I just want to use my local library in peace
Fuck you, Subscribe.
Well, Jellyfin is right over there, and it’s FOSS too. Consider switching, it’s pretty great.
The quality and features of JellyFin are nowhere close to Plex. I have used both for years.
What about Emby tho?
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby.
But better.
Not asking this to be combative, but as Jellyfin convert I’m curious what quality/features you are missing? Also what platform are you using mainly?
I watch mostly using the Android app or Nvidia Shield, and the client does everything Plex did (in terms of just media watching - no DVR or other features ) without all the bloat the current Plex client brings.
There is a huge disparity in the quality, UX, and features of the clients. Many clients are missing basic features like scrubbing, subtitles, saving position, etc… Many platform-specific clients are people’s pet projects and quickly lose support or are half baked.
Furthermore my wife and kids are not technical the way I am—when things don’t work properly they can’t debug & diagnose, they simply can’t use it. And I personally don’t want to spend my time diagnosing why I can’t fast-forward a TV show and so on.
Interesting, again at least in the android/web/Linux client ecosystem I’ve not experienced any of those issues, and Jellyfin has caused me less family tech support issues than Plex or Emby. I guess it all depends on the platform, and how much outside of just media consumption you’re wanting your server to do.
Thanks for the follow up.
For me, Plex works great on my Synology while Jellyfin is completely unusable - video payback simply crashes. Running Jellyfin on my desktop machine gets it to work, but it takes over 24 hours to scan my media library and doesn’t automatically add new media when I add new files.
So the server part runs worse from your NAS? That seems odd but I have never run either from a NAS so no idea how to help. =(
Yep. I’m guessing it insists on transcoding the video but doesn’t have the horsepower. Plex either has a superior transcoder or detects it doesn’t need to transcode it.
I think the transcode part is decided by the client, but in the Jellyfin server admin you can control if a client can request a transcode (which may not be actually needed - and if you know what client they are running it’s probably easier to decide). This could just be client setting though, because I know on Jellyfin you can change the “backend” in the client that it tries to use and can make the difference on things like x265/HVEC playing back or not.
Hmm, I’m not sure that’s the case here. I tried this with two different browsers (Firefox & Chrome) on two different computers, plus the native client on an Android phone, Android TV, and Android tablet, with various server settings - none of them worked.
I’m in the same boat as you. I’d love to switch but the user experience of Jellyfin is still pretty bad outside the most basic cases. If you have a media center PC, it’s fine, but if you want to be able to switch between several devices the way you can with Netflix, it’s quite poor.
Plex is slowly trending down and Jellyfin is slowly trending up. I hope Jellyfin outpaces Plex before the enshittification is complete, but it’s a steep hill to climb.
The big thing for me is privacy and control.
Plex requires Cloud access via accounts.
This is a sitting duck for subpoenas to mass punish media libraries once copyright holders get a more friendly government that cares less about citizens rights (which is coming up here soon).
Nothing about my jelly fin instance leaks my information to anyone else’s servers.
You can’t say the same about Plex.
I agree with you, however Jellyfin is not intrinsically more secure than any other piece of software. You have to be very careful how you go about deploying it if you open up external access, as you are dependent on the Jellyfin devs to fix vulnerabilities and they aren’t actually being paid to do this. If you’re paranoid about privacy, you should be paranoid about this too; the people sending subpoenas aren’t above port-scans on ISP subscribers, they did it back in the early days of torrents.
You get control and privacy, but you also get responsibility. It’s a trade-off, and one I’d certainly make if Jellyfin were more mature. That’s just me though, I’ve been hosting my own stuff for about a decade now and I can set up an isolated environment for Jellyfin to run within. Plex is a lot more newbie-friendly and I’d still recommend it for most folks unless they for sure know what they’re doing.
As an aside, these concerns are common to all FOSS software that don’t have deep-pocketed backers. Jellyfin is likely never getting those, unfortunately. I hope they can find some other way of sustaining themselves, they’ve not got much money for the scale of development needed and it’s all volunteer-driven today.
https://opencollective.com/jellyfin
I want them to keep going, and I’ve even donated to them. I still don’t think it’s at a place to replace Plex for most people yet though.
The way I do it with webservices is that I serve them all from virtual hosts. Scan my IP on port port 80? 301 moved permanently to same host port 443. 443? Welcome to nginx! Which webservice is actually served depends on the hostname being requested. The hostnames are just part of a wildcard subdomain with a matching wildcard certificate, so you can’t derive the hosts from the blank landing page’s cert. Though one option would be to disable https when no matching virtual host is found.
I know this isn’t protection against sophisticated attackers, but nobody uses my home services except me when I’m not home so the exposure is very limited.
Anyhow, with Plex you have a central provider who, if I’m not mistaken, knows a lot about how their customers use their product. The angle of attack is different.
they should call this new update jellyfin
Lmao, JF is not better than Plex.
Hard disagree.Plex inserts itself I to everything, and dear god is it slow by comparison.
Well, it’s free, and it’s private. Everything else about it is serviceable
I used plex for years and years with my lifetime license, but a few years ago I felt Plex was way too bloated and swapped to Jellyfin. I don’t think about Plex now unless an article mentions it. There’s no feature of functionality I notice that’s missing, and I have a low tolerance for dealing with troubleshooting when I want to relax.
I abandoned jellyfin shortly into my self hosting setup. Plex just worked, with Jellyfin I spent an hour trying to figure out how to get it to serve an acceptable to Firefox codec and never succeeded. I’m sure with more effort I could have figured out what the magic combination was, but it wasn’t obvious and I had too many other things to set up.
How long ago was that and do you remember the codec?
About a year ago, and I don’t recall the specifics. I remember combing through trancode logs and not being able to figure out a path forward. I’m sure I could have solved it given enough time, but failing to play on Firefox or provide a clear solution was enough to convince me that the Wife Approval Factor was going to be too low.
Very understandable.
