Plex is discontinuing its “watch together” feature
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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. -
I really try to move to Jellyfin, but there's always some papercuts that block me. Tried it last weekend again, and:
- It just can't find most of my movies in the NAS share. They never appear in the library.
- The music player cannot play all my files. DSF files are transcoded to AAC. Also finamp streams AAC and not Opus, and uses more data than Plexamp did.
I also tried Navidrome for music. Weirdly it had hiccups playing some files, and DSF was again a problem.
I really want to get out from Plex, but I use Plexamp so much and it handles my huge music library really well it's hard to switch
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It's bad. But it's the best we've got.
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Plexamp right now is the biggest reason I have not even thought of moving to something else. I have yet to see a music player that comes close to the features Plexamp has.
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Jellyfin is nowhere near the better option, it’s just a not-terrible dev.
Plex is refined and easy to get external users not familiar with tech up and running. Plex looks better. Plex transcodes better.
No hate for Jellyfin, just calling it how I see it.
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My friends and I use syncplay + mpv for this. It works well, and even though it's designed around local file playback, you can add https URLs to the playlist. So this with nginx serving the files has been a great solution.
You can even play YouTube videos by adding yt-dlp to mpv, but that doesn't reliably work right now as far as I can tell.
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All my media is shared from a Raspberry Pi 4 with a HDD attached to it via NFS. Jellyfin runs as a container on a cheap Chinese mini pc I got off AliExpress. I've not had any issues over the network. It even transcodes on a share of the Pi as my SSD that has Jellyfin on is too small for larger movies.
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cluegy
I believe the word you're looking for is "kludgey."
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Probably around 40% of my watching is via syncplay on Jellyfin, as I like watching with buddies.
Sans jellyfin you have to find a way for both of you to access the same file/stream and manually sync across snack/bathroom breaks or use the external and separate syncplay app.
I do like the external syncplay app but if I'm going to have to get the file to them anyways, why not just stream it synced? In my mind this is a really convenient feature.
It is not perfect, in my experience;
- on rare occasions, it gets 'stuck' and won't sync correctly, so one will play but noth the other, pausing one unpauses the other, etc. Usually rebooting helps, but if not, I just manually sync
- there was 1 occassion which made no sense. I played a movie with a friend, we were watching together, but they were ahead of me by a whole ~15 minutes by the end of the film. Neither of us felt it was fast/slow or skipping anything.
- I haven't had luck using syncplay on my TV. The feature exists but it doesn't actually work.
But these are rare, minor gripes IMO. I'm glad Jellyfin has this feature.
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I text my buddy, and say "hey do you wanna watch xyz, when you're done with work?". We hop on discord to chat and watch it. An hour or two timezone is not an issue, and for someone 'local' I'm probably not driving half an hour to their house after work. I do prefer watching together in-person, but thats not always as convenient.
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Speak for yourself, Jellyfin has been awesome for me. Fantastic piece of software.
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First they removed downloads and now this? Feels shitty. I used this feature weekly to watch a show with a remote friend.
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Now if they could just tidy up remote access so that everyone is comfortable being able to use it.
They really need to partner with let's encrypt. If they implemented automated SSL generation and regeneration in the app and a dynamic DNS/Port registry, they would get mountains of new users.
Just tidying up remote access would probably be enough to sync Plex.
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LoL. That feature is literally the only reason I also have a Plex docker pointing to my library. But they’ve definitely not been supporting it for a while, because I don’t think it’s worked well in forever. Last few times I tried it with friends, we ended up having to just try to hit play at the same time.
Oh well. One less container now.
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Downloads havent been removed
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Findroid has been around longer with downloads working well too. Just has an issue where it doesn't download the images of the items, which is a bit silly.
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I'm seeing a lot of love for Jellyfin in the comments. Seems like Jellyfin is finally mature enough to give a real shot.
Does anyone know how Emby is doing in relation to Plex feature parity?
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They already have a guide on this, its not too difficult. How would a "partnership" work?
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Similarly, I feel the same way about Jellyfin but Plex is making it really hard to be a Lifetime Pass member as well.
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I have had a plex instance but when they started adding their own movies and crapola into it, and requiring logins and etc etc etc I started keeping a Jellyfin instance live as a hedge. I still use Plex primarily, but use Jellyfin and keep it patched just in case. If there's any kind of ugly action with Plex, I feel like my bets are pretty well hedged. Plex definitely has a lot more polish than Jellyfin, but I wouldn't doubt if there is a rug-pull in some way or another. After all, Plex sold a bunch of lifetime subscriptions ONCE but they still end up paying to support those. Sooner or later they are going to want more money again.
