Switching between wasn’t seamless, it kept forgetting where I left off on the last device, which was pretty annoying. Also, mobile/remote connectivity was spotty for me. Never got to the bottom of that, but my best guess is Plex’s relay system makes up for a lot of random network issues. My best work-around was to add my phone to tailscale, but obviously that’s not a great solution and won’t work for a lot of devices.

Overall, my impression was that Plex is a lot more polished. I also bought a lifetime membership years ago, so I have no incentive to switch to something that isn’t better. Plex isn’t perfect, but it was still better than Jellyfin as of a few months ago. I honestly hope that changes soon, I have zero faith in Plex as a company.

I agree with you, however Jellyfin is not intrinsically more secure than any other piece of software. You have to be very careful how you go about deploying it if you open up external access, as you are dependent on the Jellyfin devs to fix vulnerabilities and they aren’t actually being paid to do this. If you’re paranoid about privacy, you should be paranoid about this too; the people sending subpoenas aren’t above port-scans on ISP subscribers, they did it back in the early days of torrents.

You get control and privacy, but you also get responsibility. It’s a trade-off, and one I’d certainly make if Jellyfin were more mature. That’s just me though, I’ve been hosting my own stuff for about a decade now and I can set up an isolated environment for Jellyfin to run within. Plex is a lot more newbie-friendly and I’d still recommend it for most folks unless they for sure know what they’re doing.

As an aside, these concerns are common to all FOSS software that don’t have deep-pocketed backers. Jellyfin is likely never getting those, unfortunately. I hope they can find some other way of sustaining themselves, they’ve not got much money for the scale of development needed and it’s all volunteer-driven today.

https://opencollective.com/jellyfin

I want them to keep going, and I’ve even donated to them. I still don’t think it’s at a place to replace Plex for most people yet though.

I set my parents up with infuse and it works fine with no issues. To be fair apple doesn’t seem to be very supportive of foss development on their devices

I don’t use Apple products so I can’t speak to the AppleTV support.

But your criticisms seem to be of clients for Jellyfin rather than Jellyfin itself.

There’s a much easier way.

https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-jellyfin/#usage

Copy the text from the docker-compose section, and paste it into a file called compose.yaml

You can also add your other programs which rely on each other (Sonarr/Radar/qBitttorrent) in this same compose.yaml file (you can find them on this website).

When copying the other programs, omit the lines:

---
Services:

After that, in your terminal, navigate to where the compose.yaml file is, and run this command

docker compose up -d

Now your suite of applications are installed and can talk to each other.

You’ll need to change some of the details of the compose file (to set timezones and media directories).

You can restart programs with

docker restart jellfin

LinuxServer.io are basically your one-stop shop for home-server applications

If it does the basic things that I want it to do well without being surrounded by the bloat of useless profit-driven features, and it’s FOSS, then it isn’t inferior to me.

The only meaningful update (to me) Plex has had in the past few years has been forcing everyone to switch from using TVDB to their inferior metadata agent.

You felt the need to tell us that it’s „far superior“, but won’t even mention a single argument.

I’m interested in your specific features you find better :) I really like Jellyfin but use both and like to recommend to my friends what works better for them, depending on what they like