- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Plex is starting to enforce its new rules, which prevent users from remotely accessing a personal media server without a subscription fee.
If anyone needs it: https://jellyfin.org/
I set up Plex on my mum’s TV and she can just push play. The UI is intuitive (read: familiar) to her.
Jellyfin has a reputation for giving users more control and customizability, but the other side of that coin is that it’s more “fiddly”.
My users don’t want to fiddle.
That’s the opposite of my experience. Jellyfin just works and immediately exposes the content we’re looking for, plex tries overloading you with bullshit and burying your actual content
That’s been my experience too.
Plex came with my nas, and we never used it because it it was really fiddly and wanted to show everything except my content.
By contrast, my jellyfin is linked up with the jellyfin for android tv app on the big screen tv, and if nobody told you it wasn’t a regular streaming service you’d probably never know because it’s so straightforward. My wife is not techy at all – she still daily drives her Android phone from 7 years ago because she doesn’t want to change to her new one from 2 years ago – but she can pick up the remote and play a movie at any time.
I use it every night on my phone to play videos that help me get to sleep, and the app works well.
I believe you. I feel that way about iTunes (trauma intensifies).
But Jellyfin doesn’t have that reputation.
Are you seriously telling us you reading from three reddit threads from almost a decade ago and consider that “reputation”?
I am beginning to remember what made me think Jellyfin wasn’t user friendly.
Maybe it wasn’t the user interface after all.
You’re not wrong.
The only real usability issue I’ve had is auto cataloging. It isnt right much of the time. But I don’t have any remote users that don’t have network access so that simplifies things a whole lot.
What it’s like in these threads:
https://sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_6929fca431708191ad097a7679ac1c2b?psh=HXVzZXItcUtrUmZtNkpxTk51dERTZWpxOUZWWUgw.MLaI4cXnOuhj
For remote streaming to, say, your mum’s house? (Or a friend, etc)?
Yes, after I set up the server properly (reverse proxy). With this change the same setup on the server side is necessary for remote streaming with free Plex.
My mum puts in the domain, username and password and starts streaming.
Guess what I didn’t have to setup with Plex or Emby.
That’s because you had somone elses servers doing that part for you.
Good.
That’ll be one hundred and fifty dollars, please.
Come on, I love libre software as much as the next Lemming, but the Plex TV and mobile app is leagues ahead in terms of usability over jellyfin.
I still prefer jellyfin for many other reasons, but in terms of UX and UI for the average person it’s an easy win for Plex
You must be having a wildly different experience than me then, because I don’t even understand how you can make that claim
I set up Jellyfin on my mother-in-law’s TV, it’s just push play.
My mum has an Apple TV (the device, not the subscription) and on there she uses swiftfin. The only issue has been sound not working on certain audio tracks on certain movies, but in general it is easy for anyone.
Both are very familiar interfaces for anyone used to playing something from a streaming service.
Not sure about swiftfin but try the option
downmix to stereosomewhere in the client playback settingsThanks, I didn’t manage to find many options in swiftfin, you don’t know if I can enforce it for a user from the server side?
That will be transcoding so from the server side make sure it’s enabled and working. Then you can limit the bitrate (per-user, or globally)
This way the client will stream the content and not direct play it.
Hopefully this fixes the issue with audio.
I think I tried this when troubleshooting and didn’t notice a difference. Nevermind, I pretty easily taught her how to bring up the menu and switch audio streams so she can solve it herself now.
This is legit the opposite of my experience. I am a relatively tech savvy user, I like to fiddle with all the settings and an ugly UI doesn’t inherently deter me as long as the experience is good, so when I first installed jellyfin I was ready to have a clunky experience fighting the UI.
Despite that, I was legitimately surprised at how Jellyfin was far less confusing for me to use out of the box than plex ever was. I found Plex’s UI very confusing to navigate on my TV and my family did not like using it either. I remember especially hating all the extra categories and freemium content plex added that I wasn’t interested in viewing but couldn’t remove (or at least did not find a way to remove). In Jellyfin all of my content is just there and very easily categorized and there’s no superfluous elements in the UI, just my stuff that I want to watch.
I remember plex also gave me more trouble during installation than jellyfin did. I actually found jellyfin very pleasant and intuitive to setup. Plex sent me down a Google rabbit hole to diagnose why it wouldn’t boot at all.
It was genuinely such an awful experience as a first-time user that it made me wonder why anyone would use plex.
Not doubting your experience at all. For all I know it’s a new option; I just discovered it, but for the other folks like me still stuck with Plex, most (all?) of this can be disabled in the Online Media Sources setting on the server (yeah - I know 🙄)…
I never really understood intuitive as a description for user interfaces. I remember back when opinion articles on Tech news websites would use that term to mean it “looks and functions exactly like Windows XP”
Idiomatic usage of ‘intuitive’ regarding interfaces breaks down into
‘familiar’, so, confusing intuition with knowledge, or
‘discoverable’, which is more accurate and describes things like icons and tooltips and menus, where the rules of usage become more or less apparent with exploration and logic.
Yep. What’s considered intuitive UI changes depending on what you’re used to.
It’s why Google fought so hard to put Chromebooks in American classrooms.