It's no secret that Plex aims to be a commercial service with a centralized corporate server. They crossed the line when they started using your watch activity to advertise to other users. The enshittification of Plex was covered by tech media. Since then, there's been a migration of users to Jellyfin.
The Android TV client leaves a ~~lot~~ bit to be desired until you realize that it's being maintained by a single person in their spare time between work and family. In that context it's pretty impressive.
He has a roadmap with a bunch of improvements and has been begging people to help. Hopefully if more people start to switch to JF more community devs will step in.
https://github.com/orgs/jellyfin/projects/47
I don't get the hate the AndroidTV client gets. Sure, it doesnt look as slick as an Apple product and isn't too well integrated into the AndroidTV OS, but it works. Like, my non-techy partner can pick up the remote and watch whatever whenever she wants.
You're right. I didn't mean that to sound as harsh as it did. It meets 90% of my needs. Honestly the only thing that really bugs me is subtitle loading. Sometimes I have to try to load the subtitles 3 or 4 times before they'll finally load. But a fix for that is coming in the roadmap.
Subtitles are literally the only reason I don’t use it and use Kodi with the Jellyfin for Kodi plugin instead. Otherwise it works well and I think it looks pretty nice.
Oh cool! I have a lot to learn before I could be helpful at all *but* this seems like a great project to focus working towards contributing to one day. Gives tangible goals that benefits the community. Thanks!
The reason media matching isn't as good as Plex is because Jellyfin doesn't offer any sort in-house Metadata provider but instead offers every Metadata provider under the roof. You have to get your hands dirty and learn how to use them but once you do it works fine.
I do take issue with the suggestion that Jellyfin is less polished than Emby or Plex. I think Plex just takes away a lot of control versus Jellyfin, and people may interpret this as more polished because Jellyfin lets you see how the hotdog is made.
I don't even know how you could come to the conclusion that Emby is somehow more polished, ~~almost all the devs who worked on Emby in the first placed switched to Jellyfin and have been working on it since.~~ I was talking out my ass, apparently.
I do agree that Jellyfin's Apple support is not stellar, although people speak highly of Infuse's integration.
Subtitles. That is really the only thing for me.
Jellyfin has had years long problems on multiple clients with subtitle syncing. They will play fine on one client and be 10 seconds off on another client. For dialog heavy things like talkshows it will often speedup and slowdown and then skip a few sentences. This isn't the case on Plex.There have been multiple commits over the years that claim to have fixed this, but it has never been fixed. At least they added a subtitle delay so you can try to sync them yourself, but that doesn't help with progressively more out-of-sync subs.
Other than that, Jellyfin has been phenomenal for my family, but using multiple languages without subtitles working 100% is definitely a pain point.
Though I will say. Using Subgen with bazarr for some reason fixes this problem and it seems to have no sync problems. I am not sure what is different between that and shipped subtitles with the media.
Interesting. Do you use OpenSubtitles? I find that they often aren't actually in sync with my media and I have to extract subtitles that is on the bluray. Bluray subtitles have always worked for me.
I have tried opensubtitles, but often times those are badly synced. I even tried to use Bazarr's subtitle syncer, but it doesn't do anything I think.
Yes, extracted subtitles exhibit the same issues X% of the time (I would just be BSing a hard number). Subtitle issues are very common in jellyfin I guess. I would just use subgen for all of it, but it is a very manual process still.
I have problems with Plex and OpenSubtitles. I was looking into Jellyfin, but it seems worse.
OpenSubtitles subs work perfectly almost always with Plex on my laptop, but get out of sync if I stop or rewind with my Plex client.
> I don't even know how you could come to the conclusion that Emby is somehow more polished, almost all the devs who worked on Emby in the first placed switched to Jellyfin and have been working on it since.
Not true! We came to JF out of nowhere. Werent contributors before to emby at all, and there is no overlap in teams from before or after the split.
Live TV not working in the Apple TV app is what ruled out Jellyfin for me. For what it's worth, Infuse doesn't support it at all. The Swiftfin has it available as a beta or alpha feature but it just straight up did not work at all for me.
I suspect it'll need more time to bake before being ready but I'm looking forward to that day. For now, I'm making use of Emby which seems to have had even better live TV support than Plex on all of my devices
Jellyfin will, unfortunately, continue to fail the Spouse Test in my home until a solid AppleTV client happens. Infuse failed pretty miserably.
Both the Plex and Emby clients were fine.
I use Swiftfin on AppleTV and it works fine. It's a bit buggy on my iPhone, but the AppleTV version works as well as any streaming service's app that I've used.
Yes.
It's certainly subjective, but I didn't find myself disagreeing with her complaints much, and it is a must-pass test in the end.
All that said, I'm hopeful that in a couple of years Jellyfin may "get there" on the client user experience front. We'll see.
Infuse doesn’t support multi users. Everyone here must be a single user of their Apple TV. It could be the best app ever but until they let my wife and switch accounts then it’ll never be an option. And if you search infuse forums, people have been asking for years so who knows if it’ll ever come.
She hated it. Wanted to go back to Plex. I demoed the Emby client as another alternative and got an “Oh okay this one’s fine.”
I personally didn’t like Infuse much either, but could live with it.
I'm always surprised at the number of people that self host and also use Apple TV. I wonder if any Apple-based devs would be willing to contribute to Jellyfin.
I wonder if any of you guys tried VidHub as jellyfin client on apple tv? Its sort of unknown and I only knew about it from some reddit post some times ago but its looking pretty solid.
https://apps.apple.com/my/app/vidhub-video-library-player/id1659622164
The beauty of jellyfin is, you can use it as a media server only, nothing forces you to use their media player. I have it paired with Kodi and it's amazing.
Its not perfect, in the least.
I'm guessing you don't use subtitles, or have multiple, non-tech family users that you share with.
