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Jellyfin is not just good... but better than Plex now?! (vger.social)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I've feel like I've used Plex forever. I also feel like every couple years I try Jellyfin to see how it's going. Recently I tried it again because of Plex restriction on more than one user.

Well, I just tried it again and it's substantially improved! This time it actually properly detected most of my library!

Also the Android TV app is AWESOME! No more glitches, lagging, and freezing trying to play my stuff like Plex did. It is butter smooth.

Wow! I'm impressed and I just deleted Plex. Good riddance.

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[–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

The performance of hardware acceleration in Jellyfin is markedly worse in my experience. My A380 can handle 2-3x more streams in Plex than it can in Jellyfin. My theory is that it's the jellyfin ffmpeg port slowing things down, but I admittedly don't have much evidence to back that up beyond the fact that Plex's transcoder is built on ffmpeg as well.

Plex Relays are a feature, but that's sort of the point. You get that stability from Plex by default and it works on all clients. There is no realistic way you're going to get all remote client devices on a VPN for Jellyfin. Maybe one day Jellyfin can offer that as a paid option, a la Nabu Casa for Homeassistant.

Media servers tend to get shared around with friends and family and these edges will start to drive you nuts if you have more than a handful of users. I do not want to try to walk a family member through setting up a VPN on their smart TV.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    The performance of hardware acceleration in Jellyfin is markedly worse in my experience. My A380 can handle 2-3x more streams in Plex than it can in Jellyfin.

    i've never used plex or benchmarked it, so it's possible that it does, i wonder if anybody else has reproduced that behavior, i know a lot of people do plex/jellyfin benchmarks these days. Be surprised if that hadn't yet happened. It shouldn't be any faster or slower if you're using the exact same transcoding settings, it's all limited by the hardware physically, so it's possible it was that. Could theoretically be bad drivers, or bad support i guess, but that would be a separate issue.

    Maybe one day Jellyfin can offer that as a paid option, a la Nabu Casa for Homeassistant.

    definitely a possibility, but then again there are several ways of solving this problem, in homelab universal manners, so maybe they should offer a more generic service instead.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    It shouldn't be any faster or slower if you're using the exact same transcoding settings

    That's sort of the point, both are based on ffmpeg but neither is using vanilla ffmpeg. Plex's seems to work a lot better on the same hardware for me, but more importantly it's not something you have to fiddle with. You just check the box and it figures out a decent setting. Jellyfin has some basic defaults for Intel/nVidia but there are a ton of tweakable settings that you have to go figure out.

    There's probably some way to fix the issue but it'd take a ton of fiddling, and that's the jank I keep referring to. A lot of people on Lemmy just ignore the rough edges and act like it doesn't matter just because they can get past it or because it's FOSS and they refuse to use anything else. Not everyone on here is a full-time software engineer, though; IMO it's better to be honest about shortcomings and set expectations well. More people self-hosting their media is a net positive IMO.

    Plex has people they can pay to make their product better (and at least for the moment they're still paying them), Jellyfin straight up doesn't have those resources. I hope that changes because Plex is not on a good trajectory as a company. The Homeassistant model seems like a good one that gives people a good reason to contribute code and money, I really hope the Jellyfin guys do something along those lines.

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