I’m still running Plex (with lifetime subscription), so I have some questions/comments regarding transitioning from Plex to Jellyfin. They’re not necessarily directed at scrubbles.
I was told you don’t really have to change the organization of your media, but I read there are additional configuration tweaks needed to play your media remotely using Jellyfin, like installing/signing an SSL certificate.
I haven’t heard much about the quality of Jellyfin apps. It looks like they have a Roku app, so that should cover most of my needs, but I don’t see support for game consoles.
I’d also like a side-by-side comparison of features between the servers so that I know what I’d be giving up.
I can’t answer all of your questions, but for a while now I’ve run both just in case of something like this.
For media organization, if you use a renamer, arrstack, or just follow the recommended folder structures in plex’s documentation, it should mostly just work™. I point my Plex and jellyfin to exactly the same folders and it looks like jellyfin matched everything with metadata correctly.
You do have to do SSL yourself if you want https (which you definitely want if you’re exposing it publicly, but you could skip if it’s lan only or accessed through a secure VPN). You should be able to apply just about any reverse proxy that can do letsencrypt pretty easily since there’s nothing particularly unusual about jellyfin. I use traefik and my config is almost copy pasted from their examples.
The apps, imo suck. But if the community has a bad reaction to plex’s changes then there could possibly be a lot more attention / development on jellyfin apps. So personally if Plex forces us to have free content and rentals mixed in with no ability to disable, I’ll just put up with the apps and hope they get better. Imo for Android findroid is the best but it doesn’t have casting support.
I just did the plex to jellyfin swap, so ill jump in as well:
Folder structure was no issue between plex and Jellyfin. I did have media scan crashes in jellyfin I didnt have in plex, but it turned out to be my very old music library. I used the FOSS musicbrainz picard to add idv3 tags and rename all files with strange characters in the library and the issue resolved.
Jellyfin has lots of great plugins built-in, with more here. The intro skip is excellent, as is the jellyfin ignore if you want to skip some folders. You can also add an empty file named .ignore to any directory and jellyfin will skip it.
I personally think the apps are excellent. The 1st party kodi app is way better than the 3rd party plexkodiconnect. Faster sync, more feature rich, responsive. The jellyfin android app is also very good. For music, I would recommend Symfonium. Its platform agnostic, but works great with Jellyfin.
For https, look at a reverse proxy like Swag. It will explain how to get your certs issued and automated.
For sharing, the best option is to not expose a port to the internet, but rather to integrate with tailscale. This is an always on vpn network that lets you share servers with remote clients, without opening yourself up to compromise. For a remote jellyfin client, you can install it on a raspi with kodi, android tv, or use an apple tv, which has a tailscale app available.
As a long time Jellyfin skeptic, this is the most convinving endorsement I’ve heard. I dug into the links you shared. I had no idea the Jellyfin ecosystem had expanded so far.
Yeah it’s pretty nice now. I just got tired of plex pulling shit like this and decided to pivot. Its been a breath of fresh air. Even the issues have been light.
A word of warning if you go the container route though: linuxserver.io’s jellyfin container has a bugged ffmpeg install. Use the official jellyfin container from dockers registry. The compose file is all good to use from the Linuxserver.io, just swap the image.
Really?? I wasn’t aware. Ive been running the linuxserver.io image for a few months now. You think its worth going with the official container instead? I’ll give it a shot. The docker compose writeup is the same, aside from the image name?
Yeah, i found this out while trying to run down my library scan crash. It’s in one the github support threads, but I have no idea which one at this point.
Your docker config file should be fine. I swapped the image with no other changes.
Since I am hosting my own DVD rips on my jellyfin server, I got a let’s encrypt certificate and verified it with nginx server and a reverse proxy to duck DNS.
The entire process was arcane, but I simply followed the steps from an online tutorial and it just worked.
I spent more time and energy worrying over whether or not I was doing everything correct then I did actually implementing it, and I’ve never had any issues with it.
