Honest question, because I know multiple people who are not looking to jump ship since they already have the Plex Pass.
Ease of use for my users across multiple platforms with minimal tech knowledge on their end. I’m sharing my library with ranges from 12yo to 70. I need it to “just work” and it does that perfectly.
Same here. Plex just works for my folks with 0 tech literacy. I may try Jellyfin in the future, but I have a few friends that primarily access Plex via Playstation 4/5, and I know there’s no support there yet.
Yeah, lacking the client is not good. https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/2751/playstation-5-support
Couldn’t upvote this harder. Tried Jellyfin for 5 mins and was super confused why I couldn’t find sharing options. After googling and reading about reverse proxies and buying domains and shit I said fuck it and uninstalled
Totally understandable, however basic tailscale version is free and you can just have that installed on all of the connected devices as a “reverse proxy”. You then use the ip adress from the server or main computer with the files and connect to its tailscale provided ip adress after turning it on and as long as you have port 8096 open on the server computer (http:/with your adress here:8096) you can connect to the server through the jellyfin app on the device you’ve installed it on.
Yeah, I think you lost them after the first paragraph. 😉
I am tinkering constantly with my home setup, but I am lacking the time to set up everything to my liking.
So I am using neither Plex or Jellyfin, I am using Kodi and have a Webdav share available for when I am away on holiday. 😬😁
But then I am only sharing with my closest family in my home network. Somehow it seems everyone is providing a streaming service for half the neighborhood and the remote family (or possibly a polycule with the drama associated, IIRC).
I found that the most simplicity way of doing it if you want remote acess otherwise you can connect locally without tailscale
I never fully understood this argument as you would have to do that anyways with plex unless you’re using their proxy which would just artificially rate limit all of your users. But I do realize that jellyfin doesn’t have an email invite system in place which really is my biggest issue
What’s the “that” that you’d have to do anyway with Plex? I had to do nothing of the sort. I asky friends and family to make a Plex account and ask what email address they used. Then I give that email access to my library
This.
Did you try Jellyfin? I’ve had success with Jellyfin once I’ve been the one setting up the TV app, etc. It did just work, because users found it very simple in comparison to Plex. If anything, they like how Plex shows more things beyond the collection.
I’ve been the one setting up the TV app, etc.
That is exactly the issue. I can’t personally set up the app for all my users. Most of them are not in my household.
Me either, but I don’t expect them to setup any sort of app themself (including Plex).
That’s his point though, he does expect them to be able to set up themselves, and apparently Plex is good for that.
Yes, in my case I personally had to setup both clients (Plex and Jellyfin) for the family members myself.
And right back to https://lemmy.cafe/comment/17371392
Ah, the answer to that… I configured the server beforehand and installed it at their house as a gift, so I have persistent SSH access over VPN and can administer it remotely at will within tmux. Has worked for several years.
The extent of the setup for Plex is to log in with your email and password, pick which shared libraries you want to be pinned to your home screen, and then browse. My parents in their 70s were able to figure it out and all I had to do from my end was grant them access to the libraries I wanted to share with a simple check box.
I use both at home, mostly plex though and I have about a dozen people who watch remotely and keeping the remote access private and secure I’m not putting jellyfin behind a public reverse proxy. Not feasible to setup wire guard for a dozen people across 4 states and troubleshooting those tunnels when Plex does all that for me. Plus Plex allows them to manage and reset their password without my intervention
Had to find it, but there is a new tvOS app that looks very nice: Moonfin
Thanks do letting me know about this. I tried it and it does look good. Sadly for me at least it does perform well. Moves slow between options and libraries. And the Live TV Guide isn’t working at all. That could be a me issue, but the slowness is unacceptable. Once I have more time I will play it more and probably reach out to the Dev.
I’ve never understood this stance. You do you, but if I’m offering to host stuff for friends or family for free, they can at least learn to operate that thing on their end.
Edited to add, wow I did not expect this to be such a hot take. Fuck me I guess lol.
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It seems to depend on how you are granting access and have configured the server… if they have to setup VPN access in order to access Jellyfin, as opposed to logging into plex website.
No, that doesn’t change anything about what I said really.
