The corporate creep was already felt when years ago they released the PlexAmp audio player.
Good player but to display lyrics you have to open the menu and select “Show Lyrics”, two clicks every time. Every time, for every track. When the next track is playing lyrics display is automatically turned off. It is not remembered either, you go back to previous track and have to click click them menu gain.
This is because they have to pay a licence and rather save $100 per month by inconveniencing their user base. you see, it’s extra work to click the menu every time so you won’t be viewing lyrics. Profit!
And no, if your file already has lyrics that doesn’t matter, you still have to open to view it every time, for each track.
Not only does it acknowledges that Plex is still far better than Jellyfin with its whole ecosystem, but it also depict pretty nicely the entitlement of the users overall.
On one side, they paid $75 more than five years ago for a piece of software for which they still receive weekly updates.
On the other, they talk about how leadership at Jellyfin decided to throw the blanket after a burning themselves out for free.
Up till now, Plex kept their promise regarding the Lifetime pass: we still receive updates, we still have all the features.
So, unless they change that, they haven't broken their promise.
It seems only fair from them to try to run a sustainable business, which you can do without renewed income.
They have to find money.
They raise subscription price: no impact on existing Lifetime pass owners.
They add ad-supported features: no impact on existing Lifetime pass owners. I don't see a single add wherever I access my Plex library, I have hidden their "free" library. I still have 100% of the features I had when I bought the Lifetime pass. Except that I have now access to more features.
Sure, nobody forced them to say "Lifetime", but I don't see how I could be mad if they decided to release a completely new version that is out of the Lifetime scope.
I would still have access to the old one, but if I was interested in the new one, I would have to move to one of their new plans, that looks more sustainable in the long run.
Plex is still the easiest one to use for regular user or for the people, like me, that act as IT support for their family and friends, and don't want to spend their evenings and weekends tweaking their aunt's TV just for the sake of using Open Source software.
OP here. Thank you for reading and it was something that's been brewing in my mind for a while. I agree with you and didn't really know how to approach it becuase I've got a lot of really good things to say about Plex and sure as hell have benefitted from the lifetime license.
Recently, I've been asked more and more by friends and family to set up Plex for them as it's "free" and "easy". I do the basic setup or walk them through it. Then they want to share to their libraries to others or just watch off their connection and hit the wall of having to have a subscription.
Then they bring me Jellyfin as the alternative from something they saw on XDA. I'm not too quick to help them set that up just because of the current state of it and having to find them players on their various devices. As you mentioned, I've been spending pretty much be spending all my free time helping them set it up but I think Plex being so cost prohibitive now so Jellyfin will start to become the defacto option as what we'll be tweaking for those of us that act as IT support.
For foolproof matching, adding Plex metadata in the style of "{tmdb-12345}" to the directory name would cause problems for Jellyfin, as they used to demand different formatting, for instance square brackets.
It has taken a years to convince the maintainers that this change is a good idea and not "letting Plex determine the future course of Jellyfin."
Silo is a new up and coming competitor, also completely open source and written in go, and has full Postgres support from the get-go, along with proper architecture decisions to allow transcoding across multiple hosts.
The vision of Silo appears to be much more clear, and has quite a few great devs behind it. It also has features to run side by side and has full JF api support. I have no involvement in the project, just excited for a new player in the space.
Then I went on siloserver's website and I was even more confused.
What made the success of Plex is how easy it is to setup, how nice it looks and how easy it is to use.
Siloserver's marketing miss all those points because they focus on the tech stack, don't show a single picture of the UI and don't demonstrate the UX.
Even as someone who understands the tech written on the website, I don't see the point. So I can easily imagine how someone without the technical knowledge would feel about this...
* Accelerated TV support - Jellyfin sometimes struggles to play media that plex has no problem with. This is across an old Apple TV and an oldish LG tv.
