As a long time plex user with a lifetime pass, I always enjoy seeing the good progress with Jellyfin as it will increasingly give me a soft landing for when Plex finally does something to make me move. At the very least it will hopefully keep some of plex’s most user hostile behavior in check.
As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my *arr stack and it has helped tremendously. I used to have to babysit and manually intervene on maybe 10% of requests, now it’s near zero, plus I got audiobook requests and subtitles working great. Granted a big part of the increased success was signing up for a Usenet service but of course Claude was able to configure it all and make it work. I was a little worried Claude would demur in the face of the task, but it was more than happy to help me acquire media in this way
I left Plex for Jellyfin + Infuse a couple of years ago, and I'm not looking back.
But the sore point right now is outside access, which Jellyfin really isn't made for. I set up Tailscale so I can connect Infuse to Jellyfin remotely. But that's not exactly as smooth as Plex. I can't give friends and family access, either, which was dead easy with Plex.
In terms of the UX, Infuse isn't very good, but it does the job okay. The built-in subtitle fetcher is amazing; that stuff never worked for me with Plex.
For people that don’t know, Infuse lets you use Jellyfin on Apple TV and it’s very helpful for day purpose
Crazy expensive though. It's basically a Plex subscription, just for the player.
Isn’t it something like $10/yr or something?
Yep. Worth every cent. The Apple TV experience of Infuse is night and day with Plex. I used to constantly struggle with Plex buffering and crashing on my local network with the Apple TV app. Infuse just points to a file share on my NAS and streams beautifully, even at larger 4K files.
I used Plex for years. I’d never go back from Infuse now, and I’m happy to pay that subscription to support its excellent development.
It's not as bad as I thought/misremembered. $23/year here in Denmark, and $140/lifetime.
Both for simplicity and portability, I am a very happy user of https://firecore.com/infuse.
I guess it's less full featured as Plex or Jellyfin (it still more than covers the bases for video: format support, different video/audio/subtitle tracks, tv series recognition, skip intros, Trakt.tv etc.); but then again all it requires is any online storage, and the Infuse app (either on iDevice or AppleTV).
Yeaah, second that! I use it on the AppleTV and across the rest of my devices! Works like a charm, and coupled with Tailscale I can access everything on my Nas everywhere :) I have it configured to use Jellyfin as the source, runing on said nas
You should try this: https://neptuneplayer.com/
Feels like only a matter of time with Plex doesn't it!
I've got the lifetime pass, but it really does feel like a Sword of Damocles situation...
Yes it really does, and I intend to switch eventually but from what I heard the last time I looked into it, the end user clients are a big area where plex still beats Jellyfin. Since that’s where my non technical friends and family mostly interact with the system, it’s the area I need to be the most polished and hands off.
Yes, this is the big one for me. Seemingly unlike a lot of folks, Plex is my main music server. Years ago I ripped all my CDs (1800+, IIRC) and Plex + Plexamp is really, really, really good for listening. I haven't yet found anything else that works as well.
I use Plexamp on desktop/laptop computers and then the Android and iOS apps for on-the-go music. I tried Symfonium [1] because it seemed promising and would give me a Jellyfin path, but it was weird and kinda buggy and ate my phone's battery.
I'm hopeful there'll be a good replacement available eventually, but for now, I just have to stick with Plex.
[1] https://www.symfonium.app/
Yeah PlexAmp is amazing. Feels like it's the only music client around these days that has a functional "shuffle by album" option, instead of treating my library as only a collection of individual songs.
> Feels like it's the only music client around these days that has a functional "shuffle by album" option
foobar2000 has this!
After trying dozens of music clients (including PlexAmp) I eventually settled on simply using foobar2000 pointed to an smb share - nothing else seems capable of properly handling playback by folder structure. (e.g. I've got all my Led Zeppelin albums in the "Led Zeppelin" folder, and I want to just select it and play their discography in album release order.)
Lyrion (fka Logitech Media Server ) does album shuffle
Another up-vote from me for Plexamp.
I find the mainstream subscription players to be excruciating to use to play what I want at the time.
woahhh this exists? I have an Apple Music playlist called Sunday Albums and have always wanted exactly this.
I use (and contribute to) Finamp the Jellyfin PlexAmp alternative and it's just done a 1.0.0 release which brings it up to parity with PlexAmp for me. I've previously been a long time PlexAmp user but FinAmp now does everything I want it to.
That 1.0.0, and 1.0.1 is in Beta. Is that ready to be moved into stable? Or am I looking at the wrong project? https://github.com/finamp-app/finamp/releases#release-1.0.1-...
