Plex has overhauled its apps from the ground up to make them easier to navigate. The teams says it will be able to roll out new features faster as well.
I’m in the same boat as you. I’d love to switch but the user experience of Jellyfin is still pretty bad outside the most basic cases. If you have a media center PC, it’s fine, but if you want to be able to switch between several devices the way you can with Netflix, it’s quite poor.
Plex is slowly trending down and Jellyfin is slowly trending up. I hope Jellyfin outpaces Plex before the enshittification is complete, but it’s a steep hill to climb.
This is a sitting duck for subpoenas to mass punish media libraries once copyright holders get a more friendly government that cares less about citizens rights (which is coming up here soon).
Nothing about my jelly fin instance leaks my information to anyone else’s servers.
I agree with you, however Jellyfin is not intrinsically more secure than any other piece of software. You have to be very careful how you go about deploying it if you open up external access, as you are dependent on the Jellyfin devs to fix vulnerabilities and they aren’t actually being paid to do this. If you’re paranoid about privacy, you should be paranoid about this too; the people sending subpoenas aren’t above port-scans on ISP subscribers, they did it back in the early days of torrents.
You get control and privacy, but you also get responsibility. It’s a trade-off, and one I’d certainly make if Jellyfin were more mature. That’s just me though, I’ve been hosting my own stuff for about a decade now and I can set up an isolated environment for Jellyfin to run within. Plex is a lot more newbie-friendly and I’d still recommend it for most folks unless they for sure know what they’re doing.
As an aside, these concerns are common to all FOSS software that don’t have deep-pocketed backers. Jellyfin is likely never getting those, unfortunately. I hope they can find some other way of sustaining themselves, they’ve not got much money for the scale of development needed and it’s all volunteer-driven today.
The way I do it with webservices is that I serve them all from virtual hosts. Scan my IP on port port 80? 301 moved permanently to same host port 443. 443? Welcome to nginx! Which webservice is actually served depends on the hostname being requested. The hostnames are just part of a wildcard subdomain with a matching wildcard certificate, so you can’t derive the hosts from the blank landing page’s cert. Though one option would be to disable https when no matching virtual host is found.
I know this isn’t protection against sophisticated attackers, but nobody uses my home services except me when I’m not home so the exposure is very limited.
Anyhow, with Plex you have a central provider who, if I’m not mistaken, knows a lot about how their customers use their product. The angle of attack is different.
I see. I’ve never had an issue with it forgetting my spot in a show, and as far as I know my friends haven’t either. Haven’t had connectivity issues either.
Show me an AppleTV JellyFin client that “just works”. Something my mom & dad could use to watch a movie. Something that can do normal media player things like seeking or subtitles.
There is a huge disparity in the quality, support, and features of the various clients.
I set my parents up with infuse and it works fine with no issues. To be fair apple doesn’t seem to be very supportive of foss development on their devices
Right, but the clients I use don’t have these issues. Maybe there’s an issue with the AppleTV client, that’s fair criticism, but saying that Jellyfin has inferior quality is not accurate.
I use JF. It’s ok but still rough around the edges and if we count as JF the apps, I have to admit that the Android TV app is pretty bad, it’s chokefull of very basic bugs, like crashing on start, and missing very basic features like delaying subtitles and the navigation is pretty bad, especially for TV show, navigating between series, episodes and home is a hot mess.
My main issue is that my TV occasionally decides to kill the network, which causes Jellyfin to crash on startup, clearing the server. It’s annoying, but I think the bigger problem is the TV, not Jellyfin.
I think the navigation is fine. I like the scroll by letter thing for movies on the right, and I don’t have so many TV shows that it’s an issue (maybe like 5-10 series? We don’t watch a ton of serials), and my kids seem to navigate it just fine. I did spend some time naming everything properly, so maybe that’s the difference? We rarely navigate though. My kids watch one show start to finish (however much time we give them), we generally watch one movie as a family and are done, and my SO uses it for exercise videos.
I’ve reported my fair share of bugs but the main issue with the android app is that the code is amateurish and poorly tested. Lots of the crash bugs are just devs not checking for non existent values and relying on perfect network conditions.
