Jellyfin is literally all I watch not to mention the BEST alternative to all the centralized AD riddled garbage (Now in forced foreign languages) ‘Tubi, Pluto, Prime Video’! Crazy cause being a “Prime” member isn’t enough nowadays cause they want you to DOUBLE Pay on top of a Membership Subscription to remove ads which is sooo counterintuitive?!
Straight out of that (Black Mirror) episode called (Common People) Season 7 Episode 1… Predictive Programming at it’s finest.
Strongly agreed, from the owner of a dust covered lifetime Plex Pass.
Even if we eliminate all the other reasons you might not want to use Plex or might want to use FOSS, just the performance and UI responsiveness alone makes it worth the switch.
And I do have some non-techy family that watches remotely on smart TVs and uses phone apps.
Plex is still MUCH easier to share with my friends and family. I’ll be sticking with Plex until the UX on Jellyfin is comparable. Also Plexamp is the best music app I have ever used. It’s unbelievably good. Also Plex has more features like the ability to download and select new subtitles on the fly, and consistent skip intro functionality across all apps on all devices.
Remote viewing in Jellyfin requires significantly more work from me as the server admin, but it is just as easy for the remote viewing clients. I don’t have to do any first-time setup for them. I recommend an app or two for the media type they’re using, and all they need is URL, login, password.
On UX, Plex is more full-featured I’m sure, but the performance is so much better on Jellyfin that it quickly overrode any feature concerns I may have had.
And being FOSS, there’s some nice diversity in client apps. I use Finamp for music and really like it. There’s Plappa for audio books too. And for basic viewing there are multiple choices. I think I use Streamyfin because it supports downloads.
Remote viewing in Jellyfin requires significantly more work from me as the server admin, but it is just as easy for the remote viewing clients. I don’t have to do any first-time setup for them. I recommend an app or two for the media type they’re using, and all they need is URL, login, password.
Thanks for your suggestion. I spent some time investigating this to see how feasible it would be. I have my own domain and static IP, so setup on my end would be pretty straight forward. Users would need to enter my domain:port on first login, but I could walk them through that. I’m going to give it a shot and see how practical it is. If the performance is better, as you say, then it probably trumps those features you mention. With the exception of subtitles for me and the family. We use subs most of the time and need on-demand selection. Automated subs are very hit or miss.
It’s also disappointing to hear the Jellyfin app doesn’t support downloads but I guess if Streamyfin is available on all the platforms then I could just use that.
I tried Finamp and the UI is very not good on iOS. It also lacks a lot of features compared to Plexamp.
I know, for some features Plex is better, and for a very few features Plex will always be better because it’s centralized. Jellyfin, being self-hosted, doesn’t have an easy way to share and combine libraries from multiple users, and no single “login” page like Plex. This may be annoying for users, but we know all the problems that centralization comes with.
But this makes me think about the fediverse. What if Jellyfin servers could federate with each other? I wonder if anybody is working on such a project.
Edit: okay, apparently I found this feature request on the Jellyfin features tracker.
Pro-tip: Plex is slowly enshittifying, a good open source alternative is Jellyfin.
Jellyfin is literally all I watch not to mention the BEST alternative to all the centralized AD riddled garbage (Now in forced foreign languages) ‘Tubi, Pluto, Prime Video’! Crazy cause being a “Prime” member isn’t enough nowadays cause they want you to DOUBLE Pay on top of a Membership Subscription to remove ads which is sooo counterintuitive?!
Straight out of that (Black Mirror) episode called (Common People) Season 7 Episode 1… Predictive Programming at it’s finest.
Strongly agreed, from the owner of a dust covered lifetime Plex Pass.
Even if we eliminate all the other reasons you might not want to use Plex or might want to use FOSS, just the performance and UI responsiveness alone makes it worth the switch.
And I do have some non-techy family that watches remotely on smart TVs and uses phone apps.
Plex is still MUCH easier to share with my friends and family. I’ll be sticking with Plex until the UX on Jellyfin is comparable. Also Plexamp is the best music app I have ever used. It’s unbelievably good. Also Plex has more features like the ability to download and select new subtitles on the fly, and consistent skip intro functionality across all apps on all devices.
Remote viewing in Jellyfin requires significantly more work from me as the server admin, but it is just as easy for the remote viewing clients. I don’t have to do any first-time setup for them. I recommend an app or two for the media type they’re using, and all they need is URL, login, password.
On UX, Plex is more full-featured I’m sure, but the performance is so much better on Jellyfin that it quickly overrode any feature concerns I may have had.
And being FOSS, there’s some nice diversity in client apps. I use Finamp for music and really like it. There’s Plappa for audio books too. And for basic viewing there are multiple choices. I think I use Streamyfin because it supports downloads.
Thanks for your suggestion. I spent some time investigating this to see how feasible it would be. I have my own domain and static IP, so setup on my end would be pretty straight forward. Users would need to enter my domain:port on first login, but I could walk them through that. I’m going to give it a shot and see how practical it is. If the performance is better, as you say, then it probably trumps those features you mention. With the exception of subtitles for me and the family. We use subs most of the time and need on-demand selection. Automated subs are very hit or miss.
It’s also disappointing to hear the Jellyfin app doesn’t support downloads but I guess if Streamyfin is available on all the platforms then I could just use that.
I tried Finamp and the UI is very not good on iOS. It also lacks a lot of features compared to Plexamp.
I know, for some features Plex is better, and for a very few features Plex will always be better because it’s centralized. Jellyfin, being self-hosted, doesn’t have an easy way to share and combine libraries from multiple users, and no single “login” page like Plex. This may be annoying for users, but we know all the problems that centralization comes with.
But this makes me think about the fediverse. What if Jellyfin servers could federate with each other? I wonder if anybody is working on such a project.
Edit: okay, apparently I found this feature request on the Jellyfin features tracker.
I’d love to improve Jellyfin to make people use it!
It also harvests lots of data. Check your firewall logs.
Can you import watched status and progress?