Hello! I’m just a guy who saw plex is on sale.
My current setup uses jellyfin, I use FLAC music and 4k films. I use Finamp on my iPhone and the jellyfin desktop client.
Now my question is, why?
Both platforms are great but I’m a guy who likes all free. No farm, no foul to the lifetime pass users of plex though. But I’ll scroll and I’ll see: “100% worth it!” ; “I could never go back”. Now this doesn’t capture everyone’s opinions, but out of the features they display that make lifetime unique is Transcoding (something I think you should have a right to after owning the processor) and plexamp which, I cannot rate its experience, but from what I hear it’s solid. But I’ve also heard it’s got its bugs and downloads can be finicky.
So, as a jellyfin user, why might I care or want to switch to plex?
(I’m not ignoring the issues jellyfin has, I don’t really experience any though and bugs are minimal for my case)
(I’ve posted in this sub instead of plex because I want mixed, not skewed results and yes I’ve searched the history, but I don’t think any question truly validates why transcoding or similar should be a $100+ “feature”. That’s snake oil marketing.
First, lets get all of this cleared up.
Plex came first. It was a fork of XBMC(which became Kodi).
Technically, most users could just run Kodi with a central library database and get most of the same benefits. The problem is that would primarily work for local players and wouldn’t work well for remote operations.
Plex got ridiculously popular back in the day because it had the same attitude as Kodi when it came to addons. There were a ridiculous number of addons that essentially made piracy seamless. So, Plex was a popular option for people who wanted to pirate movie streams, organize media, and do a lot of other things. This is when Plex started to surpass Kodi in popularity.
Emby came second, as an open-source alternative to Plex. One difference was that it never really allowed plugins in any significant way and therefore didnt get as popular. When Emby went closed source a few years ago, some people forked it off into Jellyfin.
Jellyfin came last. Plex and Emby had closed source their products primarily because of remote transcoding. So for quite a while, the transcoding on Jellyfin was trash. It also had a number of weird quirks and bugs. It was fairly half-baked. I personally bought Plex lifetime after Jellyfin came out because Jellyfin wasn’t mature and Emby cost money too.
At the end of the day, Plex has actually gone backwards in features because they are trying to be a more acceptable product. This means fewer mods for piracy features and they’ve killed some of the other features while adding in their “free streaming” options and some other questionable decisions.
But Emby has died and Jellyfin is still a poor substitute. Can you use Jellyfin? Absolutely. Wouldn’t even blame you if you do it. You can also run Kodi as described. But I absolutely felt it was worth it to stop fiddling with Jellyfin and just run something that worked and rarely crashed, had errors, etc.
Thank you for the explanation! I’m curious about the old Plex. I’ve heard the same about the new though. Installed first and sure I hooked up my libraries but I like jellyfin cause it doesn’t have all the “bloat” but I hear you can “disable it” as well so