To me, if I’m hosting something for my friends and family, they can put in the effort to learn how to use it. Period. Whether that’s as simple as logging in through a browser, installing an app, or using a VPN. They can learn, or they can pay for Netflix (as an example, since we’re discussing a media server originally).
In my experience getting dozens of people on to my server, plenty will happily choose to pay for Netflix. I want people to choose my server over paid streaming, so I offer both Plex and Jellyfin, and to date not a single person has stuck with Jellyfin, and several have gotten my invite email, took a look at the FAQ on how to request media, and continued using paid streaming.
I’d want them to as well, but I’d also expect them to put in the bare minimum effort considering I’m taking over server admin duties and costs.
Lifetime subscriber when it was like $75 bux
Setup and runs on my NAS (unRAID) Uses a small GPU to transcode as needed Shared only with non technical family members
Has worked as is for YEARS.
So, the question is, am I looking for something to replace a working free (prepaid) solution I have? That answer is nope.
Having non-technical family on board is priceless tbh.
Yeah, my mom uses it. My mom. I have to remove search bars from her chrome like it’s 2005.
This is my POV. It already works perfectly, is prepaid, and is accessible to my nontechnical users. Switching would be a major pain for a worse experience.
Also, Plexamp.
Someday in the future no doubt Plex will enshittify for lifetime users such that it will justify a change, but that hasn’t happened.
+1 to all of this. I paid for it when it was $90 lifetime, before either Jellyfin was popular before I heard of it, who knows. It works fine. No reason to put extra effort into replacing something that I have no problems or qualms with.
WhatI’ve noticed is that people who prioritize privacy and just want to watch their downloads on their tv usually use jellyfin and people who prioritize ux slickness and want to run an IPTV service for their friends and family usually use plex.
It’s not a matter of privacy vs UX. I actually think Plex has ruined their UX. But if you have friends and family, some are tech-illiterate, some have their own media servers, and you all want to share with each other quickly and easily, Plex is the only viable option. Same if it’s just you, but you travel a lot, and want to watch something from your home server without lugging around a device that has access to your VPN and a screen/hdmi-out.
Jellyfin is really only viable if it’s just you on your own network.
I tried Jellyfin once about a year ago and it was… OK I guess? Certainly nowhere near as polished as the rabid fan base would have me believe, and there was something in my library that it flat out refused to play.
If I didn’t already have a lifetime Plex Pass, and it was just me hosting my own media for a user count of one, then sure, I’d use it. But none of those things are true. I need something that “just works” and Plex fits that bill.
Like most people here, I bought a lifetime pass when it was $75 and it’s paid for itself over and over again in the time since. I honestly think I’ve had more than $750 worth of value from my purchase. Sure they’ve made some odd decisions recently, but until they start actively taking away functionality or rescind existing lifetime subs then I will continue to use it.
Meanwhile, not to belittle you personally, but the fact that every thread that mentions Plex in any way, good or bad, is guaranteed to be dominated by people circle-jerking over their beloved Jellyfin has put me completely off the project, to the point that I’ve had to add the word to my blocklist. Obviously that’s not working too well or I wouldn’t have seen this post!
Yea, Jellyfin might be good tech but the fans are insufferable
Tbh I just fanboy any FOSS company like that
The client apps on Apple TV are just not good. I have tried swiftfin which is slow and I find it not very visually appealing. There there is infuse which does look better, but is missing features and requires a subscription for full functionality. If there is a app I’m missing I would be happy to try it.
I keep Jellyfin up to date and check in or it from time to time. Even have watchstate so my watched history stays updated. Hoping one day there will be a good Apple TV app and I could fully switch.
Same boat on Swiftfin and Infuse.
There’s one I recently found called Moonfin that does many things well. It’s my current go-to until official apps catch up.
I hadn’t heard of Moonfin before, it looks promising as an Apple TV client. Any pitfalls with it?
I use it on my tablet and it direct plays all of my (limited) media, and also handles and organizes downloads to the device with reencoding options. Playback is more reliable and efficient compared to Swiftfin. UI seems modeled after existing streaming services.
