Why does everything need to be a social app? I don’t care what my friends/family on my Plex watch. I don’t want it to do anything other than allow me to play my own media.
The thing I liked about Plex over Jellyfin (or even Infuse) on AppleTV was the layout decisions they made that promoted a sense of place. From any screen, I know exactly where I am, and can jump to the right to scroll big libraries alphabetically, or jump left to move to a different folder. It makes perfect sense to my brain in a way other design choices do not. These changes make me a bit nervous.
One tip I’d offer is that for Infuse, pointing it to the raw NAS media folder is annoying as AppleTV doesn’t protect local image caches from being purged so Infuse has to recreate all the thumbnails from time to time and it is dog slow.
Instead, you can point Infuse at your Plex library file directly and all your artwork etc will persist instead of needing to be regenerated every so often.
Uh oh… Well I’ll try it out when the play store beta link starts working for me but I’m glad I already have jellyfin set up.
Has anybody else been able to get into the beta and can report on how accessible personal media libraries are in the new app? I’m dreading having to remake my getting started guide that I send to friends with more steps than just “pin my library and unpin the ad supported crap”.
Edit:
For personal media pros, we’ve centralized media libraries into a dedicated tab. With the option to favorite libraries and easily access power-user features, it becomes a more personalized experience, with more exciting updates to come!
I hope this means pinning is just turning into favoriting to enable personal content to show up in the main views similar to how pinning currently enables personal media to show on the home tab… And hopefully you will still be able to remove the free ad supported content…
Edit 2 electric boogaloo:
They posted the APK so I’ve taken a look and here’s what I found that I think is important:
- Favorited libraries basically works the same as pinned libraries - so your personal media is mixed into the home screen just like the current app
- There is no unpinning of live TV or Plex free movies/shows so it gets mixed into the home screen by default, and from discussions in the forums it sounds like that isn’t planned (yet), so as it is now the only way to remove those is to disable it account wide in your Plex account. Not ideal so I hope they bring back unpinning.
Ah fuck. Sounds like a lot of marketing speak for “you’re personal content is being moved into a separate tab”, with focus on getting people to watch their streaming shit. I’ll give it an honest shot, but this might be the kicker to move to Jellyfin. Now that tidal integration is gone I have fewer and fewer reasons to use Plex
deleted by creator
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.
