this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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I’ve got Jellyfin up and running right now on a DS620Slim NAS and it’s running pretty good so far. I’ve seen a lot of people say they prefer Plex over Jellyfin. What are the main advantages to plex?

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Jellyfin:

  • Free
  • Gets the job done
  • Not in financial trouble
  • No layoffs
  • Not trying to sell you stuff
  • Not selling your watch habbits
  • Mainly develops features people want

Plex (paid):

  • Decade of development with pretty solid pay features
  • Easy sharing with friends and remote watching
  • Decent clients for almost every device and more solid transcoding
  • Fairly quick fixes for problems
  • Great intro/credit/commercial skipping
  • Only develops features that might make money
  • In the middle of layoffs
  • Centralized authentication makes is impossible to watch if offline or they're offline unless you removed local authentication before it went offline.
  • They sell your viewing habbits

Plex is super convenient and slimy

Jellyfin is pure and behind on features, clients and comforts.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can get intro skipping for Jellyfin too with a plugin. It even works with Findroid, which is a native Android app for Jellyfin. I've been using it for a while now (maybe a month or so) and it's always worked perfectly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What's the name of that plugin?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

You know, its not that hard to just try and google "intro skipper jellyfin" since its actually the name of it, but here you go https://github.com/ConfusedPolarBear/intro-skipper

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Question about the viewing habits data. Is this only related to the Free Ad Supported Streaming content Plex pushes or are they also tracking viewing habits of users personal libraries?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There's no way of knowing, which is the whole problem with their model and why a lot of us self host things in the first place. Even if they super duper promise not to use the data, they could be lying. And if they are actually true to their word today, that could change tomorrow.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

We know the data goes to Plex.

I would not bet you ANY amount of money they'd leave any stone unturned on data sales.

That's why none of the stuff I sign up with them is using any of my usual credentials, they do have my ip though.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seems like I’ll continue to stick with Jellyfin because of the offline access. My internet is very spotty where I live so it seems to be the best option.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Same here.

My internet connection isn't too spotty, but having gone through it I found it really annoying not being able to watch my own shows off my own systems just because I can't auth to Plex's login servers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Great list of comparison!

Worth noting that Jellyfin is not only free as in beer (if you selfhost), but also free as in Freedom i.e. open source.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

?! I can watch stuff locally from my Plex server even if my internet is down.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You have to disable authentication for certain ip's / local networks. It's not easy or straight forward, but it works.

Last time I had an outage, I was still watching from my roku and in the browser.

https://www.howtogeek.com/303282/how-to-use-plex-media-server-without-internet-access/

Trick is, it's 4000% easier to set up when you're on the internet.

You can insert some xml in places if you're offline, but if you're offline, knowing the places is incredibly difficult.