Has anyone switched from Plex (Premium) to Jellyfin? Is it any easy transition and do you think it’s worth doing so? I got the lifetime premium subscription for Plex a couple years ago when it was on a pretty deep discount and I really enjoy having those extra features like grabbing trailers, detecting credits for skipping, etc.
That said, I’m really not a fan of the UI update the did on the Firestick app because it’s become noticeably slower and now I’m forced to have the tabs for their rentals and discovery at the top of my library. Really not a fan of them forcing their own stuff on me even if I don’t want it. I hear good things about Jellyfin, but it’d be good to know if it’s worth making the switch or if I’m better off just dealing with my gripes with Plex.
For context, I currently use Plex for movies, shows, and music.
Actually, I run both Plex and Jellyfin in parallel on the same server. There is no issue pointing both applications to the same library folders. I’d recommend installing Jellyfin and trying it out with your content.
Things I like about Jellyfin:
No cloud credentials required to access my local server
No subscription required to access hardware transcoding
Several official and 3rd party apps for and multiple platforms depending on your needs.
Not getting force fed FAST content.
Things I feel Jellyfin need to improve:
iOS/tvOS app improvement. This is a limitation imposed by Apple. The Jellyfin app on Android/Roku/etc are basically web apps hosted from the server. Apple requires apps to be code native to the platform so they function completely differently. There are several free/paid third party apps that work better than the official Jellyfin app if you have more than the average movie/TV show content. I know EposVox and others on the Discord server have discussed challenges with Anime subtitles on with the official app on AppleTV.
Library matching isn’t as robust as Plex. Part of this has to do with the cloud services Jellyfin uses by default. Matches are manually fixable, just like you can do in Plex. And part of this has to do with how Jellyfin scans. Example: when it comes to music, Jellyfin relies more on folder structure than id3 metadata. I have a bunch of music that came from ripping CDs through iTunes. Sometimes iTunes would split an album between the folder for the artist and a complication folder if a track had multiple artists listed. Jellyfin will show the 2 albums in the interface because the tracks are in two different folders. The only solution is to manually move the tracks to the same folder and rescan the library.
I wish they would implement a PIN unlock, like Plex/Disney+ and several other platforms offer. I like locking accounts to keep kids out of the adult stuff. Without a PIN, the only option is to enter my profile password each time.
I’ve just set up a new Jellyfin server and the plugins ecosystem is CRAZY and fixes a lot of my issues (library matching improved with better metadata providers, options to pull more metadata from files such as id3 tags etc.), homepage customization, yada yada.
The Apple TV app (Swiftfin I think is the real name even though it shows up as Jellyfin, it’s not “official”) is kinda annoying. It works fine MOST of the time, but some subtitles break it and you have to do weird things with the gesture remote to open subtitle options, plus I had to disable a “native player” option to get autoplaying the next episode working.
Then I downloaded a different third party app that worked PERFECTLY with subtitles, but anything that’s >1080p or HDR etc. immediately makes it ask for a subscription.
Broadly speaking you can just install Jellyfin on the same library like agizmo said and be off to the races, but I highly recommend doing some library cleanup before doing so.
Beyond the little quirks and app-specific issues (which was a huge issue with Plex for the longest time) Jellyfin is everything I wanted from Plex, including better subtitle/codec support.
If you plan on streaming outside of your network, it is more work to get that working - which I don’t touch so I can’t offer advice on.
Definitely sounds like it’s worth looking into. I only really use the streaming outside my home for music and that’s easy enough to get around by just loading it on my devices instead. If I can still get all those features I want, native or with plugins, I don’t really mind it not being as ready to go right out the box. Appreciate the insight from you guys!
Still working on getting it all configured, but I think Jellyfin will be taking over. Definitely takes some more tinkering, but at the same time it feels more like a media manager than a streaming service + my media; which I like.