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- Hacker News
- Does jellyfin offer intro/outro skipping like plex pass does? And hardware accelerated transcoding?
The only thing keeping me on plex is my lifetime plex pass, and family inertia.
by monkpit - yes (through a plugin), and yes (if you set it up)by alacritas0
- 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?by senectus1
- 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 having that is an absolute deal breaker.
by jorl17 - Yeah, unfortunately the TV app (Xbox for me) offering is really poor.
I've been playing with Kodi with the Jellyfin plug-in but it requires such brittle tower of themes and plug-ins to look like Plex that I've yet to make the switch.
by tym0 - by luaybs
- Jellyfin works great. Supports my 7.1 Atmos setup with the right media even, very slick, no issuesby skullone
- Should an Emby premiere user consider moving to Jellyfin?by znkynz
- Not until Emby starts to enshitify our jellyfin ui gets alot better. I made the switch around 2 years ago from Plex and tried out both extensively. Jellyfin just doesnt have the polish I was looking for.by nickthegreek
- 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.
by ploxxer - I use jellyfin with Infuse, Kodi, mpv-shim and a couple of mobile clients as well. No major issues so far, even my parents use it via Kodi.by radcod3
- 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.
by beAbU - I'm definitely curious about those that moved over to Emby from the XBMC days.
Did you try anything else before hand or just go straight to Emby? I have to say I never really gave it a proper chance
by reprodev - Jellyfin is a highly modified fork of Emby from Emby's last open source release (3.5.2). They're diverged since, but there's still a lot of similarities left.
- For those curious to see Jellyfin in action
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
by deejaaymac - OP here. Thank you for posting this I didn't really think about that for the article. This looks like a great way to see it for those on the fence.
If you don't mind me asking what client are you using and server setup are you using. Any tips from someone who has been using it for a decent chunk of time?
by reprodev - 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.by hellisothers
- Weird article.
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.
by wiether - > leadership at Jellyfin decided to throw the blanket after a burning themselves out for free.
What does this mean?
by sparky_z - 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.
by reprodev - As someone who was late to the game, I never even considered Plex and have been totally satisfied with Jellyfin. Is there anything better about Plex?by xnx
- Not really.
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.
by brookst - Plex has better client support. But Jellyfin being open source client support is catching up quickly.by vachina
- Last I looked (perhaps some have changed?)
- plex has some fancy remote access thing so it can figure out your home network IP without DNS. You need to use VPN/Tailscale or self host something that advertises your IP if you want remote access with Jellyfin.
This is lame if your use case is “my parents remote play from my server from their smart TV” - getting VPN working on a smart TV can be a lot of hassle.
- Jellyfin iOS did not support continuing to play on app switch last I looked (it must have focus or playback stops). Plex app does not have this issue.
I will also say the new pricing structure is a non starter to me, if I wasn’t grandfathered into a lifetime pass from when it was cheaper I would not use Plex anymore. But I do have the pass so I’m not super motivated to change (for now)
by QuiEgo - 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.
- 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.
by BarkenBark - * 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.
by vlovich123 - 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.
Something to keep an eye on!
by evulhotdog - First time I've seen a mention of Silo out on the open internet. This thing is really designed for large scale piracy networks that choke on massive libraries.by nickthegreek
I was like: why should I care?> and has full Postgres support from the get-goThen 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...
by wiether