I used Plex for my home media for almost a year, then it stopped playing nice for reasons I gave up on diagnosing. While looking at alternatives, I found Jellyfin which is much more responsive, IMO, and the UI is much nicer as well.
It gets relegated to playing Fraggle Rock and Bluey on repeat for my kiddo these days, but I am absolutely in love with the software.
What are some other FOSS gems that are a better experience UX/UI-wise than their proprietary counterparts?
EDIT: Autocorrect turned something into “smaller” instead of what I meant it to be when I wrote this post, and I can’t remember what I meant for it to say so it got axed instead.
I would love to use Jellyfin but it (indexing, changing metadata…) is too slow with a few hundred movies and shows on my Synology. Plex is way faster.
not sure why indexing speed is a factor - it doesn’t require your attention and Jellyfin only needs to index things once, doesn’t it?
Yeah, I kind of understand one wants to hit the ground running after installing but still. Let it do its thing over night and you should be good?
Agreed, between the exceptionally slow indexing speed and the near arcane witchcraft required to get it to appropriately use hardware transcoding (honestly I’ve just given up – everything says it should work and I’ve tried like 15 different things people say fixes it but it always just crashes the transcoder for me, heh), Plex’s ease of use and quality of life just seems so much higher. I really want to like JellyFin!
Let this be a lesson: never use .NET in new projects.
Yeah I was kinda surprised when I saw that 😞
Agreed. This is my largest and really only gripe after switching from Plex. I moved my server over from Mint to Arch and rescanning my hundreds of shows and movies for the Metadata took over an hour. It still missed plenty of shows too. Had to manually update those and each time it took like 5 minutes per season.
The jellyfin UI has been 1000% more responsive and the CSS customization is clean, but damn is the scanning slow. Still not going to back to plex though the input delay was disgusting for me.
Having Sonarr/Radarr put .nfo files on all my shows/movies sped the scanning speed way up, for the record. You can have JF pick up the metadata from the .nfo and not make like 6 different slow queries to metadata providers. Likewise, if you have JF save metadata to .nfo files, full library re-scans go much more quickly as well.
I think that’s mainly a problem in Synology. I’m running it on a small arm media server and it basically takes a minute. (OS on nvme, files on NFS via 1G LAN)
Runs nicely for me on a Pi 4B
I just let it index mine overnight, everything was ready to go next day. Adding new media to the server isn’t really a problem, IMO.
It’s worth it for the UI responsiveness alone, disregarding the fact that Plex just… stopped working one day for no discernable reason. No errors in any logs, my Plex server was running fine. No changes to the network, everything hosted the exact same, all my clients were logged in, running the same way, etc. Just… stopped seeing each other one day. Couldn’t access my server from any device in the home.
If your Plex server was hosted on Hetzner and only stopped working very recently, this is probably what happened.
Yeh, Plex is still great, jellyfin sucks ass
That’s a strong opinion. Why do you think Jellyfin sucks ass? It’s been nothing but delightful for me.