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thundermoose

@ thundermoose @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
73
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Locked

    Jellyfin is not just good... but better than Plex now?!

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  • Intro skipping works pretty well once you set it up and give it time to scan. Functionally, it identifies common audio to determine likely intros, so it can get confused with shows that have different intro music between episodes of the same season.

    Don't have to change any folder structures unless you were storing optimized media alongside the original files in Plex. All the metadata for both Plex and Jellyfin lives in a SQLite database in your config dir.

    You may wind up transcoding even if you think you really shouldn't have to. Browsers are weird about supporting some encodings, and both Plex and Jellyfin will automatically transcode to satisfy the client.

    Hardware transcoding is huge, don't underestimate how impactful it can be. A single 4K CPU transcode could saturate my 72-core server, but one A380 can transcode 3-4 4K streams at the same time. This admittedly doesn't matter much if you only have one user, but keep it in mind if you ever have to share. It's so annoying to have a stream start hitching because 1-2 friends decided to start watching something at the same time as you...

    I still don't have a good replacement for Plexamp either. I think Jellyfin can play music too, but I haven't tried it myself. I spent a lot of time getting the metadata right in Plex and just haven't felt like trying to find a way to migrate yet.

  • Locked

    Jellyfin is not just good... but better than Plex now?!

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  • You can look at some of my other comments for more specifics, but from your language alone I don't think you're being objective here. OP states that Plex is flatly better than Jellyfin, and a bunch of Lemmy users hype it up because of a clear bias for FOSS. A reality check is a good thing, IMO; you can prefer a solution and acknowledge its faults, but people talking on the Internet tend towards extremes instead and that will disillusion anyone who tries Jellyfin expecting all the good parts of Plex but better.

    I prefer FOSS everywhere it's reasonable, but I think a reality check is healthy here. Jellyfin is full of jank that you may run into because a bunch of independent devs are all doing their own thing to make it. Plex is a for-profit entity pulling in the same direction, so the experience is generally going to be more seamless and supported.

    I run both Plex and Jellyfin simultaneously. I use Jellyfin on my devices, except on Android TV because the app is painful to navigate. Plex is way better for sharing, but I usually offer both. I've yet to have anyone prefer Jellyfin, Plex tends to just work on their platforms of choice so they go with it. Unless they're a technical person, it's unreasonable to expect them to muddle through the edges of Jellyfin.

  • Locked

    Jellyfin is not just good... but better than Plex now?!

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  • The performance of hardware acceleration in Jellyfin is markedly worse in my experience. My A380 can handle 2-3x more streams in Plex than it can in Jellyfin. My theory is that it's the jellyfin ffmpeg port slowing things down, but I admittedly don't have much evidence to back that up beyond the fact that Plex's transcoder is built on ffmpeg as well.

    Plex Relays are a feature, but that's sort of the point. You get that stability from Plex by default and it works on all clients. There is no realistic way you're going to get all remote client devices on a VPN for Jellyfin. Maybe one day Jellyfin can offer that as a paid option, a la Nabu Casa for Homeassistant.

    Media servers tend to get shared around with friends and family and these edges will start to drive you nuts if you have more than a handful of users. I do not want to try to walk a family member through setting up a VPN on their smart TV.

  • Locked

    Jellyfin is not just good... but better than Plex now?!

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  • Yeah, that part about Plex has always bugged me. You can disable logins for your server with allow-listed networks, but most of the non-desktop apps have to log into the Plex platform to run.

  • Locked

    Jellyfin is not just good... but better than Plex now?!

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  • This isn't about want, it's a reality check. OP said jellyfin is better than Plex now, and by objective measure it is not better for most people yet. False expectations hurt Jellyfin adoption, you need to try it with the expectation of jankiness or you'll just be annoyed by the edges.

  • Locked

    Jellyfin is not just good... but better than Plex now?!

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  • There's a really strong bias on Lemmy for OSS projects. I'm glad they get so much love here, but everything people say here about Jellyfin has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. It works and you can use it. Depending on your needs, it may even work perfectly for you. There are tons of rough edges though.

    Here's a few:

    • A bunch of basic functionality most people are used to is missing by default. You can get things like intro detection and subtitle downloading to work with plugins, but you have to work at it.
    • Hardware acceleration still kind of sucks. You can get it to work, but the Jellyfin port of ffmpeg doesn't work anywhere near as well as Plex's.
    • The variety in app experience is bewildering sometimes. Apps look and feel very different between platforms.
    • Android TV app support sucks. The app is difficult to navigate and has a bunch of weird edges, like subtitle defaults not working. I have no idea what OP is talking about here, it sounds like they're only judging the app on its animation speed.
    • Public network support is finicky. This is hard to quantify, but I've been on several remote networks where my Jellyfin connection dropped in and out and Plex did not. I suspect this is due to the Plex Relay service making up for bad routes between my house and the network.

