What are some good alternatives to Plex? It doesn’t have to be free. I’ve grown tired of watching orange circles spin around.
Emby. Jellyfin. Kodi.
The answer is always the same. You could have googled your question really.
That is a very broad search though. I want to target the question to those who have experience with Plex. Is that ok with you?
I answered you. Those are the only 3 real alternatives and you’ll get 100 different reasons why to choose each, or to stay with Plex.
Your question was generic and broad. If you’re looking for something specific, ask.
I didn’t want to ask something specific. I wanted to ask a generic and broad question to a targeted audience. Is that OK with you?
Im really not sure where you are going with this.
You asked a question and got the answer.
You then say…
…as if the answer will change? But @5stringdeath is right here on the Plex forums so I’m pretty sure he has experience of Plex. So what exactly are you hoping for as an answer?
Asking generic questions is fine and you will get generic answers… but the problem is that you defined that you wanted an alternative to Plex, which is rather complex piece of software having multiple features. This is why people are asking you for more details on which aspect you want an alternative for.
I could just as well name VLC as an alternative. It is capable of playing media files and does have a rudimentary library support, but won’t most likely match your needs.
You clearly had a use case in mind, but didn’t specify it…
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I am not being critical of the answer provided, nor have I at any time asked for more. As was pointed out, I got an answer; but, the majority of the response was taken up by a snide remark suggesting that I shouldn’t be here and rather should google a question like this. The sole purpose of my subsequent responses was to qualify my reasons for asking the question and doing so in the Plex forums.
Now, with that context, please go back, Hitsville-UK and ressu, and and read your responses. You are responding as if I criticized the answer or asked for more specifics. I did not. I don’t understand what purpose your responses serve.
For clarification, my response was criticism toward your original question. You ask for alternatives without context, having provided more context in your question you would have most likely received better answers as well. But if you are happy with the answers so far, then we are done here.
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Kodi is only an answer if you do not want easy access from multiple devices, particularly Roku and if you do not want remote access and you do not want easy and seamless sync of watch status on different devices on the same network.
Jellyfin is only an answer if you want to chance running a fork of Emby with limited support and you are willing to endure a pretty high need for your own technical expertise.
Therefore the only reasonable answer is Emby. I find Emby to be superior for my needs I do not use remote access or DVR so I cannot really judge those but, from reports, it appears that Emby is at least even on those functions.
As I have said in other threads I have moved most all my media viewing to Emby and I could not be happier.
One more thing is that Emby is VASTLY superior to Plex in customer support and their interaction with their customers is WAY better and faster than Plex’s at its best.
I agree. Emby is the only one that duplicates almost all the same features as Plex, especially after the 4.0 release. The one reason I’m still using Plex over Emby is the fit and finish. Emby still has a chunkiness to the user experience that makes me constantly have to think about how to get where I want to go. Whereas navigating around in Plex seems more straight forward and obvious.
It’s not just familiarity with Plex either because I originally tried Emby and Plex within days of each other before going with Plex. Even in the 4.0 release Emby still hasn’t improved its feel in a significant way.
Am probably the same, but running both, I find emby does a better job at core functionality, like actually playing media…
I have a shield that with plex has problems playing media. (There are enough threads about it, so not worth going into details, some blame nvidia some blame plex…). But if it’s an nvidia problem then why do the files play without issue using emby.
I also have zero interest in podcasts, news, web shows and tidal. And don’t use the DVR stuff either.
I just want to have My media My way.
Well at least it used to be before they brought in the new interface which I am really not a fan of.
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Thank you!
I’ve been using Plex for a few years now (free version) and have enjoyed it, I just heard of Emby (hadn’t been looking for alternatives so that’s why I’m just now learning about it) and decided to try it out to see how I liked it. Setting up Emby was easier than getting Plex set up, there seems to be a little more customization available (I was able to create folder thumbnail images for Movies, TV Shows, Music and so on) and it did load pretty fast but only slightly quicker than Plex on a few tests I did. After playing around with Emby for a week, I think I’ll stick with Plex as it is more polished but I will keep Emby running as a back up. I suggest installing Emby and play around with it to see if it suits your needs, there are plenty of tutorial videos on youtube to walk you through the setup and the setup is pretty user friendly. In order to have both Plex and Emby run on my computer I did have to set up port forwarding on my router for each program.
We are using two HDHomerun Primes that have three tuners each. It was a breeze to setup in Emby. The program guide info populated very quickly. I am using Emby solely for Live TV and DVR right now and it is impressive. I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to be able to watch a program that is being recorded from the beginning and be able to scan forwards and backwards without it locking up or freezing. I used the default selections when setting it up. Emby appears to be having no conflicts utilizing all six tuners as well. Emby has a lot of customization options available, but it is not intuitive. I need to do some investigating before getting it tweaked to my liking. I will be keeping Plex to serve up the rest of my media as I really like how Plex does that.
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