Thank you for giving me just enough curiosity to look up what Jellyfin is. I’ve been wanting to set up a media server but lost interest quick when I realized Plex seems to have completely moved away from being a media server program. I’m so stoked to give it a proper try.
I setup jellyfin plus the arr stack on an rpi4 and man has that little thing changed my life, all the content I could ever want just for the cost of a Usenet provider. Hope you enjoy man!
How’s the rpi4 as a media server? I wanted to do that too, but i looked into it when the 3B was new and the general consensus was that it wasn’t really ideal.
As an aside, raspberry pi’s are so cool. My rpi3b running retropie/ emulation station turned out so great, and it runs way more games than I expected.
realized Plex seems to have completely moved away from being a media server program
It is still a great media server no mater what the Jellyfin fanclub says. Jellyfin is great, but from a user experience perspective it’s just not in the same league as something as polished as Plex and if your userbase is not just IT workers and FOSS enthusiasts (or you enjoy a good looking and working UI) Plex is the place to go.
I’ve only used Jellyfin, but I struggle to imagine Plex being much easier - it was a piece of piss to just run the installer and point at my folders. Complexity only comes when doing stuff like making it available over the internet.
Or if you want to use hardware encoding. Which Plex manages to setup by itself as long as you have a device capable of it. Jellyfin Hardware encoding for me has been so much tinkering with so little success and even then it only worked for a short while or only a small subset of my library.
HW Accel took me 5 min of reading the docs one time several years ago (when I first did the setup several upgrades ago), and has not been an issue since.
You are making some statements about how rough Jellyfin is, you should remember the bolded words from the quote below more often.
Jellyfin Hardware encoding for me has been so much tinkering with so little success and even then it only worked for a short while or only a small subset of my library.
You seem happy with Plex, and that’s just fine, but all the experiences you’ve related here about Jellyfin are different than mine, and different than what I typically hear from anyone else who runs Jellyfin in recent years. I was a Plex early-adopter who left Plex for Jellfyin when Jellyfin was barely a year old, and really was still rough around the edges. I still had less trouble then than you are portraying.
My non-techie wife, my teenaged son, and my youngest son with special needs all use it without issue across multiple devices.
Thank you for giving me just enough curiosity to look up what Jellyfin is. I’ve been wanting to set up a media server but lost interest quick when I realized Plex seems to have completely moved away from being a media server program. I’m so stoked to give it a proper try.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfin
Website: https://jellyfin.org/
Github: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin
I setup jellyfin plus the arr stack on an rpi4 and man has that little thing changed my life, all the content I could ever want just for the cost of a Usenet provider. Hope you enjoy man!
How’s the rpi4 as a media server? I wanted to do that too, but i looked into it when the 3B was new and the general consensus was that it wasn’t really ideal.
As an aside, raspberry pi’s are so cool. My rpi3b running retropie/ emulation station turned out so great, and it runs way more games than I expected.
It is still a great media server no mater what the Jellyfin fanclub says. Jellyfin is great, but from a user experience perspective it’s just not in the same league as something as polished as Plex and if your userbase is not just IT workers and FOSS enthusiasts (or you enjoy a good looking and working UI) Plex is the place to go.
I’ve only used Jellyfin, but I struggle to imagine Plex being much easier - it was a piece of piss to just run the installer and point at my folders. Complexity only comes when doing stuff like making it available over the internet.
Or if you want to use hardware encoding. Which Plex manages to setup by itself as long as you have a device capable of it. Jellyfin Hardware encoding for me has been so much tinkering with so little success and even then it only worked for a short while or only a small subset of my library.
HW Accel took me 5 min of reading the docs one time several years ago (when I first did the setup several upgrades ago), and has not been an issue since.
You are making some statements about how rough Jellyfin is, you should remember the bolded words from the quote below more often.
You seem happy with Plex, and that’s just fine, but all the experiences you’ve related here about Jellyfin are different than mine, and different than what I typically hear from anyone else who runs Jellyfin in recent years. I was a Plex early-adopter who left Plex for Jellfyin when Jellyfin was barely a year old, and really was still rough around the edges. I still had less trouble then than you are portraying.
My non-techie wife, my teenaged son, and my youngest son with special needs all use it without issue across multiple devices.
I guess I’m in the “Jellyfin fanclub.”