The open source alternative to my sponsor – Jellyfin vs Plex

Have you switched from Plex to Jellyfin or vice versa? What was your experience? If you've tried Emby, how does that compare?

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A free program will never be perfect, but that's the point, its free, you expect it to lack some features, but have the most obvious functionality. Plex is a multi million dollar company with paid programmers… comparing paid and Foss software is apples to oranges most of thebtime.

I went from Plex, to Jellyfin, but neither carried what I was looking to do which is Video, TV, and IPTV. Emby by far beats both of them with the premiere subscription. I have been on Emby for six months now and it handles everything, and I mean everything so much better. Mainly my IPTV though. You really should review Emby if you haven't. Emby is by far better at handling all of it.

As a developper who tested the two solution i can explain too why i dropped Plex media server in less than 2 week :

First the installation : Jellyfin took 10 minutes to install, and he just need a path + a chown/chmod to get his rights and we are good… Plex is a curse, there is no apt install, you have to wget him, you have to install dependencie, and he will try to sell you a Plex pass in the server setup, which pissed me off because he is supposed to know that i already paid.

Plex just give me nausea with his TV show proposition. I wanted to pay just for a software that let me stream correctly my movie in train, i don't understand why when you install plex you are already lost in a jungle of proposition, this is not a good way to start when you want to test your installation, check if everything is correctly setted up in your server…

And the unsupportable thing : The bugs. Bugs everywhere, i swear my install was basic, i never try to complicate him, but dude, the UI in first place is very agressive (in ads for premium/more content) you are never sure if something go wrong, or if this is an intended behavior because i don't know what the fuck he want me to do with his proposition of TV…

Thank you so much for this review. I was going to buy Plex Pass. In India, it is expensive for us. So I am really doing my research and since the most wanted features are buggy in the Plex Pass, I have chosen not to buy. I really wish Plex fixes these issues. I will buy lifetime pass if they do.

For the metadata, I'm using (not it's first goal, I admit) couch potato, detect the movies I have, than let it do the metadata itself… Could be cool a solution that do just it…

just make your files smaller and don't allow any transcoding.

tried jellyfin for music, for some reason it's horrible at gathering music metadata compared to plex

It blows my mind that Plex still does not offer a playback speed option. It's the only reason I continue to use VLC.

“I feel like Plex has lost their way”

Oof, that comment didn’t age well coming from Linus.

"Because capitalism ruins everything"
Remind me again how you got to quit your day job and become a self-made media empire?
Plex's biggest problem is that pace Dilbert, what the customer wants is better products for free. Until the people with massive pirated video libraries start being willing to pay reasonable prices for software to play them, Plex – and every other similar vendor – is going to chase partnerships that do pay the bills.

so how to use jellyfin as local video player

Jellyfin was very slow on a Pi4 4GB. Especially flipped with 0.5TB mp3.
That's something i hated on both. I want to see all files and subfolder lists.

Thanks – would love to see how these compare on FireStick

How does capitalism ruin everything? Your entire existence is based on it…

Honestly, Plex works near flawlessly for me. I love the fact I can watch my LIVE TV through it and I actually am starting to like the free tv and movies… it's like, having a cable subscription for free so my wife is happy and my kid can watch random kid shows for free without me needing to keep up with them elsewise.

your rips aren't supported right because you're not naming them properly. you know? It's not called Shrek 1 3D…. LOL

Jellyfin is feature rich, easy to use and open source. The only downside I found until now is that indexing my libraries takes a lot longer than plex on the same hardware. I have to note here that this is on a synology nas with 2gb ram, so I guess this doesn't apply to everyone.

For me the solution when I have added a lot more movies is that I let it index overnight.

Other than that, would 100% recommend!

I would mention one thing for the parental controls in Plex (this does require a PlexPass, though; so not a free option): if you create a managed account with a restriction level of "None" you can restrict content by including or excluding ratings or labels. In my case, I created a Kids account and then (because my collection is heavily saturated with R rated titles that weren't really appropriate for 6-14 year old viewers, I chose to only allow movies and shows with a label of "Kids". If the collection leaned more toward age appropriate content, then I likely would have created a label for the less appropriate titles and excluded those.

All that said, I'll be experimenting with Jellyfin in the coming months and look forward to seeing if it meets my use case just as well or better while not giving my family too many headaches.

If you want Android Auto with Movies, music, IPTV, Web browser, you name it….. -> FERMATA

if you use jellyfin just put the imdb ttXXXXX into the file name than it wil be loaded correcty on media scan

Honestly the Live TV option is kinda nice. Can easily locally record what I want. Its pretty dang smooth too from what I have tested, vs the Alternatives I have tried

OMG!!! Plex is so riddled with bugs that I now play my medias straight from the files. I regret the Lifetime Pass too

I feel LTT have lost their way :-/

Emby is pure garbage. I have used it on Linux, Truenas core and windows, neither worked properly. It didn't find the files or even the folder.

Who cares about the download feature, just drag the file onto your phone from your pc

Can Plex be used without an active internet connection, like Jellyfin can? The entire point is being able to still watch something on my smart TVs when the internet goes down.

I had problems with plex in the past, now using Jellyfin for a year now. Even got Hardware decoding working on Fedora, just add the correct copr repo. Subtitles are downloaded automatically . Works great.

I switched to jellyfin. Better.

I've run into missing audio issues before, which were almost always solved by just a repackaging of the original content with MKVToolNix, whether the original was MP4, AVI, or MKV. I've never figured out what the issue was exactly, as the file data and the tracks appear the same, but regardless the original file has some sort of error or unexpected attribute that causes the audio playback to fail, and remuxing the file sorted the issue.

I've had similar issues with video not streaming correctly, including being presented by PLEX Roku app with the wrong resolution. But a quick MKVToolNix remux and bam, problem solved.

Enshitification! I love when companies forget the problem they solved in the face of investors.

InFuse for the win

Been a Emby user for 5y+ well worth the money. (I also have Plex lifetime but keep coming back to Emby). Great native android and LG WebOS apps.

transcoded download works fine, shrek was found immediately, there are now over 10 different ratings on age, herkules works fine

Dumped plex years ago, got totally sick of having to have server side solutions and dependency on NAS / plex CPU, not to mention some pripriatry Auduo codecs just not working right and dealing with poor quality end units and remotes. Infuse + AppleTV is the way to go it just works… syncs across multiple units with Trakt sharing, and media offline download to iphone/ipad etc…. Started out with XBMC back in the day and have used a LOT of stuff in between, cant go past infuse.