I'm with you. I wish Plex they didn't offer a lifetime plex pass, because one-time payments (instead of a monthly subscription) are likely the cause of Plex needing to do all this extra stuff no one asked for to further monetize.

I check out Jellyfin periodically, but the last time I checked it isn't quite ready to replace Plex for me. All the apps (ios, Android, Android TV) aren't great, crash, and I don't think the codec support or audio passthrough support was that good. Hopefully in the future.

I consistently argue that the issue with Plex is not income, but desperately attempting to rebrand as a “legitimate” media centre.

Look at the marketing materials and features from the last few years: Specifically trying to avoid any thought of pirated content.

That’s hardly surprising. Running an ad campaign of “a great place to store all your illegal downloads” doesn’t seem like a wise strategy.

The core problem is that Plex is a business, with investors. Depending on pirated content is not a good model for business success, so they’re trying to pivot. IMO Jellyfin has it right: a non profit, open source solution.

I don't know if it's related to Jellyfin becoming a more viable competitor, but Plex has improved a lot recently. Sync/Downloads are better, the TV apps got a much nicer layout. The metadata agents got updated to be faster. I've been pretty happy lately.

> I consistently argue that the issue with Plex is not income, but desperately attempting to rebrand as a “legitimate” media centre.

If they are low on income due to non-recurring life-time purchases (which I have made myself), and the streaming thingies offered is a income-driver...

I say it's both.

> Look at the marketing materials and features from the last few years: Specifically trying to avoid any thought of pirated content.

I realize this may not reflect the majority use-case, but using Plex for non-pirated content it's still absolutely something people do.

Personally on my Plex-server, I host Photos from all the family, music I've purchased either digitally, or ripped from CDs I own, more accessible copies of DVDs/Bluerays I've also bought and owned, not to mention other DRM-free movies, media and various courses I've bought online.

In my jurisdiction none of this is illegal, and using Plex to manage that media makes managing that media-collection so much better. Why everyone assumes Plex can only be used for pirated contents beats me.

Plex just works(tm), everywhere, no matter what I feed it, and I remember with great dismay how things used to be before I had Plex.

The day Jellyfin gets good enough, I might switch, because it's FOSS and I like FOSS, but for the time being, the simplicity and just-works-ness of Plex means I'll stick around.

> In my jurisdiction none of this is illegal, and using Plex to manage that media makes managing that media-collection so much better. Why everyone assumes Plex can only be used for pirated contents beats me.

This is a great point, and part of what I feel has been the core of the issue with Plex. Back when it started, they argued publicly that serving your own purchased content for personal use was morally (and should be legally) right. Yes, there were always people who shared things illegally using Plex (and sometimes on a large scale), but Plex themselves continued to work with the goal of letting people consume their own format-shifted content. Absolutely people still do it, but it's clear that Plex is no longer working for those people or working with that ability as a goal.

Emby does lifetime purchases and hasn’t don’t the stuff plex has

I switched to Jellyfin because Plex refuses to just show me the files in my directory. Why can’t you just let me have a directory view? Makes my blood boil just topping it out.

What? You can.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/200392126-using-the-library...

> The Folders option is available for all media types, and lets you browse the media folder structure directly based on the folder hierarchy on disk. Browse By Folder is a sticky setting, letting you use Grid, List, or Summary view to browse your drive’s directory structure.

That view will show you all the media it recognized in a folder view. If you have any files that it does not recognize, it will not show them. You’re out of luck off you have something unusual (like a downloaded Rugby Union game). It. Will. Not. Show. It.

You have to put it in a library that's classified as "Other", and then it will show all video files it's capable of playing as regular media without necessarily requiring you to descend into the folder hierarchy view. I have several thousand home videos, YouTube downloads, and other "custom content" that's handled this way.

I have videos that I've pulled down with youtube-dl in mine. Like random 'let's plays', random concert footage, one off JRE episodes, etc. I put them in "videos".

I've accidentally put TV shows in the movies category and had them not show like you describe.

I agree. This is a peeve for me. I ripped toons for my kids and I can’t get the movie or to show view to display them appropriately. A directory view would have been perfect

As a workaround until you find a better solution, perhaps you could exploit the custom artwork feature.

If you have say "movie.mp4" then make two copies of a jpeg named "movie.jpg" and "movie-fanart.jpg" alongside the movie file. Plex will then show this.

You could generate the jpeg using ImageMagick or similar from a base image (per show say) and with text overlay.

I have some scripts that does this and it's better than nothing.