This is promising. Thanks! I'll check it out. I hope it gets the major features and works well.
yeah I'm in a boat of similar shape. plex and plexamp is very simple and plug and play - it handles the IP stuff for remote play, which is the tough part for me.
I don't mind lacking features in the server or the client honestly, if I can find and play an album or playlist I'm good. But the connectivity piece can be hard if you're not familiar with self host stuff. I tried to do Jellyfin and Tailscale and some client and it... kind of worked? But it was definitely not as seamless.
I do hope every year that it's my last year paying for Plex. Maybe this year!
I'm fortunate that somehow I ended up with a lifetime PlexPass for... I want to say like $50 a bunch of years back?
Because yes, the remote stuff -- and PlexAmp just working the same wherever I am -- is the huge part of it. Music sits on my NAS and things... just work.
I also really like how easy the caching and offline mode is, because I frequently find myself driving in areas without mobile data service. I keep a couple favorite albums downloaded to my phone, then knowing the app will cache the next ~2 albums of queued tracks generally makes it Just Work.
Jellyfin's Android clients seem to be fine. Android TV and smartphone at least. Have been fine for at least five years.
Can't speak to other platforms though.
This gave me an idea, what if I let an agent make a proxy for Jellyfin to act like Plex? Best of both worlds!
Maybe worth a try.
I’m interested in helping with this. Let me know if you start a repo. I was considering the same approach, though I’m not sure how feasible it is.
I don’t think it’ll work because Plex gates everything with a sign in to their online accounts, so auth would have to go through them and there might be server-to-Plex verification going on too.
That said, I’m very interested in this space - I’ve been building a music server that provides compatible APIs for Synology and QNAP mobile apps, with a few more on my todo list. I’d love to include Plexamp so if it is possible please let me know!
> I don’t think it’ll work because Plex gates everything with a sign in to their online accounts...
That isn't true. You can configure the server with which subnets are trusted, and do not require auth.
I would be interested to hear from anyone who set it and can still access Plex over their LAN in a network outage. I have set this multiple times according to docs, and it worked only once ever, thereafter apparently resetting to online login. Of course, they do not make this an easy setting to change!
You need plex pass to do this now. They changed it recently you didnt used to need it.
Performance was also a big issue for me the last time I tried running Jellyfin on the same hardware as my Plex server. I’m happy to see that has been their focus.
they'll eventually come out with a completely new overhauled version of plex that's sub only but your lifetime pass will still be good for "plex classic" which they'll stop supporting
Or just end the lifetime tier and make people pay like fastmail did. If even the HN beloved fastmail would do it I pretty much expect it from everyone.
I have a lifetime pass as well, but switched to Jellyfin years ago.
Maybe I'm naive, but I feel like if Plex was going to do anything to existing lifetime subscriptions, they would have done it by now. I think we're fine for now.
really is just the normies access to it via samsung and LG TV's that hold me back.
I am currently on vacation and used jellyfin via the browser on all the smart TV. And it just works great. I didn't expect it to work this good.
Sign in via key is easy, not stuttering. I can recommend it.
Newer TiZEN models has a jellyfin app now in the appstore!
There is a nice Jellyfin app for LG now
Lifetime pass user long before the ridiculous price hikes for it and the direction for the service going down a path I didn't want to support. You can run Plex and Jellyfin on the same server concurrently pointing to the same media files. My Plex server was still running until I was able to transfer everything over and their mobile app ecosystem got up to parity.
> As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my arr stack and it has helped tremendously.
LLMs have been AMAZING for home server maintenance and improvements. I have completed SO many of my "some day" tasks. I never have to read another fucking log file ever again. It has taken all of the friction out of the hobby. It's all* fun now.
I’ve set up literally hundreds of different self-hosted applications over the years on my homelab. I’ve configured the reverse proxy by hand, setup the docker containers, etc.
Now I can just tell Claude “Setup XYZ app on my server” and it does it all and leaves a note in my Obsidian vault documenting the service (setup instructions, backups, hostname, etc).
Trying out new things has never been easier now that the effort is near-0 to kick the tires.
If there is one thing that needs to be re-written and consolidated it is the arrs ecosystem. Replacing/consolidating the arrs themselves is pretty straightforward. The trap that quickly becomes a token incinerator is incorporating the downloader into the library manager itself. A lot of learned lessons in that sabnzbd codebase.
As someone with coding projects in the is area would you care to elaborate on "a lot of learned lessons"?
sabnzbd is basically packaged decades of domain specific knowledge about deobfuscating media files
> As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my *arr stack and it has helped tremendously. I used to have to babysit and manually intervene on maybe 10% of requests, now it’s near zero
Any more details here? I hit this a lot and it's not too much work, but still pretty annoying.
