I’ve feel like I’ve used Plex forever. I also feel like every couple years I try Jellyfin to see how it’s going. Recently I tried it again because of Plex restriction on more than one user.
Well, I just tried it again and it’s substantially improved! This time it actually properly detected most of my library!
Also the Android TV app is AWESOME! No more glitches, lagging, and freezing trying to play my stuff like Plex did. It is butter smooth.
Wow! I’m impressed and I just deleted Plex. Good riddance.
Tired of the reports about this post. Locking.
I use Jellyfin for music mostly and it struggles with metadata. For example, if a song has two artists on it and I edit to correct it, it won’t update correctly and I’ll edit up with the artist “Artist A; Artist B”.
Finamp keeps creeping towards Plex amp and functionality. I don’t love how Plex treats music either but the client seems to bridge the gap.
I used Plex for a long time and was very tempted by their lifetime plan. I tried Jellyfin but at the time it just wasn’t a patch on Plex. I continued with Plex but always had that itch to get away from closed source. I eventually tried Jellyfin again and whilst it’s definitely not as feature rich as Plex, it does what I need from it which is a central store of media that any TV in my house can use. I’ve even given a few friends a login so they can watch content.
I do love that it’s completely self hosted. I run it behind Caddy so it has a Let’s Encrypt certificate. All run in a Docker container with the media from an NFS share from a Pi4 with an external HDD.
That said, I still have Plex running as I have one Samsung TV and there’s no official Jellyfin client for it. Yes there’s some long winded developer way to get one on but I just can’t be bothered.
Plex was always terrible, anyone that uses it is an imbecile.
Another case of user matching tag
I’ve been considering switching to Jellyfin for a while due to concerns about Plex either becoming worse or them peering into my library. Any idea how the apps work on Fire TV Stick? I have one for home and one I take away with me and it all works seamlessly with Plex
Works great. I use VLC as a player (personal preference).
Not sure how the internal player works.
Jellyfin has an app for fire stick, it works flawlessly
I randomly tried using Jellyfin today instead of Plex, but Jellyfin kept crashing my browser and logging me out, so I wasn’t in the mood to troubleshoot, so I just gave up and went back to Plex.
In the past, I’ve been annoyed that Jellyfin didn’t seem to have an option to sort media by “Last Episode Date Added”, nor did it seem to have a way to build a queue of episodes from multiple different shows. I think I was also having trouble figuring out how to add multiple sources… I have my “long term” library on a local hard drive, plus anything “new” on a seedbox.
I theoretically want to fully switch over eventually, but so far, Plex is still good enough for my use case.
ui is not intuitive but there is nothing stopping you from having multiple folders for a library
Also the Android TV app is AWESOME!
I dunno…
There’s a transcoding bug in the Android TV version of the Jellyfin client where transcoding a video with 7.1 audio breaks playback. Even with a Pull Request out there that fixes it (by matching the behavior of other Jellyfin clients), the issue got closed as “not planned”. The continued suggestion continues to be “just force everything to play in stereo”.
I don’t have unlimited bandwidth, so plenty of my stuff gets transcoded in Plex. I can’t, in good, conscience, switch my friends & family (most of who use Android TV) over to Jellyfin.
Any recommendations about how to install all this jazz?
I’d like to build a music box controllable by the family, eventually centralising videos so anyone (or at least me) can just pick up their phone and watch an episode of star trek without the hassle of copying. Automatic subtitles would be magic.
Cheers!
If all you want is a local media server. It’s very easy.
You pretty much just have to install Plex or Jellyfin, setup a “library” in the software.
You usually set up one library for movies and one for TV shows. You then point these libraries to their respective folders on your hard drive and assuming you have some half decent organized media with proper naming it usually just works.
Plex doesn’t have automatic subtitles per say but mostly Plex players allow you to download new subtitles from the player. I don’t know about Jellyfin.
If you want to have external access it’s a bit harder if you use jellyfin as you will have to setup a reverse proxy but I’m guessing that there are a lot of guides for that online. Plex should work for external access out of the box assuming you have a public IP, and even if you don’t you can use their automatic relay services to get it to work anyway although in very low quality.
Proper naming is honestly the hardest part but that’s very dependent on how much existing media you have and how the naming is today. Luckily Plex and Jellyfin are fairly good at recognizing and finding media with subpar namin (you should still fix the naming to comply with the documentation)
If you want to have automatic torrent downloads, fully automatic subtitles and all that it’s quite some work to set it up properly and have it working without any input from you. If you want to tackle it (or are just curious), I recommend checking out https://trash-guides.info/
Many ways to install it officially nowadays (see their website) but most do it via docker. A very easy albeit unoffical way is via flatpak.
After having been shafted by sublime text I will never believe anything called a “lifetime subscription” is such.
A “lifetime subscription” is just a “until we decide otherwise” subscription
I mean, it naturally has to be something that they eventually find a way to charge you something for. If it’s a for-profit business, and if they only sold lifetime subscriptions, they would eventually go out of business.
Then they shouldn’t be called lifetime subscriptions. This seems like a really smarmy justification of a shitty business practice.
That makes zero sense.
Not lying makes zero sense to you?
Sublime never offered lifetime subscriptions. https://web.archive.org/web/20150928064400/http://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq You can even see as far back as 2014 that if you purchased Sublime Text 2 when Sublime 3 was still in beta:
- Upgrade Policy
A license is valid for Sublime Text 3, and includes all point updates, as well as access to prior versions (e.g., Sublime Text 2). Future major versions, such as Sublime Text 4, will be a paid upgrade. - Expiration Date
Licenses purchased for Sublime Text 3 do not expire, however an upgrade fee will be required for Sublime Text 4.