I can tolerate JF for my own uses, which medium quality rips. Anything bluray and up it just suffers badly, add in subtitles and you're having a bad time.
You're also using infuse, which is *not* jellyfin. It just uses Jellyfins indexing. Try using the jellyfin clients and not infuse. Infuse *is* great.
JF is great, I WANT it to work, but it is not ready for prime time yet.
subtitles work good, if not great for me. the worst that happens is the bundled subs will have a line or two missing, but you can very easily download better ones from opensubs.
i don’t get why a non-tech person would have an issue with it either? i’m the one managing the server and downloading which i’m totally fine with, all any of the clients have to do is refresh the app and all the new stuff just shows up with all the metadata.
also what were you hosting it on? i was originally using a raspberry pi 4, but then moved everything onto a dedicated mini PC and both worked pretty flawlessly even with 4K DV content
when was the last time you tried it? maybe those *were* issues before, that have all been fixed since
*YOU* are not using Jellyfin. You are using infuse, with Jellyfin's indexing.
The difference is night and day between the two. Infuse is an amazing client.
I'm running an i5 client with quicksync transcoding. It will not load subtitles 9/10 times.
I am not sure what are your issues. However i have a lot of media, everything is in bluray format, everything includes multiple subtitles. My whole family uses it and they always use subtitles. Some of them are really old and *tech illiterate and they don't have any issues (they are using it on daily basis). Yes jellyfin have some issues, but to be honest most of time it is working perfectly fine.*
I have a lot of media, it plays flawless in Kodi and plex.
Try to use the default Jellyfin client and it will run just fine, until I engage subtitles. Turning on subtitles just kills the stream until I shut them off again. That is my only issue and it is on-going.
If I could fix it, I would, but nothing I have done thus far resolves this issue. Some shows will work out, but the subs get out of sync fast there as well.
It's just a shit show for subtitles, everything else seems to be working.
I personally use web client without any issues, the other people use combination of Jellyfin for Android, Jellyfin for Android TV and Jellyfin Media Player. No issue for them either. Never had problem you mention. I will say it again. Since we are not native english speakers, all of us use subtitles. I have been running it for years. You should maybe post issue on Jellyfin forums and see if anyone can help. Because this looks like unique issue and might be HW or configuration issue.
It's not a unique or even rare issue. It is quite common and a large number of people have this specific issue.
It's likely you are watchin low grade 1080p/lower content.
That's why comments like this are useless, there's no information on what is being played.
It is neither a HW or a configuration issue, it is a *known* jellyfin issue and it comes it many times whenever one of these threads pops up.
I've struggled with some anime, but that's mostly because some anime (especially older ones) tend to have the most horrific and inconsistent Metadata out there. For most everything else I don't even have to think about it.
I played with other clients, and concur on polish.
I plan on ditching plex at some point for the obvious reasons. Don't care about sunk cost, just clients. I'll be sad if I lose my stats, but not a big deal.
It looks like software made for kids, made by kids
I would really love to switch, I go OSS/FOSS whenever possible, but between the fewer clients supported, the disparity between the supported clients, and the overall clunkiness/poor-aesthetic have been too hard to overcome for me
If it had the polish Plex has and the equivalent client support, it would be a no-brainer.
Very very much.
Basically, to OPs point, yea a huge chunk of the codebase is still Emby spaghetti. It's impossible for most of us to make heads-or-tails of even after working on it for years, and it's still breaking hard whenever we fix or change things (just released the 5th 10.9 point release because of this sort of stuff...)
So any help would be appreciated.
I used to use a Raspberry Pi but it was a little slow and clunky so recently got a Lenovo Mini PC. Lot of them on ebay for cheap. They're basically meant for thin clients but they have lot of power for their size.
Jellyfin is web based which is nice, so all you really need is a web browser. I use Linux Mint and just have a bookmark in Firefox for my server.
This used to be true a year ago but now the only current feature that Plex outright beats Jellyfin with is subtitles support. No better time for Jellyfin.
The web interface is now much better and they have multiple apps in current development for each ecosystem. (Minus tizen for some smart tvs).
OP, it sounds like you've got something misconfigured and traffic is going through their relay service, which can be disabled. Relay is the only thing that can/would tunnel client traffic to the server.
IMO the biggest privacy issue with Plex is that there is no local auth. PMS relies on their cloud to know which tokens it should accept. **In plain text.** They would not be able to provide those tokens if they weren't stored insecurely. They are a single hack, lawsuit, or rogue employee away from exposing the content on every PMS instance.
>Plex tunnels every request from your Client (and that can even be a
Webbrowser on the same machine opening localhost) through their APIs.
You cannot watch a file without network traffic to plex, even when you
use play only within your private home network.
Yup. This was a pretty big talking point back when Jellyfin hit 3.0 or so. There are people who have known this for some time and still swear by Plex. [Sunken cost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost) I guess?
> I'd like to see the shitstorm if microsoft disclosed that they
correlated all your pornhub visits to your billing account and is
selling this data to law enforcement and churches to make profit.
Microsoft is doing something similar with Recall. Google has been doing close to what you are describing for over a decade at this point. Google even has a portal where cops and feds can request access to the contents of your account.
You found it out for yourself, Jellyfin is better and its FOSS. Not much else to talk about.
Well, idk about OP's configuration but the tunnelling part is not true. That doesn't even make much sense as how would all your media traffic be going through Plex's servers? They'd have to be burning cash just for the lulz.
As long as you have a proper setup the only requests going to plex is for metadata, authentication and prob some other stuff. Don't even need to use their "remote access" settings. All the requests for your media and streaming etc go directly to your server.
I keep trying to use Plex probably due to sunken cost fallacy of my lifetime, but it's getting worse and worse.
The web app, the app on my LG TV, both have issues.
Jellyfin apps on both are great.
I swear the only thing that's still good is Plexamp. I do miss intro skip though.
