All good and if you are one of the contributors, you earn all the respect. By now, Emby will have a hard time to keep up with the development speed of Jellyfin. I just miss a few very important QoL features. I truly believe it is only a matter of time until they are added.

A Netflix-like login screen, where you can see all the users and they are just protected by a simple PIN.

Sharing and remote streaming, plain and simple. I have no problem setting up accounts for friends, but choosing your server is a pain for some. But the bigger problem is that the first thing anyone will say is: Don't expose Jellyfin to the Internet. That's a bit of a problem.

And they'll then say, "Oh it's not so bad just set up wireguard and..." This is the ramblings of a lunatic. I've been working with tech a long time. Tech is my job. It is my hobby. I do all of it from repairing my own hardware to administering servers to running my own home lab to doing open source development. Wireguard is not friendly. It is not something I'm going to set up at every friend and family member's house so I can share my library.

I've got a more secure but imperfect setup in sticking Jellyfin on the Internet behind a proxy that requires login. But this is not something most people are going to want to deal with. They want to stand up their server and then share it with people.

The apps don't work well at all. If you're just desktop based, its fine. But Nvidia Shield app, firestick app, mobile app, all have issues with hardware transcoding, and also somehow doesn't handle subtitles properly. I have had both Plex and Jfin set up side by side multiple times, trying to test if I can make the swap. But JF just has too many bugs on their apps, which is what I use primarily, as do my users.

I spent hours trying to set up jellyfin to watch somewhere else in my home and despite doing all the guides I just couldn't get it to work. Plex is just so much easier. It has hiccups and the new update is horrible (still holding out on updating) but it still works 9/10 times for me

Literally just the basics of choosing audio/subtitles/quality settings

That overhauled UI is buggy as shit, slow to do anything and is objectively worse as features that were already present were removed.

Feature removal might e been excused if the UI was simplified and fast and responsive. But slow and buggy UI to replace relatively well functioning UI angered almost all users. I'm had to force install an old version of plex client exactly to avoid the non-sense.

It's very bad

In my experience, Plex struggles with the same. Depends on the series.

Fair enough.

Opening ports to the network seems to "just work" or be hours of forum diving.

What OS where you using?

Yeah I use plexamp a lot too and finamp is rough and reminds me of Android apps from 2012.

I also had weird quirks in the past where shows would crash and stop streaming or it would forget my position I stopped watching at, among other things.

And the hardest one is the manual labour I put in to make lists and fetch missing metadata that was actually accurate.

Here's a comment I wrote on it about a year ago

Tldr; they are an early example of open source enshittification before enshittification was even coined (iirc)

This is going to go back quite a ways, and much of my knowledge is old at this point so some details might be off.

~15 years ago Plex as we know it started out as an OSX fork of the 0G Xbox homebrew software XBMC (Later renamed Kodi (For those who don't know, XBMC was XBox Media Center and would turn the 0g Xbox into the cheapest Home Theater PC you could get at the time, man those were the days lol))

Plex was only briefly open source and then was quickly closed when they incorporated a year or so after they had something functional. They never made any promises about not charging or being open source or anything, so that's why I'm generally fine with Plex

Sometime around 2012ish Emby came along as THE open source alternative to Plex and things were good. MOST of it was supposed to stay open source as was promised. From the beginning they kept build scripts n such closed source, probably should have caught on them, but heh ya know hindsight and all that.

Then around 2014/5 they took it all closed source, relicensed it and introduced their paywall including locking away already existing features. This is what pissed me and many others off and this is when and why Jellyfin split off promising to be truly fully open source forever. (There was a ton of drama about it at the time, but it looks like Embys Q&A thing a bit back doesn't even bother to mention it, imagine that lol)

I don't have a problem with subscriptions on open source software myself, but the way they went about it...yea. fuck em

How was Plex messing up transcoding?