Is just not as good*
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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What problems are you having with it?
I never used Plex. Up until my kids were born I used to just watch my videos on my desktop, but now I find myself watching on my phone and TV more often. My Jellyfin server has been super stable for the last 6 months or so running on a super low powered machine and external hard drive. The only issues I have is with movies with Dolby digital, they tend to get out of sync when scrubbing the timeline. I am assuming that is due to the lower power of the machine. But, I have a 400watt desktop with a 7th gen i7 and a pascal Quadro P1000 that I am planning on migrating to. Then adding a 20tb internal drive for storage. Hopefully that will resolve the small issues I have seen with it.
Not got around to trying it out properly yet. Waiting on new AMD GPUs, hoping for a low-end encoder or I ma get access to a RX 480.
What does Jellyfin use .NET for?
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby which was written in .NET. The server backend and web page are all (or mostly) .NET is my understanding. It makes use of external programs like ffmpeg on the server or VLC on the apps.
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.
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.
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Are you using kodi as the streaming app on your tv/device? And jellyfin as the backend?
yes
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One thing jellyfin doesnt do well its anime content. But fortunately there's Shoko Server, a metadata engine you can selfhost. Its awesome!
It works pretty well for me but I separate anime and TV/movies, and make sure the anime library is only scraping data from anime-centric databases. But I'm also not watching too much new or obscure stuff.
Yeah also with shoko you have to create a library only for animes (only one for both series and films tho). Idk, last time I checked jellyfin sucked. Maybe now its better. Another thing that shoko does is automatically track your progress on anidb, so thats cool :)
In my experience, jellyfin seems to think everything is anime for some reason.
I've had to go in to every single TV series and manually enter Metadata.
Not a huge deal I only have a few series' but man it's weird.
You can also change the directories names, appending [MVDB ID], so that for the future if you ever happen to have to reinstall jellyfin, it'll automatically repopulate them how they were :)
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 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.
I didn’t give it very long but it was literally just 3 films and 1 TV show
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
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 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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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?
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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.
You should not be using NAT to access your Plex externally, I will explain.
App.plex.tv and the apps use Plex services to generate a point to point connection from remote clients through your router to the server. This is important because you never need to expose a private IP to the Internet, and the authentication can be protected with something robust like a Google account which support 2FA and even phishing-resistant 2FA.
The combination of more advanced security and secure/convenient SSO authentication are one of the biggest benefits of Plex in my opinion.
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This is more about familiarity than difference in ease of use. I've used both, they are both super easy.
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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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