    Jellyfin is improving all the time, and I hope the recent EFCore update improves performance and development velocity. I'm also holding out hope it will eventually lead to externally hosted databases and active-active servers.

    Disclaimer: I run Plex and Jellyfin and regularly check in on the state of things in Jellyfin. I donate to Jellyfin. I want Jellyfin to be better than Plex. I don't think any objective measure bears this out yet.

  • Removed

    ZFS new disk

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  • Oh, forgot to mention: striping in ZFS will use the capacity of the smallest drive. It sounds like you have a 1TB drive and a 4TB drive, so striping would give you access to 2TB at most.

  • Removed

    ZFS new disk

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  • Losing one drive in a striped pool with no redundancy means the entire pool is shot. Restoration from your HDDs may take a very long time, on top of data loss between the time of failure and your last snapshot. Striping without redundancy is fast, but dangerous.

    This may work at first, and maybe you really do have a use case where this kind of failure is tolerable. However, in my experience, data is precious more often than it isn't. Over time, you're more likely to find use cases where the loss of the pool will be frustrating at best, and devastating at worst.

    If you're not using any redundancy, I would create separate pools so each drive can fail independently. You'll have all 5TB of storage, but not contiguously. That at least constrains the failure modes you're likely to run into.

    If you are striping with redundancy (e.g., RAID-Z1), which I would highly recommend, you can lose a drive and not lose any data. That would take at least 3 equally-sized drives though, and you'd only be able to use the capacity of 2 of them.

  • I want to finally degoogle my life and install GrapheneOS

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  • Google bought Waze 11 years ago, it's been part of Google Maps for years now

  • Plex is overhauling its apps with a redesign and under-the-hood upgrades

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  • 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.

  • Plex is overhauling its apps with a redesign and under-the-hood upgrades

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  • Plex is overhauling its apps with a redesign and under-the-hood upgrades

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  • 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.

  • Plex is overhauling its apps with a redesign and under-the-hood upgrades

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  • I'm in the same boat as you. I'd love to switch but the user experience of Jellyfin is still pretty bad outside the most basic cases. If you have a media center PC, it's fine, but if you want to be able to switch between several devices the way you can with Netflix, it's quite poor.

    Plex is slowly trending down and Jellyfin is slowly trending up. I hope Jellyfin outpaces Plex before the enshittification is complete, but it's a steep hill to climb.

  • We'll have a long memory as things get worse for working class Americans, minorities and women

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  • You're conflating "voting for a single-seat position" with any method of vote counting. There's only ever one winner if there's one seat, but there are better ways of counting votes than first-past-the-post. At least with ranked-choice, more people are happy with the outcome because the winner might be their second preferred option.

  • Figma marketing done good

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  • figma balls

  • Self-hostee storage for Gmail

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  • It's really more of a proxy setup that I'm looking for. With thunderbird, you can get what I'm describing for a single client. But if I want to have access to those emails from several clients, there needs to be a shared server to access.

    docker-mbsync might be a component I could use, but doesn't sound like there's a ready-made solution for this today.

  • Self-hostee storage for Gmail

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  • Yeah, they are ideally the same mailbox. I'd like a similar experience to Gmail, but with all the emails rehomed to my server.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Steam + Proton works for most games, but there are still rough edges that you need to be prepared to deal with. In my experience, it's typically older titles and games that use anti-cheat that have the most trouble. Most of the time it just works, I even ran the Battle.net installer as an external Steam game with Proton enabled and was able to play Blizzard titles right away.

    The biggest gap IMO is VR. If you have a VR headset that you use on your desktop and it's important to you, stay on Windows. There is no realistic solution for VR integration in Linux yet. There are ways that you can kinda get something to work with ALVR, but it's incredibly janky and no dev will support it. There are rumors Steam Link is being ported to Linux, nothing official yet though.

    On balance, I'm incredibly happy with Mint since I switched last year. However, I do a decent amount of personal software development, and I've used Linux for 2 decades as a professional developer. I wouldn't say the average Windows gamer would be happy dealing with the rough spots quite yet, but it's like 95% of the way there these days. Linux has really grown up a lot in the last few years.

  • “Complete Dehumanization”: Israel Killed Over 800 Palestinians in 11 Days

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  • Ralph Nader saying that he thinks the death toll is over 200k is not a reasonable source to cite. The 30-50k estimates from most sources are already appallingly high. There's an active contingent of Ben Shapiro types trying to convince everyone what Israel is doing is fine, don't give them ammo to cast doubt on the official death count.