Step one is to just let Claude have ssh access to the machine you run plex from and let him do a full sweep. I had some conflicting profile rules and was not properly blocking malware and not properly marking failures so they were never retried. This fixed a big portion of the manual work needed, but the usenet account is really what got me to nearly 100% hands off. I think I am paying $3/month for the next fifteen months, and apparently if I pay attention during Black Friday there will be some pretty cheap deals. For more months of access at even less
EDIT: Claude was also able to look at my logs and noticed that nearly all of the exe or other malware was coming from 2 trackers so we just eliminated those.
I second your Usenet recommendation. I also have the $3 deal which just rolls over each year.
Where could someone learn more about the usenet account method?
Claude will be able to help you with everything you need. If you don't have Claude code then the various self hosted subreddits are a good starting point. I had Claude do a sweep of the recent reddit posts to capture the current most recommended usenet accounts, he gave me two links, told me to sign up and paste in the API keys and he took it from there.
How long before they block this kind of work with ai.
They're already banning certain questions and workflows in the frontier models, but you can usually work around it with well structured queries. The ablated ("cracked") local LLMs will do whatever you want.
I already had DeepSeek tell me "I cant help you with torrents or other copyright infringing uses".
You can get around the checks with careful prompting. You’re just interested and want to learn more about it.
All I did was create a wrapper script to pipe to the torrent client, then "pipe these torrent files to the script" - so easy to circumvent you wonder why they bother
weird, when I ran ds4flash it didn't complain about it at all.
I have had claude do the same, plus reorder nfs mounts, share templates, and do some init-container magic to start vpn/gluetun with port-forwarding, all in a k8s cluster. It's become so easy to manage and debug.
unrelated to your otherwise helpful comment, I just wanted to note that it is "demur" (i.e. hesitate or object) you want in this case; "demure" is an adjective meaning shy or modest.
Thanks, fixed
I also have a lifetime pass, but I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with Plex. Why do I have to regularly turn off their "recommended" stuff that is just ads for movies I can buy online? Why does it appear and re-appear?
Also, the Plex app for LG TV has been buggy and broken for years: some content will not play at all, some will not play if you ff/rewind, and some will not play until you physically turn your TV off and then on. Very annoying.
I'm glad to see competition.
Claude and jellyfin and HASS is great. Now my phone has a “door lock” which turns off the kids user’s access, but lets the current playing finish. And another “door lock” unlocks playing for ten minutes.
What do you mean by door lock, where does the code show up?
What are you using for audiobook requests? I also recently setup arr stack, but I saw readarr is depreciated and there doesn't seem to be a clear successor.
After reading a lot of reddit threads I settled on ReadMeABook[0] and it has been working great so far. One pretty cool feature is that it lets you connect an LLM API key and then you can have it make requests based on your library. I now have Fable 5.1 suggesting my next book.
[0]: https://github.com/kikootwo/readmeabook
Hello Mantis. Question: what do you do with the books? Is there kindle integration somehow?
Chaptarr is great! Just had their public release after a long alpha testing phase
Could you share a link to source code/repo? I couldn't find it
https://github.com/Chaptarr/chaptarr maybe?
It’s been a while since I used it but lazylibrarian has worked for me in the past.
I tried shelfarr as well with some success a while back, but haven’t needed any new books lately since I’m busy catching up on the books I’ve downloaded (the Bible is long lol).
If you don’t want to commit to one of the vibecoded no community arr clones for books then i recommend shelfmark. Lightweight grabber, easy to start with, easy to rip out later.
Also a lifetime pass Plex user, I'll leave as soon as someone has a good solution for identifying raw Bluray rips automatically. Why do I have to manually name the episodes? We had CDDB last century, why isn't there an equivalent for raw video rips? The ripped data should be identical, a simple hash should uniquely identify it.
Are you describing a plex feature? I was under the impression they required the media to follow certain naming conventions. [1]
Maybe mkv-renamer is of use to you? [2]
1: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-...
2: https://github.com/ssanj/mkv-renamer
I'm describing a hypothetical feature that I want. Essentially an automatic version of mkv-renamer that can identify series, episodes, and special content based on the signature of the ripped files. For whatever reason, such a service doesn't even exist.
I just like the confirmation that AI is happy to be a Boatswain.
Claude is perfectly happy to do it and gives great suggestions. I can't imagine it will last, I did run into one situation where I wanted to archive all the media on a subscription site before my subscription expired, and it refused. But splitting it into one session to collect all URLs and a second session to plug them into yt-dlp with the right arguments worked just fine.
I like them both, but I can never give up plexamp. I’ve tried navidrome and various jellyfin clients but I keep going back.
