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Plex is overhauling its apps with a redesign and under-the-hood upgrades
(www.engadget.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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I used plex for years and years with my lifetime license, but a few years ago I felt Plex was way too bloated and swapped to Jellyfin. I don't think about Plex now unless an article mentions it. There's no feature of functionality I notice that's missing, and I have a low tolerance for dealing with troubleshooting when I want to relax.
Right now, Jellyfin is still too buggy and feature-poor for my tastes. I can't imagine trying to convince my friends and family to use it instaed of Plex. Jellyfin shows a lot of promise though. Hopefully it won't be too long before I'm comfotable making the switch. I suppose Plex might force my hand before that.
What is feature poor about it?
Not OP but there were 3 things that made me switch back after about 2 weeks (around 5 months ago):
It's very impressive how good they made jellyfin with volunteer effort, it's just very tough to compete with paid staff (in terms of how much time can they put into each feature and part). I do hope it gets there, cuz plex has been circling the drain for a while for me now.
Hrm, my Plex experience (which made me jellyfin) was that it would reliably shit the bed every few watching sessions, usually just hanging mid video and making me reset the cast. I'll agree the subs are for shit tho, plenty that get rendered below the border, and the app is slow...but once I start playing a show it works so I was content. Maybe worth rechecking Plex.
Interesting, for all its faults I have found Plex to work very reliably for playback.
You can also try emby, it has its own different faults but I've found it better for my above issues than jellyfin. I remember finding something else with it which made me go back to Plex again, but it escapes me what it was.
Even my mother can use it.
The only issues I encountered so far is playback on my chromecast dongle with the embedded player refusing to play nicely with some files/subtitles.
I abandoned jellyfin shortly into my self hosting setup. Plex just worked, with Jellyfin I spent an hour trying to figure out how to get it to serve an acceptable to Firefox codec and never succeeded. I'm sure with more effort I could have figured out what the magic combination was, but it wasn't obvious and I had too many other things to set up.
How long ago was that and do you remember the codec?
About a year ago, and I don't recall the specifics. I remember combing through trancode logs and not being able to figure out a path forward. I'm sure I could have solved it given enough time, but failing to play on Firefox or provide a clear solution was enough to convince me that the Wife Approval Factor was going to be too low.
Very understandable.
This was my exact experience as well.
I'll keep an eye on it for sure and will most likely try to set it up again in another year or so. But right now, I have no time to fiddle to make things work.
Are jellyfin apps available on most devices yet?
Jellyfin didn't have an app for my then 3-year old LG WebOS TV so, unfortunately, I couldn't use it.
I know people are going to say I should just use a smart box connected to my TV instead of my TV's smart features, but there's a difference in usability that they're not acknowledging.
My LG WebOS TV has it, and it's pretty old (8 years?). It works fine most of the time, but the TV has a habit of disconnecting from the WiFi, and if I launch Jellyfin when the WiFi is borked, Jellyfin forgets my server config, and I have to enter it again. It also doesn't work with my HTTPS URL, so I have to connect it to the HTTP one.
I set up Jellyfin this year, so maybe the app just didn't exist yet. I'd imagine newer WebOS TVs wouldn't have at least the HTTPS issue, and may behave better WRT WiFi.
I just checked again and you're right! The app seems to now be available for older versions of WebOS whereas it wasn't a year ago or so.
Thanks for the heads up!
Sure, np. I hope it works out for you. 😀
Yes
Not for xbox
Jellyfin does support dlna as well
DLNA is pretty janky compared to a real app though.
Eh, worked fine for us for a few years on our LG WebOS TV, but now we use Jellyfin because it's a much better experience.
They finally added intro skipping within the last month that works with the web client. Now we just have to wait for clients to update.
How about iOS downloads for offline viewing? Server transcoding?
I’m a lifetime plex user but this enshitification has been increasing a lot lately.
I can't speak for iOS but for Android the official app allows you to download the files but you have to watch them in another app. There's a 3rd party app for Jellyfin that lets you download and watch in-app. It's peak open source fragmentation.
Server transcoding is there and works great though.
Not sure, I don’t use Jellyfin myself. I use Emby. It’s the more feature rich and polished older brother of Jellyfin.
I’ve been following Jellyfin’s progress because I’d like to go full FOSS but it’s still just not there yet. UI, clients, performance, all too big a downgrade from Plex still.
I can definitely recommend you look into Emby. It’s still the best alternative to Plex’s enshittification.
Thanks so much for the response. You understand. I want to go OSS but I’m just not quite willing to settle for a huge feature gap.
It’s funny, it’s a race to see if the OSS can get good enough or if the commercial software gets shitty enough.
Eventually I’ll switch but the loss in feature has to outweigh the shit.
Yep Jellyfin offline download only shows on web for iOS and Swiftfin isn’t there either. Great project overall but this is my biggest drawback.