The open source alternative to my sponsor – Jellyfin vs Plex

35 thoughts on “The open source alternative to my sponsor – Jellyfin vs Plex”

• Have you switched from Plex to Jellyfin or vice versa? What was your experience? If you've tried Emby, how does that compare?

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• @plex it’s been over 2 years

• What about using Plex as a back-end and Kodi as a front-end?

• I switched from Plex to EMBY for 3 months, then switched back to Plex. EMBY isn’t ready for prime time yet, trust me!

• Dumped plex years ago, got totally sick of having to have server side solutions and dependency on NAS / plex CPU, not to mention some pripriatry Auduo codecs just not working right and dealing with poor quality end units and remotes. Infuse + AppleTV is the way to go it just works… syncs across multiple units with Trakt sharing, and media offline download to iphone/ipad etc…. Started out with XBMC back in the day and have used a LOT of stuff in between, cant go past infuse.

• transcoded download works fine, shrek was found immediately, there are now over 10 different ratings on age, herkules works fine

• Been a Emby user for 5y+ well worth the money. (I also have Plex lifetime but keep coming back to Emby). Great native android and LG WebOS apps.

• InFuse for the win

• Enshitification! I love when companies forget the problem they solved in the face of investors.

• I've run into missing audio issues before, which were almost always solved by just a repackaging of the original content with MKVToolNix, whether the original was MP4, AVI, or MKV. I've never figured out what the issue was exactly, as the file data and the tracks appear the same, but regardless the original file has some sort of error or unexpected attribute that causes the audio playback to fail, and remuxing the file sorted the issue.

  I've had similar issues with video not streaming correctly, including being presented by PLEX Roku app with the wrong resolution. But a quick MKVToolNix remux and bam, problem solved.

• I switched to jellyfin. Better.

• I had problems with plex in the past, now using Jellyfin for a year now. Even got Hardware decoding working on Fedora, just add the correct copr repo. Subtitles are downloaded automatically . Works great.

• Can Plex be used without an active internet connection, like Jellyfin can? The entire point is being able to still watch something on my smart TVs when the internet goes down.

• Who cares about the download feature, just drag the file onto your phone from your pc

• Emby is pure garbage. I have used it on Linux, Truenas core and windows, neither worked properly. It didn't find the files or even the folder.

• I feel LTT have lost their way :-/

• OMG!!! Plex is so riddled with bugs that I now play my medias straight from the files. I regret the Lifetime Pass too

• Honestly the Live TV option is kinda nice. Can easily locally record what I want. Its pretty dang smooth too from what I have tested, vs the Alternatives I have tried

• if you use jellyfin just put the imdb ttXXXXX into the file name than it wil be loaded correcty on media scan

• If you want Android Auto with Movies, music, IPTV, Web browser, you name it….. -> FERMATA

• I would mention one thing for the parental controls in Plex (this does require a PlexPass, though; so not a free option): if you create a managed account with a restriction level of "None" you can restrict content by including or excluding ratings or labels. In my case, I created a Kids account and then (because my collection is heavily saturated with R rated titles that weren't really appropriate for 6-14 year old viewers, I chose to only allow movies and shows with a label of "Kids". If the collection leaned more toward age appropriate content, then I likely would have created a label for the less appropriate titles and excluded those.

  All that said, I'll be experimenting with Jellyfin in the coming months and look forward to seeing if it meets my use case just as well or better while not giving my family too many headaches.

• Jellyfin is feature rich, easy to use and open source. The only downside I found until now is that indexing my libraries takes a lot longer than plex on the same hardware. I have to note here that this is on a synology nas with 2gb ram, so I guess this doesn't apply to everyone.

  For me the solution when I have added a lot more movies is that I let it index overnight.

  Other than that, would 100% recommend!

• your rips aren't supported right because you're not naming them properly. you know? It's not called Shrek 1 3D…. LOL

• Honestly, Plex works near flawlessly for me. I love the fact I can watch my LIVE TV through it and I actually am starting to like the free tv and movies… it's like, having a cable subscription for free so my wife is happy and my kid can watch random kid shows for free without me needing to keep up with them elsewise.

• How does capitalism ruin everything? Your entire existence is based on it…

• Thanks – would love to see how these compare on FireStick

• Jellyfin was very slow on a Pi4 4GB. Especially flipped with 0.5TB mp3.
  That's something i hated on both. I want to see all files and subfolder lists.

• so how to use jellyfin as local video player

• "Because capitalism ruins everything"
  Remind me again how you got to quit your day job and become a self-made media empire?
  Plex's biggest problem is that pace Dilbert, what the customer wants is better products for free. Until the people with massive pirated video libraries start being willing to pay reasonable prices for software to play them, Plex – and every other similar vendor – is going to chase partnerships that do pay the bills.

• “I feel like Plex has lost their way”

  Oof, that comment didn’t age well coming from Linus.

• It blows my mind that Plex still does not offer a playback speed option. It's the only reason I continue to use VLC.

• tried jellyfin for music, for some reason it's horrible at gathering music metadata compared to plex

• just make your files smaller and don't allow any transcoding.

• For the metadata, I'm using (not it's first goal, I admit) couch potato, detect the movies I have, than let it do the metadata itself… Could be cool a solution that do just it…

• Thank you so much for this review. I was going to buy Plex Pass. In India, it is expensive for us. So I am really doing my research and since the most wanted features are buggy in the Plex Pass, I have chosen not to buy. I really wish Plex fixes these issues. I will buy lifetime pass if they do.

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