Because Jellyfin is an ugly, duct-taped-together mess. It’s very utilitarian at best, when everything is working. Ease of use is just not there for your non-technical friends and family.
Invariably whenever you bring any of these issues up, people will come out of the woodwork and tell you “Oh you just have to bolt this thing on or use it in this one specific unintended way in order to get it working halfway towards what you want”.
Not that I want to disagree with you, and I have never used Plex. But I was shocked how polished and easy Jellyfin is for an open source project when I used it the first time. It feels like a very mature piece of software to me. My gf really loves it, too.
I agree setting up tailscale for remote access was a bit of a learning curve though.
If you think there’s anything polished about Jellyfin there’s a whole world of open source projects out there for you to discover. The world is your oyster.
It definitely isn’t mature by any measure. It’s been stuck in the process of fixing technical debt and poor design decisions from the project it was forked from for years now and still isn’t finished, though they’ve made some progress in the last couple years. But I’m not sure if they are going to keep the momentum up since several lead maintainers have left the project recently. Jellyfin still hasn’t figured out table stakes features like native intro and credit skipping, OIDC support, etc. There are some devastating bugs that having been around more most of its lifetime too. One they fixed like a month ago was if Jellyfin couldn’t access your media files for even a short period of time, it would delete all media from your playlists and you’d have to recreate them one one.
I don’t think that is how it works. I don’t necessarily need a reference to tell something is a good or a bad product. I have never said that Jellyfin is more polished than Plex is, just that my impreession is contadictionary to yours of Jellyfin being a duct-taped mess. No idea why you would argue against another persons obviously subjective opinion?
I’m not saying you don’t think it’s polished, I’m saying that if Jellyfin is where you set the bar for what “polished” means to you, then the rest of the open source world is going to blow your mind. Like you have nowhere to go but up from here.
Jellyfin being a duct taped mess on the other hand isn’t part of any subjective opinion, that’s just the state the software is in. Like it’s just missing basic features of its competitors, and has been stuck in relative development hell trying to rework the internals it inherited from Emby.
I wouldn’t call it subjective. The issues that it has are all objectively there, whether or not you’re bothered by them is what’s subjective. If you’re personally ok with all the quirks, bugs, missing features and general lack of polish that plague Jellyfin but not Plex more power to you. But those problems exist regardless, and they are the answer to the question you asked.
Of course it’s subjective, but it was you who asked why people continue to use Plex. This is a reason, and the reason is valid whether you share the same experience or not.
Because Jellyfin is an ugly, duct-taped-together mess. It’s very utilitarian at best, when everything is working. Ease of use is just not there for your non-technical friends and family.
Invariably whenever you bring any of these issues up, people will come out of the woodwork and tell you “Oh you just have to bolt this thing on or use it in this one specific unintended way in order to get it working halfway towards what you want”.
Not that I want to disagree with you, and I have never used Plex. But I was shocked how polished and easy Jellyfin is for an open source project when I used it the first time. It feels like a very mature piece of software to me. My gf really loves it, too.
I agree setting up tailscale for remote access was a bit of a learning curve though.
If you think there’s anything polished about Jellyfin there’s a whole world of open source projects out there for you to discover. The world is your oyster.
It definitely isn’t mature by any measure. It’s been stuck in the process of fixing technical debt and poor design decisions from the project it was forked from for years now and still isn’t finished, though they’ve made some progress in the last couple years. But I’m not sure if they are going to keep the momentum up since several lead maintainers have left the project recently. Jellyfin still hasn’t figured out table stakes features like native intro and credit skipping, OIDC support, etc. There are some devastating bugs that having been around more most of its lifetime too. One they fixed like a month ago was if Jellyfin couldn’t access your media files for even a short period of time, it would delete all media from your playlists and you’d have to recreate them one one.
I don’t think that is how it works. I don’t necessarily need a reference to tell something is a good or a bad product. I have never said that Jellyfin is more polished than Plex is, just that my impreession is contadictionary to yours of Jellyfin being a duct-taped mess. No idea why you would argue against another persons obviously subjective opinion?
I’m not saying you don’t think it’s polished, I’m saying that if Jellyfin is where you set the bar for what “polished” means to you, then the rest of the open source world is going to blow your mind. Like you have nowhere to go but up from here.
Jellyfin being a duct taped mess on the other hand isn’t part of any subjective opinion, that’s just the state the software is in. Like it’s just missing basic features of its competitors, and has been stuck in relative development hell trying to rework the internals it inherited from Emby.
That’s subjective. I’ve never had an issue with it, neither has my wife or son or the couple of friends who use my media.
I wouldn’t call it subjective. The issues that it has are all objectively there, whether or not you’re bothered by them is what’s subjective. If you’re personally ok with all the quirks, bugs, missing features and general lack of polish that plague Jellyfin but not Plex more power to you. But those problems exist regardless, and they are the answer to the question you asked.
Of course it’s subjective, but it was you who asked why people continue to use Plex. This is a reason, and the reason is valid whether you share the same experience or not.