It has now been years since I have had a problem-free viewing experience at home at my desk using Plex.
I’m a plexpass supporter, and have been using it for… well over a decade now.
My issue has been that while the wife usually occupies our living room setup with a Shield TV, where Plex works fine, I’m often sat at my workstation when consuming media, because our media interests rarely align.
My problems have been plentiful, particularly inconsistencies with media playback, random quality reductions for no apparent reason, clients being end of lifed, the webplayer sometimes being better than the dedicated option and even the Emby client providing a superior experience. I’ve even added a dedicated graphics card and upscaled to a full xeon CPU just to see if I could improve the viewing experience. But alas.
So just to see what the fuss was about, I installed Jellyfin and indexed my library. The client works 100% of the time, with whatever media I throw at it, and I can finally just enjoy watching a show without spending five minutes every time trying to get the best possible quality or just giving up and watching the media directly in VLC media player instead.
It’s been years since I’ve felt any core-mechanic being prioritized from Plex for improvement and as far as I can tell, creating local optimized copies of media for travel on the go is the only justification for Plex to exist now.
I even jumped on the PlexAmp train, created a few playlists, only to discover that you can’t even sort a playlist, search through it to see what you’ve already added, nor can it handle you removing or renaming items. Makes managing a playlist next to impossible. There’s no option for downloading a copy of it, either, so you could use it as a point of recovery if you needed to re-install your server for whatever reason. (Matching track and album information should not be hard.)
So I’m left wondering if Plex has broken its legs in the pursuit of a viable business model?
I, too, tried Jellyfin, if only as a backup, but also to see if the server and client experience was any better. I eventually abandoned it, mainly because its library management functionality is crude, at best – and totally broken in a few ways.
I had spent a lot of time combining multiple versions of various movies, changing posters and otherwise customizing it to my liking. Along the way I found some bugs with what I considered very basic library/media management functions. I reported them and had some discussions with the dev/support folks, but it didn’t go anywhere. Between those bugs and the overall management experience, I decided it wasn’t worth the time investment.
I’m pretty happy with Plex, despite the occasional hiccups. To be sure, I have some long-standing frustrations with certain behavioral problems (which I consider bugs, but never seem to get fixed), but those are mostly avoidable. And the overall experience with managing a roughly 30TB media collection is much better than it was with JF.
Obviously everyone’s experience will be different. Best of luck with your installation!
A key thing to bear in mind is definitely the client(s) that you plan on using.
On Apple devices in Plex everything is buggy as hell. Plex staff even acknowledge this.
Spatial Audio (only partly works), lip sync issues (hacked work around), AirPlay (non existent), video stutter due to thermal issues. They have to be worked around constantly by switching between any combination of both the new and old video player and audio engine.
So unless you have the patience of a saint Plex is a shambles on Apple clients.
Jellyfin on Apple devices on other hand is…Much WORSE. The experience on the native player is shocking and on the dedicated swiftfin player…well it’s just not worth the effort to install it after two plus years of development.
I don’t honestly have a lot of Plex left having migrated largely to Jellyfin. Im soooo tired of the forced features that I don’t want and never asked for. Between just stuff like the holiday suggestions being server controlled only not on MY client, and the debacle with the friends sharing BS. Just like so many other platforms, Plex doesn’t give a rats booty about what use users think. Plex used to be that way. Not anymore. I’m super happier with Jellyfin.
Haven’t even set Jelly up for external access yet.
I’m literally running a separate server application just to get a problem-free viewing experience at this point. Ludicrous.
What’s wrong with the apple-based clients? Maybe I should try it out on the Shield, if I can ever move the missus away from her stories, to see how it is on Android.
I have no issues with Plex on ATV HD or ATV 4K, u need to know what are the issues to fix it, I will describe my setup in addition to ATV settings for a smooth playback.
My setup:
Plex server on Synology DS920+ SHR with total usable capacity of 38TB, 2x1G connected to 1G switch
Plex on ATV HD/4K, Samsung TV’s, Xiaomi MiBox 4, Roku Ultra, FireTV
All 1G wired network
Wireless only on iPhones and iPads Plex Clients
ATV HD/4K works flawlessly with H264 directly play no transcoding
ATV HD/4K works flawlessly with 10bit HDR/HEVC H265 with transcoding @ 10M 1080p
Frame Rare Set to “Auto” in ATV
Plex App on ATV set Home streaming to “10M 1080p” not “Maximum”
Plex is much better and no transcoding for h264 or h265 on Xiaomi MiBox
I am also leaving the Plex. I will use Emby and Jellyfin. I like Plex but I’ve had a lot of problems on TV Samsung Q60C, which doesn’t happen in the other media servers.
Infinite buffer generating infinite loadings (on the chart shows that it simply stopped loading the network data), media jumping 5 seconds forward all the time, Audio EAC3 being converted to AAC and generating problems, while the other media servers works great…
I think Plex needs to make a correction in the media transmission system. I don’t have any of these problems in Emby and Jellyfin.
I hope Plex improves because I like its layout and features.
I feel you. This is something I still can’t understand. A basic but essential feature IMO.
But … I’ve written a handy Python script for this exact reason. You may want to check it out:
I’ve also written another script where you can upgrade your playlists in terms of bitrate quality. Just look at my Github profile. I’m currently working on a script that automatically removes duplicates from playlists. But that may take some time before it’s finished.
