I MUCH prefer Jellyfin to Plex. Jellyfin seems to have active development whereas Plex is more interested in adding in a ton of “features” (aka garbage) that I never ever wanted and continues to leave YEARS old bugs out in the wild. I think it won’t be long until Plex enshittifies itself to death. They clearly have a financial situation that is not aligned with its users.
You could use Emby instead. Jellyfin is the FOSS version of Emby and Emby has apps for everything. I moved to Emby from Plex five years ago or so and it’s been great.
In the worst case scenario, you can access it via browser and then bookmark it.
I do that on my tv for which almost no apps can be installed and found no issues so far. Even HDR media plays, which I found that it is (or was?) a paid feature on Plex
I think it depends on what client devices you have. Last time I checked, some content (like HDR) won’t play on Apple TV via Jellyfin unless you spring for a relatively expensive paid client (like Infuse). The open source client won’t work.
FWIW, my Plex Pass has worked to be much less than that since I purchased it.
Much (not all) of the negative I see about Plex is associated with cost of a Plex Pass. If subscribing monthly, it costs more. If you play the long game with the Lifetime Pass, it’s dirt cheap and pretty darn solid.
I’m only interested in one-time purchases, so I just saw the $75 and decided it was too expensive. It’s also just a hurdle to get over. Right now, my Apple account doesn’t even have a payment method associated with it, because I generally just use free / FOSS apps.
Jellyfin feels like it’s 95% of the way there. I switched from Plex to Jellyfin back to Plex again a year or two ago, but I am thinking I should give Jellyfin another shot some time. There was some media that Jellyfin wasn’t able to play even without transcoding that Plex handled fine, but those transcoding issues could be solved by now.
I tried but the technical gap from Plex to Jellyfin was too intense for me to try and make work at this time of my life. Plex works well for my purposes and I paid for the phone apps when needed ($6 per device I think).
I admire and support Jellyfin as FOSS and hope I can jump on when I have more time to make it work.
Yeah for sure, didn’t mean to imply folks shouldn’t use Plex just giving it a shout out as an alternative. I’ve used both and they are both pretty awesome. One of my friends set up a seed box with Jellyfin so I kinda cheated in leaving the tinkering to them but I don’t think it was too bad with the provider they went with.
Worth checking out Jellyfin as well
I MUCH prefer Jellyfin to Plex. Jellyfin seems to have active development whereas Plex is more interested in adding in a ton of “features” (aka garbage) that I never ever wanted and continues to leave YEARS old bugs out in the wild. I think it won’t be long until Plex enshittifies itself to death. They clearly have a financial situation that is not aligned with its users.
I agree, I’ll give the software another try once I have more free time to learn and troubleshoot
Plex has a client on my TV and Xbox. How would I watch Jellyfin content on those?
I say this a guy that got his RasPi3 Plex server running just good and stable a year ago and doesn’t touch it except to cycle in new content.
You could use Emby instead. Jellyfin is the FOSS version of Emby and Emby has apps for everything. I moved to Emby from Plex five years ago or so and it’s been great.
In the worst case scenario, you can access it via browser and then bookmark it.
I do that on my tv for which almost no apps can be installed and found no issues so far. Even HDR media plays, which I found that it is (or was?) a paid feature on Plex
I think it depends on what client devices you have. Last time I checked, some content (like HDR) won’t play on Apple TV via Jellyfin unless you spring for a relatively expensive paid client (like Infuse). The open source client won’t work.
Infuse is only $10 per year and that includes on your Apple TV and iPhone. It really is quite slick and looks really good.
Agreed. This is not expensive at all. 100% worth the value which is less than a dollar a month.
FWIW, my Plex Pass has worked to be much less than that since I purchased it.
Much (not all) of the negative I see about Plex is associated with cost of a Plex Pass. If subscribing monthly, it costs more. If you play the long game with the Lifetime Pass, it’s dirt cheap and pretty darn solid.
$1/month or $10 year. I’d say that’s relatively cheap as far as paid media apps go but certainly more expensive than free.
I’m only interested in one-time purchases, so I just saw the $75 and decided it was too expensive. It’s also just a hurdle to get over. Right now, my Apple account doesn’t even have a payment method associated with it, because I generally just use free / FOSS apps.
Jellyfin feels like it’s 95% of the way there. I switched from Plex to Jellyfin back to Plex again a year or two ago, but I am thinking I should give Jellyfin another shot some time. There was some media that Jellyfin wasn’t able to play even without transcoding that Plex handled fine, but those transcoding issues could be solved by now.
Unfortunately, there’s no Jellyfin application on my TV, or I’d swap :-(
I tried but the technical gap from Plex to Jellyfin was too intense for me to try and make work at this time of my life. Plex works well for my purposes and I paid for the phone apps when needed ($6 per device I think).
I admire and support Jellyfin as FOSS and hope I can jump on when I have more time to make it work.
Yeah for sure, didn’t mean to imply folks shouldn’t use Plex just giving it a shout out as an alternative. I’ve used both and they are both pretty awesome. One of my friends set up a seed box with Jellyfin so I kinda cheated in leaving the tinkering to them but I don’t think it was too bad with the provider they went with.
Exact same thing happened to me, i just couldn’t get it to consistently work.
I can’t for the life of me get HW encoding working with Jellyfin. Plex was just plug and play.
i7-11800H
worth checking out until you get to the cry for developers that they posted yesterday. fuck switching my media serving to a dying platform