I’m still running Plex (with lifetime subscription), so I have some questions/comments regarding transitioning from Plex to Jellyfin. They’re not necessarily directed at scrubbles.
I was told you don’t really have to change the organization of your media, but I read there are additional configuration tweaks needed to play your media remotely using Jellyfin, like installing/signing an SSL certificate.
I haven’t heard much about the quality of Jellyfin apps. It looks like they have a Roku app, so that should cover most of my needs, but I don’t see support for game consoles.
I’d also like a side-by-side comparison of features between the servers so that I know what I’d be giving up.
I can’t answer all of your questions, but for a while now I’ve run both just in case of something like this.
For media organization, if you use a renamer, arrstack, or just follow the recommended folder structures in plex’s documentation, it should mostly just work™. I point my Plex and jellyfin to exactly the same folders and it looks like jellyfin matched everything with metadata correctly.
You do have to do SSL yourself if you want https (which you definitely want if you’re exposing it publicly, but you could skip if it’s lan only or accessed through a secure VPN). You should be able to apply just about any reverse proxy that can do letsencrypt pretty easily since there’s nothing particularly unusual about jellyfin. I use traefik and my config is almost copy pasted from their examples.
The apps, imo suck. But if the community has a bad reaction to plex’s changes then there could possibly be a lot more attention / development on jellyfin apps. So personally if Plex forces us to have free content and rentals mixed in with no ability to disable, I’ll just put up with the apps and hope they get better. Imo for Android findroid is the best but it doesn’t have casting support.
I just did the plex to jellyfin swap, so ill jump in as well:
Folder structure was no issue between plex and Jellyfin. I did have media scan crashes in jellyfin I didnt have in plex, but it turned out to be my very old music library. I used the FOSS musicbrainz picard to add idv3 tags and rename all files with strange characters in the library and the issue resolved.
Jellyfin has lots of great plugins built-in, with more here. The intro skip is excellent, as is the jellyfin ignore if you want to skip some folders. You can also add an empty file named .ignore to any directory and jellyfin will skip it.
I personally think the apps are excellent. The 1st party kodi app is way better than the 3rd party plexkodiconnect. Faster sync, more feature rich, responsive. The jellyfin android app is also very good. For music, I would recommend Symfonium. Its platform agnostic, but works great with Jellyfin.
For https, look at a reverse proxy like Swag. It will explain how to get your certs issued and automated.
For sharing, the best option is to not expose a port to the internet, but rather to integrate with tailscale. This is an always on vpn network that lets you share servers with remote clients, without opening yourself up to compromise. For a remote jellyfin client, you can install it on a raspi with kodi, android tv, or use an apple tv, which has a tailscale app available.
As a long time Jellyfin skeptic, this is the most convinving endorsement I’ve heard. I dug into the links you shared. I had no idea the Jellyfin ecosystem had expanded so far.
Yeah it’s pretty nice now. I just got tired of plex pulling shit like this and decided to pivot. Its been a breath of fresh air. Even the issues have been light.
A word of warning if you go the container route though: linuxserver.io’s jellyfin container has a bugged ffmpeg install. Use the official jellyfin container from dockers registry. The compose file is all good to use from the Linuxserver.io, just swap the image.
If you have any questions, let me know.
Really?? I wasn’t aware. Ive been running the linuxserver.io image for a few months now. You think its worth going with the official container instead? I’ll give it a shot. The docker compose writeup is the same, aside from the image name?
Yeah, i found this out while trying to run down my library scan crash. It’s in one the github support threads, but I have no idea which one at this point.
Your docker config file should be fine. I swapped the image with no other changes.
Since I am hosting my own DVD rips on my jellyfin server, I got a let’s encrypt certificate and verified it with nginx server and a reverse proxy to duck DNS.
The entire process was arcane, but I simply followed the steps from an online tutorial and it just worked.
I spent more time and energy worrying over whether or not I was doing everything correct then I did actually implementing it, and I’ve never had any issues with it.