I’ve been in a multi year process to move my users off plex onto jellyfin. They just keep doing things I’m not a fan of
Jellyfin is absolute dogshit though.
Sauce: I just installed it on my media server that concurrently runs plex. I run the app on a fire tv cube to use it… and it crushes constantly.
I had a few metadata issues with Jellyfin until I changed the primary metadata source to be the same as what Radarr/Sonarr use so they all the file names match up and I’ve had no issues since.
I also don’t have a notable issues with subtitles in Jellyfin, but maybe your requirements have more friction. Have you tried the (iirc included by default) Jellyfin plugin to automatically download subtitles for your stuff? Or the *arr program that handles subtitles (I forget its name)?
Works great here, and my users are very happy with it. Not disputing your experience, just saying it’s not universal.
Could be a compatibility issue with amazon’s android fork? I have only used the android client on google pixel, samsung phones and AOSP builds.
Although Plex is running on your server it isn’t there to do what you want… unless Plex’s real owner permits it.
That’s how proprietary software works.
The eternal problem of open source: people will happily pay for proprietary software and services, complain that open source isn’t ready. Then when it is, they will not donate a single cent to continue development but instead create passive aggressive posts and issues demanding features or shitting on the project.
Jellyfin is love, Jellyfin is life.
It’s bad. But it’s the best we’ve got.
Speak for yourself, Jellyfin has been awesome for me. Fantastic piece of software.
Extremely slow and clunky UI on Android. Music has no star rating as every other software including Plex and Navidrome has. It sometimes starts transcoding for no apparent reason.
Not perfect but the best we’ve got.
Jellyfin is the sever bro. You can implement your own client and choose from a pretty decent variety of clients on Android and most platforms. Only Android TV really suffers from required first party support, but the api is documented and we encourage you to make your own or port it to whatever front end you’d like.
Why are there official clients then? Better not to provide any client at all than bad clients based on the web UI.
What hell is wrong with these idiots?
Obviously they got outside pressure to remove this because of muh ease of piracy sharing
Honestly I really don’t like how self hosted streaming services have been lumped into the same category as piracy. I have no issue buying media. If the law says I can’t share it outside my household I will comply without arbitrary software locks.
My concern is that media companies will go after Jellyfin. They don’t really need to win all they need to due is bankrupt everyone involved.
Don’t worry, there are countries where it’s perfectly legal to rip your own physical media and use it in a digital library. There are some countries where it’s even legal to download a pirated digital copy of your owned media.
Jellyfin will remain, and even if the capitalist pigs try and go after it - which is already close to impossible - they’ll find shelter in a country with moral values.
Yeah that’s not how that works.
That’s exactly how it works.
Lame. I’ve used this feature a lot. It feels like such a basic thing to include.
SharePlay is a standard feature in Apple devices, and it handles it. But only in supported apps.
The pandemic showed how nice such a feature can be for a lot of people.
people still use plex after the last sneaky they pulled?
Got a plex lifetime sub like 7 years ago… As soon as Jellyfin allows downloads for offline viewing, I’m jumping ship. I know I’ll have to figure out TV listing data for OTA recordings, but that seems like a small price to pay. I’ve already got Jellyfin setup and running in my Kubernetes cluster for my video backups, but plex thus far “just works”.
The android app has had downloads for years, they just download the entire file to your phone.
Streamyfin is a newer android app that also works very well with downloads.
Switch to jellyfin, it’s really at the point where it’s ready for everyone
I run both Plex and Jellyfin. Jellyfin is ready for everyone who doesn’t have to deal with the Mother-in-Law Factor. Plex has an easy setup process, and I could walk my MIL through it on my phone. In 5 minutes, her TV was connected to my server.
Jellyfin isn’t to that point yet, and likely never will be. Since there’s no centralized server for an app to phone home to, there’s no way to create a unified account creation/login experience. Jellyfin is nice as a “just for me” server. But as soon as I have to help others use it, it becomes a nightmare. Walking my MIL through setting up Jellyfin on her TV was the reason I re-installed Plex in the first place.
I had finally converted my wife away from using paid streaming apps, and dealt with all of the “Why do I have to use three different apps to access it on my three different devices? They all look different and are harder to use” complaints. By the time it got around to my MIL, I was tired of dealing with it and just reinstalled Plex so people could have a consistent experience.
I still use Jellyfin for my personal viewing because I prefer it. But saying “just ditch Plex, Jellyfin is ready now” is a little disingenuous. Jellyfin is ready for the people who want to use it. But if you’re trying to convince people to ditch their streaming apps, you’re fighting a lot of social inertia. You need to be able to provide a consistent experience across their different devices, with a decent login experience. And Jellyfin definitely isn’t there yet.
I dunno, I found it easier to move my family to JF.
I made them a bunch of accounts and sent them via signal.
For my mum I logged in as her and configured everything how she would want.
