The open source alternative to my sponsor - Jellyfin vs Plex

my relationship with Plex has been Rocky it feels like they've changed hey uh can I watch a movie when I signed up for a lifetime license our future looked so bright but what happened I've been a loyal Plex user basically since I found out that air video didn't have an Android client and for the most part it's been great well at least it's worked mostly the truth is that increasingly I've been feeling like plexus lost its way I don't want games or live TV or yet another bloody movie rental service I want a management tool that organizes and streams my media library to my devices and while it does still do that mostly the community feedback on our recent sponsored video was the little push that I needed to finally check out the big competitor even internally around here jellyfin which is a free and open source media management tool has received a lot of Praise but like any open source project you can count on three things some really good ideas and functionality that commercial products would do well to copy a rabid fan base that will turn any discussion of the paid alternative into an excuse to talk about it and some quirks that you'd have to have a blind spot the size of Jupiter to miss that in mind then let's go swimming with the jellies and see what I've been missing out on and see our sponsor Zoho desk over a hundred thousand businesses worldwide trust zoho's context to wear help desk to improve productivity and ensure their customers are kept happy click the link below to learn more about Zoho desk one of the best things about plex is the Doom appeal whatever the device is be it a Samsung tizen TV PlayStation 5 VR headset or even a Facebook portal there's a first party app that will let you stream your own DVD and Blu-ray rips to it need more Shrek on your Android auto dashboard while you barrel down the highway well they've got an app for that too no sorry I'm just kidding about that one there is a Plex app for the car but it's Audio Only that's a key benefit of being a for-profit company as opposed to an open source project you have the money to pay people to handle not just porting your applications over and testing them but also to deal with the tedium of getting them certified and listed on the various app stores I can't speak for our International audience but in Canada there are a total of 11 streaming apps available on the PS4 five that aren't specifically for sports and Plex is the only one of them that's for self-hosted media and while jellyfin does also have an impressive lineup of official apps especially when they're free and open source nature is accounted for many of them are simply rappers for web browsers that access the standard jellyfin web UI it is fine for most scenarios but as we'll discuss later confining developers to the limitations of a browser does have some downsides just try using jellyfin on the Xbox and it will become painfully clear that this method doesn't work well for every use case the jellyfin team does seem to be moving to address this issue though on iOS there are currently two official apps available jellyfin mobile which is the standard web browser implementation and the newly released Swift fin a proper native app that aims to be a standalone solution instead of piggybacking on top of safari for now all that one can do is basic Library browsing and Playback which barely scratches the surface of jellyfin's capabilities but unlike its web browser dozen it finally works on Apple TV and could help to expand jellyfin's feature set in the future of course none of these apps matter if we don't have a server to get the content from in the first place thankfully neither Plex nor jellyfin are difficult to set up on a Windows desktop it's as easy as running an app and following the basic instructions all you really need is familiarity with file explorer so that you can point the server app at the correct folder or folders on Docker it is a touch trick here but it's not any more challenging than setting up any other Docker image the one curveball is you do need to choose between the Linux server image and the official image both are acceptable but the Linux server group just likes to change configurations a little bit compared to stock once the base installation is concluded the finer details of setup are all done through the web browser of any machine on the same network as the server the only scenario where there seems to be a big difference in server install methods is with FreeBSD Plex supports it jellyfin does not and trunas core is based on FreeBSD so it's a bit of a bummer for users of what is arguably the best free Nas software setting up the library was as close to seamless as possible on either platform with only minor hiccups for a few titles on Plex for example our Shrek Blu-ray rips were not detected properly on Deli fin though Thor Ragnarok was not detected properly it was slightly easier though to apply metadata on Plex as it gave us recommendations for what this unrecognized title could be while on jellyfin we needed to use movie DB in order to set it subtitles were downloaded automatically by both though which is a huge Plus for accessibility DVD special features and extras on the other hand were not handled automatically on either system both times the files needed to be put in a specially named folder and have their metadata entered manually this would be a great area for both of them to improve though we're not quite sure if there's a good resource that already exists for cataloging the home release extras especially given how many of them there are and how different regions and even different releases of the same movie in the same region will often have different content speaking of content filtering on jellyfin works pretty well on web and Android the UI is easy to follow with with enough options to find most of what you want and all of them seem to just work multiple options can be selected both from different filters and from the same section on Google TV and swiftfin that's unfortunately not