PLEX or Jellyfin? MY PICK using both for Years!

Hi everyone, this video is going to be about probably the two best in home media and streaming servers, and they are Plex and Jellyfin. What I'm going to do is compare the two. I made a video similar to this one, but including I envy the differences in this case. I actually have several

years

of experience on

both

platforms, so this is more of an informal review of my experiences and the differences and why I personally prefer and love Jellyfen, but I'm actually

using

Plex on a daily basis and first what What I'm going to do is talk about what they

both

do really well and that's 95 of all the functionality and that's streaming media.

Both are fantastic platforms for this, the services will be able to recognize. all media on your server will be able to stream that media, both have hardware acceleration if needed, but there are little asterisks for Plex and when it comes to setting up and installing both services on whatever your Windows 11 box is, whether it's a drive of real server, your Nas, whatever the setup process is, it's going to be incredibly simple, it's usually going to be a couple of commands on Linux or you could do what I do on that real Docker container setup, you can see on the right. here is my unread.

I have a jelly fin Docker container right here up and running. I just turned this on a moment ago to make this video and it's really cool because no matter which service you use, they both work in the same way, when it comes to overall library organization, you could have both services running at the same time. from these same libraries and they will both do a phenomenal job building the libraries getting the metadata putting all the banners on the front page, whatever that may be. and actually present your media in a very beautiful and organized way, since Plex is the main thing I'm

using

currently.

I have it in a separate box. It's here running on protainer here on its own standalone machine because this little Intel Nook that I've handled all the hardware encoding and media streaming processes and like I said, they're pretty similar in the setup processes. I basically do both with Docker Compose or a minor does it for you with templates here. Look, this is my Docker Compose for Plex, really simple stuff and it's pretty much the same with Plex. You have your environment variables, your time zone, your permissions here. The actual containerized Linux server has a great Docker image for both Plex and Jellyfin and then you just configure. your volumes as you want for this, this is an Intel device so I just need to get this through so I can actually use it for hardware encoding and the overall setup of both services is phenomenal before we continue.

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You can see my latest movies here, the latest music, the latest shows, and if I open something like John Wick 4, Chapter 4, without playing it. for the media, this is kind of what we get in terms of the data that's presented to us and it's pretty similar on Plex and Plex here. If I search for John Wick 4 as well, you can see it shows up here and it looks a little bit different but it's almost the same information that our cast members have that you can play we have some settings that you can rate Plex gives you a little bit more in terms of like here are the track albums we have related movies on the server other Keanu Reeves movies and then for example if I go here I click edit we can see all the options that I have, tags that share the poster background, everything that, if I jump to Jellyfin, this is what we have and of course you have themes and all that so you can make them look different if you want, but if I go here it looks a little different, we have to identify the metadata of editing, so many of the settings are built into this type of dropdown menu. but if I click on a metadata, for example, or edit metadata, you can see the options that we have here, so as far as the organization and the user interface and what you get, it's very similar, but with some differences minors and that ultimately comes down to your general tastes and preferences and then that will lead us to some of the key differences and the main one is the proprietary nature of the two pieces of software.

Jellyfin is completely free and open source, they have no paywalls. There are no pop-ups or anything weird, it's all you, you just get everything, it's nice and a lot of those things are premium features that you see in Plex. An example of that is here, this is the Plex Pass website and the features you get with Plexpass. Personally, I have a lifetime membership. I got it on sale for around $80, which compared to open source and completely free is still a bit of money, but you'll notice that many of these premium features in Plex are already included in Jellyfish a Key.

An example of this is hardware transcoding here. Hardware transcoding is what you'll want to use if you're streaming media to a device that doesn't support the format. This will transcode it on the server side so you can generally support it on that device. you want to avoid doing this anyway because it consumes unnecessary resources, especially if you can have many formats in the right codec or whatever, but if you want to do something like reduce it to 720p because you're watching on a mobile device or whatever and you're trying saving data, this is where hardware transcoding comes in really handy.

You will need a Plex pass to use this on Plex for Jelly Fan, it is already included and when it comes to general hardware transcoding setup again, as I said before, it is basically the same process granted, as you will see, Jelly Fin actually has many more settings when it comes to hardware transcoding. This here is transcoding options in Plex, it has a couple of checkboxes. you have your directory to transcode and then if we go to Jellyfin, we're going to play here. Hardware acceleration, you actually choose the specific one for me, like I said, it's Intel fast sync and you have all your options, whether it's your formats and codecs. you want to enable hardware transcoding and then if we scroll down here you can see that you actually have a lot more options and a lot more detail on how you want this to work so if you're really

pick

y about some of this stuff,

jellyfin

is definitely a very good option so basically for the vast majority of people Jellyfit is going to be perfect especially if you're just streaming at home and this is where I'm going to start to digress a little bit. talk about some of the benefits of Plex and why I'm personally using it at the moment and this will revolve around the type of client-side applications.