They also have a plugin that “updates” your existing Jellyfin install so the features show up on the official client, but uses code injection which I didn’t like and so did not partake. The sense I get is that they push for features and implementation while official Jellyfin development takes a much more conservative approach. I hope they can work together some day.
Absolutely, my other friends are doing the same. They keep their state synced between services and keep checking in on the AppleTV client improvements for Swiftfin.
I’m in the same boat. Considering swapping out for a Linux based media box instead of the AppleTV.
Kodi works well as a frontend to Jellyfin and Plex
I hate this answer so much. I get that it works, but it feels like a kludge
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I use Jellyfin on my phone and just do the screen share to my AppleTV.
Problem is access outside your home for family and friends.
There are serious security gaps that make it a non starter to expose to the internet.
I’ve been using Jellyfin ever since they forked out of Emby, and honestly, it’s the biggest complaint that I have. It is incredibly difficult to make it available to friends and family who are on various devices, networks, so on and so forth.
Whereas Plex “just works.”
I’m not switching at this time because I already bought a lifetime pass about 7 years ago. If ANY of my functionality gets changed by Plex then I’ll be switching
They already changed the authentication system a few years ago. Everything goes through their server now. You can’t self-host it.
Can you explain what you mean by not being able to self-host?
They can’t because they’re just plain wrong. I’ve been self-hosting Plex (lifetime pass) for years so idk what they’re on about
I don’t know what this means and maybe I’m just not techy enough, but all my shit is on my PC, and if my PC is turned off it doesn’t work. Are you saying it goes through their servers? I’m just curious why it matters.
I already own a lifetime Plex pass, so I have no reason to stop using it. They are high thinking that anyone will pay $750 for lifetime. I paid under $100 but frankly I would have paid more, I use it every day. I’m glad that the devs there were able to get paid and provide for their families while making Plex. Plex works incredibly well for me and my family, I will use it for as long as I am able to.
I struggle to understand why JF users seem to want Plex users to convert so badly. I used JF for a while but things are great on Plex. If I thought JF was better I would switch and my metadata is well prepared for the day I need to.
Solidarity. New people are being forced to deal with this enshittification wave. We may be immune to it (for now), but the more people involved and excited about the alternative the better it’ll be. Yeah, I got mine… but we can also be involved in something better.
I got started with jellyfin and never used Plex but there’s a bunch of rough edges:
- No apps on several smart tv/streaming stick stores, Vizio has an app for plex but not jellyfin so I would need to buy a new streaming device. Yes smart tvs spy on you but the alternatives people recommend either spy on you just as much or are expensive (Nvidia shield) and most of them still require side loading so it’s a major obstacle for sharing with anyone else.
- Casting from the mobile app won’t play at full resolution, you can get around this by using VLC as your player and casting from that but that causes it to frequently lose watch progress. Also stopping casting or playing the next episode doesn’t work properly with VLC and you need to rapidly mash “back” to get into the jellyfin app again and queue up a new episode.
- The current release of Jellyfin desktop won’t play audio for iptv streams, this is fixed in the dev branch but I have yet to find a build without other critical bugs so I’ll likely need to wait for the next release which currently has no target date.
- The browser version has spotty controller support that stops working constantly. When it does work it lacks any way to access context menus to mark shows as watched etc. If you’re using a flatpak browser to run it on steam deck or whatever, you’ll have codec and passthrough issues (Chrome is the only flatpak with decent codec support).
- Others have mentioned the security issues which you can bypass by putting authentik or something in front of it but then you can only share with people using browser.
What about exposing through Pangolin tunnel, Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale Funnel approach? Would that allow proper client access?
Cloudflare doesn’t allow streaming large quantities of data through their tunnels. At least it’s against their ToS.
When setup with tunnels, cloudflare doesn’t see any media traffic. Cloudflare only needs to serve the auth and handshakes. The actual traffic is IP to IP, TLS encrypted if you setup a domain correctly. Or just use something like tailscale that sets up the certificates and domains for you.
Lifetime pass, it still works well so why would I switch?
Same here, but I am also maintaining jellyfin alongside it. In case Plex decides that “lifetime” means something other than what I expected it to mean. I’ve long ago gotten my $80 of usage out of it.
