I have setup Jellyfin as a docker container and will bind-volume the same locations as Plex, but I was interested in anyone’s perspective having made the switch in the last year or so.
What are some things you miss, what are issues/benefits you hadn’t expected?
I really don’t miss a single thing about Plex. In fact I switched because I was constantly getting playback bugs with Plex where I was getting no video stream. Jellyfin has been a lot more reliable.
How’s the offline experience?
Last time I checked something big was missing, I can’t remember what though.
I’ll restart my homelab in a month and I have already chosen Jellyfin but I’m still curious about what to expect.
Absolutely flawless. I haven’t got a single complaint.
It supports hardware decoding right?
Can you download episodes and when you watch it it gets replaced by the next one ?
Is there a YouTube Kids skin for Jellyfin?
There’s a pretty good Linus Tech Tips video going over most of what you’re asking about, you might find it useful.
I’ll be watching the thread. Been thinking about this too since Plex laid some people off
When I started self hosting, I used plex because it was so widely used. But I just did not like the initial experince. Felt like using a corporate app. Jellyfin is so much more awesome and customizable. Never needed anything else
Does Jellyfin have anything like Prologue on iOS for audiobooks?
Audiobooks make up a huge part of our media library and letting friends listen to our books is a huge part of why we use Plex.
Never owned an ios device so not sure what prologue is…a quick search tells me its an client? If so I would recommened using Audiobookshelf. Its cross platform, has metadata support and just works.
I’m still dual-wielding Plex and Jellyfin. Plex for sharing, Jellyfin mostly for me. What I miss: Skip intro, skip outtro, PMM, Tautulli, Overseer (looks like Jellyseer can cover it, but while I wait for others I might as well wait for the main repo to support Jellyfin), the interface is pretty old-school but their new VueJS (IIRC) interface looks like it’ll solve that issue. Nowits’s just about waiting for it to become the primary interface in apps.
Benefit: No more defaulting to 720p 3mbps! That shit is outdated as fuck in 2023…
Jellyfin has skip intro. Let me know if you wanna know how to set it up
I didn’t know that. If you point me in the direction of the source I think I’ll manage it from there.
Sure.
https://github.com/ConfusedPolarBear/intro-skipper
Ps. This doesnt work on android with the official client yet. But you can use the findroid app. It works flawlessly
Am I using plex wrong? Where the hell is there a skip intro??
You need a Plex Pass subscription in order to use it. You can find info about how to set it up here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/skip-content/
This is the way (dual-wielding). I ran them side by side for a while on the same media, but shutdown my plex instance after a couple of months. I got in the habit of using Infuse for my AppleTV playback, and haven’t bothered to check back in on the official client much. I’m sure there are lots of deltas out there, but for my home use case the transition was simple.
I’m also dual wielding. I think the only thing really keeping me on plex is there doesn’t seem to be a straight forward way to set up a tv tuner.
The UI on both the NVidia Shield TV and LG webOS apps is much, much snappier for one. There was always a bit of lag navigating the Plex UI.
I have had some issues with subtitles though; Watching a series and going to the next episode, the selected subtitles language won’t persist, and trying to pick the subtitles doesn’t work without backing out of the episode, starting playback again and picking the subs.
Also, Plex had the builtin subtitle search feature which Jellyfin doesn’t have. There’s a plugin, but it doesn’t seem like you can use it on the TV app, only on the web UI.
Still, even with these sharp edges, using Jellyfin feels much nicer and cleaner, as I really wasn’t feeling the commercial / forced account creation / data collection / ads aspect of Plex.
Subtitles had been my main issue with Jellyfin.
I don’t personally care, but my wife is all about the subtitles so that makes it a big issue for me!
For the language, I went in and set it for my user for the subtitles and audio.
I also have bazaar setup to clean up the subtitles.
Bazaarr is a good tip and I’ll look in to that, thank you. I’ve found Jellyfin’s external subtitle plugin to be hit and miss.