But yeah, It gets the job done, it’s just not a great app.
Hmm, I haven’t used it much. Maybe I’ll take some time this holiday season to go bug squashing. I did a little of that with the Jerboa app here some time back, so maybe I’ll lend a hand here as well.
That said, I’ve only used it to show my collection to friends or test a new network tweak.
That’s unfortunate to hear. Jellyfin does definitely suffer the from the problem of not having a teams developing apps under a unified banner. You can make your own, provided you’re determined enough, but guidance from the core Jellyfin team is not to be expected.
No, No, and Yes – Consoles are notoriously difficult to work with. Not for actual programming, no - Consoles are difficult to navigate POLITICALLY. Xbox, understandably doesn’t like F/OSS software, and PS5 has tons of rules and regulations you must meet.
The UI for the Xbox app is rudimentary and a bit janky, but the performance is undeniably better than Plex. I have Plex and Jellyfin on the same machine, serving the same content, and Plex stutters often. It is especially bad when using subtitles. Jellyfin has no such issues.
That’s too bad, but it sounds more like you bit off too much rather than Jellyfin being bad. Once it’s set up, it’s fairly smooth, we just drop movies in a folder on the NAS, name them somewhat appropriately, and Jellyfin frequently recognizes it, though sometimes I’ll need to help it out a bit. Setup wasn’t much more complicated than other self-hosted stuff I run, but I’m also a full-time Linux user for some 15 years and a SW dev by trade, so I guess I’m blind to issues I take for granted.
Yeah absolutely it is a me problem, but the imsinuation is that these jumps are easy. Plex works easier and windows in mpre intuitive, I hate microsoft and will push on with Linux and hopefully jellyfin but it isnt an easy move.
Windows is only intuitive because that’s what you have experience with. If you grew up on macOS or Linux, you would probably find it as confusing as you do Linux right now.
But yeah, it’s a learning curve, and self-hosting on Linux generally requires a mental shift from thinking of things as “apps” and moving to “clients” and “servers.” On Windows, the two tend to be mixed, because managing servers on Windows kinda sucks, but the opposite is true on Linux.
But yeah, do one thing at a time. Get comfy with Linux first, and then learn about self-hosting stuff (including Jellyfin).
I dont know what to do with linux to get comfortable. Outside of doing something like jellyfin, which is basic to most people, I would just be browsing.
Tbh I cant even get my ps5 controller to work properly to play games.
The PS5 controller should work out of the box on pretty much any Linux distribution, at least through Steam. If you have trouble, ask on !linux_gaming@lemmy.world.
And Jellyfin is a bit complex since you need to host the server, so don’t feel bad about that.
Copy the text from the docker-compose section, and paste it into a file called compose.yaml
You can also add your other programs which rely on each other (Sonarr/Radar/qBitttorrent) in this same compose.yaml file (you can find them on this website).
When copying the other programs, omit the lines:
---Services:
After that, in your terminal, navigate to where the compose.yaml file is, and run this command
docker compose up -d
Now your suite of applications are installed and can talk to each other.
You’ll need to change some of the details of the compose file (to set timezones and media directories).
You can restart programs with
docker restart jellfin
LinuxServer.io are basically your one-stop shop for home-server applications
It being FOSS does not make up for it being severely lacking and features in comparison
It does for me. I apparently don’t need all those extra features because Jellyfin completely meets my expectations. I don’t even know what I’d want to add.
GIMP
GIMP is an exception. It’s usable (I made my wedding invitations using it), but you’re right, it’s pretty awful to use. There are tons of related software that’s pretty high quality, such as Krita (drawing) and Blender (3D modeling). I’m not sure why GIMP has such bad UX, but there’s still plenty of good stuff in the FOSS landscape.
