This is simply a rehash/summary of an original article on 404media. Beyond that, you would have to be living under a rock to think that Plex was interested in what their users actually wanted. I ran a Plex server for years until I got fed up with trying to turn off some new self serving misfeature with every new update. It’s been clear for years that offering a self hosting media server solution is simply a bridgehead for Plex to seek every more revenue opportunities, even for paying
victimscustomers. I moved to and recommend Jellyfin- comparable user experience (minus the crap), use the same library, apps for all your devices, open source and completely self contained.Problem is jellyfin doesn’t have apps on stuff, therefore my family can’t reach the content on their TVs without side loading and that’s so far beyond any of them it isn’t even funny
What devices are missing support in your case? Not an exhaustive list of clients
An Xbox app that isn’t just the web UI. Plex has a damn good Xbox app.
Damn good, is an understatement. The only app I found better than the Xbox app is using Kodi Plex Plug In, but the HDR is non-existent on that, so it’s worthless to me.
What does Kodi do better?
This madlad made a chart comparing which files /codecs transcoded or Direct Played a few years ago. I finally found it again. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-nOzJkgEmo_wrU3zyUy21qW8vJ-Vo1j_z6GLhQBiTOQ/edit?usp=drivesdk Edit: That’s an old one, there was one updated with the Series consoles, but I can’t find it. The Series Plex update (which may work on the others as well) rarely transcode anyone.
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Which TV models?
I’m gonna guess plugging in a roku is too much for them, too? When Arthur C Clarke said his magic quote I didn’t expect that line to be drawn at shiny lights on a screen for most people.
I don’t think the anime titles are bothering as many people as the unintentional exposure of their pornography.
Does Jellyfin support skip-intro and skip-credits?
Skip-intro is an unofficial plugin ATM but can vouch that it works decently well. Can’t compare it to the Plex implementation since it has been quite a while since I’ve had Plex deployed.
Love how the headline equates the shame of viewing porn with the shame of viewing anime
It’s called hentai, and it’s art.
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Thanks, Dean.
They’re subtly trying to hint that it’s that kind of anime porn.
Lol, I just finished building my JellyFin server last weekend too. Bye Plex!
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I’m one of the programmers of the Jellyfin Roku client. What are some of the things you’re seeing that need polish? We’re always looking for what to work on next to make it better for users.
Ok here’s my personal gripes/nitpicks
Music:
- overlay band name on band tile. I know the name is up top, but I don’t recognize a lot of those tile pics and have to go one by one trying to find the right one.
- when I click a band tile, the “Albums” icon is too small. Ideally have album tiles horizontal along the bottom, but at least make the icon bigger and put next to Instant Mix, also a “all songs” next to “albums”.
- Instant Mix is confusing, it seems to be shuffle just name it shuffle, and if you hit shuffle from a band details I’d expect it to shuffle just that band, vs “Shuffle All” from main screen, or Shuffle album from album details, etc.
- when playing and play/pause is focused, if I could push “up” to focus the progress bar, and then left/right to fast fwd/rewind, or “ok” btn to enter a time to skip to (think, where I left off in this 20 hour long audiobook)
Movies section had some nitpicks too. Like wishing there was a quick bar when you focus a movie, or at least putting “un/mark watched” in the asterisk menu instead of having to drill into it. The rest is probably just me needing to get used to the playback button design, like pushing up I’d expect to see progress bar and some quick functions but instead I see file info which doesn’t seem like a common thing I’d care to look at. Similarly, being able to click the progress bar and skip to a time would be wonderful vs hitting “right” a hundred times on my crappy Roku remote 🙂
Hope you found my complaining useful!
Here are bugs you’ve identified.
overlay band name on band tile. I know the name is up top, but I don’t recognize a lot of those tile pics and have to go one by one trying to find the right one.
There is a setting to always show the titles on the items. On the home view press *, then go to Settings / User Interface / Libraries / General / Grid View Settings / Item Titles. Ensure this setting is set to Always Show. In your music library you will see titles for all your artists, but only if you’re using the Artists (Grid) view - accessed by pressing * while in your library. The titles in the Artists (Presentation) view aren’t honoring this setting. That’s a bug 🐛
Here are new features you’ve identified that I’ll made enhancement tickets for so we can work on them in the future.
also a “all songs” next to “albums”.
