Strongly agreed, from the owner of a dust covered lifetime Plex Pass.
Even if we eliminate all the other reasons you might not want to use Plex or might want to use FOSS, just the performance and UI responsiveness alone makes it worth the switch.
And I do have some non-techy family that watches remotely on smart TVs and uses phone apps.
Plex is still MUCH easier to share with my friends and family. I’ll be sticking with Plex until the UX on Jellyfin is comparable. Also Plexamp is the best music app I have ever used. It’s unbelievably good. Also Plex has more features like the ability to download and select new subtitles on the fly, and consistent skip intro functionality across all apps on all devices.
Remote viewing in Jellyfin requires significantly more work from me as the server admin, but it is just as easy for the remote viewing clients. I don’t have to do any first-time setup for them. I recommend an app or two for the media type they’re using, and all they need is URL, login, password.
On UX, Plex is more full-featured I’m sure, but the performance is so much better on Jellyfin that it quickly overrode any feature concerns I may have had.
And being FOSS, there’s some nice diversity in client apps. I use Finamp for music and really like it. There’s Plappa for audio books too. And for basic viewing there are multiple choices. I think I use Streamyfin because it supports downloads.
I know, for some features Plex is better, and for a very few features Plex will always be better because it’s centralized. Jellyfin, being self-hosted, doesn’t have an easy way to share and combine libraries from multiple users, and no single “login” page like Plex. This may be annoying for users, but we know all the problems that centralization comes with.
But this makes me think about the fediverse. What if Jellyfin servers could federate with each other? I wonder if anybody is working on such a project.
Edit: okay, apparently I found this feature request on the Jellyfin features tracker.
Pro-tip: Plex is slowly enshittifying, a good open source alternative is Jellyfin.
Strongly agreed, from the owner of a dust covered lifetime Plex Pass.
Even if we eliminate all the other reasons you might not want to use Plex or might want to use FOSS, just the performance and UI responsiveness alone makes it worth the switch.
And I do have some non-techy family that watches remotely on smart TVs and uses phone apps.
Plex is still MUCH easier to share with my friends and family. I’ll be sticking with Plex until the UX on Jellyfin is comparable. Also Plexamp is the best music app I have ever used. It’s unbelievably good. Also Plex has more features like the ability to download and select new subtitles on the fly, and consistent skip intro functionality across all apps on all devices.
Remote viewing in Jellyfin requires significantly more work from me as the server admin, but it is just as easy for the remote viewing clients. I don’t have to do any first-time setup for them. I recommend an app or two for the media type they’re using, and all they need is URL, login, password.
On UX, Plex is more full-featured I’m sure, but the performance is so much better on Jellyfin that it quickly overrode any feature concerns I may have had.
And being FOSS, there’s some nice diversity in client apps. I use Finamp for music and really like it. There’s Plappa for audio books too. And for basic viewing there are multiple choices. I think I use Streamyfin because it supports downloads.
I’d love to improve Jellyfin to make people use it!
I know, for some features Plex is better, and for a very few features Plex will always be better because it’s centralized. Jellyfin, being self-hosted, doesn’t have an easy way to share and combine libraries from multiple users, and no single “login” page like Plex. This may be annoying for users, but we know all the problems that centralization comes with.
But this makes me think about the fediverse. What if Jellyfin servers could federate with each other? I wonder if anybody is working on such a project.
Edit: okay, apparently I found this feature request on the Jellyfin features tracker.
It also harvests lots of data. Check your firewall logs.
Can you import watched status and progress?