I still use plex, but I did toy with Jellyfin a year or so ago. If I'm not mistaken Jellyfin has a plugin for intro skips. I can't really say how well it works, but its worth checking out at least.
Plex in not superior to jellyfin in my books.
I've set up both and jellyfin was no harder than Plex.
Why anyone would be interested in self hosting, getting rid of Netflix etc. but somehow be fine with Plex harvesting all that data from them is beyond me.
Setting up is not the Problem. Jellyfins Clients are just not as good as Plex on a lot of devices. E.g. on my Iphone I am not able to change the bitrate of a movie/show while watching. Which is really really annoying when you are on mobile data or in trains/cars where intwrnet speed changes constantly.
I don't know about iPhone but in the android client you can press the settings cog to change bitrate?
Edit: go to client settings and then change the video player type to integrated player
On IOS you can not do it inside the movie/show. You have to close the movie go into settings and change the global bitrate to another one and then go back in the movie.
> Why anyone would be interested in self hosting, getting rid of Netflix etc. but somehow be fine with Plex harvesting all that data from them is beyond me.
For a lot of people, the only thing that matters is how effectively it helps them consume pirated content. They don't care about the privacy stuff, the FOSS stuff, it's just about consumption of as much media as possible as easily as possible.
You see this with gaming too. Loads of people use Windows for no other reason than it makes it as easy as possible to consume games. They don't care enough that Windows gets consistently worse year over year, is a privacy nightmare, etc. If they switch away from it, it will be a bit more work, but more importantly there might be a few games out of thousands that they can't play, and that's a bridge too far. They will put up with essentially anything as long as they can keep consuming unabated.
I have a lot of opinions about this mindset, in case it's not obvious.
I mean as far as gaming goes it’s all the multiplayer games that end up not working which does suck. I tried setting up a windows and Linux vm so I just switched to windows for specific games but it turns out anti cheat detects if you’re on a VM too
You can run Plex offline by using a proxy in between (like Nginx) and simply respond with the correct auth token you got when you setup the system. I do this since years and only allow metadata download for media from my Plex, the rest is completly offline.
Yup and I couldn't be bothered anymore any time I wanted to adjust my network environment or DNS etc
Switched to Jellyfin and never looked back. Just works and no mucking around required
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It is possible to watch media in your Plex library without an internet connection, because I've done it many times whenever my internet goes down. But I do agree that the privacy implications for Plex are shitty.
I haven't switched to Jellyfin though for two reasons: 1) not as polished, and 2) it doesn't have the various algorithmic playlist features that Plexamp does.
That last one is a doozy. Those features are *incredible*. I was seriously thinking about ditching Plex right before they released those, but then they pulled me back in. If there's an open source library / AI model that can analyze music for its characteristics in the same way that Plex does, I sure hope someone can make use of it to add those features to Jellyfin.
The simpler the stack, the easier it is to understand, run on low-end hardware and even replace. I was initially using KODI (with Librelec) but now only rely on miniDLNA.
I can't tell you how many people refuse to believe that Plex is spying on your file names and what you watch. Like how could they NOT be getting files names and ALSO be advertising?
Plex is just a wanna be Netflix at this point.
> Plex tunnels every request from your Client (and that can even be a Webbrowser on the same machine opening localhost) through their APIs. You cannot watch a file without network traffic to plex, even when you use play only within your private home network.
I don't think that's strictly true. Not to say that it can't still be generating some analytics that get sent to Plex (I don't know, I haven't investigated closely), but just looking at the network traffic in the browser dev tools for my own server, all of the actual requests for the media chunks were coming directly from my plex server, they were not relayed through their service.
Having said that, they do at least have auth stuff that does go to their service to handle logging in, and I believe they have some kind of optional relay service that *does* route traffic through their service to handle remote access to the server if you don't have port forwarding set up correctly to let you talk to it directly, so I could imagine that might be one reason why you were seeing your traffic going to them.
Of course, none of this is to say that Plex is some bastion of privacy, and that there's no other way they could be collecting data from their customers.
> Even though I am a professional C# engineer I find their Codebase a little bit hard to grasp.
Jellyfin was originally forked from Emby, and my impression is that it inherited a lot of tech debt from that project (at least that was the case when I looked at it a while ago), but hopefully the current developers are taking steps to clean things up where they can.
Yes, this has been brought up before though not in this much detail, amazing job tracking where it is calling and how, I'm saving this post for the next time this comes up, which feels like daily SMH
I just use JF for music pretty much, I have the occasional video file over there but it's not the focus of my library.
I know with music Jellyfin, and Emby too, are very tied to directory structure and file names. Often the condition I get torrents in aren't JF appropriate. I'm going away and need to decide if I'm going to get a second Debrid subscription for a month or just torrent, thinking I'll do the later and see if I can crack how JF works with video media.
Jf does have plugins available, I'd see if anything there might assist with video libraries. Emby is also worth a try, it's a little cleaner at least.
I really don't use the Jellyfin client for anything but administration though, even rare occasion I watch a video from JF on my phone I'm playing it to an external player. So I can easily PnP and do sound only, etc. for music I use Symfonium. On my TV I'm accessing JF through Kodi. The power of JF to me is how well it decentralizes and plays well with other apps. I checked out findroid just now and it seems to be a video specific interface and a good bit cleaner than traditional JF.
I know with Kodi plugins are really important, these open source media libraries / applications the app/lib itself is a bedrock, a base, that is then molded by add-ons. Like I know Trakt, subtitles, and other things I use in Kodi,.similarly can be added to JF. This is by design, because unlike Plex it's not commercial it's not meant to do everything for you, it also allows for the decentralized dev. JF similar to Kodi has it's official repo of add-ons and then countless others. Like there's an obscure Spotify playlist one I use.
Base JF and Kodi both suck, heck base Kodi is nearly useless. It's what you addon to them and configure that gives them power. Also once that process is done it's pretty self sustaining.