I used to have subtitle management issues, but now I use mkv files so that I can include the original subtitles from my discs. You can use settings in Handbrake to control size and quality. This doesn’t help of course if you aren’t using discs…
funny, I have the exact same issue with subtitles and needing to back out and back into the video, but on plex
Unfortunately whenever I play a video on Jellyfin, it stutters for a second every 10 seconds. I thoroughly checked the video playback settings but couldn’t determine the cause. It’s been a non-starter for me, despite how much I want to switch over from Plex.
I’m trying out jellyfin lately and there are a few frustrations I’ve run into. I don’t have any transcoding hardware, running a Xeon d based server and Jellyfin does not like this. Plex can transcode fine without a quicksync enabled CPU, but Jellyfin is very hit or miss.
The Apple TV app. Been using Plex on Apple TV for years and had zero issues. Tried the Jellyfin app and it is pretty terrible. Even scrolling through movies is problematic as it bugs out. Cant play 4k movies either. I tried using Infuse and it is much better and can play 4k movies. The only thing I really miss from Plex here is sorting movies by year, rating etc.
Mobile apps. Again, problems with the Jellyfin app. It’s very hit or miss whether something will play or not, and usually seeking will make it hang forever.
I’m very tempted to bust out my old Intel nuc and test Jellyfin with quicksync, but I don’t really want to increase my power usage just for one app. So I’ll primarily use Plex for now until I upgrade my server or Jellyfin becomes less demanding.
From my migration experience Plex seems to be a bit more forgiving if you don’t already have a fully organized media library complete with correct metadata, especially for large music libraries.
Also there is no Rasplex, i.e if you want a standalone Jellyfin client device for your TV you have to go through Kodi, there’s no fire-and-forget finished image.
Jellyfin also doesn’t seamlessly play movie files that have been split into parts, so I’ve had to do some manual ffmpeg concatenations to get many of my movies ready for it.
Then there is Plexamp, of course, which is still superior to Finamp in terms of features.
İ was using Plex with lifetime license until now for last three years but i switched to Jellyfin for three main reasons:
- Plex still doesn’t support ASS type subtitles.
- Plex discontinued plugin support and because of this i couldn’t put my anime shows and movies in same folder. Workaround for plugins sometimes work and sometimes not.
- Plex still not supporting ebooks, comics or mangas.
But Jellyfin lets me finally direct play anime episodes with ass subtitles, episodes load instantly and i made mixed libraries for my easier access.
Plugin support for Jellyfin is amazing. Currently using Symfonium for my music library and it’s really good, works better than Plexamp for me.
It was a pain to setup youtube videos on Plex, it couldn’t show metadata but with Jellyfin it only takes two seconds to show metadata with embedded thumbnails. Library scans are really fast too.
Now i can put all my movies, shows, albums, photos, youtube rips and even comic books on Jellyfin without a problem.
I tried Symfonium and paid for it, but the Google Play unlock took my money and didn’t unlock it, I emailed the developer and had such a bad reaction I had to report him to Google who said they were considering taking down his account. I have the screenshots of I choose to make a post in the future. But I won’t be using Symfonium in the future.
I have started using AudioBookShelf for audiobooks & podcasts and it’s been really good.
I like jellyfin on desktop, but the TV app isn’t great, that being said the streaming is much better than Plex but I didn’t try transcode.
I avoid anime specifically because of the dropped plugin support so Jellyfin might need to come in just for that.
Komga is what I use for Comics.
i didn’t know that about Symfonium, thanks for letting me know. what a rude guy. It sucks that happened to you, I’m sorry.
i’ll switch to Finamp then :)
jellyfin’s support is much better than Plex, it works great without problems. i get my metadata from anidb, anilist and the other sources easily.
i renamed the anime shows according to episode order of anidb and jellyfin shows them up very well. one thing i like is how it can see every season as a seperate show.
i hash my anime files with Shoko Server and it gets the metadata from AniDB.
then i installed the Shokofin plugin for Jellyfin and it loads all the metadata from Shoko’s database. i got more than 800 anime shows and movies imported easily without an api ban :)
Plex was always hanging while getting the metadata.
Causal user who only really used plex for music, jellyfin is so much better for music. Firstly good clients without having to pay for plexpass. Music doesn’t really need transcoding so I can’t speak on that behalf.
