Jellyfin is not just good... but *better* than Plex now?!

anybody have a guide for an old laptop

I might have to check out Jellyfin. Can you run both at the same time?

I don't see any reason why you couldn't with default settings. Beware of enabling any setting that stores data next to the media like nfo metadata storage, as those could maybe cause conflicts.

Plex is unbelievably slow to start and navigate through my huge library on my TV. Jellyfin flies.

The search is also much better on my TV, because I can use the system keyboard which supports voice to text via the remote. Plex on the other hand has no debouncing, so pressing each key just makes a new search and it's slow as sh—.

I also had it outperform Plex when Plex couldn't play an audio language track where Jellyfin could.

However, it doesn't seem like Jellyfin is as good at figuring out duplicates/versions of the same media? It shows up as two identical posters of the same thing without any discernible info until you step into the media page of the thing (movie/episode).

All in all, a very good complement to, if not replacement for, Plex. 8/10. I'm proud of them!

Honestly ever since Plex started going the enshittification route and hocking their fucking bullshit instead of just being a home server it's been irritating the shit out of me. The only thing they aren't doing at this point is adverts live vids.

Been using Plex for a couple years now, and the experience is mostly unchanged for me, once you disable the online media sources.

Genuinely curious, what are some enshittified dealbreaker features for you that they've introduced?
- The 'Plex suggestions', the constant return of rental prices when doing a search instead of just my media library. I had to remove a bunch of menu items they automatically added without my cosent during their last major update which seems to be when it all started. The search bit is especially angering because it's lagging load times as it's searching these online sources for rentals I don't want instead of just pulling up the returns on my local media server. If there's a setting disabling it I must have missed it because when they introduced the garbage I immediately scoured the settings to try and turn it off. Those are the main two off the top of my head.

It's not proprietary, so it could be shit on a shingle and still beat plex. I'm not installing anything proprietrary on anything I own.

i only wish jellyfin would add chapter titles and hover cards (maybe thats in the new thumbs now? I haven't yet migrated because lazy lmao)

and that they fix the weird UI shenanigans from it's emby days. Some QOL shit would be nice, auto sorting so that its not manually default to the stupidest setting ever. and the other usual shit.

I'm still having issues with my client freezing on playback of high bitrate video (like heavy 4K content) but transcoding down fixes that, im not sure what causes that, something gets caught up i guess, a refresh fixes it though.

There's a really strong bias on Lemmy for OSS projects. I'm glad they get so much love here, but everything people say here about Jellyfin has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. It works and you can use it. Depending on your needs, it may even work perfectly for you. There are tons of rough edges though.

Here's a few:

A bunch of basic functionality most people are used to is missing by default. You can get things like intro detection and subtitle downloading to work with plugins, but you have to work at it.
Hardware acceleration still kind of sucks. You can get it to work, but the Jellyfin port of ffmpeg doesn't work anywhere near as well as Plex's.
The variety in app experience is bewildering sometimes. Apps look and feel very different between platforms.
Android TV app support sucks. The app is difficult to navigate and has a bunch of weird edges, like subtitle defaults not working. I have no idea what OP is talking about here, it sounds like they're only judging the app on its animation speed.
Public network support is finicky. This is hard to quantify, but I've been on several remote networks where my Jellyfin connection dropped in and out and Plex did not. I suspect this is due to the Plex Relay service making up for bad routes between my house and the network.

Jellyfin is improving all the time, and I hope the recent EFCore update improves performance and development velocity. I'm also holding out hope it will eventually lead to externally hosted databases and active-active servers.

Disclaimer: I run Plex and Jellyfin and regularly check in on the state of things in Jellyfin. I donate to Jellyfin. I want Jellyfin to be better than Plex. I don't think any objective measure bears this out yet.

Hardware acceleration still kind of sucks. You can get it to work, but the Jellyfin port of ffmpeg doesn’t work anywhere near as well as Plex’s.

pretty much just works for me on intel QSV. as long as you have drivers and hardware support it seems perfectly fine. Maybe plex has a cleaner implementation? Not sure, never used it.

Public network support is finicky. This is hard to quantify, but I’ve been on several remote networks where my Jellyfin connection dropped in and out and Plex did not. I suspect this is due to the Plex Relay service making up for bad routes between my house and the network.

depending on your network configuration, and routing of the network, this is most likely to be plex relays, this wouldn't be a jellyfin issue, it would be a plex feature. You could easily fix this with a relay VPN server or something like that. (you probably shouldn't publicly expose services these days anyway.)
- 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.
I have no idea what OP is talking about here, it sounds like they're only judging the app on its animation speed.

In the plex PLAYER, I constantly have to restart my tv, glitches, audio out of sync, black screen etc, stutters randomly. Incredibly annoying when I’m trying to watch something. I haven’t had a single playback issue yet with the jellyfin player. It just works

Edit: oh and how can I forget: in the plex player, sometimes “pause” just… didn’t fucking work?! Lmao. I had to exit the player and re enter. So annoying.
I have been looking at JellyFin as a replacement for my aging Emby install, but the over-the-air TV support is weak and mostly broken. I am a FOSS fanboy, but first and foremost TV has to work for my household, not just for me with glitches. I suppose the correct answer is to contribute to improving it, but like most folks, free time is not copious.
One thing Jellyfin is way better at is offline viewing. I have frequent internet outages at my house and I've run into issues multiple times where Plex wouldn't stream my own local media because it couldn't connect to the internet. For this, Jellyfin has always just worked.
- jellyfin is quite literally seamless in this regard, the only thing that wont work is metadata scraping (which if like me you run a yt archive, can be relatively frequent, but often isn't even a huge problem) I only notice network outages when other shit breaks lmao.
- Yeah, that part about Plex has always bugged me. You can disable logins for your server with allow-listed networks, but most of the non-desktop apps have to log into the Plex platform to run.
I think it sounds like you want a paid product that just works out of the box. Jellyfin has some rough edges sure, but it's also a volunteer project for the most part.

I've got to disagree or clarify with some of these points. These points seem subjective and I feel the need to say something in case others are trying to compare plex/jellyfin.

Hardware acceleration works just fine? Unless there's some hardware specific issue?

The difference in apps is because there's two platforms. The web player (with CSS themeing) and the native (like on Android, which is a straight up android app, not a web page). There's some capabilities that you can only get on Android if you build an app instead of a web player. There's only like one guy building the android TV app.

Unfortunately just one guy working in his spare time on the android TV app. I've never had subtitle issues either (might be a good time to open a bug in report?)

