So Many Plex Issues Lately – Any Better Alternatives?

General Discussions
1

Hello,

I’m starting to get fed up with Plex even though I used to love this service. I keep having problems whenever I watch my movies or shows.

  • Very often it cuts out in the middle of the movie for no apparent reason. Then it’s a hassle to resume where I left off. Sometimes it even restarts from the beginning.

  • Subtitle handling is a nightmare through the mobile app (which is by the way much worse than before). Sometimes the subtitles stop working and it’s impossible to turn them back on without shutting everything down and restarting.

  • Very often my movies freeze, and I have to skip forward 10 seconds. And if I dare to go back, everything crashes. Yet my movies work perfectly on my PC with VLC Media Player, for example.

In short, the Plex experience has become annoying and I don’t know why. I can’t watch a full movie anymore without running into a problem. I didn’t have all these issues a few years ago.

I’m thinking about switching to another solution. I’ve heard about Jellyfin. Is it a good alternative?

Thanks.

1 Like
2

You should probably ask that question in the Jellyfin forum if they have one. I don’t know if they do.

3

Good Afternoon! I’m a very long time user of Plex Server, purchasing my lifetime Plex pass about 10 or more years ago. I’ve run my Plex server with virtually no interaction with Plex in all those years. I’m not a forum user/reader/poster with one exception. Many years ago, there was a big kerfluffle when Plex managed to completely screw up the Roku app. Perhaps I’m not being fair in that description, as I recall it was a mutal screwup between Plex and Roku. Regardless of blame, the Plex community went nuts over the whole thing. I posted a couple of things back then and took it upon myself to move from Roku to AppleTV and from that point forward, I’ve used AppleTV’s to view my Plex content. I haven’t come back to the forums since that time. Any issues I’ve had, I solved myself and have been happy doing my thing in all the years since then.

I have watched Plex change many things over time, adding all sorts of features I found no interest in having. All I ever wanted was a way to catalog my content and provide an easy to use interface to view that content. I don’t want live TV with dozens of worthless channels, I don’t want to rent movies, and there are a host of things I have no interest in using. I’ve been mildly irritated as these new features have been pushed on me. For each thing I had no interest in using, I just rearranged my content as best I could to hide what I didn’t want. In some cases, hiding these things was hard to do, but I just put up with the irritation.

Not being a user of the many forums available for Plex, I seldom know about anything going on in the Plex community. Today my son sent me a link to an article about Plex coming making the decision to charge users to view any content that I have on my Plex server:

I only have about 15 friends/family with whom I share my libraries, but I have no desire to share my content to 15 people who will now have to pay Plex for that privilege.

After all these many years, it’s time for me to say goodbye to Plex, thank them for a good run, and move on. I purchased a lifetime Plex pass, so I’m not going to delete my account. Who knows, maybe this will be something that causes the Plex community to rebel like then did long ago over the Roku disaster. Maybe the powers that be will rethink this decision. So, no cancellation from me, but I am going to remove the software from computer, delete all the databases, and quietly go away.

I’ve looked at a few alternatives. From what I see, Jellyfin sounds like it may do all the things I originally wanted back in the day I bought my Plex pass. It has no bells and whistles, just a simple way to create a few libraries, configure a few firewall rules, and go back to a simple way to share my media with this small group of friends. Plex will not be getting paid by these small group of users. I’ll be curious to see if others like me make this same decision.

Thanks again to Plex. You guys gave me a good run these last few years. Goodbye!

2 Likes
4

You have a Plex Pass, your users do not have to buy/pay for anything. They will continue to be able to stream from you.

From the article you shared “Under the new rules announced in March, a server owner needs to have a Plex Pass subscription, which starts at $7 per month, to grant users remote access to their server.”

1 Like
5

@Gakuna29

Hi, can you expand on what Plex apps your having issue, your post is vague on that front.

6

Aah man looks like you got some bad info. You have a lifetime plex pass, so none of the remote streaming stuff applies to you or any of your users. All 15 of your friends/family will not have to pay Plex anything as you already purchased a lifetime license.

