Hey, I wanted to do a little pool to see which one is your favourite I already know it will surely be Plex, but since a few time, there is JellyFin that came on the market.
By my side, I switched to Jelly recently. Me, my girlfriend and my brother are the main users of this installation my girlfriend didn’t completely switch from Plex but yeah.
We recently added a Flood, ruTorrent system that you can use with telegram too instead of qBittorent. To be honest, it works really well, and I love the Flood’s interface and that the fact that we can separate users quiet easily.
Because since I watch a lot of anime often the metadata is really broken so it’s really useless to use them by my side.
Here are the main reasons we switched to Jelly.
Firstly damn it’s so much faster. I love Jelly just for this reason.
Plex always bugs by my side sometimes a song is not synced sometimes if you skip too much the infinite loading screen kicks in. There is still a thing that NEEDS to bug every time we want to watch a film, so it takes me like 5 minutes to put a movie on the TV.
We were looking a lot for the GPU transcoding sadly… I wanted to buy one, but I got scammed recently so yeah this idea is kind of in standby.
One thing we also love about Jelly is since we do CPU transcoding and for some reason even if you want simply the server to send you Blueray 4k on plex or jelly, it doesn’t work.
Jelly has a really interesting feature where you can copy the link of your movie and playing it from the source like a stream in blueray (on VLC and surely on the local network too :P) .
Now jelly is not perfect for the following reasons by my side. Firstly the library automatic update doesn’t work well by my side. I often refresh my self. Secondly, the metadata can break everything literally because Jelly folders need to be ordered in a really specific way like folder for movies, shows, …
In my private folders for my anime things, I simply disabled it, but they always pop up as a movie, never as a show like Plex did even without taking the metadata from sites like the TvDB (if i remember right the name of that thing).
And finally, for now, I can’t Chromecast on my TV…
I know there is a lot of disadvantages, but I still prefer jelly by my side.
Personally, I feel like a lot of your Plex issues were caused by something other than Plex, as none of those are issues that I’ve generally run into (despite heavy usage across the past few years and across numerous server configurations). My only gripe with Plex at this point is that it’s sync functionality is garbage.
I’ve tried out Jellyfin, but the support wasn’t there yet. It’s getting better, but it’s still a way off. Same goes for Olaris (being developed by @Animazing). Really promising project, but it’s a long way off yet.
Plex, despite a few minor issues through the years, remains my number one choice. It’s performed consistently well with very few issues (which were often easily fixable). I find that a lot of people’s issues with it are actually to do with poor client support. Rokus are the best for smooth Plex playback.
Plex has been solid for a decade and has many clients for basically every platform. I gave Jellyfin a shot about a month ago and found its clients lacking. It wouldn’t let me direct play content from my browser where Plex would direct play the same content just fine. Their Windows client wouldn’t even start but instantly crashed on me.
So yeah Plex is my preferred media server and I doubt that will change sometime soon.
Because there are various devices I watch content on, including but not limited to tablets, phones and laptops. I don’t want to walk around with a flash drive nor have multiple copies of movies / series on different flash drives. It’s pretty much a pain in the ass to do that, compared to opening nzb360 on my phone, entering the serie / movie and having it available on Plex in a few minutes.
@Wolveix I’m trying to learn more about Plex as I’m quite new to this.
I see Transcoding is a paid feature, is that right?
How does Plex deal with .mkv files with multiple subtitles?
As @Solaire said, only hardware encoding is a paid feature (I pay but I don’t use it). The majoriy of my media uses mkv as the extension, and Plex natively supports embedded subtitles as well as external subtitle files.
Ideally, you want all clients to direct play, but this requires the client to support both the audio and video codec, and have the bandwidth to support the file. This is the reason I created Plexus, as h264 and aac are the most universally compatible codecs, lowering the possibility of transcoding.
Think I have to reorganize files or something to try Jellyfin … … Maybe I should anyways
BTW, in Plex, I have some music videos in the same folders as the albums, I would have to add the same music folder as a video library?
Yes, but a separate library scanning the same directories, just for different content, right?
(Assuming you answered the Plex question.)
Jellyfin seems to work pretty straightforward. Installed the linuxserver docker image, mapped rclone mount to /data/music. It’s still scanning the library. The mobile app looks ok, haven’t really dug in yet.
… Maybe I should anyways 
