I’ve been a Plex user since the very early days, before they even broke it apart as a client/server app and it was just an xbmc port for OS X. I recently tried Jellyfin, which seems to have the most buzz around it and it wasn’t a good experience.

I was running both on the same hardware (Synology NAS via docker), and using the same client device (AppleTV). Jellyfin was painfully slow, via the native web interface to the point of being nearly unusable. On the AppleTV I tried both Swiftfin and Infuse. Swiftfin was painfully slow to the point of being unusable. Infuse was better once the caches loaded, but that took several hours of just navigating around the app. Once I did, the interface wasn’t one I liked and I seem to remember having issues with adding new files. I also has play back issues in one or more of the apps, I think.

As much as I’ve been concerned about the direction of Plex, it seems like the alternative isn’t up to the task. I remember installing the first version of Plex server probably over 15 years ago and it was smooth and fun to watch, with movie posters turned over as it loaded them in. Jellyfin felt like a chore.

Needless to say, I’m back on Plex. I’ll still keep an eye on alternatives in the space, but I’m really disappointed with all the people who have been shouting the Jellyfin name from the rooftops, saying it’s better than Plex. That was not my experience at all. Maybe on a much more powerful system, with a much smaller library? I’d love to see it become great, but it feels like they have a long way to go to really nail the basics while remaining performant.

I have something like 420+ movies on my Jellyfin system (on an old Mac Mini 2011 running Debian 12). I've enabled the file watcher so as soon as the movie is added to the folder, it's scanned and added to the library. I'm using Infuse on Apple TV and it works pretty great.