I’m surprised people reach for plex, not sure what I’m missing - but a Jellyfin container set up has been fantastic for strictly at home usage (running on an old gaming PC).

It’s fantastic software - the cross platform applications are pretty useable. Don’t think we’ve even had any major issues over the last 4 years using it.

Many thanks to the builders and maintainers, hopefully Andrew can take some rest and know they help a lot of people!

I run JF not plex, but the #1 missing feature I'd like is per-user granular sharing of content within specific libraries.

So far as I can tell, the only way around this is to symlink the subset of media into separate folders, make each of them libraries, then present those libraries to each user.

I have a problem that it constantly tries to re-encode video that could be played perfectly fine in their player or the mpv shim. I wound up just mounting my remote drives and playing in my local mpv. I don't really use it because of that. Unfortunate because otherwise I love a lot of things about it.

The Apple TV solutions for Jellyfin are inadequate last I checked. Basically you are stuck with Plex and Infuse. I already have lifetime Plex Pass so no reason to care... for now.

Because Plex worked amazingly ~5-6 years ago, while Jellyfin was still very early stage. It'd sort of work. So there's a lot of "Well I'm already using Plex" inertia. Plus Plex has very lovely, polished clients, you can easily invite people, share your library with others etc etc. Once they got all that of course, then the changes/fees/ads/bloat started.

Jellyfin is great, it's all I've ever used. But it's still very rough - AppleTV support is limited+buggy (ask my wife...), you can't cast to a Chromecast from iOS etc. Plugins are required for some things to work. Transcoding is harder to get working. Good luck downloading stuff for offline use on the mobile client apps, all you get is the raw movie/tv show file - you have to use VLC to play it.

Again, I love Jellyfin and I use it daily. But we're both kidding ourselves if we think the polished experience you get with Plex is the same as it is with Jellyfin.

I bought a cheapo lifetime pass in the early days of plex. Their business leadership decided to make Plex more like a TV than a personal media server, and the UI / UX changes reflected this.

I got a great deal as an early user, but new users have Good Reasons not to use plex anymore.

I use Plex because the whole experience looks and feels more polished than Jellyfin (that’s personal but even the name Jellyfin irks me, I hate jellyfish), which is something I value more than openness. Also I bought the Plex lifetime a few years ago during Covid and at that time Jellyfin was nowhere near Plex in terms of user friendliness, Plex already had a TV app, a mobile app with ability to download locally, a feature to share access to anyone with a Plex account, automatic metadata update, etc. I don’t know if Jellyfin has all that even today.

If I were to make a choice today I think my first choice would still be Plex.

I have been using Plex since 2014, paid for the lifetime pass back then. It is by-far the most used piece of software I've ever relied on (excluding any general purpose software like OS/Browser).

I have my family setup on Plex, my automations, my apps, my preferences, etc. I'm so comfortable in Plex that until they do something catastrophic to my experience, I can't find the motivation to train my mother to use another app.

I never heard of Jellyfin until now (I might have been living under a rock). Plex has been... fine, though this looks really interesting so I might switch over.

Plexamp is still head and shoulders above anything comparable on the jellyfin side.

plex runs on most of the commercial NAS you can buy as a simple click-install-works packet, even on the cheap CPUs. It is a very slick tool, but I am happy I moved everything over to jellyfin.

Biggest reason for me - for a long time - was no Apple TV app. Using Infuse has fixed that for me, however.

Plex has a great Tizen app. It just works on my TV same as Netflix.

5 years ago when i bought an LG OLED tv and finally decided to move from SAMBA/Apache/plain files I tried first Jellyfin, but

1. Jellyfin up to to a year or two ago didn't have WebOS client.

2. Jellyfin android client is (was?) just the webclient - so no video or audio codec support.

3. Server ran very poorly on my raspberry pi

so I went with Plex and am still using Plex

> I'm surprised people reach for plex

I have a lifetime subscription from 2016. All my friends have Plex, too. It works. We share. Ezpz.

How much music do you have in Jellyfin? I tried it a few weeks ago and it was extremely slow and terrible with my music library. It would take 30+ seconds to load artist pages.

The media player app for android set top boxes like nvidia shield handles different subtitle formats and advanced settings much better than the jellyfin one, especially for anime subs.