CordCutters - a place for those who have unsubscribed from traditional cable TV or satellite service

I've used Plex for 10 years+ and Jellyfin for few months. Plex handles media recognition great and has an easy match function for the videos that aren't automatically recognized or need to be fixed. I have a few friends/family that I share my library with and it's easy for them to get connected remotely using their phones and roku/firestick without any issues using their plex accounts. I have the lifetime pass so my mobile devices connect for free but it there may be cost to install the mobile app.

Plex has expanded their free/ad-supported movies/tv shows but I have enough content I haven't explored it much. My server isn't very powerful so I can only have 2 streams going at once for my library which is mostly x265 content with a bunch of x264 content as well but that's enough for my needs.

I use a roku as my main client and besides some flakiness with the wifi from time to time it works fine, responsive and you can use the mobile app or http://remoku.tv/ as remote controls too in addition to the physical remote.

Plex is easy and works on everything I use it on. Easy enough that my old parents can use it. I know some people are bothered by their recent pivot to try to have some legitmacy but it's trivial to ignore their commercial-subsidized content

Plex rocks, the lifetime subscription is worth it. If you want Roku Apps get a Roku and use the Roku to access Plex.

I hate Plex. It's gotten too bloated.

I run Emby primarily, but not externally accessible [vpn]. It works really well for me, haven't had any issues.

I use Jellyfin to put some stuff for the toddlers. It works on Amazon Fire Kids, while Emby doesn't. It works ok, but it's definitely less polished than Emby, and I feel like it's not as stable. Could just be me though.

I've been running Plex for years (maybe a decade or more). Yes, there are a bunch of mainstream-ish features that I don't use. It's still simple for everyone in my family (including older parents) to navigate and use. I use it for movies, TV, and it runs a photo screen saver with family pics.

I would like to second the issues with Plex. I understand their desire to try and mainstream themselves and have a non-sketchy reason for people to still install them, but at some point it became too much of a mess and I went back to Kodi, which is great but not applicable for your use case

I've only used Jellyfin, but it does everything I need it to really well. It's a fork of Emby so it would probably be a pretty easy transition if that's where you're coming from. Jellyfin gives you a lot of control over things which is both a blessing and a curse, but I don't think it would be too much coming from Emby. I think if you want an app that works anywhere, go with Plex, but Jellyfin is working on getting on more devices and while some apps are better than others, the Roku app is their most mature and I've really enjoyed using it.

I've heard pretty good things about Plex, but I think a lot of the features are blocked behind a paywall. Hardware accelerated encoding is one feature that's locked on Plex but available on Jellyfin which is what got me to go Jellyfin.

I can't really speak on the multiple users since I'm the only one that uses my instance, but I'd assume that would come down to your hardware more than the particular software you use (I could be totally wrong tho).

And for file management, do you mean like grabbing metadata and thumbnails and such? If so, Jellyfin does a great job with that. It uses TMDb by default to get all of the movie info (synopsis, cast, crew, year, etc.), but you can use whatever database you want. It also makes it really easy to find movies that it misses or gets wrong. You can either use Jellyfin to search a database and choose the result manually, or plug in the movie id from a bunch of different databases (including IMDb) and I've never had any issues with it finding the right movie. If you mean actually managing the files on your hard drive, I can't really speak to that. I try to keep things super organized myself (with some automation from Sonarr/Radarr) which makes things really easy for Jellyfin to find everything and do its thing.

I've used all three and here is what I have most recently settled on: Jellyfin as a backend server with Infuse on the frontend. It has been rock solid for the last two years.