Not only does it acknowledges that Plex is still far better than Jellyfin with its whole ecosystem, but it also depict pretty nicely the entitlement of the users overall.
On one side, they paid $75 more than five years ago for a piece of software for which they still receive weekly updates. On the other, they talk about how leadership at Jellyfin decided to throw the blanket after a burning themselves out for free.
Up till now, Plex kept their promise regarding the Lifetime pass: we still receive updates, we still have all the features. So, unless they change that, they haven't broken their promise. It seems only fair from them to try to run a sustainable business, which you can do without renewed income. They have to find money. They raise subscription price: no impact on existing Lifetime pass owners. They add ad-supported features: no impact on existing Lifetime pass owners. I don't see a single add wherever I access my Plex library, I have hidden their "free" library. I still have 100% of the features I had when I bought the Lifetime pass. Except that I have now access to more features.
Sure, nobody forced them to say "Lifetime", but I don't see how I could be mad if they decided to release a completely new version that is out of the Lifetime scope. I would still have access to the old one, but if I was interested in the new one, I would have to move to one of their new plans, that looks more sustainable in the long run.
Plex is still the easiest one to use for regular user or for the people, like me, that act as IT support for their family and friends, and don't want to spend their evenings and weekends tweaking their aunt's TV just for the sake of using Open Source software.
Recently, I've been asked more and more by friends and family to set up Plex for them as it's "free" and "easy". I do the basic setup or walk them through it. Then they want to share to their libraries to others or just watch off their connection and hit the wall of having to have a subscription.
Then they bring me Jellyfin as the alternative from something they saw on XDA. I'm not too quick to help them set that up just because of the current state of it and having to find them players on their various devices. As you mentioned, I've been spending pretty much be spending all my free time helping them set it up but I think Plex being so cost prohibitive now so Jellyfin will start to become the defacto option as what we'll be tweaking for those of us that act as IT support.
What does this mean?
This will reduce the switching workload, and you can run both services at the same time whilst trying out Jellyfin.
For foolproof matching, adding Plex metadata in the style of "{tmdb-12345}" to the directory name would cause problems for Jellyfin, as they used to demand different formatting, for instance square brackets.
It has taken a years to convince the maintainers that this change is a good idea and not "letting Plex determine the future course of Jellyfin."
The vision of Silo appears to be much more clear, and has quite a few great devs behind it. It also has features to run side by side and has full JF api support. I have no involvement in the project, just excited for a new player in the space.
Something to keep an eye on!
> and has full Postgres support from the get-go
Then I went on siloserver's website and I was even more confused.
What made the success of Plex is how easy it is to setup, how nice it looks and how easy it is to use.
Siloserver's marketing miss all those points because they focus on the tech stack, don't show a single picture of the UI and don't demonstrate the UX.
Even as someone who understands the tech written on the website, I don't see the point. So I can easily imagine how someone without the technical knowledge would feel about this...
I'm thinking of trying it out though to see if there's any noticeable differences in performance etc.
Marketing is not really the important bit at the moment when they’re working on building things from the ground up.
I was just mentioning it because it’s a new contender to the space, changing the status quo. Always a good thing in the OSS world.
* general Tv support - no Jellyfin app on Samsung TVs (at least older ones)
* General challenges to get things to start - it never worked for me out-of-the-box
* slightly weird sign in flows because it’s all self-hosted (have to first install a mobile app to make signing in on TV app smoother unless you happen to have your computer and TV side by side)
* weird issues with things suddenly stopping to work: DLNA was working but without any changes I can think of on my end it no longer works
* weird dlna support - at least with iOS VLC it didn’t work smoothly - like VLC sometimes wouldn’t see the announcement or something and I’d have to reset. Could be a VLC issue but don’t recall similar problems with Plex
So basically Plex is a smoother, easier to use experience that typically “just works” without issues.
- Jellyfin forced me to organize my files into Show/Season folders, whereas Plex just handled my original flat mess of scattered files.
- When playing video on Plex, I generally have to wait some time before subtitles show up, whereas the subtitles in Plex just show up immediately
- Plex has built in search for openly available subtitles matching your video that you can use if your video lacks subtitles (not sure if Jellyfin has it too)
That said, I still prefer Jellyfin for numerous other reasons, and I don't regret my migration.
