Why do people still use Plex
Well, Jellyfin is right over there, and it’s FOSS too. Consider switching, it’s pretty great.
Maybe in a decade, when it has a feature set close to Plex. Jelly fin is just a cheap knock off. No thanks.
It’s a FOSS alternative, and that’s a pretty important feature for me. It has worked well so far for me.
Compared to Plex? It being FOSS does not make up for it being severely lacking and features in comparison. If your standards are much lower than mine, so be it. That’s your choice.
FOSS ≠ better. Just look at GIMP. It can’t even come close to what Photoshop can do, and the interface is an absolute nightmare.
The quality and features of JellyFin are nowhere close to Plex. I have used both for years.
I’m in the same boat as you. I’d love to switch but the user experience of Jellyfin is still pretty bad outside the most basic cases. If you have a media center PC, it’s fine, but if you want to be able to switch between several devices the way you can with Netflix, it’s quite poor.
Plex is slowly trending down and Jellyfin is slowly trending up. I hope Jellyfin outpaces Plex before the enshittification is complete, but it’s a steep hill to climb.
The big thing for me is privacy and control.
Plex requires Cloud access via accounts.
This is a sitting duck for subpoenas to mass punish media libraries once copyright holders get a more friendly government that cares less about citizens rights (which is coming up here soon).
Nothing about my jelly fin instance leaks my information to anyone else’s servers.
You can’t say the same about Plex.
How does it not work for you? I use it on my phone, laptop, ipad, kodi, … without issues
Can you elaborate on how it’s poor in that regard? That’s how I and many of my friends use it, and none of us have had any issues relating to that.
Not asking this to be combative, but as Jellyfin convert I’m curious what quality/features you are missing? Also what platform are you using mainly?
I watch mostly using the Android app or Nvidia Shield, and the client does everything Plex did (in terms of just media watching - no DVR or other features ) without all the bloat the current Plex client brings.
For me, Plex works great on my Synology while Jellyfin is completely unusable - video payback simply crashes. Running Jellyfin on my desktop machine gets it to work, but it takes over 24 hours to scan my media library and doesn’t automatically add new media when I add new files.
There is a huge disparity in the quality, UX, and features of the clients. Many clients are missing basic features like scrubbing, subtitles, saving position, etc… Many platform-specific clients are people’s pet projects and quickly lose support or are half baked.
Furthermore my wife and kids are not technical the way I am—when things don’t work properly they can’t debug & diagnose, they simply can’t use it. And I personally don’t want to spend my time diagnosing why I can’t fast-forward a TV show and so on.
Quality is fine, sounds like user error. Features sure, but that’s to be expected with a paid app.
Show me an AppleTV JellyFin client that “just works”. Something my mom & dad could use to watch a movie. Something that can do normal media player things like seeking or subtitles.
There is a huge disparity in the quality, support, and features of the various clients.
Is there a jellyfin app on the Xbox? The ps5? Roku TV app store?
I think no so it’s hard to switch if you have family using many different devices to watch plex.
What type of device is the Xbox or PS5 hooked up to? If a TV (“smart TV”) then there is a client for both Roku and Android TV. If they are using a monitor, could they use the web client? Or could they use the web client on either console (I never had an Xbox, and only PS was PS1 so I honestly have no idea)?
I’ve only used the Android/Android TV/web client versions from the Jellyfin team, but all seemed solid these days. On Linux I’ve also used a number of 3rd party clients, and there are plenty of 3rd party clients for most non-console platforms.
Roku, yes. Xbox as well. PS5 no, but not for lack of trying. That’s apparently on Sony.
I jumped to linux and downloaded jellyfin… shit is too complicated I havent got time to get to terms with it
That’s too bad, but it sounds more like you bit off too much rather than Jellyfin being bad. Once it’s set up, it’s fairly smooth, we just drop movies in a folder on the NAS, name them somewhat appropriately, and Jellyfin frequently recognizes it, though sometimes I’ll need to help it out a bit. Setup wasn’t much more complicated than other self-hosted stuff I run, but I’m also a full-time Linux user for some 15 years and a SW dev by trade, so I guess I’m blind to issues I take for granted.
Are you using the LSIO docker image, or did you install it manually via the website instructions?
I use JF. It’s ok but still rough around the edges and if we count as JF the apps, I have to admit that the Android TV app is pretty bad, it’s chokefull of very basic bugs, like crashing on start, and missing very basic features like delaying subtitles and the navigation is pretty bad, especially for TV show, navigating between series, episodes and home is a hot mess.
crashing on start
My main issue is that my TV occasionally decides to kill the network, which causes Jellyfin to crash on startup, clearing the server. It’s annoying, but I think the bigger problem is the TV, not Jellyfin.
I think the navigation is fine. I like the scroll by letter thing for movies on the right, and I don’t have so many TV shows that it’s an issue (maybe like 5-10 series? We don’t watch a ton of serials), and my kids seem to navigate it just fine. I did spend some time naming everything properly, so maybe that’s the difference? We rarely navigate though. My kids watch one show start to finish (however much time we give them), we generally watch one movie as a family and are done, and my SO uses it for exercise videos.
I’ve reported my fair share of bugs but the main issue with the android app is that the code is amateurish and poorly tested. Lots of the crash bugs are just devs not checking for non existent values and relying on perfect network conditions.
But yeah, It gets the job done, it’s just not a great app.
Only basic-ass bitches prefer Plex over Kodi or JellyFin.
If this turns out as bad as it seems then I’ll probably finally be leaving my lifetime Plex pass behind for jellyfin once it rolls out to the Android TV app.
as bad as it seems
Based on anything in particular? General consensus seems pretty positive from folks who have tried it.
Because it’s continuing the trend of focusing on live free channel streaming, finding things to watch on other streaming services, social media-esque interactions with other users, and other shit I don’t care about.
I just want something that will stream my media from my NAS to whatever I’m trying to watch it on, and do it well.
So, just because they added a few features, you’re not interested in, futures you don’t have to use or even see, you wanna switch to a far inferior alternative? And people are supposed to believe this is a reasonable argument?
There are some punctuation errors in your title. It should read:
Plex is “overhauling” its apps with a redesign and under-the-hood “upgrades”
Those who use Plex to access personal media will find that their libraries are in a
dedicated[hidden] tab, while the Watchlist will take up prime real estate in the top navigation section. Plex says it also streamlined the user menu for quick access to things like your profile, friends and watch history.
So they’re hiding the entire point of Plex deep in the menu and promoting things that make them money. Enshittification.
Precisely. I don’t want or use any of those features. I’ve disabled all the streaming service and friend stuff, I don’t ever use the watchlist, and I use Tautulli for watch history. I don’t even really care about watch history either. I mostly set up Tautulli because I like self-hosting stuff.
