PLEX or Jellyfin? MY PICK using both for Years!

hello everybody this video is going to be about probably the two top dogs in home media servers and streaming and that is Plex and jellyfin what I'm going to be doing is comparing the two I've done a similar video just like this but including Envy the differences in this case I actually have multiple years of experience in both platforms so this is kind of be more of a unformal review of my experiences and the differences and why personally I prefer and love jellyfen but I'm actually using Plex on a daily basis and first what I'm going to do is talk about what both of them do really well and that is 95 of all the functionality and that is streaming media they are both fantastic platforms for this the services are going to be able to recognize all the media on your server they're going to be able to stream that media they both have Hardware acceleration if needed but there's little asterisks there for Plex and when it comes to setting up and installing both of these services on whatever whether that be your windows 11 box whether that be an actual server unit your Nas whatever the setup process is going to be incredibly simple usually it's going to be a couple commands in Linux or you could do what I do in that set up actual Docker containers you can see right here this is my unread I have a jelly fin Docker container right here up and running I just spun this up just a little bit ago to actually do this video and it's really good because no matter what service you use they both kind of work in the same way when it comes to overall Library organization you could have both Services running at the same time pulling from these same libraries and both of them are going to do a phenomenal job building the libraries getting the metadata putting all the posters cover art whatever it is and actually presenting your media in a very beautiful and organized way since Plex is the main thing I'm currently using I do have it in a separate box it's over here running on protainer right here in its own independent machine because this little Intel Nook that I have handles all the processes for Hardware coding and streaming media and like I said they're pretty similar in the processes of setting up I do basically both of them with either Docker compose or underage kind of does it for you with templates here you can see this is my Docker compose for Plex really simple stuff and it's virtually the same with Plex you have your environment variables your time zone your permissions here the actual container Linux server has a great Docker image for both Plex and jellyfin and then you just set up your volumes how you want that to for this this is an Intel device so I just need to feed this through so it can actually use that for Hardware encoding and overall setting up both of these Services is phenomenal before I move on I do need to thank the sponsor geek Nook in their Intel line of Nook machines on their website geeknook.com they also have really high-end Intel machines such as the Nook 12 Enthusiast serpent Canon bare bone for only 9.99 and they have options for 32 or 64 gig and one terabyte and 2 terabyte and this is even 500 cheaper on their website than it currently is on Amazon and walmart.com I've done a couple videos on their products overall they are really great they try to give you the lowest prices they have a three year warranty and the no questions asked 30-day return and exchange policy so if you're interested make sure you check out the link down below and enter my discount code to save some money so with that let's get back into the comparison just for a general difference in appearance this right here is my jelly fit instance that I just spun up it automatically pulled everything very well you can see my latest movies here latest music latest shows and if I open up something such as John Wick 4 chapter 4 without actually playing the media this is kind of what we get in terms of the data that we're presented and it's pretty similar in Plex and Plex here if I search for John Wick 4 as well you could see it pull up right here and it does look a little bit different but it's a lot of the same information we have our cast members you could play we have some settings you can rate it Plex does give you a little bit more in terms of like here's the tracks albums we have related movies on the servant other Keanu Reeves movies and then for example if I go over here here I click on edit we can see all the options I have tags sharing poster background all that if I jump over to jellyfin this is what we got going on and of course you got themes and all that so you can make these look different if you'd like to but if I go over here it does look a little bit different we have to identify edit metadata so a lot of the settings are built into this kind of drop down but if I click on a metadata for example or edit metadata you can see the options we have here so really when it comes to the organization and user interface and what you get it's a lot of the same but with some minor differences and that just ultimately boils down to your overall taste and preferences and then that's going to take us into some of the key differences and the main one is the proprietary nature of the two pieces of software jellyfin is completely free and open source they don't have any pay walls no pop-ups or anything weird everything is you just you get everything it's nice and a lot of those things are premium features that you see on Plex an example of that is here this is the Plex pass website and the features that you get with plexpass I'm personally have a lifetime membership I got it on sales like 80 bucks which compared to completely free and open source is still a bit of money but you'll notice a lot of these premium features in Plex are already included in jellyfish a key example of that is Hardware transcoding here Hardware transcoding is the thing you're going to want to use if you have media streaming to a device that does not support the format this will transcode it server side so that it can support it on that device usually you kind of want to avoid doing this anyway because it takes up unnecessary resources especially if you could have a lot of the formats at the proper codec or whatever but if you want to do something such as down scale it to 720p because you're watching on a mobile device or whatever and you're trying to save data this is where Hardware transcoding it really it comes in handy you're going to need Plex pass for using this on Plex for jelly fan it's already included and when it comes to the overall setup of Hardware transcoding again like I said earlier it's basically the same process granted as you'll see jelly fin actually has far more settings when it comes to Hardware transcoding this right here is transcoding options on Plex you have a couple check spot check boxes you have your directory for transcoding and then if we head over to jellyfin we go over to playback here Hardware acceleration you actually pick your specific one for me like I said it's Intel quick sync and you have all your options whether your formats and codecs they actually want to enable hardware transcoding for and then if we scroll down here you could see really you do have a lot