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I've tried a few times with every alternative to Plex out there, but none of them seem to do a decent job handling the wide variety of video content in my Plex

I've tried a few times with every alternative to Plex out there, but none of them seem to do a decent job handling the wide variety of video content in my Plex library. I've tried Emby, Jellyfin, and everything else. For someone starting from scratch, sure, pick whatever you want. But to migrate a set of gigantic libraries, ouch.

merlincorey 4y ago
Can you perhaps detail some of the issues you encountered for those of us who might be considering a change?
- pwinnski 4y ago
  The last one I tried was Emby, sometimes during the pandemic, and it just flat-out didn't come up with a number of movies that matched the number of movie files in the directly I pointed it at. It also seemed to mis-match or fail to match many of them. Admittedly, I have a decent percentage of foreign-language movies, mostly in filenames with their English-translated titles, but Emby would often pick an English-language movie that did not match the filename exactly, while ignoring a Korean (for example) movie that did. IIRC, it was even worse when it came to TV. Fortunately, I was running it side-by-side with Plex, so after about a week of trying to get it to recognize my entire collection, I just gave up and deleted it. Your mileage may vary.
  - washadjeffmad 4y ago
    Detection in Emby works but is... odd. I have Premiere. There's still definitely a "right way" to organize your library, but detection and settings have massively improved over the past year (I'm on 4.8.0.13). Probably 15% of my library has had to be manually identified, and 70% is non-English. Prioritizing the metadata sources helps a lot. Definitely a labor of love.
heavyset_go 4y ago
You can use something like Radarr to put your movie collection into sane and consistent filenames and directory structures that apps like Jellyfin can parse well and store metadata in without issues. You can do the same thing with Sonarr for shows, and pretty much any ID3 tag editor with batch renaming for music. Both apps seem to have better identification and normalization features than Jellyfin does.
- graftak 4y ago
  If you go this route you should set it up for sonarr media directories to include the initial release year. This helps identify series with the same or similar names, like The Office, or House of Cards.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  I happen to believe that my current movie and tv collection already use sane and consistent filenames. Certainly they're sane enough for Plex (and most are set by the Scene). If you're suggesting a directory per movie, we disagree on what is sane.

merlincorey 4y ago

Can you perhaps detail some of the issues you encountered for those of us who might be considering a change?

pwinnski 4y ago
The last one I tried was Emby, sometimes during the pandemic, and it just flat-out didn't come up with a number of movies that matched the number of movie files in the directly I pointed it at. It also seemed to mis-match or fail to match many of them. Admittedly, I have a decent percentage of foreign-language movies, mostly in filenames with their English-translated titles, but Emby would often pick an English-language movie that did not match the filename exactly, while ignoring a Korean (for example) movie that did. IIRC, it was even worse when it came to TV. Fortunately, I was running it side-by-side with Plex, so after about a week of trying to get it to recognize my entire collection, I just gave up and deleted it. Your mileage may vary.
- washadjeffmad 4y ago
  Detection in Emby works but is... odd. I have Premiere. There's still definitely a "right way" to organize your library, but detection and settings have massively improved over the past year (I'm on 4.8.0.13). Probably 15% of my library has had to be manually identified, and 70% is non-English. Prioritizing the metadata sources helps a lot. Definitely a labor of love.

heavyset_go 4y ago

You can use something like Radarr to put your movie collection into sane and consistent filenames and directory structures that apps like Jellyfin can parse well and store metadata in without issues. You can do the same thing with Sonarr for shows, and pretty much any ID3 tag editor with batch renaming for music. Both apps seem to have better identification and normalization features than Jellyfin does.

graftak 4y ago
If you go this route you should set it up for sonarr media directories to include the initial release year. This helps identify series with the same or similar names, like The Office, or House of Cards.
pwinnski 4y ago
I happen to believe that my current movie and tv collection already use sane and consistent filenames. Certainly they're sane enough for Plex (and most are set by the Scene). If you're suggesting a directory per movie, we disagree on what is sane.