JELLYFIN or PLEX? | Which To Use For Your Media Server

hey everyone welcome back to the channnel I'm Logan and if you're putting together your own media server for streaming movies and TV shows within your local network one issue that you're going to have to face sooner rather than later is deciding what kind of software you want to use to serve that content to other devices in your home and that's exactly what I'm going to be trying to cover in today's video because here in our home theater we've been using both Plex Media Server and jelly fin media server for a few years and I think it's a really good opportunity to talk about some of the similarities some of the differences and what we really feel works best here in our setup and for a little bit of context we keep 4K Blu-ray rips of our physical media collection right here on our sonology ds620 Plus network attached storage which currently has a set of 6 14 tbte Seagate exos Enterprise hard drives running in raid and if all that sounded like gibberish don't worry about it the only point that I'm trying to make here is that we have a large large but pretty standard setup that most people out there could replicate without much of any hassle the hardware in the sonology is nothing insanely powerful and an older desktop PC could do the same job quite easily and running on top of Sony's dsmos we have both installations of Plex Media Server and jelly fin running at the same time and I want to be clear here that this is absolutely an option if you're putting together a media server and you're not sure what software to use just use both so long as you have enough Ram it should work completely fine we're running 8 gigs in Arnav as far as the installation of these two solutions go at least from the perspective of the sonology Plex Media Server is really easy to get set up literally all you have to do is head on over to the sonology package Center grab Plex tell it which volume you want to save to and you're pretty much done jelly fin is a little more involved since you'll need to install the docker runtime on your NZ and deploy a jelly fin container but there's plenty of documentation on the jelly fin website and overall it's a pretty easy process and with each piece of software installed I feel that I need to quickly talk about the differences in the goals or thought processes or ideology between the two solutions because I feel like it's very helpful in understanding why we feel the way we do about these two pieces of software and ultimately why we prefer one over the other and you see a long time ago Plex Media Server was a piece of software that served your media over the network and that might sound a little strange because obviously that's the point but in more recent times there have been some changes to Plex that we feel are honestly a little aside from this goal and they can be concerning as far as how much control you have over watching your content for example they've added a bunch of free ad supported online streaming options which to each their own but then there are some features inlex like streaming trailers and extras for movies that have been added as paid features offered by their Plex pass subscription and honestly that's fine it's not something that we feel is essential to watching movies in your home but then there are some bigger limitations like the fact that you also need to pay to use the Plex mobile apps so hopefully you weren't planning to do that and then they started asking money to allow you to use Hardware transcoding on your own computer with your own media and what I mean by that is transcoding is a process where your movie files are converted on the fly during playback back into an encoding that's compatible with the device you're trying to watch the movie on you could say it's transforming the movie into a different encoding and by default Plex does this process in software meaning it runs a little piece of software on your computer CPU to handle this conversion but for 4K High bit rate content CPU software transcoding can be limiting since it really slows down your computer and movies could get pretty choppy especially if you have more than one stream playing back at the same time so in order to alleviate this we instead want to leave this job to special dedicated Hardware within the computer which is designed to decode and encode video as efficiently as possible without slowing down the CPU and that's the hardware encoding that Plex is asking you to pay a subscription to use it's overwhelmingly likely that your computer already has the hardware acceleration built in but for Plex to take advantage of it they first need to take a dip into your wallet and that's where we have a little bit of a problem jelly fin on the other hand doesn't have anything like this it's a completely free and open source project meaning you can download the source code if you want to and there's an open Community that's constantly working to improve it because they're the ones using it and they want the best experience possible without subscriptions or anything like that so Hardware transcoding is completely available without a charge on Jelly fin now I'm not trying to make the case that you should brush off Plex completely cuz we still use it and for a few good reasons but I feel like it's been made clear that with plex's subscriptions and now attempts at offering their own free content it seems like these days they're a little more interested in being an online streaming service rather than purely providing a way for you to stream media in your home but that brings us to the issue of actually using these two pieces of software one of the things that Plex has always done really well from our standpoint for just about the entire time it's existed is offering a really nice user experience across hundreds of different devices if you have something that can play a movie chances are there's a good Plex app for it already in our case we're using Plex on an Nvidia Shield Android TV for our playback the interface is slick it's relatively fast and most importantly when you add a movie to your server Plex is really good at automatically identifying that content and pulling metadata like a title description cover art a list of actors things like that all from the internet set and it can apply it without any manual user intervention movies usually play back just fine with minimal buffering and all of the options for adjustments such as choosing a different audio track within the player are decently well laid out if you can help to ignore all the sponsored content and stuff you probably wouldn't want to watch given it's not on your own media server we think the Plex app is pretty good and it's consistent across most devices jelly fin on the other hand is a bit more of a mixed bag out of the box it has a very basic user interface that puts your movies TV shows and other content into tiles that you can click into and browse fairly easily it'll also go through and scrape content over the Internet for movies that you add but generally we haven't found the jelly fin scraper to be as reliable as the Plex one and I would generally say that the interface is clunkier now jelly fin does have one huge a up its sleeve and that you can customize the interface however you want since it's just a web page and people have made some really cool themes that make it much more similar to Plex or Netflix and we really like these options but they just don't have the same extensive device support that Plex offers now with that said most things usually play fine and there are some alternative apps for certain devices like Swift fin for Apple iOS and Apple tv overall we still keep both on our Naz because we like to use both and we really feel like Plex is a rock solid option that served us well for a long time and on the other hand we think jelly fin represents a strong alternative that gives you more control over your media without the inclusion of the subscriptions and other Oddities that people are trying to get away from with Plex in the end if you're setting up your own media server and you're not sure which to go with we think that jelly fin is a really good place to start unless you like the value provided by some of the features in Plex I know we can't speak for everyone and some of you really might be interested in the wider variety of free content or maybe the social media features provided by Plex But whichever solution you choose to go with we think you'll be really happy and that's really all I have to say both of them are great options give them a try and see how you like them so if you found this video helpful don't forget to like subscribe and ring the bell so you don't miss any of our future content and as always have an awesome day

Channel: TwoGuyzTech

Views: 18,711

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Id: J8yIQg74mtI

Length: 8min 21sec (501 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024