and never looked back.

Plex has been terrible for a long time if it weren't for Jellyfin I would've just not bothered with a media server for a few years until they got their shit together. That reminds I should throw some money at the Jellyfin team.

Has been for a long while. Also there are tons of unofficial apps as well.

So glad people are dipping out of plex.

Plex was always terrible, anyone that uses it is an imbecile.

I've had both for a while now, but I find that subtitle playback is a bit spotty in Jellyfin. Is that fixed, or have I missed a setting somewhere? The other thing is that my libraries are alphabetical in Jellyfin, so "Anime" comes before "Kaiju", and I truly can't stand the idea that Godzilla gets sent to the back of the bus. Is there a way to customize the order of libraries?

Can Jellyfin handle symlinks? That's all it would take to sell me at this point.

If you're on mobile, the app Streamyfin for Android and iOS is fantastic. Handles downloads, transcoding, great UI, and it even integrates with additional third-party tools that enhance it further, like Jellyseer.