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Plex will do anything other than make their player easy to use.
My only real complaint is their app is laggy.
Do you have other complaints with it?
Biggest issue I and my friends have with my Plex server is the constant buffer-play-for-a-minute-buffer issue with certain anime subtitle formats. Although the little bit of searching I’ve done with that indicates that may be more of an issue with the device being streamed on than with Plex itself. I dunno.
Certain subtitle formats cannot be directly streamed, so your server is probably re-encoding video on the fly to burn in the subtitles. PGS format is actually a series of images and will always require re-encoding video. Picking SRT should work with device direct streaming.
That must be it, then. Thankfully I’ve got Bazarr set up to snag SRTs for imported media, so those should generally be available.
I added whisper and have never looked back. Sometimes it’s not exactly right but it’s usually obvious and funny 🤣
As someone else said, this almost always comes down to the device they’re using. Especially if it’s a Playstation console or a Smart TV (in my experience) as they don’t support x265 codec or have .ass support, or both
I’ve noticed Roku TVs are a common device to have issues.
Come to think of it the AppleTV app does say a piece of media doesn’t have subs when it does. And if I turn them on the playback hangs for ~10 seconds.
I don’t get the play/buffer/play/buffer issue but I only really use it on my LAN so not really a surprise there.
My main complaint is when it decides to just stop casting to Chromecast in the middle of episodes randomly - then I have to open the app, reconnect, and resume.
Also I find the Chromecast controls stop responding frequently making it so I can’t pause what I’m watching - it’ll like disconnect from the Chromecast but keep playing.
My partner also complains about lots of bugs on the iOS app.
I’ve been having trouble with this too.
So far my best assessment is that the problem stems from the Chromecast not playing well with my router. Resetting the Wi-Fi on my router tends to fix the problem, but it’s seriously annoying.
Separately, I also have issues with the play/pause not working when casting and some other weird interface behaviors sometimes. But all in all, it’s worth complaining, but it still works better than everything else.
It’s terrible with direct streaming lossless Dolby Atmos (TrueHD) streams, not only where it’s not possible but there are workarounds (AppleTV / Infuse), but also on each and every platform it’s being done by other apps (Android, Xbox, PC / Kodi).
I only use it because I paid peanuts for lifetime premium and alternatives have egregious UX that I can withstand but my extended family cannot.
My biggest complaint is that it defaults to “recommended” instead of “library” which means for new users (family members you are trying to help remotely) don’t see the videos in your collection but instead a random unordered list to scroll sideways.
After you select library to see everything, it doesn’t save that view as default unless you go into settings and change it to remember changes.
A new annoying feature they added is when setting up a new account, the default is to send every video you watch to all friends/family unless you select disable. So you can’t even setup quickly by putting in a user/password and being ready to go. You have to talk family members through setup or everyone with access to your Plex will get email spammed with everything that person watched.
I have home videos on my server and this means lengthy phone calls to family so they can actually see the videos.
My biggest complaint is that it defaults to “recommended” instead of “library”… it doesn’t save that view as default unless you go into settings and change it to remember changes.
That’s a pretty minor gripe considering there is a setting for it. Also, given that it’s a you-get-it-one-way-or-the-other kind of setting, they’re always going to be upsetting someone.
Do you actually use their “recommended” view?
Do you primarily watch Plex live TV or their other ad supported movies?
Do you actually use their “recommended” view?
Yes, it lists shows I’m currently watching and takes me directly to the next episode.
Do you primarily watch Plex live TV or their other ad supported movies?
No, never.
Have you helped an older relative with computer problems over the phone?
If you could set the default, it wouldn’t be a problem.
Where do you imagine setting the default?
I imagine he means being able to set the default view for everyone accessing your server from the settings on your server. So that everyone who accesses your server gets those defaults that they can then change for their user if they desire.
Which would be a nice feature.
I would not want my settings affected by the servers I connect to. That would piss me off.
Yes I’m absolutely hating the Android app. The core player experience is so much better on iOS. No need to worry about direct play/transcode, it just works. It’s rubbish on android
all my homies use jellyfin…
Was going to say the same. Why use plex, when jellyfin exists.
Edit: spelling
Because jellyfin has less device compatibility, worse transcoding performance, and still struggles with media matching. Oh and still had memory leak issues.
I have it installed, regularly update and test it, i want to ditch plex. But it’s just got to many basic issues. Anime matching in particular is rough and yes even after adjusting match sources some anime just outright fails till i manually match, matches incorrectly, won’t work either way.