That said, I’m not a FOSS purist, I just tend to prefer FOSS for things that I’ll be relying on for many years to come, and self-hosted platforms absolutely counts there. If I decide to bail from Jellyfin to something else, I know there will be a way to export my data, even if I have to build it myself. I don’t know much about Plex (maybe it’s easy to export too?), but if I don’t need the features, I’ll tend to stick w/ FOSS.
hardware transcoding - I think Jellyfin supports it, and it’s an extra fee for Plex; not sure how “good” it is though since I don’t need it, it works fine on my devices
app support - works on my TV, tablets, phones, and desktop; honestly, I can’t think of anywhere else I’d need it
TV shows + DVR - looks like Jellyfin supports this, but I don’t watch live TV, so I have no use for this; maybe I’ll look into it at some point
access more movies/TV shows - I’ll just get a streaming subscription to Netflix or something instead
I’m probably missing a ton though, and I’m guessing Plex has an overall smoother experience. But Jellyfin has been fine so far, so I haven’t had any reason to try others. I only want it for playing my ripped DVD and Blu-ray collection, and it works well for that.
You admit that you’re “missing a ton of stuff” after listing a couple of features
No, I was curious what I was missing, so I looked for a comparison between the two. I’m not “contradicting myself,” I’m trying to compare the merits of both so I’m fair, despite not ever using Plex.
Jellyfin was the first one I tried, and it did everything I needed it to do. So I stuck with it. I heard about Plex and Emby, but I never got around to trying them. I did try Kodi years ago, but I didn’t like it at the time (mostly used it to get Netflix working on my Raspberry Pi connected to my dumb TV on my RetroPie box).
My argument is that I didn’t feel like Jellyfin was lacking anything once I got it set up. If this UX update pisses people off, try Jellyfin, because it does largely the same thing, and it being FOSS is also a pretty neat feature.
Hey there! I want to preface this by saying a couple of things. The first thing is that I don’t really have a horse in this race. What people run in their homelabs is their business, and I appreciate seeing diverse setups. The second thing is that we had a cordial conversation before about nuclear fusion. I’ve seen you around a lot, and I have a pretty high opinion of you. I’ve felt that if we interacted again, it’d be a mutually positive experience.
After reading this thread, I feel surprised and concerned. The tone of conversations in this thread seems different from what I’ve seen in the past when seeing the rainbow Starfleet badge. I hope I’m coming across genuinely when I ask—is everything okay? I’m not asking out of some oblique motivation to dismiss your point of view, but because I feel like there’s more anger and frustration in some responses than is (in my opinion, and only my opinion) warranted by the situation. Like, for example, have there been bitter arguments about this topic in the past? Is this topic similar to other ones that are frustrating/upsetting? Has today just been a really shitty day? The last one is pretty common for me, and I find that it can make me react with more anger and force than I would have otherwise intended. It doesn’t change my opinions or values, it just affects the way I express myself. I personally do not like to express anger on the internet (unless I feel that my anger is truly warranted), and I sometimes wish someone would stop and ask me “is everything okay?” in those moments. Being able to think about and express feelings about the thing that’s aggravating me is such a relief, and it helps me step back into myself. I’ve seen enough of your posts that I’m going to presume to extend that to you.
I want to reiterate that my intention here is not to dismiss or reduce your points, nor is it to change your mind. I’m not trying to tone police, because the tone people use on the internet is their own damn business. I’m totally accepting of a “please go away,” if all of this is off base or unwanted in any way. I’ve just grown fond of seeing your comments, and this thread seems like an outlier. If that’s intentional, then I apologize for my presumption.
Well, Jellyfin is right over there, and it’s FOSS too. Consider switching, it’s pretty great.
The quality and features of JellyFin are nowhere close to Plex. I have used both for years.
I’m in the same boat as you. I’d love to switch but the user experience of Jellyfin is still pretty bad outside the most basic cases. If you have a media center PC, it’s fine, but if you want to be able to switch between several devices the way you can with Netflix, it’s quite poor.
Plex is slowly trending down and Jellyfin is slowly trending up. I hope Jellyfin outpaces Plex before the enshittification is complete, but it’s a steep hill to climb.
The big thing for me is privacy and control.
Plex requires Cloud access via accounts.
This is a sitting duck for subpoenas to mass punish media libraries once copyright holders get a more friendly government that cares less about citizens rights (which is coming up here soon).