Plex has many more options. Jellyfind has some options and some fantastic options. You can see here that this is what is recommended, they have Roku Android TV web OS so that alone will probably cover most people, we have iOS Android so the usual mobile apps are Kodi clients and if I go here to everything, this is where we get some of the other things I think the Apple TV is here somewhere, there's Swift fin, this is the Apple TV now it's in beta, it works pretty well, but there are some additional workarounds to do and sometimes the media. the stream fails and everything and that doesn't happen on Plex really the Plex Apple TV app is amazing and it's just one thing for me personally.

I have an Apple TV and many people I share my media with use it. Apple TV, so that's a key thing that leans me towards Plex. This is the Plex website. You can watch Apple TV. Chromecast. Basically everything is available, since they are Jellyfin. They really aren't far behind. They have game console applications, home accessories. integrate VR stuff, just a lot more client side integrations, let's go here to the servers, it's basically going to be the same situation, they're both going to work on all of NASA's, now another thing that's a little easier with Plex is sharing externally and This is mainly because I have some grandparents who like to log into my Plex server, watch some of the media I have there and be able to just download the Plex app, log in with their Gmail or whatever.

I add them here natively. appears, they don't need to manually enter an IP address or anything like that. I don't need to work that hard to set up reverse proxies or anything like that, it will just work, which comes with a big downside. with Plex the only thing I've found recently is a pretty irritating black color so it doesn't work very well if your router or your home network is offline and this may even be in your house so if I have my Nas running Plex or it Maybe my Internet is not working for some reason, it's CenturyLink, it probably goes down here and there.

I'm having this weird issue where I can't switch users on Plex Home and media is really hit or miss whether it decides to work or not which is really weird because it's hosted locally on my home network so I'm probably going to keep that Jellyfin server I started just in case I run into instances like that. Jellyfind works all the time locally no matter what and then that. It brings us to another thing where Plex has another slight advantage and that is the choice and number of third party tools that are available. An example of that is here.

I'm going to Thule, I think of course it has a bug I recently changed an IPS, let me fix it real quick, it's actually this check server, here we go. I traded in my 12th gen Intel Nexus for our 13th gen. Slightly better hardware encoding performance, here we go, boom, this is an example of a third-party app that is available specifically for Plex that does some wonderful stats. You can send things like newsletters to people on your Plex server so they can know what's new, what's been removed, a bunch of different things that you can see here right now.

Hopkey fan, which is like the main home account, is streaming The Office right now on Apple TV. We get a lot of information. I could stop it if I wanted to be an idiot, but we also have other stats, so we have play counts. we have our main play, so War for the Planet of the Apes gets a lot of plays and we continue, we can see all the most popular movies, the most watched TV shows, the office at 95 plays a big surprise, Yellowstone Stone, Rick and Morty , Shameless and Plex. its own kind of statistics tool, but this one is much deeper and has many more features, so go to the graphs here.

I have our play count by media type, play count by time of day, so this helps, if I want, I like it. run server updates automatically. You could set it for 11 p.m. m. and that usually works. who watches the most media and specifically what type needs it, just a third party tool, there are a lot of third party tools, it has things like supervisor here which is awesome, I think Jelly Finn was someone who forked it and made their own specific version only for Jelly Fin watches magnificent and many things simply fit together. If I go here to the apps in Unraid and then just search for Plex, you'll see a lot of different things Plex Media Manager Plex DV time.

Plex web Plex announcer Plex rip are a lot of different things now, if I search for Jelly Fin, a lot less things happen here. We have a lot of different Jellyfin customers. Lots of twists. This is a view of Jelly Fin. I don't know what that is, it's where something might be worth taking a look at, let's take a look at it now, okay? Oh, this is great so we can see the old player versus the new player. That's good, that's something we'll maybe delve into a little more in a separate article. video, but yeah, those are my main differences between Jelly and Plex again.

I definitely prefer Jelly Fin in general, free open source that has no issues with media playback and hardware transcoding is actually my personal preference, but when it comes to hosting a server for a group of other people, a group of people in my family, Plex seems like the best route and with the Plex pass, if I add people through that typefrom Plex Home situation, they also get the Plex pass when using my server. One thing I really like about Plex is that it is a multimedia application. I use it quite a bit and it's kind of like a Plex pass, which is like my main method of music consumption right now, really nice, so if you're interested. setting up your own Jelly Fin server.

I have a series of tutorials on that and I'm going to be working on a serial tutorial series for Plex, if you want to get it up and running, the Plex setup tutorial is underway. to revolve around this geekom uh what is this super cheap Intel mini air 11 machine I think? It's a hundred or two hundred dollars and this right here can run a Plex server just fine so again, big thanks to geekom for sponsoring this video and with all that I hope you have an absolutely beautiful day and goodbye.