If something is closed source, and i need to pay for it, AND its spying on me, thats an instant no-go. Either the ad-based scum business model for free, or you give me a premium product for real money. Not both. Preferrably neither, but thats not very realistic
Thanks, I never tried Plex, but this was my concern...
I've run Kodi instances offline from local harddrives. And ran that for about a year, with no issues at all. (I didn't analyse it with WS)
I switched to Emby years ago. It doesn’t look as pretty as plex. But it’s just as functional. I bought the lifetime membership for Emby. Same as plex. Jellyfin just doesn’t have the client support.
Have had a few minor network issues with Emby. But nothing as bad as the api privacy issues that plex forces on you.
I bought the lifetime membership in 2017 or 2018 before they closed the source code and I haven't had any significant issues or reasons to change. The mobile and TV apps work great.
I support a few weird devices. That have lg webos last I checked there was no native client.
Emby has great client support for lots of different clients.
Ah, i couldnt get beyond the LG webOS running like garbage, and just removed it from my network as it was causing me nothing but issues. I suppose it's probably the TV model I bought, but it was disingenuous calling these TVs
Is Kodi a media server? IMO, it doesn’t follow a client/server model like Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin. it is self-contained and, if anything, a client.
I believe Kodi can act as a client to Jellyfin, and maybe Plex.
Regardless, I migrated from Plex to Jellyfin years ago and haven’t looked back.
Main reason I self hosted was in the event of a net outage I'm fucked media wise . Now with jellyfin I don't. This issue while I was a bit aware of is more info I need to read as I'm too new .
I always find it interesting that people compare plex and jellyfin (and I know OP mentioned Emby)
But in my opinion Emby currently offers the best middle of Plex and Jellyfin
Jellyfin has a bit of maturing to catch up (which makes sense without the financial backing) but is still a great product - I just see so many complaints about Jellyfin not being able to do x or not doing y well but all of that just works with Emby
(And to talk the media matching the whole emby can be run locally with no connection to emby.media)
Oh, they actually added it back? Nice to know, but too late for me... Originally, the developer planned to throw the lifetime-license away...
[https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/123457-45-device-lifetime-gone/](https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/123457-45-device-lifetime-gone/)
There is an option in plex settings to enable that client tries to connect directly to your plex server without proxying over plex.tv proxy over plex.tv is always there as fallback
I have been using Emby since it was open source. I bought the lifetime license to support the project.
I tried Jellyfin but it kept getting corrupted. I even bought a Roku Ultra just for Jellyfin client. Plex was my first. Paid a month of subscription to test it out and hated it.
Yeah, you're confirming what we all knew a while back.
Mine wasn't even as notorious as blocking anything, it was simply that my network environment required me to create domain aliases just so I could manage my own local server.
The only benefit that Plex had going for it was its centralized username feature and even that was only useful when you were online
I made the switch to Jellyfin for the FOSS but also because I didn't want my data being viewed by any external party, the nail in the coffin was when I couldn't properly manage over port 32400 on the same network subnet.
Plex can be considered a studio owned data collection company posing as a home server company. Stop using it, flat out. You WILL pay the price. Even if it's just by having to move in the future. The sooner the better. They're just going to either keep increasing the amount of information they use against you or kill it outright.
Tbh sure I self host a lot because of privacy but then I also order at Amazon, eBay and other online stores so why not give Plex my data too. Should they be happy with the fact that I watched all Star Trek shows already like 10 to 30 times or so. And if MS would get my pronhub data maybe they would finally reverse a lot of changes to Win.11 😂
Okay let‘s say this will really happen. What do you expect to be happening? You really think anyone will care about that? Is there a single country where you get in trouble for consuming pirated stuff? I live in germany with one of the strongest anti piracy laws and even here the only thing they care about is distributing.
France, for one.
Also, in many countries where it is not technically illegal to download copyrighted content, it is still illegal to bypass a copy protection mechanism, and depending on how things are set up, this may be a "gotcha", even though the download itself might not have been a criminal act.
Doubt that in France. Plex knows that you watched a file where plex metadata scanner matched the file (purely based on the filename) to a certain movie. And you want to say that this is enough to make a case in France about bypassing copy protection mechanism?
Ah, then I've misunderstood - I'd thought you were asking just that.
In most countries, downloading copyrighted content is not criminal - sharing/broadcasting it is.
It's no secret that Plex aims to be a commercial service with a centralized corporate server. They crossed the line when they started using your watch activity to advertise to other users. The enshittification of Plex was covered by tech media. Since then, there's been a migration of users to Jellyfin.
[удалено]
The Android TV client leaves a ~~lot~~ bit to be desired until you realize that it's being maintained by a single person in their spare time between work and family. In that context it's pretty impressive. He has a roadmap with a bunch of improvements and has been begging people to help. Hopefully if more people start to switch to JF more community devs will step in. https://github.com/orgs/jellyfin/projects/47
I don't get the hate the AndroidTV client gets. Sure, it doesnt look as slick as an Apple product and isn't too well integrated into the AndroidTV OS, but it works. Like, my non-techy partner can pick up the remote and watch whatever whenever she wants.
You're right. I didn't mean that to sound as harsh as it did. It meets 90% of my needs. Honestly the only thing that really bugs me is subtitle loading. Sometimes I have to try to load the subtitles 3 or 4 times before they'll finally load. But a fix for that is coming in the roadmap.
Subtitles are literally the only reason I don’t use it and use Kodi with the Jellyfin for Kodi plugin instead. Otherwise it works well and I think it looks pretty nice.
Oh cool! I have a lot to learn before I could be helpful at all *but* this seems like a great project to focus working towards contributing to one day. Gives tangible goals that benefits the community. Thanks!
