Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?!
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It’s not a transcoding power issue. It’s a UI consistency and usability issue. With every device having a slightly different UI, with some apps having issues if playing back natively and some needing transcoding, the experience is inconsistent and frankly doesn’t pass the “wife acceptance factor” test, or the “let your friends use it without needing to handhold them through regular troubleshooting for their particular device” test.
I still don’t use Plex and exclusively use Jellyfin, but it’s still a hard sell to non technical users. Plex has much more polish.
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Bullshit. Docker Plex is easy af. You calling yourself experienced is the real joke here
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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.
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Absolutely run them together.
Especially in light of Plex trying to keep tabs on what everybody's doing and probably resell that data.
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Am I the only one here using emby? I’m pretty happy with it honestly.
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I have my media files in specific folders on a RAID5. It won't take that as a valid path, nor even anything in the ~/ directory. If I use the server root, it will. I don't like that - seems like a poor system design. No way I want it to scan my root directory. Christ it will take forever to scan my entire RAID of 200Tb.
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With every device having a slightly different UI, with some apps having issues if playing back natively and some needing transcoding, the experience is inconsistent and frankly doesn’t pass the “wife acceptance factor” test, or the “let your friends use it without needing to handhold them through regular troubleshooting for their particular device” test.
This is a configuration issue, then. Because I have no idea what you're talking about. The UI is exactly the same across devices, and profiles (which can be cloned) once setup, don't require any user intervention to do transcoding. You literally click a video and it works...
Not sure what you're doing over there, but you're making it harder than it has to be.
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Wait, isn’t Jellyfin the same way?
Jellyfin has a native web-ui, yes. But not a proprietary one, like Plex uses. When I installed a Plex server I had to go to plex.tv and setup a user account there to be able to log into my own damn server... Then they strongly encourage you to use https://app.plex.tv/ to manage your local server.
It's all unnecessarily confusing and difficult.
Is there no account management on Jellyfin?
Yes. Local accounts. Not some cloud based PAMd system.
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Okay, but... how is it confusing from the front end if what you're doing is going through the same steps of creating an account? You punch in a login and password in both.
Sure, Plex is doing this extra thing where it's also bringing in centralized content along with your library and it will default to its remote access system if you log in from outside your network. But again, from the front-end that is transparent. You log in and you have your library. If anything they're being a bit too transparent, I've had times where networking stuff got in the way and it took me a minute to notice that Plex was routing my library through their remote access system instead.
I can see objections to it working that way, you trade a (frankly super convenient) way to share content remotely and access content from outside your network without too much hassle for... well, going through someone else's server and having their content sitting alongside yours. But "confusing and difficult" isn't how I'd describe it. It seems to work like any other service, self-hosted or not, as far as the user-facing portions are concerned. I guess I just don't see the confusing part there.
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Okay, but… how is it confusing from the front end if what you’re doing is going through the same steps of creating an account? You punch in a login and password in both.
Because there's zero difference between the app.plex.tv interface spawned from plex server, and one without. There's zero indication that it's actually your server and your content because it fucking displays everything by default.
It's such an incredibly bad proprietary system...
But again, from the front-end that is transparent.
It's not. There's no server configuration options at all. There's nothing to indicate it's local content...
I can see objections to it working that way, you trade a (frankly super convenient) way to share content remotely and access content from outside your network
For 90% of the content people use Plex for, this is an illegal act. So I don't see the advantage to providing this option let alone making it easier to commit a felony... I've never needed to "share" my media library with anyone and even if this was something I wanted to do, it's a simple DNS record away from doing the same thing in Jellyfin. There's no reason to lock people into your login system because 10% of people would "find it easier." It's just such a bad argument.
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any reason to use this over real debrid + stremio?
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I am very confused here. You seem to have slipped from arguing that it was difficult and complicated to arguing that it's bad to be able to share content remotely because it's a felony, which seems like a pretty big leap.
For one thing, it's not illegal and I do rip my own media. I will access it from my phone or my laptop remotely whenever I want, thank you very much.
For another, and this has been my question all along, how is it possibly more difficult and complicated to have remote access ready to go than being "a DNS record away"? Most end users don't even know what a DNS is.
And yes, not having (obvious) server configurations up front is transparent. That's what I'm saying. It does mix at least two sources (their unavoidable, rather intrusive free streaming TV stuff and your library), but it doesn't demand that you set it up. The entire idea is to not have to worry about whether it's local content. Like I said, there are edge cases where that can lead to a subpar experience (mainly when it's downsampling your stuff to route it the long way around without telling you), but from a UX perspective I do get prioritizing serving you the content over warning you of networking issues.
I don't know, man, I'm not saying you shouldn't prefer Jellyfin. I wouldn't know, I never used it long enough to have a particularly strong opinion. I just don't get this approach where having the thing NOT surface a bunch of technical stuff up front reads as "complicated and difficult". I just get hung up on that.
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You seem to have slipped from arguing that it was difficult and complicated to arguing that it’s bad
These are the same thing...
For one thing, it’s not illegal and I do rip my own media.
Soon as you share it over the Internet it is. You need a license from the IP holder to do that.
how is it possibly more difficult and complicated to have remote access ready to go than being “a DNS record away”?
- They're effectively the same.
- Plex forces you to use their way. It's more difficult because it's not the way most people would want to do it in a selfhost environment.
It does mix at least two sources (their unavoidable, rather intrusive free streaming TV stuff and your library), but it doesn’t demand that you set it up.
I mean yeah, it doesn't demand anything because it doesn't give you an option. lol
I don’t know, man, I’m not saying you shouldn’t prefer Jellyfin.
And I'm not saying that you should prefer Jellyfin. But to call Plex "easier" than jellyfin is verifiably an incorrect statement--which is what I've been saying since the beginning here. The way Plex forces you to do things isn't easier at all.
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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.
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Storing media locally is great on the off chance your internet goes out, in addition if there’s shows that RD hasn’t cached yet and have no seeders.
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Audiobookshelf is absolutely awesome for audiobooks. Tho it's possible, Jellyfin isn't really very audiobook friendly imo. Just run both.
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I bought an 13th Gen Asus Nuc with an i7 running Debian headless and a hard-disk bay for my setup, previously all I was using was a Rasp Pi 4, I honestly don’t know if my Jellyfin instance is utilizing the CPU’s iGPU not really sure how to tell.
Running lspci in the shell does return
00:10.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Raptor Lake-P [Iris Xe Graphics] (rev 04) -
Different devices. iOS, android, AppleTV. Most of it is likely Apple’s fault for the limited options in the ecosystem tho.
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Rd has no issues torrenting stuff? If it isnt cached it downloads it for me faster than my internet could lol. Thats a good idea tho, but typically if I lose internet, I've also lost power.
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It shouldn't really matter where you've got your files as long as they're mounted on a standard path. Maybe try creating a symlink from where your media is to a standard path like
/mnt/mediaor something?