Nothing about my jelly fin instance leaks my information to anyone else’s servers.
You can’t say the same about Plex.
I agree with you, however Jellyfin is not intrinsically more secure than any other piece of software. You have to be very careful how you go about deploying it if you open up external access, as you are dependent on the Jellyfin devs to fix vulnerabilities and they aren’t actually being paid to do this. If you’re paranoid about privacy, you should be paranoid about this too; the people sending subpoenas aren’t above port-scans on ISP subscribers, they did it back in the early days of torrents.
You get control and privacy, but you also get responsibility. It’s a trade-off, and one I’d certainly make if Jellyfin were more mature. That’s just me though, I’ve been hosting my own stuff for about a decade now and I can set up an isolated environment for Jellyfin to run within. Plex is a lot more newbie-friendly and I’d still recommend it for most folks unless they for sure know what they’re doing.
As an aside, these concerns are common to all FOSS software that don’t have deep-pocketed backers. Jellyfin is likely never getting those, unfortunately. I hope they can find some other way of sustaining themselves, they’ve not got much money for the scale of development needed and it’s all volunteer-driven today.
https://opencollective.com/jellyfin
I want them to keep going, and I’ve even donated to them. I still don’t think it’s at a place to replace Plex for most people yet though.
The way I do it with webservices is that I serve them all from virtual hosts. Scan my IP on port port 80? 301 moved permanently to same host port 443. 443? Welcome to nginx! Which webservice is actually served depends on the hostname being requested. The hostnames are just part of a wildcard subdomain with a matching wildcard certificate, so you can’t derive the hosts from the blank landing page’s cert. Though one option would be to disable https when no matching virtual host is found.
I know this isn’t protection against sophisticated attackers, but nobody uses my home services except me when I’m not home so the exposure is very limited.
Anyhow, with Plex you have a central provider who, if I’m not mistaken, knows a lot about how their customers use their product. The angle of attack is different.
Can you elaborate on how it’s poor in that regard? That’s how I and many of my friends use it, and none of us have had any issues relating to that.
Left a comment further down: https://lemmy.world/comment/13599910
I see. I’ve never had an issue with it forgetting my spot in a show, and as far as I know my friends haven’t either. Haven’t had connectivity issues either.
What about Emby tho?
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby.
But better.
Quality is fine, sounds like user error. Features sure, but that’s to be expected with a paid app.
Show me an AppleTV JellyFin client that “just works”. Something my mom & dad could use to watch a movie. Something that can do normal media player things like seeking or subtitles.
There is a huge disparity in the quality, support, and features of the various clients.
I set my parents up with infuse and it works fine with no issues. To be fair apple doesn’t seem to be very supportive of foss development on their devices
I’ll have to check out Infuse, thanks for the recommendation.
I don’t use Apple products so I can’t speak to the AppleTV support.
But your criticisms seem to be of clients for Jellyfin rather than Jellyfin itself.
They are effectively one and the same. You cannot use JellyFin without a client.
Right, but the clients I use don’t have these issues. Maybe there’s an issue with the AppleTV client, that’s fair criticism, but saying that Jellyfin has inferior quality is not accurate.
I use JF. It’s ok but still rough around the edges and if we count as JF the apps, I have to admit that the Android TV app is pretty bad, it’s chokefull of very basic bugs, like crashing on start, and missing very basic features like delaying subtitles and the navigation is pretty bad, especially for TV show, navigating between series, episodes and home is a hot mess.
My main issue is that my TV occasionally decides to kill the network, which causes Jellyfin to crash on startup, clearing the server. It’s annoying, but I think the bigger problem is the TV, not Jellyfin.
I think the navigation is fine. I like the scroll by letter thing for movies on the right, and I don’t have so many TV shows that it’s an issue (maybe like 5-10 series? We don’t watch a ton of serials), and my kids seem to navigate it just fine. I did spend some time naming everything properly, so maybe that’s the difference? We rarely navigate though. My kids watch one show start to finish (however much time we give them), we generally watch one movie as a family and are done, and my SO uses it for exercise videos.