You can view directories, you just have to switch to folder view. It isn't a great directory browser though and that view isn't always sticky so YMMV.

I don't get this. I'm a Jellyfin user too, and I've never seen an option for a directory view in the web UI.

At least my movies are reasonably well-catalogued. My TV shows are still a mess because of how inflexible their naming policy is.

I don't understand this desire, why would you ever want that? The point of using something like Plex is to organize by metadata.

Because some people just prefer something to be laid out a certain way. I have that with music for example, I don't care about albums other than a grouping unit for files (my playlist is flat though). Album art, etc is otherwise irrelevant to me, but some music apps will fetishize organization by album, etc and the art is highlighted etc.

Oh man, I can't find a single usable music app on Linux. I've used MusicBee for years on wine, but I'm stuck on an older version (for stability) and now that I want to run all of my stuff on a Rpi4 I'm screwed (wine+x86 app is a pain). I installed quodlibet, rythmbox, clementine, amarok... All hot garbage when it comes to UI layout. So for now I'm still running MusicBee on an old laptop and controlling playback via the DLNA plugin and the excellent BubbleUPNP.

I've been a huge fan of the mpd+ncmpcpp combo for quite some time now.

This ^ it’s a beautiful thing, seriously. Curses based front end in your terminal with mpd. Light weight and easily integrates with things like polybar

I'll try it out

Did you ever try out gmusicplayer? Depending on what you are looking for it might be something for you. Very customizable and for 'advanced users'. It allows you to combine using Folders and tags for example. Want all it to list all Albums of a single artist in a single Folder? Done. Want it to show you all Artists in One Folder and then again show the contents of that Folder but only those relating to the picked artist? I think it is pretty fun!

Ugly though, if you ask me ;)

I'll try it. At this point I've forgotten the ones I've tried over the years. Every year or so I tend to install everything that a Google search turns up. Some I immediately uninstall. Others I kick the tires for a while but ultimately find some major flaw.

Audacious with the winamp skin mostly works for me, I still miss a few features though the core of it is there. (Global hotkeys for a jump-to and queue songs prompt, nobody except audacious has gotten this down since winamp)

I personally like [TauonMusicBox](https://tauonmusicbox.rocks/) a lot.

Check out mpd+ncmpcpp, or Navidrome. I use the latter.

manual change for metadata is bigger work when you have big library, move or rename folder is easy and fast from terminal of FTP you dont require custom web app

and auto-metadata from IMDB and other API is bad if you have niche videos (me: documentaires for anarchism, feminism, anti-colonialism). so bad it can replace good data with bad data (example sub.media/c/trouble documentary series becomes "good trouble" series)

It sounds like you agree that Plex is not what you should be using in that usecase.

hello using jellyfin for months no idea how to folder view. can you explain?

I use Emby but it house be similar - you should be able to have a library tyoe to “folder” or maybe files. Then it just allows you to browse. But this has downsides

How difficult is the transition from Plex to Jellyfin, do you lose any capabilities?

Also what's the fuzzy feeling you get running FOSS? Do you contribute to the project?

Just being an user of a FOSS system is already a huge contribution. It provides a good feedback loop for developers and brings motivation for the teams to solve issues that are sidelined when no one seems to care.

Granted, FOSS developers don't live off user feedback alone, but if you depend on 1% of your user base becoming faithful financial backers, the more users you have, the better it is.

jellyfin is good but lots of bugs need help. "just being user" like me is not helping very much

It is not just about solving bugs, it is also about gaining mindshare. If a user comes to me and (politely) says "I want to use your product, but while issue X is not solved I will have to stay with your competitor", guess what will get prioritized in the backlog?

As a Jellyfin maintainer, I can confirm that these messages are never polite and are not prioritized.

What about the polite ones?

Or perhaps I should also add "reasonable" to the list of qualifiers? I can see that a larger project might be overflowing with well-meaning but mostly clueless people with unreasonable requests.

How are the ones who don't come to you contributing, though? You said merely using it is a huge contribution, but this example goes beyond just using it.

The one that is using without contributing any feedback is at the very least not using the competitor.

If someone asks them "what are you using to solve problem X" and the answer involves my product, it's my product that gets exposed to another user, who might be interested in contributing...

- no auto sync of content like plex/netflix is the biggest one for me - if the server isn't accessible, the entire app just doesn't work on android. It would be cool to have your shows on the go - metadata/initial content library setup took ages (read 10+ hours) for me (12+TB content) - no live-tv over tvheadend.. but that should be similar to plex

overall, not quite ready, but on it's way

> How difficult is the transition from Plex to Jellyfin

You obviously need to setup a some new software, optionally on a new server/container, and need to reconfigure all your libraries.

