this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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I've feel like I've used Plex forever. I also feel like every couple years I try Jellyfin to see how it's going. Recently I tried it again because of Plex restriction on more than one user.

Well, I just tried it again and it's substantially improved! This time it actually properly detected most of my library!

Also the Android TV app is AWESOME! No more glitches, lagging, and freezing trying to play my stuff like Plex did. It is butter smooth.

Wow! I'm impressed and I just deleted Plex. Good riddance.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (7 children)

It's still terrible for music. There's not even user-based star rating...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Plexamp being behind a paywall stopped me from using Plex for music. Went with Navidrome and it works great.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Wrong tool for the job ! Use Navidrome with your music library. There's even a new scanner rewrite in the working which will even further improve how good it is !

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Any recommendations about how to install all this jazz?

I'd like to build a music box controllable by the family, eventually centralising videos so anyone (or at least me) can just pick up their phone and watch an episode of star trek without the hassle of copying. Automatic subtitles would be magic.

Cheers!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

If all you want is a local media server. It's very easy.

You pretty much just have to install Plex or Jellyfin, setup a "library" in the software.

You usually set up one library for movies and one for TV shows. You then point these libraries to their respective folders on your hard drive and assuming you have some half decent organized media with proper naming it usually just works.

Plex doesn't have automatic subtitles per say but mostly Plex players allow you to download new subtitles from the player. I don't know about Jellyfin.

If you want to have external access it's a bit harder if you use jellyfin as you will have to setup a reverse proxy but I'm guessing that there are a lot of guides for that online. Plex should work for external access out of the box assuming you have a public IP, and even if you don't you can use their automatic relay services to get it to work anyway although in very low quality.

Proper naming is honestly the hardest part but that's very dependent on how much existing media you have and how the naming is today. Luckily Plex and Jellyfin are fairly good at recognizing and finding media with subpar namin (you should still fix the naming to comply with the documentation)

If you want to have automatic torrent downloads, fully automatic subtitles and all that it's quite some work to set it up properly and have it working without any input from you. If you want to tackle it (or are just curious), I recommend checking out https://trash-guides.info/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Many ways to install it officially nowadays (see their website) but most do it via docker. A very easy albeit unoffical way is via flatpak.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I’ve been running plex for a few years no. No real issues to complain of.

Until today. I just upgraded my server with an Intel ARC. Was looking forward to enabling qsv for streaming. Turns out you need plex pass to do that.

Can jellyfin do it?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

The addons are great too. The intro/outro skip is slick and nearly flawless, background subtitle download is seamless, on and on.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I've had both for a while now, but I find that subtitle playback is a bit spotty in Jellyfin. Is that fixed, or have I missed a setting somewhere? The other thing is that my libraries are alphabetical in Jellyfin, so "Anime" comes before "Kaiju", and I truly can't stand the idea that Godzilla gets sent to the back of the bus. Is there a way to customize the order of libraries?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The other thing is that my libraries are alphabetical in Jellyfin, so “Anime” comes before “Kaiju”, and I truly can’t stand the idea that Godzilla gets sent to the back of the bus.

If you mean the order the libraries are listed in the web interface, you change that from "User settings" -> "Home".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So, I tried that a long time ago, and it didn't work. Tried it again today, same deal. Then, I tried a third time and actually hit the "Save" button this time... Yeah, I think Jellyfin was never the problem.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

I used Plex a while ago and didn't like how I had to look for my folders against the stuff they offered. And the upside of being able to get my stuff from a server install on another network had me wondering if they were looking at the movies I had to pirate. Once I installed jellyfin, I didn't have to worry. My only issue is if I want to use it on vacation, I have to do some vps hack-jiggery.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I tried to switch from plex to jellyfin 2 months ago, running both at the same time in containers, but I removed jellyfin after a week

The main issue was the CPU usage, on idle Jellyfin was using about 1vcore while plex used only 0.3, no background tasks seemed to be running and after a week my 4tb of media should have been indexed

Also a feature that I use regularly with plexamp, starting a radio from a song, was not giving me good results on finamp

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (5 children)

One thing jellyfin doesnt do well its anime content. But fortunately there's Shoko Server, a metadata engine you can selfhost. Its awesome!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

It works pretty well for me but I separate anime and TV/movies, and make sure the anime library is only scraping data from anime-centric databases. But I'm also not watching too much new or obscure stuff.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

In my experience, jellyfin seems to think everything is anime for some reason.

I've had to go in to every single TV series and manually enter Metadata.

Not a huge deal I only have a few series' but man it's weird.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

anybody have a guide for an old laptop

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (6 children)

Although I have my issues with plex, jellyfin has its own problems:

  • STILL can't clear out the TS transcoded files automatically. So if you watch a bunch of TV episodes on a weekend, your jellyfin container will run out of space and break.
  • STILL can't handle subtitles properly. I swear, this must be jellyfin's Waterloo.
  • jellyfin cannot demux 5.1 and present stereo sound on certain streams. I think this is a tooling issue. But it's low level enough that I can handle it manually with mkvtoolnix myself on the few cases it happens.
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Can Jellyfin handle symlinks? That's all it would take to sell me at this point.

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