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.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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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.
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.
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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.
Jellyfin is awesome.
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.
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!
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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.
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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.
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.
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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'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.
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.
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.
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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.