* general Tv support - no Jellyfin app on Samsung TVs (at least older ones)
* General challenges to get things to start - it never worked for me out-of-the-box
* slightly weird sign in flows because it’s all self-hosted (have to first install a mobile app to make signing in on TV app smoother unless you happen to have your computer and TV side by side)
* weird issues with things suddenly stopping to work: DLNA was working but without any changes I can think of on my end it no longer works
* weird dlna support - at least with iOS VLC it didn’t work smoothly - like VLC sometimes wouldn’t see the announcement or something and I’d have to reset. Could be a VLC issue but don’t recall similar problems with Plex
So basically Plex is a smoother, easier to use experience that typically “just works” without issues.
These are the pain points I experienced moving from Plex to Jellyfin a while ago:
- Jellyfin forced me to organize my files into Show/Season folders, whereas Plex just handled my original flat mess of scattered files.
- When playing video on Plex, I generally have to wait some time before subtitles show up, whereas the subtitles in Plex just show up immediately
- Plex has built in search for openly available subtitles matching your video that you can use if your video lacks subtitles (not sure if Jellyfin has it too)
That said, I still prefer Jellyfin for numerous other reasons, and I don't regret my migration.
> Jellyfin forced me to organize my files into Show/Season folders, whereas Plex just handled my original flat mess of scattered files.
You keep all your shows in a single directory? or just sorted into folders per show?
I haven't had any issues with files just sorted into show folders for shorter series, but even in general it's very un-particular about filenames as long as you have `<show name> (<year>) S<Season #>E<Episode #>` (and it accepts a decent number of formats for season/episode number, and year is usually only needed if you need to differentiate shows with the same name).
No don't, sonarr is definitely worse if you have a unstructured media folder. I currently use it and its good, but I remember when first starting out with pile of files in semi random folders it being a mess to start up. Like some of the restrictions of the bulk importer made very little sense. Also, sonarr is tied to a single metadata provider which sometimes makes very unpopular decisions about the naming of series and episodes. When pluribus was initally released, they insisted on naming the series "plur1bus" even though no other source, imdb or even AppleTV used that as the official name. This broke auto downloading for the season.
I'd say the biggest difference is Plex had years to get polish and mature. (After you turn off all the annoying features ...). So Jellyfin is missing little things, or has apparent bugs (especially on android tv). For example no way to remove a series from Continue Watching, or quickly reload metadata for one series.
I use Kodi. I never used Plex or Jellyfin. I'm not even sure what they are. They look like media players, but... over the network? I don't really understand how that works. In a web browser? Why whould anyone run a media player in a browser? Can anyone explain?
Essentially, think of it as Netflix for which you provide the media yourself. A browser is one possible way to connect, but clients exist too (e.g. a Roku app and so on). Having the ability to connect with a client running on something connected to your TV is nice, as is the ability to connect remotely (if you open up the ports on your firewall of course). It also gives you things like remembering what shows you were watching and giving a shortcut to the next episode, intro skipping, transcoding, and so on.
Looks and feels like an Android app from 10 years ago and all this hides whatever setup and management went into getting this going. Plex Just Works, and is very easy on the eyes.
I've been a paying Emby user for close to ten years, ever since plex tried to launch a VR player or some shit, while there were still critical bugs in the player for web and other devices.
Emby just works, it's players are great, and issues actually get fixed. I know it's a closed source fork of XBMC, I know that's controversial, but the product itself is just so good.
I have found Emby to be a nice middle ground between Plex and Jellyfin.
It has more polish and refinement than Jellyfin but doesn't have the obtrusive ads and whatnot that Plex offers. Client support is also great. Jellyfin is still quickly gaining ground but Emby is still my media server of choice for now.
>Jellyfin but doesn't have the obtrusive ads and whatnot that Plex offers
I'm a Plex user who's been thinking about trying Jellyfin out, largely in response to some recent UI changes I dislike but... what Plex ads? I don't have any on my android apps, on Roku installs, or on my parent's SmartTV, and none of my other users have ever mentioned any ads to me. (If I was seeing ads, Jellyfin would become "take some time off work and get it working now".)
I know I've disabled everything except my own libraries, so it's possible there's a setting somewhere that allows them, but if so, I disabled it so long ago I honestly don't remember ever seeing any. Are other Plex users seeing ads? Was it after a recent update that I may have skipped, maybe?
