I’m not all that bothered about looks it’s the way the apps handle tags that annoys me. I don’t understand why there are so few sort options, makes the whole thing difficult to use. Also, I’m still, after 48 hours, running my first library scan and so far the results are not encouraging as far as using my own tags is concerned.
in which case I strongly encourage you to spend a moment and have a look at the support articles (before blaming Plex for not guessing what you want it to do 
). Those e.g. explain how Plex matches your files against online sources (and how you should name your files / folders for that to succeed). If you want to rely solely on your embedded tags, best use a “other videos” library.
I had several issues with plex with no solutions offered, so I switched to Emby a while ago but kept some libraries shared between the two and some exclusive to Emby and some exclusive to Plex. I had 0 issues with Emby so far and used all my available libraries there. Today I accessed a plex library and for some reason (server update I assume) some of my mp4’s that always worked perfectly suddenly played only sound and a static image. I checked the server to be sure it wasn’t on the client’s side, but no, the problem is present on the server as well. Note that these video’s worked perfectly for years on plex. I used vlc to check if it might be a File error, butthey play perfectly on VLC. Tested some more mp4’s and while most play well, several refuse to play. Loaded that library into Emby and behold… Everything plays perfectly…
While Plex certainly has a lot of advantages, the constant bugs and new errors drove me to Emby. Now I am migrating my last “plex exclusive” libraries to Emby as well since the latest problems I experienced. Unless they start to mess up at Emby as well I will stay there. Stability still is most important for me. Yes, I don’t give a crap if the UI looks better or worse, I just want to be able to play my collection of vids and music. I might be considered a power user with daily usage and around 50TB of data on my drives so if there is something wrong it almost always will affect me. I love that Plex handles custom tags for home vids and/or music vids and I like the Tidal integration (when it works) and yes, I will miss that in Emby, but hey at least it plays everything I throw at it.
Plex has become worthless. Just too many issues.
Emby works. Jellyfin, works. Kodi works. VLC works(and gives me access to my local files). Plex constantly has issues. People have been asking for a way to exclude peripherals like joysticks and controllers as input devices, but the people at Plex are too busy trying to monetize their product at this point.
Ps. Yeah, businesses are in the business of making money… blablabla. Make a good, flexible, reliable product, chose a good business model and somehow that will take care of itself.
Sadly, Plex used to be really good, but the changes over the last two years have been a downward spiral.
Sad you don’t like it or don’t find it useful for your use case. On the other hand you apparently just answered your own question for your respective use case and are no longer looking for a solution of whatever issues you had with Plex… so we can wrap this up.
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After the recent outage I’ve been looking at Jellyfin.
Yes the setup is more complex, but I’ve got it running really well within my LAN on Firesticks and browsers, on Firestick it doesn’t have all the issues Plex does.
Remote use is essential to me, and difficult to set up on Jellyfish, especially if you insist on secure connections as I do. I got through that too.
Client Apps are still not up to the standard of Plex, The lack of a dedicated App for Apple TV doesn’t hurt me, but a few of my remote users rely on it. Apparently it’s in development. The iPhone app is pretty slick.
Short Answer: For me, I still need Plex to do what I need, BUT, Jellyfin is not far away from being there. Once Jellyfin sort out these client apps I’m very likely to change over.
My main reason for this stance is that with Jellyfin my access to my content is only reliant on my server, not one that is apparently fragile that I have no control over.
PS: Love PlexAmp, and having a lifetime pass I will probably leave my Plex server running on the music library only, just for PlexAmp, especially now it works in Apple Car Play.
I’d happily pay $100 $150 a year for an app that:
Didn’t randomly simply not work.
Didn’t randomly fail to work remotely. Usually when I’m thousands of miles away.
Didn’t randomly decide it couldn’t connect to the server. Even better doesn’t show me my local media, and then simply ignore my furious tapping on it.
Didn’t constantly “improve” the UX making it harder to use.
Didn’t make SSL, remote access, and other basic tasks insanely complex.
Offered paid support.
I guess this is unrealistic today…
Long story short: Emby!
It’s not as polished but it also doesn’t give so as much headaches as Plex and it doesn’t change the UX every other month.
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