Reading this thread, it seems like two different groups of people are having two different conversations.

For me, self-hosting is just that, running my own stuff at home for myself (and my immediate family). My motivation is privacy and freedom. I want to use services that are free of commercial incentives against my interests whenever possible. That usually means self-hosting my services.

I’ve been a system and network engineer for most of my career and I like configuring and managing stuff. I like knowing how everything on my home network runs, where and what data is shared, etc.

As soon as people start talking about “my users need …” I’m out. That sounds too much like what I do at work. I want to relax when I’m at home. Jellyfin is perfect for me to do that with my content without needing any of my data to go to any companies.

For everyone who wants to be an IPTV operator, Plex is the best choice right now. Jellyfin isn’t really focused on that use case.

Jellyfin is awesome for local use, Plex is better at sharing libraries with friends and family and jellyfin is total ass for music

I run jellyfin

I don’t know if it’s improved, but I was only put off by the memory footprint on windows. Plex was running more efficiently and does look more polished. This was also impart as I now use Channels for my live TV purposes as nothing else really comes close.

It’s still installed and ready to go if I need to make the switch but I don’t really have a big enough reason to do it. Too many other things to tinker with.

Last time I tried, there was no prebuilt client for Jellyfin on my Samsung TV. I had to put the TV in dev mode, cross compile and install their experimental code, and it honestly wasn’t that good a client.

I don’t use the paid features of Plex so I’m just holding my nose and keeping it until the alternatives become viable.

As said in literally every thread here that ever mentions anything about Plex or jellyfin, biggest is remote library sharing.

No, I will not walk my in-laws through setting up a vpn gateway so their TV will connect to me

No, despite my extensive homelab setup, I am not going to set up a reverse proxy and go through the SSL/TLS cert bullshit and expose especially considering the security limitations the devs say likely will not be fixed

There’s others, but those are the main ones for a bunch of us

I already paid when it was cheap. I’ll stay and get my full dollars worth and then some. I paid for it, I’ll use it. When it is unusable I’ll bail. Anything else is stupid.

TL;DR… Lowest common denominator stops people setting up tailscale or the like, along with sunken cost fallacy.

Problem is access outside your home for family and friends.

There are serious security gaps that make it a non starter to expose to the internet.

I’ve been using Jellyfin ever since they forked out of Envy, and honestly, it’s the biggest complaint that I have. It is incredibly difficult to make it available to friends and family who are on various devices, networks, so on and so forth.

Whereas Plex “just works.”

Have lifetime already. No reason to jump. Generally it just works.

No need to have another project while Plex still works fine.

I paid for it ages ago on a deal, and it currently suits my needs. It runs as a docker container and it just works. It’s easy enough for my elderly mom to use remotely and I’ve ripped my entire movie collection for her to watch. I also like the live tv that’s included with the pass.

I would switch in a heartbeat if it wasn’t doing what I need, but so far I have no complaints, it works well for my family’s needs.

This is all a fascinating thread because everyone says Plex “just works”

I started using jellyfin about 6 months ago. I don’t really know anything about plex use. However, jellyfin worked out of the box for me. Set up with a docker container and have never had any problems with it.

Its never failed to load media, or loaded duplicates or any of the other random things others have mentioned here.

For the most part it feels like people in the thread have just used Plex for a long time and had their first impression of jellyfin years ago and probably haven’t checked it out since.

Which, fair play to them, life gets busy and setting up and migrating a media library is something that takes at least a couple hours which could be spent doing anything else.

If people are new, I’m sure they won’t even bother with Plex and their ridiculously high fees. I cannot see Plex maintaining their userbase at this rate.

With them unable to maintain their userbase, I give it a year before they cancel lifetime passes and 2 years or so before it’s completely enshitified and unusable.

I had a real problem with the media scanner - turns out it was just very slow. :(

I stopped using Plex because it was buggy for me, stopped using Jellyfin because it didn’t have an app for my smart TV and using it in the TVs browser sucked, and now I use Emby because it’s pretty simple, works amazingly and is free. I still technically have Jellyfin running side-by-side with Emby, I just don’t use it. Jellyfin had a simple UI and basic UX, but Emby looks and feels so good.

Now, go ahead and tell me that Emby supports baby eating facists or something

I’m afraid of exposing HTTPS to the open internet.