this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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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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[–] QualifiedKitten@lemmy.world 16 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I randomly tried using Jellyfin today instead of Plex, but Jellyfin kept crashing my browser and logging me out, so I wasn't in the mood to troubleshoot, so I just gave up and went back to Plex.

In the past, I've been annoyed that Jellyfin didn't seem to have an option to sort media by "Last Episode Date Added", nor did it seem to have a way to build a queue of episodes from multiple different shows. I think I was also having trouble figuring out how to add multiple sources... I have my "long term" library on a local hard drive, plus anything "new" on a seedbox.

I theoretically want to fully switch over eventually, but so far, Plex is still good enough for my use case.

[–] kameecoding@lemmy.world 5 points 20 hours ago

ui is not intuitive but there is nothing stopping you from having multiple folders for a library

[–] cantevencode@lemmy.world 8 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

I've been considering switching to Jellyfin for a while due to concerns about Plex either becoming worse or them peering into my library. Any idea how the apps work on Fire TV Stick? I have one for home and one I take away with me and it all works seamlessly with Plex

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 8 points 19 hours ago

Jellyfin has an app for fire stick, it works flawlessly

[–] WhyAUsername_1@lemmy.world 4 points 19 hours ago

Works great. I use VLC as a player (personal preference).

Not sure how the internal player works.

[–] Swarfega@lemm.ee 11 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

I used Plex for a long time and was very tempted by their lifetime plan. I tried Jellyfin but at the time it just wasn't a patch on Plex. I continued with Plex but always had that itch to get away from closed source. I eventually tried Jellyfin again and whilst it's definitely not as feature rich as Plex, it does what I need from it which is a central store of media that any TV in my house can use. I've even given a few friends a login so they can watch content.

I do love that it's completely self hosted. I run it behind Caddy so it has a Let's Encrypt certificate. All run in a Docker container with the media from an NFS share from a Pi4 with an external HDD.

That said, I still have Plex running as I have one Samsung TV and there's no official Jellyfin client for it. Yes there's some long winded developer way to get one on but I just can't be bothered.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 5 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Any recommendations about how to install all this jazz?

I'd like to build a music box controllable by the family, eventually centralising videos so anyone (or at least me) can just pick up their phone and watch an episode of star trek without the hassle of copying. Automatic subtitles would be magic.

Cheers!

[–] lud@lemm.ee 3 points 16 hours ago

If all you want is a local media server. It's very easy.

You pretty much just have to install Plex or Jellyfin, setup a "library" in the software.

You usually set up one library for movies and one for TV shows. You then point these libraries to their respective folders on your hard drive and assuming you have some half decent organized media with proper naming it usually just works.

Plex doesn't have automatic subtitles per say but mostly Plex players allow you to download new subtitles from the player. I don't know about Jellyfin.

If you want to have external access it's a bit harder if you use jellyfin as you will have to setup a reverse proxy but I'm guessing that there are a lot of guides for that online. Plex should work for external access out of the box assuming you have a public IP, and even if you don't you can use their automatic relay services to get it to work anyway although in very low quality.

Proper naming is honestly the hardest part but that's very dependent on how much existing media you have and how the naming is today. Luckily Plex and Jellyfin are fairly good at recognizing and finding media with subpar namin (you should still fix the naming to comply with the documentation)

If you want to have automatic torrent downloads, fully automatic subtitles and all that it's quite some work to set it up properly and have it working without any input from you. If you want to tackle it (or are just curious), I recommend checking out https://trash-guides.info/

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[–] Mikelius@lemmy.ml 7 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

I could never get Plex to work the way I wanted it to, so I'm actually someone who moved to Kodi and then to Emby. Once I got into Emby, I've yet to leave it. My biggest problem now is that I want to leave it for Jellyfin, but the lack of many things I love about Emby have never been moved to Jellyfin.

For example, I have a very specific organization of my music libraries I use to navigate what I want to listen to much quicker, since I'm into all kinds of genres of music. Emby allows me to navigate by folder structure, so if I'm in the mood for heavy metal one day, go to that folder. If classical another day, go there. Jellyfin on the other hand didn't have folder structure view and even though it's one of the top requested features for the past few years when I last checked, it's never been added...

I think the day Jellyfin does fill in these gaps, assuming new ones aren't introduced due to Emby also improving, I'll finally jump over.

I guess to the original topic, I do think Jellyfin exceeds Plex though lol.

[–] Kushan@lemmy.world 1 points 13 hours ago

I'm also on emby and it works well for me. My main grievance is setting up a new device is a chore, "emby connect" is far too clunky to use so I end up configuring via URL every time - and on some devices that's a real chore.

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[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 10 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Does jellyfin do any kind of library sharing? Because that's the killer feature that Plex has for me.

I have three friends who have Plex servers and between the four of us, I think we have all the content anyone could want.

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 20 hours ago

Yeah, it does

[–] ch00f@lemmy.world 5 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

I’ve been running plex for a few years no. No real issues to complain of.

Until today. I just upgraded my server with an Intel ARC. Was looking forward to enabling qsv for streaming. Turns out you need plex pass to do that.

Can jellyfin do it?

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[–] ZeroCool@slrpnk.net 14 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

Yeah, I'm really glad I found out about Jellyfin. I switched to Jellyfin because Plex doesn't let you disable Passout Protection (automatically stopping playback after something like 3hrs) without Plex Pass. I was just about to fork over $95 for a lifetime license when I looked into Jellyfin and discovered continuous playback was the default. I switched that very day and never looked back.

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[–] endeavor@sopuli.xyz 5 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

I knew basically nothing bout jellyfin except it existed and this thread inspired me to finally set up my own server and client on the tv cause the chromecast has just become so unbearably bad.

I had it up and running in 5 minutes. Hardest part was remembering the auth key while running between rooms. I don't buy into the atmos meme, for music I have bt amplifier or vinyl and it has everything I need: Watch content from my tv.

[–] paequ2 11 points 23 hours ago

Yeah! It's been great for me. No detection issues or weird bugs. The mobile and TV apps are also great!

[–] Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

I feel like 20 years ago someone made a similar realization with Linux vs windows

Edit: i remember people telling me how good Linux was in 2010ish (so maybe 20 years was wrong), so idk…

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[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 12 points 1 day ago

Has been for a long while. Also there are tons of unofficial apps as well.

[–] normonator@lemmy.ml 9 points 23 hours ago

Plex has been terrible for a long time if it weren't for Jellyfin I would've just not bothered with a media server for a few years until they got their shit together. That reminds I should throw some money at the Jellyfin team.

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