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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Tired of the reports about this post. Locking.
I tried Jellyfin a few weeks ago and didn’t have much luck with it. I only added a couple of shows and movies just to test it but half of them just didn’t show in the library (even though it detected them as they showed in other places). Will it only show stuff in the library if it can pick up the metadata for it?
How long did you give it? It indexes the library. I had to rebuild my library once, and while I don’t have a huge collection - mainly just rips of my DVD collection, about 450 films, and it takes over an hour to index everything. Until it’s done, not everything shows up.
I didn’t give it very long but it was literally just 3 films and 1 TV show
How many episodes in the show? Depending on the hardware, that could take a few minutes. If it’s trying to index over a network mounted drive, it could take a long time. My material was mounted locally over USB3 on an older 16-core Ryzen machine.
Once indexing is done, it’s fast, but there initial indexing can be slow.
Not that many, 6 seasons with 6 episodes each and a few specials. Maybe I do just need to leave it longer though, I’ll try again at some point
Start it up before you go to bed. If it isn’t indexed when you wake up, it’s just not going to work for you.
Jellyfin is pretty good about preserving the index; you only really pay a cost during that first start up, or if you shuffle content around on the storage. Otherwise, it only indexes new stuff, which should be mostly not noticeable.
I don’t have that restriction on Plex? I have 30+ remote users and 4 in home users not counting myself and there is no restrictions what so ever. All can strea 4k without issue. Could you explain more?
OP probably doesn’t have a plex pass.
Ahhh, good call-out I forget I have that since I bought it so long ago. Much appreciated
Yeah, I have 31 remote users (though less then 10 are actually active). If you’re running a server setup to the point of supporting that, the plex lifetime pass is just a piss in the wind.
But the lemmy FOSS crowd is strong, we’re severely outnumbered here :D
Maybe I need it give it another chance, but 3 months ago it was still hot garbage compared to plex
I’ve noticed it definitely varies depending on how you access it. The web version is flawless as long as the software has the resources it needs to run (my server is slightly very over-provisioned and gets crazy IO delay pretty frequently from running too much on too little).
The official Android and IOS apps are pretty good but do glitch and hitch from time to time, but apps on other platforms are less perfect. Also the third party Streamyfin and Swiftfin apps both seem to work a bit better than the official one but have their own quirks to be aware of.
The Roku app only just got consistently usable around 3-6 months ago, and still prefers to crash without displaying an error when fed media it can’t direct play, and for some reason some user profiles just don’t work on it. I don’t have anything else to try other apps on but that’s my experience so far
I haven’t really used Plex so I don’t know how clean of an experience it provides, but Jellyfin is very usable and honestly at this point most of the problems I have are specific to my media or my setup and not so much problems with the software itself
Yes, if I was using it only for myself I could make Jellyfin work for me, but since I share my Plex server with about 50 family members and friends I still have to stick with Plex. It just has an app for pretty much every device that exists, which isn’t the case for Jellyfin. The clients are also much more user friendly so I don’t have to play tech support all the time because people can’t get the Jellyfin app working on their shitty 10 year old Samsung smart TV.
Jellyfin is great but, to be fair, anything is better than Plex.
This thread is fucking blowing me away. It’s half people who realize that Plex is hot goddamn garbage, and the other half that are sucking its pp so hard it’s about to fall off.
Absolutely mindblowing to me that anyone would defend Plex and their proprietary garbage as “good.”
Wait - what restrictions on Plex?
Multiple home users, hardware transcoding, media downloads on mobile…
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202526943-plex-free-vs-paid/
I use Plex BTW , but lurking Jellyfin for some time, just not so easy to setup or comparability for my shared users.
That don’t seem to apply to plex pass. Those limitations. I have a plex pass
Unless therer was some major update in the last 6 months I’ve missed, I’d say no … not even close.
I would probably be using Jellyfin if it were just me.
The handful of people in my family that use my Plex server though are all non-tech people. When I hear that random smart TV apps aren’t nearly as good, that is what gives me pause.
That, plus the fact that a lifetime Plex pass was a one-time purchase on sale several years ago. It may be a proprietary product instead of FOSS like it should be, but at least they aren’t trying switch me to $1.99/month or some BS like that. But they’re probably smart enough to know they’d really start the Plexodus!
Maybe I should run jellyfin alongside Plex to keep better tabs on it.
Absolutely run them together.