Create a new section that shows a selectable list of all the artist’s songs.
when playing and play/pause is focused, if I could push “up” to focus the progress bar, and then left/right to fast fwd/rewind, or “ok” btn to enter a time to skip to (think, where I left off in this 20 hour long audiobook)
This has been on my mind ever since I first wrote the audio player. It’s coming once we get the last of what I call “the foundation” items completed. In a nutshell, we needed the behind the scenes code to be improved before we could jump into adding more “advanced” functions to the audio player.
Movies section had some nitpicks too. Like wishing there was a quick bar when you focus a movie, or at least putting “un/mark watched” in the asterisk menu instead of having to drill into it.
We’ve had other people mention a similar menu in other locations. We’ve started calling it a context menu. We need to think more about how it interacts with existing * menus and all that, but it’s another good idea.
Hope you found my complaining useful!
Very helpful, thank you!
Gonna unpack these in small groups. I’ll start with things I believe the client already does or will do soon.
when I click a band tile, the “Albums” icon is too small. Ideally have album tiles horizontal along the bottom, but at least make the icon bigger and put next to Instant Mix
If the artist has albums, you should be able to press down on the remote to get to the album section without having to use the left icon menu. That menu is really only there to help people like me who have some artists with dozens of albums and I don’t want to have to press up through all of them to get back to the top. It’s a little jump menu.
Instant Mix is confusing, it seems to be shuffle just name it shuffle, and if you hit shuffle from a band details I’d expect it to shuffle just that band, vs “Shuffle All” from main screen, or Shuffle album from album details, etc.
Instant mix is kinda like a radio play option. It generates a playlist based on the band you’re on. To play all the songs by the selected band, press the Play button on their artist page. To shuffle play the artist, currently you can press the play button on their artist page then enable shuffle mode.
The upcoming 2.0 release will provide a new option where you can simply press the play button on your remote and it will shuffle play all the songs by the currently highlighted artist.
The rest is probably just me needing to get used to the playback button design, like pushing up I’d expect to see progress bar and some quick functions but instead I see file info which doesn’t seem like a common thing I’d care to look at. Similarly, being able to click the progress bar and skip to a time would be wonderful vs hitting “right” a hundred times on my crappy Roku remote.
The upcoming 2.0 release replaces the playback info and subtitle select popups with an OSD (on screen display). It has buttons to play/pause, skip by chapters, a chapter list, and the moved playback info and subtitle select popups. It also shows you where you are in playback (but this bar is not selectable due to technical reasons - thanks Roku 👎
Doesn’t Plex require you to buy their premium service in order to use it on mobile devices?
I remember setting up my Plex server and was shocked that I had to pay to view my own media.
devs have to eat too, open source software (when fully free) is sometimes built as a hobby like Jellyfin, or as a portfolio project, or worst case scenario as a bait and switch to paid (sometimes it’s death sentence). Then there are sponsored projects like Vulkan, or others that live off of donations like Mozilla.
I always see this but I used Plex on my iPhone for months before I bought the Plex pass. I did buy the Plex app way back when and maybe that’s why but I’m also using a new Plex account so I don’t see how’d they be tied together.
I’m not sure if it is exactly the same on Iphone. But on Android you can choose to either pay for the app( a one time payment) or have Plex pass. Either way lets you watch on the mobile app.
I do not pay for Plex and watch stuff on my phone all the time
Buying the premium app and Plex pass are different things. You need to buy the app to be able to watch on mobile via the app.
I use VLC for mobile to access my Plex server.
I’ll admit this feature should have definitely been opt-in. But when the update came out there was a big pop-up on your screen when you logged in. Where you just turned all of this off and hit save. It is super easy to disable.
The sharing what I watch with friends part is dumb. But it is pretty cool how you can recommend stuff to friends.
I got the pop up. I disabled it. But I just got an email from Plex telling me everything my family member watched in the last week. This is complete shit!!
You opted out, but they didn’t
I thought I was opting out of my account and my server. But nope, Plex is scraping up everything that’s on my server and shipping it in an email to other people including me.
I’m not following.
If you’re using Plex for porn and also adding friends on it, what were you thinking in the first place? Like, it was so obvious something like this was going to happen, and that’s besides the already existant risk of accidentally sharing the wrong library with your friend.
It’s a cool feature, it obviously would have been better if it filtered by age rating or adult film by default to begin with but I really see this as an overreaction.
