With Plex announcing stark price increases for their Plex Pass service, and requiring Plex Pass or a Remote Watch Pass for remote streaming, plenty of folks in the homelab space are evaluating or recommending a switch to Jellyfin. Jellyfin’s come a long way since the last time I looked at, and I’m quite impressed with its functionality.
One thing that I found quite interesting is that playback seems to start faster on Jellyfin than Plex. It honestly feels as snappy as using one of the pro streaming platforms, while Plex always seems like it hangs for a hot second before starting playback.
That’s not to say it’s not without its own quirks. Plex seems capable of detecting that you have more than one version of a video and to magically combine them into one entry, whereas Jellyfin shows both. On the other hand, it’s a good opportunity to see where I need to clean things up. In addition, there’s a bit of OSS design jank, ie: some settings are global, some are per-user, and some are even per-client, and some of the settings that are per-user or per-client feel like they should have a way to change a global default.
Getting it working was pretty easy though. For this spike, I decided to use the Proxmox Community Scripts installer, which got me much of the way through pretty quickly. It’s not what I’d call my final install, as I wanted to do a quick eval and I made some less ideal security posture changes on the LXC container that I’d like to fix for a full prod deployment, as well as change up some of the storage layout, but I think the spike is at a point where, barring discovering some really bad footguns I’ll be switching to Plex from here on. Especially since Plex pushed out a new app update for my tablet that causes its CPU to light up like a Christmas tree.