I run Jellyfin for myself and Plex for others. The Jellyfin android tv app almost pushed me back to Plex, but Wholpin works quite well.
+1 for Wholphin, it’s so good! I wish it was the default app.
I have a pretty old lifetime Plex pass that I got on sale.
I’m still 100% a Jellyfin convert. Keeping my Plex server while trying out Jellyfin myself lasted even less time than my Windows partition after I had linux installed.
I’ve been self hosting for about 2 years now. I never gave Plex a thought. I immediately went with Jellyfin and setup tailscale for remote access and its been awesome. We have our phones and tvs with android boxes all connected. Only we use Wholphin on the android boxes bc its better but extremely happy with the Jellyfin/Tailscale setup.
when making a media server i first went for plex. but when i heard it costs money to view my own files in 4k i had to use jellyfin instead
I literally pay the same for Nebula, which is decidedly not my own media. Paying a subscription for your own media playback is so stupid.
I run both concurrently, but Plex has had a rash of outages recently that led to it and any services relying on it completely useless. It’s insane that an online service outage would cause me to be unable to stream media locally, so yeah Jellyfin has been all but essential, recently.
That’s a big red flag for privacy imo
Oh, I generally couldn’t agree more. In this specific case it was actually their authentication service that was down, but it meant if you use multiple accounts with Plex or have a pin on your singular account that you were essentially locked out. But I agree it’s a bad look to have remote dependencies at all.
“But my parents can’t use a VPN!!”
Was that line in the sand drawn before or after footing the bill, installing a media server, and an entire arr stack?
Their house is right there, bro.
It’s been a year or two since I gave up on Jellyfin, so maybe it’s better now… But the Android TV client was rough, rough, rough when I tried using it.
If you watched Live TV, the transcode buffer would just keep going and fill your entire disk over the course of a few days after you shut down the client and stopped watching.
It was a coin toss whether you’d actually be able to stream any given movie. If you had media with more than 6 audio channels, and also needed to transcode (because you live in the U.S. and don’t have unlimited upload bandwidth)… playback would just die right around the 5-10Mbps range. I spent a weekend on the forums chasing down the exact scenarios that caused this one, someone had a Pull Request that fixed it in a matter of hours (by mimicking the transcode logicr of the official desktop client)… and the dev told them to kick rocks
Try with Wholphin. It’s a great Android TV app for Jellyfin. Way better than the “real” one.
ITT
Imo anyone who stayed with Plex after they required you to create an account is insane, especially considering there have always been good alternatives.
This exactly.
I looked into setting Plex up a few years ago. It installed, and then starts talking about making a cloud account. I don’t want to talk to a cloud I just want to organize my own shit on my own network. Why does that need a cloud?
I uninstalled it. Everything I’ve seen since, and I mean EVERYthing, tells me I dodged a bullet. Not once have I read an article that makes me wish I’d continued the install.
jellyfin just runs and looks better, too
You were right to switch whether the price increased or not.
In fairness to Plex, I bought a Lifetime subscription during a Black Friday deal over a decade ago and it’s still serving me well to this day.
I have jellyfin set up ready to go but Plex has the UX down at this point. I’ll keep using it whilst my lifetime subscription remains valid.
Same here, JF is on reserve but I’ll be sad if I ever need to switch. Ever since they fixed downloads I have 0 major complaints. Plex just works, and it works very well for my and my family’s needs. I am perfectly happy paying once for software that I use every single day.
I run both side by side and I’m very thankful that Plex exists. Jellyfin is my backup app and would be very painful to get setup in my families houses.
Tried Jellyfin, lacked critical functionality, got Plex, was amazed and got a lifetime pass and never worried about it again
Critical functionality like what? I just switched to Jellyfin and hardly noticed a difference aside from a few different bugs.
Remote play……
Library sharing…,
Apps on everything….
You can do all that on JF. Apps are def available on most things.
If you really wanted to try to complain about it, you should complain about security, search speed and subtitle support.
Remote play you can’t unless you want to open your network up to the internet, which is a terrible idea, and even then most TVs and devices don’t have a JellyFin app.
Remote play you can’t unless you want to open your network up to the internet,
That’s absolutely wrong. You can remote proxy the same way they do, sure to the edge. you can open just the port and sandbox the container. There are ways.
and even then most TVs and devices don’t have a JellyFin app.
Almost every streaming device outside of TV’s are covered and many tv’s already support it. Every roku and android tv support it, along with most samsungs.
Tell me, are you guys getting paid by a plex PR firm or something, you all feel lots of ways about things with very little information and tons of white lies.
It’s a perennial thing with Jellyfin that it doesn’t have the app / remote access support Plex provides. By itself it’s a fully functional network media server, but by design it doesn’t have the ability to reverse tunnel and it doesn’t have the corporate infrastructure that gets it’s app onto devices.
Yes you can set up wireguard / VPN access. Yes there are workarounds that can get Jellyfin streaming to most devices.
None of that matters when trying to talk someone on the phone through connecting to your server through the internet.
Plex is an account, it looks like a streaming service, it requires zero knowledge. I’m fairly certain some of my relatives have no idea it’s streaming from a server in my basement. Jellyfin they have to trust you enough to setup separate other apps / configuration and have the patience / attention span / ability to follow directions to do so.
Reverse proxy to jellyfin looks identical to a normal streaming service from a user’s perspective.
It’s been a decade. That should be in JF by now.
Reverse proxy doesn’t fix their unprotected endpoints. It doesn’t give their clients 2fa, it doesn’t make their search work reasonably well or their music client be able to preload the next song.
They’re kind of stuck in a rut and are down to basic maintenance for releases
Jellyfin has plugins fro both LDAPand OIDC, though IIRC the OIDC one isn’t great.
Out of curiosity, what “critical functionality” was it lacking?
My media player is an ancient Chromecast 4k Ultra (yes, I hate google, but I also hate buying new things) and I can’t cast from Jellyfin.
