“We’ve spent two years requiring our apps from the ground up to boost our development speed, which should enable us to bring new features to you more efficiently, across more platforms,”
… “and that’s why we’re deleting a bunch of features never to bring them back. Because we’re just so efficient!” Crazy how many companies use this awful excuse.
Also is that a misquote by the author or did they really write “requiring”?
More often than not that is corporate speak for “we fired the old team and replaced them with cheaper workers. And we didn’t want to pay them to learn the old code/they tried but failed, so we are dumping features now”
Removing old features so we can bring them back as paid features later on.
Misquotes are unlikely thanks to copy-paste. The post from Plex has been edited, so I think it was to correct that typo.
It’s wild to me. I’ve been in software development for almost 8 years now. The number one thing that we’re told across both companies (one small company and one huge company) is to not remove existing features or APIs.
Lack of feature parity is the number one thing holding so many people back from switching to Jellyfin. Of Plex is going to start deleting beloved features, a lot of minds will be made up very quick.
This is a feature that Jellyfin natively has already. So now Jellyfin exceeds Plex in some areas.
Although Plex is running on your server it isn’t there to do what you want… unless Plex’s real owner permits it.
That’s how proprietary software works.
Jellyfin is love, Jellyfin is life.
It’s bad. But it’s the best we’ve got.
Speak for yourself, Jellyfin has been awesome for me. Fantastic piece of software.
Extremely slow and clunky UI on Android. Music has no star rating as every other software including Plex and Navidrome has. It sometimes starts transcoding for no apparent reason.
Not perfect but the best we’ve got.
Jellyfin is the sever bro. You can implement your own client and choose from a pretty decent variety of clients on Android and most platforms. Only Android TV really suffers from required first party support, but the api is documented and we encourage you to make your own or port it to whatever front end you’d like.
Why are there official clients then? Better not to provide any client at all than bad clients based on the web UI.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of open source. This is something someone made for the community out of the goodness of their heart and a desire to create. You can build on top of it or use it as a base and completely remake it if you want, but they’re not making money off this… So your attitude towards them and what they’re offering to everyone for free is honestly quite rude and entitled.
I understand the purpose of open-source. I can voice my opinion and say the software isn’t good in some ways. The developer should be able to handle criticism.
Obviously they got outside pressure to remove this because of muh ease of piracy sharing
I’ll sadly have to keep using Plex until jellyfish makes library sharing simple.
I have like 10 different family members using my server. If I have to do anything beyond just letting them log in to a plex account on the app to get access, they just won’t.
Is adding a URL too much? Jellyfin is also just login in addition to enter the server URL.
Yes. Even with Plex I’ve had people just never log in. Or after I log them in and set it as a favorite they just never go to the unfamiliar icon.
Most of the problem isn’t even Plex/Jellyfin/etc.'s fault, it’s that the UI of smart tvs is a nightmare hellscape running on underpowered hardware and people just want to interact with it as little as possible. The absolute best thing would be to copy Netflix/Disney/etc and throw a QR code on the screen to sidestep that by throwing authentication to the phone.
Yes. Anything harder than Netflix is too much
But it’s easier. Instead of “Netflix” you type “yourdomain.com.” And no payment or whatever needed, and it has the same login process as Netflix.
That’s it. I call mine “media.mydomain.com,” and my domain is really easy to remember.
I mean fuck yeah, probably. I share with my family and I had to check their email for them to prove that they received it.
I have like 10 different family members using my server. If I have to do anything beyond just letting them log in to a plex account on the app to get access, they just won’t.
Umm that is all you need to do with jellyfin. You can setup wizarr and give them invites to create an account or just manually make them and give out the info to people.
Yup, took my SO like 10s to get on our Jellyfin server. No issues here.
Isn’t it trivial to run both? You just point them at the same library right?
I haven’t tried Plex but Jellyfin is super easy. Type in IP, username and password and you’re done. Only need to setup port forwarding on the router to make it work.
Switch to jellyfin, it’s really at the point where it’s ready for everyone
I run both Plex and Jellyfin. Jellyfin is ready for everyone who doesn’t have to deal with the Mother-in-Law Factor. Plex has an easy setup process, and I could walk my MIL through it on my phone. In 5 minutes, her TV was connected to my server.
Jellyfin isn’t to that point yet, and likely never will be. Since there’s no centralized server for an app to phone home to, there’s no way to create a unified account creation/login experience. Jellyfin is nice as a “just for me” server. But as soon as I have to help others use it, it becomes a nightmare. Walking my MIL through setting up Jellyfin on her TV was the reason I re-installed Plex in the first place.
I had finally converted my wife away from using paid streaming apps, and dealt with all of the “Why do I have to use three different apps to access it on my three different devices? They all look different and are harder to use” complaints. By the time it got around to my MIL, I was tired of dealing with it and just reinstalled Plex so people could have a consistent experience.
I still use Jellyfin for my personal viewing because I prefer it. But saying “just ditch Plex, Jellyfin is ready now” is a little disingenuous. Jellyfin is ready for the people who want to use it. But if you’re trying to convince people to ditch their streaming apps, you’re fighting a lot of social inertia. You need to be able to provide a consistent experience across their different devices, with a decent login experience. And Jellyfin definitely isn’t there yet.
Jellyfin is not there yet but it definitely can be. It can be done pretty easily without any centralised server.
- Sending people magic links to their accounts on their phones that auto log them into Jellyfin.