You keep all your shows in a single directory? or just sorted into folders per show?
I haven't had any issues with files just sorted into show folders for shorter series, but even in general it's very un-particular about filenames as long as you have `<show name> (<year>) S<Season #>E<Episode #>` (and it accepts a decent number of formats for season/episode number, and year is usually only needed if you need to differentiate shows with the same name).
Regarding this, try out sonarr/radarr with hard links.
Plex was the jellyfin of the 2010’s. Pirate-centric (or at least agnostic), hobbyist focused, a bit hard to use and ugly but super valuable.
Then they went corporate and yeah it’s weird and in decline.
https://demo.jellyfin.org/stable/web/#/home
Username is demo, PW is blank
Also, I've been running jellyfin for many years, I've had no issues
If you don't mind me asking what client are you using and server setup are you using. Any tips from someone who has been using it for a decent chunk of time?
> think of it as Netflix for which you provide the media yourself.
Netflix is a provider of content. If I have the content, why do I need a provider for?
> Having the ability to connect with a client running on something connected to your TV is nice
(???) But that's what I'm doing now with Kodi.
> as is the ability to connect remotely (if you open up the ports on your firewall of course).
Wireguard (only one port), and all home LAN is accessible, not just one service.
> It also gives you things like remembering what shows you were watching and giving a shortcut to the next episode
Kodi does that too. Or maybe you mean it remembers between player devices? See ep.1 on player A and it shows up as seen when I start player B too? That's nice, but I don't think this feature alone is worth the effort of installing and maintaining yet another service.
I think I read somewhere that Kodi can use a remote MySQL/MariaDB for it's library. I could probably set up a shared DB.
> intro skipping
How does it know where the intro is and how long?
> transcoding
If I were to install Plex/Jellyfin it would be where the storage is - on a router that also serves as a NAS. It doesn't have the power to transcode anything. Meanwhile, the lowest spec phone can play everything. So, why would anyone transcode in 2026?
It has more polish and refinement than Jellyfin but doesn't have the obtrusive ads and whatnot that Plex offers. Client support is also great. Jellyfin is still quickly gaining ground but Emby is still my media server of choice for now.
I'm a Plex user who's been thinking about trying Jellyfin out, largely in response to some recent UI changes I dislike but... what Plex ads? I don't have any on my android apps, on Roku installs, or on my parent's SmartTV, and none of my other users have ever mentioned any ads to me. (If I was seeing ads, Jellyfin would become "take some time off work and get it working now".)
I know I've disabled everything except my own libraries, so it's possible there's a setting somewhere that allows them, but if so, I disabled it so long ago I honestly don't remember ever seeing any. Are other Plex users seeing ads? Was it after a recent update that I may have skipped, maybe?
Last time I searched I couldn't turn it off. But maybe I missed that setting.
Emby just works, it's players are great, and issues actually get fixed. I know it's a closed source fork of XBMC, I know that's controversial, but the product itself is just so good.
Did you try anything else before hand or just go straight to Emby? I have to say I never really gave it a proper chance
The only thing keeping me on plex is my lifetime plex pass, and family inertia.
b) I would never use an app that used VLC for playback.
And it’s in their repo.
It seems to be status “official beta” and closing in on a new release with a considerable amount of rework done.
I’m running a local build deployed to my appletv and it’s working fine.
I say that without judgement, it’s just a reality. Open source was always going to be the path.
I paid for Plex for a long time but I no longer use it because I got fed up of fighting it. (I now use Jellyfin + Tailscale instead.) I think the problem with Plex is they aren't happy with what they are: a service for people viewing their own (yes, pirated) media library. They always wanted to be something more. Netflix envy.
But all anyone I know ever wanted Plex to do was handle their media library, perhaps offer a paid tunnelling system but otherwise get out of the way.
That killer remote user connection brokering can’t be free, right?
Maybe I'm old, but it feels like everyone has a little too much "business-brain."
The dream would be: anybody with a jellyfin install can add your library to theirs, anybody with the jellyfin client can be invited to browse your library.
I've been playing with Kodi with the Jellyfin plug-in but it requires such brittle tower of themes and plug-ins to look like Plex that I've yet to make the switch.
Not having that is an absolute deal breaker.