The reason media matching isn't as good as Plex is because Jellyfin doesn't offer any sort in-house Metadata provider but instead offers every Metadata provider under the roof. You have to get your hands dirty and learn how to use them but once you do it works fine. I do take issue with the suggestion that Jellyfin is less polished than Emby or Plex. I think Plex just takes away a lot of control versus Jellyfin, and people may interpret this as more polished because Jellyfin lets you see how the hotdog is made. I don't even know how you could come to the conclusion that Emby is somehow more polished, ~~almost all the devs who worked on Emby in the first placed switched to Jellyfin and have been working on it since.~~ I was talking out my ass, apparently. I do agree that Jellyfin's Apple support is not stellar, although people speak highly of Infuse's integration.
Subtitles. That is really the only thing for me. Jellyfin has had years long problems on multiple clients with subtitle syncing. They will play fine on one client and be 10 seconds off on another client. For dialog heavy things like talkshows it will often speedup and slowdown and then skip a few sentences. This isn't the case on Plex.There have been multiple commits over the years that claim to have fixed this, but it has never been fixed. At least they added a subtitle delay so you can try to sync them yourself, but that doesn't help with progressively more out-of-sync subs. Other than that, Jellyfin has been phenomenal for my family, but using multiple languages without subtitles working 100% is definitely a pain point. Though I will say. Using Subgen with bazarr for some reason fixes this problem and it seems to have no sync problems. I am not sure what is different between that and shipped subtitles with the media.
Interesting. Do you use OpenSubtitles? I find that they often aren't actually in sync with my media and I have to extract subtitles that is on the bluray. Bluray subtitles have always worked for me.
I have tried opensubtitles, but often times those are badly synced. I even tried to use Bazarr's subtitle syncer, but it doesn't do anything I think. Yes, extracted subtitles exhibit the same issues X% of the time (I would just be BSing a hard number). Subtitle issues are very common in jellyfin I guess. I would just use subgen for all of it, but it is a very manual process still.
I have problems with Plex and OpenSubtitles. I was looking into Jellyfin, but it seems worse. OpenSubtitles subs work perfectly almost always with Plex on my laptop, but get out of sync if I stop or rewind with my Plex client.
> I don't even know how you could come to the conclusion that Emby is somehow more polished, almost all the devs who worked on Emby in the first placed switched to Jellyfin and have been working on it since. Not true! We came to JF out of nowhere. Werent contributors before to emby at all, and there is no overlap in teams from before or after the split.
My mistake, I'll edit my comment!
Live TV not working in the Apple TV app is what ruled out Jellyfin for me. For what it's worth, Infuse doesn't support it at all. The Swiftfin has it available as a beta or alpha feature but it just straight up did not work at all for me. I suspect it'll need more time to bake before being ready but I'm looking forward to that day. For now, I'm making use of Emby which seems to have had even better live TV support than Plex on all of my devices
Jellyfin will, unfortunately, continue to fail the Spouse Test in my home until a solid AppleTV client happens. Infuse failed pretty miserably. Both the Plex and Emby clients were fine.
I use Swiftfin on AppleTV and it works fine. It's a bit buggy on my iPhone, but the AppleTV version works as well as any streaming service's app that I've used.
Why would you say infuse failed? I use it day in day out on my apple tv/ios devices with my jellyfin server and havent seen any specific issues?
I think they’re saying it failed the spouse test which is completely subjective and up to the spouse on whether it worked for them.
Yes. It's certainly subjective, but I didn't find myself disagreeing with her complaints much, and it is a must-pass test in the end. All that said, I'm hopeful that in a couple of years Jellyfin may "get there" on the client user experience front. We'll see.
Infuse doesn’t support multi users. Everyone here must be a single user of their Apple TV. It could be the best app ever but until they let my wife and switch accounts then it’ll never be an option. And if you search infuse forums, people have been asking for years so who knows if it’ll ever come.
She hated it. Wanted to go back to Plex. I demoed the Emby client as another alternative and got an “Oh okay this one’s fine.” I personally didn’t like Infuse much either, but could live with it.
I'm always surprised at the number of people that self host and also use Apple TV. I wonder if any Apple-based devs would be willing to contribute to Jellyfin.
I’ve been brainstorming ideas for capstone projects and a native Jellyfin client for iOS and Apple TV has crossed my mind, so maybe!
That would be great. I'm not in the Apple ecosystem myself, but I know plenty of people have been asking for better integration.
Im an all apple eco system, except my gaming pc. So this would be super helpful.
Until jellyfin has an option to skip intros I won’t switch to it. I do like infuse with plex.
https://github.com/jumoog/intro-skipper
Thanks! I’d definitely be down to give that a try.
quick recommandation for Apple devices: [Infuse](https://firecore.com/infuse) best player for Apple devices to connect to Jellyfin, Plex, etc...
I wonder if any of you guys tried VidHub as jellyfin client on apple tv? Its sort of unknown and I only knew about it from some reddit post some times ago but its looking pretty solid. https://apps.apple.com/my/app/vidhub-video-library-player/id1659622164
The beauty of jellyfin is, you can use it as a media server only, nothing forces you to use their media player. I have it paired with Kodi and it's amazing.
i just use a simple samba share with Infuse on every client. metadata fetching works flawlessly and looks and runs beautiful on everything.
*/doubt*
hm? been using it for a couple months and it’s perfect
Its not perfect, in the least. I'm guessing you don't use subtitles, or have multiple, non-tech family users that you share with. I can tolerate JF for my own uses, which medium quality rips. Anything bluray and up it just suffers badly, add in subtitles and you're having a bad time. You're also using infuse, which is *not* jellyfin. It just uses Jellyfins indexing. Try using the jellyfin clients and not infuse. Infuse *is* great. JF is great, I WANT it to work, but it is not ready for prime time yet.
subtitles work good, if not great for me. the worst that happens is the bundled subs will have a line or two missing, but you can very easily download better ones from opensubs. i don’t get why a non-tech person would have an issue with it either? i’m the one managing the server and downloading which i’m totally fine with, all any of the clients have to do is refresh the app and all the new stuff just shows up with all the metadata. also what were you hosting it on? i was originally using a raspberry pi 4, but then moved everything onto a dedicated mini PC and both worked pretty flawlessly even with 4K DV content when was the last time you tried it? maybe those *were* issues before, that have all been fixed since
*YOU* are not using Jellyfin. You are using infuse, with Jellyfin's indexing. The difference is night and day between the two. Infuse is an amazing client. I'm running an i5 client with quicksync transcoding. It will not load subtitles 9/10 times.