the case you have some sorting options but it's not really a replacement Plex content filtering on the other hand is much more robust but it lacks the ability to mix and match options usually on Android you can mix and match away but don't try it on your TV in order to get to the filtering on either though you will first have to go into the section for the type of media you want then into the library tab from the default recommended tab jellyfin's default view by contrast just feels less demanding the first thing you see is a row of your different Library types followed by a row of media you can continue to watch and then finally a list of the latest additions to your libraries no matter what you want you're clicking in roughly the same area and it doesn't require you to use multiple menus and click all around your screen just to filter through shows or movies parental controls in jelly are likewise pretty complete libraries can be restricted by account and maximum parental ratings can be set since we're in Canada the Canadian Motion Picture ratings are used but even when media has a rating from another system it seems to translate over pretty well a PG-13 rating for example will be read the same as a 14a rating Plex has a cool feature called managed accounts which allows you to set maximum ratings by selecting one of four restriction profiles younger kid older kid teen and none you're not able to customize however what these profiles restrict or create new ones which seems like kind of an oversight to me if you create a managed account you can actually share that with your friends and family but they won't have very much autonomy over it you can share your entire Plex library with their separate account that they control though turning your Blu-ray collection into a sort of Legally problematic private Netflix in order to use all the features though they will need a Plex pass of their own jelly Fin's only option for accounts is to create one manually for each person not unlike a Plex managed account which isn't a problem but they won't be able to select their own username or recover their account if they lose their password so if you enjoy resetting great aunt Janine's six letter password every three weeks so she can watch her stories uh you'll have a great time with that how about the actual video players though as it turns out these vary a fair bit between platforms on web Plex allows you to do quite a bit like changing the subtitle Styles accessing the play queue adding a video to a playlist downloading the file and granting Library access to others the only things jellyfin does that Plex doesn't do out of the box is show you what time it will be when the video ends that's kind of cool while they can both skip intros they both use the same flawed method of detecting intros audio gets compared between episodes and sections that match are flagged as long as they adhere to a rule set as a solution it's far from perfect especially for shows with opening gags and variations such as how Lisa's saxophone riff changes slightly between episodes a better solution might be to allow a mixture of this and scene recognition with the ability to tweak it between shows Plex does not detect intros for example that are less than 20 seconds long and can only find them in the first half of an episode jellyfin's intro skip on the other hand is a plug-in that needs to be installed which isn't convenient but the payoff is that it is much more customizable that customization comes at a cost though as the only way to implement the skip intro button is with the web UI for those browser wrapper apps like the jellyfin player on iOS that works fine but for the native apps like Swift thin and iOS and Apple tv there is no way to pop up that skip intro button on Google TV both uis are similar to pretty much any other video streaming app Plex lets you toggle subtitles playlists and playback quality the usual oh and it also has an added bonus sometimes when you switch playback quality on a TV show just after the credits finish it'll act like the episode has completed kicking you to the the up next screen and then it'll auto play the next episode at original quality which is this this is intended functionality right man I've seen a lot of bugs on Plex uh jellyfin on Google TV while looking similar enough actually has a surprising amount of options for customization you can change the entire layout of the home screen the functionality of buttons on your remote and because it's a native app you can even change what underlying video player is being used though again this means that plugins that rely on modifying the web version like skip intro simply will not work on standard phone and tablet Android we see the biggest difference so far between the uis functionally they're not that different from their Google TV counterparts aside from one key detail the ability to download one of plex's biggest selling features is offline mobile access they know it and you will too if you try to use a free account gotta love that upsell the idea and this came along long before YouTube and Netflix offered similar functionality is that you can download your videos at whatever resolution in bitrate you like and then watch them on the plane or wherever else you happen to be then when you come back online any episodes or movies that you watched will be marked as such in your library man that would be a cool feature to have wouldn't it of course it would be which is why I get so angry about this plex's mobile downloads feature is buggy at best and non-functional to the point of false advertising at worst on Android downloads might work fine for you mostly so long as you want the original quality but half a gig or more per 20 minute episode is going to eat up your storage very quickly if you're working with web downloads and just two full fat Blu-rays could completely fill up an entry-level phone but then that's the whole point of having a server to transcode the files in the first place right unfortunately downloading transcoded videos is where the trouble really happens