[al_borland]

I’ve been a Plex user since the early days. I currently run it on a Synology NAS in a container, using the Plex app on the AppleTV as my primary client device. I tried setting up a Jellyfin container a few months ago as I’ve been concerned about the direction of Plex. It went poorly.

I have a fairly large library, which Plex never seemed to care about. Jellyfin choked. It took forever to go through it all, and I seem to remember questioning of it was working; it wasn’t clear. Plex on the other hand makes it pretty entertaining to watch covers flip over as the metadata is loaded in to see the progress. Then every app I tried on the AppleTV also seemed to have trouble. The one that worked best had to create its own local cache of everything, which required I spend hours browsing to every screen and waiting before it became reasonably smooth. After that, the layout was still pretty strange. I think it would have worked just as well to point it at a file share. Actually playing videos was hit and miss in every app I tried.

I’m still using Plex. If I need to move to Jellyfin at some point, I feel like I’ll need to build a server with a lot more power than Plex requires. Of course that’s just a theory… a theory that will be expensive to test.

For all the fanfare Jellyfin gets online, I expected it to be better. It made me question how honest the people pushing it are. But maybe they have small libraries or only tested it with 5 movies for the review. I don’t think that’s a real-world experience.

[Marsymars]

> For all the fanfare Jellyfin gets online, I expected it to be better. It made me question how honest the people pushing it are. But maybe they have small libraries or only tested it with 5 movies for the review. I don’t think that’s a real-world experience.

I don't love crapping on open source software, but I had the same experience recently - installed Jellyfin because I wanted to test hardware-accelerated AV1 transcoding, and the whole app experience felt rough compared to Plex. The UI/UX really needs some TLC.

[al_borland]

> I don't love crapping on open source software

The software is probably fine for what it is. I mostly meant to crap on those pushing it and claiming it’s better than Plex, when, a least for large libraries, it isn’t. It’s important people have the right expectations going in.

Plex has almost a decade of development on Jellyfin, and Plex itself was born as an OS X fork for XBMC, so it got a big head start from open source itself.

[lossyalgo]

Got a 7-year old QNAP NAS recently and wanted to try Jellyfin. Installed, running, indexing... 6 hours later NAS is no longer reachable. Nothing worked so had to hard reboot. Afterwards the Jellyfin service wouldn't start anymore. Installed Plex (via app store) and 2 weeks later everything is indexed and streams to multiple devices, though I did have to google a few times to fix things related to crashing while transcoding and playing subtitles. It was literally 2 toggles in the UI. The only irksome thing is it doesn't let me play audio files (which could be related to the crappy built-in Plex app on the cheap projector). I also wish there was a way to disable all the (paid) cloud offerings, I want it to be LAN-only.

To be fair, Jellyfin page doesn't list my NAS as being supported, so I had to "manually" install it (a couple commands and clicks).