The open source alternative to my sponsor - Jellyfin vs Plex

my relationship with Plex has been rocky, it feels like they've changed. Hey, can I watch a movie? When I signed up for a lifetime license, our future seemed very bright, but what happened? I've been a loyal Plex user basically since I found out about it. That video on air did not have an Android client and for the most part it has been great, well at least it has worked for the most part. The truth is that each time I have felt as if the

plex

us was losing its way, I don't want games or live TV even another damn movie rental service.

I want a management tool that organizes and streams my media library to my devices, and while it still does, mostly the community feedback on our recent

sponsor

ed video was the little push I needed to finally see the big contender. Even internally around here, Jellyfin, which is a free and

open

source

media management tool, has received a lot of praise, but like any

open

source

project, you can count on three things, some really good ideas and functionality that the products commercials would do well to copy a rabid fan. base that will turn any discussion about the paid

alternative

into an excuse to talk about it and some quirks that you'd have to have a blind spot the size of Jupiter to miss that in mind, so let's go swimming with the jellyfish and see what I've been up to. losing and I see our

sponsor

Zoho Desk.

Over a hundred thousand businesses around the world rely on Zoho context to use help desk to improve productivity and ensure their customers are happy. Click on the link below to learn more about Zoho Desk, one of the best things. About

plex

is the appeal of Doom, whatever the device, be it a Samsung tizen TV PlayStation 5 VR headset or even a Facebook portal, there is an application of its own that will allow you to stream your own DVDs and Blu-ray. Need more Shrek on your Android Auto Dashboard while you're on the road, well they have an app for that too, no sorry, I'm just kidding about that, there's a Plex app for the car, but it's just audio, that is a key benefit of being a for-profit company, unlike an open source project, you have the money to pay people to take care of not only porting your applications and testing them, but also to deal with the tedium of certifying them and listing them in the various app stores.

I can not speak. for our international audience, but in Canada there are a total of 11 streaming apps available on the PS4, five of them are not specifically for sports and Plex is the only one of them that is for self-hosted media and although

jellyfin

also has an impressive lineup Of official applications, especially when they are free and the open source nature is taken into account, many of them are simply rappers for web browsers that access the standard Jellyfin web UI, it is fine for most scenarios, but As we will see later, limit developers to limitations. from a browser has some drawbacks, just try using

jellyfin

on Xbox and it will become painfully clear that this method doesn't work well for all use cases.

The jellyfin team appears to be taking steps to address this issue, although on iOS there are currently two official apps available, jellyfin mobile, which is the standard implementation of the web browser, and the recently released Swift fin, a proper native app that aims to be a standalone solution instead of leveraging Safari, for now all that can be done is basic browsing and playback in the library. which barely scratches the surface of Jellyfin's capabilities, but unlike its dozen or so web browsers, it finally works on Apple TV and could help expand Jellyfin's feature set in the future.

Of course, none of these applications matter if we don't have a server to get the content. Right off the bat, fortunately, neither Plex nor Jellyfin are difficult to set up on a Windows desktop. It's as easy as running an app and following the basic instructions. All you really need is to be familiar with file explorer so you can point the server application to the correct folder or folders in Docker, it's a touch trick here, but no more challenging than setting up any other Docker image. The only curveball is that you have to choose between the Linux server image and the official image.

Both are acceptable, but the Linux server. The group simply likes to change the configurations a bit compared to the original once the basic installation is finished, the finer details of the configuration are done through the web browser of any machine on the same network as the server, the only scenario where there seems to be a big difference in server installation methods is that FreeBSD Plex is supported, Jellyfin is not, and Trunas Core is based on FreeBSD, so it's a bit of a pain for users of what is possibly the best free Nas software. Setting up the library was as seamless as possible. on either platform with only minor hiccups for some titles on Plex, for example our copies of Shrek Blu-ray were not detected correctly on Deli fin, although Thor Ragnarok was not detected correctly, although it was a little easier to apply metadata on Plex, as it gave us recommendations.

To find out what this unrecognized title could be while we were on Jellyfin, we needed to use Movie DB to set it up. They both downloaded the subtitles automatically, which is a big plus for accessibility. The DVD's special features and extras, on the other hand, were not handled automatically on either. system on both occasions the files had to be placed in a folder with a special name and their metadata entered manually. This would be a great area for both of them to improve, although we're not quite sure if there's a good resource for cataloging home release extras anymore, especially considering how many of them there are and how different regions and even different releases of the same movie in the same region will often have different content.