Jellyfin is… ok. It works, it works consistently, and it is consistently almost great. But I provide “cable replacement” and “streaming supplement” services to family that doesn’t live in the same house, and will all likely break a box that managed a VPN.
Given the above, we’ll ride out Plex until they go nuts. Hopefully jellyfin will be polished enough for child use by then.
Why would you bother “maintaining” jellyfin when you don’t use it? Just install it if you ever move away from Plex. Seems like work for nothing.
One, so that it’s already ready if I ever need to use it seriously, and two, so I can continue to observe its progress and dependencies.
I suspect Plex will not give us a lot of warning if they decide that old lifetime passes aren’t good enough anymore. Money grabs like that are best as a surprise.
I have two Plex servers I maintain, for myself, friends, and family. Both also have jellyfin serving the same sources. It’s trivial to maintain them side by side. Since it’s there, I can easily use it occasionally and see if the things I don’t like about jellyfin have been fixed.
I like Plex.
When I bought my Plex lifetime pass I saw it as an investment. So far, it’s paid off handsomely.
I’m still getting great experiences, able to access it from anywhere in the world, on basically any device, seamlessly and simply.
I get it that the jellyfin community is really excited about their thing - I just am not.
I’ve run jellyfin, it was kind of cool I guess, but there was nothing compelling about it. So I uninstalled it. What is jellyfin’s “must have” feature, anyway?
I wouldn’t go out and build a new car when I’m perfectly happy with my 10-year old sedan. If you’re expecting me to go through that just because the new ones cost more than I spent years ago, you’re insane. I wouldn’t go and re paint my house just because the old company now charges new customers more for their paint.
I paid for it, it works well. There’s no reason (except all the FUD I keep seeing on lemmy,) to even think about dismantling and recreating it with something new.
Keep building your dream tool Jellyfin people - Godspeed, but your community should target acquiring net-new users instead of trying to scare and poach happy users away from what they already have.
Agree with most of the other comments here, but number one for me is PlexAmp.
100%, Plexamp is amazing when you really get into it.
Dedicated music on Jellyfin is something I’ve never been able to wrap my head around. Would be curious if others have figured something out that works really well within the same ecosystem.
Navidrome. It’s lightweight and works with any subsonic app.
100% this. I couldn’t find any other good carplay music player that wasn’t a subscription like Spotify.
Finamp exists, and it’s just as good.
I’ve used FinAmp. It’s not “just as good.”
This is all a fascinating thread because everyone says Plex “just works”
I started using jellyfin about 6 months ago. I don’t really know anything about plex use. However, jellyfin worked out of the box for me. Set up with a docker container and have never had any problems with it.
Its never failed to load media, or loaded duplicates or any of the other random things others have mentioned here.
For the most part it feels like people in the thread have just used Plex for a long time and had their first impression of jellyfin years ago and probably haven’t checked it out since.
Which, fair play to them, life gets busy and setting up and migrating a media library is something that takes at least a couple hours which could be spent doing anything else.
If people are new, I’m sure they won’t even bother with Plex and their ridiculously high fees. I cannot see Plex maintaining their userbase at this rate.
With them unable to maintain their userbase, I give it a year before they cancel lifetime passes and 2 years or so before it’s completely enshitified and unusable.
I’m at the user level of “people keep saying docker… what the fuck is a docker?” -looks it up- “this explains nothing.”
Plus, I got lifetime Plex a while back, and can use it to stream videos to my remote classroom for examples in class.
docker means that the software is so brittle that it only works on the developer’s machines. So they ship the developer’s machine too.
Docker is not a software distribution medium
I can’t tell if you’re being facetious or not. The world runs on containerisation… you can totally package, ship, and run software using docker images.
Yeah I understand that. I was also at that level when I started. It did take me a while to understand the docker compose syntax. But was pretty simple once I got into it. I understand not wanting to dive that deep though.
yeah as a former plex user I can confirm the setup is way more annoying. for me “just works” means I spin up the container, point it at my media library, and I’m done. never had to make an online account or pay for anything with jellyfin. I agree with ppl that say the plex web UI and native apps are more polished but that’s about the only positive
Not it’s mostly about remote access anywhere without VPN. Forcing your friends and family to use a VPN to access a jellyfin instance securely is not something everyone is willing to do (and might be impossible on some devices).