Jellyfin "remote" is pretty rudimentary. You'd be better off just accessing it through a tunnel anyways -- and then youd have access to your own just not your server.
- This isn't about want, it's a reality check. OP said jellyfin is better than Plex now, and by objective measure it is not better for most people yet. False expectations hurt Jellyfin adoption, you need to try it with the expectation of jankiness or you'll just be annoyed by the edges.
- Op's criteria wasn't "is it a good product?", it was "is it better than Plex?". Stop taking valid criticism as if it were an attack. If we want software to improve we have to be honest about its shortcomings.

Really from what I hear the only thing Jellyfin is missing is a Plex amp alternative!

I personally would never go the Plex route at this point.

there's finamp. and i think jellyfin is just running a sonic server? Not sure, but that's basically what it is under the hood, so.

My biggest complaint about jellyfish is any file upgraded with the arr stack is readded as a new media. 2nd is lack of smart collections and playlists.

For me, Plex would often end up having audio drift lag and it was annoying as fuck. It'd start fine, then the lag would gradually increase until you changed encoding back and forth, then gradually increase again.
Jellyfin just works.
That was enough to get me to switch and not look back. I'm also rid of the bullshit plex login that I never cared for, and also of their push for whatever "recommended" stuff is supposed to be about.

YES

The addons are great too. The intro/outro skip is slick and nearly flawless, background subtitle download is seamless, on and on.

I gotta try those
- Here's a pretty good list to get started with:
  
  Awesome Jellyfin

Idk PlexAmp is the killer app that I can't stop using. Does jellyfin have something similar?

Symfonium is pretty good as a one time purchase.

I tried to switch from plex to jellyfin 2 months ago, running both at the same time in containers, but I removed jellyfin after a week

The main issue was the CPU usage, on idle Jellyfin was using about 1vcore while plex used only 0.3, no background tasks seemed to be running and after a week my 4tb of media should have been indexed

Also a feature that I use regularly with plexamp, starting a radio from a song, was not giving me good results on finamp

I've been using both for ages.

For remote access to friends plex is easier and cleaner.

For offline viewing in Android plex is cleaner

I'm running tailscale with jellyfin for personal use and it's wonderful, But I wouldn't ask my relatives to do that and I don't trust to surface the port. Plex has a dedicated security team and 2FA.

The Roku client for jellyfin is also a futureless husk of a client.

I have lifetime Plex so I'm in no hurry to do a full conversion. I would love to drop plex all together though

Futureless or featureless?
- both, probably.

Jellyfin is so underrated

Plex has recently started applying a green filter to certain content.

The files Plex has a problem with work just fine in Jellyfin.

Green filter? Are you talking about the issue where you try to play Dolby Vision content on a non DV TV?
No, that issue can happen on Jellyfin as well, because it's happened to me. But that was before I used the Trash guides to set up Sonarr/Radarr so that Dolby Vision files were never fetched.

I've been running plex since 2016 and jellyfin since 2019. I'm slowly moving users over to jellyfin with the plan to cut off plex at somepoint in the next couple years. Jellyfin is missing some quality of life features but nothing super crazy

It is…..if you use a computer. Their AppleTV app still looks like some random coder’s pet project with random playback issues.

I just sucked it up and paid for Infuse Pro and now my Apple TV experience with Jellyfin is great
- I've had Infuse Pro for about 6 years and it has been an absolutely perfect app for me. I've used it across many different iterations of home media servers (Emby, Jellyfin, NFS, SMB, etc...)
  
  If you use Apple devices it's the best way to go.
The app on my LG TV is acceptable, but does have random problems, like it can't connect over TLS, and it's kinda slow to navigate. But it works, and my kids know how to work it.
- I also use it on an LG TV and sometimes it can't run at its normal framerate with subtitles on. I haven't figured out why yet, but it might be embedded files like someone else says in this thread. Other than that it works like a charm.
Huh, it works great on my android os Nvidia shield
- The TV/mobile apps vary wildly in their capabilities and performance. Swiftfin is better for iOS devices, but not sure about AppleTV. That's my main gripe with Jellyfin overall.
I mean, just like everything else there's an optimal setup. I have a NAS with an extensive media library and running Jellyfin on it was a terrible experience. The NAS simply isn't powerful enough to make Jellyfin usable.

I fixed that issue by running the server on my PC, and the libraries point to my NAS library locations. It's the perfect setup. I get access to my GPU for HD video transcoding, and an overpowered CPU with the advantage of not having to worry about storage.

I feel like it's the perfect setup for me.
- It’s not a transcoding power issue. It’s a UI consistency and usability issue. With every device having a slightly different UI, with some apps having issues if playing back natively and some needing transcoding, the experience is inconsistent and frankly doesn’t pass the “wife acceptance factor” test, or the “let your friends use it without needing to handhold them through regular troubleshooting for their particular device” test.
  
  I still don’t use Plex and exclusively use Jellyfin, but it’s still a hard sell to non technical users. Plex has much more polish.

Jellyfin seems solid.

The only issues I've had are with dodgy media files. Obviously better player hardware gets you better performance, but transcoding eliminates some of those issues.

Yep same. I got an Intel Arc card for transcoding and it plays on anything perfectly now.
- btw intel QSV on iGPUs is actually crazy, you can put a little intel cpu from like 12th gen and it'll decode and encode most content for you perfectly fine, unless you're extremely picky about tone mapping and color space (idk in that case, i don't have super strenuous content requirements lol)
  
  the arc cards are even better, but not needing an entire GPU for decoding/encoding is SO nice for smaller homelabs.

I would probably be using Jellyfin if it were just me.

The handful of people in my family that use my Plex server though are all non-tech people. When I hear that random smart TV apps aren’t nearly as good, that is what gives me pause.

That, plus the fact that a lifetime Plex pass was a one-time purchase on sale several years ago. It may be a proprietary product instead of FOSS like it should be, but at least they aren’t trying switch me to $1.99/month or some BS like that. But they’re probably smart enough to know they’d really start the Plexodus!

Maybe I should run jellyfin alongside Plex to keep better tabs on it.

Absolutely run them together.

Especially in light of Plex trying to keep tabs on what everybody's doing and probably resell that data.
- Ugh, yeah. I guess I’ll definitely have to try it!
If the apps don't work for you then I'd stick to plex. But I had the opposite experience, especially with the Plex Android TV app, it is so shitty... And the Jellyfin Android TV app is rock solid
- I guess it’s worth trying rather than relying on vague internet comments. I’ll set it up for myself, then I can try apps on the various platforms as I visit people, etc.
I'm a bit biased as I started with Jellyfin, but the Roku Jellyfin app works flawlessly on the family TV.

I'd advise at least becoming mildly familiar with how you'd go about it, since corpos suddenly rug-pulling existing users and forcing subscriptions is pretty common, basically expected, behavior of American business now.

