Optimal Plex Settings for Privacy-Conscious Users

All the people yes jellyfin is great but plex is easiest to share to non tech people to just download an app and they are instantly connected to my server. It’s just works and it’s a lot easier to explain to my family then jellyfin is.
- It’s not just that. I’m a techie. I’ve been in the industry for decades. I know my way around computer very well.
  I want to like Jellyfin and I want to ditch Plex (even though I have a lifetime license) because of what it has become and where it’s headed.
  That said, the other day my Plex server had some issues that took me a while to figure out. Since when it failed I just wanted to watch an episode of a series and relax, I once again fired up the JF client. I couldn’t get seek to work, I had to manually find and download subtitles (that’s not always the case but when it is, it’s pretty annoying), and ultimately I couldn’t watch my series at all as playback would randomly stop, the player would close and I’d be back at the menu, without the position having been recorded and with no way to fast-forward as seek didn’t work at all.
  I ended up spending 15min figuring out what was wrong and fixing Plex, then watched my series undisturbed.
  Like I said, I want to drop Plex for JF, but in the 3 years or so that I’ve been running both, every time I fire up JF I end up running back to Plex as I just want to sit back and watch a bloody series or movie.
  
  Funny I have always had better luck with jellyfin over Plex for subtitles. It's one of the reasons I started looking at jellyfin.
  
  i wanted to share my library with my parents in another state. i set up a jellyfin server on my computer and walked them through setting up the android app on their chromecast in no time at all and they use it just like any other app
- Jellyfin was more work on my end so that family could connect with https, but for me to set them up it’s literally just “here is the URL, login, and password.”
- How difficult can it be to just give someone a login? I don't get the whole sharing jellyfin is difficult argument. It is just as easy as any online service 🤷‍♂️
  
  while I agree you have to remember everyone one here is likely way more techie than the average person
  the ONLY issue I think non-tech people have with JellyFin is that you have to enter a specific domain/ip address to connect to a server - like I know to us that’s simple but it’s also very unlike how most paid-for streamers operate
- It's not that hard. Everyone knows how to put in a URL.
  
  Have fun doing that with a TV remote though, I guess you could buy a very short domain name.
- jellyfin is great, IF you have an organized collection. If your collection is like mine, spread across 3 drives that have been used for the last 15+ yrs, and not organized into folders for each show...you're gonna have a bad time. i found:
  jellyfin didn't like when files used periods instead of spaces.
  jellyfin assumed that a year in the filename was the year the content was released and ignored using that year to search the title(i.e. if content has a year in it's title jellyfin was ignoring that year).
  jellyfin seemed to choose random old shows instead of the obvious show that it should have been.
  jellyfin didn't seem to have an option to change what show a file was a part of, i had to move it into a folder of the show's name.
  jellyfin has issues with text files in the folders that have filenames that are urls(i.e. www.torrentsitehere.com-downloads.galore.txt would somehow tell jellyfin to go look at that url in the filename for info about the file, but of course it didn't even parse the url out of the filename correctly and tried going to the full filename as the url and erroring out). i only found this out as it also wasn't deleting the content that had these files in them as it was somehow trying to delete that url from the filename.
  jellyfin doesn't like when content has it's own NFO file to talk about where the content came from, or the person who claimed to release it first(since the NFO file is in this case is just a text file showing off some ASCII 'art' and edgy text, jellyfin isn't able to parse the file)
  using jellyfin did help me realize i didn't need half the stuff i had, and helped me see that i wasn't going to watch most of that again. It is open source, but that only means you can see the code and what goes into it, it doesn't instantly make it better.
  in the end i'm probly going to run both, since i primarly watch via the plex app on my xbox and the jellyfin xbox support is abysmal, it isn't made for controller at all and it literally just a webpage that you move the cursor(mouse pointer) around with the left stick.
  
  jellyfin didn't like when files used periods instead of spaces.
  At least that can't be the problem since my entire library (except music) uses periods instead of spaces.
  Then again, I spent quite some time organizing my library when I first started using Radarr and Sonarr. Ever since those manage my library I had no issues in Jellyfin.
  
  There are great apps that provides a way of organizing such libraries which you should do to have stuff organized regardless of problems with JF. They're called Sonarr for tv shows and Radarr for movies, they also provide other features, but their media organization is great

The privacy conscious choice is to not use Plex at this point. It is only a matter of time before they start directly screwing with private library's.

I'm sad this isn't just a link to Jellyfin
- That was my thought.

The most optimal plex setting is Jellyfin
- stopppp
  it’s already dead
  
  Not dead enough. We need to bully all high profile plex users such as Linus (tech tip man) into switching to Jellyfin.

A privacy conscious selfhoster wouldn't be using Plex.

