Agree. I went directly with Jellyfin because I joined late the party, but never regret it.
So can’t comment on Plex, because I never used it. But I see the news and see the enshittified path it’s going on with Plex
I understand that they need revenue, specially if they actually provide the bandwidth to let you access your media from outside home. I also understand why people is mad, but I guess convenience come with a price, of you don’t want to pay for it, there are alternatives I don’t see anything bad in switching to jellyfin.
specially if they actually provide the bandwidth to let you access your media from outside home.
Why would Plex need to do that? I can access my Jellyfin and outside of my home just fine without someone else acting as a middle man.
I don’t know much about Plex but I guess because it is not easy for the average guy. Setting up a remote connection without a VPN is definitely not something I would recommend to someone who is just a media enthusiast.
Isn’t that the plesk added value?
You may not need Plex to do anything, but it’s kinda disingenuous to say most people can easily and securely set up port forwarding and a DNS service/reverse proxy/etc to keep outside access working.
Its not even the easiest to setup the default configuration stack most people use with Plex or jellyfin. I mean if you’re techy its not hard, but it definitely takes time to set up. I see why people use Plex as the media player, it is stupid easy for everyone else to use. Its like a Facebook invite for media.
I don’t mean that as a “I can do it so obviously everyone else can” I mean it more as a “what purpose does plex even serve in this regard?”
Like what do you mean plex provides bandwidth? It’s hosted locally, no? From your network and your server? They provide software but surely plex as a company doesn’t host your media?
They provide super-simple access from outside your home without any tech knowledge. Automagically. It even works (albeit slowly) without port forwarding.
Is it like a TURN server that provides p2p connection or do they proxy it?
I don’t know, and honestly that’s the beauty of it. It just works, and while I know every system is vulnerable to attack, I suspect it’s more secure than what I’d setup myself.
I guess I don’t understand why remote access is such a popular use case. Throw some shit on your phone, h/d, or thumbdrive and you’re good for a few hours. I crammed 4 full seasons of STNG on my phone recently.
Because I have friends and family that want access to some of the media I host. It’s a lot easier if I can just give them access and have it just work and whatever device they want to use.
Ah, so you have friends and family! That is a blessing, and I know that from distant experience.
I am hoping that jellyfin gets better over the next few years. I keep trying it and it keeps feeling broken to me. Lots of people have the same experience it seems but then there’s also always a few people that act like I’m crazy. Nah, it’s still not there, unless things have changed a lot in the past year.
What about it feels broken? I’ve been running Plex and Jellyfin together for a long time and always find myself using Jellyfin. I’m curious what problems people run into to see if I have the same problem or maybe I’m just overlooking something.
Same. Have run both for a while. Find the jellyfin customisation preferable to plex.
I use a 3rd party client called Wholphin and it works great.
Also it helps to set up profiles in sonarr/radarr to make sure you’re getting media thats compatible with the devices that will interact with Jellyfin, and filter out formats that cause problems. I use Profilarr to load in community made quality profiles to sonarr/radarr and then i copy them and tweak them for myself.
Before i started doing this i had loads of problems with Jellyfin not being able to play stuff, and now everything runs perfectly.
The biggest discovery I made that was causing a lot of my problems was HDR formats. HDR10+ only really works on Samsung TVs for example. I dont have a Samsung TV, so anything I had that would try to play that content would come out a weird green/purple colour. Content with Dolby Vision Profile 5 would flat out not play on devices that don’t support Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision Profile 7 falls back to regular HDR10 when the device doesnt accept DV, so that works, but DV Profile 5 doesnt do that.
I was able to filter out HDR10+ and DV Profile 5 using quality profiles and all my playback issues disappeared immediately.
I appreciate these tips. I’m gonna save this comment for the next time I circle back to Jellyfin.
Despite all of this, I haven’t completely abandoned Plex.
Plexamp remains one of the best self-hosted music applications I’ve ever used.