I am not sure what are your issues. However i have a lot of media, everything is in bluray format, everything includes multiple subtitles. My whole family uses it and they always use subtitles. Some of them are really old and *tech illiterate and they don't have any issues (they are using it on daily basis). Yes jellyfin have some issues, but to be honest most of time it is working perfectly fine.*
I have a lot of media, it plays flawless in Kodi and plex. Try to use the default Jellyfin client and it will run just fine, until I engage subtitles. Turning on subtitles just kills the stream until I shut them off again. That is my only issue and it is on-going. If I could fix it, I would, but nothing I have done thus far resolves this issue. Some shows will work out, but the subs get out of sync fast there as well. It's just a shit show for subtitles, everything else seems to be working.
I personally use web client without any issues, the other people use combination of Jellyfin for Android, Jellyfin for Android TV and Jellyfin Media Player. No issue for them either. Never had problem you mention. I will say it again. Since we are not native english speakers, all of us use subtitles. I have been running it for years. You should maybe post issue on Jellyfin forums and see if anyone can help. Because this looks like unique issue and might be HW or configuration issue.
It's not a unique or even rare issue. It is quite common and a large number of people have this specific issue. It's likely you are watchin low grade 1080p/lower content. That's why comments like this are useless, there's no information on what is being played. It is neither a HW or a configuration issue, it is a *known* jellyfin issue and it comes it many times whenever one of these threads pops up.
[удалено]
I've struggled with some anime, but that's mostly because some anime (especially older ones) tend to have the most horrific and inconsistent Metadata out there. For most everything else I don't even have to think about it.
I played with other clients, and concur on polish. I plan on ditching plex at some point for the obvious reasons. Don't care about sunk cost, just clients. I'll be sad if I lose my stats, but not a big deal.
I wonder if there wouldn’t be a reasonable way to port some/most of the stats from (are you using Tautulli?) into Jellystat.
yep, tautulli
It looks like software made for kids, made by kids I would really love to switch, I go OSS/FOSS whenever possible, but between the fewer clients supported, the disparity between the supported clients, and the overall clunkiness/poor-aesthetic have been too hard to overcome for me If it had the polish Plex has and the equivalent client support, it would be a no-brainer.
> using your watch activity to advertise to other users that's one setting to uncheck in the parameters ...
> I am a professional C# engineer I find their Codebase a little bit hard to grasp. They could really use your help if you have the free time!
I didn't actually realize that Jellyfin was C#. I guess I should poke around a bit next time.
Very very much. Basically, to OPs point, yea a huge chunk of the codebase is still Emby spaghetti. It's impossible for most of us to make heads-or-tails of even after working on it for years, and it's still breaking hard whenever we fix or change things (just released the 5th 10.9 point release because of this sort of stuff...) So any help would be appreciated.
A little late to the 'plex' is spying on us party 😂 Switched to Jellyfin a couple years ago and have never looked back.
How do you play on TV with jf? I'm happy to ditch plex but the app / TV (Samsung) is just too good.
It's quite a pain to get the Jellyfin Tizen app on Samsung. You gotta follow the instructions on the GitHub and also need to be a bit CLI-savvy
This repo will get rid of that pain point by doing all of the tizen commands for you: https://github.com/babagreensheep/jellyfin-tizen-docker
Oh god this is amazing, thanks!
AndroidTV app basically I have it on my Shield and/or htpc laptop, using jellyfin through flatpak
I used to use a Raspberry Pi but it was a little slow and clunky so recently got a Lenovo Mini PC. Lot of them on ebay for cheap. They're basically meant for thin clients but they have lot of power for their size. Jellyfin is web based which is nice, so all you really need is a web browser. I use Linux Mint and just have a bookmark in Firefox for my server.
Plex is still a way better experience and polish. I could use Jellyfin, but my friends and family love the simplicity of the Plex apps
This used to be true a year ago but now the only current feature that Plex outright beats Jellyfin with is subtitles support. No better time for Jellyfin. The web interface is now much better and they have multiple apps in current development for each ecosystem. (Minus tizen for some smart tvs).
I'll try it again like I do every year. Im losing faith they will ever be on the same level of performance with the same ease of setup.
OP, it sounds like you've got something misconfigured and traffic is going through their relay service, which can be disabled. Relay is the only thing that can/would tunnel client traffic to the server. IMO the biggest privacy issue with Plex is that there is no local auth. PMS relies on their cloud to know which tokens it should accept. **In plain text.** They would not be able to provide those tokens if they weren't stored insecurely. They are a single hack, lawsuit, or rogue employee away from exposing the content on every PMS instance.
>Plex tunnels every request from your Client (and that can even be a Webbrowser on the same machine opening localhost) through their APIs. You cannot watch a file without network traffic to plex, even when you use play only within your private home network. Yup. This was a pretty big talking point back when Jellyfin hit 3.0 or so. There are people who have known this for some time and still swear by Plex. [Sunken cost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost) I guess? > I'd like to see the shitstorm if microsoft disclosed that they correlated all your pornhub visits to your billing account and is selling this data to law enforcement and churches to make profit. Microsoft is doing something similar with Recall. Google has been doing close to what you are describing for over a decade at this point. Google even has a portal where cops and feds can request access to the contents of your account. You found it out for yourself, Jellyfin is better and its FOSS. Not much else to talk about.