Plex just works, especially for library sharing and remote watching - something that does not work without insecure and/or messy workarounds on jellyfin.
Did you read what they are saying Plex “just works” a[ that Jellyfin doesn’t?
I tried jellyfin/emby for the third time about 6 months back. I had heaps of encoding issues (not playing) with x265 and lots of issues with dolby encodes (running it through my home theatre from a 2017 nVidia shield using the official client). I even went so far as to run a separate ffmpeg instance but no dice. Until it’s not a hobby project and ‘just works’ I’m not interested.
I absolutely love jellyfin and frequently take advantage of its features. But the client absolutely suck butt. When I can hardly get my mom to remember which app on her TV lets her watch what, I can’t also have her fucking around with play buttons that don’t do what they say, a “continue watching” list that’s often haunted by episodes that have been marked as watched, or inscrutable menu icons mashed into the top-right corner of a media browser.
And don’t get me started on getting people logged in on the client.
TL; DR: UX, UI, and memory.
Memory usage is a significant concern. It immediately made my NAS completely crash when attempting to scan the (not even very large) library. Plex, right now, as of writing, when idle, uses 30MB, compared to the 3.1GB reported by Jellyfin when I last tried it, which was the last reading before my NAS died a tragic death of RAM starvation.
The apps are bad. A browser isn’t a good solution - see HDR, 10bit, 5.1, Atmos, and bit-perfect support. Remote access is complex, particularly for those behind CG-NAT, and encryption for remote access is even more convoluted; Plex does it in one checkbox. Some of that is architectural, some financial, but the end result is a worse experience for me.
The UI design is such that any server slowdown affects responsiveness severely, even for simple actions, which unfortunately speaks volumes about how much of a priority the actual user experience is - that’s not something I’m compatible with as a person in general.
Third-party apps are not good either for my platforms, I deemed them to be unusable unstable and amusingly poorly designed - that’s including the Swift and Flutter versions, the latter of which’s design and UX I found incredibly obtuse. Stretching a phone app for desktop use feels a bit like stretching your ballsack into a wind sail - maybe just get a sail mate.
I genuinely wanted to like Jellyfin, I hate proprietary software, let alone paid software, LET ALONE paid piracy software. But JF still has so many areas like these that are just incredibly frustrating to deal with. Plex’s dogshit decisions are not impacting me much (Lifetime), I have established custom setups around the desktop Plex clients to make them usable, so I see no immediate reason to switch until Jellyfin addresses its memory usage and considers using a non-skid language for an application that’s essentially a file server, set of ffmpeg scripts and a metadata database.
Thank you for providing a possible answer for why my Jellyfin server is such a memory hog. It eats up memory and CPU even while idling and grinds all of my other services to a crawl if I let it
I actually distrust the plex approach to granting remote access. WireGuard or Yggdrasil into a jellyfin instance seems more practical and manageable for me, and for my friends it’s fine, but I will concede it’s not great for people trying to commercialize their pirated content. That added step of connecting with VPN is super not great.
For my friends and family, it’d be fairly annoying to connect to Tailscale, and really annoying to connect to Wireguard or Yggdrasil.
Think of a smart TV used by your mom and having to guide her to install Wireguard on it lol.
I don’t fundamentally distrust Plex’s encryption after having tcpdumped it and seeing nothing but gibberish - which is exactly what my ISPs would see, that’s my reason for encryption. But I do not trust them to keep that feature operational indefinitely.
I’ve actually seen more people commercialise Jellyfin because you can edit the fuck out of its source code and add 10 ads and 3 paywalls. I’ve only seen people selling access to Plex shares directly - like you would sell a Steam key, whereas Jellyfin custom shares get customised and sold as a Netflix alternative with an active subscription in some places around the world.
it’d be fairly annoying to connect to Tailscale, and really annoying to connect to Wireguard or Yggdrasil.
Tailscale is a managed Wireguard service.
