this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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I've feel like I've used Plex forever. I also feel like every couple years I try Jellyfin to see how it's going. Recently I tried it again because of Plex restriction on more than one user.

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

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

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

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[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (14 children)

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. TMM runs on a schedule, every 30 minutes, so I just have to drop my media into the folders and the metadata is grabbed, updated, custom naming functions are run, and everything is moved all automatically. Works great.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 0 points 4 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] towelie@lemm.ee 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Not the UI, the UX. The UI may be editable, but if I have to make my own UI to be happy with what it looks like or works like, then that's bad UX.

I get that sometimes those terms are used interchangeably, but they're not the same.

[–] towelie@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Sorry, I misread. What is bad about the UX exactly? You don't need to customize anything if you don't want to; "it just works". And I dont follow you on how having the option to customize things makes it a bad user experience. You're assuming the native UI is bad for some reason.

I've used Plex a lot too back in the day but there's nothing it provides that Jellyfin doesn't do out of the box + self-hosted + for free.

[–] splendoruranium@infosec.pub -1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Sorry, I misread. What is bad about the UX exactly? You don’t need to customize anything if you don’t want to; “it just works”. And I dont follow you on how having the option to customize things makes it a bad user experience. You’re assuming the native UI is bad for some reason.

Being given the tools to customize something by hand is not the same as being offered enough option to simply choose what you want. Having a good UX means that there was a UI designer who alread did the customzing for you and you simply have click a button to apply it.

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