No it’s not the filenames. I use Sonarr, they are all very clean.
Series name(year) | Season folder (001) | SxxExx episode title
Edit: i give up figuring out how to make this stay treed, fucking hate reddit/lemmy formatting
worse transcoding performance
You have to pay on Plex to use hardware acceleration for transcoding. Lmao
It doesn’t make the point any less valid. I would pay for better transcoding performance in jf if it were an option.
I have hard time believing Plex’s software transcoding is more performant than Jellyfin’s hardware accelerated trandcoding
My problems are less about speed and more about compatibility. I have Plex and jelly thing set up next to each other as containers on the same media database. There’s quite a number of videos that play on Plex that will not play on jellyfin. It could be problems between the two clients.
I’ve understood that “performance” in this sort of context mean how quickly a given task is done
I paid for lifetime in 2012. Worth it.
I’m not using HA so that’s irrelevant to me. It’s just cpu encoding on my threadripper server.
i use Jellyfin but a big thing that Plex has is the ability to easily stream remotely. Its doable with Jellyfin but requires a lot of manual configuration that a non technical user just can’t/won’t do.
For the sake of not being trapped by Plex I could deal with all the other problems everyone’s listed here.
But asking my friends and family to either use tailscale or for me to leave that open highly complicated open source project dangling out there on an open port…
Jellyfin has automatic port mapping, but it’s been hit or miss in my experience. I use Zerotier for remote access, but I forget that not everyone wants to take the time to play around with stuff.
I find the Jellyfin UX to be unbearable. It frequently shows the metadata for completely different movies, despite perfect file naming. Nearly every time I use it I have to restart it due to some weird UI bug or another.
Right now for me its smart collections and playlists and the fact that you can pin them to the home screen. My family lives off the home screen and smart collections.
The only reason that Plex has survived every service purge on my system is because Jellyfin doesn’t have a PS4 app. Every other device that accesses my media is going through Jellyfin. I have my PS4 connected to Jellyfin via DLNA, but asking my wife to give up the polished (turd) Plex app for the file-picker front end in the media player app isn’t a viable option for me.
Dude…what’s your CashApp? A Firestick costs like $20.
Does a Firestick require WAN access? I know my PS4 calls out of the network pretty regularly, but I’m a little hesitant to add more data harvesting into my network. I haven’t ruled it out, though.
I can’t recall offhand. What I will say, though, is that your PS4 is not designed to be a streaming device. It can utilize streaming apps, but that is not its purpose or focus. The apps available on its platform will always be a step behind those for dedicated streaming devices such as Firestick, Roku, Chromecast, AppleTV, or specific streaming apps on a smart TV.
If you are concerned about data harvesting, you should migrate away from Plex and onto something open source like Jellyfin overall. Once Plex closed their code and pushed towards monetization, they began harvesting data just like any other streaming service. That said, there is no Jellyfin app on PS4, but it is fully accessible through the PS4. Again, however, your PS4 is not really meant to be your all-encompassing streaming platform. A Roku or Firestick is very cheap, it is designed to only stream apps, both of Jellyfin, and Plex if you need to continue on that path, and will provide a far better viewing experience than a PS4.
I appreciate the response, and as i said, I understand that jellyfin is completely accessible from PS4 even though there is no dedicated app. Unfortunately, that’s not an option for all the users in my household, which is why I’m running both a JF and Plex server.
As far as PS4 not being designed as a streaming device, the fact remains that it does stream media, and since I have it in my house, it does serve that purpose when it is not being used for gaming. I’m not ruling out the option of adding a dedicated streaming device, but I am loath to the idea of trading in one data harvesting service (plex) for another.
Why use a PS4?
Because people already have the hardware… Why buy something else when what you got works?
Apparently its not working how they want to use it.
it should* have the performance to do anything a smort TV can
Is there a good walkthrough of how to set up Jellyfin on Linux? If I’m breaking away from a shit OS, I may as well try breaking away from an increasingly crummy Plex
depends on your distro.
an internet search like “debian jellyfin install” should point you into the right direction.if in doubt or having trouble: there’s a friendly linux community around the corner.
The official documentation has some guides on setting it up in a few different ways, although they assume the user is decently familiar with Linux/terminal commands and such. There might be some more beginner-friendly guides out there, though.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation/container/
I switched from Plex to Jellyfin a while back and I’ve been very happy with it.
I don’t care about the photos. But glad to hear they are taking photos and music out of the main app and making it less bloated.