I’ve reported my fair share of bugs but the main issue with the android app is that the code is amateurish and poorly tested. Lots of the crash bugs are just devs not checking for non existent values and relying on perfect network conditions.
But yeah, It gets the job done, it’s just not a great app.
Hmm, I haven’t used it much. Maybe I’ll take some time this holiday season to go bug squashing. I did a little of that with the Jerboa app here some time back, so maybe I’ll lend a hand here as well.
That said, I’ve only used it to show my collection to friends or test a new network tweak.
Is there a jellyfin app on the Xbox? The ps5? Roku TV app store?
I think no so it’s hard to switch if you have family using many different devices to watch plex.
Roku, yes. Xbox as well. PS5 no, but not for lack of trying. That’s apparently on Sony.
The Xbox app is a UWP app, and has basically been abandoned.
That’s unfortunate to hear. Jellyfin does definitely suffer the from the problem of not having a teams developing apps under a unified banner. You can make your own, provided you’re determined enough, but guidance from the core Jellyfin team is not to be expected.
No, No, and Yes – Consoles are notoriously difficult to work with. Not for actual programming, no - Consoles are difficult to navigate POLITICALLY. Xbox, understandably doesn’t like F/OSS software, and PS5 has tons of rules and regulations you must meet.
Idk, but there’s one on my LG TV.
The UI for the Xbox app is rudimentary and a bit janky, but the performance is undeniably better than Plex. I have Plex and Jellyfin on the same machine, serving the same content, and Plex stutters often. It is especially bad when using subtitles. Jellyfin has no such issues.
I tried Plex and it had all kinds of shit that could not be turned off
I jumped to linux and downloaded jellyfin… shit is too complicated I havent got time to get to terms with it
Guy who runs Plex on a Ubuntu container on Proxmox.
Yeah see I barely understand that
That’s too bad, but it sounds more like you bit off too much rather than Jellyfin being bad. Once it’s set up, it’s fairly smooth, we just drop movies in a folder on the NAS, name them somewhat appropriately, and Jellyfin frequently recognizes it, though sometimes I’ll need to help it out a bit. Setup wasn’t much more complicated than other self-hosted stuff I run, but I’m also a full-time Linux user for some 15 years and a SW dev by trade, so I guess I’m blind to issues I take for granted.
Yeah absolutely it is a me problem, but the imsinuation is that these jumps are easy. Plex works easier and windows in mpre intuitive, I hate microsoft and will push on with Linux and hopefully jellyfin but it isnt an easy move.
Windows is only intuitive because that’s what you have experience with. If you grew up on macOS or Linux, you would probably find it as confusing as you do Linux right now.
But yeah, it’s a learning curve, and self-hosting on Linux generally requires a mental shift from thinking of things as “apps” and moving to “clients” and “servers.” On Windows, the two tend to be mixed, because managing servers on Windows kinda sucks, but the opposite is true on Linux.
But yeah, do one thing at a time. Get comfy with Linux first, and then learn about self-hosting stuff (including Jellyfin).
I dont know what to do with linux to get comfortable. Outside of doing something like jellyfin, which is basic to most people, I would just be browsing.
Tbh I cant even get my ps5 controller to work properly to play games.
The PS5 controller should work out of the box on pretty much any Linux distribution, at least through Steam. If you have trouble, ask on !linux_gaming@lemmy.world.
And Jellyfin is a bit complex since you need to host the server, so don’t feel bad about that.
Thanks dude, I’ll follow up on that because it is a bit disappointing I have everything else ready to go
Are you using the LSIO docker image, or did you install it manually via the official website instructions?
Ahh think I did the website
There’s a much easier way.
https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-jellyfin/#usage
Copy the text from the docker-compose section, and paste it into a file called compose.yaml
You can also add your other programs which rely on each other (Sonarr/Radar/qBitttorrent) in this same compose.yaml file (you can find them on this website).
When copying the other programs, omit the lines:
--- Services:After that, in your terminal, navigate to where the compose.yaml file is, and run this command
Now your suite of applications are installed and can talk to each other.