the fact that the download fails is enough to get frustrated over like no you retry this you know it failed you know it has to be retried why do you need me to come back to my phone constantly and click the button but it's even worse than that Plex will sometimes show that a download has completed even though it never downloaded anything now this problem can be made worse by not using Hardware transcoding but it can be very challenging to figure out if Hardware transcoding is working or even if it is working which GPU it's running on I mean imagine taking a long road trip with a back seat full of kids you've spent valuable packing time in the evening before loading up all the entertainment trusting Plex when it tells you hey I got you half an hour into the drive all hell breaks loose and it's become painfully clear you've been lied to it's enough to make you wish you had a vehicle with a separate back seat bubble Dome complete with optional restraints and muzzles to contain your quarreling children which is a reference they might get if the shows I tried to download for them had worked on iOS things aren't much better often the app will just crash for me when I'm trying to download and even when it doesn't it might just not work anyway if you're using a firewall with DNS rebinding or not reflection there's a very good chance that the security certificate that Plex attaches will get the transfer blocked and this has been a known issue ever since Plex switched their mobile SYNC feature for mobile downloads back in mid-2021 you heard me right Plex has had more than a full year to fix a major selling feature that they advertise and still haven't done so but thank God I have games and it's not the first time that they've pulled this mobile photo backup to your server was an awesome alternative to paid cloud services that just quietly went away fine I got over that one but downloading my media for offline viewing is a make or break feature for me I care so much about it that when I realized it had stopped working which was on a recent trip I didn't really travel for a couple years and didn't really notice I dropped Plex as a sponsor but we're not going to work with Plex until they resolve some of my longtime issues with it however it's also the same reason that I am not going to be switching over to jellyfin yet for now jellyfin only offers bog standard download the original file offline viewing and has no way of keeping track of what has or hasn't been viewed this way thankfully though the roadmap going forward looks very promising at least on paper the move to Native apps means that offline playback is a very real thing that's coming up because it doesn't require downloading a web page for the UI and it can use the system's built-in video player on official apps like fendroid already allow you to watch shows offline and can even update episodes once they're viewed unfortunately it lacks the option to download a transcoded version meaning that it's pretty rough on your storage but it is an implementation nonetheless and that means that the jellyfin core team has something to iterate on offline viewing is the top post on jellyfin's feature request board and they have said they're working on it even if there is no ETA yet similarly native intro skipping is the fourth most requested feature though for that one there's no word on whether anyone is actively working on it given that there's already open source implementations for these features in some capacity hopefully they can use the work that's already been done to cut down on development time but being free and open source slow development Cycles are to be expected and we should just be grateful for everything that they do do jellyfin's biggest contributors still have day jobs after all making it all the more impressive then when they LeapFrog Plex and functionality like their configurable HDR tone mapping I mean it's frustrating that the paid solution is so buggy and incomplete and that the Free Solution is so slow in development I mean if we could just put plex's money into jellyfin maybe we'd have a good solution but then because capitalism ruins everything we'd probably start the cycle all over again probably that leads us pretty well then into the elephant in the room MB is the formerly open source project that jellyfin is based on and apparently already has several of the features that Plex claims to have and that jellyfin claims to be working on its user base though is significantly smaller to the point where I'm kind of hesitant to put the time into switching over and it also doesn't help that there's no effective way to try it before you buy it but given that there's seemingly no other matured Alternatives could it be worth giving a shot I would love to know your experiences positive or negative With Envy sell me on it or talk me out of it as for my final message to the Plex team guys you haven't lost me yet but you have got to get it together basic functionality hair like this crappy copy of Hercules that I have that won't play back audio at original quality but will if I transcode [Music] like which by the way when I transcode half the time it reduces the audio volume and not to mention your inability to play the next episode for me on mobile stuff like that cannot be broken but if you can deal with my list here I will happily take you back as a sponsor in the meantime let me tell you about someone who isn't on my sponsor poop list secret lab their chairs are engineered to keep you incredibly comfortable for long hours at work and play their Titan Evo 2022 series chair offers 4-way lumbar support comes with a magnetic memory foam head pillow and is offered in different upholsteries like hybrid leatherette soft weave fabric and Napa leather with up to a five year extended warranty and 49 day return policy you're covered if anything goes wrong so head to the link in the description and check out secret lab today if you guys enjoyed this video you might like our Plex server guide even if you're using something like jellyfin it's actually still quite relevant