I wish they’d allow syncing of my full music library to my mobile app so I can finally get off Apple Music.
Musicbee can pull your songs and playlists from itunes and allow syncing of them to your phone. It doesn’t do streaming though.
To what app in the phone? Does it keep playlists?
It adds it to local folders so you can pretty much use any music player app you want. I like personally like poweramp. I just add the directory with my playlists which are .m3u and it they just pop up
The problem for me is that my music is arranged around “smart playlists”. My music library would be unmanageable if I had to add every song to playlists manually.
Ah, then musicbee might not be for you. I’ve managed my own songs for at least a decade the old fashioned way so it was easy to import and move my songs around to other forms of media apps. You can however copy and paste the Playlist from iTunes to musicbee. You don’t have to manually add all the songs to the playlist from your library.
Put all songs in a playlist and then download that playlist?
But I need all my playlists, not just all my songs in one big useless playlist. I have around 50 of them.
You can download all your playlists.
Hmm, okay maybe I will experiment with it. It seems I read somewhere that there was an issue with doing this. Have you tried it? Then whenever I add new music I’d have to remember to add it to this playlist. Other playlists would automatically use the local copy?
I have Plexamp on my phone configured to automatically download the “loved” album (songs I’ve rated 4 or 5 stars). It automatically downloads songs I add to the playlist. My library is too big to download it all to my phone (most songs are in FLAC format) so I’d need to download a curated list anyways.
This seems to work well. I’ve used it a few times on flights or when I’m in a hotel room with spotty phone coverage and no wifi.
If you play the same songs on other playlists does it use the local copy?
So still not addressing the myriad problems the player has, especially on AppleTV where it’s been reported for nearly half a decade to not work well. But hey you get yet another place to do photos things (which they admit literally no one wants or uses, they’d be better off dropping support for photos altogether).
This is super frustrating because plex is very polished despite its clear bugs and misdirection. I just switched over to JellyFin and it’s faster and much more focused but just still has a lot of rough edges. I’m not sure which will be my long term solution but plex needs to attract folks to subscribe and focusing on features that 1/5 of a percent of users utilize is not how you do that.
As a longtime Plex user, I also hate their lack of focus and tendancy to priorotize bad features (like paid streaming and VR). But this one feels more like a way to re-focus on video by removing photo code from the main (video) app’s codebase, making it easier to maintain.
Can Jellyfin and Plex point to the same libraries and coexist?
I haven’t tried it before but maybe I should. I don’t have huge complaints with the Plex AppleTV app. I just find it laggy at times.
They can, I turned off my plex VM to save resources but no real reason they can’t both point to the same libraries at once.
Yes I do this. Same exact library folders so I can let my friends use whatever they prefer. If everything is named in a Plex friendly way it should just work in jellyfin.
I don’t use it much but haven’t had too many issues with plex on apple TV. I do have infuse too and a lot of people with plex servers prefer infuse on apple products.
I switched to Emby earlier this year and never looked back. All the core features are solid. And it works great on my AppleTV.
I only recently started using Plex because they added the Drew Carey Show. I didn’t know they were anything other than a streaming service.
Their main product is a server that you run on a computer and lets you stream your own content.
Their main product is telemetry and selling your watch history to advertisers.
That’s why Plex doesn’t work without an active internet connection.
K. You lost me years ago when your photos and camera upload function were total shit forever. I since moved all my crap to nextcloud camera upload and photoprism. Not gonna change any time soon
Plex never fixes stuff and it’s really bad. They don’t even have a feedback system.
The login process for Plex photos (Android) was near im impossible, because it used the browser which closed/if I went away from the app such as if I wanted to copy my passqord from my password manager. I wouldn’t be at all suprised if that wouldn’t change until way after stable release.
You can log into the browser beforehand if that helps
I use Firefox Focus because operating a phone is hard. I guess I can switch it temporarily but that’s once again iffy.
I genuinely love PlexAmp. I’m curious about the photos thing and might give it a try.
I just wish it had local sync for my whole music library, not just some small slice of it.
At this point the only thing holding me back from switching to Jellyfin is Plex’s transcoded download function.
I’ve found emby to be a good compromise.
Yeah that’s a good point. I think the appeal of Jellyfin is it being an open source project.
I wish there was a way to hide the synopsis.
I like watching movies and TV without knowing the plot of what I’m about to watch
Nice! The old photos feature in the main app felt too bloated so I stopped using it. Hopefully this one’s snappier cause I’ve been looking for a good way to access my old photos again.
