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From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

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Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#61

Post by shepherdjerred »

I've considered moving from Plex to Jellyfin (or some other offering in the space), but I don't think anything can really compete with Plex.

Plex, for me, required quite a bit of fiddling, but once you get it working it works _very_ well. There are decent-quality apps on every platform you want to use. There's a whole lot of software that integrates with Plex from things like requesting/adding new media to monitoring/analyzing Plex server usage.

Some of the things I appreciate about Plex:

- It does a very good job at matching media - It's very easy to share access with others - It supports many types of media -- TV, movies, music, live TV, and just plain ol' video. I store class lectures on Plex! - I'm able to stream very high bitrate movies (upwards 40mbps) without issue

Plex doesn't have the smoothest UX. You have to understand some technical concepts to use it effectively, e.g. sometimes I have to force a transcode when streaming an incompatible format. I have been very frustrated with Plex because of this.

I do wish that Plex would stop working on features that few use. I suppose this is a hard thing to do when they're working on a product that is so heavily associated with piracy.

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#62

Post by phpisthebest »

rektide wrote: post #37
discardedrefuse wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phones and tablets can access windows shares just fine. You just need a file manager that supports it. Regardless, direct playing files from a share, doesn't come close to matching the UX a media server provides. Also, don't expose windows shares to the internet.

> Also, don't expose windows shares to the internet. Is this a problem? I feel like this reputation is 10 years out of date. Personally I use smbd & I am not afraid for it. I'd like to tell Windows users the dame, provided I trust them to disallow all but logged in users.

Generally speaking unless you are prepared to (at a minimum)

1. Harden the operating system

2. Actively monitor logs, and apply updates upon release

3. Put a Firewall with IDS/IPS between the server and the internet (which most home "routers" do not provide)

you should not put anything on the wider internet, instead using something like tailscale (which you mention in another post) to create a secured private network across unsecured inet

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#63

Post by xavdid »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #20
dualboot wrote: post #6

Plex lost me when they became obsessed with trying to put advertisements in front of my grandparents when all they want to do is watch Mash on my plex server.

I've only seen ads in Plex when watching the streaming services they have integrated, which is expected. Those services need to pay for their content somehow. My media is completely ad-free.

Yes, but they now show their catalogue by default on every new client you log into. So you (or whoever has access to your server) have to know to hide their rows in favor of local media collections. They don't differentiate them in any way, so I hope your media libraries are named something more descriptive than "Movies & TV". Really disappointing.

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#64

Post by gh02t »

colechristensen wrote: post #55
AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #36

Plex seems to regularly add new features which I really have no use for but makes it relatively easy to turn them off if you want. Every month or three when I login to the web interface there's Some New Thing which I need to disable. Recently I needed a 100% offline-capable media player (and while Plex would probably work, it's not 100% reliable) and tried with Kodi. It's a very unfluid experience, requiring multiple…

I really liked the original homebrew xbmc on a modded original xbox (both plex and kodi are forks) I would appreciate a simpler batteries included media center software in that theme.

Kodi isn't a fork of the old school XBMC on Xbox, it's the direct continuation of the project. After they migrated their focus onto PC and other platforms the Xbox version was actually forked off into a separate codebase and dropped from the main project, but Kodi is the direct descendent/inheritor of the original XBMC.

I've been using it since it was still called XBMP, it really hasn't changed that much UI wise.

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#65

Post by colordrops »

jghn wrote: post #43
colordrops wrote: post #34

Plex is one of the reasons I now always choose open source over closed source but free as in beer. They start out great but as financial constraints creep in the compromises are made that create a very unpleasant experience. For example, I'd love to use Obsidian, which is an amazing app, but who knows what will happen to it in the future.

With Obsidian the thing that made me ok with this was it's all just markdown. I have all my data stored locally in an ubiquitous file format

But there's an entire workflow embedded in the use of Obsidian. It's not "just markdown". That's like saying you could move from vscode to notepad because it's "just text".

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#66

Post by stormbeard »

dbg31415 wrote: post #52

I think it's funny everyone is complaining about Plex forcing you to sign in... and the first thing Jellyfin does when you click "see it in action" is force you to sign in. Just saying...

Sign in to what? Jellyfin doesn’t have an org behind it to even make an account with. It’s all hosted on your server.

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#67

Post by dinosaurdynasty »

rektide wrote: post #48
dinosaurdynasty wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMB has been a huge transmission vector for viruses over the years, that's why some ISPs block it by default (its security is terrible). And as someone who used to watch over SSHFS for years... the biggest feature of things like Jellyfin/Plex is automatically remembering what I'm watching and where I am. Admittedly it's mostly an issue if you watch shows instead of movies (I'm never going to remember which episode of…

Dlna works really well for me... on linux with a PlayBin media renderer. Which will support essentially any media thrown at it. I've definitely found tv's and sticks to be very hit or miss eith codecs, need transcoding too oftenm But dlna worked pretty nicely when I used it with a competent media renderer. The appeal is being able to have some network connections to other people's media servers too. Making the media…

I feel like the better approach to what you want is "let Jellyfin/etc access other people's media servers (syncthing, torrent, smb, somehow)".

And there are FUSE filesystems that do transcoding, but they have really weird limitations because of FUSE and wouldn't let you change bitrate during a watch based on network conditions (if you're the kind of person to watch shows on a phone on LTE on a subway for instance).

Even though I selfhost (some things) I am very biased towards more "centralized" stuff (aka serve off the NAS in my house and let most stuff be web clients/thin clients) because of the seamless experience... I very commonly go from using an app on my phone to the same app on my desktop to on my laptop when I travel and even on my tablet or my TV and if everything just works the same it's all so much better then having to deal with weird oddities because maybe read status doesn't work or some metadata doesn't show up properly or whatever.

(or in other words just cobble stuff together ~once and then let all the other devices use the result)

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#68

Post by endisneigh »

qudat wrote: post #59
jghn wrote: post #47

I have used Plex for about 12-13 years but am very very far from a power user. I find it mildly annoying I need to login but other than that I've not noticed anything that annoys me. I admit this is most likely due to how little I use it and how non-advanced that usage is. Given this, is there any value add to Jellyfin for someone like myself? My read on this article is that it gets back to an earlier, more raw state…

> For my use case my interpretation is that would mean extra work for potentially lower quality, and unlikely any value add given that nothing annoys me about current Plex. Here's a positive example from my experience from switching to plex to jellyfin. When I drop files into my movie/tv folder jellyfin automatically syncs the files whereas in plex I always had to go to the page and click a menu icon and then click s…

Both Jellyfin and Plex sync by default automatically but Plex’s default was a few hours or so.

Re: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

#70

Post by katbyte »

colordrops wrote: post #39
crims0n wrote: post #18

I am interested in migrating to Jellyfin for most of the same reasons, but the apparent lack of an Apple TV app is a bit of a deal breaker.

Someone else in this thread mentioned "Infuse" as a useable frontend.

I have used infuse with emby, it works pretty well however I still prefer the Emby app to it for ease of navigation.
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