I used plex for years and years with my lifetime license, but a few years ago I felt Plex was way too bloated and swapped to Jellyfin. I don’t think about Plex now unless an article mentions it. There’s no feature of functionality I notice that’s missing, and I have a low tolerance for dealing with troubleshooting when I want to relax.
Right now, Jellyfin is still too buggy and feature-poor for my tastes. I can’t imagine trying to convince my friends and family to use it instaed of Plex. Jellyfin shows a lot of promise though. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I’m comfotable making the switch. I suppose Plex might force my hand before that.
Jellyfin didn’t have an app for my then 3-year old LG WebOS TV so, unfortunately, I couldn’t use it.
I know people are going to say I should just use a smart box connected to my TV instead of my TV’s smart features, but there’s a difference in usability that they’re not acknowledging.
I abandoned jellyfin shortly into my self hosting setup. Plex just worked, with Jellyfin I spent an hour trying to figure out how to get it to serve an acceptable to Firefox codec and never succeeded. I’m sure with more effort I could have figured out what the magic combination was, but it wasn’t obvious and I had too many other things to set up.
They finally added intro skipping within the last month that works with the web client. Now we just have to wait for clients to update.
How about iOS downloads for offline viewing? Server transcoding?
I’m a lifetime plex user but this enshitification has been increasing a lot lately.
I can’t speak for iOS but for Android the official app allows you to download the files but you have to watch them in another app. There’s a 3rd party app for Jellyfin that lets you download and watch in-app. It’s peak open source fragmentation.
Server transcoding is there and works great though.
Not sure, I don’t use Jellyfin myself. I use Emby. It’s the more feature rich and polished older brother of Jellyfin.
I’ve been following Jellyfin’s progress because I’d like to go full FOSS but it’s still just not there yet. UI, clients, performance, all too big a downgrade from Plex still.
I can definitely recommend you look into Emby. It’s still the best alternative to Plex’s enshittification.
