I've used both extensively, and I'm 100% on board with jellyfin.
Plex is, without question, better. It works better, it looks better, it was easier to set up (iirc).
Jellyfin looks and feels like your typical mediocre open source project. The core functionality is there, and it does 90% of what it should 90% of the time. It's okay. I have many minor and major annoyances, but it works good enough.
The reason I don't use Plex is simple: I refuse to make an account to access my own media. I refuse to be advertised to by software on my own server. I don't like their business model, so I politely refuse them and use the inferior alternative.
I'm at a point in my life where I find these kinds of practices objectionable and I just don't want to expend any mental effort dealing with it. I'm hosting media that I own, on a physical box in my actual house. Having software require an account on a remote server, or "premium" features, or ads and nags is just beyond unacceptable to me. I don't care that it can be turned off or worked around, it doesn't matter. Plex just isn't better enough for me to justify dealing with a business in any capacity.
Jellyfin is free, and it works well enough. Knowing that I control the software at every stage between my sever and my couch is much more valuable to me than the relative minor convenience of Plex.
100% co-signed. If you want a seamless corporate subscription experience, just use whatever HBO Max is calling itself this month. If you can handle building your own media library, Jellyfin is the easy part.
I’m a long time Plex user (bought a lifetime pass for $75 some number of years ago).
I periodically try jellyfin, usually after plex does something else annoying to its userbase, and keep coming back to plex.
Jellyfin’s menus experience, particularly the cover art and metadata matching, seems to be worse than plex’s and I haven’t bothered to figure out what the difference is.
Jellyfin's metadata matcher doesn't handle Plex's filename format well at all. Renaming everything to the preferred jellyfin form and it works much better.
I moved from Plex to Jellyfin, and to be honest… it’s mostly felt like a downgrade.
I’ve had tons of transcoding issues I’ve never had with Plex. Particularly with 4K. It was problematic with Plex, but Jellyfin on Android TV is often just completely broken, or has glitches in the video stream. I’ve tried different backend players, no dice.
I’ve had audio lag issues with Jellyfin that I’ve never had with Plex or other streaming apps.
Plexamp was awesome. Jellyfin’s music player is barely functional.
The item matching in Plex was sometimes strange. Jellyfin feels like it would rather pick an obscure stage production from 1947 than to pick a Disney movie from 2019. The music matching in Jellyfin is, for me, broken 50% or more of the time. I hope my tastes in Classical Crossover aren’t that obscure.
I don’t have an Apple TV; but for the love of Pete, I would pay so much if Infuse finally supported Music.
Infuse does support Mac, https://apps.apple.com/app/id1136220934 , however, I hate how it needs to 'cache' the library locally and do delta syncs with JellyFin. It's brittle and just fails and has to re-scan the library pretty often.
I'm enjoying Jellyfin so far. The one thing I can't work out is why hardware transcoding isn't working.
I'm running the latest TrueCharts release on TrueNAS Scale with a CPU that supports Intel QuickSync (Xeon E-2324G) but no dice yet. Whenever 'Enable hardware encoding' is checked everything stops working. Not sure if the problem is with TrueNAS Scale or Jellyfin but there isn't an abundance of information/guidance out there just yet.
I'm unsure what a 'TrueCharts' is, but if it's anything Docker based you probably need to mount the Intel GPU device. You can do this pretty easily with a device mount: `--device=/dev/dri`. Another issues that may occur is that `/dev/dri` has insufficient permissions for Docker or that the device driver hasn't initialized.
On TrueNAS Scale you install applications that run on Docker/Kubernetes, and TrueCharts is a registry of these applications. They work with just a few clicks, it's very impressive and still new to me.
I think you're right on this, I'll investigate further today.
I like Jellyfin. I've got some TV shows, movies, and anime, and it's been working smoothly. Even hardware decoding with NVidia works fine. The cover art and metadata are fetched correctly, but granted, I only have popular titles. I don't know if it still works as well for indie or esoteric works.
Been using it at home with my MacBook via docker compose, got tired of my TV not being able to handle more than 4gigs of recorded 4K media from a variety of sources.
Simply map a volume to your local folder & bring up the service.
I'm in the same boat as you with the liftime plan. Plex felt a bit like it's losing the focus I care about a bit in the previous years (Integratin free ad supported streaming, FAST etc.) but so far it has been not intrusive and I don't really have a reason to look at alternatives as it's working nicely and their Apple TV app is solid.
As long as they don't complely pivot away from the "self-hosting your media collection" use case I care about, I'll be a happy user.
I walked away from plex after Little Snitch notified me that Plex for Mac was connecting out to plex's servers every time I took an action in the client (search, select media details, start playback, stop playback, pause, rewind, etc).
I know they claim it's all anonymized and no media file details are shared with third parties, but I don't feel there's any reason for them to get the details at all.
Plus the privacy policy doesn't cover anything at all when using the plex media matcher (default now). That usage sends the raw filenames of everything in your library to plex and they don't say a single thing about what they do with the data.
Haven't tried it for several years. I really liked it, but it simply wouldnt play some of my videos and the sound wasn't always in sync. Plex just worked.
Swiftfin is what I was talking about. The "Jellyfin Mobile" app doesn't support Apple TV at all, and Swiftfin is a far worse experience than Plex's Apple TV app.
WinSCP - using the SFTP protocol, which the ssh server on the Pi provides - would be a better file transferring tool than the outdated/insecure "scp" command.
The command 'scp' != the protocol 'scp'.
The scp command does not use the scp protocol anymore since openssh 9.0 but uses the SFTP protocol by default.
https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-9.0
As much as I love Pis (I have six or seven around doing home automation, 3D printer servers, etc.), I should point out that just about any cheap Intel with QuickSync support will do hardware transcoding vastly better (I use an Intel(R) Atom(TM) x5-Z8350, which is way worse than the current crop of sub-$200 miniPCs).
It's open and doesn't require an account like Plex.