- Make IP dictionary to have people type “cat mug door end” which pings the server with a login from an IP.
- Show QR code.
- Scan with an authorised app which pings the server to authorise the device on behalf of the user.
It’s passwordless 4 word input + phone scan that can be optimised for TV pretty heavily since you only need make something 10^12 unique to account for all IPv4.
It will take around 15-30 hours to code though for a person familiar with Jellyfin on android TV and server.
I’m in the same boat, I use Jellyfin where I can but Plex is still so much better for sharing, especially with non-technical people so I run both. Really hoping the Jellyfin folks realize they can sell a relay service to make some money and fund their development to improve the app. Seems to be working well for Homeassistant!
It’s really not hard though, it’s just entering a domain name. If you pick a decent one, it can be very memorable.
All of my stuff is at “thing.domain.com.” For Jellyfin, it’s “media.mydomain.com.” Nextcloud is “cloud.mydomain.com.” Actual Budget is “budget.domain.com.” Enter that, then you’re good. Repeat on any device.
Is that really a barrier for people? Surely this is sufficient:
- Install Jellyfin app
- Enter domain.com
- Login
Do that once and you’re good pretty much forever.
I’ve used the website, android app, and WebOS app, and they all work pretty similarly, not sure what’s confusing there.
Is the Plex experience significantly different?
Lame. I’ve used this feature a lot. It feels like such a basic thing to include.
SharePlay is a standard feature in Apple devices, and it handles it. But only in supported apps.
The pandemic showed how nice such a feature can be for a lot of people.
I’ve been in a multi year process to move my users off plex onto jellyfin. They just keep doing things I’m not a fan of
Jellyfin is absolute dogshit though.
Sauce: I just installed it on my media server that concurrently runs plex. I run the app on a fire tv cube to use it… and it crashes* constantly.
Edit: More stuff :)
-My media library when imported immediately showed seasons of shows as separate shows, it doesn’t intelligently automatically merge it like Plex would.
-Subtitle options are not consistent or robust. I MUST have subtitles due to having a multilingual family which is largely ESL, if they speak English at all. This is the problem I tried moving to jellyfin to fix.
I’ve been lucky I guess to have no issues or at least major issues. I find small bugs here and there and report them and usually get fixed in a minor release or two. Once Jellyfin has Native 2fa I’ll fully cut off Plex and be completely moved over
For anyone in that spot of being savvy-ish but having fellow users that finally got used to plex:
A work around is Xteve and owncast. I was successfully able to make an owncast broadcast into a “DVR channel”.
Its cluegy but it does work. My tech level in this stuff is spotty. I’m used to stacks of tech but more for physical control systems (NOT consumer facing). But I was able to get that to work.
Edit: little bit of clarification: Xteve will let you add DVR to your plex server. It’s possible to tie owncast into Xteve. That allows users to cue into a “DVR” channel which is kind of “simulcasting” whatever you’re pointing owncast to. In my case it was a screen share of sportsball, but it could be whatever.
LoL. That feature is literally the only reason I also have a Plex docker pointing to my library. But they’ve definitely not been supporting it for a while, because I don’t think it’s worked well in forever. Last few times I tried it with friends, we ended up having to just try to hit play at the same time.
Oh well. One less container now.
First they removed downloads and now this? Feels shitty. I used this feature weekly to watch a show with a remote friend.
Downloads havent been removed
In 2022 they added a paywall to the feature which was previously free to all users of a Plex Pass server. https://support.plex.tv/articles/downloads-sync-faq/
Downloads definitely haven’t been removed. I use it virtually every day to watch stuff on my iPad at work.
In 2022 they added a paywall to the feature which was previously free to all users of a Plex Pass server. https://support.plex.tv/articles/downloads-sync-faq/
I never used that feature. Sometimes less is more. Anyone actively using it in plex or Jelly?
I never used it, but it was a popular third party add-on before the feature was integrated.
Yeah I don’t even used the SharePlay on Apple. Question for people using it: How do you start that? First do you start over phone/whatsapp/messengers? Or do you see people online in plex and propose to watch? For me either people are in different timezone so not practical or will be home and we watch it irl sync on the same tv.
I text my buddy, and say “hey do you wanna watch xyz, when you’re done with work?”. We hop on discord to chat and watch it. An hour or two timezone is not an issue, and for someone ‘local’ I’m probably not driving half an hour to their house after work. I do prefer watching together in-person, but thats not always as convenient.
Thanks for sharing
Probably around 40% of my watching is via syncplay on Jellyfin, as I like watching with buddies.
Sans jellyfin you have to find a way for both of you to access the same file/stream and manually sync across snack/bathroom breaks or use the external and separate syncplay app.
I do like the external syncplay app but if I’m going to have to get the file to them anyways, why not just stream it synced? In my mind this is a really convenient feature.
It is not perfect, in my experience;
- on rare occasions, it gets ‘stuck’ and won’t sync correctly, so one will play but noth the other, pausing one unpauses the other, etc. Usually rebooting helps, but if not, I just manually sync
- there was 1 occassion which made no sense. I played a movie with a friend, we were watching together, but they were ahead of me by a whole ~15 minutes by the end of the film. Neither of us felt it was fast/slow or skipping anything.
- I haven’t had luck using syncplay on my TV. The feature exists but it doesn’t actually work.
But these are rare, minor gripes IMO. I’m glad Jellyfin has this feature.
Thanks for sharing