Lyrion, Music Assistant, and Navidrome are all solid options. And Jellyfin also supports music hosting, along with FinAmp, which has similar functionality to PlexAmp (maybe not as good, but download functionality works).
Personally, I abandoned PlexAmp. Wasn’t worth keeping with the rest and it has been downhill since the loss of Tidal integration. Navidrome clients work great, have solid radio and discovery features for large collections, and support local downloading for on the go.
And for local listening, I’d argue that Lyrion with Blissmix or LastFM “Don’t Stop the Music” plugins are as good and sometimes better than PlexAmp. And Navidrome and/or Music Assistant with AudioMuse-AI plugin utterly destroys PlexAmp’s radio/DJ functionality. Install AudioMuse, scan your library and go, it just works. Especially with recent builds having native Linux, Mac, and Windows now (I deployed with Docker compose before these options were available).
FinAmp and its beta rewrite don’t really come close to PlexAmp in terms of functionally or polish, but if anyone switched from Plex to Jellyfin and wants a nice aesthetic music player app Discrete has done the job for me. It’s essentially an Apple Music clone so it looks nice and navigates well.
TBH I don’t recommend FinAmp, but it’s an option if you only want to deal with Jellyfin and not run multiple servers.
Lyrion (LMS) and Navidrome server/clients though, absolutely. They’re great.
If anyone goes with finamp, sign up for the test version as it’s UI is significantly better than stable.
The UI is objectively better but it still looks like a 10 year old material UI student project. I’ve been keeping an eye on it but it might not be worth giving up the stability for
JF is damn good for video and has a better interface than plex
Finamp is horrible for big collections. As you ask JF for tracks or artists it loads them a handful at a time. I have 2300 artists 26,000+ tracks, if I want to listen to some NiN, trying to scroll through to N’s is maddening.
Finamp just crashes on me now and then. Play -> shuffle… wtf knows, might go 10m might go 2. Samsung Phone with 6GB of ram.
Finamp is rooted to JF features only, eg: it is incapable of cross fading because it has no ability to tell JF the songs were last played easily. If you want to set up a really large playlist, it’s one at a time, but you can put an m3u in the folder. but once you do that, your playlist is no longer editable through the GUI.
I moved over to Symfonium. It loaded my playlists, let’s me crossfade, everything seems ok, until i add new music or modify a playlist and it has to scrape the entirety of my collection to add a song. It can take hours.
I’m big on my playlists. I have exported years of jackfm and 98 rock to recreate real playlists from different eras.
JF audio is just absolutely stuck in the stoneage and any attempt for clients to work arond it and dig them out still have to deal with their slower than fuck database and api.
I personally really like FinAmp. I use it every single day during my commute and work, it works incredibly well with FLAC files.
I used it for a bit, but after getting Navidrome up and running, Arpeggi replaced it as my download “away from home” client, and at home I use Lyrion or Music Assistant via Squeezelite since I have Wiims in every room of the house.
I understand the authors reasons, but for me personally, having paid for the app, I’ll use it until it no longer suits my needs. Right now it does early what I need and does not cause me any issues. As soon as the enshittification hits me though, I’ll abandon it for something else. I also would not recommend someone purchase it, given the new pricing, and the availability of free alternatives. Had they been there when I paid for Plex, I’d be using them instead.
Yeah, Jellyfin has treated us well, there has been some oofing with some features, however overall it’s been really good!
I’ve already had a Plex pass for ages, so I’ve just been running both concurrently.
Plex is a lot more accessible for my friends and family that are less tech inclined.
Yeah thats the main problem for me, Ive run both Jellyfin and Plex in the past when plex used to charge users to watch on mobile. but Jellyfin Id always have to help create their account, show them how to add my domain and stuff, only for them to need help again a month down the line when they want to use it.
