this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Privacy
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This isn't an entirely "new" feature, in a way.
You always had access to see what your friends were watching on your own server. This is a consequences of being an admin, you kind of have to have access to that kind of data to manage your system and streams.
This seems to just extend it to showing you what they're watching on other servers, as well.
Anyway, if the concern is that Plex, the company, has access to this data, then yeah, you probably should have read the privacy policy a little closer.
Jellyfin is there and doesn't have a parent company to "phone home" data to.
It's unfortunate that Jellyfin is just slightly worse than Plex at pretty much everything. Playback is smooth, sure, but set up is harder, getting good metadata is harder, logging in is harder, etc.
The metadata one really put me off. I set up a Jellyfin instance with the exact same media set as my Plex instance, and it immediately started "recognizing" standard movies and shows as porn and hentai. I'm still going to push through and get it properly set up eventually, but even so, I'm not looking forward to manually managing accounts when people can just SSO with Plex.
I've had similar issues/experiences with Jellyfin as well.
Metadata has been far better in JF than Plex.
I mean, I have a ton of media that Plex recognizes automatically and Jellyfin doesn't, so... Agree to disagree, I guess. I'm not trying to defend Plex's recent enshittification, but that doesn't change the fact that it's generally a better experience than Jellyfin right now.
Add to that my usual gripes about it being weird with transcoding. And I'll try it again today, have to see if there really is a way to stop it transcoding everything without a fucking reason. The other thing I remember is that it takes a lot of time and effort to ingest my media. Plex did it in like a minute, this takes half an hour of more. But I'll edit this post once I check.
Anyway, a whole lot of people are saying that somehow jellyfin is better when it simply is not. It's free, that's really really good. But that doesn't magically make it better.
edit:
first issue, jellyfin doesn't start smoothly, it somehow thinks there is another jellyfin server somewhere in my lan, and I had to 'delete' that server, do a couple of refreshes to get it to understand I was connected to the server. Not a biggie, but it's just bad UX and plex does better.
second: selecting a network share asks for a network share. once you enter it it asks for some kind of folder. what? so I'm unable to add a shared folder during initial setup, maybe it's the part where it asks for a local folder or the part where I can't enter my credentials for the share. skipping that for now.
third: the media ingestion takes forever. it's grinding my disks, no idea why it takes so long and is so incredibly intensive. one more point for plex which did this in probably less than a minute. it's been probably 25 minutes and it's still not done (i quit updating this number, it's going to be more than 30 minutes).
fourth: there are no settings for disabling transcoding on the server. this is plain stupid, there is no excuse for not having an option which all of these jellyfin defenders don't have to use. It's like giving people options will take something away from somebody, it's silly. i had to search around again, because these options are hidden in the user settings. have to say again that this is plain hostility. if the devs really can't live without transcoding rename it to transcodefin and have at it, don't let people get the wrong idea about usability and the goal of this project.
fifth: it can't display normal subtitles without a black box if it's not transcoding. like I said, this is fucking embarrassing by now.
I've been doing things around the house while making this edit and the library scan is still working. it's been a long long time.
I'll let this server live for a couple of days because I'm not a fan of what plex does with the nagging and begging for money, but it works soooo much better that it's not even a competition. maybe I'll kill it for fear of it destroying my nas drives with all the grinding, like how is it possible that plex did this in less than 5 minutes without raising the nas temperature? I guess it's like with the transcoding, screw me and screw being efficient.
I'll update after a couple of days I guess