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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Jellyfin is so underrated
It is……if you use a computer. Their AppleTV app still looks like some random coder’s pet project with random playback issues.
The app on my LG TV is acceptable, but does have random problems, like it can’t connect over TLS, and it’s kinda slow to navigate. But it works, and my kids know how to work it.
I also use it on an LG TV and sometimes it can’t run at its normal framerate with subtitles on. I haven’t figured out why yet, but it might be embedded files like someone else says in this thread. Other than that it works like a charm.
Yeah, I did have a to transcode a bluray rip, but I think that might be a network limitation rather than a processing one. 1080p transcode worked fine, so it’s not resolution.
One of these days I’ll DIY a HTPC, but for now, the Jellyfin app works acceptably well.
I quit streaming services around 4 months ago, determined the exact maximum streaming quality every device I own can handle, used a $60 used office PC from craigslist, admittedly I haven’t fully figured out how to get subtitles to work without transcoding, but I just need to sit down and figure it out at some point. I direct stream all of my content from a 10+ yr old PC and it uses less than 5% cpu while watching a 4k movie. I could stream to easily 5-10 PC’s and still likely be able to do software maintenance on the PC at the same time. That and with how jellyfin looks like a streaming service, with no transcoding it’s better than any streaming service. Nearly every streaming service you use is transcoding on the fly instead of storing 20versions of each video for direct streaming, direct streaming a previously encoded asset will always deliver a higher quality viewing experience.
In my experience, transcoding with subtitles becomes an issue when the subtitles are burned in to the video. I often get external subtitles from https://www.opensubtitles.org/ and then stick the downloaded SRT file in the same folder as the movie. Make sure it has the exact same file name as the movie so jellyfin will associate the two together. Once I do that, it does not transcode at least for subtitle reasons.
Nearly every streaming service you use is transcoding on the fly instead of storing 20versions of each video
If you’re talking about commercial streaming services like Netflix, I highly doubt that. If you’re talking about self-hosted services like Plex, then you’re absolutely right.
I genuinely do not understand the issues people are having with Jellyfin subtitles. I just have Bazarr set up to automatically download and they play on every device (web, android, iOS, roku, android TV) with zero issues.
Sounds like it’s mostly with embedded subs inside the media files already. Thats where all my subs are so I’m going to test soon but haven’t played anything on jellyfin needing subs in a while
I now extract all my subs, but for the first 2 years using it I left everything embedded and it always worked normally. Even with some advanced ones like Jujutsu Kaisen and One Pace, which both use stylized ones.
Just tested and with Findroid on my phone, no subtitle options appeared at all, though it had 4 languages embedded. On my roku they showed up but as soon as I picked it it loaded until it said Error During Playback
I don’t use it for myself but my experience with Jellyfin is the subtitles UX kind of sucks. It got a lot better on the Android TV app recently (ty to the maintainer!), particularly with improved subtitle support, but because of ExoPlayer it still can’t play bitmapped embedded subtitles easily, only .srt subtitles.
The experience on iOS/appletv with Jellyfin/Swiftfin was so bad that I ended up recommending Infuse. Infuse is a great app, but it’s not a libre app, which kind of clashes with the rest of Jellyfin in that regard. And, once again, it needs massaging: unless you want to be popped up with a buy Infuse Pro pop-up your video and audio has to be in certain codecs.
As I said, I don’t use these things, myself. I don’t even have a TV. But every now and again, I will put a file up for some relatives, and I want it to be totally directly playable, because my server is just an old laptop. So I have to spend a lot of manual time making sure the files are juuuuust right. If there comes a day where there’s direct playback with embedded PGS or SRT subtitles on all platforms that will be the day the Jellyfin suite of software becomes 10/10 software for me.
Embedded subtitles definitely work, and I’ve used bitmap ones before, although I generally avoid them so I’m not sure if they consistently work well. Directly playback also does work with those subtitles, so if you had issues it was likely related to codec support.
Unfortunately I can’t play around with it anymore because I live a thousand miles away from everyone I support who actually uses Jellyfin. My experience with the Android TV app was embedded SRT subtitle support is now 100% good as of late last year, but embedded PGS trips things up so much that I cannot use them.
Fair enough, not saying you should bother with it, just surprised to hear it happening.