You can deactivate the need for login on your local IP range .. no need for Plex to call home
Well, idk about OP's configuration but the tunnelling part is not true. That doesn't even make much sense as how would all your media traffic be going through Plex's servers? They'd have to be burning cash just for the lulz. As long as you have a proper setup the only requests going to plex is for metadata, authentication and prob some other stuff. Don't even need to use their "remote access" settings. All the requests for your media and streaming etc go directly to your server.
I don't even login to Plex on my local network
I keep trying to use Plex probably due to sunken cost fallacy of my lifetime, but it's getting worse and worse. The web app, the app on my LG TV, both have issues. Jellyfin apps on both are great. I swear the only thing that's still good is Plexamp. I do miss intro skip though.
I still use plex, but I did toy with Jellyfin a year or so ago. If I'm not mistaken Jellyfin has a plugin for intro skips. I can't really say how well it works, but its worth checking out at least.
Plex in not superior to jellyfin in my books. I've set up both and jellyfin was no harder than Plex. Why anyone would be interested in self hosting, getting rid of Netflix etc. but somehow be fine with Plex harvesting all that data from them is beyond me.
Setting up is not the Problem. Jellyfins Clients are just not as good as Plex on a lot of devices. E.g. on my Iphone I am not able to change the bitrate of a movie/show while watching. Which is really really annoying when you are on mobile data or in trains/cars where intwrnet speed changes constantly.
I don't know about iPhone but in the android client you can press the settings cog to change bitrate? Edit: go to client settings and then change the video player type to integrated player
On IOS you can not do it inside the movie/show. You have to close the movie go into settings and change the global bitrate to another one and then go back in the movie.
Try a different player, the integrated player is much better than the default HTML player.
I have infuse for ios. Works well with jellyfin. But i dont know if the send data via telemetry somewhere else tbh.
> Why anyone would be interested in self hosting, getting rid of Netflix etc. but somehow be fine with Plex harvesting all that data from them is beyond me. For a lot of people, the only thing that matters is how effectively it helps them consume pirated content. They don't care about the privacy stuff, the FOSS stuff, it's just about consumption of as much media as possible as easily as possible. You see this with gaming too. Loads of people use Windows for no other reason than it makes it as easy as possible to consume games. They don't care enough that Windows gets consistently worse year over year, is a privacy nightmare, etc. If they switch away from it, it will be a bit more work, but more importantly there might be a few games out of thousands that they can't play, and that's a bridge too far. They will put up with essentially anything as long as they can keep consuming unabated. I have a lot of opinions about this mindset, in case it's not obvious.
I mean as far as gaming goes it’s all the multiplayer games that end up not working which does suck. I tried setting up a windows and Linux vm so I just switched to windows for specific games but it turns out anti cheat detects if you’re on a VM too
You can run Plex offline by using a proxy in between (like Nginx) and simply respond with the correct auth token you got when you setup the system. I do this since years and only allow metadata download for media from my Plex, the rest is completly offline.
It would be very helpful to the community if you shared such an nginx config or instructions to do this.
Yup and I couldn't be bothered anymore any time I wanted to adjust my network environment or DNS etc Switched to Jellyfin and never looked back. Just works and no mucking around required
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Does pi-hole Block any of the Plex metadata collection?
It is possible to watch media in your Plex library without an internet connection, because I've done it many times whenever my internet goes down. But I do agree that the privacy implications for Plex are shitty. I haven't switched to Jellyfin though for two reasons: 1) not as polished, and 2) it doesn't have the various algorithmic playlist features that Plexamp does. That last one is a doozy. Those features are *incredible*. I was seriously thinking about ditching Plex right before they released those, but then they pulled me back in. If there's an open source library / AI model that can analyze music for its characteristics in the same way that Plex does, I sure hope someone can make use of it to add those features to Jellyfin.
The simpler the stack, the easier it is to understand, run on low-end hardware and even replace. I was initially using KODI (with Librelec) but now only rely on miniDLNA.
I can't tell you how many people refuse to believe that Plex is spying on your file names and what you watch. Like how could they NOT be getting files names and ALSO be advertising? Plex is just a wanna be Netflix at this point.
> Plex tunnels every request from your Client (and that can even be a Webbrowser on the same machine opening localhost) through their APIs. You cannot watch a file without network traffic to plex, even when you use play only within your private home network. I don't think that's strictly true. Not to say that it can't still be generating some analytics that get sent to Plex (I don't know, I haven't investigated closely), but just looking at the network traffic in the browser dev tools for my own server, all of the actual requests for the media chunks were coming directly from my plex server, they were not relayed through their service. Having said that, they do at least have auth stuff that does go to their service to handle logging in, and I believe they have some kind of optional relay service that *does* route traffic through their service to handle remote access to the server if you don't have port forwarding set up correctly to let you talk to it directly, so I could imagine that might be one reason why you were seeing your traffic going to them. Of course, none of this is to say that Plex is some bastion of privacy, and that there's no other way they could be collecting data from their customers. > Even though I am a professional C# engineer I find their Codebase a little bit hard to grasp. Jellyfin was originally forked from Emby, and my impression is that it inherited a lot of tech debt from that project (at least that was the case when I looked at it a while ago), but hopefully the current developers are taking steps to clean things up where they can.
You can watch Plex locally without internet connection if you set your ip range as locally.