more options and a lot more specifics on how you actually want this to work so if you're real nitpicky on some of this stuff jellyfin is definitely a really good option so basically for a vast majority of people jellyfit is going to be perfect for especially if you're just doing home streaming and this is where I'm going to start to deviate a little bit I'm going to talk about some of of the benefits of Plex and why I am personally using it for the time being and this is going to revolve around the kind of client-side applications Plex has a lot more options granted jellyfind does have some options and some fantastic options you can see here this is the recommended they have web OS Roku Android TV so that right there alone is going to cover probably a majority of people we have iOS Android so regular mobile applications Kodi clients and if I go over here to all this is where we get some of the other stuff which I do believe the Apple TV one is in here somewhere there it is Swift fin this is the Apple TV one now it's in beta it works pretty good but you have to do some extra workarounds and sometimes the media streaming crashes and all that and just that doesn't happen on Plex really the Plex Apple TV app is awesome and it's just one thing personally for me I have an Apple TV and a lot of the people that I kind of share my media with use Apple TV so that is one key thing kind of leaning me into the direction of Plex this is the Plex website you can see Apple TV Chromecast basically everything is available granted they are jellyfin really is not too far behind they have gaming console apps home accessories that integrate virtual reality stuff just a lot more client-side Integrations we go over here to servers it's basically going to be the same situation they both are going to work on all NASA's now another thing that is a little bit easier with Plex is sharing externally and this is mostly because I have a some grandparents that like to log into my Plex server watch some of the media I have on there and being able just to download the Plex app sign in with their Gmail or whatever I add them here therein it just natively shows up they don't need to manually enter in an IP address or anything like that I don't need to work as hard to set up like reverse proxies or anything like that it's just going to work which then that comes with a big con with Plex the one thing that I found quite recently that is rather irritating black so it doesn't work very good if your router or your home network is offline and this can even be in your home so if I have my Nas running Plex or whatever my internet is down for whatever reason it's CenturyLink it's bound to go down here and there I get this weird issue where I cannot switch users on Plex Home and the media is really just a hit or miss whether or not if it decides to work which is really strange because it is hosted locally on my home network which again is why I'm probably going to keep that jellyfin server I spun up just in case if I run into instances like that jellyfind works all the time locally no matter what and then that takes us to another thing where Plex has kind of another slight advantage and that is the option and the amount of third-party tools that are available an example of that is right here I'm gonna to to Thule I think which of course it has an error I recently changed an IPS just let me fix that real quick it's actually this one verify server there we go I switched out my Intel Nexus of a 12th for our 13th gen slightly better Hardware encoding performance there we go boom this is an example of a third-party application that is available specifically for Plex that does some wonderful statistics you could send out things like newsletters to the people in your Plex server so they can know what's new what's been removed bunch of different things you can see here right now the hopkey fan which is like the main household account is uh streaming the office at the moment on Apple TV we get a lot of information I could stop it if I wanted to be an ass but we also have some other statistics so we have play counts so we have our top play so War for the Planet of the Apes getting a lot of plays and we go on we can see all that most popular movies most watched TV shows the office at 95 plays big surprise Yellowstone Stone Rick and Morty Shameless and Plex has its own kind of Statistics tool but this one is way more in-depth and has a lot more features so like go to graphs here I have our play count by media type play count by hour of day so this helps so if I want to like run server updates automatically I could set it for 11 pm and that usually does the trick platforms you can see a lot of Android streams the second most is TV OS which I talked about earlier and then we have the most played and then we have the users who kind of watch the most media and specifically what type you need it just one third-party tool there's a lot of third-party tools you have things like overseer here which is awesome which I do believe that jelly Finn kind of somebody forked it and made their own specific version just for jelly fin watches magnificent and a lot of things just integrate if I go over here to apps on unraid and then I just search for Plex you're gonna see a lot of different things Plex Media manager Plex DV time Plex web Plex announcer Plex rip are a bunch of different stuff now if I search for jelly fin there is a lot less things going on here we have a bunch of different jellyfin clients a bunch of spins this is a jelly fin view which I don't know what that is it's where something might be worth checking out let's just check it out now shall we oh this is cool so we can see the old player versus new player nice that's something we'll maybe dive into a little further in a separate video but yeah those are my primary differences between jelly from them Plex again I definitely prefer jelly fin overall free open source that has no issues with media playback streaming Hardware transcoding on it is actually my personal preference but when it comes to actually hosting a server for a bunch of other people a bunch of people in my family Plex just seems kind of like the better route and with the Plex pass if I add people through that kind of Plex Home situation they get the Plex pass when they're using my server also one thing I really like about plex is they're a media application I do use that quite a bit and that's kind of a Plex pass thing that's like my primary music consumption method at the moment really nice so with that if you're interested in setting up your very own jelly fin server I have a series of tutorials on that and I'm going to be working on a series of serials series of tutorials for Plex if you want to get that spun up and running the Plex setup tutorial is going to kind of revolve around this geekom uh what is this mini air 11 super cheap Intel machine I believe it's one or two hundred dollars and this right here can run a Plex server just fine so again big thank you for geekom for sponsoring this video and with all that I do hope you have an absolutely beautiful day and good bye

Channel: TechHut

Views: 117,656

Keywords: linux, linux tutorial, desktop enviorment

Id: MUhpu42sWWM

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2023