That way you have an "out" and your service can have minimal downtime. :)

On the other hand, you might just find you like how sleek and functional Jellyfin is. I can only see wins for you here. :p
- Yeah I suspect I’m going to like it.
  
  I think I’m going to set it up to run in parallel, then I’ll be ready to try it on people’s various devices as I get access to them.

any reason to use this over real debrid + stremio?

Storing media locally is great on the off chance your internet goes out, in addition if there’s shows that RD hasn’t cached yet and have no seeders.
- Rd has no issues torrenting stuff? If it isnt cached it downloads it for me faster than my internet could lol. Thats a good idea tho, but typically if I lose internet, I've also lost power.

The applications aren't that good. That's the only thing keeping me from switching completely. Subtitles, aspect ratio, audio track selection just don't work as expected. In some cases I can only pick the aspect ratio and no subs and sometimes the other way around? Also if I have no subs for a movie, I can't search for them on the fly - good feature of plex. As it stands, jellyfin video player is not up to my standards and I can't switch yet. I use it for porn though. That works fine.

After having been shafted by sublime text I will never believe anything called a "lifetime subscription" is such.

A "lifetime subscription" is just a "until we decide otherwise" subscription

I don't mean to be glib or upset you, but you still have lifetime access to the versions of Sublime Text for which you paid; you just don't get free updates to the next version. AFAIK, that's been the way they've done things for years.
- Before the one license=one version switch in 2013 the license stated "and future updates" which they did, but they switched to needing to pay for new licenses for some reason. I remember that being the primary reason I switched to emacs.
After having been shafted by sublime text I will never believe anything called a "lifetime subscription" is such.

Care to elaborate?

AFAIR SublimeText licenses are always only for a specific major version. And they sometimes might work for the next major version. So, I guess you’ve just installed a newer version for which your lifetime license isn’t valid anymore.
- Before sublime text 3 all updates were included in the single license, not just major revision updates. This was back in 2013.
I mean, it naturally has to be something that they eventually find a way to charge you something for. If it's a for-profit business, and if they only sold lifetime subscriptions, they would eventually go out of business.
- Then they shouldn't be called lifetime subscriptions. This seems like a really smarmy justification of a shitty business practice.

I don't use it for myself but my experience with Jellyfin is the subtitles UX kind of sucks. It got a lot better on the Android TV app recently (ty to the maintainer!), particularly with improved subtitle support, but because of ExoPlayer it still can't play bitmapped embedded subtitles easily, only .srt subtitles.

The experience on iOS/appletv with Jellyfin/Swiftfin was so bad that I ended up recommending Infuse. Infuse is a great app, but it's not a libre app, which kind of clashes with the rest of Jellyfin in that regard. And, once again, it needs massaging: unless you want to be popped up with a buy Infuse Pro pop-up your video and audio has to be in certain codecs.

As I said, I don't use these things, myself. I don't even have a TV. But every now and again, I will put a file up for some relatives, and I want it to be totally directly playable, because my server is just an old laptop. So I have to spend a lot of manual time making sure the files are juuuuust right. If there comes a day where there's direct playback with embedded PGS or SRT subtitles on all platforms that will be the day the Jellyfin suite of software becomes 10/10 software for me.

Embedded subtitles definitely work, and I've used bitmap ones before, although I generally avoid them so I'm not sure if they consistently work well. Directly playback also does work with those subtitles, so if you had issues it was likely related to codec support.
- Unfortunately I can't play around with it anymore because I live a thousand miles away from everyone I support who actually uses Jellyfin. My experience with the Android TV app was embedded SRT subtitle support is now 100% good as of late last year, but embedded PGS trips things up so much that I cannot use them.

I've found the opposite to be the case unfortunately. Plex "just works" while my jellyfin server had almost constant issues with subtitles (two of my frequent users need these because of hearing problems) and would frequently crash requiring docker restarts.

I adopted jellyfin very early, used it for many (maybe 6?) years and these problems only got worse over time.

I always prefer open source (often to a fault) but I am glad I switched to Plex a few months ago. I got the lifetime pass for cheap for black Friday. I still leave jellyfin running for a few users, but everyone else has already switched over.

I had the opposite. Jellyfin just works. Plex kept losing my movie folders, refused to play videos, wouldn’t screen cast, had problems with audio tracks, there always seemed to be a disconnect between app and server, they refused to connect despite both being the correct versions. It worked great initially, but got steadily more and more problematic over time. I gave up, even though I’d paid for it, and made a jellyfin server and have had zero trouble since.

Don’t know why two programs should have such radically different experiences, they should just do what they’re supposed to.
What are the issues you’re having with Jellyfin’s subtitles? Do you know if there is an open bug report or feature request that is tracking the same?

I use Jellyfin for music mostly and it struggles with metadata. For example, if a song has two artists on it and I edit to correct it, it won't update correctly and I'll edit up with the artist "Artist A; Artist B".

Finamp keeps creeping towards Plex amp and functionality. I don't love how Plex treats music either but the client seems to bridge the gap.

I tried Jellyfin years ago, it is in my test for later todo since then, it was pretty vanilla compared to my Plex Media Server (for instance I couldn't get to work the transcoder to use quick sync to lower the CPU load if needed, meanwhile Plex worked fine with the Docker container even).

With that said, I stopped using Plex daily in order to give some use to my Real Debrid account (so Stremio and Kodi are the next logical alternatives for me) and because I only have a two bay NAS with 10 TB in total, and I like to hoard so I struggle every time I need to delete something, since I knew about Riven/Zurg/Rclone/DMM combo I have returned using Plex without worrying each day about my drives, keeping it updated and enjoying the thinkering process of this new experience, also sharing the love with a couple of friends, I see no need to try Jellyfin, even after that many years.

I genuinely do not understand the issues people are having with Jellyfin subtitles. I just have Bazarr set up to automatically download and they play on every device (web, android, iOS, roku, android TV) with zero issues.

Sounds like it's mostly with embedded subs inside the media files already. Thats where all my subs are so I'm going to test soon but haven't played anything on jellyfin needing subs in a while
- I now extract all my subs, but for the first 2 years using it I left everything embedded and it always worked normally. Even with some advanced ones like Jujutsu Kaisen and One Pace, which both use stylized ones.
Depends on how you're viewing Jellyfin. I use Chromecast and Chromecast doesn't support embedded subtitles well with Jellyfin. So I usually just use ffmpeg to extract the subtitles to an srt file, and then they run fine;

pushd "\\nas\Media\Movies\" fd -e mkv | each {|x| ffmpeg -i $x -map 0:s:0 $x.srt }

Temporarily maps my UNC network location to a usable drive, then using fd and an elvish each loop, iterate over all the mkv files, and use ffmpeg to extract the subtitles.

