this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

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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.

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I've stopped recommending Plex to newcomers, because Jellyfin is ready for families now (www.xda-developers.com)
submitted 5 days ago by cm0002@lemy.lol to c/jellyfin@poweruser.forum
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[–] RamenJunkie@midwest.social 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I will be songlad when Plex is dead. They are almost the perfect poster chikd for enshitification of a product.

Like why the fuck do I need an account, ro stream entirely within my home box to TV.

Why do I want all of these other systems, that already have apps, within my app. I just want tonstream box to TV, I have a netflix app, I don't want other people's Plex set ups off the web, or some random bull shit from who knows where.

Box to TV.

This is why I switched to Jellyfinn.

[–] dmention7@midwest.social 4 points 4 days ago

TBF, Plex has 2 things going for it that are tough to do without an account and use of their servers:

  1. Near-zero-config sharing of your media library remotely and with other users
  2. Being able to have media from all available sources (friends, other servers) available together in a single dashboard view

With that in mind, I can understand why they would default to requiring an account. Before I spun up my own media server, I was a user on 2 friends' Plex accounts, and it was indeed nice to have that seamless access to both sources. But once they started requiring everyone involved to have a paid account, I noped out to Jellyfin.

A local account-free option, with the ability to later upgrade to a "cloud" account, would have been awesome. Clearly that was not their business model though.

[–] Muffi@programming.dev 8 points 5 days ago

Bought a RPi 5 and a 16TB external drive to run Jellyfin a couple of years ago. It has been running flawlessly ever since, and has been super easy to harden and share with friends and family.

I am a big fan of Jellyfin now.

[–] ALERT@sh.itjust.works 8 points 5 days ago (3 children)

No, it is not. It cannot search for subtitles while playing on an end device like a TV.

[–] TheOctonaut@piefed.zip 14 points 5 days ago (2 children)

...thats your "families" criteria?

[–] ALERT@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] disobey2623@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 4 days ago (3 children)

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?

[–] ALERT@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 days ago

Done setting a Bazarr instance up. It's very good. Thank you.

[–] ALERT@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 days ago

I will try Bazarr again. Thank you. Maybe it will help me make this process easier.

[–] brb@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] disobey2623@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] brb@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago

Thanks, will check this out

[–] TheOctonaut@piefed.zip 1 points 4 days ago

"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.

[–] paultimate14@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] RamenJunkie@midwest.social 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

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".

[–] paultimate14@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

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.

[–] FrederikNJS@piefed.zip 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You can use Bazarr to prefetch any relevant subtitles.

[–] ALERT@sh.itjust.works 9 points 5 days ago

No, thank you. I want to browse the opensubtitles while I'm inside the app.

[–] Supervisor194@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (4 children)

Edit: Apparently a client for Apple TV does exist, I'm gonna check it out, as soon as they implement adding subtitles in the client.

[–] brrt@sh.itjust.works 6 points 4 days ago

I don’t understand what you mean by doesn’t exist. Swiftfin is an official native client app that works on all iOS type devices including Apple TV.

[–] Sineljora@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago

You press down on the Apple Remote to see subtitle options

[–] ohshit604@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Infuse and Swiftfin exist? Infuse does require a purchase for certain features but Swiftfin certainly works just fine.

Gripe I had was they were unable to transcode 4K down to 1080p because of the older Apple TV models making playback unusable.

[–] SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago

Infuse connected to a simple SMB share is the best Apple TV interface. It’s the only TV app I pay for, but pretty cheap.

You have to organize and name files correctly and sometimes you have to switch subtitles but it is reliable and easy to use.

[–] VitoRobles@lemmy.today 1 points 4 days ago

I feel so validated.

I was recommending Jellyfish since the pandemic.