Like so many people in the last few months, I made the move to Jellyfin recently and am now running it side by side with plex. In general the move was pretty ok!

Positives

  • TV & Movies all work more or less as expected

I was a bit worried about things like clients and moving the family off plex. However, the default iOS app seems largely fine and we use Jellyfin for Kodi for media playback. I have found it works more or less identically to the plexkodiconnect integration, but with the benfit of remote control from the iOS app working again.

Intro skip works just fine with the intro skip plugin, I’m not sure if I hadn’t said anything that it would have been noticed that we had switched…which is surely the best endorsement! Obviously this may be different if using smart TV apps or Apple TV’s etc. We don’t use any of those.

  • Jellyfin for Kodi supports Home assistant remote playing library items

This is a bit niche, but the drop-in replacement meant that the basic method of using kodi to automate playback of shows based on kodi id’s I had been previously using continued to work just fine. I use a wooden block with nfc sitckers on each face, with TV show pictures on top of them for my little boy to choose what he wants to watch. When the block is placed on an nfc reader it is read by Home Assistant, which sends a command to kodi to play an item from Jellyfin. It works really nicely!

Sad truths

  • Music support kinda sucks.

I’ve installed a Navidrome instance, but even that pales compared to the mighty Plexamp. I’ve been collecting digital music for a shade over 20 years now. The tags on my files are generally pretty ok, but perhaps a little sparse and certainly not in line with standards used with software like Picard or Beets.

This has presented something of an issue as importing all the files has resulted in something far messier than I would like. I have managed to export all the metadata from my plex music library using tautulli and, I guess, I’ll use an LLM to develop a script to parse it and start writing some of the fields to the music files itself. This is a bit of a massive job though and it’s clear that Plex/Plexamp’s library management is just smarter.

  • External library sharing

All the WiFi devices in the house automatically connect to our wireguard VPN when they are not at home, so using Jellyfin without exposing it to the internet hasn’t been a particular issue. The question of whether to expose any service to the internet is an interesting one (and I’ve been leaning more towards not doing this over the last few years, despite having had no issues for about 15 years). I’m no expert on secure code, but there have been a few rumblings about Jellyfin’s external security. Keeping it remotely accessible via VPN only solves this and doesn’t really impact us.

However, it would be nice to easily share logins to a couple of friends and family. With the huge variability in quality of clients for platforms like Apple TV etc, coupled with requiring people to launce a vpn app before using Jellyfin…come on now, this isn’t going to happen. Not a huge issue, but something to consider.

Conclusions

I have actually had a Plex lifetime pass for very nearly a decade, so it’s not like I haven’t had value from it. Plexamp is going to have to continue to be the main source of music playback for now because it’s just too good. I’ll keep working on Navidrome, but even then the clients are not quite as pretty as Plexamp. We’ll see how this goes.

However, TV and Movies are now very much going to be Jellyfin going forward. For me, the switch has been relatively painless and is just a case of doing things a bit differently than before.