Especially in light of Plex trying to keep tabs on what everybody’s doing and probably resell that data.
Ugh, yeah. I guess I’ll definitely have to try it!
It’s less painful than it sounds. You install the server pointed at your media files set up the same shares as you have for Plex. There’s not a lot of finagling there
Oh yeah sorry for the tone. That wasn’t my intent. I am not dreading Jellyfin whatsoever. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and I’m pretty sure it installed the WebOS app on my TV several months ago assuming the switch was coming.
No worries just attempting to put you at ease.
So uh, what’s your favorite way to enable secure remote access?
It needs to be something that people can use with smart TV apps.
I looked at some of the instructions out there, but my head is killing me so I’m not in a “figure out computer thing” mood. Otherwise I’d be at work, lol.
Tailscale has a generous free account and runs on windows, mac, IOS, android, apple TV, firestick, and shield. You just set it up on your media server and every client, and just use to 100. address for your server in each client.
If you need Roku,LG,Samsung, it’s no longer fun. The tailnet can be forwarded from a routed device on the network, but that’s deep in the weeds for random people.
You could install HAProxy and run let’s encrypt, forwarding your JF to an external port (ISPs usually block 443, but it’s not hard to tell the client what port you need. Then your users can just specify your home IP and a specific port.
Or you could forgo the SSL and just open JF up on a high port. Maybe fail2ban on logins. it’s REALLY not ‘good’ at remote access :)
Well for better or worse, I am off sick from work today so I just set up the server!
That was fast.
I’m a bit biased as I started with Jellyfin, but the Roku Jellyfin app works flawlessly on the family TV.
I’d advise at least becoming mildly familiar with how you’d go about it, since corpos suddenly rug-pulling existing users and forcing subscriptions is pretty common, basically expected, behavior of American business now.
That way you have an “out” and your service can have minimal downtime. :)
On the other hand, you might just find you like how sleek and functional Jellyfin is. I can only see wins for you here. :p
Yeah I suspect I’m going to like it.
I think I’m going to set it up to run in parallel, then I’ll be ready to try it on people’s various devices as I get access to them.
If the apps don’t work for you then I’d stick to plex. But I had the opposite experience, especially with the Plex Android TV app, it is so shitty… And the Jellyfin Android TV app is rock solid
I guess it’s worth trying rather than relying on vague internet comments. I’ll set it up for myself, then I can try apps on the various platforms as I visit people, etc.
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 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.
I bought an 13th Gen Asus Nuc with an i7 running Debian headless and a hard-disk bay for my setup, previously all I was using was a Rasp Pi 4, I honestly don’t know if my Jellyfin instance is utilizing the CPU’s iGPU not really sure how to tell.
Running lspci in the shell does return
00:10.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Raptor Lake-P [Iris Xe Graphics] (rev 04)
The only thing about jellyfin is the damn subtitles. Subtitle sync is horrible. They added a subtitle offset feature last year which was a good workaround and then removed it a few months ago on androidtv and android. Now the subtitle offset on the web player doesn’t do anything anymore either
Even Subgen generated subtitles, which are pretty perfectly in sync in reality, are sometimes played back at an incorrect speed so it will progressively get more and more out of sync, but there is no way to tell what speed the subtitles are being played at.
Also it just ignores themes a lot of times or only displays themes on the admin console and nowhere else.
That said, jellyfin is still amazing!
Subtitles are the biggest non-issue it’s crazy… Some devices don’t support internal subs, so you just extract them for your entire library using ffmpeg;
pushd "\\nas\Media\Movies\" fd -e mkv | each {|x| ffmpeg -i $x -map 0:s:0 $x.srt }Once it’s done, it’s done forever for the files you have. As you add them, just run it again.
Crazy how that doesn’t at all even address the problem of subtitle sync! It just pastes subtitles as-is in there. What if the subtitle files are at a different framerste? What if the subtitles have the wrong starting offset for the media? What if the subtitles have 1-2 mistakes in them as far as timing?
Hence why there are a dozen subtitle syncing tool projects supplementing ffmpeg like ffsubsync, subsync, alass, autosubsync, srtsync, etc…
subtitles offset works here even on latest version, both android tv, android and browser
if you don’t have the option on android, check that the player used is the right one, you will find that in settings
Using the integrated player. That is the only player option on android TV. On android I am also using the integrated player. If I use the web player, the same UI as the web shows up WITHOUT the subtitle offset option that is in the web player in a web browser. Not sure what the difference could be. Always burning in subtitles isn’t enabled either.
