Selfhosted

It’s not just that. I’m a techie. I’ve been in the industry for decades. I know my way around computer very well.

I want to like Jellyfin and I want to ditch Plex (even though I have a lifetime license) because of what it has become and where it’s headed.

That said, the other day my Plex server had some issues that took me a while to figure out. Since when it failed I just wanted to watch an episode of a series and relax, I once again fired up the JF client. I couldn’t get seek to work, I had to manually find and download subtitles (that’s not always the case but when it is, it’s pretty annoying), and ultimately I couldn’t watch my series at all as playback would randomly stop, the player would close and I’d be back at the menu, without the position having been recorded and with no way to fast-forward as seek didn’t work at all.

I ended up spending 15min figuring out what was wrong and fixing Plex, then watched my series undisturbed.

Like I said, I want to drop Plex for JF, but in the 3 years or so that I’ve been running both, every time I fire up JF I end up running back to Plex as I just want to sit back and watch a bloody series or movie.

How difficult can it be to just give someone a login? I don't get the whole sharing jellyfin is difficult argument. It is just as easy as any online service 🤷‍♂️

Jellyfin was more work on my end so that family could connect with https, but for me to set them up it’s literally just “here is the URL, login, and password.”

It's not that hard. Everyone knows how to put in a URL.

jellyfin is great, IF you have an organized collection. If your collection is like mine, spread across 3 drives that have been used for the last 15+ yrs, and not organized into folders for each show...you're gonna have a bad time. i found:

• jellyfin didn't like when files used periods instead of spaces.
• jellyfin assumed that a year in the filename was the year the content was released and ignored using that year to search the title(i.e. if content has a year in it's title jellyfin was ignoring that year).
• jellyfin seemed to choose random old shows instead of the obvious show that it should have been.
• jellyfin didn't seem to have an option to change what show a file was a part of, i had to move it into a folder of the show's name.
• jellyfin has issues with text files in the folders that have filenames that are urls(i.e. www.torrentsitehere.com-downloads.galore.txt would somehow tell jellyfin to go look at that url in the filename for info about the file, but of course it didn't even parse the url out of the filename correctly and tried going to the full filename as the url and erroring out). i only found this out as it also wasn't deleting the content that had these files in them as it was somehow trying to delete that url from the filename.
• jellyfin doesn't like when content has it's own NFO file to talk about where the content came from, or the person who claimed to release it first(since the NFO file is in this case is just a text file showing off some ASCII 'art' and edgy text, jellyfin isn't able to parse the file)

using jellyfin did help me realize i didn't need half the stuff i had, and helped me see that i wasn't going to watch most of that again. It is open source, but that only means you can see the code and what goes into it, it doesn't instantly make it better.

in the end i'm probly going to run both, since i primarly watch via the plex app on my xbox and the jellyfin xbox support is abysmal, it isn't made for controller at all and it literally just a webpage that you move the cursor(mouse pointer) around with the left stick.