I hope the project succeeds and think this is a good move. But I have a lifetime Plex pass and Jellyfin still seems not as good. I have both on my box, but whenever I try to use Jellyfin theres just something missing. I will keep checking back.
This goes against my experience. I too have a Plex lifetime pass and it has been rock solid, my library lives in network mounted NAS drive, formatted with filebot. I've unpinned the default views that it comes with when you install the client and pinned just my libraries. It just works on all devices, absolutely no issues, no memory leaks, the UI is beautiful and Netflix like, which is important for my family. The central account is what makes claiming the server and sharing the library with others and the overall remote login experience very easy, this is what enables plex.tv/link functionality.
Yes it is not perfect and they made mistakes along the way but comments as such just tend to ride on the sentiment that vilifies all non OSS products as if it's something inherently bad, the "us vs them" attitude is something I see time and time again here.
> The central account is what makes claiming the server and sharing the library with others and the overall remote login experience very easy, this is what enables plex.tv/link functionality.
The fact that this is all it enables just reinforces the idea that it should be optional. All of the core functionality is possible to implement without requiring an account.
> this is what enables plex.tv/link functionality.
> The fact that this is all it enables
Not sure where you got the idea that linking is the /only/ thing an account gives you. One feature I quite enjoy is syncing watch status between servers. So if one has multiple servers they use (multiple they control or friend’s servers) their watch status can be synced. In my case I have a travel/portable Plex server and my main Plex server so it’s nice to have my watch state kept in sync.
And there are more features from having a central account, this is just one of them to disprove that linking is the only reason you need an account or that it’s the only feature of having an account.
It does match your experience, you just explained their justification. There is no reason to require a central account. Linking discovery, etc is completely possible without it.
Even if they did have the account, the unforgivable part is that you cannot use the mobile app for your family and have people have different profiles because the plex pass is tied to a profile. That’s a sleazy cash grab that drove me off of plex.
Unless they changed it, having Plex Pass on the account that manages the server “blesses” that server, unlocking all Plex Pass features for everyone using that particular server.
An example of this is sunsetting Plex Sync and replacing it with Plex Downloads.
At the time they used the whole 'Sync never worked right' argument to justify why they got rid of it.
In reality, Plex sync used to allow any user to download videos from any server where the server owner had plex pass.
Now with downlods, the user must have Plex Pass to download anything.
I used to feel the same way about Plex til they started flooding my less savvy family with ads for their own content and useless features unrelated to what they want to do. Really not impressed by that one. I realized how bad it was when I got a call about a broken movie I didn't even have.
Plex still seems slicker than Jellyfin in some ways but after that experience I'd certainly consider a switch. Offline is the only reason I still use plex, but their offline setup is pretty buggy too.
Plex is great. There's rock solid and then there's rock solid to the extent that my spouse and family members can all use it with no support calls to me. My dad was able to download movies to his iPad for a flight to NZ all on his own.
Yes, they keep adding cruft, I just ignore or hide it. That said, I didn't know I wanted Plexamp until they gave it to me, and now I love it.
If you like PlexAmp then you might be interested in Prologue [0] as well. It’s not a first-party app but it’s audiobook app that uses your Plex server as a source. So you can have a library of audiobooks that it pulls from.
I buy all my audiobooks on Audible, remove the DRM, then put them on my server so I can use Prologue instead of the default Audible app. Yes, you give up WhisperSync but I rarely use that anyway.
The Plex Hater community is easily in my top 3 most hated online communities, and has been so for at least 5 years now.
There are few environments that seem to attract the sort of discussion where every single person feels justified in writing a 12 paragraph vitriolic entitled screed drawing from the same bucket of recycled quips. To say that you actually like Plex is some sort of great offence that attracts at least a few replies telling you that you’re wrong.
I’m so incredibly confident that there’s a large contingent of people that wouldn’t care an iota that Plex phones home, if not for the fact that they’re so deep into the Plex Hate scene that they’ve learned to be up in arms about it.
I’m not a gamer but have interacted with gaming communities here and there as I’m sure we all have to varying extents. I see the Plex community as pretty similar. I think it attracts the same sort of ‘power user’.
You might be onto something. I think it's to do with the fact that self hosting attracts a certain crowd, and when you have a product that is popular to self host, but is not open source and with some paywalled features, it irritates them deeply. The narrative is popular enough to hate Plex that I suspect some people who don't even care try to farm karma from the bandwagon. Podcasts like selfhosted.show also ride these tropes...
I have never used Plex even though I've heard it's superior but I just didn't bother when I saw exactly what you said. Creating an account somewhere to use my own instance? Even though I could just block all outbound traffic and hope it'll still work - no thanks. Jellyfin turned out very fine.
I stopped using Plex almost immediately after installing it. I couldn't figure out how to proceed without creating a centralized account with them, which is the last thing I want or expect from a "self hosted" software package.
I think this is the worst part of Plex, it's self hosted but not really. Still depends on the company's continued existence. If the company goes bust my solution will probably just stop working. It took some time to set it up properly so the bloat is thoroughly swept under the rug, never in sight. This gives me a more than decent experience and the interface/UX is spot on for me.
The best of Jellyfin is that it's truly self hosted. But no matter how much set up I do, the experience is still never too good. I don't really like the UI/UX but I could get used to it. My biggest issue is how it handles the folder structure and metadata for series. They will always have to be neatly organized in folders to be properly picked up. You can't throw an episode file here, an episode in a folder there, the rest of the season in another folder and so on. They're just seen as independent material, no metadata. This makes the watching experience very stunted.