I tried Jellyfin two years ago and was so fed up troubleshooting the installation that I swore it off. Tried it again a few months ago and it worked flawlessly! Now I host movies, shows, music, ebooks, and audiobooks for a handful of friends and family. My jellyfin instance is probably siphoning $120/month from Netflix’s subscription revenue lol
The addons are great too. The intro/outro skip is slick and nearly flawless, background subtitle download is seamless, on and on.
I gotta try those
Here’s a pretty good list to get started with:
anybody have a guide for an old laptop
edit thabks for responses, perennial topic
Depends, does it have a gpu? What OS do you use? Do you want to run it in docker or are you ok with just installing the server app?
For Plex or jelifin. Either way you can install ready made distro like Truenas, unraided, Hexos(it has an easier interface for Truenas but got no idea how usable it is) or use a Linux distro like Debian and install docker then jelifin/plex. There are a lot of guides if you just search.
Depends on how old. I don’t recommend using vastly underpowered hardware to stream media content.
Plex has recently started applying a green filter to certain content.
The files Plex has a problem with work just fine in Jellyfin.
Green filter? Are you talking about the issue where you try to play Dolby Vision content on a non DV TV?
No, that issue can happen on Jellyfin as well, because it’s happened to me. But that was before I used the Trash guides to set up Sonarr/Radarr so that Dolby Vision files were never fetched.
I do my own ripping direct from disc and I’ve still seen it happen. So far it’s exclusive to the TV apps so I think it’s something to do with the lack of hardware support for certain things.
It is……if you use a computer. Their AppleTV app still looks like some random coder’s pet project with random playback issues.
I just sucked it up and paid for Infuse Pro and now my Apple TV experience with Jellyfin is great
I’ve had Infuse Pro for about 6 years and it has been an absolutely perfect app for me. I’ve used it across many different iterations of home media servers (Emby, Jellyfin, NFS, SMB, etc…)
If you use Apple devices it’s the best way to go.
Huh, it works great on my android os Nvidia shield
I mean, just like everything else there’s an optimal setup. I have a NAS with an extensive media library and running Jellyfin on it was a terrible experience. The NAS simply isn’t powerful enough to make Jellyfin usable.
I fixed that issue by running the server on my PC, and the libraries point to my NAS library locations. It’s the perfect setup. I get access to my GPU for HD video transcoding, and an overpowered CPU with the advantage of not having to worry about storage.
I feel like it’s the perfect setup for me.
It’s not a transcoding power issue. It’s a UI consistency and usability issue. With every device having a slightly different UI, with some apps having issues if playing back natively and some needing transcoding, the experience is inconsistent and frankly doesn’t pass the “wife acceptance factor” test, or the “let your friends use it without needing to handhold them through regular troubleshooting for their particular device” test.
I still don’t use Plex and exclusively use Jellyfin, but it’s still a hard sell to non technical users. Plex has much more polish.
With every device having a slightly different UI, with some apps having issues if playing back natively and some needing transcoding, the experience is inconsistent and frankly doesn’t pass the “wife acceptance factor” test, or the “let your friends use it without needing to handhold them through regular troubleshooting for their particular device” test.
This is a configuration issue, then. Because I have no idea what you’re talking about. The UI is exactly the same across devices, and profiles (which can be cloned) once setup, don’t require any user intervention to do transcoding. You literally click a video and it works…
Not sure what you’re doing over there, but you’re making it harder than it has to be.
Different devices. iOS, android, AppleTV. Most of it is likely Apple’s fault for the limited options in the ecosystem tho.
There are definitely UI inconsistencies across devices, especially smart TVs. Jellyfin on Firestick looks different from Jellyfin on Roku which looks different from Jellyfin on WebOS. Some devices deliver Jellyfin through a thin browser client, and in those cases you get access to a unified design. Outside of that it’s a crapshoot as what the app will let you do. Of course, it’s a volunteer project (and all my thanks to any maniac willing to develop TV apps), so I don’t expect that everything can be easily and neatly unified.
I can’t deny that it’s sometimes hard to support my users because of this. Someone complains that they’re getting movies dubbed in an unwanted language: I can’t guarantee that the button to select audio track will look the same on their end when I talk them through it.