Ez-pz.

I still maintain that Emby is better than Jellyfin. I try it again maybe once a year and every time I end up back on Emby. It just runs better, works pretty flawlessly and doesn't lose my libraries every so often. Music playback is better by far on Emby and that's my main usecase.

Hardware decoding would be nice, but I don't have a system I could use this on for either and I've not had trouble without it.

What do you mean library losses. I've been using jellyfin twoish years now and have never had this happen.
- Same. The only issue I've had is it not finding my TV shows, but once I figured out how it wants them stored, no issues whatsoever.

Jellyfin is awesome.

Yep

Welcome to the future

Not having to pay for hardware transcoding/tonemapping is the biggest „selling“point for Jellyfin. I used to have plex before. It worked well but I didn’t want to pay 100€ for transcoding. Never tried emby for the very same reason.

The only problem I'm having with jellyfin is around subtitles, but it's getting better all the time. I bought the plex lifetime license a few years ago, but we've moved our whole house to jellyfin now.

Can you describe the subtitles issue you’re having? Do you know if there is an open bug report or feature request open on github or Jellyfin’s website?
- Not op but in my case it's the client ignoring embedded subtitles

Am I the only one here using emby? I’m pretty happy with it honestly.

Nope, I still use Emby myself. Although I'm in the process of switching to Jellyfin I think. I have it running separately to sort of evaluate it. Jellyfin was a fork of Emby, so there are a lot of similarities.

I tried to setup Plex and it was just about the most god-awful experience I've ever had. It was unnecessarily complex to accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup.

Installing Jellyfin took like.. 2 minutes and I've had no issues since.

Only thing I don't like about Jellyfin is the metadata engine, which I have disabled and just use TinyMediaManager and save everything to .nfo which is picked up by Jellyfin immediately. Works great.

It was unnecessarily complex to accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup.

Please elaborate how you needed to "accommodate their cloud infrastructure setup".

When I set my server up years ago all I did was log in on the web interface. Literally as simple as any other service.
- When I set my server up years ago all I did was log in on the web interface. Literally as simple as any other service.
  
  They make you register with their own website to login to your local instance... That's you jumping through hoops to accommodate their cloud bullshit;
  
  It’s important to understand that Plex Media Server does not have its own graphical user interface. When you run the server on your computer, NAS, or other device, you won’t see a window open with a “server UI” or similar. Instead, you use our web app to manage your server.
  
  It's so fucking unnecessary.
Hm. I gave Jellyfin a try and the UX was a turnoff, so I ended up in Plex. The separate management of metadata does sound like a pain to me, too, but maybe there's a bit of sunk cost fallacy to that.

Either way it seems people are mostly fine with their choices and there is a viable free alternative, so... all good there.
- The separate management of metadata does sound like a pain to me
  
  It's really not, but I guess it depends on how you do it. You can even automate it.
- You can change the UI design to whatever you want with a custom CSS. Can make your own or there's a plethora of themes on GitHub. I remember trying one that replicated the Netflix app, and don't hold me to it but I think I saw a Plex one as well.
  
  Also, regarding the metadata, there are options that auto populate it for you. Idk how it does it, but my haphazard library of torrents all had accurate metadata AND it downloaded the subtitle files as well.

I've been using Kodi with Jellyfin for around 10 years now. I tried Plex now and then because everyone uses it but I could never get behind why everyone is using it. It has always been worse in every aspect for me.

Jellyfin is only 6 years old
- I started with Kodi and added Jellyfin later
Wife approval factor

My wife won't use it if she can't see an app for it to click on to start using immediately. Going through browsers is not an option. Not having a dedicated app on the LG TV is not an option. Not being able to find something instantly means instant rejection. She refused Plex, but now sometimes uses it and has learnt to find subtitles, etc by herself.

I don't touch my self hosted apps. If something doesn't behave properly on the first attempt then it gets rejected from our household. It's only for us enthusiast nerds to put up with kanky UI and setup issues for the sake of superior functionality. Normie's won't tolerate it.
- Not having a dedicated app on the LG TV is not an option.
  
  There’s your first problem.
- Not having a dedicated app on the LG TV is not an option.
  
  When was the last time you checked? Jellyfin has had an app on LG's webOS store for a couple of years now, although older TVs didn't get it until a few months later. I'd given up on it and bought a lifetime Emby Premiere licence by the time by TV was finally supported.
- My wife uses the Kodi app on Android TV just fine.
A big one for me was user management. I don't have to concern myself with that. So it helps. They also have apps for most things, I can just say go get Plex instead of what device are you using? Get x app. Here is the server information you'll need to put in.

I didn't have to put a lot of effort into managing the people using it.
- We have different requirements apparently. I don't need user management and we only watch on our TV (plus myself using Jellyfin as backend for Symfonium).
Are you using kodi as the streaming app on your tv/device? And jellyfin as the backend?
- yes

Jellyfin is still not up to snuff with where Plex was pre-enshittification, but Plex is enshittified. For everyone in between, there’s Emby, which I have been very happy with.

You people do realize that you can use the Plex server without using the Plex apps right? I pretty much exclusively use Infuse to interface with my Plex server and have none of the issues I see mentioned here.
- I mean you very much still have the privacy issues and online requirements. And if you’re not even using the plex web client or any of the apps, all Infuse is using plex for is the metadata, at which point you might as well just use the Jellyfin back end.
what are the things i will miss from plex's pre-enshittification?
I'd have to agree with this, there was a time where Plex was amazing. after like the 3rd time I was forced stop it from hiding my library and them pushing services in my face I made the switch to Jellyfin. It's been long enough now that I don't recall the features I miss, and overall Jellyfin is fine, and seems to get better pretty consistently.
- after like the 3rd time I was forced stop it from hiding my library and them pushing services in my face
  
  Seeing shit like this makes me wonder what different Plex I'm using from everyone else. Pinned my local library at the top 4 years ago and now every device shows that tab first when logging in and hasn't ever behaved differently except when the home server is down (it'll still go to the tab but read OFFLINE)

I installed Mint last week and haven't addressed media players yet... strokes chin. Thanks for the info!

As a long time plex pass user, is there anything there that would make me want to switch? Plex has just plain worked for me for years. mobile apps, everything is just great. Why should I look around?

I just made the switch for a few reasons.

For background, I was a Lifetime Plex Pass user since it launched, created the POC exploit for token theft (a couple of months before they implemented SSL), and built a clustering/sync application (a few months before they released sync, patterns much?).

I did not think Jellyfin was up to task a few years ago. It is now. All the missing features like themed visuals and audio, chapters, thumbnails on seek, all exist now.