Talking about content filtering in Jellyfin, it works quite well on the web and on Android, the user interface is easy to use. stick with enough options to find most of what you want and they all seem to work. Multiple options can be selected from different filters and from the same section on Google TV and Swiftfin, unfortunately that is not the case. It has some sorting options, but it's not really a replacement. Plex's content filtering, on the other hand, is much more robust, but lacks the ability to mix and match options. Usually on Android you can mix and match, but don't try it on your TV to get to the When filtering either of the two, you will first have to go to the section for the type of media you want and then to the library tab from the recommended default tab.

Jellyfin's default view, on the other hand, feels less demanding. The first thing you see is a row of your different Library Types followed by a row of media that you can continue viewing and then finally a list of the latest additions to your libraries, no matter what you want, you're clicking roughly on the same area and does not require you to use multiple menus. and click the entire screen only to filter shows or movies. The parental controls on Jelly are also quite comprehensive. Libraries can be restricted by account and maximum ratings can be set for parents, since we are in Canada, Canadian movie ratings are used, but even when media has a rating from another system, it seems to translate quite well, a PG rating -13, for example, will read the same as a 14a rating.

Plex has a cool feature called managed accounts that allows you to set maximum ratings by selecting one of four. Restrict profiles for younger kids, older kids, teens and none that you can't customize, however what these profiles restrict or create new ones which seems like an oversight to me, if you create a managed account you can share it with your friends and relatives. but they won't have much autonomy in this regard, you can share your entire Plex library with your separate account that they control, although they will turn your Blu-ray collection into some kind of legally problematic private Netflix to be able to use all the features, although they will.

They need their own Plex pass. Jelly Fin's only option for accounts is to manually create one for each person, unlike a Plex-managed account, which isn't a problem, but they won't be able to select their own username or recover their account if they lose their password. , so if you like resetting Great Aunt Janine's six-letter password every three weeks so she can watch her stories, you'll have a great time with that, how about real video players? It turns out that they vary quite a bit. cross-platform on the web Plex allows you to do many things like change subtitle styles access the play queue add a video to a playlist download the file and grant library access to others, the only things Jellyfin does that Plex doesn't out of box show you what time it will be when the video ends, that's great as they can both skip intros.

They both use the same flawed method to detect introductions. Audio is compared between episodes and matching sections are marked as long as they match. one set of rules as a solution is far from perfect, especially for shows with opening jokes and variations, like how Lisa's saxophone riff changes slightly between episodes. A better solution might be to allow a combination of this and scene recognition with the ability to modify it between programs. Plex doesn't detect intros, for example, that last less than 20 seconds and can only find them in the first half of an episode. Jellyfin's intro jump, on the other hand, is a plugin that must be installed, which is not convenient, but the advantage is that it is much more customizable, although customization comes at a cost, since the only way to implement the button skip intro is with the web UI for those browser apps like Jellyfin Player on iOS which works fine, but for native apps like Swift Thin and iOS and Apple TV there is no way for the skip intro button to appear on Google TV.

Both UIs are similar to almost any other video streaming app. Plex lets you toggle subtitle playlists and playback quality as usual. Oh and it also has an added bonus sometimes, when you change the playback quality on a TV show right after the credits end, it will act as if the episode has completed and take you to the next screen and then play automatically the next episode with the original quality, which is this. this is the intended functionality, man. I've seen a lot of bugs on Plex uh jellyfin on Google TV, although it looks pretty similar, it actually has a surprising amount of customization options, you can change the entire layout of the home screen, the functionality of the buttons on your remote and because Because it's a native app, you can even change the underlying video player being used, although again this means that plugins that rely on modifying the web version, such as skipping the intro, simply won't work on Android phones and tablets. standard, we see the biggest difference, so functionally, they are not that different from their Google TV counterparts, apart from one key detail: the ability to download one of Plex's best-selling features is mobile offline access, they do it They know and you will too if you try to use a free account.

I love that idea of ​​increasing sales and this came about long before YouTube and Netflix offered similar functionality: you can download your videos in any bitrate resolution you want and then watch them on the plane or wherever else you are. when you come. When you come back online, any episode or movie you've watched will be marked as such in your library, man, that would be a cool feature to have, wouldn't it? Of course it would be, which is why I get so upset that this plex's mobile downloads feature is buggy. at best, and non-functional to the point of generating false advertising, at worst, Android downloads can work fine for you as long as you want the original quality, but half a gig or more per episode of 20 minutes will eat up your storage very quickly.

