Text:
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners. This data is used to deliver personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Your consent applies to all devices on which you have Plex installed. You can withdraw your consent at any time in Account Settings or using this page.
Soure: https://www.plex.tv/vendors/ (Might have to clear cache)
Can also read about the changes here: https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/
Can someone clue me in on the reason why anyone would prefer Plex instead of Jellyfin?
There are a LOT of pros and cons.
Pros:
Cons:
edit: * a word ** forgot to shout out for the tuner support *** replaced media with audio for clarity
I am a die-hard Jellyfin user, but I still haven't found a proper way to index and stream my music library with it. As far as i know, Plex is still better at that.
Navidrome and Airsonic advanced provide a better music experience than jellyfin for me anyway and both are free.
I dropped my library in, Jellyfin indexed it and streamed first try. What didn't work for you?
Not the user you replied to, but for me, the issue I've been running into is with featured albums or albums with album artist metadata info filled out {image}.
Its been a minute so I dont have the specific cause I was focused on. This problem was more prevalent in EDM tracks
https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/5fa246a8-22bc-4bfc-90f5-d9ff04b768a8.jpeg
I don't think jellyfin does any tagging for you. Pretty sure you can edit it, but it's not automatic. I use lidarr and mp3tag for that. Maybe musicbrainz picard on a rare occasion, if I've got a bunch of files that need to be identified first.
Not OP, I've kinda had a middle of the road experience with it.
I run JF and Plex on the same shares.
I dropped 10k tracks on it and a bunch of audiobooks, my stuff is 100% tagged.
I use tailscale to get to the server because here's no Nat Holepunching going on.
I try to use it as much possible for audio, but some days, I just give in and use plexamp (like a guilty pleasure)
cons:
pros:
Can this edit the metadata in bulk? I'll have to give it another shot. I'm pretty sure the album artist was the the problem, and I couldnt just delete that bit.
I've recently had really good luck with Finamp on Android at least. With the recent support of time lyrics in Jellyfin and Finamp's redesign I've been using that to stream my Flac audio files. Works quite well with separate collections as well. Though, to this day I still have to force close it more times than I like to get the UI to refresh after closing it. Plexamp was tough to lose when I swapped many years ago, but the third party space has slowly been closing that gap over the years.
I think it mostly comes down to sharing stuff with others.
There's a lot of stuff in Jellyfin you wouldn't want to expose to the internet.
No idea if Jellyfin even has a client for my dad's shonky old 4K TV, but I certainly wouldn't be able to set up Wireguard or anything on it.
I wouldn't expose Plex to the internet either
Years ago, I tried out Jellyfin (Emby at the time) and it couldn't do chromecasting with subtitles (probably fixed by now, this was a long time ago). Since I wanted to watch anime, I bought a Plex lifetime subscription instead, and I'm too lazy to switch.
It is a matter of time before they will get to you
I am in the same boat but jellyfin ain't there yet for my use case
It can Chromecast these days
People commonly cite more polished clients and clients available on obscure platforms like legacy smart TVs and such
They're going to sell the data to movie companies so they can find out what is being pirated
I fuckin guarantee it.
Trakt did the same thing I bet
It's not hard to find out what's being pirated, BitTorrent isn't private.
End user management.
Essentially, accounts and passwords are not my problem.
The lack of a PS5 app makes Jellyfin useless to me. We have a dumb TV with no casting ability so the PlayStation is out media box.
$30 Android box solves this
I generally agree with you and its what I did, but why do i need yet another device plugged in, draining power all the time? I dont want to leave an even larger co2 footprint and software support on existing hardware could aid in that. The android box is a workaround, not a green enough solution in my opinion.
Because of proprietary garbage, copyright law and enshittification. Sony wants you to use the software its bribers pay it to support, another symptom of our dystopian, profiteering world.
I sometimes think Jellyfin gets on Roku devices because none of the little snots at Roku's corporate office have taken notice, fallen through the cracks and forgotten about.
If it's any benefit to you, the Android box being Android allows it to sip power at an LED bulb's level of efficiency when it's idle.
