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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Have a look at Jellyfin, if you haven't. I moved from Plex because of restrictions in HW decoding.
Do you mean hardware encoding, because that's what's paywalled in Plex.
I personally migrated from a Jellyfin ecosystem to a Plex with Lifetime Pass one when building my current server - while both are highly capable media servers, Plex has, by far, the better clients.
Yup much easier to use Plex, couldn't stand jellyfin
Jellyfin requires a reverse proxy or similar to be reachable from outside the network, once that's set up, the usability gap between the two becomes a lot smaller. And Jellyfin does, still, have some benefits over Plex - first and foremost: it doesn't require an active Internet connection and an "ok" from a central server to fully function - it also has fewer restrictions when it comes to sharing content and a better plugin ecosystem.
Again, I think both are highly capable servers and I'm running both in parallel, even after migrating most of my personal use to Plex.
It's the clients where it all falls down, sadly. Jellyfin's are, even after all these years, clunky, ugly and unpleasant. The choice of supported devices and systems is also quite limited. This is where Plex shines: they have a, generally excellent, client for pretty much everything you would ever want to play your media on.
To be fair there are workarounds to getting Plex to play locally without Internet (I had to look this up because I didn't believe you lol) but you have to set it up on the server with internet.. I originally started with jellyfin but it was too clunky for me overall, Plex was way more elegant. Also I'm pretty sure Plex deprecated plugins entirely.
Plex killed their official plugin repository, but plugins are, technically, still supported. There just isn't much life left in that ecosystem after Plex strangled it.
Ironically, it's probably Jellyfin's thriving plugin-ecosystem that's holding back its clients - since anything with a native UI can't really be used with any plugin that extends the UI feature set and vice versa.
Oh, and all "workarounds" that I know of for "offline" Plex involve essentially disabling user auth for certain IPs - which is insane. Plex simply doesn't support local auth, it's not an offline-capable solution. That (and some other restrictions) is why I'm still running and maintaining Jellyfin as a fallback.
That's true, I'm considering having jellyfin spun up for local playback just in case now. Thanks