If you're working with web downloads and just two full Blu-rays could completely fill a basic phone, but that's the whole point of having a server to transcode the files in the first place, unfortunately, downloading transcoded videos is where the problem really happens, the The fact that the download fails is enough to make you frustrated, like if it doesn't, you try again, you know it failed, you know you have to try again, whyYou need me to constantly go back to my phone and click the button, but it's even worse than that, Plex will sometimes show that a download is complete even though it never downloaded anything.

Now this problem can be made worse by not using hardware transcoding, but it can be very difficult to determine if hardware transcoding is working or even at all. working on what GPU it's running on, I mean, imagine taking a long road trip with a backseat full of kids, you've spent valuable time packing up at night before loading up all the entertainment, trusting Plex when it tells you, hey , I have you half an hour. Along the way all hell breaks loose and it becomes painfully clear that you've been lied to, it's enough to make you wish you had a vehicle with a separate bubble-dome rear seat, complete with restraint systems and optional muzzles to contain your fighting children, which is a reference. they could get it if the programs I tried to download for them had worked on iOS, things aren't much better, often the app just crashes when I try to download and even when it doesn't work it may just not work anyway.

If you're using a firewall with DNS rebinding or no mirroring, there's a good chance that the security certificate Plex attaches is blocking the transfer, and this has been a known issue since Plex changed its mobile sync feature again for mobile downloads. mid 2021 you heard me right Plex has had over a full year to fix a major selling feature they announced and they still haven't done it, but thank God I have games and it's not the first time they've released this phone. Backing up photos to your server was a great

alternative

to paid cloud services that just disappeared.

I'm over it, but downloading my media for offline viewing is a deal breaker feature for me. I care so much that when I realized it had stopped working, which was on a recent trip. I didn't really travel for a couple of years and I didn't really realize that I left Plex as a sponsor, but we're not going to work with Plex until they solve some of my problems. Long-standing issues with it, however, it's also the same reason I'm not going to switch to Jellyfin yet, for now Jellyfin only offers standard download of the original file, offline viewing and has no way to track what has been or not.

Looked at this way, fortunately, although the roadmap going forward looks very promising, at least on paper, the shift to native apps means that offline playback is a very real thing coming because it doesn't require downloading a web page. for the user interface and you can use The system-integrated video player in official apps like fendroid already allows you to watch shows offline and can even update episodes once watched. Unfortunately, it lacks the option to download a transcoded version, which means it's quite hard on your storage, but that's what it is. an implementation anyway and that means the Jellyfin core team has something to iterate on offline viewing is the main post on the Jellyfin feature request board and they have said they are working on it even if there is no ETA , but similarly, bypassing the native introduction is the fourth most requested feature, although for that one there is no information on whether anyone is actively working on it given that there are already open source implementations for these features in some way, hopefully they can use work has already been done to reduce development time, but slow, free and open source development cycles are expected, and we should be grateful for all they do.

After all, Jellyfin's biggest contributors still have day jobs, making it even more impressive than when using LeapFrog Plex and features like its configurable HDR hue. mapping I mean, it's frustrating that the paid solution is so buggy and incomplete and the free solution is so slow in development. I mean, if we could put Plex's money into Jellyfin maybe we'd have a good solution, but since capitalism screws everything up we'd probably start the cycle all over again, that probably gets us pretty close to the elephant in the room. MB is the old open source project that Jellyfin is based on and apparently already has several of the features that Plex claims to have and that Jellyfin claims to be working on in its user base, although it is significantly smaller to the point where I doubt a little in spending time to change and it doesn't help that there is no effective way to try it before you buy it, but since there are apparently no other mature alternatives.

Might be worth a try? I would love to know your positive or negative experiences. With Envy, sell me or talk me out of it, as for my final message to the guys on the Plex team, you haven't. I still missed it, but you have to fix it. Basic functionality. Hair like this bad copy of Hercules I have that doesn't play original quality audio, but will if I transcode like that. By the way, when I transcode half the time. reduce the audio volume and not to mention your inability to play the next episode on mobile devices, things like that can't be broken, but if you can take care of my list here, I'll gladly take you back as a patron in the meantime, let me tell you. about someone not on my secret lab poop sponsor list their chairs are designed to keep you incredibly comfortable during long hours of work and gaming their 2022 titan evo series chair offers 4-way lumbar support comes with a magnetic memory foam pillow headrest and is offered in different upholstery, such as soft synthetic leather hybrid fabric and Napa leather, with an extended warranty of up to five years and a 49-day return policy.

You're covered if something goes wrong, so head to the link in the description and check out the secret lab today if you guys enjoyed this video. You might like our Plex server guide, even if you're using something like Jellyfin, it's actually still pretty relevant.