Plex has overhauled its apps from the ground up to make them easier to navigate. The teams says it will be able to roll out new features faster as well.
Not asking this to be combative, but as Jellyfin convert I’m curious what quality/features you are missing? Also what platform are you using mainly?
I watch mostly using the Android app or Nvidia Shield, and the client does everything Plex did (in terms of just media watching - no DVR or other features ) without all the bloat the current Plex client brings.
There is a huge disparity in the quality, UX, and features of the clients. Many clients are missing basic features like scrubbing, subtitles, saving position, etc… Many platform-specific clients are people’s pet projects and quickly lose support or are half baked.
Furthermore my wife and kids are not technical the way I am—when things don’t work properly they can’t debug & diagnose, they simply can’t use it. And I personally don’t want to spend my time diagnosing why I can’t fast-forward a TV show and so on.
That’s why I gave up on Plex. I couldn’t get it to play over Chromecast reliably and it kept forgetting my media library information. I haven’t had those issues with Jellyfin.
Interesting, again at least in the android/web/Linux client ecosystem I’ve not experienced any of those issues, and Jellyfin has caused me less family tech support issues than Plex or Emby. I guess it all depends on the platform, and how much outside of just media consumption you’re wanting your server to do.
Ah, “standards”, you got to love them. I was also thinking in terms of using Chromecasting" and not the use of the physical Chromecast device. Thanks for the follow up.
You can open the Play Store on the Chromecast 4th generation (the one with Google TV), and from that you can indeed install the Jellyfin Android TV app (as Google TV is derived from Android TV apparently). However if you try to look for a Jellyfin app from the regular “Apps” menu there is nothing. Typical Google making it super convoluted.
For me, Plex works great on my Synology while Jellyfin is completely unusable - video payback simply crashes. Running Jellyfin on my desktop machine gets it to work, but it takes over 24 hours to scan my media library and doesn’t automatically add new media when I add new files.
Yep. I’m guessing it insists on transcoding the video but doesn’t have the horsepower. Plex either has a superior transcoder or detects it doesn’t need to transcode it.
I think the transcode part is decided by the client, but in the Jellyfin server admin you can control if a client can request a transcode (which may not be actually needed - and if you know what client they are running it’s probably easier to decide). This could just be client setting though, because I know on Jellyfin you can change the “backend” in the client that it tries to use and can make the difference on things like x265/HVEC playing back or not.
Hmm, I’m not sure that’s the case here. I tried this with two different browsers (Firefox & Chrome) on two different computers, plus the native client on an Android phone, Android TV, and Android tablet, with various server settings - none of them worked.
Yeah, sounds like the more mature Plex backend might just be better for your use case. But just because I’m curious are you running Jellyfin as an app or in docker? And is your Synology Intel based or AMD, as the latter will only do software transcoding and probably easily overwhelm a NAS CPU.
For me, the DVR functionality is basically non-existent. Having to pay a third-party for channel programming is just lol. The UI too, it is one that a programmer thinks is peak, but any outside user sees era Windows 2000.
Those were the two killers; I know there was more but without /complete/ DVR functionality ootb, it’s doa for me.
Not asking this to be combative, but as Jellyfin convert I’m curious what quality/features you are missing? Also what platform are you using mainly?
I watch mostly using the Android app or Nvidia Shield, and the client does everything Plex did (in terms of just media watching - no DVR or other features ) without all the bloat the current Plex client brings.
There is a huge disparity in the quality, UX, and features of the clients. Many clients are missing basic features like scrubbing, subtitles, saving position, etc… Many platform-specific clients are people’s pet projects and quickly lose support or are half baked.
Furthermore my wife and kids are not technical the way I am—when things don’t work properly they can’t debug & diagnose, they simply can’t use it. And I personally don’t want to spend my time diagnosing why I can’t fast-forward a TV show and so on.
That’s why I gave up on Plex. I couldn’t get it to play over Chromecast reliably and it kept forgetting my media library information. I haven’t had those issues with Jellyfin.
Interesting, again at least in the android/web/Linux client ecosystem I’ve not experienced any of those issues, and Jellyfin has caused me less family tech support issues than Plex or Emby. I guess it all depends on the platform, and how much outside of just media consumption you’re wanting your server to do.
Thanks for the follow up.
No Chromecast support was a dealbreaker for me.
The Android version at least has Chromecast support, not sure on other platforms.
deleted by creator
Ah, “standards”, you got to love them. I was also thinking in terms of using Chromecasting" and not the use of the physical Chromecast device. Thanks for the follow up.
You can open the Play Store on the Chromecast 4th generation (the one with Google TV), and from that you can indeed install the Jellyfin Android TV app (as Google TV is derived from Android TV apparently). However if you try to look for a Jellyfin app from the regular “Apps” menu there is nothing. Typical Google making it super convoluted.
For me, Plex works great on my Synology while Jellyfin is completely unusable - video payback simply crashes. Running Jellyfin on my desktop machine gets it to work, but it takes over 24 hours to scan my media library and doesn’t automatically add new media when I add new files.
So the server part runs worse from your NAS? That seems odd but I have never run either from a NAS so no idea how to help. =(
Yep. I’m guessing it insists on transcoding the video but doesn’t have the horsepower. Plex either has a superior transcoder or detects it doesn’t need to transcode it.
I think the transcode part is decided by the client, but in the Jellyfin server admin you can control if a client can request a transcode (which may not be actually needed - and if you know what client they are running it’s probably easier to decide). This could just be client setting though, because I know on Jellyfin you can change the “backend” in the client that it tries to use and can make the difference on things like x265/HVEC playing back or not.
Hmm, I’m not sure that’s the case here. I tried this with two different browsers (Firefox & Chrome) on two different computers, plus the native client on an Android phone, Android TV, and Android tablet, with various server settings - none of them worked.
Yeah, sounds like the more mature Plex backend might just be better for your use case. But just because I’m curious are you running Jellyfin as an app or in docker? And is your Synology Intel based or AMD, as the latter will only do software transcoding and probably easily overwhelm a NAS CPU.
Running as a socket container - I don’t think there’s a native Synology package for Jellyfin. This is an Intel Synology.
For me, the DVR functionality is basically non-existent. Having to pay a third-party for channel programming is just lol. The UI too, it is one that a programmer thinks is peak, but any outside user sees era Windows 2000.
Those were the two killers; I know there was more but without /complete/ DVR functionality ootb, it’s doa for me.