this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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It is still a great media server no mater what the Jellyfin fanclub says. Jellyfin is great, but from a user experience perspective it's just not in the same league as something as polished as Plex and if your userbase is not just IT workers and FOSS enthusiasts (or you enjoy a good looking and working UI) Plex is the place to go.
What does this even mean? My 6 year old niece uses jellyfin, it's actually simpler than netflix. I may be biased because I'm not into frills but I think the UI looks great. I've admittedly had a few non-critical bugs with the UI (web, flatpak, android, roku) but most all of them have been worked out now. Plex is more polished and has a much larger ecosystem like you said, but the rest of this comment is not the most reasonable.
First and foremost, I don't know or particularly care about fanclub opinions as a whole. Not trying to be rude or anything, but it's weird to tell me that A is great despite what B fans tell me when I never even heard a word from B fans to begin with.
I've looked briefly into plex recently, which seems bloated with services and monetization that I don't want or care about (even the help articles are written like ads), and I've looked at the 3 websites for Jellyfin that I linked, and Jellyfin seems like a more clear cut and feature rich version of what plex started out as, which was primarily a media server program.
I have a large amount of users on my Jellyfin instance including people who are more tech illiterate and nobody has had any issues. The setup of Jellyfin is probably more complicated than Plex (just guessing, I haven't tried it) but besides that, the UI is very user friendly
I've only used Jellyfin, but I struggle to imagine Plex being much easier - it was a piece of piss to just run the installer and point at my folders. Complexity only comes when doing stuff like making it available over the internet.
Or if you want to use hardware encoding. Which Plex manages to setup by itself as long as you have a device capable of it. Jellyfin Hardware encoding for me has been so much tinkering with so little success and even then it only worked for a short while or only a small subset of my library.
HW Accel took me 5 min of reading the docs one time several years ago (when I first did the setup several upgrades ago), and has not been an issue since.
You are making some statements about how rough Jellyfin is, you should remember the bolded words from the quote below more often.
You seem happy with Plex, and that's just fine, but all the experiences you've related here about Jellyfin are different than mine, and different than what I typically hear from anyone else who runs Jellyfin in recent years. I was a Plex early-adopter who left Plex for Jellfyin when Jellyfin was barely a year old, and really was still rough around the edges. I still had less trouble then than you are portraying.
My non-techie wife, my teenaged son, and my youngest son with special needs all use it without issue across multiple devices.
I guess I'm in the "Jellyfin fanclub."
When you say "hardware encoding", are you talking about using your GPU for stuff like transcoding when streaming to devices?
I ask because I actively disable all transcoding because I run jellyfin off my laptop and don't wanna overwork it so to speak. I just assumed it was using the GPU.
Yes, I use my server from outside my home quite often and don't always have wifi fast enough for 4k movies, so I have plex break it down to my bandwidth. Works like a charm. Jellyfin just refuses to work.
...for you.
Oh come on, it's better to be helpful if you can rather than just saying "for you" and adding nothing else to the conversation.
Seriously I'm sure they'd love to try it again if the issue is resolved. I know I wouldn't pick Plex over Jellyfin unless I had no choice.
I added quite a bit more already in other comments. I noticed they were still acting like their bad experiences with Jellyfin were universal, and that was all I had left.
Fair enough, just saw the "if you're not an IT worker" comment haha
😁
Ah, my use case right now is almost exclusively streaming stuff from my laptop to a phone with HEVC support over a local network so I can just turn transcoding off and be okay.
I did however have issues with my lack of transcoding (I turned it off myself, not Jellyfin's fault. Pitchforks down, people) on a tablet without hardware HEVC support though so I may have to experiment with it soon.
FWIW I had to go in and turn the feature off but there's also a good chance it was using CPU instead of GPU