Plex is discontinuing its “watch together” feature
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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.
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Emby I feel is more mature then jellyfin in the sense of every device my family or I have just works on emby but has some issues on jellyfin. Also emby has features closer to plex that jellyfin doesn't have, like offline downloads and, at least in the emby beta, smart playlists. Jellyfin gives you more settings options for things like transcoding and per user settings than emby or plex. Both programs do some things better than plex too, like scheduling individual server tasks or outright disabling them. Overall from my experience a direct competitor to plex right now is emby while I would say a few more features are needed for jellyfin to be a direct competitor.