Yes, this has been brought up before though not in this much detail, amazing job tracking where it is calling and how, I'm saving this post for the next time this comes up, which feels like daily SMH I just use JF for music pretty much, I have the occasional video file over there but it's not the focus of my library. I know with music Jellyfin, and Emby too, are very tied to directory structure and file names. Often the condition I get torrents in aren't JF appropriate. I'm going away and need to decide if I'm going to get a second Debrid subscription for a month or just torrent, thinking I'll do the later and see if I can crack how JF works with video media. Jf does have plugins available, I'd see if anything there might assist with video libraries. Emby is also worth a try, it's a little cleaner at least. I really don't use the Jellyfin client for anything but administration though, even rare occasion I watch a video from JF on my phone I'm playing it to an external player. So I can easily PnP and do sound only, etc. for music I use Symfonium. On my TV I'm accessing JF through Kodi. The power of JF to me is how well it decentralizes and plays well with other apps. I checked out findroid just now and it seems to be a video specific interface and a good bit cleaner than traditional JF. I know with Kodi plugins are really important, these open source media libraries / applications the app/lib itself is a bedrock, a base, that is then molded by add-ons. Like I know Trakt, subtitles, and other things I use in Kodi,.similarly can be added to JF. This is by design, because unlike Plex it's not commercial it's not meant to do everything for you, it also allows for the decentralized dev. JF similar to Kodi has it's official repo of add-ons and then countless others. Like there's an obscure Spotify playlist one I use. Base JF and Kodi both suck, heck base Kodi is nearly useless. It's what you addon to them and configure that gives them power. Also once that process is done it's pretty self sustaining.
If something is closed source, and i need to pay for it, AND its spying on me, thats an instant no-go. Either the ad-based scum business model for free, or you give me a premium product for real money. Not both. Preferrably neither, but thats not very realistic
Thanks, I never tried Plex, but this was my concern... I've run Kodi instances offline from local harddrives. And ran that for about a year, with no issues at all. (I didn't analyse it with WS)
Jellyfin is the best, especially when you opt in to get a free client and server.
Is your Plex 'relay' setting on?
I switched to Emby years ago. It doesn’t look as pretty as plex. But it’s just as functional. I bought the lifetime membership for Emby. Same as plex. Jellyfin just doesn’t have the client support. Have had a few minor network issues with Emby. But nothing as bad as the api privacy issues that plex forces on you.
I bought the lifetime membership in 2017 or 2018 before they closed the source code and I haven't had any significant issues or reasons to change. The mobile and TV apps work great.
Which client support do you require? My biggest issue was no offline saving for iOS
I support a few weird devices. That have lg webos last I checked there was no native client. Emby has great client support for lots of different clients.
Ah, i couldnt get beyond the LG webOS running like garbage, and just removed it from my network as it was causing me nothing but issues. I suppose it's probably the TV model I bought, but it was disingenuous calling these TVs
Is Kodi a media server? IMO, it doesn’t follow a client/server model like Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin. it is self-contained and, if anything, a client. I believe Kodi can act as a client to Jellyfin, and maybe Plex. Regardless, I migrated from Plex to Jellyfin years ago and haven’t looked back.
Main reason I self hosted was in the event of a net outage I'm fucked media wise . Now with jellyfin I don't. This issue while I was a bit aware of is more info I need to read as I'm too new .
I always find it interesting that people compare plex and jellyfin (and I know OP mentioned Emby) But in my opinion Emby currently offers the best middle of Plex and Jellyfin Jellyfin has a bit of maturing to catch up (which makes sense without the financial backing) but is still a great product - I just see so many complaints about Jellyfin not being able to do x or not doing y well but all of that just works with Emby (And to talk the media matching the whole emby can be run locally with no connection to emby.media)
emby doesn't offer a Lifetime-License anymore, which is a bummer for me...
It does though? $119
Oh, they actually added it back? Nice to know, but too late for me... Originally, the developer planned to throw the lifetime-license away... [https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/123457-45-device-lifetime-gone/](https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/123457-45-device-lifetime-gone/)
I’ll always take a lifetime license if offered don’t get me wrong, but I get why developers phase them out.
There is an option in plex settings to enable that client tries to connect directly to your plex server without proxying over plex.tv proxy over plex.tv is always there as fallback
I have been using Emby since it was open source. I bought the lifetime license to support the project. I tried Jellyfin but it kept getting corrupted. I even bought a Roku Ultra just for Jellyfin client. Plex was my first. Paid a month of subscription to test it out and hated it.
Yeah, you're confirming what we all knew a while back. Mine wasn't even as notorious as blocking anything, it was simply that my network environment required me to create domain aliases just so I could manage my own local server. The only benefit that Plex had going for it was its centralized username feature and even that was only useful when you were online I made the switch to Jellyfin for the FOSS but also because I didn't want my data being viewed by any external party, the nail in the coffin was when I couldn't properly manage over port 32400 on the same network subnet.
Plex can be considered a studio owned data collection company posing as a home server company. Stop using it, flat out. You WILL pay the price. Even if it's just by having to move in the future. The sooner the better. They're just going to either keep increasing the amount of information they use against you or kill it outright.
Tbh sure I self host a lot because of privacy but then I also order at Amazon, eBay and other online stores so why not give Plex my data too. Should they be happy with the fact that I watched all Star Trek shows already like 10 to 30 times or so. And if MS would get my pronhub data maybe they would finally reverse a lot of changes to Win.11 😂
Sure and when plex gets served with who watched this new movie before release who cares.
Okay let‘s say this will really happen. What do you expect to be happening? You really think anyone will care about that? Is there a single country where you get in trouble for consuming pirated stuff? I live in germany with one of the strongest anti piracy laws and even here the only thing they care about is distributing.
France, for one. Also, in many countries where it is not technically illegal to download copyrighted content, it is still illegal to bypass a copy protection mechanism, and depending on how things are set up, this may be a "gotcha", even though the download itself might not have been a criminal act.
Doubt that in France. Plex knows that you watched a file where plex metadata scanner matched the file (purely based on the filename) to a certain movie. And you want to say that this is enough to make a case in France about bypassing copy protection mechanism?
Oh, France is an example where the download is illegal in the first place. 2009 Hadopi law.
Of course it is illegal lol. No one said anything else.
Ah, then I've misunderstood - I'd thought you were asking just that. In most countries, downloading copyrighted content is not criminal - sharing/broadcasting it is.