Stash is far better for xxx than Plex anyway. It was made for it.
Can I use the porn Stash if I don’t have a porn stache?
Stash? Asking for a friend.
Tell your friend to google stashapp.
i dont download porn (anymore) but if I did use a plex server for it I would absolutely partition it off from other users on my server
Wow, glad I switched to Jellyfin.
I’m a little shocked at how difficult it seems to be to find instructions on how to disable this feature. Pretty sure I got it, but it wasn’t a feature called discover together but a series of sharing options.
The fact that you’re only “pretty sure” and not “entirely sure” is pretty shitty on plex in itself.
Yep. I’m not thrilled.
The great enshittening of internet platforms continues
So how exactly is this enshitiffication?
It’s a stupid feature that’s for sure, but you’ve gotta stop calling everything enshitiffication mate
?
It’s a degradation in functionality masquerading as an improvement. And as for labelling everything ‘shit’, have you seen my comment history. This is the first time I have used this term on any platform. Smh
Re: using it the first time - sorry, people just tend to use it when not applicable.
It’s not a degradation in functionality, it’s a dumbass move, but I’m sure they didn’t intend to worsen anything.
Jellyfin ftw
Everytime I hear something about Plex I become a bit happier with my choice for Emby as media server.
At the time of building my then server I could choice between them(jellyfin wasn’t a thing yet). Luckily I picked emby
I picked Plex mainly because the lifetime sub wasn’t bad, and the features and polished interface were worth it. If Plex adds too many garbage/bloat features or removes useful features then I’ll jump ship to jellyfin immediately. Same boat for paying for bitwarden vs self hosting vaultwarden
This is the problem with proprietary software, it starts out fine, but as it get more popular the value goes down
As a former director of a tech startup it all goes downhill when you bring investors on board to raise capital. I had to do many things I disagreed with because once you bring investors in you generally end up facing life ruining financial penalties if you don’t deliver what they want.
What sucks to me is how hard jellyfin is to setup outside the network
Jellyfin is generally just as easy to set up for external access. The only thing you really need to worry about is having a dynamic IP. If you have a domain name, then setting up dynamic DNS is quite straightforward.
The only issue I have with people remotely accessing Jellyfin is that you cannot set a total system bandwidth cap. You can set a per stream cap, but that doesn’t help if you have too many people accessing your server at once.
I’m not trying to sound like a dick but having your own domain name isnt something most people have
Dynamic free domain names are everywhere, and work. Nothing really to setup either.
I certainly agree that it adds an element of complexity. I had never dealt with anything like this before and had to learn it, but it really is a pretty easy thing to setup.
You can easily request a free domain through services like duckdns.org. Might not be the prettiest domain name, but for these purposes it’s fine.
Maybe time to look into load balancers, e.g. nginx
Regarding domain names: tailscale funnel rocks!
Stuff like this really makes me want to switch to jellyfin, but I watch stuff from me and my friend groups libraries and Plex lets me search for shows across my entire friend group at once. I’m afraid I’ll be waiting forever for jellyfin to allow federating servers so that [email protected] can share a library with [email protected] allowing Alice to browse red+blue instance content from their home instance UI instead of requiring an account with every instance.
More about this here: https://lemmy.ml/post/8550733
How does Jellyfin compare to Kodi?
You can’t really compare the two. Kodi is a media player. Jellyfin is a media server and has a bunch of clients to access that sever. There’s even a kodi addon to connect to Jellyfin. It’s called jellycon and I am experimenting with it now.
Different use cases.
They work great together. I have jellyfin as my media server / manager /backend, and kodi on my nvidia shield connected to my TV as my main media player / frontend. In kodi, the jellyfin plugin syncs all metadata from jellyfin to kodi’s library, and streams the media from my jellyfin.
While it should have been opt-in it is not that dramatic. The server owner can see what is played anyways. And since the primary use case is a home and friends setup it is vastly different to a Netflix scale privacy break.
Yes, a server owner can see what is played. But this is sending email summaries about what I am watching on my own server. Even if that friend is not invited to my particular server, and even libraries that I haven’t shared with anyone.
It doesn’t even matter if I’m embarrassed by what it sends. That information is private. Period.
Are you saying that this information isn’t collected by Plex for a use case that doesn’t obviously require it? Because if it is the case, then it’s a big fucking deal.