Hope you didn’t wipe all your plex users and server data :grimacing:

2 Likes
7

Read this support article which will explain.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/requirements-for-remote-playback-of-personal-media/

Already have a Plex Pass subscription

You can enjoy all of your Plex Pass functionality and you can stream personal media video remotely from any Plex Media Server to which you have access.

Other users to which you have granted access to libraries on a Plex Media Server you run can stream video remotely from that server.

8

The two viable alternatives I’m aware of are Jellyfin and Emby. I’m running both of those concurrently with Plex and have found that they are very similar but do have some differences, and there are advantages and disadvantages of all three. Jellyfin is the least polished but it is completely free. It lacks any sort of cloud hosted component so you are on your own to set up remote access. Emby is much nicer in this regard and works a lot more like Plex did back in the day before they added the layers of complexity and social nonsense with all the hoops to jump through to share your library. The biggest downside is that Emby isn’t free, at least not if you want enough features for it to be useful however a lifetime pass for up to 15 users is pretty affordable. Plex still has the best library and metadata management, it’s the most resource efficient and requires less memory on the server than Emby or Jellyfin and it has been the most polished experience overall until recently but it has been rapidly deteriorating as they focus entirely on features I don’t care about at all while placing the feature everyone initially got Plex for - streaming their own libraries, on the back burner.

9

What about for livetv, with a guide? Plex seems like the only viable option, am I wrong?

10

Kodi would work. I believe you need some plug-ins for it though.

11

Emby supports Live TV and has guide data. It also supports IPTV streams directly without needing to do a bunch of workarounds.

12

Free, so download and try it out.

Emby not free for Premier, but free to d/l any try.

(why ask on a Plex forum?)

13

Emby and Jellyfin both do Live TV setups with different degrees of complications and support.

Really Plex is the most “mature” option out there for server\client setups because it became the defecto solution for several years… until it wasn’t. So there are some things Plex was able to develop because of their resources that just aren’t found in other similar platforms for local media server\client setups. They are catching up though. :slight_smile:

So overall, Emby and Jellyfin are two totally viable options with Emby being a bit more polished and easier to pick up for users and Jellyfin being a bit more flexible (and free). Jellyfin is a fork of Emby so they are very similar. Both alternatives do an excellent job of providing server\client media management and playback on a variety of devices. The functional differences for experience between each that might appeal to one person or another is mostly around personal preferences and environment setups.

The differences between Emby\Jellyfin and Plex are going to be pretty varied so it’s hard to answer these types of “which is better” without specifics. For example I like custom smart collections setup as Home Screen rows and you can’t do that with Emby\Jellyfin (yet - coming soon). At the same time Emby\Jellyfin has a spoilers feature that blurs\hides unwatched episode thumbnails and summaries which would be nice to have in Plex.

@Gakuna29 Playback issues often aren’t going to change with platform changes so if the issue is playback it’s likely not specifically a Plex issue otherwise it’d have a much broader impact and tens of 1000s of Plex users would be here complaining. Without more info about those issues that’s hard to address (which clients, what type of files, remote\local, etc) but might be worth looking into since it might be an issue switching to Emby\Jellyfin won’t solve.

That being said, it’s pretty easy to run Emby\Jellyfin alongside Plex. There’s some naming\matching differences but just to test it out the worst case you’d have is some unmatched titles. So definitely worth trying it out and just seeing how it goes. I did that with Emby for a few weeks recently and was pleasantly surprised it went smoother than I expected even with my lazy file management.

Other common solutions are Kodi and Infuse which are client based - no server component. There again that’ll depend on your clients for support and setup but you can run Kodi\Infuse without having to stop using Plex so it’s easy to try out. Lots of folks use Infuse as their AppleTV Plex client for example. I don’t think Kodi\Infuse handle LiveTV\Tuner though - I think Kodi has plugins for it but that’ll depend on client support (you might be able to do TV Tuner setup with a media pc but not with Roku for example).