You’ll need to change some of the details of the compose file (to set timezones and media directories).
You can restart programs with
LinuxServer.io are basically your one-stop shop for home-server applications
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I tried to switch from Emby to JF but I am grandfathered into free premium Emby and if I switch to JF I would have to pay for live TV guide.
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It’s a FOSS alternative, and that’s a pretty important feature for me. It has worked well so far for me.
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It does for me. I apparently don’t need all those extra features because Jellyfin completely meets my expectations. I don’t even know what I’d want to add.
GIMP is an exception. It’s usable (I made my wedding invitations using it), but you’re right, it’s pretty awful to use. There are tons of related software that’s pretty high quality, such as Krita (drawing) and Blender (3D modeling). I’m not sure why GIMP has such bad UX, but there’s still plenty of good stuff in the FOSS landscape.
That said, I’m not a FOSS purist, I just tend to prefer FOSS for things that I’ll be relying on for many years to come, and self-hosted platforms absolutely counts there. If I decide to bail from Jellyfin to something else, I know there will be a way to export my data, even if I have to build it myself. I don’t know much about Plex (maybe it’s easy to export too?), but if I don’t need the features, I’ll tend to stick w/ FOSS.
Here are some of the distinguishing features I see (looking at this site):
I’m probably missing a ton though, and I’m guessing Plex has an overall smoother experience. But Jellyfin has been fine so far, so I haven’t had any reason to try others. I only want it for playing my ripped DVD and Blu-ray collection, and it works well for that.
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No, I was curious what I was missing, so I looked for a comparison between the two. I’m not “contradicting myself,” I’m trying to compare the merits of both so I’m fair, despite not ever using Plex.
Jellyfin was the first one I tried, and it did everything I needed it to do. So I stuck with it. I heard about Plex and Emby, but I never got around to trying them. I did try Kodi years ago, but I didn’t like it at the time (mostly used it to get Netflix working on my Raspberry Pi connected to my dumb TV on my RetroPie box).
My argument is that I didn’t feel like Jellyfin was lacking anything once I got it set up. If this UX update pisses people off, try Jellyfin, because it does largely the same thing, and it being FOSS is also a pretty neat feature.
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Hey there! I want to preface this by saying a couple of things. The first thing is that I don’t really have a horse in this race. What people run in their homelabs is their business, and I appreciate seeing diverse setups. The second thing is that we had a cordial conversation before about nuclear fusion. I’ve seen you around a lot, and I have a pretty high opinion of you. I’ve felt that if we interacted again, it’d be a mutually positive experience.
After reading this thread, I feel surprised and concerned. The tone of conversations in this thread seems different from what I’ve seen in the past when seeing the rainbow Starfleet badge. I hope I’m coming across genuinely when I ask—is everything okay? I’m not asking out of some oblique motivation to dismiss your point of view, but because I feel like there’s more anger and frustration in some responses than is (in my opinion, and only my opinion) warranted by the situation. Like, for example, have there been bitter arguments about this topic in the past? Is this topic similar to other ones that are frustrating/upsetting? Has today just been a really shitty day? The last one is pretty common for me, and I find that it can make me react with more anger and force than I would have otherwise intended. It doesn’t change my opinions or values, it just affects the way I express myself. I personally do not like to express anger on the internet (unless I feel that my anger is truly warranted), and I sometimes wish someone would stop and ask me “is everything okay?” in those moments. Being able to think about and express feelings about the thing that’s aggravating me is such a relief, and it helps me step back into myself. I’ve seen enough of your posts that I’m going to presume to extend that to you.
I want to reiterate that my intention here is not to dismiss or reduce your points, nor is it to change your mind. I’m not trying to tone police, because the tone people use on the internet is their own damn business. I’m totally accepting of a “please go away,” if all of this is off base or unwanted in any way. I’ve just grown fond of seeing your comments, and this thread seems like an outlier. If that’s intentional, then I apologize for my presumption.
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Can’t go cheaper than free. They don’t even sell your data
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It’s basically infinity value for your money
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Hauppage TV tuner DVR capability, apps for more TVs and i could kill off Plex, personally