I didnt have to explain to anybody that remote stream needs to be unlimited bandwidth for better performance.
If mum forgets her password I can reset it.
To log her TV in we used quick connect where I had her enter the 6 digit code on the tv.
We used SyncPlay to watch a movie together.
I’ll sadly have to keep using Plex until jellyfish makes library sharing simple.
I have like 10 different family members using my server. If I have to do anything beyond just letting them log in to a plex account on the app to get access, they just won’t.
I haven’t tried Plex but Jellyfin is super easy. Type in IP, username and password and you’re done. Only need to setup port forwarding on the router to make it work.
I have like 10 different family members using my server. If I have to do anything beyond just letting them log in to a plex account on the app to get access, they just won’t.
Umm that is all you need to do with jellyfin. You can setup wizarr and give them invites to create an account or just manually make them and give out the info to people.
I’m seeing a lot of love for Jellyfin in the comments. Seems like Jellyfin is finally mature enough to give a real shot.
Does anyone know how Emby is doing in relation to Plex feature parity?
I can confirm jellyfin is great… But I have moved onto burning onto physical Media (BD) to avoid HDD / SSD failure with data loss
“We’ve spent two years requiring our apps from the ground up to boost our development speed, which should enable us to bring new features to you more efficiently, across more platforms,”
… “and that’s why we’re deleting a bunch of features never to bring them back. Because we’re just so efficient!” Crazy how many companies use this awful excuse.
Also is that a misquote by the author or did they really write “requiring”?
Removing old features so we can bring them back as paid features later on.
Jellyfin has much better Syncplay than plex
release announcement:
Is there some trick to get it to work properly? Everytime I tried to use it, it works fine for like 10 minutes and then everyone desyncs to hell.
It’s still better than Plex’s which didn’t work at all though.
I personally had really huge problems in the beginning with this feature, it depends on the file format, if it needs to be transcoded, if the subs are external or in the video container and what your users are watching it on.
I can give you some advice on what to look for, but it will come down to just tinkering with the settings until you find something that works for you the best.
Hardware acceleration is quite important, especially when there are like 6 people watching at once and 4 of them just refuse to watch it using the jellyfin desktop client that actually supports direct play feature (video does not need to be transcoded).
Switching languages of subtitles sometimes mess things up, especially when the subtitles need to be extracted from the video container and then sent separately. Sometimes it just lags the video for up to two seconds. It usually just messes with one person that then is a few seconds behind so not a big deal. Although I recommend setting languages in the very beginning so it does not break sync mid-way.
I also limited the thread count of the single ffmpeg stream to just one. Then i also limited the stream buffer to like 5 minutes so it just won’t try to prepare a 4k movie for one person for the next several minutes. From my experience anyways, when we were watching some movie that is quite big, the jelly went bananas and a single user just maxed out the CPU and GPU. Ever since I set those limits, while also having the hardware acceleration enabled, the sync-play feature caused me little to no trouble. — One of my friends has a slow internet that sometimes likes to drop things on the way and when his net drops out totally, it usually causes some issues and he then has to restart the browser tab. Although rare, it still happens from time to time.
I have an Intel i5 8400 and a UHD Graphics 630. The performance is good enough for my uses and movies play without issues even when 6 people are watching while my dad sits on tv while also watching something else.
Oh yes, now there are also a few other things to worry about. Make sure to check the maximum per-user bitrate the jelly will enable the users to watch. It’s 40Mbps by default, I think. And you do not really need anything above it anyways, especially if streaming over the public internet.
The second thing is having a Nvidia GPU. From what I heard, the consumer graphics card can have up to 3 consecutive video streams running at once. But since I do not have anything Nvidia, I can’t really care, tho I would strongly recommend you checking the GPU limitations including both the encoder/decoder limits and the codec support. This will help you set the buffer limits and codec support.
So full wrap, you’ll just have to monitor your server’s vitals and see if there is a bottleneck. Check your users client compatibility, see if the GPU or CPU is maxed out or if your ISP just isn’t giving you a big enough pipe. It just comes down to tinkering.
Lack of feature parity is the number one thing holding so many people back from switching to Jellyfin. Of Plex is going to start deleting beloved features, a lot of minds will be made up very quick.
I really try to move to Jellyfin, but there’s always some papercuts that block me. Tried it last weekend again, and:
- It just can’t find most of my movies in the NAS share. They never appear in the library.
- The music player cannot play all my files. DSF files are transcoded to AAC. Also finamp streams AAC and not Opus, and uses more data than Plexamp did.
I also tried Navidrome for music. Weirdly it had hiccups playing some files, and DSF was again a problem.
I really want to get out from Plex, but I use Plexamp so much and it handles my huge music library really well it’s hard to switch :(
Plexamp right now is the biggest reason I have not even thought of moving to something else. I have yet to see a music player that comes close to the features Plexamp has.
Hard agree. PlexAmp has been stellar.