Not a big deal IMO.

> do you lose any capabilities?

I had issues with HDR-output to my TV (on my AppleTV 4K), and that for me was a show-stopper. Also the application is generally not as smooth or polished.

It might improve though, so I'm sure I'll check it out again some time later.

> Also what's the fuzzy feeling you get running FOSS?

You know that the people making it want to solve the same problems you do. That they are not desperately seeking a way to make money, because that can often severely affect the direction the software is taking.

- no Samsung Tizen app yet, have to use FireTV/Roku app/DLNA streaming. Have not tried development version (https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-tizen)

- no offline download in iOS app. Can use browser UI and download mkv to device.

I disabled all those streaming service views so I only see my own stuff.

How much of your use is audio streaming? I'm dying to make my collection remotely accessible after leaving the Plex ecosystem.

I use Finamp with Jellyfin for audio

https://github.com/UnicornsOnLSD/finamp

I also use Finamp for audio streaming (or local, downloaded playback). It's a good app, but still lacking a lot of features other audio players have, like rearranging the play queue. I'd suggest also trying [Gelli](https://github.com/dkanada/gelli), which seems to be a more mature app for music playback.

In the past I wasn't super thrilled by Jellyfin's audio streaming (nor Plex's tbh).

I'm auditioning Subsonic at the moment, but I might give Ampache a go soon (it's apparently having a bit of a revival at the moment).

Also check out funkwhale!

Funkwhale is awesome, but it's also one of those FOSS projects whose website doesn't exactly illustrate what it exactly is or what it's exactly for, so here's a direct link to straightforward answers for both of those questions

https://docs.funkwhale.audio/features.html#scope

I want to say +1 for funkwhale, but I didn't get it to work with the subsonic client and haven't found yet a way to download/cache songs from my library on the phone. Have you figured this out?

Subsonic phone clients were kind of a crapshoot last I checked. Ultrasonic was the only one that kinda worked for me.

https://github.com/ultrasonic/ultrasonic

Ahh no I haven't, if that's not working then it might be better to stick with subsonic...

Airsonic is also nice. I was a long time (paying) Subsonic user, but got a bit fed up with it and migrated.

Another comment not from GP, but I'd recommend Polaris. It's very light (unlike Airsonic), FOSS all the way, and has a functional web client (again unlike Subsonic). Can't recommend it enough

I would like to look up Polaris but my searching skills seem to be lacking. Might you have a web site for it that you could share?

had a hard time too but I think it's this https://github.com/agersant/polaris

An alternative is to use a cloud based player, and stream music from a cloud storage service.

Disclaimer: I run this service: https://asti.ga/

I've written up some alternatives at https://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/2021/0...

I'd love to know any feedback you have.

I have close to 3 tb of music, storing it all offsite is prohibitively expensive at the hundreds of dollars per month level, so that service is not good for me.

Depends what you mean by prohibitively... you can store that for $5/month...

I tried out Jellyfin for music, but it kept messing up my music tagging. I switched to Navidrome last year. It works with all subsonic clients and has a great web UI.

I'd love audio streaming suggestions too, I've been running Kodi on an old fire tablet to stream music from a Synology NAS but it's surprisingly flaky

Just try Navidrome!

I use navidrome with bobob and it works great!

bonob acts as a media libary bridge so sonos can use navidrome as a media library (instead of having to use a janky old version of smb auth that sonos requires)

i use navidrome but no folder view, so mixtapes with many artist is counted like many albums

Just tag the tracks of you mixtape with "compilation=true": https://www.navidrome.org/docs/faq/#i-have-an-album-with-tra...

maybe you could try https://github.com/sentriz/gonic (nightly build)

it supports browsing by folder

Seeing how Jellyfin runs on raspberry pi 4 your Synology must be very fast with lots of ram.

It might just have hardware support for relevant codecs. They often do, which gives them a massive advantage when playing media files.

It only hosts the files.

Hosting files takes almost no CPU power. If you're running in to trouble on anything you're transcoding, which means converting the files from the format they're in on disk to something else for streaming (usually to reduce the bitrate for internet transmission or because the player doesn't support the native format).

If you aren't streaming over the internet, disable transcoding and you're more or less only limited by bandwidth.

No transcoding. Jellyfin simply running uses too much ram (like 10 times plex does) so pi runs out of memory and starts swapping.