I tried to evaluate Jellyfin recently but dropped it pretty quick. Live (OTA) television is barely a thought (seems to be acknowledged that no dev uses it), and you have to figure out a source for guide data. I have complaints with Plex's implementation, but it's a lot smoother than Jellyfin.
I'd argue that raising a bunch of venture capital is what stopped them from being able to be a sustainable business.
I paid for Plex for a long time but I no longer use it because I got fed up of fighting it. (I now use Jellyfin + Tailscale instead.) I think the problem with Plex is they aren't happy with what they are: a service for people viewing their own (yes, pirated) media library. They always wanted to be something more. Netflix envy.
But all anyone I know ever wanted Plex to do was handle their media library, perhaps offer a paid tunnelling system but otherwise get out of the way.
I assume they mean how easy Plex makes it to share content across the internet. I setup a server, you download a client. No port forwarding, VPN shenanigans, etc
It’s not about tech literacy to setup, it’s about sharing my content with friends and family - there is no easy way to do it, even if everybody is tech savvy it’s still high friction.
The dream would be: anybody with a jellyfin install can add your library to theirs, anybody with the jellyfin client can be invited to browse your library.
I would absolutely love to cut to jellyfin, but for the TV integration.
Last time i looked samsung TV's (which most of my fam use) dont have a decent client. Has that changed?
This is exactly the core reason why I can't consider changing. The Plex app for Samsung has worked great for me for many years. It has its quirks, but it works!...
Not only does it acknowledges that Plex is still far better than Jellyfin with its whole ecosystem, but it also depict pretty nicely the entitlement of the users overall.
On one side, they paid $75 more than five years ago for a piece of software for which they still receive weekly updates. On the other, they talk about how leadership at Jellyfin decided to throw the blanket after a burning themselves out for free.
Up till now, Plex kept their promise regarding the Lifetime pass: we still receive updates, we still have all the features. So, unless they change that, they haven't broken their promise. It seems only fair from them to try to run a sustainable business, which you can do without renewed income. They have to find money. They raise subscription price: no impact on existing Lifetime pass owners. They add ad-supported features: no impact on existing Lifetime pass owners. I don't see a single add wherever I access my Plex library, I have hidden their "free" library. I still have 100% of the features I had when I bought the Lifetime pass. Except that I have now access to more features.
Sure, nobody forced them to say "Lifetime", but I don't see how I could be mad if they decided to release a completely new version that is out of the Lifetime scope. I would still have access to the old one, but if I was interested in the new one, I would have to move to one of their new plans, that looks more sustainable in the long run.
Plex is still the easiest one to use for regular user or for the people, like me, that act as IT support for their family and friends, and don't want to spend their evenings and weekends tweaking their aunt's TV just for the sake of using Open Source software.
Recently, I've been asked more and more by friends and family to set up Plex for them as it's "free" and "easy". I do the basic setup or walk them through it. Then they want to share to their libraries to others or just watch off their connection and hit the wall of having to have a subscription.
Then they bring me Jellyfin as the alternative from something they saw on XDA. I'm not too quick to help them set that up just because of the current state of it and having to find them players on their various devices. As you mentioned, I've been spending pretty much be spending all my free time helping them set it up but I think Plex being so cost prohibitive now so Jellyfin will start to become the defacto option as what we'll be tweaking for those of us that act as IT support.
This will reduce the switching workload, and you can run both services at the same time whilst trying out Jellyfin.
For foolproof matching, adding Plex metadata in the style of "{tmdb-12345}" to the directory name would cause problems for Jellyfin, as they used to demand different formatting, for instance square brackets.
It has taken a years to convince the maintainers that this change is a good idea and not "letting Plex determine the future course of Jellyfin."
The vision of Silo appears to be much more clear, and has quite a few great devs behind it. It also has features to run side by side and has full JF api support. I have no involvement in the project, just excited for a new player in the space.
Something to keep an eye on!
Then I went on siloserver's website and I was even more confused.
What made the success of Plex is how easy it is to setup, how nice it looks and how easy it is to use.
Siloserver's marketing miss all those points because they focus on the tech stack, don't show a single picture of the UI and don't demonstrate the UX.
Even as someone who understands the tech written on the website, I don't see the point. So I can easily imagine how someone without the technical knowledge would feel about this...