Why I switched:

API: I have scripts that do different things with different media and they were super easy to recreate with the API. An example would be moving ytdlp videos from my Youtube Watch Later folder to a deletion folder if they've been watched.

LDAP: I now have user control via my Samba AD.

Privacy: I never wanted my media list stored with a third party to begin with.

Plugins: I have a library I tag with filenames, like ==Tag--Tag==filename.ext. It took me a half day to make a Jellyfin plugin that converts these to Genres. It was a nightmare of DB hacking to do it in Plex. Not to mention there are waaaay more existing plugins that are supported. Jellyfin is where this happens now, not Plex.

Fine grain control: Transcoding settings, bandwidth settings, etc are are open and transparent.
Plex is closed source and gradually being enshittified. You might not leave today, but you should have an exit plan.
- I've been using Plex for over 10 years and I can't say anything about it has changed for the worse honestly
- gradually
  
  Yeah nah. It's going pretty fast tbh.
If Plex is just working for you, stick with it. I switched to Jellyfin when I got sick of having to reset my Plex library. (Even now, thinking of the "Plex dance" makes me shudder.)
- Agree 100%. Most of the former Plex users turned Jellyfin users I have come across did so better Plex was broken in some way for them. For me it was the general lack of care in creating/maintaining a good Apple TV app. Over the past few years it's just gotten buggier and buggier with a lot of complaints on the Plex forums where devs would essentially stop by to say they weren't working on any fixes.
  
  Jellyfin doesn't fix 100% of the issues, but at least there is active development on Swiftfin that showed a desire to fully support all devices.
I have a lifetime Plex pass but am still annoyed at having to deal with "recommended" every time a device is setup or reset.

The recommended view is useless and there is no way to make library the default view. You have to reset every source. It makes it incredibly annoying helping my family remotely to get to family videos.
- I was just thinking yesterday - when was the last time we server owners actually had a feature update? I think last one I noticed was credits skip, and that was... 3 years ago? About?
  
  Meanwhile Jellyfin apparently has been developing full steam ahead, I noticed credit skips in my test instance yesterday.
Same boat! I paid monthly for ages, then got a lifetime pass and everyone was singing the praises of Jellyfin, at this point it works for me!
Well you’re on Lemmy and it’s not FOSS. Not a great place to get unbiased opinions on the matter. It’s actively shitted on in the fediverse. They even bum rush the plex community here.
- Plex was bought out by venture capital and has been enshittifing for years. "Free" media stream sources added riddled with ads that you have to opt out of, opt out "everyone can see what everyone is watching" features, nebulous "we need to upload hashes of your media to skip credits" privacy issues, abandoning apps for various platforms like kodi, on and on.
  
  I have a lifetime pass, but no longer consider plex a viable platform. The issues are not baseless, but rather based on what plex has decided to do to make money.
  
  Meanwhile, jellyfin is FOSS with no profit motive, no privacy issues, skips intros and credits with no issue, pulls subtitles down and indexes media flawlessly, and has native kodi clients with Database sync support so a show paused in one room can be resumed at the same point in another room.
  
  Hard to beat "slick, private and free."

Been using jellyfin for a few years now, never had a problem vs constant problems with plex

I never used Plex. Up until my kids were born I used to just watch my videos on my desktop, but now I find myself watching on my phone and TV more often. My Jellyfin server has been super stable for the last 6 months or so running on a super low powered machine and external hard drive. The only issues I have is with movies with Dolby digital, they tend to get out of sync when scrubbing the timeline. I am assuming that is due to the lower power of the machine. But, I have a 400watt desktop with a 7th gen i7 and a pascal Quadro P1000 that I am planning on migrating to. Then adding a 20tb internal drive for storage. Hopefully that will resolve the small issues I have seen with it.

Although I have my issues with plex, jellyfin has its own problems:

STILL can't clear out the TS transcoded files automatically. So if you watch a bunch of TV episodes on a weekend, your jellyfin container will run out of space and break.
STILL can't handle subtitles properly. I swear, this must be jellyfin's Waterloo.
jellyfin cannot demux 5.1 and present stereo sound on certain streams. I think this is a tooling issue. But it's low level enough that I can handle it manually with mkvtoolnix myself on the few cases it happens.

I’ll have to check but I haven’t had an issue with the transcoded files filling up.

Subtitles work as expected for me but all of my file names are in English, are the ones you’re having problems with file names in another language perchance?

That last one I fixed myself by wrapping ffmpeg around a script I wrote that forces 5.1 to transcode to AC3 so it goes to my speakers properly.
This last one is why I have to use Plex instead of jellyfin on my tv. The jellyfin roku app fuckin sucks and refuses to demux anything.

It's curious that I'm almost in the opposite boat, have been using Jellyfin without issues for around 5 years, but recently was considering trying Plex because Jellyfin is becoming too slow on certain screens (probably because I have too much stuff, but it shouldn't be this slow).

Edit: this made me want to check in Plex, so I'll leave my story for people amusement:

My experience with Plex:

Write the docket compose
leave out the claim because it's optional and I have no idea what it is
launch it
asks me to create an account
not really comfortable creating an external account to access my local server, but okay.
discovered I already had an account. Huh? I wonder why I don't remember ever running Plex then.
login to that account
shows me a bunch of stuff
find it weird that it already scanned everything, especially because I didn't pointed it to my media
proceed to try to watch something
can't play due to DRM
WAT?
go back and discover there's a bunch of content that's not in my library
ok, so this must be some free content
how do I configure my local library?
spend 15 min navigating the UI trying to find it
open the docs, they say to click the settings icon
that icon is nowhere to be seen
click a similar one
can't find anything the docs say I should
maybe I'm not on the right site? site is <IP>:<port>/web/yaddayaddayadda so it seems correct
try to go to <IP>:<port> get to the same page
look at the docs on how to access the web app says to go to <IP>:<port>/web
try that, get a message about not being authorized
WAT?
read some more docs discover I need that claim
spend some time trying to find that in the UI
google it up, find the link
go to that page, grab the claim, set it up on the server and restart the server
I'm able to get to the web app now
Do you want to access it from the internet? If this works it would be great, so yes!
setup my library
let it scan and try to watch something from it
UX sucks, video plays in a sort of popup in landscape on my phone.
Ah, dumb of me, I probably have my browser set to desktop mode
No, I don't.
Ok, so the web is maybe only expected to be used on desktop, let me install the app
Install the app, login to my account, only have the Plex provided content
Look around trying to find the media I scanned, find a thing saying my server is disconnected
WAT?
Go back to the web app via IP, try to look into settings
"You are not connected directly to the server"
WAT?
everything else seems okay, I even enabled remote access there and it says it's working
Every few minutes the page says my server is not available for a few seconds then comes back
It's now been 1 hour and I haven't been able to watch anything.