Really? Idle, my Jellyfin instance has about 260MB resident right now. I don't think I've had any memory issues while in use; the old Mac Mini (running Linux) I have it running on only has 4GB total, and it's also running a couple Mono-based apps that are a bit more memory-hungry.

Jellyfin runs on about 700-800MiB of RAM for me. It sounds like you're hitting a memory bug if you're running out of RAM just serving files, to be honest. I've never used Plex but I doubt it runs with just 70MiB.

Perhaps it'll use much more RAM transcoding, but I'd still expect a dedicated 2GiB to be plenty for Jellyfin even in extreme cases. I doubt you'll get any decent transcoding speed out of ffmpeg if you need a buffer that size anyway.

HTOP says plex uses 100M

Plex, its costs-money competition, transcodes files for playback (using `ffmpeg` or `libav` iirc). Is `jellyfin` less capable in this department then or something else?

Jellyfin does also support transcoding, also using ffmpeg.

It's got 4Gb RAM and 4 cores at 2.2Ghz. (RPi4 has 1.5Ghz if I'm reading Wiki right).

It's certainly not as quick as on my desktop, but it's rare if 2 people in my household stream video from it so no trouble so far.

I have only recently switched from desktop to NAS though, so perhaps I'll notice the performance later on.

I'm running Jellyfin on a recent Intel-based Synology (they also have cheaper ARM CPU models), and it can transcode H.265->H.264 on the fly using about 50% CPU. It also runs in a Docker container so it's pretty easy to manage. I'm a big fan!

I'm curious - why does it matter if Plex is pushing their streaming services? Isn't it really easy to ignore?

You can actually toggle them all off in the settings. You'll never see them in a client after that.

I have no problem with Plex doing this. They're trying to show value for a service rather than just gatekeeping premium convenience features.

My problem with Plex is the utter distain they show for users by not having any sort proper bug triage. Users throw themselves at a forum that staff members rarely interact with. It's desperate.

This is a surprising comment! I have a lifetime plex pass from probably 8 years ago. They had a bad release a few years ago that broke some stuff. Made a post. They asked for logs and I uploaded them and they pushed a new build with a fix the next day. Only time I’ve interacted with them and it was super pleasant. My main consumers and my friends with young kids with kid shows and plex runs everywhere and even small kids can work the interface. I really enjoy it!

Depends on whether your wishes align with theirs.

For example: the long-term threads asking for a “TV” mode that will automatically play your library in channel format so that you can go channel surfing.

Even the very very basic version of this (the ability to automatically update playlists) is essentially a dead thread.

You can use the unofficial Plex API to do pretty much anything you want, if you have some time to set it up. https://github.com/pkkid/python-plexapi

e.g. the auto updating playlist idea would be done reality easily with the python Plex api above.

The log handling is one aspect of how poorly Discourse is failing them here. A proper bug triage system would solicit the information they needed at the time of posting. It would also do a better job of filtering out duplicates. That their employees have to go round and do these janitorial jobs manually is a waste of everybody's time.

But there are so many widespread issues that appear ignored. Things like AMD VCN support, Android clients forcing transcoding on some streams. The problem get acknowledged but there's no easy way to track progress. You don't have to dig far to find others users in there who feel habitually ignore, usually as replies ~"I reported the same thing 7 months ago, good luck getting an answer!", eg https://forums.plex.tv/t/is-anybody-working-at-plex-going-to...

It's a shame because it's not a bad product.

We didn't have the same experience.

A bug that also affected me was reported at least twice (March 2019 and April 2019[1]).

After 5 months of wait, the OP posted a script he wrote to work around the issue.

A simple path building issue took 8-9 months to get pushed in the BETA channel.

[1] : https://forums.plex.tv/t/dvr-moving-files-from-grab-bug/3967...

Same, my Plex pass says "comped" because I reported a security bug to them. In my experience the security bug reporting process is super painful. Most devs are super arrogant about how their code couldn't possibly be vulnerable, it must be something else. Plex took the bug report, immediately agreed it was an issue they should fix, fixed it, and without promoting comped my Plex pass for life. 10/10 would report again.

The UI is great, transcoding and playback on a myriad of devices just works, sharing with other people is a few clicks. To me Plex is the perfect example of the Jim Gaffigan joke; everything is amazing and everyone is miserable.

Jellyfin UI is cleaner, no upsell buttons and does not tie everything to cloud account.

No, it's difficult if not impossible to figure out how to get past the login screen without logging in, and they change it all the time. Also who knows what data they are sending back about you and your watching habits?