Not having to pay for hardware transcoding/tonemapping is the biggest „selling“point for Jellyfin. I used to have plex before. It worked well but I didn’t want to pay 100€ for transcoding. Never tried emby for the very same reason.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Maybe when the merge transcoded downloads on the official clients. rn depending on streamyfin
I used Plex a while ago and didn't like how I had to look for my folders against the stuff they offered. And the upside of being able to get my stuff from a server install on another network had me wondering if they were looking at the movies I had to pirate. Once I installed jellyfin, I didn't have to worry. My only issue is if I want to use it on vacation, I have to do some vps hack-jiggery.
Jellyfin is awesome.
One thing jellyfin doesnt do well its anime content. But fortunately there's Shoko Server, a metadata engine you can selfhost. Its awesome!
I need some explanation in the "Anime" part, I don't get it ?
Well, jellyfin often doesn't find the right metadata for anime episodes ecc, so theres this thing called Shoko Server that calculates a checksum of your files, compares it with the database over at anidb, and creates a virtual filesystem for jellyfin to make things easier! It's pretty neat. Do you have additional questions?
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I've been using Kodi with Jellyfin for around 10 years now. I tried Plex now and then because everyone uses it but I could never get behind why everyone is using it. It has always been worse in every aspect for me.
Wife approval factor
My wife won't use it if she can't see an app for it to click on to start using immediately. Going through browsers is not an option. Not having a dedicated app on the LG TV is not an option. Not being able to find something instantly means instant rejection. She refused Plex, but now sometimes uses it and has learnt to find subtitles, etc by herself.
I don't touch my self hosted apps. If something doesn't behave properly on the first attempt then it gets rejected from our household. It's only for us enthusiast nerds to put up with kanky UI and setup issues for the sake of superior functionality. Normie's won't tolerate it.
Not having a dedicated app on the LG TV is not an option.
There’s your first problem.
My wife uses the Kodi app on Android TV just fine.
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A big one for me was user management. I don't have to concern myself with that. So it helps. They also have apps for most things, I can just say go get Plex instead of what device are you using? Get x app. Here is the server information you'll need to put in.
I didn't have to put a lot of effort into managing the people using it.
We have different requirements apparently. I don't need user management and we only watch on our TV (plus myself using Jellyfin as backend for Symfonium).
Are you using kodi as the streaming app on your tv/device? And jellyfin as the backend?
yes
I feel like 20 years ago someone made a similar realization with Linux vs windows
Edit: i remember people telling me how good Linux was in 2010ish (so maybe 20 years was wrong), so idk…
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I don't know about using the jellyfin client but as a backend for Kodi, it's amazing
I actually prefer the Jellyfin client to the Kodi client by a lot. Using Kodi on top just adds more unneeded complexity and reloading libraries in my experience.
I tried Jellyfin a few weeks ago and didn’t have much luck with it. I only added a couple of shows and movies just to test it but half of them just didn’t show in the library (even though it detected them as they showed in other places). Will it only show stuff in the library if it can pick up the metadata for it?
How long did you give it? It indexes the library. I had to rebuild my library once, and while I don't have a huge collection - mainly just rips of my DVD collection, about 450 films, and it takes over an hour to index everything. Until it's done, not everything shows up.
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it will still shows stuff in the library even if it failed to pick up the metadata.
for jellyfin, folder structure is kinda important for auto detection to work.
For shows, you can organises your files like this:
series-name-a/
season-01/
episode-01
episode-02
You can check out the doc, it is more detailed
They both suck.
Long live Stremio.
It's curious that I'm almost in the opposite boat, have been using Jellyfin without issues for around 5 years, but recently was considering trying Plex because Jellyfin is becoming too slow on certain screens (probably because I have too much stuff, but it shouldn't be this slow).
Edit: this made me want to check in Plex, so I'll leave my story for people amusement:
My experience with Plex:
- Write the docket compose
- leave out the claim because it's optional and I have no idea what it is
- launch it
- asks me to create an account
- not really comfortable creating an external account to access my local server, but okay.
- discovered I already had an account. Huh? I wonder why I don't remember ever running Plex then.
- login to that account
- shows me a bunch of stuff
- find it weird that it already scanned everything, especially because I didn't pointed it to my media
- proceed to try to watch something
- can't play due to DRM
- WAT?
- go back and discover there's a bunch of content that's not in my library
- ok, so this must be some free content
- how do I configure my local library?
- spend 15 min navigating the UI trying to find it
- open the docs, they say to click the settings icon
- that icon is nowhere to be seen
- click a similar one
- can't find anything the docs say I should
- maybe I'm not on the right site? site is :/web/yaddayaddayadda so it seems correct
- try to go to : get to the same page
- look at the docs on how to access the web app says to go to :/web
- try that, get a message about not being authorized
- WAT?
- read some more docs discover I need that claim
- spend some time trying to find that in the UI
- google it up, find the link
- go to that page, grab the claim, set it up on the server and restart the server
- I'm able to get to the web app now
- Do you want to access it from the internet? If this works it would be great, so yes!
