After 14 years with Plex, I finally moved my video library to Jellyfin. Why rising costs, feature restrictions and digital ownership pushed me towards FOSS.
I am hoping that jellyfin gets better over the next few years. I keep trying it and it keeps feeling broken to me. Lots of people have the same experience it seems but then there’s also always a few people that act like I’m crazy. Nah, it’s still not there, unless things have changed a lot in the past year.
Not OP, but I have similar feelings and they have nothing to do with the client or plugins. If I can’t easily and securely share my Jellyfin with the Internet beyond my LAN without resorting to a VPN, then Jellyfish is not going to come close to replacing Plex. Sharing my library securely with tech illiterate family and any browser I have access to, without modification, was the one and only reason I moved away from XBMC/Kodi and installed Plex in the first place. Jellyfin is fine inside my LAN and for my personal use, totally fails at hosting.
I use a 3rd party client called Wholphin and it works great.
Also it helps to set up profiles in sonarr/radarr to make sure you’re getting media thats compatible with the devices that will interact with Jellyfin, and filter out formats that cause problems. I use Profilarr to load in community made quality profiles to sonarr/radarr and then i copy them and tweak them for myself.
Before i started doing this i had loads of problems with Jellyfin not being able to play stuff, and now everything runs perfectly.
The biggest discovery I made that was causing a lot of my problems was HDR formats. HDR10+ only really works on Samsung TVs for example. I dont have a Samsung TV, so anything I had that would try to play that content would come out a weird green/purple colour. Content with Dolby Vision Profile 5 would flat out not play on devices that don’t support Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision Profile 7 falls back to regular HDR10 when the device doesnt accept DV, so that works, but DV Profile 5 doesnt do that.
I was able to filter out HDR10+ and DV Profile 5 using quality profiles and all my playback issues disappeared immediately.
I am hoping that jellyfin gets better over the next few years. I keep trying it and it keeps feeling broken to me. Lots of people have the same experience it seems but then there’s also always a few people that act like I’m crazy. Nah, it’s still not there, unless things have changed a lot in the past year.
If you mean limitations in the client, I discovered that there’s a Jellyfin for Kodi plugin.
Kodi has had decades of development. It’s super customizable, has every feature you can think of, direct plays every video format, and is fast.
Having it act as a Jellyfin client has been amazing and given me the best of both worlds.
Not OP, but I have similar feelings and they have nothing to do with the client or plugins. If I can’t easily and securely share my Jellyfin with the Internet beyond my LAN without resorting to a VPN, then Jellyfish is not going to come close to replacing Plex. Sharing my library securely with tech illiterate family and any browser I have access to, without modification, was the one and only reason I moved away from XBMC/Kodi and installed Plex in the first place. Jellyfin is fine inside my LAN and for my personal use, totally fails at hosting.
Where does this myth come from that Plex is secure to share over the open internet?
Nice. I’ll try that
I use a 3rd party client called Wholphin and it works great.
Also it helps to set up profiles in sonarr/radarr to make sure you’re getting media thats compatible with the devices that will interact with Jellyfin, and filter out formats that cause problems. I use Profilarr to load in community made quality profiles to sonarr/radarr and then i copy them and tweak them for myself.
Before i started doing this i had loads of problems with Jellyfin not being able to play stuff, and now everything runs perfectly.
The biggest discovery I made that was causing a lot of my problems was HDR formats. HDR10+ only really works on Samsung TVs for example. I dont have a Samsung TV, so anything I had that would try to play that content would come out a weird green/purple colour. Content with Dolby Vision Profile 5 would flat out not play on devices that don’t support Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision Profile 7 falls back to regular HDR10 when the device doesnt accept DV, so that works, but DV Profile 5 doesnt do that.
I was able to filter out HDR10+ and DV Profile 5 using quality profiles and all my playback issues disappeared immediately.
I appreciate these tips. I’m gonna save this comment for the next time I circle back to Jellyfin.