Really from what I hear the only thing Jellyfin is missing is a Plex amp alternative!
I personally would never go the Plex route at this point.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Idk PlexAmp is the killer app that I can't stop using. Does jellyfin have something similar?
Symfonium is pretty good as a one time purchase.
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.
For me, Plex would often end up having audio drift lag and it was annoying as fuck. It'd start fine, then the lag would gradually increase until you changed encoding back and forth, then gradually increase again.
Jellyfin just works.
That was enough to get me to switch and not look back. I'm also rid of the bullshit plex login that I never cared for, and also of their push for whatever "recommended" stuff is supposed to be about.
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My biggest complaint about jellyfish is any file upgraded with the arr stack is readded as a new media. 2nd is lack of smart collections and playlists.
I think the music experience with Plex + Plexamp is still far better. That's the main thing I use Plex for.
There's a really strong bias on Lemmy for OSS projects. I'm glad they get so much love here, but everything people say here about Jellyfin has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. It works and you can use it. Depending on your needs, it may even work perfectly for you. There are tons of rough edges though.
Here's a few:
- A bunch of basic functionality most people are used to is missing by default. You can get things like intro detection and subtitle downloading to work with plugins, but you have to work at it.
- Hardware acceleration still kind of sucks. You can get it to work, but the Jellyfin port of ffmpeg doesn't work anywhere near as well as Plex's.
- The variety in app experience is bewildering sometimes. Apps look and feel very different between platforms.
- Android TV app support sucks. The app is difficult to navigate and has a bunch of weird edges, like subtitle defaults not working. I have no idea what OP is talking about here, it sounds like they're only judging the app on its animation speed.
- Public network support is finicky. This is hard to quantify, but I've been on several remote networks where my Jellyfin connection dropped in and out and Plex did not. I suspect this is due to the Plex Relay service making up for bad routes between my house and the network.
Jellyfin is improving all the time, and I hope the recent EFCore update improves performance and development velocity. I'm also holding out hope it will eventually lead to externally hosted databases and active-active servers.
Disclaimer: I run Plex and Jellyfin and regularly check in on the state of things in Jellyfin. I donate to Jellyfin. I want Jellyfin to be better than Plex. I don't think any objective measure bears this out yet.
I think it sounds like you want a paid product that just works out of the box. Jellyfin has some rough edges sure, but it's also a volunteer project for the most part.
I've got to disagree or clarify with some of these points. These points seem subjective and I feel the need to say something in case others are trying to compare plex/jellyfin.
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Hardware acceleration works just fine? Unless there's some hardware specific issue?
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The difference in apps is because there's two platforms. The web player (with CSS themeing) and the native (like on Android, which is a straight up android app, not a web page). There's some capabilities that you can only get on Android if you build an app instead of a web player. There's only like one guy building the android TV app.
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Unfortunately just one guy working in his spare time on the android TV app. I've never had subtitle issues either (might be a good time to open a bug in report?)
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Jellyfin "remote" is pretty rudimentary. You'd be better off just accessing it through a tunnel anyways -- and then youd have access to your own just not your server.
Op's criteria wasn't "is it a good product?", it was "is it better than Plex?". Stop taking valid criticism as if it were an attack. If we want software to improve we have to be honest about its shortcomings.
This isn't about want, it's a reality check. OP said jellyfin is better than Plex now, and by objective measure it is not better for most people yet. False expectations hurt Jellyfin adoption, you need to try it with the expectation of jankiness or you'll just be annoyed by the edges.
I have been looking at JellyFin as a replacement for my aging Emby install, but the over-the-air TV support is weak and mostly broken. I am a FOSS fanboy, but first and foremost TV has to work for my household, not just for me with glitches. I suppose the correct answer is to contribute to improving it, but like most folks, free time is not copious.
One thing Jellyfin is way better at is offline viewing. I have frequent internet outages at my house and I've run into issues multiple times where Plex wouldn't stream my own local media because it couldn't connect to the internet. For this, Jellyfin has always just worked.
Yeah, that part about Plex has always bugged me. You can disable logins for your server with allow-listed networks, but most of the non-desktop apps have to log into the Plex platform to run.
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The addons are great too. The intro/outro skip is slick and nearly flawless, background subtitle download is seamless, on and on.
I tried to switch from plex to jellyfin 2 months ago, running both at the same time in containers, but I removed jellyfin after a week
The main issue was the CPU usage, on idle Jellyfin was using about 1vcore while plex used only 0.3, no background tasks seemed to be running and after a week my 4tb of media should have been indexed
Also a feature that I use regularly with plexamp, starting a radio from a song, was not giving me good results on finamp
Plex has recently started applying a green filter to certain content.
The files Plex has a problem with work just fine in Jellyfin.
No, that issue can happen on Jellyfin as well, because it's happened to me. But that was before I used the Trash guides to set up Sonarr/Radarr so that Dolby Vision files were never fetched.
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Green filter? Are you talking about the issue where you try to play Dolby Vision content on a non DV TV?
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I tried Jellyfin years ago, it is in my test for later todo since then, it was pretty vanilla compared to my Plex Media Server (for instance I couldn't get to work the transcoder to use quick sync to lower the CPU load if needed, meanwhile Plex worked fine with the Docker container even).
With that said, I stopped using Plex daily in order to give some use to my Real Debrid account (so Stremio and Kodi are the next logical alternatives for me) and because I only have a two bay NAS with 10 TB in total, and I like to hoard so I struggle every time I need to delete something, since I knew about Riven/Zurg/Rclone/DMM combo I have returned using Plex without worrying each day about my drives, keeping it updated and enjoying the thinkering process of this new experience, also sharing the love with a couple of friends, I see no need to try Jellyfin, even after that many years.