I’ve feel like I’ve used Plex forever. I also feel like every couple years I try Jellyfin to see how it’s going. Recently I tried it again because of Plex restriction on more than one user.
Well, I just tried it again and it’s substantially improved! This time it actually properly detected most of my library!
Also the Android TV app is AWESOME! No more glitches, lagging, and freezing trying to play my stuff like Plex did. It is butter smooth.
Wow! I’m impressed and I just deleted Plex. Good riddance.
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It is……if you use a computer. Their AppleTV app still looks like some random coder’s pet project with random playback issues.
The app on my LG TV is acceptable, but does have random problems, like it can’t connect over TLS, and it’s kinda slow to navigate. But it works, and my kids know how to work it.
I genuinely do not understand the issues people are having with Jellyfin subtitles. I just have Bazarr set up to automatically download and they play on every device (web, android, iOS, roku, android TV) with zero issues.
Sounds like it’s mostly with embedded subs inside the media files already. Thats where all my subs are so I’m going to test soon but haven’t played anything on jellyfin needing subs in a while
I now extract all my subs, but for the first 2 years using it I left everything embedded and it always worked normally. Even with some advanced ones like Jujutsu Kaisen and One Pace, which both use stylized ones.
Just tested and with Findroid on my phone, no subtitle options appeared at all, though it had 4 languages embedded. On my roku they showed up but as soon as I picked it it loaded until it said Error During Playback
I quit streaming services around 4 months ago, determined the exact maximum streaming quality every device I own can handle, used a $60 used office PC from craigslist, admittedly I haven’t fully figured out how to get subtitles to work without transcoding, but I just need to sit down and figure it out at some point. I direct stream all of my content from a 10+ yr old PC and it uses less than 5% cpu while watching a 4k movie. I could stream to easily 5-10 PC’s and still likely be able to do software maintenance on the PC at the same time. That and with how jellyfin looks like a streaming service, with no transcoding it’s better than any streaming service. Nearly every streaming service you use is transcoding on the fly instead of storing 20versions of each video for direct streaming, direct streaming a previously encoded asset will always deliver a higher quality viewing experience.
The applications aren’t that good. That’s the only thing keeping me from switching completely. Subtitles, aspect ratio, audio track selection just don’t work as expected. In some cases I can only pick the aspect ratio and no subs and sometimes the other way around? Also if I have no subs for a movie, I can’t search for them on the fly - good feature of plex. As it stands, jellyfin video player is not up to my standards and I can’t switch yet. I use it for porn though. That works fine.
I’ve been using plex for several years and setup jellyfin a few months ago to tinker with it. Playing videos works fine for me locally but I have some family out of state who have access and jellyfin doesn’t have a solution for that outside of me publicly sharing the URL and managing the passwords. Also a pain point for me is having multiple files of different quality for the same movie/episode, it always shows as two episodes that it will play back to back and seems to require a lot of manual work per show/movie to get it tracked as 1 piece of media with 2 files to choose from. Would love to ditch Plex eventually but for me and my family it just works without issue and they can manage their own remote login.
I use jellyfin for every device except for my android TV. I really like it and prefer it over Plex, but it was working fine until it suddenly stopped working a few months ago. I tried updating the app, the jellyfin container, reinstalling the app and clearing data and redoing my jellyfin instance entirely. Nothing worked, everytime I try to connect to the server via the android TV i just got an error unable to connect… and the rest is cut off. Regular android app works, idk what the problem is but it has to be client side, so I just gave up and now have plex running alongside just for the TV.
If anyone has had this Problem before I would love suggestions!
I still maintain that Emby is better than Jellyfin. I try it again maybe once a year and every time I end up back on Emby. It just runs better, works pretty flawlessly and doesn’t lose my libraries every so often. Music playback is better by far on Emby and that’s my main usecase.
Hardware decoding would be nice, but I don’t have a system I could use this on for either and I’ve not had trouble without it.
What do you mean library losses. I’ve been using jellyfin twoish years now and have never had this happen.
I’ve found the opposite to be the case unfortunately. Plex “just works” while my jellyfin server had almost constant issues with subtitles (two of my frequent users need these because of hearing problems) and would frequently crash requiring docker restarts.
I adopted jellyfin very early, used it for many (maybe 6?) years and these problems only got worse over time.
I always prefer open source (often to a fault) but I am glad I switched to Plex a few months ago. I got the lifetime pass for cheap for black Friday. I still leave jellyfin running for a few users, but everyone else has already switched over.
I had the opposite. Jellyfin just works. Plex kept losing my movie folders, refused to play videos, wouldn’t screen cast, had problems with audio tracks, there always seemed to be a disconnect between app and server, they refused to connect despite both being the correct versions. It worked great initially, but got steadily more and more problematic over time. I gave up, even though I’d paid for it, and made a jellyfin server and have had zero trouble since.
Don’t know why two programs should have such radically different experiences, they should just do what they’re supposed to.
The only problem I’m having with jellyfin is around subtitles, but it’s getting better all the time. I bought the plex lifetime license a few years ago, but we’ve moved our whole house to jellyfin now.
Although I have my issues with plex, jellyfin has its own problems:
- STILL can’t clear out the TS transcoded files automatically. So if you watch a bunch of TV episodes on a weekend, your jellyfin container will run out of space and break.
- STILL can’t handle subtitles properly. I swear, this must be jellyfin’s Waterloo.
- jellyfin cannot demux 5.1 and present stereo sound on certain streams. I think this is a tooling issue. But it’s low level enough that I can handle it manually with mkvtoolnix myself on the few cases it happens.
This last one is why I have to use Plex instead of jellyfin on my tv. The jellyfin roku app fuckin sucks and refuses to demux anything.
Not having to pay for hardware transcoding/tonemapping is the biggest „selling“point for Jellyfin. I used to have plex before. It worked well but I didn’t want to pay 100€ for transcoding. Never tried emby for the very same reason.
Been using Jellyfin along side the ‘ARR suite for about a year now, my biggest issue is with Subtitles.
On the IOS/iPadOS apps of Jellyfin subtitles seem to prevent media from streaming, tried utilizing Bazaar but have had no luck.
I think I might be able to help with Bazaar settings if you still want to try it. It took a lot of playing around with things, there weren’t any guides at the time I set it up. But I can send you screenshots of my settings and highlight the crucial settings.
I used to have similar issues, was due to my PC not being able to handle the transcoding. Enabling hardware acceleration with the correct settings fixed it for me.
Jellyfin is awesome.
Is just not as good*
What problems are you having with it?
I never used Plex. Up until my kids were born I used to just watch my videos on my desktop, but now I find myself watching on my phone and TV more often. My Jellyfin server has been super stable for the last 6 months or so running on a super low powered machine and external hard drive. The only issues I have is with movies with Dolby digital, they tend to get out of sync when scrubbing the timeline. I am assuming that is due to the lower power of the machine. But, I have a 400watt desktop with a 7th gen i7 and a pascal Quadro P1000 that I am planning on migrating to. Then adding a 20tb internal drive for storage. Hopefully that will resolve the small issues I have seen with it.
