I love Jellyfin but it has flaws. Let's talk about them.

Enjoy our work? Join the thousands of folks who've signed up for our newsletter (and get exclusive perks)!

Sign Up

•

More Details

Sign in<br>Subscribe

🔗

Our articles often include affiliate links which are shown with a<br>tag () icon. If you make a purchase<br>using one of our links, we make a small commission.

Learn more

I love Jellyfin. I've talked about it here on The Review many times. Before I was a Jellyfin user, though, I was a Plex guy.

See, I've never been keen on the idea of streaming services. You know the ones: Netflix, Hulu, CBS All Access Paramount Plus, HBO Now HBO Max Max, Disney+, Crunchyroll, Amazon Prime Video... etc, etc, ad naseum.

👉<br>Though I have subscribed to a few independent services like Nebula for the excellent Jet Lag: The Game and Dropout for their variety of awesome shows like Game Changer and Make Some Noise.

I've always been a collector of physical media. Be it movies, shows, music, games, books... even as that became passe. I have whole sections of my home dedicated to my ever-expanding physical media collection.<br>So when I found Plex? I was elated. It was the perfect solution to my hobby since, admittedly, the idea of getting up and swapping discs when I wanted to watch the next episode was growing increasingly unappealing. So I built up the infrastructure of my nascent homelab to rip my media and started converting my collection.<br>Plex was more than happy with my collection, it usually just found the episodes of my shows, scraped metadata from online databases, and Bob's your uncle; my own personal Netflix.<br>Gardinerflix, if you will.<br>And I'll admit it: that's still the appeal of Plex. It's easy to use. Very easy. Convenient, even.<br>It was so easy and convenient that, back when they increased the price of a Lifetime Plex Pass license? I scooped it up since A) I liked the product and B) the FOMO of missing out on a "good deal" was unbearable. (This was around the time they had announced a pricing increase from $99 to some higher amount.)<br>But after a time, Plex stopped emphasizing my media and started foisting garbage streaming services my way "included with my Plex Pass." Or showing me movies I could rent through my own server. It was all so ludicrous and, being a privacy advocate, I realized Plex was some untrusted company's proprietary software on my server.<br>Well, last week, Plex announced another huge price increase coming in June. This is clearly an attempt by them to discourage folks from buying the lifetime licenses and, instead, pay rent to Plex Inc. for access to their own media. Borderline criminal behavior in my book.<br>In my coverage of Plex's announcement, I provided a guide on how to dump Plex and switch to an alternative Free and Open Source media streaming app: Jellyfin.<br>But there were some comments from folks saying that Jellyfin really wasn't the alternative I was portraying it to be. And, you know what? After thinking about it? In some ways they were absolutely right.

Jellyfin's Weaknesses<br>Don't get me wrong: I'm still an ardent Jellyfin user. I recommend it to lots of people. But there are many ways that it's just not a drop-in alternative for Plex.<br>This article was not written to shoot on or disparage Jellyfin. I love this app. It's the only way I want to watch movies and TV.

But it's precisely because of my love and affection for this app that I'm taking a critical look at it.

Hopefully, you'll find some value in this sober look at the app. And let me know your thoughts, your pain points, the features you couldn't do without, and – critically – your favorite plugins in the comments below!<br>🧩<br>And before we get to the article, I want to take a second and mention the elephant in the room: plugins. If I don't, I know there will be dozens of comments saying "Jellyfin can do that... with a plugin."

I am fully aware that plugins are a thing, that they offer an enormous amount of flexibility, and that they're relatively painless to install and manage. I also believe that for the vast majority of people coming from the Plex world, plugins are bad UX.

I'm not talking about how you manage them. The UI itself is fine. What I'm talking about is setting the expectation that it's normal to install a plugin. That's bad security UX.

Most plugins , especially when it comes to enabling feature parity with Plex, require adding third-party repos . It's quick, easy, and painless to do so. And that's a problem.

Most folks don't think about (and therefore won't fret over) adding any random Github URL to their instance. They won't be cognizant of how this could be a threat to them. And by normalizing the idea of plugins? I believe it's bad for everyone.

That's why I won't be talking about or recommending plugins in this article.

Media Scraping<br>Media scraping is important. In fact, it's one of the primary features of an app like this. Media scraping is how a movie, show, or music file is identified and how...