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,515,423

Keywords: Plex, Jellyfin, Homelabs, Home Labs, Home AV Servers, DIY Servers, DIY Media Servers, Media Servers, Home Theatre, Emby, Kodi, XMBC, DIY Netflix, DIY Hulu

Id: jKF5GtBIxpM

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 30 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/oxf144]

I'm really hoping this is what it takes for Plex to start taking these issues seriously. Downloads being broken for more than a year is unacceptable.

[u/sk9592]

His main gripe with Plex seems to be downloads and I don't blame him. I shouldn't need to spend an hour the night before my trip babying the downloads process, only to open Plex halfway into a plane ride and find that I can't actually play anything.

I'm also one of the small handful of people that actually used the photos backup functionality as well. Not as annoyed about this one but still bummed to see it go.

[u/Emotional-Mastodon44]

I have Jellyfin spun up solely for downloads. LTT calling Plex out for this is fantastic, there is absolutely no excuse for downloads being broken.

[u/Fit-Arugula-1592]

Guys listen, it took plex months to fix something so simple as a search bar. Give the downloads feature about 2 more years. They'll get to it when they have time.

[u/DOMME_LADIES_PM_ME]

I just wish they would fix the 5.1 to stereo volume issues. I don't get why they have the "audio boost" feature (which has no effect for me) instead of just fixing the low volume problem for 5.1 media played on stereo systems. In jellyfin this problem just doesn't exist, whether it's a stereo, 5.1, or 7.1 played on my stereo TV, the volume on my TV stays the same and I don't have to crank it up to double the normal volume just for surround sound source files.

Having Plex pass for 7 years but experiencing these kinds of rough edges with no sign of any plan to address them feels pretty lame.

[u/varano14]

If his track record is anything to go by this might be what it takes to get them moving.

Jasco, and Eufy, both recently got his wrath. Sony is currently on the block due to wifi interference but he didn't throw down the gauntlet as much with them.

[u/_penseroso_]

Long time plex user and have experienced most of the issues he mentioned. The ultra buggy download feature being the most glaring (since we had to pay for it, Jesus)

Hopefully this lights a fire under the plex teams asses.

[u/Bokaii]

I would really like to convert to Jellyfin, but there are just too many things not working out of the box, unfortunately.

Will definitely keep an eye on development, and wish the devs the best of luck!

[u/[deleted]]

For my use I honestly have not had any issues UNTIL my internet went out one day due to a snow storm and I could not access my local media sever from local network. Kinda the point of local media sever lol.

Quickly looking it up I seen there was a way to put in setting in to make it work. Got it working on my desktops app but no go on the Roku.

So my plex complaint is make local media playback from the same local network just work...