If you haven’t been keeping up with Plex, self-hosters like myself and others are up in arms over the client rewrite. It feels like the Sonos update for us. Broken features. Useful functionality removed. UI that’s more streaming focused than self-hosting like it used to be.
If you haven’t gone down the Plex path yet, don’t right now as the community and developers sort out their roadmap. Plex seems to be open to feedback, but a lot of us feel betrayed. They had open user testing for the new apps but they didn’t implement or fix any of the reported issues.
I moved away from Plex when they started shoving free B/C movies with lewd posters on my home page and made is very hard and confusing to remove (if removing it completely was even an option, I still don't know).
The whole reason I host plex is that I want an offline experience that I curate myself. The requirement for internet to authenticate and shoveling crapware in my face pushed me towards trying Jellyfin. The Jellyfin UI on TV and mobile is not as flashy and polished as Plex, but it is extremely functional and respects users choices.
Been a happy Jellyfin customer for years now though I only use it to organize and browse my library now. Actual playback is either MPV on PC or Kodi over NFS on TV. After trying many many players, these were the two I found best for respective platforms, nothing else even comes close.
I think this is the path. I like jellyfin but I find it has trouble with some files on some devices. Kodi handles pretty much everything. Not as nice for browsing though.
Totally. I had some issues where Jellyfin would transcode to remove HDR when trying to play on a HDR capable TV. Disabling transcoding completely means black screen for a lot of videos which kodi plays just find over NFS (so no chance of transcoding) on the same device.
I’ve been using Plex since it was a Mac only XBMC fork. While it’s drastically different than where it started, I haven’t noticed any recent changes. I do 99% of my viewing via the AppleTV app and it hasn’t changed. I removed all the shortcuts for their streaming stuff long ago.
I’m running the server in Docker and pretty lazy about updating it. Is that the side that changed? It looks like I’m running 1.27 and 1.41 is out now. Should I be sticking with what I have?
The good thing about docker is that you can just spin up 1.41 in another container and check it out.
I really like Infuse Player on my AppleTV. It "just" reads from a network share that has a bunch of folders with movies and tv shows and just handles the rest. Occasionally I will have a codec issue but I just transcode for free using handbrake.
I used SMB before with Infuse, but switched to selfhosting Jellyfin as scanning takes too much time over the network (the files are on HDDs attached via USB). I still play with Infuse, but it uses Jellyfin's database.
I never really understood what is the point od running something locally and then registering on .com domain. Like if I will loose internet connection I cant listem my own music? Seemed radicoulous. But I guess it does nit require much knowledge and people keep using it.
I give all my services a proper subdomain so SSL works. But I keep all my services internal and run a pi.hole with DNS for my local services. (I use wireguard to vpn into my network to access everything).
If internet goes out, DNS to my local services still works fine since it is being served directly from my pi.hole.
On another note, Jellyfin can look inside .iso files, which afaict Plex is not able to. Very handy with my collection of ripped dvd's.
What about their plexamp app for streaming music? It looks pretty nice and seems like a good deal if you purchase the lifetime plan for 50% off during Black Friday.
Might not be true for all setups, but I find that Plex is a resource hog. Navidrome and Jellyfin are a lot leaner. Plex was using quite a bit of CPU just browsing the library.
Plexamp sounds awful to me, trebly and thin. Googling around I found it was a common complaint.
It DOES handle multichannel audio well, though I don't think it can do Atmos natively.
Interesting they felt the need for a re-write when it was already so good. I wonder what the impetus was