Lack of feature parity is the number one thing holding so many people back from switching to Jellyfin. Of Plex is going to start deleting beloved features, a lot of minds will be made up very quick.
Good thing I chose jellyfin over plex. This is the main reason I got jellyfin.
Jellyfin has much better Syncplay than plex
release announcement:
Is there some trick to get it to work properly? Everytime I tried to use it, it works fine for like 10 minutes and then everyone desyncs to hell.
It’s still better than Plex’s which didn’t work at all though.
I personally had really huge problems in the beginning with this feature, it depends on the file format, if it needs to be transcoded, if the subs are external or in the video container and what your users are watching it on.
I can give you some advice on what to look for, but it will come down to just tinkering with the settings until you find something that works for you the best.
Hardware acceleration is quite important, especially when there are like 6 people watching at once and 4 of them just refuse to watch it using the jellyfin desktop client that actually supports direct play feature (video does not need to be transcoded).
Switching languages of subtitles sometimes mess things up, especially when the subtitles need to be extracted from the video container and then sent separately. Sometimes it just lags the video for up to two seconds. It usually just messes with one person that then is a few seconds behind so not a big deal. Although I recommend setting languages in the very beginning so it does not break sync mid-way.
I also limited the thread count of the single ffmpeg stream to just one. Then i also limited the stream buffer to like 5 minutes so it just won’t try to prepare a 4k movie for one person for the next several minutes. From my experience anyways, when we were watching some movie that is quite big, the jelly went bananas and a single user just maxed out the CPU and GPU. Ever since I set those limits, while also having the hardware acceleration enabled, the sync-play feature caused me little to no trouble. — One of my friends has a slow internet that sometimes likes to drop things on the way and when his net drops out totally, it usually causes some issues and he then has to restart the browser tab. Although rare, it still happens from time to time.
I have an Intel i5 8400 and a UHD Graphics 630. The performance is good enough for my uses and movies play without issues even when 6 people are watching while my dad sits on tv while also watching something else.
Oh yes, now there are also a few other things to worry about. Make sure to check the maximum per-user bitrate the jelly will enable the users to watch. It’s 40Mbps by default, I think. And you do not really need anything above it anyways, especially if streaming over the public internet.
The second thing is having a Nvidia GPU. From what I heard, the consumer graphics card can have up to 3 consecutive video streams running at once. But since I do not have anything Nvidia, I can’t really care, tho I would strongly recommend you checking the GPU limitations including both the encoder/decoder limits and the codec support. This will help you set the buffer limits and codec support.
So full wrap, you’ll just have to monitor your server’s vitals and see if there is a bottleneck. Check your users client compatibility, see if the GPU or CPU is maxed out or if your ISP just isn’t giving you a big enough pipe. It just comes down to tinkering.
It’s not currently my own jellyfin server but I am looking to set up one soon. Thanks for the huge write up though, it’ll be very helpful when I eventually get to it. So far whenever I searched it up, I just found a lot of complaints on GitHub with not much solutions, so I really appreciate it.
Well I’ll just hope you’ll find something that works for you.
I’ve been in a multi year process to move my users off plex onto jellyfin. They just keep doing things I’m not a fan of
Jellyfin is absolute dogshit though.
Sauce: I just installed it on my media server that concurrently runs plex. I run the app on a fire tv cube to use it… and it crashes* constantly.
Edit: More stuff :)
-My media library when imported immediately showed seasons of shows as separate shows, it doesn’t intelligently automatically merge it like Plex would.
-Subtitle options are not consistent or robust. I MUST have subtitles due to having a multilingual family which is largely ESL, if they speak English at all. This is the problem I tried moving to jellyfin to fix.
Obviously they got outside pressure to remove this because of muh ease of piracy sharing
Honestly I really don’t like how self hosted streaming services have been lumped into the same category as piracy. I have no issue buying media. If the law says I can’t share it outside my household I will comply without arbitrary software locks.
My concern is that media companies will go after Jellyfin. They don’t really need to win all they need to due is bankrupt everyone involved.
Switch to jellyfin, it’s really at the point where it’s ready for everyone
I run both Plex and Jellyfin. Jellyfin is ready for everyone who doesn’t have to deal with the Mother-in-Law Factor. Plex has an easy setup process, and I could walk my MIL through it on my phone. In 5 minutes, her TV was connected to my server.
Jellyfin isn’t to that point yet, and likely never will be. Since there’s no centralized server for an app to phone home to, there’s no way to create a unified account creation/login experience. Jellyfin is nice as a “just for me” server. But as soon as I have to help others use it, it becomes a nightmare. Walking my MIL through setting up Jellyfin on her TV was the reason I re-installed Plex in the first place.
I had finally converted my wife away from using paid streaming apps, and dealt with all of the “Why do I have to use three different apps to access it on my three different devices? They all look different and are harder to use” complaints. By the time it got around to my MIL, I was tired of dealing with it and just reinstalled Plex so people could have a consistent experience.
I still use Jellyfin for my personal viewing because I prefer it. But saying “just ditch Plex, Jellyfin is ready now” is a little disingenuous. Jellyfin is ready for the people who want to use it. But if you’re trying to convince people to ditch their streaming apps, you’re fighting a lot of social inertia. You need to be able to provide a consistent experience across their different devices, with a decent login experience. And Jellyfin definitely isn’t there yet.
