I would be welcome for comments and experience based observations.
I’ve been a user of Plex for around a year (paid subs), but after Tom (@lawrencesystems ) mentioned Emby a number of times, I thought I would give it a go.
In fairness, Plex had already prepared me for the routine of adding jails, mount points, user permissions, etc. But it wasn’t very long before I had Emby running on a spare TrueNAS machine.
I’m very impressed so far, just little details such as parental controls/schedules and that only my content is visible, no additional channels.
The layout is nicer too, simplified.
I just wonder if I’m looking at it too positively and welcome any negative reviews or opinions?
It’s the opensource fork of Emby once Emby went closed. Since then they are expanding upon the original project to now where Jellyfin is its own thing.
Like what? For most things it works fine. I would ignore most reviews that were not about the latest release, 10.7. Since that release it definitely became more polished. That said there are some quirks. The devs are very receptive to feedback on GitHub.
I was initially waiting to switch to jellyfin b/c at the time they didnt have transcode throttling at the time, but they do now, so once my OS goes EOL… then i’ll move everything over.
Thank you for letting me know the background, much appreciated, I didn’t know it was fork of Emby
The self hosted show were not enthusiastic about Jellyfin a few years ago, then within the last month or so they said it’s well worth a look and a lot of past issues have been ironed out.
That seems to tally with your release version reference, it’s really nice that the contributors get together and push hard to resolve issues.
I’ve been playing more with Emby, for my use case I think it could be better than plex. I just have to fiddle with it more (i.e. try to break it like a normal user would) and then I might stop my Plex sub’s and switch over.
I would use Jellyfin, but I’m not literate enough to resolve issues, I also like the concept of paying someone for a thing I’m receiving, it’s only fair!
I forked over for a lifetime pass, however, my biggest gripe was that it requires remote sign on. The most frustrating thing for me was when I we had an internet outage for like a week so I go to fire up Plex and the login token expired and I couldn’t sign into my own damn media on my local network because their shit idea of external cloud auth. Not sure if thats the case anymore but it burned me so much that I violently switched to jellyfin because its all local network so you have 100% control, as it should be.
That’s very interesting to hear, I’m put off by the “Plex must have internet” thing as well. After all, part of the benefit of self hosting should be that it’s available without WAN access.
Is Emby better or is it only Jellyfin that can save images, etc. to the server offline? Fiddling through Emby it did seem to have that feature but I’ve not checked yet.
Just a little update, all this talk of Jellyfin made me give an install a go. Sadly I couldn’t make very much progress It’s more my own abilities than anything else I expect.
I went to here:
I was able to download, but then I didn’t know where it had actually downloaded too. I couldn’t shell into the newly created jail and download it while in there and couldn’t figure a way of getting the successful download into the jail.
It was all a bit mystifying, perhaps I’ll try again in a few months!
Well just a little update with my Plex vs Emby experience.
This is from the perspective of someone who’s tech savvy, but not fully in tech. I do have patience!
So to summarise, things I didn’t like Plex for:
Subtitles were a bit odd.
No in built parental controls relating to time/schedule.
If the internet dies, the library is effected (this is from distant memory though)
The GUI can be confusing for ‘older users’. (though this could be to do with my config).
The Pro’s for Plex (compared to Emby)
Was generally easy to setup.
It’s definitely easier to setup - but it then sacrifices how customisable it is.
After some fiddling around, I’ve now got it working very well. There are some really nice touches, such as the inclusion of the time the film will end - that’s just one of those thoughtful considerations that appeal to me. Another thing is on an Nvidia shield how you can discretely enter a password with the circular keypad, I like that.
I am getting the odd TrueNAS log though, such as: avahi-daemon 4533 - - IP_DROP_MEMBERSHIP failed: Can’t assign requested address
So, I’ve ponied up for the monthly package at the moment, I’ll see how I get on.
I tried the others (maybe a bit too early i suppose) and was let down over the functionality that i had with plex.
I stumped up for lifetime when a sale came along.
it is family approved such that now a lot of times its, “go watch plex” and the kids/family know exactly what that is and how to use/navigate/etc.
I used plex in a docker and its been set and forget basically… Even when i was running it native in an Ubuntu install it was fairly set and forget…
I can’t poo-poo the others too much as I don’t have too much experience with them apart from some trially a while back but with plex i am happy and until i am no longer happy i can’t really see myself changing any time soon.
That’s interesting to hear, I missed the boat with the heavily discounted life time Plex offer.
The only thing I’ve found with Emby so far, vs Plex is that remote/off-site viewing isn’t as straight forward. Who knows though, perhaps that’s a good thing from a security perspective?
Ah, I do have a different situation as it’s on TrueNAS, though Plex has been incredibly reliable for direct play, it did go a bit wrong occasionally when streamed remotely.
I think if I had paid for the Lifetime Plex Sups, I definitely would stick to it. I’m not committed to Emby as yet and I spent at least 6 months fiddling with Plex to see what it’s capable of. I do like to tweak things to my liking and Emby seems more suitable for my use case - that’s not to say that a return to Plex is completely out of the question…we’ll see!
I would be interested to know if you tried elderly users with it? My experience was fairly bad in that regard.
Have you heard of Jellyfin? Emby is now closed source and Jellyfin is a fork before envy went closed source. That is only important if your big into foss
You have used both Plex, and Jellyfin. How does Jellyfin compare feature wise?
Can you watch remotely etc?
Did you Need to set up a proxy? (Or just for other reasons)
You can setup remotely but you either use a VPs for cheap and then Nginx a cert to a domain. Or you setup https to you local isp. By default there are no plex servers that encrypt ones traffic like plex does. So it is not always secure with Jellyfin/emby. You have to manage your own security. For instance I have it wireguarded to linode and linode uses my website domain to provide https access remotely.
It is for privacy over the internet. Behind lan you don’t have to do any of the Nginx setup
I can access my Jellyfin server with Nguni and linode at Jellyfin.argone site.com
It’s more my own abilities than anything else I expect.