🤫
Have you even tried the web UI?
Chromecast. Regular is cheap, and grab the 4K one if you wanna stream higher quality movies. Cost you less than $100.
TV apps.
Can I ask why nobody recommends Emby? I've been using it for years with zero issues. The only thing I can think of is that Jellyfin exists and is free. Emby is sort of a middleground between Plex and Jellyfin; it has a paid license (lifetime option exists), but it's closer to Jellyfin than Plex on the whole.
Emby rugpulled their users, that's why jellyfin exists at all.
Do you mind elaborating on that? It sounds like I got in on Emby after the rugpull. It works fine for me and I use it without the Connect (online account) feature.
For one, they moved from open source to closed source without notice.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181212104719/https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby/issues/3479
Thanks for the info. I'm sure it'll also be useful to others reading the comments.
This sucks because, functionally-wise I have zero issues with Emby. But morally, this bothers me a lot. I thought it was going to just be because of the license (I think I paid $99 around Christmas a few years ago for a Lifetime license).
Guess I'll be switching to Jellyfin then and donating to the project. If I paid for Emby, there's no reason I can't donate to a free, open-source project being developed and maintained by volunteers.
Found a good one ☝️
Because Plex used to be good but new it's just pure enshitification.
Jellyfin is not as easy as Plex to use. Many of us are not that technically advanced
If you are advanced enough to run a docker image with Plex, you can do the same with Jellyfin
What is a docker? Plex is just a few clicks.
My first time fucking around with Plex did NOT include docker. I googled what docker was like 9 times over the course of stupid few months cause I just didnt understand it. Now I do, and I run it via a docker stack but very very few beginners are gonna go for docker.
Then how did you use Plex? Did you even RTFM?
Since I originally started using it on my everyday use Windows PC via an exe, no I did not hahahaha. Now I have it running in Open Media Vault on my NAS.
Lmao I dont know how stupid got used in my reply, made me sound angry
I use samba (file sharing) and vlc.
I went to the Jellyfin landing page, went to the install instructions, copy pasted and ran literally one command, opened it in a browser, made my local account, clicked a button to point it at my media folders and then I was done.
What isn't easy?
Sharing it with people outside your house. Added hardships if behind CGNAT.
I’ll edit this…sharing it securely outside of your house. Just port forwarding to the box and saying have at it isn’t really a great idea.
I’ve been a Plex user. Honestly it was mostly because I chose Plex years ago before a lot of the recent controversy. Plex always seemed like it had a nicer interface, though I never really gave Jellyfin a try. As of late, Plex has started to add a lot of bloat to their interface, so at this point Jellyfin’s UI might actually be a pro.
I've tried Jellyfin and the Live TV / tuner interface sucked so bad I didn't want to bother with it any further. Maybe I could have found plugins or some shit to make it more usable but I've had a lifetime Plex pass for almost a decade and it still works great
Yes, they've made a number of decisions that truly suck in that time but it's still better than the experience I had with Jellyfin or Emby, even recently.
It works pretty well for me personally. What was the problem?
The guide (or lack thereof) and UX was severely lacking.
Have you used a tuner on Plex?
User sharing without opening my Plex server to the public internet. For Jellyfin I would have to become a VPN provider and allow people into my private network to share it safely, since you wouldn't want to have Jellyfin available to the internet with their stance on security
Because Jellyfin et al are all still very much "open source projects" in terms of UI/UX and it is still "missing" so many features.
For me? The big reasons why I just use plex boil down to:
My personal opinion? For something that only "tech savvy" people are using more or less locally, Jellyfin is fine. For something that "just works"? There is no competition with Plex. And considering how many of the Jellyfin workarounds end up being "just download a copy of the file locally and watch it in VLC"... why would I use Jellyfin at all in that case when I could otherwise just mount a samba share or use Kodi (that is the latest incarnation of XBMC or whatever the samba share frontend we all used to watch porn on our playstations was, right?).
To be clear. I check in on Jellyfin probably every other year at this point? I WANT an alternative to Plex. But... Jellyfin ain't it.