Now that plex got rid of that whole mobile charge stuff if the server owner has a plex pass it made it much simpler.
it is still annoying when adding a new user showing them how to disable all the ad supported stuff but usually its a one time thing, after that if they forget their password or whatever its between them and plex. plus plex is much simpler as far as I know when your users also start to run servers, they just invite you back and you have access to everything on one account
Lol ‘i didnt rage quit and post about it’
‘I rage quit amd wrote a blog about it’
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code NAS Network-Attached Storage NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
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Good bot
I was using Synology’s video server software. They had an app for android and IOS. Then Synology killed it and the only options were plex or Jellyfin. I bought into Synology because of their remote connection options. When I tried Plex they were making me pay per connected device. No way! Jellyfin became my only option at that point.
There’s also Emby. And some other options.
You dont have to pay Plex per connected device, but you do have to pay something somewhere for remote streaming.
I started with jellyfin a month ago and I miss nothing. Total newbie, used free chatgpt to set everything up. I can access from anywhere.
The only thing I haven’t done is to get the app to the Hisense tv so I use through a browser. Just didn’t have time yet, not sure how that works.
Funny timing, I’ve been playing with Jellyfin lately too and I ended up forking a little project to bridge Plex into Jellyfin: https://github.com/ndieschburg/xtream-to-strm-web
It syncs your Plex.tv libraries (even shared servers you don’t own) into .strm and .nfo files, so Jellyfin just picks them up as a normal library and you can watch everything from any Jellyfin client. There’s a built-in proxy that hides the Plex tokens from the STRM files, and for clients that don’t follow HTTP redirects (like Findroid) there’s an HLS proxy mode so it still plays fine.
Still a bit rough but it does the job if you want to keep a single Jellyfin frontend and still reach the stuff that only lives on Plex.
I just want an Apple TV app for Jellyfin then I’ll switch.
Looks like I got weekend plans
Damn it’s a missed opportunity to call it Pectin
Neptune is amazing
If you want a quick fix you can always airplay from an iphone.
JellySee is great IMO - costs 8 or 9 credits though it’s worth it because it’s a one time purchase
Apple TV
Well you really fucked it there, friend
I mean, in terms of raw capability, it’s actually one of the better “turn a dumb TV into a smart TV” devices on the market. It has good hardware transcoding support to take the burden off of your server. It also has very little in the way of fluff. It was one of the few boxes that wasn’t packed full of ads by default (though I’m not sure if this is still true).
But yeah, it means you’re locked into Apple’s ecosystem. Which is… Not always the best. Apple is notoriously difficult/annoying if your app gets tied up in approvals, so native apps can sometimes be trapped in limbo for a while. And that’s assuming they even allow the native app.
I guess you could build an HTPC with similar functionality and hardware support, but then you’ll be stuck using a Bluetooth keyboard to navigate things, plus all of the “oh let me wait for my computer to boot up before I can watch anything” pains that go along with it. There are solutions for a lot of the complaints, but a lot of them are fiddly or require lots of extra stuff just to achieve the same basic functionality of “remote has power button that turns on TV and streaming box, and navigates menus as if it’s a native app.”
I had an Nvidia shield, but I couldn’t stand the newer Home Screen filled with ads. I like the peaceful quiet of the Apple TV Home Screen. Also picture quality is pretty great. I don’t need to side load apps cause I was using Plex for a decade for all my media needs, plus my in-laws know how to use it when they watch my kids. Win all around.
I have both, Apple TV 4K and Shield TV Pro, both have strengths and weaknesses. Being able to use my AirPods with one click on the ATV is super nice, I also use it for Apple Music (with Atmos). The Shield is more capable, I am using Projectivy Launcher, autostart Plex on boot and it just works with all the codecs I ever needed. The ads are bad, but Android still allows you to change the Launcher (you only have to uninstall the stock launcher with
adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 <package>).
It took a bit of work but my Kodi setup is very very kickass: local movies/tv, iptv, youtube (no ads), music (various services plus local collection), video games… There are some glitches but generally I love it.
Do you use docker to host those services? I’m definitely interested in replicating that, but I’m not super familiar with anything other than docker yet.
hmm I wonder if it’s because of the recent subscription hike … hmmmm
intense HMMMM
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