I have (and have a Jellyfin server running on the network). IMO, it's nowhere near as polished as the 2017 version of Plex. Cover art and metadata matching is terrible. Plex seems to handle slightly "off" filenames and folder names far better.
Every so often I update jellyfin and try again, only to find it's still a worse experience than Plex.
I'm more than willing to take the trade off of slightly worse metadata and a less polished UI vs plex reporting all my media, habits, etc to their movie studio bed partners. They've already turned on their users and are abandoning what made plex great to begin with. Once you get used to JellyFin it's really great.
This is why I never take the jellyfin evangelicals seriously. Plex is good software - nothing has been taken away and my experience with it has been consistently good and stable for multiple years.
> plex reporting all my media, habits, etc to their movie studio bed partners
There is no proof that they're doing what you're claiming. From what I've seen, people love trying to to push jellyfin by making things up about plex. Also a polished UI/UX counts for a lot more than the solo-user jellyfin crowd thinks.
I have also googled this, and this does not reliably work - especially for things that aren't TV shows, such as videos from YouTube channels or music videos.
That said, it does feel like PLEX hsa been introducing better features and cleaner UI since jellyfin launched. I wonder if they keep track of Jellyfin installs on local system. Competition is good.
It's not as good as Plex. I hope one day it will be, it continues to improve, but it's a worse experience. Once they have proper intro skipping, I'll check it out again to see if they have fixed their other issues.
Fwiw, the Intro Skipper [0] plugin is actually fairly straightforward to install and set up and works as advertised (I personally just have it configured to auto-skip).
No, I paid for a lifetime license to an application that didn't have ads, didn't collect viewing data (and email it to my friends!), and wasn't blocking people hosting Plex wherever they want.
If you can find a company that went from simply paying for a license to incorporating data collection, advertising, and raised VC funds and became better after, I'd love to hear about it.
One major paint point for me is their policy concerning the mobile app. I paid for the lifetime pass for my account with the goal that Plex would work well for my users and myself.
This is not the case anymore since now users need to pay to be able to use the mobile app to stream from my server, otherwise they're limited to 5 minutes.
I ended up making a small web UI where they can log in, search for movies and episodes, and download them.
Why? Why do my users have to pay to stream from my server?
I hope they toss a few million to make sure that jumping forward and backward work properly. I can fast forward or backward once and then if I try again, it hangs. That’s pretty much my biggest Plex woe. Unless someone has a solution to that?
I use plex daily on fire tv and have not had any issues with seeking forward or backward. I use the “skip back 10 seconds” with the left button all the time when I miss some dialogue.
When speaking of Plex you have to mention the client, it runs on almost everything but some clients work better than others.
How would you bring media ownership to the masses? A hardware "hub" you can put a disc in and it rips it and organizes it and allows your family to stream it?
They could add a cloud based subscription for storage if you don't want their hub. The tech is all out there, someone just needs to do it in an Apple-like dead-simple manner.
