Plex Broke My Heart, Jellyfin Fixed It

General Discussions Lounge
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I’ve been a Plex Lifetime Pass holder for many years. I wanted to keep loving Plex, I really did. I was even a Plex Ambassador, proudly recommending Plex to everyone I knew, helping friends and family set it up, configure their servers, and showing them how powerful it could be.

But after all the bloated updates, the broken casting, the endless “Live TV” spam, and the features nobody asked for, it just became impossible. The Plex I loved was gone, and eventually, I realized I couldn’t keep going with them anymore.

:crown: Enter Jellyfin.

I can finally tell my Google Home to skip forward or back by x minutes, something Plex never managed to do right. I can adjust the volume on my phone itself while casting, without it hijacking my Chromecast’s volume, even when the app’s running in the background. And best of all, downloads just work, reliably, quickly, and without any nonsense.

Performance? Jellyfin is leaner, faster, and way lighter on CPU and bandwidth compared to Plex. It’s incredibly smooth, even with a large media library.

:rocket: Setup was ridiculously easy. After installing Jellyfin, I just allowed network access (very important!) and connected from my phone by typing in my PC’s Wi-Fi IP address: http://192.168.x.x. No headaches, no hacks, no broken features, it just worked.

:satellite_antenna: Casting and AirPlay? Fully supported.
The official Jellyfin Mobile app handles AirPlay beautifully, and Streamyfin (available on both iOS and Android) lets you cast to Chromecast directly without a problem.

:clapper_board: Metadata control? Real control.
You choose your sources, like TheMovieDB or The Open Movie Database, without Plex’s forced “Discover” junk clogging up your library.

:broom: More granular control, less garbage:
No forced “Live TV” spam, no random ads, no decisions made for you, just your content, your way, the way it should be.

When it indexed my huge collection, Jellyfin finished in under 2 minutes and I was casting a movie to my TV right after.

Best part? It’s FREE. No subscriptions, no gatekeeping. And the Jellyfin community is alive, helpful, and growing fast.

And if you want to support the developers, you can, Jellyfin welcomes donations to keep the project strong and independent. I decided to contribute as a small way of saying thanks, because they earned it.

Plex forgot the people who built them. Jellyfin never will.

Long live Jellyfin.

Server Version#: 1.41.6.9685
Player Version#: 2025.14.0

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I’ve downloaded Jellyfin and installed with a basic default config. Just haven’t had the time to explore. Early signs are more positive than I expected.

I hope that Plex execs/senior management are getting some kind of signalling that further effort needs to be placed into community forum engagement & progression of long standing bugs (and now obviously getting the new code base to the right level of features).

The amount of asks for support and help that auto close without any meaningful engagement is quite pathetic, especially when these forums are the only way customers can get help.

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You can even sync watched status from Plex to Trakt using this awesome tool:
GitHub - Taxel/PlexTraktSync: A python script that syncs the movies, shows and ratings between trakt and Plex (without needing a PlexPass or Trakt VIP subscription)

Then, just install the Trakt plugin on Jellyfin, restart the server, configure the plugin (make sure to enable downloading watched history), and finally run the scheduled task to pull all your watched history into Jellyfin!

Simple as that: Plex → Trakt → Jellyfin. :rocket:

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BTW… this also works pretty well if some folks don’t want to give their watch data to Trakt → GitHub - luigi311/JellyPlex-Watched: Sync watched status between jellyfin, plex and emby locally

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Could I cast to a remote AppleTV?

This is the one think that I really want to do as my mum gets confused with the Plex interface) (that’s about her being 88yrs old, not Plex).

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:white_check_mark: Jellyfin Mobile app (official) on iOS supports AirPlay,
meaning:

  • You can stream/cast content from your iPhone to an Apple TV on the same Wi-Fi network.

BUT — very important:

  • It must be on the same network (local Wi-Fi).
  • Jellyfin doesn’t (yet) have native “remote AirPlay” over the internet like YouTube or Netflix apps sometimes can.

:white_check_mark: Streamyfin app is focused more on Chromecast,
but AirPlay should work through the system-wide AirPlay on iOS if you play something, then tap the AirPlay icon.

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Does jellyfin allow different versions of media (e.g. HD and 4K) to be stored in different folders yet?

Last time I tried Jellyfin it would create separate library items for each version. There was a convoluted workaround to merge the items but, from memory, it still left you needing to do things manually and hide libraries.

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Yes it does as different Libraries only

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Sounds like it’s no different than last time I tried it then. That’s a shame.

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Thanks!

So, it’s a ‘no’ then (it’s the same as Plex in this regard).

I have been told you can do something with TailScale, but not sure how to configure it.

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For me, if your already invested in a Lifetime Plex Pass, JellyFin is just a good fall back at present. I can’t wait to see 2025.15.0 ATV release this week through TestFlight. Fingers crossed it still going in right direction with Fixes.

