Technology

Biggest issue I and my friends have with my Plex server is the constant buffer-play-for-a-minute-buffer issue with certain anime subtitle formats. Although the little bit of searching I’ve done with that indicates that may be more of an issue with the device being streamed on than with Plex itself. I dunno.

My main complaint is when it decides to just stop casting to Chromecast in the middle of episodes randomly - then I have to open the app, reconnect, and resume.

Also I find the Chromecast controls stop responding frequently making it so I can't pause what I'm watching - it'll like disconnect from the Chromecast but keep playing.

My partner also complains about lots of bugs on the iOS app.

My biggest complaint is that it defaults to "recommended" instead of "library" which means for new users (family members you are trying to help remotely) don't see the videos in your collection but instead a random unordered list to scroll sideways.

After you select library to see everything, it doesn't save that view as default unless you go into settings and change it to remember changes.

A new annoying feature they added is when setting up a new account, the default is to send every video you watch to all friends/family unless you select disable. So you can't even setup quickly by putting in a user/password and being ready to go. You have to talk family members through setup or everyone with access to your Plex will get email spammed with everything that person watched.

I have home videos on my server and this means lengthy phone calls to family so they can actually see the videos.

It’s terrible with direct streaming lossless Dolby Atmos (TrueHD) streams, not only where it’s not possible but there are workarounds (AppleTV / Infuse), but also on each and every platform it’s being done by other apps (Android, Xbox, PC / Kodi).

I only use it because I paid peanuts for lifetime premium and alternatives have egregious UX that I can withstand but my extended family cannot.

Because jellyfin has less device compatibility, worse transcoding performance, and still struggles with media matching. Oh and still had memory leak issues.

I have it installed, regularly update and test it, i want to ditch plex. But it's just got to many basic issues. Anime matching in particular is rough and yes even after adjusting match sources some anime just outright fails till i manually match, matches incorrectly, won't work either way.

No it's not the filenames. I use Sonarr, they are all very clean.

Series name(year) | Season folder (001) | SxxExx episode title

Edit: i give up figuring out how to make this stay treed, fucking hate reddit/lemmy formatting

i use Jellyfin but a big thing that Plex has is the ability to easily stream remotely. Its doable with Jellyfin but requires a lot of manual configuration that a non technical user just can't/won't do.

I find the Jellyfin UX to be unbearable. It frequently shows the metadata for completely different movies, despite perfect file naming. Nearly every time I use it I have to restart it due to some weird UI bug or another.

The only reason that Plex has survived every service purge on my system is because Jellyfin doesn't have a PS4 app. Every other device that accesses my media is going through Jellyfin. I have my PS4 connected to Jellyfin via DLNA, but asking my wife to give up the polished (turd) Plex app for the file-picker front end in the media player app isn't a viable option for me.

Right now for me its smart collections and playlists and the fact that you can pin them to the home screen. My family lives off the home screen and smart collections.

depends on your distro.
an internet search like "debian jellyfin install" should point you into the right direction.

if in doubt or having trouble: there's a friendly linux community around the corner.

The official documentation has some guides on setting it up in a few different ways, although they assume the user is decently familiar with Linux/terminal commands and such. There might be some more beginner-friendly guides out there, though.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/container/

I switched from Plex to Jellyfin a while back and I've been very happy with it.

They can, I turned off my plex VM to save resources but no real reason they can’t both point to the same libraries at once.

Yes I do this. Same exact library folders so I can let my friends use whatever they prefer. If everything is named in a Plex friendly way it should just work in jellyfin.

Their main product is telemetry and selling your watch history to advertisers.

That's why Plex doesn't work without an active internet connection.