I see Jellyfin suggested as an alternative to Plex here. I hope it is one day.
At the moment it’s nowhere close.
I’ve been running Jellyfin side-by-side Plex for two years and it’s still not a viable replacement for anyone but me. Parents, my partner, none of the possible solutions for them come anywhere near close to the usability of Plex and its ecosystem of apps for various devices.
That will likely change because plex is getting worse every day and folks can contribute their own solutions to the playback issues. With plex it’s more noise, more useless features. So one gets better (Jellyfin) and one gets worse (Plex).
But at the moment it really isn’t close for most folks who are familiar with the slickness of commercial apps.
Even from the administrative side, Jellyfin takes massively more system resources and it doesn’t reliably work with all my files.
Again, Jellyfin will get there it’s just not a drop in replacement for most folks yet.
And for context I started my DIY streaming / hosting life with a first gen Apple TV (pretty much a Mac mini with component video outs) that eventually got XBMC and then Boxee installed on it. I even have the forksaken Boxee box.
I’m not trying to be a dick, but in what ways is Jellyfin vastly inferior to Plex? I haven’t used Plex before but Jellyfin does everything me and my family need from a streaming service.
It’d probably different for everyone, but in my case, its smart collections and playlists. My family lives off the home screen and pretty much never venture beyond it. Jellyfin cannot do smart collections and the home screen is very bare bones and unpolished. In Plex I have smart collections and playlists that build automatically for them all pinned neatly to the home screen.
The Jellyfin clients are also unpolished in general and buggy. The server works great though. No problems with that.
Was trying to get a friend to switch to jellyfin the other day and it turns out he’s got a weird Hisense projector that uses VIDAA OS, which does not have a jellyfin app, but DOES have a Plex app. I imagine setups like this are probably limiting Jellyfin’s adoption. VIDAA is actually less niche than I thought as well, heaps of cheap-ish TVs and projectors are running it.
I have another comment in this thread about my own experience so I’ll copy that here.
I can use plex on ps4, xbox. I use my ps4 for all my streaming so jellyfin not being in there means more annoyance for me. I have Jellyfin setup side by side with plex, accessing the same content and Plex displays it all properly while jellyfish does funky shit like displaying multiple entries for a single show (it had nearly 50 entries until I manually reworked a ton of filename shit), or fucking up and showing box art and a title for a porn movie instead of the actual movie which was Princess Mononoke. There may be settings that help with this buried somewhere but for now it’s definitely more of a pain to use.
I see Jellyfin suggested as an alternative to Plex here. I hope it is one day.
At the moment it’s nowhere close.
I’ve been running Jellyfin side-by-side Plex for two years and it’s still not a viable replacement for anyone but me. Parents, my partner, none of the possible solutions for them come anywhere near close to the usability of Plex and its ecosystem of apps for various devices.
That will likely change because plex is getting worse every day and folks can contribute their own solutions to the playback issues. With plex it’s more noise, more useless features. So one gets better (Jellyfin) and one gets worse (Plex).
But at the moment it really isn’t close for most folks who are familiar with the slickness of commercial apps.
Even from the administrative side, Jellyfin takes massively more system resources and it doesn’t reliably work with all my files.
Again, Jellyfin will get there it’s just not a drop in replacement for most folks yet.
And for context I started my DIY streaming / hosting life with a first gen Apple TV (pretty much a Mac mini with component video outs) that eventually got XBMC and then Boxee installed on it. I even have the forksaken Boxee box.
I’m not trying to be a dick, but in what ways is Jellyfin vastly inferior to Plex? I haven’t used Plex before but Jellyfin does everything me and my family need from a streaming service.
It’d probably different for everyone, but in my case, its smart collections and playlists. My family lives off the home screen and pretty much never venture beyond it. Jellyfin cannot do smart collections and the home screen is very bare bones and unpolished. In Plex I have smart collections and playlists that build automatically for them all pinned neatly to the home screen.
The Jellyfin clients are also unpolished in general and buggy. The server works great though. No problems with that.
Was trying to get a friend to switch to jellyfin the other day and it turns out he’s got a weird Hisense projector that uses VIDAA OS, which does not have a jellyfin app, but DOES have a Plex app. I imagine setups like this are probably limiting Jellyfin’s adoption. VIDAA is actually less niche than I thought as well, heaps of cheap-ish TVs and projectors are running it.
I mean, that’s like, your opinion man… I prefer Jellyfin.
But that’s exactly my point - we here in this bubble prefer Jellyfin - but it’s not ready for mass adoption. Even plex is a drop in the bucket.
jellyfin > plex
Sure. Except in the ways it isn’t.
Its free, its faster, less buggy, actively developed, etc etc
What does plex have? Google login?
From this thread it seems Plex has astroturfing capabilities
I have another comment in this thread about my own experience so I’ll copy that here.
I can use plex on ps4, xbox. I use my ps4 for all my streaming so jellyfin not being in there means more annoyance for me. I have Jellyfin setup side by side with plex, accessing the same content and Plex displays it all properly while jellyfish does funky shit like displaying multiple entries for a single show (it had nearly 50 entries until I manually reworked a ton of filename shit), or fucking up and showing box art and a title for a porn movie instead of the actual movie which was Princess Mononoke. There may be settings that help with this buried somewhere but for now it’s definitely more of a pain to use.