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I've been a Plex-to-Jellyfin convert for a long while now, and I've nothing bad to say. I switched because Plex kept pushing their streaming services, and the f

I've been a Plex-to-Jellyfin convert for a long while now, and I've nothing bad to say. I switched because Plex kept pushing their streaming services, and the fuzzy feeling I get from running FOSS. Jellyfin used to run on my desktop which has a beefy CPU/GPU, but runs fine on my puny Synology NAS.

MikusR 5y ago
Seeing how Jellyfin runs on raspberry pi 4 your Synology must be very fast with lots of ram.
- y4mi 5y ago
  It might just have hardware support for relevant codecs. They often do, which gives them a massive advantage when playing media files.
  - MikusR 5y ago
    It only hosts the files.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      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?
      - boolemancer 5y ago
        Jellyfin does also support transcoding, also using ffmpeg.
    - wolrah 5y ago
      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.
      - MikusR 5y ago
        No transcoding. Jellyfin simply running uses too much ram (like 10 times plex does) so pi runs out of memory and starts swapping.
        kelnos 5y ago
        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.
        jeroenhd 5y ago
        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.
        MikusR 5y ago
        HTOP says plex uses 100M
- jszymborski 5y ago
  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.
- machrider 5y ago
  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!
notesinthefield 5y ago
How much of your use is audio streaming? I'm dying to make my collection remotely accessible after leaving the Plex ecosystem.
- jszymborski 5y ago
  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).
  - hardwaresofton 5y ago
    Also check out funkwhale!
    - rglullis 5y ago
      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?
      - hardwaresofton 5y ago
        Ahh no I haven't, if that's not working then it might be better to stick with subsonic...
      - theandrewbailey 5y ago
        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 https://github.com/ultrasonic/ultrasonic
    - revolvingocelot 5y ago
      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 https://docs.funkwhale.audio/features.html#scope
awill 5y ago
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.
- joshspankit 5y ago
  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.
  - afavour 5y ago
    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.
    - awill 5y ago
      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.
  - josteink 5y ago
    > 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.
candiddevmike 5y ago
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?
- rglullis 5y ago
  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.
  - klahaha 5y ago
    jellyfin is good but lots of bugs need help. "just being user" like me is not helping very much
    - rglullis 5y ago
      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?
      - addingnumbers 5y ago
        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.
        rglullis 5y ago
        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...
endisneigh 5y ago
I'm curious - why does it matter if Plex is pushing their streaming services? Isn't it really easy to ignore?
- executive 5y ago
  Jellyfin UI is cleaner, no upsell buttons and does not tie everything to cloud account.
- oliwarner 5y ago
  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.
  - flatiron 5y ago
    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!
    - Frank2312 5y ago
      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/396794 https://forums.plex.tv/t/dvr-moving-files-from-grab-bug/3967...
    - joshspankit 5y ago
wussboy 5y ago
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.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  I don't understand this desire, why would you ever want that? The point of using something like Plex is to organize by metadata.
  - avh02 5y ago
    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.
    - raffraffraff 5y ago
      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.
      - Pius_IX 5y ago
        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 ;)
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I disabled all those streaming service views so I only see my own stuff.

MikusR 5y ago

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

y4mi 5y ago
It might just have hardware support for relevant codecs. They often do, which gives them a massive advantage when playing media files.
- MikusR 5y ago
  It only hosts the files.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    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?
    - boolemancer 5y ago
      Jellyfin does also support transcoding, also using ffmpeg.
  - wolrah 5y ago
    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.
    - MikusR 5y ago
      No transcoding. Jellyfin simply running uses too much ram (like 10 times plex does) so pi runs out of memory and starts swapping.
      - kelnos 5y ago
        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.
      - jeroenhd 5y ago
        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.
        MikusR 5y ago
        HTOP says plex uses 100M
jszymborski 5y ago
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.
machrider 5y ago
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!

notesinthefield 5y ago

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

jszymborski 5y ago
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).
- hardwaresofton 5y ago
  Also check out funkwhale!
  - rglullis 5y ago
    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?
    - hardwaresofton 5y ago
      Ahh no I haven't, if that's not working then it might be better to stick with subsonic...
    - theandrewbailey 5y ago
      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 https://github.com/ultrasonic/ultrasonic
  - revolvingocelot 5y ago
    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 https://docs.funkwhale.audio/features.html#scope

awill 5y ago

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.

joshspankit 5y ago
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.
- afavour 5y ago
  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.
  - awill 5y ago
    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.
- josteink 5y ago
  > 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.

candiddevmike 5y ago

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?

rglullis 5y ago
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.
- klahaha 5y ago
  jellyfin is good but lots of bugs need help. "just being user" like me is not helping very much
  - rglullis 5y ago
    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?
    - addingnumbers 5y ago
      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.
      - rglullis 5y ago
        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...

endisneigh 5y ago

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

executive 5y ago
Jellyfin UI is cleaner, no upsell buttons and does not tie everything to cloud account.
oliwarner 5y ago
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.
- flatiron 5y ago
  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!
  - Frank2312 5y ago
    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/396794 https://forums.plex.tv/t/dvr-moving-files-from-grab-bug/3967...
  - joshspankit 5y ago

wussboy 5y ago

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.

Godel_unicode 5y ago
I don't understand this desire, why would you ever want that? The point of using something like Plex is to organize by metadata.
- avh02 5y ago
  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.
  - raffraffraff 5y ago
    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.
    - Pius_IX 5y ago
      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 ;)

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

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