Jellyfin is awesome.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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I never used Plex. Up until my kids were born I used to just watch my videos on my desktop, but now I find myself watching on my phone and TV more often. My Jellyfin server has been super stable for the last 6 months or so running on a super low powered machine and external hard drive. The only issues I have is with movies with Dolby digital, they tend to get out of sync when scrubbing the timeline. I am assuming that is due to the lower power of the machine. But, I have a 400watt desktop with a 7th gen i7 and a pascal Quadro P1000 that I am planning on migrating to. Then adding a 20tb internal drive for storage. Hopefully that will resolve the small issues I have seen with it.
Not got around to trying it out properly yet. Waiting on new AMD GPUs, hoping for a low-end encoder or I ma get access to a RX 480.
What does Jellyfin use .NET for?
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby which was written in .NET. The server backend and web page are all (or mostly) .NET is my understanding. It makes use of external programs like ffmpeg on the server or VLC on the apps.
Is just not as good*
What problems are you having with it?
I've been using Kodi with Jellyfin for around 10 years now. I tried Plex now and then because everyone uses it but I could never get behind why everyone is using it. It has always been worse in every aspect for me.
Wife approval factor
My wife won't use it if she can't see an app for it to click on to start using immediately. Going through browsers is not an option. Not having a dedicated app on the LG TV is not an option. Not being able to find something instantly means instant rejection. She refused Plex, but now sometimes uses it and has learnt to find subtitles, etc by herself.
I don't touch my self hosted apps. If something doesn't behave properly on the first attempt then it gets rejected from our household. It's only for us enthusiast nerds to put up with kanky UI and setup issues for the sake of superior functionality. Normie's won't tolerate it.
Not having a dedicated app on the LG TV is not an option.
When was the last time you checked? Jellyfin has had an app on LG's webOS store for a couple of years now, although older TVs didn't get it until a few months later. I'd given up on it and bought a lifetime Emby Premiere licence by the time by TV was finally supported.
Not having a dedicated app on the LG TV is not an option.
There’s your first problem.
My wife uses the Kodi app on Android TV just fine.
A big one for me was user management. I don't have to concern myself with that. So it helps. They also have apps for most things, I can just say go get Plex instead of what device are you using? Get x app. Here is the server information you'll need to put in.
I didn't have to put a lot of effort into managing the people using it.
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Maybe when the merge transcoded downloads on the official clients. rn depending on streamyfin
I used Plex a while ago and didn't like how I had to look for my folders against the stuff they offered. And the upside of being able to get my stuff from a server install on another network had me wondering if they were looking at the movies I had to pirate. Once I installed jellyfin, I didn't have to worry. My only issue is if I want to use it on vacation, I have to do some vps hack-jiggery.
One thing jellyfin doesnt do well its anime content. But fortunately there's Shoko Server, a metadata engine you can selfhost. Its awesome!
It works pretty well for me but I separate anime and TV/movies, and make sure the anime library is only scraping data from anime-centric databases. But I'm also not watching too much new or obscure stuff.
Yeah also with shoko you have to create a library only for animes (only one for both series and films tho). Idk, last time I checked jellyfin sucked. Maybe now its better. Another thing that shoko does is automatically track your progress on anidb, so thats cool :)
In my experience, jellyfin seems to think everything is anime for some reason.
I've had to go in to every single TV series and manually enter Metadata.
Not a huge deal I only have a few series' but man it's weird.
You can also change the directories names, appending [MVDB ID], so that for the future if you ever happen to have to reinstall jellyfin, it'll automatically repopulate them how they were :)
I need some explanation in the "Anime" part, I don't get it ?
Well, jellyfin often doesn't find the right metadata for anime episodes ecc, so theres this thing called Shoko Server that calculates a checksum of your files, compares it with the database over at anidb, and creates a virtual filesystem for jellyfin to make things easier! It's pretty neat. Do you have additional questions?
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