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.
There’s a really strong bias on Lemmy for OSS projects. I’m glad they get so much love here, but everything people say here about Jellyfin has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. It works and you can use it. Depending on your needs, it may even work perfectly for you. There are tons of rough edges though.
Here’s a few:
- A bunch of basic functionality most people are used to is missing by default. You can get things like intro detection and subtitle downloading to work with plugins, but you have to work at it.
- Hardware acceleration still kind of sucks. You can get it to work, but the Jellyfin port of ffmpeg doesn’t work anywhere near as well as Plex’s.
- The variety in app experience is bewildering sometimes. Apps look and feel very different between platforms.
- Android TV app support sucks. The app is difficult to navigate and has a bunch of weird edges, like subtitle defaults not working. I have no idea what OP is talking about here, it sounds like they’re only judging the app on its animation speed.
- Public network support is finicky. This is hard to quantify, but I’ve been on several remote networks where my Jellyfin connection dropped in and out and Plex did not. I suspect this is due to the Plex Relay service making up for bad routes between my house and the network.
Jellyfin is improving all the time, and I hope the recent EFCore update improves performance and development velocity. I’m also holding out hope it will eventually lead to externally hosted databases and active-active servers.
Disclaimer: I run Plex and Jellyfin and regularly check in on the state of things in Jellyfin. I donate to Jellyfin. I want Jellyfin to be better than Plex. I don’t think any objective measure bears this out yet.
Since you run both, I have a few questions if you don’t mind.
I don’t have a plex pass but, so the only feature I want is intro skipping and from what you mention I understand it needs tinkering. Acceptable for me.
My usage is pretty simple if I migrate to Jellyfin do I need to fuck around with my folder structures ? No special case just /movie/title | tv/title in my use-case with the usual arr stack for grabbing.
The client used currently is a desktop client on arch/windows and I don’t need hardware transcoding. The server and libraries are on Truenas.
I don’t need remote playback for movies/tvs but I have no idea how to replace Plexamp and if you have suggestions, feel free to mention it.
Intro skipping works pretty well once you set it up and give it time to scan. Functionally, it identifies common audio to determine likely intros, so it can get confused with shows that have different intro music between episodes of the same season.
Don’t have to change any folder structures unless you were storing optimized media alongside the original files in Plex. All the metadata for both Plex and Jellyfin lives in a SQLite database in your config dir.
You may wind up transcoding even if you think you really shouldn’t have to. Browsers are weird about supporting some encodings, and both Plex and Jellyfin will automatically transcode to satisfy the client.
Hardware transcoding is huge, don’t underestimate how impactful it can be. A single 4K CPU transcode could saturate my 72-core server, but one A380 can transcode 3-4 4K streams at the same time. This admittedly doesn’t matter much if you only have one user, but keep it in mind if you ever have to share. It’s so annoying to have a stream start hitching because 1-2 friends decided to start watching something at the same time as you…
I still don’t have a good replacement for Plexamp either. I think Jellyfin can play music too, but I haven’t tried it myself. I spent a lot of time getting the metadata right in Plex and just haven’t felt like trying to find a way to migrate yet.
Also the Android TV app is AWESOME!
I dunno…
There’s a transcoding bug in the Android TV version of the Jellyfin client where transcoding a video with 7.1 audio breaks playback. Even with a Pull Request out there that fixes it (by matching the behavior of other Jellyfin clients), the issue got closed as “not planned”. The continued suggestion continues to be “just force everything to play in stereo”.
I don’t have unlimited bandwidth, so plenty of my stuff gets transcoded in Plex. I can’t, in good, conscience, switch my friends & family (most of who use Android TV) over to Jellyfin.
It’s worth noting that that not planned was a stalebot close, the issue is valid to remake.
anybody have a guide for an old laptop
edit thabks for responses, perennial topic
Depends on how old. I don’t recommend using vastly underpowered hardware to stream media content.
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, 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?
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.
