Lifetime plex sub here: Downloads for Offline viewing.
Please Jellyfin, that feature will allow me to transition the whole family away from Plex.
Don’t care that plex is paid for, I’d rather exclusively run Jellyfin instead of both just so others in the household can get their offline video fix while traveling.
But it just downloads to disk, you cannot click “play” in the app, finishing an episode doesn’t make it as watched, you do not retain the ability to “continue” playing,…
I guess that depends on the app. I know what you mean by it doesn’t mark the played episode as played, it’s like there’s no offline sync so it’s kind of half baked. I think that’s still wholly on the app side of things (aka the client), as I believe the server side functionality exists.
I mean it all cones down to what features you use. For example, my kids live off smart collections, and in Plex you can pin them right to the home screen, and that experience is unified across TVs and tablets. You can’t do that yet in Jellyfin yet.
I would absolutely switch if I didn’t have kids though. I already tried. So many complaints and we went back to Plex. One day I will switch though when Plex goes belly up or gets bought its an inevitability.
You can run both simultaneously. I have Plex, Jellyfin and an OSMC client (via NFS) running out of the same library.
I use Plex because it’s easier for my various family members to use on their strange devices and TVs. They can’t remember an e-mail and password but a jellyfin URL may as well be eldritch incantations to hear them talk about it.
I host a Plex server and only use it to stream video. I don’t use any other features built into Plex. I’ve never had a an issue that I haven’t caused myself, and have a dozen people that share my library remotely.
I haven’t read about specifics in a long time, but I thought at one point jellyfin didn’t support remote streaming, which immediately makes in not an option. At this point it will take something more significant to get me to take the hours required to migrate everything out of Plex to a different solution, but are there any drop dead reasons why I should move now other than not being able to use the watch together feature that I’ve never used, although I disappointed they removed it, because it’s a nice feature?
I spun up Jellyfin recently just out of curiosity and setup wasn’t difficult at all. You can point it at the exact same library folders that Plex uses, so there’s not really much to migrate. Jellyfin will take time to do its media processing on the first library import, but that doesn’t require anything but patience while it does its thing.
It definitely supports remote streaming - one of my friends in another state was able to successfully sign in and watch something.
Jellyfin’s support for plugins is nice as well - paired with JFA-GO, user account management is a breeze.
The main drawback it still seems to need work on is streaming support on a larger variety of devices, which is where you’d be likely to still run into issues since you share your library with others. A few of my friends have devices that don’t have Jellyfin apps, and it’s the only reason I haven’t transitioned everything off of Plex. I don’t recall exactly what devices they were using that didn’t work, but I’m pretty sure at least one or two were game consoles.
Jellyfin just does everything I need, and has done for a long time, so I find it funny when all I ever hear about Plex is how it’s constantly getting worse like that wasn’t always going to happen with a closed source platform.
if it still works for you I wouldn’t drop everything and migrate; but the day is coming.
Prologue is also pretty fucking fantastic for audiobooks. I initially tried Audiobookshelf, but Docker refused to play nice with my NAS libraries. And ABS refuses to ship an installable program outside of Docker, so I was just up shit creek until I found Prologue.
Plex doesn’t natively support metadata and chapters for m4b files. It just tries to fucking play them like a 4 hour long music track. Technically it works, but it’s not very helpful for audiobooks. But Prologue does support m4b files. Prologue just uses Plex to remotely access your audiobook library (set up as a music library in Plex) and then it does all of the actual metadata and bookmark stuff locally.
if you aren’t trying to justify your lifetime subscription what are you even doing with Plex?
Lifetime plex sub here: Downloads for Offline viewing.
Please Jellyfin, that feature will allow me to transition the whole family away from Plex.
Don’t care that plex is paid for, I’d rather exclusively run Jellyfin instead of both just so others in the household can get their offline video fix while traveling.
it let’s you download. you’re talking about playback in app, right?
Both Android and iOS allow this. It depends on the user account settings in Jellyfin and a client that supports it.
But it just downloads to disk, you cannot click “play” in the app, finishing an episode doesn’t make it as watched, you do not retain the ability to “continue” playing,…
I guess that depends on the app. I know what you mean by it doesn’t mark the played episode as played, it’s like there’s no offline sync so it’s kind of half baked. I think that’s still wholly on the app side of things (aka the client), as I believe the server side functionality exists.
I mean it all cones down to what features you use. For example, my kids live off smart collections, and in Plex you can pin them right to the home screen, and that experience is unified across TVs and tablets. You can’t do that yet in Jellyfin yet.
I would absolutely switch if I didn’t have kids though. I already tried. So many complaints and we went back to Plex. One day I will switch though when Plex goes belly up or gets bought its an inevitability.
You can run both simultaneously. I have Plex, Jellyfin and an OSMC client (via NFS) running out of the same library.
I use Plex because it’s easier for my various family members to use on their strange devices and TVs. They can’t remember an e-mail and password but a jellyfin URL may as well be eldritch incantations to hear them talk about it.
I got my lifetime subscription so long ago there weren’t any viable options at the time.
And now I just use jellyfin (and occasionally toss them some dollars for dev because its awesome).
Thanks for reminding me. I should really donate to OSS tools I use more often.
I host a Plex server and only use it to stream video. I don’t use any other features built into Plex. I’ve never had a an issue that I haven’t caused myself, and have a dozen people that share my library remotely.
I haven’t read about specifics in a long time, but I thought at one point jellyfin didn’t support remote streaming, which immediately makes in not an option. At this point it will take something more significant to get me to take the hours required to migrate everything out of Plex to a different solution, but are there any drop dead reasons why I should move now other than not being able to use the watch together feature that I’ve never used, although I disappointed they removed it, because it’s a nice feature?
I spun up Jellyfin recently just out of curiosity and setup wasn’t difficult at all. You can point it at the exact same library folders that Plex uses, so there’s not really much to migrate. Jellyfin will take time to do its media processing on the first library import, but that doesn’t require anything but patience while it does its thing.
It definitely supports remote streaming - one of my friends in another state was able to successfully sign in and watch something.
Jellyfin’s support for plugins is nice as well - paired with JFA-GO, user account management is a breeze.
The main drawback it still seems to need work on is streaming support on a larger variety of devices, which is where you’d be likely to still run into issues since you share your library with others. A few of my friends have devices that don’t have Jellyfin apps, and it’s the only reason I haven’t transitioned everything off of Plex. I don’t recall exactly what devices they were using that didn’t work, but I’m pretty sure at least one or two were game consoles.
Jellyfin just does everything I need, and has done for a long time, so I find it funny when all I ever hear about Plex is how it’s constantly getting worse like that wasn’t always going to happen with a closed source platform.
if it still works for you I wouldn’t drop everything and migrate; but the day is coming.
Well, luckily I don’t have a lifetime subscription with em…
it’s the only reason I can see that anyone still uses it.
PlexAmp is bar none the best app for selfhosting music. The movie and TV stuff is nice too
Prologue is also pretty fucking fantastic for audiobooks. I initially tried Audiobookshelf, but Docker refused to play nice with my NAS libraries. And ABS refuses to ship an installable program outside of Docker, so I was just up shit creek until I found Prologue.
Plex doesn’t natively support metadata and chapters for m4b files. It just tries to fucking play them like a 4 hour long music track. Technically it works, but it’s not very helpful for audiobooks. But Prologue does support m4b files. Prologue just uses Plex to remotely access your audiobook library (set up as a music library in Plex) and then it does all of the actual metadata and bookmark stuff locally.
Watch together is… Was genuinely great, it work… ed so well but I guess we just can’t have nice things