It's now been 1 hour of trying to set this up and I give up. Jellyfin is much more easy to setup, and even if Plex was instantaneous I could have loaded my TV library hundreds of times in the 1h I just wasted trying to get this to work. Probably every other time I tried I got similar results which is why I have an account there even though I don't remember ever using Plex.

Edit2: after some nore more fiddling managed to get it working, not sure what I changed, so now:

Open the app, see my content there
Try to watch something
"You're watching in indirect mode, quality might be bad"
Ok, so it's not connecting directly to my server, anyways, let's ignore this for now, maybe it's getting confused because it's in a docker container
"Activate Plex"
Ah, ok, it's the "pay or not now" screen, not now
No subtitles play
Try different subtitles
Still nothing
Plus quality seems shit
Confirmed, it's reproducing at 720x300 even though it's a 4K video
Look at docs, figure out the direct play is about converting the video
Select maximum quality which according to docs should use the original file
Still get a 300p video
Figure out maybe it's the android app that's the problem, go to the TV, install Plex and connect to it
Video takes forever to load
Give up again after a couple of minutes waiting for the movie to load

This is more about familiarity than difference in ease of use. I've used both, they are both super easy.
- Some of it yes, the claim for example, but the rest is still pretty bad UX (and even that is stupid, I shouldn't need a claim to watch locally), I'm an experienced self hosing person and I'm getting frustrated every step of the way, imagine someone who doesn't know their way around docker or is not familiar with stuff... Jellyfin might be less polished as some claim, but setting it up is a breeze, never had to look at documentation to do it.
The quality was probably bad because you were routed through Plex Relay services which have a bandwidth limit. It is honestly quite a nice free service because it means it will work pretty much regardless how your network is setup but the quality will be bad. If you want to directly connect to your server you need a public IP so CGNAT won't do you might also have to open some ports.
- Even though they're both on the same LAN? That sounds stupid, why would I need my videos to travel half across the globe to go from one room to the next?
- You should not be using NAT to access your Plex externally, I will explain.
  
  App.plex.tv and the apps use Plex services to generate a point to point connection from remote clients through your router to the server. This is important because you never need to expose a private IP to the Internet, and the authentication can be protected with something robust like a Google account which support 2FA and even phishing-resistant 2FA.
  
  The combination of more advanced security and secure/convenient SSO authentication are one of the biggest benefits of Plex in my opinion.

I quit streaming services around 4 months ago, determined the exact maximum streaming quality every device I own can handle, used a $60 used office PC from craigslist, admittedly I haven't fully figured out how to get subtitles to work without transcoding, but I just need to sit down and figure it out at some point. I direct stream all of my content from a 10+ yr old PC and it uses less than 5% cpu while watching a 4k movie. I could stream to easily 5-10 PC's and still likely be able to do software maintenance on the PC at the same time. That and with how jellyfin looks like a streaming service, with no transcoding it's better than any streaming service. Nearly every streaming service you use is transcoding on the fly instead of storing 20versions of each video for direct streaming, direct streaming a previously encoded asset will always deliver a higher quality viewing experience.

Nearly every streaming service you use is transcoding on the fly instead of storing 20versions of each video

If you're talking about commercial streaming services like Netflix, I highly doubt that. If you're talking about self-hosted services like Plex, then you're absolutely right.
In my experience, transcoding with subtitles becomes an issue when the subtitles are burned in to the video. I often get external subtitles from https://www.opensubtitles.org and then stick the downloaded SRT file in the same folder as the movie. Make sure it has the exact same file name as the movie so jellyfin will associate the two together. Once I do that, it does not transcode at least for subtitle reasons.

I tried Jellyfin two years ago and was so fed up troubleshooting the installation that I swore it off. Tried it again a few months ago and it worked flawlessly! Now I host movies, shows, music, ebooks, and audiobooks for a handful of friends and family. My jellyfin instance is probably siphoning $120/month from Netflix's subscription revenue lol

How well do ebooks & audiobooks work on jellyfin? I'm an emby user, and while I love it a lot, it's not great for audiobooks & there's functionally no ebook support... you can see ebooks in their library but not even open them.

I have audiobookshelf too which handles both, but I'm also always looking for ways to cut down on excess stuff to have to worry about or maintain
- Audiobookshelf is absolutely awesome for audiobooks. Tho it's possible, Jellyfin isn't really very audiobook friendly imo. Just run both.

I've been using plex for several years and setup jellyfin a few months ago to tinker with it. Playing videos works fine for me locally but I have some family out of state who have access and jellyfin doesn't have a solution for that outside of me publicly sharing the URL and managing the passwords. Also a pain point for me is having multiple files of different quality for the same movie/episode, it always shows as two episodes that it will play back to back and seems to require a lot of manual work per show/movie to get it tracked as 1 piece of media with 2 files to choose from. Would love to ditch Plex eventually but for me and my family it just works without issue and they can manage their own remote login.

Does anyone have any recommendations for migrating their Plex library over to Jellyfin? One day I fully expect to migrate over but when I do i want my full watch/listen history to come with me.

You might just be able to point jellyfin to your media directories and then let it scan them.
- That won't migrate watch history
This isn't a complete solution, but trakt.tv covers a lot of ground. I started using it for getting a consistent history of watched shows between jellyfin on the road and kodi at home. It works okay enough for this, though at times it does seem that one or both of the plugins can fail to log a watched show. I would guesstimate a 90% success rate.

Been using Jellyfin along side the ‘ARR suite for about a year now, my biggest issue is with Subtitles.

On the IOS/iPadOS apps of Jellyfin subtitles seem to prevent media from streaming, tried utilizing Bazaar but have had no luck.

I used to have similar issues, was due to my PC not being able to handle the transcoding. Enabling hardware acceleration with the correct settings fixed it for me.
- I bought an 13th Gen Asus Nuc with an i7 running Debian headless and a hard-disk bay for my setup, previously all I was using was a Rasp Pi 4, I honestly don’t know if my Jellyfin instance is utilizing the CPU’s iGPU not really sure how to tell.
  
  Running lspci in the shell does return
  
  00:10.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Raptor Lake-P [Iris Xe Graphics] (rev 04)
I think I might be able to help with Bazaar settings if you still want to try it. It took a lot of playing around with things, there weren't any guides at the time I set it up. But I can send you screenshots of my settings and highlight the crucial settings.

I use jellyfin for every device except for my android TV. I really like it and prefer it over Plex, but it was working fine until it suddenly stopped working a few months ago. I tried updating the app, the jellyfin container, reinstalling the app and clearing data and redoing my jellyfin instance entirely. Nothing worked, everytime I try to connect to the server via the android TV i just got an error unable to connect... and the rest is cut off. Regular android app works, idk what the problem is but it has to be client side, so I just gave up and now have plex running alongside just for the TV.