For music, I use Navidrome + Symfonium. Not quite as smooth as Plexamp was (and there's nothing on par with Symfonium on desktop), but I disliked having my music and video commingled so it's been worthwhile for me.
Thank you for starting this thread. Another lifetime plex pass user, interested in my choices. For now, I am happy on plex/plexamp. Good to know what jellyfin is at.
For what it’s worth, I am very happy with Jellyfin and the *arr suite. It took a bit of agent prodding to get them all playing nicely together and bypassing Cloudflare CAPTCHAs. However, it's pretty sweet when you get it all working.
> bypassing Cloudflare CAPTCHAs
Can you say more about this? I've never encountered this problem in nearly a decade of running the same stack.
With the *arr stack, some of the trackers it uses to search for a torrent will present a captcha when Prowlerr queries it for a search. If you integrate FlareSolverr and set up Prowlerr to submit queries through it for the trackers that have CAPTCHAs, it won't get blocked by them.
Yep. It really isn’t nefarious or abusive. I keep mine slowed down to not scan often to be considerate. Even private trackers can require it now.
I (also a lifetime Plex Pass user) decided to try it out ~6 months ago, and I've switched over. I haven't had any gaps in functionality yet, though YMMV of course. While it isn't better than Plex (which is still fine for now), it isn't worse either, and I trust the Jellyfin devs a lot more than the Plex devs at this point.
I switched to jellyfin about 6 months ago and I can say it is definitely worse. I’m constantly fighting to fix thumbnails, fix episodes to be in the same show, force rescans to get it to even recognize a show that already exists. I never had any of these problems with plex. Plex also defaults to transcoding which fixes a lot of gaps with clients that don’t support certain codecs. I’m often running into issues where infuse can’t play DTS so I need to reencode before I can play the movies.
Also in the process of ditching plex I switched to audiobookshelf for my audiobooks and I have to say it’s also crap. It’s constantly refusing to start playing, or pausing for a really long time before playing.
All that being said I’m not switching back. It’s been a pain but it was worth it.
The default recommended folder naming settings are different for jellyfin from plex if I recall correctly. Personally I just let the arr app download metadata and let jellyfin scan local nfo files only for metadata so have not had a problem for a long time.
I moved from plex to jellyfin and got 10% of the way through organising the films the jellyfin style and then just moved the rest of the video files into a folder called 'ok' and it worked fine. try the lazy way first and see how it goes
I don't recall the folder names being different, but by default Jellyfin uses different metadata providers than Plex. That means that things like numbering of specials (think BSG and the webisodes), or shows which have a different aired vs DVD order (i.e. Futurama) might differ between the two. For those, you have to either tweak your episode numbers or just tell Jellyfin to use the metadata provider Plex does (which is what I did for those edge cases).
> Plex also defaults to transcoding which fixes a lot of gaps with clients that don’t support certain codecs.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but as far as I can tell, Plex defaults to direct play enabled, and will direct play unless it's not supported by client. (Or other constraints, like limited bandwidth settings, etc.)
That's fair. It got most of my stuff without issues, but there were a fair few I needed to fix.
However, compared to Plex, I've found the remote experience (through Tailscale) to be a lot easier and better performing than the Plex equivalent for me personally. I never have any issues connecting externally now, whereas I did all the time with Plex. Maybe I just needed to get Plex running over Tailscale but it seemed to fight that a bit.
Don't have any of those library issues, something wrong in your setup? My tv also doesn't support DTS, but don't have to do any manual work, jellyfin should do it on the fly for you.
Fair enough, but I honestly have not had a single issue with Jellyfin. It really has been on par with Plex for me.
My only beef with Jellyfind when I used it some time back was inability to resize subtitles, which were huge on a large TV. Could have been lack of knowledge on my part though.
I must be old school. I never got on board with Plex, because my "lifetime" licenses for PlayOn, TVersity and Twonky all ended up completely useless. Yes, those licenses still work, but you can't get the latest versions which provide support for the latest codecs, features, etc. There's a cutoff on the versions that "lifetime" license allows you to upgrade to, and some of those licenses were not that cheap at the time.
So of course, Plex is going to engage in the fuckery that they are. JellyFin on the other hand, for the amount it costs is surprisingly low on janky behavior.
Yes, eventually, all of them will end up this way. But the attitude lacks nuance. I paid $120 for Plex 8 years ago, and if it becomes utter crap tomorrow, it's been totally worth it.
Don't think of any such thing as "lifetime". Just ask: "For the amount they are charging me, how long does it need to last for it to have been worth my money?" With the price I paid, one year would have been enough.
huh, yeah I should start an xbmc fork/reimagining. the limitations with the tools of the day are imagination. a LOT of the software I use these days are things I facilitated the creation of and a media player is definitely supposed to be on that list