When I used it a few years ago it was still possible to use without an account if you knew the exact extremely-hidden-behind-dark-patterns steps, much like making a local account in Windows these days. But from the other comments in this thread I get the impression that even that tricky process is no longer an option.
> I need a plex.com account to use my own self hosted instance?
And anybody could log into their plex account on my instance! The way they handle accounts for self-hosted instances is either deliberately convoluted or ineptly designed.
Ditto. I would love to use jellyfin in principle, but in reality I find myself often butting heads with it when I just want to watch a damned film - and Plex, despite its considerable bloat, just works.
Yep. Every time I've tried Jellyfin, I thought it was great... Until a video wouldn't play, or the sound wasn't synchronised, or something else. Whereas Plex just works, and always did.
Hoping Jellyfin keeps going, maybe I'll check it out again at some point.
In my own experience (and the takeaway is “software is hard” not “I am right”), every movie I watched via plex had audio desync issues, which has never been an issue with Jellyfin.
2) The way you fix the matching in Jellyfin has a pretty terrible UX. You select the movie w/o metadata (there's no filter to "find all media that Jellyfin fail to match w/ metadata) and click "Identify" in the 3-dot menu, then fill in the information and search (why can't Jellyfin prefill useful metadata, at the very minimum the year that should be easily identified using regex?), then pick either IMDb or tmdb (why do I have to choose one of them? Can I bulk-switch my library to use IMDb instead of tmdb?), with a checkbox to confirm you want to "replace existing images" (why do I have any images to replace? Jellyfin did not match the media to any metadata right?) you now have some useful metadata.
3) When I need to force a rescan of a library, there's no way (that I can find) to do that when you are viewing the library. The only way to do this is to go to Settings -> Dashboard -> Scan All Libraries.
4) There's no offline media playback support (AFAIKT).
1 - I'm not sure what you mean. Jellyfin can use the NFO, and if not will do a normal search and match.
2 - I agree that Find all without set metadata in a library would be nice. However when identifying you don't need to chose one or the other, you just type whatever info you have (the name, or the year, or both, or ...) and search and it search in all providers it has a plugin for (so in your case, both imdb and tmdb) and show all results from both.
The do you want to replace image is because it's very common to switch to another provider for obscure series for exemple, but want to keep you hand replaced image. It doesn't really apply to "blockbuster" series or movies, so I guess it could be nice to have a default you can set.
3 - It separates the admin part and the viewing part, I think it's good. If you're solo user it can feel bothersome, but for me it's a better thing.
4 - You can download the files for later viewing offline.
Overall the only one I agree with is the figure out which movie or serie you didn't identify and let me fix that in bulk, that process could be improved, but it's also a one time thing at first setup.
1) I do generate NFO for all my media and Jellyfin should have enough information to match the metadata, yet it fail to match constantly.
2) When I try to identify the media, I would expect Jellyfin to pre-fill the form with the name, year etc, basically anything it can find, either from parsing the filename or the NFO. But Jellyfin did nothing here to make it easier.
4) Oh I just found this functionality in the Android client! But this is over simplified, for TV shows it doesn't support "download the next N unwatched episodes". I also tried to download a movie just now and I got a notification "download unsuccessful" w/o more insight to debug the issue (although to be fair Plex is not better in giving a reason why download failed). And I don't see in the UI to manage all downloaded media (maybe because I haven't had a successful download?).
For 1) I use folder and file naming myself rather than NFO so I can't help you more, but if it fails on such a large scale you should submit a bug with an example as it's obviously not normal behavior.
2) I understand what you mean,but I would disagree, usually it would get in the way for me (whatever it identified or thought it did was wrong).
4) The log will be on the server, admin, logs. There won't be a manage my upload though, it's a client thing and the current client does consider that outside of its scope.
Personnaly when needed it's download then use Vlc when I want to watch.
I've been able to identify everything by just using the title. Jellyfin could be better here, but there's almost no friction in entering the title, hitting enter, selecting the right movie and then completing it. You don't have to change anything after selecting the movie, since it by default replaces images (and simply provides the option in case you already have images you'd like to keep).
Are you advocating taking away an option other users might use because it confuses you?
Just so you know, there are (open source!) third-party clients available that solve these issues. Particularly with respect to the music player, there's Fintunes[1], Finamp[2] and AmpFin[3] for instance.
I have more issues when using Plex than I do with Jellyfin. Jellyfin can still be annoying, but Plex can be infuriating trying to get it play nice with my library. I've stopped using Plex.
The client I use is Apple TV 4k and Plex does not have reliable playback for that device. It’s pathetic this has been broken for so long. I have to use Infuse for playback, which is $1/mo.
Jellyfin works well except that if you’re not transcoding, you’ll need Infuse for (IIRC?) a couple not-ubiquitous-but-not-rare audio codecs that Apple TV doesn’t natively support.
I use Infuse with Jellyfin. My server’s way too weak for reliable transcoding, plus not using it avoids a large proportion of bugs in the Jellyfin issues tracker at any given time.
Using the Jellyfin webui on AppleTV without even installing an app works decent.
There’s a dedicated AppleTV app, which works great for a month, then reliably forgets its credentials. I use it, but the kids don’t want to learn how to type urls, usernames, and passwords so they don’t. That’s fair.
