After looking at this list I’d like to pre-qualify what I’m about to say: I have jellyfin and like it, I use jellyfin regularly. I have it pointed to the same catalog as Plex and if Plex ever gets thoroughly enshitified I will leave it for jellyfin
The biggest things I’ve seen (in decreasing order of pain):
transcoding can fail on media that Plex has no problems with
Jellyfin is significantly worse at detecting names and properly assigning metadata. Jellyfin does not have the same ease of fixing that when it happens that Plex has.
I’m not going to go through all the work to reverse proxy it. Nor do I trust opening it to the internet. So for her to access it outside the house she’s going to be using tailscale. Kind of just extra steps for the sake of extra steps.
Finamp is a poor replacement for Plexamp, Don’t get me wrong I love the fan project but it’s not anywhere near as good, and it becomes quite painful to use on large audio catalogs.
The Roku client doesn’t have any method to mark things as watched or unwatched or modified playlisted items.
I dislike the sections being static one row high and then having to rotate left and right through multiple things when they could just wrap.
I am super amazed that the project runs as well as it does. It’s a monumental piece of open source work, but there’s a lot of polish problems and I’m not qualified to help them fix them.
Edit: oh and I really really miss these skip intro Skip credits option that Plex has.
Quick notes from an avid jellyfin user. When you have a show or movie or whatever you want, not get identified, there’s a simple identify option you can do on the client on a computer or phone by clicking the 3 dots on the media. You get to search and label it. The only time this hasn’t appropriately assigned metadata for me was for shows with duplicate episodes in one mkv or whatever. That did take a lot of renaming, which did suck and is reasonable to not want to have to do. Especially for massive libraries.
I definitely agree about the roku client not having a marked as watched feature, that should be added.
There’s a lot of work to be done but it’s not just being done in the basic edition. For instance, there’s plugins that allow the skip credits and skip intro functions you want. And there’s ones for fanart, and allowing other databases of Metadata to select from. There’s a lot of plugins and more are being actively developed rather often. Even I’m trying to develop a “continue watching” feature like from Netflix, but it’s going slowly.
Jellyfin definitely takes more finagling than plex, i switched at the beginning of the year, but I’ve had multiple times since where my internet is out and because jellyfin is local network I’m still able to stream my media.
So yeah. Just some info about jellyfin. I get wanting the ease of plex, but I’ve personally really enjoyed adding the plugins and fucking around with everything it has.
Just general glitchiness, odd UI design choices etc. Def needs more polish
When I say Spouse Test I mean from the context of a spouse who just “doesn’t do computers”, if your spouse is technically inclined at all, say as a PC gamer or something and has dealt with sometimes-kinda-annoying software and has some patience, then they’ll probably be fine with it
This makes sense. I had to poke around the UI to figure it out. And, the client occasionally needs rebooted or the cache cleared. I can see how some users would have trouble.
I’d suggest that teaching those users is probably easier than setting up Plex today and then setting up Jellyfin as an emergency service when Plex inevitably begins ad injection or introduces a paywall for local streaming.
Where’s Jellyfin failing the spouse test? My spouse preferred it to Plex because she could turn off all the crap on the home screen.
After looking at this list I’d like to pre-qualify what I’m about to say: I have jellyfin and like it, I use jellyfin regularly. I have it pointed to the same catalog as Plex and if Plex ever gets thoroughly enshitified I will leave it for jellyfin
The biggest things I’ve seen (in decreasing order of pain):
transcoding can fail on media that Plex has no problems with
Jellyfin is significantly worse at detecting names and properly assigning metadata. Jellyfin does not have the same ease of fixing that when it happens that Plex has.
I’m not going to go through all the work to reverse proxy it. Nor do I trust opening it to the internet. So for her to access it outside the house she’s going to be using tailscale. Kind of just extra steps for the sake of extra steps.
Finamp is a poor replacement for Plexamp, Don’t get me wrong I love the fan project but it’s not anywhere near as good, and it becomes quite painful to use on large audio catalogs.
The Roku client doesn’t have any method to mark things as watched or unwatched or modified playlisted items.
I dislike the sections being static one row high and then having to rotate left and right through multiple things when they could just wrap.
I am super amazed that the project runs as well as it does. It’s a monumental piece of open source work, but there’s a lot of polish problems and I’m not qualified to help them fix them.
Edit: oh and I really really miss these skip intro Skip credits option that Plex has.
Quick notes from an avid jellyfin user. When you have a show or movie or whatever you want, not get identified, there’s a simple identify option you can do on the client on a computer or phone by clicking the 3 dots on the media. You get to search and label it. The only time this hasn’t appropriately assigned metadata for me was for shows with duplicate episodes in one mkv or whatever. That did take a lot of renaming, which did suck and is reasonable to not want to have to do. Especially for massive libraries.
I definitely agree about the roku client not having a marked as watched feature, that should be added.
There’s a lot of work to be done but it’s not just being done in the basic edition. For instance, there’s plugins that allow the skip credits and skip intro functions you want. And there’s ones for fanart, and allowing other databases of Metadata to select from. There’s a lot of plugins and more are being actively developed rather often. Even I’m trying to develop a “continue watching” feature like from Netflix, but it’s going slowly.
Jellyfin definitely takes more finagling than plex, i switched at the beginning of the year, but I’ve had multiple times since where my internet is out and because jellyfin is local network I’m still able to stream my media.
So yeah. Just some info about jellyfin. I get wanting the ease of plex, but I’ve personally really enjoyed adding the plugins and fucking around with everything it has.
I want to go and look at the plugins I wasn’t aware that some of that stuff was available. I was an avid plug-in user until Plex pulled that from me.
Just general glitchiness, odd UI design choices etc. Def needs more polish
When I say Spouse Test I mean from the context of a spouse who just “doesn’t do computers”, if your spouse is technically inclined at all, say as a PC gamer or something and has dealt with sometimes-kinda-annoying software and has some patience, then they’ll probably be fine with it
This makes sense. I had to poke around the UI to figure it out. And, the client occasionally needs rebooted or the cache cleared. I can see how some users would have trouble.
I’d suggest that teaching those users is probably easier than setting up Plex today and then setting up Jellyfin as an emergency service when Plex inevitably begins ad injection or introduces a paywall for local streaming.