I used Plex, and have a lifetime account, for the past decade. I just switched over to Jellyfin this week.
Feel free to ask any questions that you have about differences or my opinion.
Anything you’re missing from Plex?
Regarding the big picture interface:
- Are there trailers for upcoming movies and shows?
- Can you easily search, download and sync subtitles?
- Can you sort your library after various parameters?
- Can you put movies on a watch list and have Radarr download it?
- Can you delete movies and shows (including their files)?
- I don’t see anything in settings or in the official plugins but there seems to be some plugins. Some seem to be to just search and not the pre-roll trailers.
- There is a subtitles plugin that works well. It is not as cleanly handled for my tastes. You have to search for it on the media landing page. You cannot download and select while playing your media.
- You can filter and then sort
- I do not have experience to answer that
- There is a delete media option. I am transferring a large amount of data right now and cannot test if it deletes it from Jellyfin or entirely.
Thanks
jellyfin welcomes you with open arms
This is for remote streaming. Can Jellyfin be accessed outside the network? I thought that was the difference.
Like if I didn’t like Plex and I ran Jellyfin (and I have done), I could access it locally but I couldn’t access it, say, from a hotel a thousand miles away. Or it requires a lot more work (and maybe some paid service) to do.
Plex may have gone up, but a bunch of us got it for $100 or less years ago and we are not affected by the new limitations. Still free for our family members accessing remotely. Wasn’t free for us to set up.
Yes it can be accessed outside the network. We use Tailscale. Our Jellyfin setup cost us the energy to run it, lol.
I don’t run Jellyfin, but I’ve considered it. From what I understand, you have to set up a reverse proxy or something like Tailscale in order to access it remotely. Doing that safely can take a bit of learning, but the only part that could cost money is getting a domain name.
Is a domain name strictly necessary though? You would need a static IP. I thought you needed something like a VPS or VPN — I know what a VPN is, but I think it was something with a similar acronym — and that was a service that cost money.
With Plex it just works. When I load up Plex on a remote machine, first it tells me my server is offline, because my server is a Mac and Macs are sleepy bois, so it wakes up the Mac, which wakes up the drives, and then the server loads up and I can play pretty much anything.
I’ve ran Jellyfin on both Mac (current setup) and Windows/Intel. I like Jellyfin overall, and it does some cool things Plex doesn’t. Like you can fix details Plex won’t let you. Like for some reason it only lists the foreign actors in anime, you can manually specify the English voices if you want. Plex doesn’t let you do that and AFAIK there’s no way to. (There should be an API out there that taps into a service that lets you access any language cast, and there should be a way to set it to dynamically change the cast to whatever language you have selected.) But anyway, Jellyfin is somewhat fine, but to use it on other devices (e.g. an Apple TV box on the same network), you have to do a fair bit of configuring. It’s not just, log into the account on your phone and type in the text on the screen. Jellyfin doesn’t even prioritise Apple development, but they have come a long way.
Honestly the others in this comment section would be better to ask about accessing Jellyfin remotely, but I can tell you what I know.
If you go the VPN route, Tailscale is typically recommended, which appears to be free for personal use. It looks like these are the docs for using Tailscale with Jellyfin.
I host a couple services for my family using a reverse proxy (nginx through SWAG), and I have a free domain name with duckdns. This is not as secure as the above tailscale solution, but has worked for me so far. This is likely how I would add Jellyfin to my workflow, since I already have a reverse proxy and domain name.
Can Jellyfin be accessed outside the network?
Yes. Jellyfin is just a Docker container. It can be accessed the same as any other Docker container. Plex simplifies this because they can basically configure all the DNS stuff for you, because it goes through their DNS. But either can be accessed.
Or it requires a lot more work (and maybe some paid service) to do.
More specialized knowledge to configure Tailscale or a reverse proxy, yes. I use Yunohost which makes all of this a whole lot simpler.
Sorry to be a pendantic ass. But. Jellyfin, in and on itself, has absolutely nothing to do with docker.