Marketing is not really the important bit at the moment when they’re working on building things from the ground up.
I was just mentioning it because it’s a new contender to the space, changing the status quo. Always a good thing in the OSS world.
I'm thinking of trying it out though to see if there's any noticeable differences in performance etc.
* general Tv support - no Jellyfin app on Samsung TVs (at least older ones)
* General challenges to get things to start - it never worked for me out-of-the-box
* slightly weird sign in flows because it’s all self-hosted (have to first install a mobile app to make signing in on TV app smoother unless you happen to have your computer and TV side by side)
* weird issues with things suddenly stopping to work: DLNA was working but without any changes I can think of on my end it no longer works
* weird dlna support - at least with iOS VLC it didn’t work smoothly - like VLC sometimes wouldn’t see the announcement or something and I’d have to reset. Could be a VLC issue but don’t recall similar problems with Plex
So basically Plex is a smoother, easier to use experience that typically “just works” without issues.
- Jellyfin forced me to organize my files into Show/Season folders, whereas Plex just handled my original flat mess of scattered files.
- When playing video on Plex, I generally have to wait some time before subtitles show up, whereas the subtitles in Plex just show up immediately
- Plex has built in search for openly available subtitles matching your video that you can use if your video lacks subtitles (not sure if Jellyfin has it too)
That said, I still prefer Jellyfin for numerous other reasons, and I don't regret my migration.
You keep all your shows in a single directory? or just sorted into folders per show?
I haven't had any issues with files just sorted into show folders for shorter series, but even in general it's very un-particular about filenames as long as you have `<show name> (<year>) S<Season #>E<Episode #>` (and it accepts a decent number of formats for season/episode number, and year is usually only needed if you need to differentiate shows with the same name).
Regarding this, try out sonarr/radarr with hard links.
Plex was the jellyfin of the 2010’s. Pirate-centric (or at least agnostic), hobbyist focused, a bit hard to use and ugly but super valuable.
Then they went corporate and yeah it’s weird and in decline.
https://demo.jellyfin.org/stable/web/#/home
Username is demo, PW is blank
Also, I've been running jellyfin for many years, I've had no issues
Emby just works, it's players are great, and issues actually get fixed. I know it's a closed source fork of XBMC, I know that's controversial, but the product itself is just so good.
It has more polish and refinement than Jellyfin but doesn't have the obtrusive ads and whatnot that Plex offers. Client support is also great. Jellyfin is still quickly gaining ground but Emby is still my media server of choice for now.
I'm a Plex user who's been thinking about trying Jellyfin out, largely in response to some recent UI changes I dislike but... what Plex ads? I don't have any on my android apps, on Roku installs, or on my parent's SmartTV, and none of my other users have ever mentioned any ads to me. (If I was seeing ads, Jellyfin would become "take some time off work and get it working now".)
I know I've disabled everything except my own libraries, so it's possible there's a setting somewhere that allows them, but if so, I disabled it so long ago I honestly don't remember ever seeing any. Are other Plex users seeing ads? Was it after a recent update that I may have skipped, maybe?
The only thing keeping me on plex is my lifetime plex pass, and family inertia.
b) I would never use an app that used VLC for playback.
And it’s in their repo.
It seems to be status “official beta” and closing in on a new release with a considerable amount of rework done.
I’m running a local build deployed to my appletv and it’s working fine.
I say that without judgement, it’s just a reality. Open source was always going to be the path.
I paid for Plex for a long time but I no longer use it because I got fed up of fighting it. (I now use Jellyfin + Tailscale instead.) I think the problem with Plex is they aren't happy with what they are: a service for people viewing their own (yes, pirated) media library. They always wanted to be something more. Netflix envy.
But all anyone I know ever wanted Plex to do was handle their media library, perhaps offer a paid tunnelling system but otherwise get out of the way.
That killer remote user connection brokering can’t be free, right?
Maybe I'm old, but it feels like everyone has a little too much "business-brain."
Jellyfin-mpv-shim is great.
The dream would be: anybody with a jellyfin install can add your library to theirs, anybody with the jellyfin client can be invited to browse your library.
Not having that is an absolute deal breaker.