Plex is discontinuing its “watch together” feature
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I never used it, but it was a popular third party add-on before the feature was integrated.
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Ah, that makes sense. I didn't realize we had asked for a new UI, here I was thinking we just wanted basic quality of life updates
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Lame. I’ve used this feature a lot. It feels like such a basic thing to include.
SharePlay is a standard feature in Apple devices, and it handles it. But only in supported apps.
The pandemic showed how nice such a feature can be for a lot of people.
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Yeah I don’t even used the SharePlay on Apple. Question for people using it: How do you start that? First do you start over phone/whatsapp/messengers? Or do you see people online in plex and propose to watch? For me either people are in different timezone so not practical or will be home and we watch it irl sync on the same tv.
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I know Findroid allows easy downloading and offline watching. Fladder (another newer Android client) also has downloading, haven't tried it myself yet.
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This is a feature that Jellyfin natively has already. So now Jellyfin exceeds Plex in some areas.
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What hell is wrong with these idiots?
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They took private investment.
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The android app has had downloads for years, they just download the entire file to your phone.
Streamyfin is a newer android app that also works very well with downloads.
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Honestly, the two reasons I've been sticking with Plex is the federated/shared libraries and watch together.
If they're starting to axe those then I see no reason to continue using it.
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Removing old features so we can bring them back as paid features later on.
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Ah, strange.
I've never had any issues, but I also haven't used it in a while.
Might be related to transcoding/sub-burning? https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/issues/6210
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Although Plex is running on your server it isn't there to do what you want.. unless Plex's real owner permits it.
That's how proprietary software works.
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Did it download the original file or are there download options transcoded on the server?
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Id love to have the federated libraries in jellyfin. That would be amazing.
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Jellyfin has had sync play for a long time
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As soon as Jellyfin allows downloads for offline viewing
Time to jump ship then...
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Ada is a Jellyfin user? We’re in good hands.
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default apps download original files, no transcode options.
Streamyfin claims download any file transcoded as long as your server can transcode it. Haven't tested it myself.
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I personally had really huge problems in the beginning with this feature, it depends on the file format, if it needs to be transcoded, if the subs are external or in the video container and what your users are watching it on.
I can give you some advice on what to look for, but it will come down to just tinkering with the settings until you find something that works for you the best.
Hardware acceleration is quite important, especially when there are like 6 people watching at once and 4 of them just refuse to watch it using the jellyfin desktop client that actually supports direct play feature (video does not need to be transcoded).
Switching languages of subtitles sometimes mess things up, especially when the subtitles need to be extracted from the video container and then sent separately. Sometimes it just lags the video for up to two seconds. It usually just messes with one person that then is a few seconds behind so not a big deal. Although I recommend setting languages in the very beginning so it does not break sync mid-way.
I also limited the thread count of the single ffmpeg stream to just one. Then i also limited the stream buffer to like 5 minutes so it just won't try to prepare a 4k movie for one person for the next several minutes. From my experience anyways, when we were watching some movie that is quite big, the jelly went bananas and a single user just maxed out the CPU and GPU. Ever since I set those limits, while also having the hardware acceleration enabled, the sync-play feature caused me little to no trouble. --- One of my friends has a slow internet that sometimes likes to drop things on the way and when his net drops out totally, it usually causes some issues and he then has to restart the browser tab. Although rare, it still happens from time to time.
I have an Intel i5 8400 and a UHD Graphics 630. The performance is good enough for my uses and movies play without issues even when 6 people are watching while my dad sits on tv while also watching something else.
Oh yes, now there are also a few other things to worry about. Make sure to check the maximum per-user bitrate the jelly will enable the users to watch. It's 40Mbps by default, I think. And you do not really need anything above it anyways, especially if streaming over the public internet.
The second thing is having a Nvidia GPU. From what I heard, the consumer graphics card can have up to 3 consecutive video streams running at once. But since I do not have anything Nvidia, I can't really care, tho I would strongly recommend you checking the GPU limitations including both the encoder/decoder limits and the codec support. This will help you set the buffer limits and codec support.
So full wrap, you'll just have to monitor your server's vitals and see if there is a bottleneck. Check your users client compatibility, see if the GPU or CPU is maxed out or if your ISP just isn't giving you a big enough pipe.
It just comes down to tinkering.