If anyone has had this Problem before I would love suggestions!

My guess would be internal networking issue preventing the two from talking

I used Plex a while ago and didn't like how I had to look for my folders against the stuff they offered. And the upside of being able to get my stuff from a server install on another network had me wondering if they were looking at the movies I had to pirate. Once I installed jellyfin, I didn't have to worry. My only issue is if I want to use it on vacation, I have to do some vps hack-jiggery.

I randomly tried using Jellyfin today instead of Plex, but Jellyfin kept crashing my browser and logging me out, so I wasn't in the mood to troubleshoot, so I just gave up and went back to Plex.

In the past, I've been annoyed that Jellyfin didn't seem to have an option to sort media by "Last Episode Date Added", nor did it seem to have a way to build a queue of episodes from multiple different shows. I think I was also having trouble figuring out how to add multiple sources... I have my "long term" library on a local hard drive, plus anything "new" on a seedbox.

I theoretically want to fully switch over eventually, but so far, Plex is still good enough for my use case.

ui is not intuitive but there is nothing stopping you from having multiple folders for a library

I don't know about using the jellyfin client but as a backend for Kodi, it's amazing

I actually prefer the Jellyfin client to the Kodi client by a lot. Using Kodi on top just adds more unneeded complexity and reloading libraries in my experience.
- I disagree, as kodi syncs jellyfin DB without issue for me and I much prefer its UX.
  
  The nice part of jellyfin is that they support both kodi and a "jellyfin on kodi" experience natively. Plex has neither, with both being 3rd party apps where the support is hit or miss. I used "plexkodiconnect" for years and was glad for it, but it was a journey to keep working at times.

One thing jellyfin doesnt do well its anime content. But fortunately there's Shoko Server, a metadata engine you can selfhost. Its awesome!

It works pretty well for me but I separate anime and TV/movies, and make sure the anime library is only scraping data from anime-centric databases. But I'm also not watching too much new or obscure stuff.
- Yeah also with shoko you have to create a library only for animes (only one for both series and films tho). Idk, last time I checked jellyfin sucked. Maybe now its better. Another thing that shoko does is automatically track your progress on anidb, so thats cool :)
In my experience, jellyfin seems to think everything is anime for some reason.

I've had to go in to every single TV series and manually enter Metadata.

Not a huge deal I only have a few series' but man it's weird.
- You can also change the directories names, appending [MVDB ID], so that for the future if you ever happen to have to reinstall jellyfin, it'll automatically repopulate them how they were :)
I need some explanation in the "Anime" part, I don't get it ?
- Well, jellyfin often doesn't find the right metadata for anime episodes ecc, so theres this thing called Shoko Server that calculates a checksum of your files, compares it with the database over at anidb, and creates a virtual filesystem for jellyfin to make things easier! It's pretty neat. Do you have additional questions?

I used Plex for a long time and was very tempted by their lifetime plan. I tried Jellyfin but at the time it just wasn't a patch on Plex. I continued with Plex but always had that itch to get away from closed source. I eventually tried Jellyfin again and whilst it's definitely not as feature rich as Plex, it does what I need from it which is a central store of media that any TV in my house can use. I've even given a few friends a login so they can watch content.

I do love that it's completely self hosted. I run it behind Caddy so it has a Let's Encrypt certificate. All run in a Docker container with the media from an NFS share from a Pi4 with an external HDD.

That said, I still have Plex running as I have one Samsung TV and there's no official Jellyfin client for it. Yes there's some long winded developer way to get one on but I just can't be bothered.

I've been considering switching to Jellyfin for a while due to concerns about Plex either becoming worse or them peering into my library. Any idea how the apps work on Fire TV Stick? I have one for home and one I take away with me and it all works seamlessly with Plex

Jellyfin has an app for fire stick, it works flawlessly
Works great. I use VLC as a player (personal preference).

Not sure how the internal player works.

Maybe when the merge transcoded downloads on the official clients. rn depending on streamyfin

I tried Jellyfin a few weeks ago and didn’t have much luck with it. I only added a couple of shows and movies just to test it but half of them just didn’t show in the library (even though it detected them as they showed in other places). Will it only show stuff in the library if it can pick up the metadata for it?

How long did you give it? It indexes the library. I had to rebuild my library once, and while I don't have a huge collection - mainly just rips of my DVD collection, about 450 films, and it takes over an hour to index everything. Until it's done, not everything shows up.
- I didn’t give it very long but it was literally just 3 films and 1 TV show
it will still shows stuff in the library even if it failed to pick up the metadata.

for jellyfin, folder structure is kinda important for auto detection to work.

For shows, you can organises your files like this:

series-name-a/ season-01/ episode-01 episode-02

You can check out the doc, it is more detailed

Is just not as good*

What problems are you having with it?

Not got around to trying it out properly yet. Waiting on new AMD GPUs, hoping for a low-end encoder or I ma get access to a RX 480.

What does Jellyfin use .NET for?

Jellyfin is a fork of Emby which was written in .NET. The server backend and web page are all (or mostly) .NET is my understanding. It makes use of external programs like ffmpeg on the server or VLC on the apps.

Does jellyfin do any kind of library sharing? Because that's the killer feature that Plex has for me.

I have three friends who have Plex servers and between the four of us, I think we have all the content anyone could want.

Yeah, it does

I could never get Plex to work the way I wanted it to, so I'm actually someone who moved to Kodi and then to Emby. Once I got into Emby, I've yet to leave it. My biggest problem now is that I want to leave it for Jellyfin, but the lack of many things I love about Emby have never been moved to Jellyfin.

For example, I have a very specific organization of my music libraries I use to navigate what I want to listen to much quicker, since I'm into all kinds of genres of music. Emby allows me to navigate by folder structure, so if I'm in the mood for heavy metal one day, go to that folder. If classical another day, go there. Jellyfin on the other hand didn't have folder structure view and even though it's one of the top requested features for the past few years when I last checked, it's never been added...

I think the day Jellyfin does fill in these gaps, assuming new ones aren't introduced due to Emby also improving, I'll finally jump over.

I guess to the original topic, I do think Jellyfin exceeds Plex though lol.

Is there a reason that you don't organize your music by artist\album and leverage tags? It's been some time since I tried Jellyfin, but Plex does an excellent job of tagging (not directly written to original files) and categorizing. It's a good experience.
- Yeah, in my example, I have various genres of music I listen to and some days I'm in the mood for one and not another. Some of those might have subgenres I am in the mood to listen to. For example: Metal might break into subfolders called black metal, thrash metal, melodic metal, etc. Based on where I feel they belong the most. If I'm in the mood for some melodic metal today, I'll go there. Or EDM, I'll have a folder for Psytrance, another for House, etc...
  