I still maintain that Emby is better than Jellyfin. I try it again maybe once a year and every time I end up back on Emby. It just runs better, works pretty flawlessly and doesn’t lose my libraries every so often. Music playback is better by far on Emby and that’s my main usecase.
Hardware decoding would be nice, but I don’t have a system I could use this on for either and I’ve not had trouble without it.
What do you mean library losses. I’ve been using jellyfin twoish years now and have never had this happen.
Same. The only issue I’ve had is it not finding my TV shows, but once I figured out how it wants them stored, no issues whatsoever.
The applications aren’t that good. That’s the only thing keeping me from switching completely. Subtitles, aspect ratio, audio track selection just don’t work as expected. In some cases I can only pick the aspect ratio and no subs and sometimes the other way around? Also if I have no subs for a movie, I can’t search for them on the fly - good feature of plex. As it stands, jellyfin video player is not up to my standards and I can’t switch yet. I use it for porn though. That works fine.
I’ve been using plex for several years and setup jellyfin a few months ago to tinker with it. Playing videos works fine for me locally but I have some family out of state who have access and jellyfin doesn’t have a solution for that outside of me publicly sharing the URL and managing the passwords. Also a pain point for me is having multiple files of different quality for the same movie/episode, it always shows as two episodes that it will play back to back and seems to require a lot of manual work per show/movie to get it tracked as 1 piece of media with 2 files to choose from. Would love to ditch Plex eventually but for me and my family it just works without issue and they can manage their own remote login.
I use jellyfin for every device except for my android TV. I really like it and prefer it over Plex, but it was working fine until it suddenly stopped working a few months ago. I tried updating the app, the jellyfin container, reinstalling the app and clearing data and redoing my jellyfin instance entirely. Nothing worked, everytime I try to connect to the server via the android TV i just got an error unable to connect… and the rest is cut off. Regular android app works, idk what the problem is but it has to be client side, so I just gave up and now have plex running alongside just for the TV.
If anyone has had this Problem before I would love suggestions!
My guess would be internal networking issue preventing the two from talking
I’ve found the opposite to be the case unfortunately. Plex “just works” while my jellyfin server had almost constant issues with subtitles (two of my frequent users need these because of hearing problems) and would frequently crash requiring docker restarts.
I adopted jellyfin very early, used it for many (maybe 6?) years and these problems only got worse over time.
I always prefer open source (often to a fault) but I am glad I switched to Plex a few months ago. I got the lifetime pass for cheap for black Friday. I still leave jellyfin running for a few users, but everyone else has already switched over.
I had the opposite. Jellyfin just works. Plex kept losing my movie folders, refused to play videos, wouldn’t screen cast, had problems with audio tracks, there always seemed to be a disconnect between app and server, they refused to connect despite both being the correct versions. It worked great initially, but got steadily more and more problematic over time. I gave up, even though I’d paid for it, and made a jellyfin server and have had zero trouble since.
Don’t know why two programs should have such radically different experiences, they should just do what they’re supposed to.
What are the issues you’re having with Jellyfin’s subtitles? Do you know if there is an open bug report or feature request that is tracking the same?
The only problem I’m having with jellyfin is around subtitles, but it’s getting better all the time. I bought the plex lifetime license a few years ago, but we’ve moved our whole house to jellyfin now.
Can you describe the subtitles issue you’re having? Do you know if there is an open bug report or feature request open on github or Jellyfin’s website?
Not op but in my case it’s the client ignoring embedded subtitles
Which client are you seeing the issue on and can you provide more info on the type of embedded subtitle (run mediainfo on the file if on Linux)?
Android TV and any file with embedded subtitles. Only external subtitles, if present, are shown. I understood that is because I’m using AMD hardware encoding and I assumed it was unfixable. Didn’t investigate more as I’m going to switch to Intel soon
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.
- I’ll have to check but I haven’t had an issue with the transcoded files filling up.
- Subtitles work as expected for me but all of my file names are in English, are the ones you’re having problems with file names in another language perchance?
- That last one I fixed myself by wrapping ffmpeg around a script I wrote that forces 5.1 to transcode to AC3 so it goes to my speakers properly.
“<shrug> not a problem for me!”
Why even bother replying?
If you search for the issues I mentioned, you’ll find I’m not the only one.