You can find that disagreeable, but it was not something they hid from us customers.
Licenses for sublime text 2 just said “and future updates”. I remember the “lifetime” thing being a selling point on producthunt. This was back in 2013 though, and the weird way the licensing change was handled made me switch to emacs.
- Upgrade Policy
I don’t mean to be glib or upset you, but you still have lifetime access to the versions of Sublime Text for which you paid; you just don’t get free updates to the next version. AFAIK, that’s been the way they’ve done things for years.
Before the one license=one version switch in 2013 the license stated “and future updates” which they did, but they switched to needing to pay for new licenses for some reason. I remember that being the primary reason I switched to emacs.
After having been shafted by sublime text I will never believe anything called a “lifetime subscription” is such.
Care to elaborate?
AFAIR SublimeText licenses are always only for a specific major version. And they sometimes might work for the next major version. So, I guess you’ve just installed a newer version for which your lifetime license isn’t valid anymore.
Before sublime text 3 all updates were included in the single license, not just major revision updates. This was back in 2012.
Hmm… I remember buying the license for ST2 back in the days and it specifically saying it’s for ST2.x only. However, it also worked for early ST3 versions but stopped working at some point. Which was when I’ve switched to something else.
It was over eleven years ago at this point so my memory may be hazy on the details but I remember something happening in the major version change that pissed me off enough to switch off of it. 🤔
I think the music experience with Plex + Plexamp is still far better. That’s the main thing I use Plex for.
One thing jellyfin doesnt do well its anime content. But fortunately there’s Shoko Server, a metadata engine you can selfhost. Its awesome!
I need some explanation in the “Anime” part, I don’t get it ?
Well, jellyfin often doesn’t find the right metadata for anime episodes ecc, so theres this thing called Shoko Server that calculates a checksum of your files, compares it with the database over at anidb, and creates a virtual filesystem for jellyfin to make things easier! It’s pretty neat. Do you have additional questions?
That’s all for now, thanks
In my experience, jellyfin seems to think everything is anime for some reason.
I’ve had to go in to every single TV series and manually enter Metadata.
Not a huge deal I only have a few series’ but man it’s weird.
You can also change the directories names, appending [MVDB ID], so that for the future if you ever happen to have to reinstall jellyfin, it’ll automatically repopulate them how they were :)
It works pretty well for me but I separate anime and TV/movies, and make sure the anime library is only scraping data from anime-centric databases. But I’m also not watching too much new or obscure stuff.
Yeah also with shoko you have to create a library only for animes (only one for both series and films tho). Idk, last time I checked jellyfin sucked. Maybe now its better. Another thing that shoko does is automatically track your progress on anidb, so thats cool :)
It’s not proprietary, so it could be shit on a shingle and still beat plex. I’m not installing anything proprietrary on anything I own.
I still maintain that Emby is better than Jellyfin. I try it again maybe once a year and every time I end up back on Emby. It just runs better, works pretty flawlessly and doesn’t lose my libraries every so often. Music playback is better by far on Emby and that’s my main usecase.
Hardware decoding would be nice, but I don’t have a system I could use this on for either and I’ve not had trouble without it.
What do you mean library losses. I’ve been using jellyfin twoish years now and have never had this happen.
Same. The only issue I’ve had is it not finding my TV shows, but once I figured out how it wants them stored, no issues whatsoever.
Also the Android TV app is AWESOME!
What do you run Android TV on? Raspberry Pi? My cheapo solution has been to use an old Android phone that supports DP alt mode (USB-C to HDMI adapter) combined with a USB hub + generic air mouse/remote + customized launcher.
It actually works surprisingly well. I installed FCast on it, so it even works like a Chromecast. If I’m watching a video on my phone using Grayjay, I can just cast it to the phone and it will start playing automatically. The only thing stopping it from being perfect is that it can’t turn the TV on automatically. As a plus, since the phone has a battery, it’s always powered on so I don’t have to wait for stuff to boot, and it uses relatively little power.
… but overall it’s janky and finicky, and the OEM bloatware is probably spying on me, so I’ve been looking for alternatives that can match the good parts of this setup.
I don’t like Raspberry Pis for this because they’re overpriced. I have a couple that I could use for this, but I’m hoping to find a cheaper solution, and one that I can recommend to friends/family when they ask. (the Android phone I’m using cost me a total of $15 on ebay)
I genuinely do not understand the issues people are having with Jellyfin subtitles. I just have Bazarr set up to automatically download and they play on every device (web, android, iOS, roku, android TV) with zero issues.
Sounds like it’s mostly with embedded subs inside the media files already. Thats where all my subs are so I’m going to test soon but haven’t played anything on jellyfin needing subs in a while
I now extract all my subs, but for the first 2 years using it I left everything embedded and it always worked normally. Even with some advanced ones like Jujutsu Kaisen and One Pace, which both use stylized ones.
Just tested and with Findroid on my phone, no subtitle options appeared at all, though it had 4 languages embedded. On my roku they showed up but as soon as I picked it it loaded until it said Error During Playback
I’ve never used Findroid, but they work on my regular Jellyfin app. I think on Roku transcoding is required, but afaik that’s on Roku not supporting the subtitle format.