  Rather than trying to edit the metadata on thousands and thousands of files every time I change media systems as I've done over these years, it's 100x simpler for me to just navigate to the folders directly and not care about how the system "wants" to organize it. Every media system wants to organize differently and I'm kind of tired of having to spend hours editing all my music just to get it to organize the way that works for me, so that's where I've gotten to the point of just using folder structures.
I'm also on emby and it works well for me. My main grievance is setting up a new device is a chore, "emby connect" is far too clunky to use so I end up configuring via URL every time - and on some devices that's a real chore.

Any recommendations about how to install all this jazz?

I'd like to build a music box controllable by the family, eventually centralising videos so anyone (or at least me) can just pick up their phone and watch an episode of star trek without the hassle of copying. Automatic subtitles would be magic.

Cheers!

Many ways to install it officially nowadays (see their website) but most do it via docker. A very easy albeit unoffical way is via flatpak.
If all you want is a local media server. It's very easy.

You pretty much just have to install Plex or Jellyfin, setup a "library" in the software.

You usually set up one library for movies and one for TV shows. You then point these libraries to their respective folders on your hard drive and assuming you have some half decent organized media with proper naming it usually just works.

Plex doesn't have automatic subtitles per say but mostly Plex players allow you to download new subtitles from the player. I don't know about Jellyfin.

If you want to have external access it's a bit harder if you use jellyfin as you will have to setup a reverse proxy but I'm guessing that there are a lot of guides for that online. Plex should work for external access out of the box assuming you have a public IP, and even if you don't you can use their automatic relay services to get it to work anyway although in very low quality.

Proper naming is honestly the hardest part but that's very dependent on how much existing media you have and how the naming is today. Luckily Plex and Jellyfin are fairly good at recognizing and finding media with subpar namin (you should still fix the naming to comply with the documentation)

If you want to have automatic torrent downloads, fully automatic subtitles and all that it's quite some work to set it up properly and have it working without any input from you. If you want to tackle it (or are just curious), I recommend checking out https://trash-guides.info/

Yeah, I'm really glad I found out about Jellyfin. I switched to Jellyfin because Plex doesn't let you disable Passout Protection (automatically stopping playback after something like 3hrs) without Plex Pass. I was just about to fork over $95 for a lifetime license when I looked into Jellyfin and discovered continuous playback was the default. I switched that very day and never looked back.

That's so weird. I've been using Plex for years and had never heard of "Passout Protection" until looking it up just now, nor does it ever stop playback on its own for me unless it reaches the end of the queue. I'm using the free version via web browser on my computer. Maybe it's a setting that only affects apps? Continuous playback on Plex is one of the reasons why I've always preferred it over Netflix, etc.
- Yeah, I don't think it effects browsers.

I’ve been running plex for a few years no. No real issues to complain of.

Until today. I just upgraded my server with an Intel ARC. Was looking forward to enabling qsv for streaming. Turns out you need plex pass to do that.

Can jellyfin do it?

Yes. You set hardware encoding to QSV, then you're mostly set. You can choose which formats it should work on, which for an Arc card will probably be all of them. I got an Arc A380 and its worked flawlessly with many streams at once.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration/intel/

Yeah! It's been great for me. No detection issues or weird bugs. The mobile and TV apps are also great!

Has been for a long while. Also there are tons of unofficial apps as well.

I knew basically nothing bout jellyfin except it existed and this thread inspired me to finally set up my own server and client on the tv cause the chromecast has just become so unbearably bad.

I had it up and running in 5 minutes. Hardest part was remembering the auth key while running between rooms. I don't buy into the atmos meme, for music I have bt amplifier or vinyl and it has everything I need: Watch content from my tv.

Plex has been terrible for a long time if it weren't for Jellyfin I would've just not bothered with a media server for a few years until they got their shit together. That reminds I should throw some money at the Jellyfin team.

I feel like 20 years ago someone made a similar realization with Linux vs windows

Edit: i remember people telling me how good Linux was in 2010ish (so maybe 20 years was wrong), so idk…

Let's not rewrite history, 20 years ago desktop Linux was an absolute shit show.

It's still terrible for music. There's not even user-based star rating...

Wrong tool for the job ! Use Navidrome with your music library. There's even a new scanner rewrite in the working which will even further improve how good it is !
- I used to use it. But I had so many services running it was a pain to maintain. It didn't have a TV app aswell. And Navidrome looked kind of abandoned at the time. Maybe I should go back though. Is there a way to migrate my playlists? I think that's the one thing holding me back.
Plexamp being behind a paywall stopped me from using Plex for music. Went with Navidrome and it works great.
True, also no support for cue sheets, search is bad and no lyrics.
- Lyrics work :)

I've had both for a while now, but I find that subtitle playback is a bit spotty in Jellyfin. Is that fixed, or have I missed a setting somewhere? The other thing is that my libraries are alphabetical in Jellyfin, so "Anime" comes before "Kaiju", and I truly can't stand the idea that Godzilla gets sent to the back of the bus. Is there a way to customize the order of libraries?

I actually had the opposite experience, better subtitle support without transcoding the video track with Jellyfin
The other thing is that my libraries are alphabetical in Jellyfin, so “Anime” comes before “Kaiju”, and I truly can’t stand the idea that Godzilla gets sent to the back of the bus.

If you mean the order the libraries are listed in the web interface, you change that from "User settings" -> "Home".
- So, I tried that a long time ago, and it didn't work. Tried it again today, same deal. Then, I tried a third time and actually hit the "Save" button this time... Yeah, I think Jellyfin was never the problem.
Anime and .ass subtitles are a bit funky but that's not due to jellyfin but the player used while streaming in direct play. (In my case)

I had the issue where on my mobile/laptop some subtitles just disappeared or where strangely formated. After some digging arround I found out that VLC was the culprit and changing the default player to MPV or alternatives like Findroid (which uses MPV as default player) everything went butter smooth in direct play !

No idea about transcoding though :/
subtitle playback

This is still a little weird. I found that the web client (in a browser) handles this really well with default settings. However, if I try to use the desktop app or a mobile client, I have to force it to burn in the subtitles for them to show up reliably. Fortunately, there are per-client settings for this now:

Can Jellyfin handle symlinks? That's all it would take to sell me at this point.

Yup.
My media folder is a symlink to my NAS mount if that's what you're asking.

If you're on mobile, the app Streamyfin for Android and iOS is fantastic. Handles downloads, transcoding, great UI, and it even integrates with additional third-party tools that enhance it further, like Jellyseer.