I switched years ago from Plex to Jellyfin, and while the UI wasn’t quite as nice, everything else is better.
And I don’t have to pay to use HW transcoding on my own hardware…
Honestly, I don’t really understand how people prefer the Plex UI to Jellyfin. No shade, it just doesn’t make sense to me. Plex is incredibly cluttered and busy. Jellyfin is simple and clean. I like the latter a lot more.
Jellyfin looks pretty bad on an iPad. Subtitles setting keep getting reset on their own, it doesn’t understand basic keyboard controls (spacebar to pause), the UI is overall tiny. Oftentimes it will forget to save the spot where I finished watching and on the next launch will happily play the movie from beginning.
Simple auth was honestly one of the upsides for me.
Plex claims to have an offline mode, but I could never got it to work, for some reason.
And I got pissed off one too many times when my Internet went down and I couldn’t watch anything from the NAS a few meters away…
I had that problem when i first started using jellyfin- I would have to give my users some sort of default login which I couldn’t trust them to actually go and change within jellyfin. And then when someone forgot their password, they’d have to ask me to manually reset their password, and until then they couldn’t use their account.
My solution was to use the jellyfin LDAP auth plugin with an lldap docker container, so once I set up my users’ accounts, they have to do the password reset process themselves to initially set their password, and the only info I need from them is their preferred username and email address. Makes sure they’re familiar with the password reset process as well, and now if I get any questions/support requests related to passwords, I can simply direct them to the lldap password reset page.
It also makes it much easier to offer extra services such as mastodon and NextCloud which support LDAP, so users can manage their logins on all platforms from a central place.
What’s better, exactly?
I switched years ago from Plex to Jellyfin, and while the UI wasn’t quite as nice, everything else is better.
And I don’t have to pay to use HW transcoding on my own hardware…
Honestly, I don’t really understand how people prefer the Plex UI to Jellyfin. No shade, it just doesn’t make sense to me. Plex is incredibly cluttered and busy. Jellyfin is simple and clean. I like the latter a lot more.
Jellyfin looks pretty bad on an iPad. Subtitles setting keep getting reset on their own, it doesn’t understand basic keyboard controls (spacebar to pause), the UI is overall tiny. Oftentimes it will forget to save the spot where I finished watching and on the next launch will happily play the movie from beginning.
Was this with the first party Jellyfin app or with Swiftfin?
If it was with the first party app, I’d definitely recommend giving Swiftfin a try.
First party app, yes. Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll give swiftfin a try.
Plexamp. Genuinely my favorite audio player since Winamp.
There’s ‘finamp’ for jellyfin which I really like so far.
I haven’t used plexamp though, so I can’t vouch for it as an alternative.
For Android users there’s Symfonium which I find really great
The reason I’m not switching yet, is that there’s no federated auth. If they had that, I’d switch in a heartbeat.
Simple auth was honestly one of the upsides for me.
Plex claims to have an offline mode, but I could never got it to work, for some reason.
And I got pissed off one too many times when my Internet went down and I couldn’t watch anything from the NAS a few meters away…
Same here. I have it installed, but I’m resistant to managing other people’s passwords.
I had that problem when i first started using jellyfin- I would have to give my users some sort of default login which I couldn’t trust them to actually go and change within jellyfin. And then when someone forgot their password, they’d have to ask me to manually reset their password, and until then they couldn’t use their account.
My solution was to use the jellyfin LDAP auth plugin with an lldap docker container, so once I set up my users’ accounts, they have to do the password reset process themselves to initially set their password, and the only info I need from them is their preferred username and email address. Makes sure they’re familiar with the password reset process as well, and now if I get any questions/support requests related to passwords, I can simply direct them to the lldap password reset page.
It also makes it much easier to offer extra services such as mastodon and NextCloud which support LDAP, so users can manage their logins on all platforms from a central place.