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thanks will try this out, current plex experience is beyond horrible

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I have this running for me and a few other users and it works great. Takes quite a while for a large library though.

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I remember reading a lot of people making a huge stink and deal about Jellyfin being “so complicated.” Lots of posts saying that Plex does so much for you with certificates, and ensuring the connection is fine and blahblah. It sounded like making mountains out of molehills, like they were just saying things to make it sound complex. The more I read the rhetoric of “Plex is doing so much invisible stuff that make your life easier!” it just reminded me of Microsoft with windows.

With Windows a lot of the value proposition was “it’s so much easier than Linux” but I had a revelation. Windows used to be the easier one. But with the way Windows has been it feels like I spend hours researching new problems that they invented with every forced update. Over time the “easier than Linux” argument felt hollow because, at a certain point it isn’t.

Been trying to figure out why Plex won’t let me screen share on Discord for months now. Doesn’t work on my computer, my room mates computer, or my friends computer. Read threads on it and it was all things like, “Plex put DRM over your stream”, “Just use your browser instead of the client”, “Use the Discord overlay to get past that issue”, “I’ve never had that issue, it must be a you thing” and “Use Plex’s watch together feature!”

Browser doesn’t work because it constantly wants to transcode for some reason. Discord overlay was always finnicky, and Plex got rid of watch together entirely. So here I was, spending another day off trying to find any lead, reinstalling and installing stuff again, trying to figure out some way to get this stupid Discord overlay workaround running. Chasing leads of using OBS to capture, and still bridge the audio in. Or finding ways to get browser to stop transcoding 1080p to 1080p. And I was just like, “Okay this is stupid. This is SO stupid. I’m so sick of trying to work around this crap. They’re charging more money, making the app crappier, removed the one official workaround to this problem. This isn’t easy! This is literally hours of research with no solution available.”

On top of that there are still features that don’t exist that have been asked for for a long time. They’re actively removing features from the main build. I’m being told that in the future if I want to manage my servers I need to use Plex Dash, for music Plexamp, and for just movies and shows Plex. And if my TV supports only Plex and not Plexamp then I guess I can screw myself or find some workaround.

All I see are more problems being invented, and that’s not even going into all that extra work that I’m anticipating from users of my server who are suddenly looking at this new UI and trying to figure out what the hell happened. Plus you know, I get to pay near twice as much to force beta test their new app(s).

It’s just problem after problem, complication after complication. Endless troubleshooting and I get to spend more money for the pleasure of “simplicity.” Death by a million cuts as it were. Like I already have to use Tautulli for what I consider to be fairly basic analytics. And we’re not working towards making more of those features basekit, we’re walking away from it.

It seems like Plex wants to keep everything silo’d so they can start upselling everything piecemeal down the line. Try to become their own music platform, maybe upsell extra extra premium server management features. That’s the only reason I can see as to why they’re forcing all these changes. So when they have subscriptions through mobile app store services they can separate each charge on a per-app basis. But only time will tell if that is going to happen. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong on that speculation at the very least.

Getting back to my point, I just gave up and said “To hell with this. How hard is Jellyfin really going to be?” If it’s really as bad as people say, it’s not like I’ve lost anything by trying. I had it up, running, and doing a discord streamshare within maybe 15-20 minutes.

Way way way simpler than all of this going on these days. Will there be problems down the line? Maybe. Will I still be paying for Plex for now? More than likely. But at least this way I’ve already front-loaded the mental effort on adapting to a new platform if things get as bad with Plex as I fear they will.

Bottom line, Jellyfin was not that hard. Hell it wasn’t hard at all.

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I’d be happy if the Plex folks just put up an instruction page for Plexamp. We shouldn’t have to search threads or start a new thread for basic questions.

Looking into Jellyfin.

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what exactly are you trying to do that you need instructions for with PlexAmp?

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Make it work. Seriously, I only got Plex in the first place so I could listen to my own music library from my phone. That’s it. I don’t care about tv or movies or any of the other stuff.

And Plex worked just as I wanted. So naturally, the developers decided to mess with it and shift the music to Plexamp. Giant PITA, but whatever. So I installed Plexamp, which had no guidance whatsoever on what to do. Someone on one of these threads gave a hint, which doesn’t work. So it’s useless to me. Why not simply have some instructions? Not everyone who wants to use this app is a tech person. I can do a fair amount, but I’m not an engineer.

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I still don’t know what you need instructions for, “make it work” is so broad that it’s from here to the moon.

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jellyfin isnt bad if youre technically inclined and dont mind messing with ■■■■. if you have a family that wants to just stream ■■■■, jellyfin sucks.

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Not true, it was super easy to set up using Jellyfin’s quick start guide, and my family is loving it. They’ve come a long way!

Once the server’s running, just open the mobile app and connect to the server’s IP address with the default port, something like http://192.168.x.x:8096. Then log in with the username and password you created during setup.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

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