98
I've stopped recommending Plex to newcomers, because Jellyfin is ready for families now
(www.xda-developers.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
98 points (97.1% liked)
Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System
120 readers
1 users here now
Jellyfin is a free and open-source media server and suite of multimedia applications designed to organize, manage, and share digital media files to networked devices.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
...thats your "families" criteria?
Yes and no. While most of our content is English-speaking, that needs careful subtitles selection for my family, some of it is Polish-speaking, that needs careful subtitles selection for me also. All of those who tell me that Jellyfin is complete and we can all migrate from Plex, are English-speaking. While, of course, you can faceroll English subtitles, as they are plentiful, you cannot do this for Ukrainian. No, I won't go to Bazaar to search for subtitles for each series episode, I want to spend roughly 10 seconds while I'm already playing said episode.
The idea with bazarr is that, if the subtitle exists, you would already have it when you play the media on your TV. Not sure how you manually searching for the subtitle on the TV in plex would improve upon that. Bazarr has no trouble automatically finding subtitles in multiple languages at once.
At the end of the day, bazarr works just fine with Plex, why don't you try it and see if it's good enough to not need to manually find subs on your TV?
Done setting a Bazarr instance up. It's very good. Thank you.
I will try Bazarr again. Thank you. Maybe it will help me make this process easier.
For some languages the subtitle situation is terrible. You have to try multiple different files to find one that is even somewhat synced or isn't completely broken. Bazarr can't do that.
There seems to be a few options for that. Bazarr has some synchronisation built in, but with varying degrees of success. Here's another tool that feels more promising: https://github.com/johnpc/subsyncarr
Thanks, will check this out
"Families" in this context doesn't specifically mean your family's niche needs. It means that generally children and/or parents can do 90% of things without tech support.
I don't actually agree at all that Jellyfin is at that level, but asking for it to automatically fetch subtitles on languages outside the top 40 languages in the world doesn't feel like a common scenario.
Right? Like, you can also use the phone app to add the subtitles and just refresh the android TV app. Or use the web browser.
Personally i consider subtitles to be part of the trandcoding process (along with alternate language audio tracks). So something that should be taken care of before the file is even added to Jellyfin.
It would be great if that feature would be added to the official TV app someday, but I would definitely not consider this a reason to use Plex over Jellyfin.
This is VASTLY overestimating how much the average user is capable of or wants to do for this functionality.
Essentially the only solution is "menu with remote, subtitles on/off".
But I'm saying that adding subtitles is the Administrator's job anyways. If using the app on a phone to download and add subtitles is too complicated for the average user to do, why would the ability to do so on the AndroidTV version of the app be any different?
Users don't have to search for subtitles to download when they use DVD's or Blu-Rays, or when they are watching any commercial streaming service.