- setup my library
- let it scan and try to watch something from it
- UX sucks, video plays in a sort of popup in landscape on my phone.
- Ah, dumb of me, I probably have my browser set to desktop mode
- No, I don't.
- Ok, so the web is maybe only expected to be used on desktop, let me install the app
- Install the app, login to my account, only have the Plex provided content
- Look around trying to find the media I scanned, find a thing saying my server is disconnected
- WAT?
- Go back to the web app via IP, try to look into settings
- "You are not connected directly to the server"
- WAT?
- everything else seems okay, I even enabled remote access there and it says it's working
- Every few minutes the page says my server is not available for a few seconds then comes back
- It's now been 1 hour and I haven't been able to watch anything.
It's now been 1 hour of trying to set this up and I give up. Jellyfin is much more easy to setup, and even if Plex was instantaneous I could have loaded my TV library hundreds of times in the 1h I just wasted trying to get this to work. Probably every other time I tried I got similar results which is why I have an account there even though I don't remember ever using Plex.
Edit2: after some nore more fiddling managed to get it working, not sure what I changed, so now:
- Open the app, see my content there
- Try to watch something
- "You're watching in indirect mode, quality might be bad"
- Ok, so it's not connecting directly to my server, anyways, let's ignore this for now, maybe it's getting confused because it's in a docker container
- "Activate Plex"
- Ah, ok, it's the "pay or not now" screen, not now
- No subtitles play
- Try different subtitles
- Still nothing
- Plus quality seems shit
- Confirmed, it's reproducing at 720x300 even though it's a 4K video
- Look at docs, figure out the direct play is about converting the video
- Select maximum quality which according to docs should use the original file
- Still get a 300p video
- Figure out maybe it's the android app that's the problem, go to the TV, install Plex and connect to it
- Video takes forever to load
- Give up again after a couple of minutes waiting for the movie to load
The quality was probably bad because you were routed through Plex Relay services which have a bandwidth limit. It is honestly quite a nice free service because it means it will work pretty much regardless how your network is setup but the quality will be bad. If you want to directly connect to your server you need a public IP so CGNAT won't do you might also have to open some ports.
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This is more about familiarity than difference in ease of use. I've used both, they are both super easy.
Some of it yes, the claim for example, but the rest is still pretty bad UX (and even that is stupid, I shouldn't need a claim to watch locally), I'm an experienced self hosing person and I'm getting frustrated every step of the way, imagine someone who doesn't know their way around docker or is not familiar with stuff... Jellyfin might be less polished as some claim, but setting it up is a breeze, never had to look at documentation to do it.
I set Plex up as an inexperienced selfhoster in 2020 and it was easy.
I've been considering switching to Jellyfin for a while due to concerns about Plex either becoming worse or them peering into my library. Any idea how the apps work on Fire TV Stick? I have one for home and one I take away with me and it all works seamlessly with Plex
Jellyfin has an app for fire stick, it works flawlessly
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Any recommendations about how to install all this jazz?
I'd like to build a music box controllable by the family, eventually centralising videos so anyone (or at least me) can just pick up their phone and watch an episode of star trek without the hassle of copying. Automatic subtitles would be magic.
Cheers!
Many ways to install it officially nowadays (see their website) but most do it via docker. A very easy albeit unoffical way is via flatpak.
If all you want is a local media server. It's very easy.
You pretty much just have to install Plex or Jellyfin, setup a "library" in the software.
You usually set up one library for movies and one for TV shows. You then point these libraries to their respective folders on your hard drive and assuming you have some half decent organized media with proper naming it usually just works.
Plex doesn't have automatic subtitles per say but mostly Plex players allow you to download new subtitles from the player. I don't know about Jellyfin.
If you want to have external access it's a bit harder if you use jellyfin as you will have to setup a reverse proxy but I'm guessing that there are a lot of guides for that online. Plex should work for external access out of the box assuming you have a public IP, and even if you don't you can use their automatic relay services to get it to work anyway although in very low quality.
Proper naming is honestly the hardest part but that's very dependent on how much existing media you have and how the naming is today. Luckily Plex and Jellyfin are fairly good at recognizing and finding media with subpar namin (you should still fix the naming to comply with the documentation)
If you want to have automatic torrent downloads, fully automatic subtitles and all that it's quite some work to set it up properly and have it working without any input from you. If you want to tackle it (or are just curious), I recommend checking out https://trash-guides.info/
Jellyfin is still not up to snuff with where Plex was pre-enshittification, but Plex is enshittified. For everyone in between, there’s Emby, which I have been very happy with.
what are the things i will miss from plex's pre-enshittification?
I'd have to agree with this, there was a time where Plex was amazing. after like the 3rd time I was forced stop it from hiding my library and them pushing services in my face I made the switch to Jellyfin. It's been long enough now that I don't recall the features I miss, and overall Jellyfin is fine, and seems to get better pretty consistently.
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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.
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.
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I’ve been running plex for a few years no. No real issues to complain of.
Until today. I just upgraded my server with an Intel ARC. Was looking forward to enabling qsv for streaming. Turns out you need plex pass to do that.
Can jellyfin do it?