plex or Jellyfin?

HomelessCanadian@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 127 points –

I’ve got Jellyfin up and running right now on a DS620Slim NAS and it’s running pretty good so far. I’ve seen a lot of people say they prefer Plex over Jellyfin. What are the main advantages to plex?

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I have both (they both can coexist peacefully on the same library). I use jellyfin for any watching on my phone or computer.

However, where jellyfin still really kind of falls apart is when casting to my Chromecast. Controls don't work, subtitles are unpredictable or missing, and it's just generally a mess.

So I use Plex for casting, and jellyfin for everything else. I bought a Plex lifetime pass ages ago, so it's an easy call to just have them both running.

Is the Plex pass really worth the 160$ CAD? Seems like a lot of money on one application

The $160 is a lifetime pass... I pay $20/mo for Netflix. That's $240/year. So, if you think it's worth it for even one year, compared to something like Netflix, then it's a pretty solid value proposition.

I bought the lifetime pass in 2014 when it was $75. Been more than happy with that decision.

Same. I don't recall the pricing but I signed up roughly around that time. I haven't regretted it.

I found what really helps Jellyfin on my Chromecast is setting the player manually. There's a setting to make it ask which player to use when starting a show and if one doesn't work, 99% of the time the other one works fine.

Sometimes switching players doesn't fix subtitles for me, in those situations I usually have to toggle subs a few times or restart the stream and they actually work.

In my opinion it's a minor enough inconvenience given Jellyfin is 100% free and open source, whereas Plex is tracking you and charging you. But of course maybe your media is in some more difficult format than mine.