Can't figure out why you would use Plex over jellyfin, I have a life time pass to Plex, I haven't used it in years, this isn't about money, it's about not having garbage running on your machine.
- There's a simple answer to that. When many people first got started with Plex, it was awesome! Way better than xbmc! Also, jellyfin didn't exist.
  Once you've had things up and running smoothly for years, changing everything is a hard sell. You could spend hours setting it up, fixing little inconsistencies, manually matching titles that had weird names, etc. or you could just... not.
  I hope I've cleared things up for you! The answer is laziness!
  
  IDK, the hardest (Most tedious) part for me was renaming everything and categorizing things properly, but that passed over seamlessly, although I do remember being paranoid that I would have to do It again and the only reason I switched is because Windows broke something on my old server and I had to use Linux so I was kinda forced into it.
- I have been trying to use jellyfin locally but subtitles have issues some times depending on the show or format. Also recently my wife watched 2 episodes more than me so we needed to go back 2 episodes and only way to do that from the Up Next or Resume screens was to start a new search of the show and click into the season and then find the episode. In Plex that takes 2extra clicks to get to the season and find the episode. I get supporting open source but for my jellyfin only has 70% of the features I use weekly on Plex. Definitely supporting it and trying to use it but it's not feature parity for me
- This.
- Jellyfin is ugly, buggy, and the options to secure it aren’t really up to snuff.
  If Jellyfin implemented proper SSO support (without needing the plugin) and the clients worked with it as well, I’d be much more willing to use Jellyfin.
- Can’t figure out why you would use Plex over jellyfin
  Probably the biggest reason is that it makes it so easy to securely share across the internet. With JF you're on your own and you can really fuck things up. If you're just running it on your LAN the JF is the obvious choice.
  
  Set up Jellyfin with Yunohost, it comes with all the fun security stuff built in.
  
  There are plenty of VPN solutions.
  Get something like Netbird and share the port.
- agree in principal, but in practice:
  parents who live across the state
  plexamp for music
  
  Remote access is definitely a pain, and just surfacing the ports is a bad idea.
  Finamp is close. No visualization, No normalization, and there's gapless playback but no crossfading.
  I use tailscale to watch videos and play music remotely.
  
  You absolutely need to be careful sharing your own media with people outside your household as that's probably illegal. If you still need to you can setup a VPN.
  The Jellyfin music player has recently seen a lot of love
- Here's some thoughts I posted on a different post https://lemmy.world/comment/15822959 I was running jellyfin off the same server and hardware as Plex, yet it's less efficient and performant.
  
  Agreed it all really just depends on what functionality is important to you. If it was just me and my wife using it I'd absolutely be using Jellyfin. But between grandparents and small children using mine, I got so many complaints I had to turn Plex back on after a week.
- Jellyfin for me sucks. Not the server, the client. It works great on my wife's machine but whenever I wanna watch something I get constant issues with crashing and seeking not working.
  
  I recently had a weird bug with Jellyfin, are you by chance using a domain name? Try accessing Jellyfin using direct IP, e.g. http://192.168.1.123:8096/
  
  Sounds like a transcoding issue which AFAIK can depend on the machine you try to play this with. Doesn't really solve your problem other than next time get something that's better at playing more video formats, which is a hilarious and silly problem to have these days.
  
  This is why I’ve stuck with Emby.
  I get why people switched, and I’m open to it eventually, but Emby is much more polished. That’s not to say the Emby clients don’t also crash from time to time.
  
  If you're trying to watch 4k content in a browser, AFAIK, Edge is the only one capable.
- Jellyfin always irrecoverably crashes for me over time. It also suffers from permissions issues where videos won't play sometimes due to a a transcode folder being full or something like that.
  I want to use it but it always breaks.
  
  The sqlite database that Jellyfin uses tends to get corrupted easily, especially if the disk gets full.
  The main big feature that Jellyfin devs are working right now is a complete overhaul of the internal database system:
  https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/13047
  
  I've used it for about 2 years and it has been mostly stable. The only major issue I had was about a year and a half ago where it got stuck in a infinite crash due to a corrupt database. It was a known bug that was fixed.
  
  What's your setup and hardware look like? I'm just curious.
  My jellyfin service has been up for about six months, and has played probably 100+ shows and movies, for myself internally and a few external clients over that time. My hardware is a HP elite desk mini and a 10TB USB HDD
- I’m running Plex with the Xbox One Digital TV Tuner for live TV channels. Would that work with Jellyfin now? When I set this system up, Plex was the only thing that I got to work.
  
  I use the HDhomerun

For me, who has several streaming subscriptions (Netflix,...), this allows me to have a unified library and to be able to launch Netflix from Plex. Is it possible to do the same thing with jellyfin?
- No, I don't think so

Why would you waste your energy and manage something yourself when they collect your data anyway?

Wow, I haven't used Plex in years but this reads like some Windows 11 installation guide with all those checkmarks and hidden options.