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Not necessarily related, but I'll take the opportunity to share my dislike of this company. Like others, they built a loyal following around a set of features p
by BowBun 1y ago
Not necessarily related, but I'll take the opportunity to share my dislike of this company. Like others, they built a loyal following around a set of features provided, no questions asked, to stream your content to your own devices.
Over the last couple of years, Plex has continued to strip functionality, add paywalls, make deals with publishing companies, and take other actions that firmly put them in the 'enshittifaction' phase. They've capitalized on the community that gave them their success, so I've cashed out as well.
At this point there is little need for those of us with some technical ability to use this software and all the bloat that comes with it. Jellyfin[1] is an excellent alternative that I've fully switched over to this last year. I will not let a company take ownership of my media library, ever.
[1] https://jellyfin.org/ https://jellyfin.org/
- gchamonlive 1y agoDo I still need to mess with filenames in order to have jellyfin pick them up to create the library?
- BowBun 1y agoI haven't noticed this issue any more than Plex, seems to be more about having all the files in a clear folder for a show/season than the specific individual file names. But YMMV
- defrost 1y agoNot if: * they already have peer filename.nfo files with TVDB | IMDB | TMDB ID's * not if they have scene standard names AND are not ambiguous media names (eg: Utopia - which of the 5 possible series do you mean?) But these are issues all media libraries face. Group series episodes in per series (or even per season) folders and include a tvshow.nfo file with any IDs. eg: <episodeguide>{"tmdb":"328","imdb":"tt0983200","tvdb":"82616","tvrage":"7565","wikidata":"Q6805564"}</episodeguide> <id>82616</id> <imdbid>tt0983200</imdbid> <tmdbid>328</tmdbid> <uniqueid default="false" type="tmdb">328</uniqueid> <uniqueid default="false" type="imdb">tt0983200</uniqueid> <uniqueid default="true" type="tvdb">82616</uniqueid> <uniqueid default="false" type="tvrage">7565</uniqueid> <uniqueid default="false" type="wikidata">Q6805564</uniqueid> <premiered>1989-05-08</premiered> is over kill for Media Watch https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/328-media-watch https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/328-media-watch which just leaves the issue of TheMovieDB being weak on metadata for that series .. but can be completed from theTVDB https://www.thetvdb.com/series/media-watch https://www.thetvdb.com/series/media-watch
- unethical_ban 1y agoSoemtimes I have needed to rename files, but to me it is both sensible (how else to recognize a show, maybe a metadata file) and totally worth it. I don't want to need to have a centralized account to access my media library on my device. I don't want to have to pay monthly to enable hardware transcoding.
- gchamonlive 1y agoI can't because most of my media is in an off-site server and the mount point is readonly
- theshrike79 1y agoThen rename them at the off-site server? There are very specific and common standard on renaming video files to contain "metadata" so that every single tool doesn't have to use ffmpeg to investigate and try to guess the exact movie/tv show from the title. The Plex naming guidelines are pretty good: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-movie-media-files/ https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-... Some people like to add resolution and audio track information to the file name too.
- nick_ 1y agoYes. This is the flaw in Jellyfin that makes it a non-starter for me. One time I spent like two hours updating all the metadata, and then some strangely worded button reset it all. Haven't used it since.
- pixl97 1y ago>then some strangely worded button reset it all "Reset universal entropy"
- vachina 1y agoIf you categorize your libraries into their correct directories (i.e. TV into TV, movies into movies), then no. Their metadata lookup is quite solid.
- gchamonlive 1y agoWill give it a try, thanks
- 0points 1y agoYou need to sometimes suffix the folder/file name with {imdb-tt1234} to make it match the correct movie/show. This is the same deal with Plex tho, although I found plex internal metadata engine to auto-match better than jellyfin currently does. You can help here though. Just come to https://www.themoviedb.org/ https://www.themoviedb.org/ and help us add metadata.
- gchamonlive 1y agoChanging files isn't really an option for me because my media stays in an off-site server and the mount point is readonly. I'll setup jellyfin and see which titles I'm unable to add and try to collaborate on metadata. It's always important to favor opensource. I can always have both services running side by side.
- 0points 1y agoYou can also manually match each movie from the jellyfin frontend, but the issue with going this path is that if you need to rebuild your jellyfin instance for some reason, you would need to redo all of this manual matching. So, the recommended path is to clean up the media files: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/
- johnbellone 1y agoI have a “lifetime pass”. I’ve noticed some of these “features” creeping into the ecosystem (bloat), but I haven’t actually seen any stripped functionality. For the most part, it works as advertised. That being said, a lot of my mates are moving to Jellyfin. Nothing but good things from them.
- BowBun 1y agoFor lifetime pass owners, I think you've dodged the features they've put paywalls up for. The big one is preventing free accounts from streaming to shared user libraries. So if you have your pass + 5 buddies sharing their plexes (and they don't have Plus), you cannot view their content I believe.
- blactuary 1y agoYou first post said "built a loyal following around a set of features provided, no questions asked, to stream your content to your own devices" and now you're saying they removed the ability for people to share content with each other if they are not paying customers.
- hamdingers 1y ago> but I haven’t actually seen any stripped functionality Plugins, the watch later list, the up next/playback queue, Plex Cloud/Cloud Sync, photo backup (this one hurt), privacy preferences were badly nerfed. Those are just the ones I miss, I'm sure there are more (like the short lived arcade thing).
- ewenjo 1y agoWatch Together is also being removed
- ajdude 1y agoWhich got a lot of people (including me, also a lifetime subscriber) in this thread absolutely livid: https://forums.plex.tv/t/allow-watch-together-for-tv-shows-mod-more-than-1-episode-at-a-time/644669 https://forums.plex.tv/t/allow-watch-together-for-tv-shows-m... (We were begging for them to fix the functionality of watch together for almost 5 years)
- vachina 1y agoThey removed mobile device playback rights from users who paid for this feature specifically. Nobody in their right mind will do business with Plex.
- magicalhippo 1y agoI like Jellyfin, but I keep using Plex for two reasons. First is subtitle support is quite limited in comparison. It fails more often than it works for me. Second is the lack of skipping. This is with the Android TV client, haven't really tried the others.
- BowBun 1y agoFair, I handle subtitles in my ingestion pipeline and so those are ready to go by the time Jellyfin gets involved. Skipping, do you mean skipping intros and such? Or something else?
- magicalhippo 1y ago> I handle subtitles in my ingestion pipeline What do you do? Separate file? Not sure if I've noticed a pattern other than "mostly doesn't work well". > Skipping, do you mean skipping intros and such? Sorry, I meant jumping back and forth. On Plex I can just press left/right arrows on the remote, and it jumps a few seconds. On Jellyfin I have to press ok/confirm to actually do the jump. Very annoying.
- theshrike79 1y agoThe *arr stack is what people usually use. Bazarr specifically in this case, it can search multiple locations for missing subtitles automatically.
- vachina 1y agoSome Plex clients will fail to direct stream DTS + PGS. Jellyfin somehow just works on all my devices.
- JamesSwift 1y agoJellyfin clients are the weakest aspect imo. Sort of hit or miss, and the ios client is inferior to a 3rd party paid offering (infuse)
- 0points 1y ago
- vlovich123 1y agoOne thing I'll note is that while I've found every device surface I've come across has a Plex app, that isn't true of Jellyfin. YMMV.