Comment by Xanza@lemm.ee on Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?!

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.

I tried to setup Plex and it was just about the most god-awful experience I’ve ever had. It was unnecessarily complex to accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup.

Installing Jellyfin took like… 2 minutes and I’ve had no issues since.

Only thing I don’t like about Jellyfin is the metadata engine, which I have disabled and just use TinyMediaManager and save everything to .nfo which is picked up by Jellyfin immediately. Works great.

Hm. I gave Jellyfin a try and the UX was a turnoff, so I ended up in Plex. The separate management of metadata does sound like a pain to me, too, but maybe there’s a bit of sunk cost fallacy to that.

Either way it seems people are mostly fine with their choices and there is a viable free alternative, so… all good there.

You can change the UI design to whatever you want with a custom CSS. Can make your own or there’s a plethora of themes on GitHub. I remember trying one that replicated the Netflix app, and don’t hold me to it but I think I saw a Plex one as well.

Also, regarding the metadata, there are options that auto populate it for you. Idk how it does it, but my haphazard library of torrents all had accurate metadata AND it downloaded the subtitle files as well.

Not the UI, the UX. The UI may be editable, but if I have to make my own UI to be happy with what it looks like or works like, then that’s bad UX.

I get that sometimes those terms are used interchangeably, but they’re not the same.

Sorry, I misread. What is bad about the UX exactly? You don’t need to customize anything if you don’t want to; “it just works”. And I dont follow you on how having the option to customize things makes it a bad user experience. You’re assuming the native UI is bad for some reason.

I’ve used Plex a lot too back in the day but there’s nothing it provides that Jellyfin doesn’t do out of the box + self-hosted + for free.

Sorry, I misread. What is bad about the UX exactly? You don’t need to customize anything if you don’t want to; “it just works”. And I dont follow you on how having the option to customize things makes it a bad user experience. You’re assuming the native UI is bad for some reason.

Being given the tools to customize something by hand is not the same as being offered enough option to simply choose what you want. Having a good UX means that there was a UI designer who alread did the customzing for you and you simply have click a button to apply it.

I barely even remember what the specific dealbreaker was, honestly. I was just dabbling, considering expanding my NAS and maybe getting the gear to dump my 4K BluRays. I gave Jellyfin a try first, I went through the setup process and I remember it being a) confusing to set up directly on my NAS, and b) very ugly.

I gave Plex a try to cover my bases and that looked better and got me up and running faster, so I just stuck with it. Easier remote access was a feature for me there, too, but the choice was made purely on the onboarding process, there was nothing activist to it. It’s maybe the most user-level, unresearched decision I’ve taken on software in a while, honestly. I was already trying to figuring out the ripping and encoding at the same time, so I didn’t want to put any additional attention on library management.

If anything I gave Jellyfin a bit more of a chance than I otherwise would have because I had heard a lot of angry chatter from people about Plex. I guess I came in after they made the changes that pissed people off and didn’t mind the state of the current product without a frame of reference. I would have bailed if there was a subscription, but they do have a one-and-done purchase, so now I’m set up, it’s working and I’ve paid them as much as I’m going to, so I’m fine with it. I do appreciate a free alternative existing, though.

I don’t know if it’s bad UX or UI, but I do agree there’s something really disturbing with jellyfin’s options and tweaks… More than once I lost my way and had to click on every option button again to find a specific thing to disable/enable something?

Now It’s easier after I have passed some time in the options/user menu, but some tweaks and options are not very intuitive.

Other than that, Jellyfin is awesome and I can’t believe something as good as Jellyfin is free and open source. Thanks to all devloppers behind this, I hope they will stay true to open source and jellyfin will last forever !! But I doubt it.

The separate management of metadata does sound like a pain to me

It’s really not, but I guess it depends on how you do it. You can even automate it.

It was unnecessarily complex to accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup.

Please elaborate how you needed to “accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup”.

When I set my server up years ago all I did was log in on the web interface. Literally as simple as any other service.

When I set my server up years ago all I did was log in on the web interface. Literally as simple as any other service.

They make you register with their own website to login to your local instance… That’s you jumping through hoops to accommodate their cloud bullshit;

It’s important to understand that Plex Media Server does not have its own graphical user interface. When you run the server on your computer, NAS, or other device, you won’t see a window open with a “server UI” or similar. Instead, you use our web app to manage your server.

It’s so fucking unnecessary.

Wait, isn’t Jellyfin the same way? Pretty much every self-hosted app I run uses some web interface you log into so you can use it anywhere on the network. Sure, Plex also has some pre-set remote connection thing, but from the end user perspective it’s the same set of steps. I also had to make a login for all the stuff I fully self-host.

Is there no account management on Jellyfin? I would probably want that as a feature.

Wait, isn’t Jellyfin the same way?

Jellyfin has a native web-ui, yes. But not a proprietary one, like Plex uses. When I installed a Plex server I had to go to plex.tv and setup a user account there to be able to log into my own damn server… Then they strongly encourage you to use https://app.plex.tv/ to manage your local server.

It’s all unnecessarily confusing and difficult.

Is there no account management on Jellyfin?

Yes. Local accounts. Not some cloud based PAMd system.

You made me feel like I was crazy, so I just downloaded Plex Media Server and installed it. Ran it, and was immediately presented with this: https://i.xno.dev/mqWFZ.png

I was then immediately routed to app.plex.tv and see this: https://i.xno.dev/cLPfw.png

There’s no option to not use a plex account. You must either use an existing account or sign up for one. You cannot use local users. Then it forces you to use the app.plex.tv so it can display content you don’t even have, or have access to…

How in any possible way is any of this easier than Jellyfin?

EDIT: Oh, don’t forget the sales pitch! https://i.xno.dev/79WBs.png

Okay, but… how is it confusing from the front end if what you’re doing is going through the same steps of creating an account? You punch in a login and password in both.

Sure, Plex is doing this extra thing where it’s also bringing in centralized content along with your library and it will default to its remote access system if you log in from outside your network. But again, from the front-end that is transparent. You log in and you have your library. If anything they’re being a bit too transparent, I’ve had times where networking stuff got in the way and it took me a minute to notice that Plex was routing my library through their remote access system instead.

I can see objections to it working that way, you trade a (frankly super convenient) way to share content remotely and access content from outside your network without too much hassle for… well, going through someone else’s server and having their content sitting alongside yours. But “confusing and difficult” isn’t how I’d describe it. It seems to work like any other service, self-hosted or not, as far as the user-facing portions are concerned. I guess I just don’t see the confusing part there.

Okay, but… how is it confusing from the front end if what you’re doing is going through the same steps of creating an account? You punch in a login and password in both.

Because there’s zero difference between the app.plex.tv interface spawned from plex server, and one without. There’s zero indication that it’s actually your server and your content because it fucking displays everything by default.

It’s such an incredibly bad proprietary system…

But again, from the front-end that is transparent.

It’s not. There’s no server configuration options at all. There’s nothing to indicate it’s local content…

I can see objections to it working that way, you trade a (frankly super convenient) way to share content remotely and access content from outside your network

For 90% of the content people use Plex for, this is an illegal act. So I don’t see the advantage to providing this option let alone making it easier to commit a felony… I’ve never needed to “share” my media library with anyone and even if this was something I wanted to do, it’s a simple DNS record away from doing the same thing in Jellyfin. There’s no reason to lock people into your login system because 10% of people would “find it easier.” It’s just such a bad argument.

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Jellyfin is not just good... but better than Plex now?!

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