Edit: I may have overreacted
I was replying to maybe share the wrapper script I wrote, but if you’re going to be a jerk about it…
So other people who might be considering Jellyfin vs Plex know that your problems aren’t universal?
I’m in the same boat as the other person. Ive had Jellyfin running for years, watch something on it daily, and have never had the container break due to transcodes not being removed.
Maybe its just you and your setup?
Sorry, maybe that was a knee jerk.
Don’t get me wrong. I like jellyfin and I try to use it over Plex most days. But it does have out-of-the-box issues.
I’ve installed jellyfin several times with both docker and bare metal methods over the last 4 years. The transcodes have been an issue every time.
Maybe its my usage, but watching roughly 5 episodes of a show fills up roughly 3gb of the /var/lib/jellyfin/transcodes folder. In a 4gb container image, that’s death. Jellyfin is the only container I need to expand to 16gb to adequately deal with this.
The default transcodes cleanup task is limited to every 24h at smallest interval, the option “delete segments” does absolutely nothing (I’ve watched).
This last one is why I have to use Plex instead of jellyfin on my tv. The jellyfin roku app fuckin sucks and refuses to demux anything.
After having been shafted by sublime text I will never believe anything called a “lifetime subscription” is such.
A “lifetime subscription” is just a “until we decide otherwise” subscription
After having been shafted by sublime text I will never believe anything called a “lifetime subscription” is such.
Care to elaborate?
AFAIR SublimeText licenses are always only for a specific major version. And they sometimes might work for the next major version. So, I guess you’ve just installed a newer version for which your lifetime license isn’t valid anymore.
Before sublime text 3 all updates were included in the single license, not just major revision updates. This was back in 2012.
I don’t mean to be glib or upset you, but you still have lifetime access to the versions of Sublime Text for which you paid; you just don’t get free updates to the next version. AFAIK, that’s been the way they’ve done things for years.
Before the one license=one version switch in 2013 the license stated “and future updates” which they did, but they switched to needing to pay for new licenses for some reason. I remember that being the primary reason I switched to emacs.
I mean, it naturally has to be something that they eventually find a way to charge you something for. If it’s a for-profit business, and if they only sold lifetime subscriptions, they would eventually go out of business.
Then they shouldn’t be called lifetime subscriptions. This seems like a really smarmy justification of a shitty business practice.
Sublime never offered lifetime subscriptions. https://web.archive.org/web/20150928064400/http://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq You can even see as far back as 2014 that if you purchased Sublime Text 2 when Sublime 3 was still in beta:
- Upgrade Policy
A license is valid for Sublime Text 3, and includes all point updates, as well as access to prior versions (e.g., Sublime Text 2). Future major versions, such as Sublime Text 4, will be a paid upgrade. - Expiration Date
Licenses purchased for Sublime Text 3 do not expire, however an upgrade fee will be required for Sublime Text 4.
You can find that disagreeable, but it was not something they hid from us customers.
Licenses for sublime text 2 just said “and future updates”. I remember the “lifetime” thing being a selling point on producthunt. This was back in 2013 though, and the weird way the licensing change was handled made me switch to emacs.
- Upgrade Policy
That makes zero sense.
Does anyone have any recommendations for migrating their Plex library over to Jellyfin? One day I fully expect to migrate over but when I do i want my full watch/listen history to come with me.
You might just be able to point jellyfin to your media directories and then let it scan them.
That won’t migrate watch history
This isn’t a complete solution, but trakt.tv covers a lot of ground. I started using it for getting a consistent history of watched shows between jellyfin on the road and kodi at home. It works okay enough for this, though at times it does seem that one or both of the plugins can fail to log a watched show. I would guesstimate a 90% success rate.
Been using Jellyfin along side the ‘ARR suite for about a year now, my biggest issue is with Subtitles.
On the IOS/iPadOS apps of Jellyfin subtitles seem to prevent media from streaming, tried utilizing Bazaar but have had no luck.
I think I might be able to help with Bazaar settings if you still want to try it. It took a lot of playing around with things, there weren’t any guides at the time I set it up. But I can send you screenshots of my settings and highlight the crucial settings.
I used to have similar issues, was due to my PC not being able to handle the transcoding. Enabling hardware acceleration with the correct settings fixed it for me.
