I’ve got Jellyfin up and running right now on a DS620Slim NAS and it’s running pretty good so far. I’ve seen a lot of people say they prefer Plex over Jellyfin. What are the main advantages to plex?
I’ve got Jellyfin up and running right now on a DS620Slim NAS and it’s running pretty good so far. I’ve seen a lot of people say they prefer Plex over Jellyfin. What are the main advantages to plex?
Kodi has fallen out of fashion these days but it’s also an excellent solution, depending on your streaming needs. I’ve used Plex in the past and found it to be sluggish on Samsung’s Tizen OS. Jellyfin was a lot slicker, but also a fair bit more work to set-up if you want to stream remotely.
In the end, I put one of my pi4s to work as a Kodi box, since I only stream to my TV. It’s running LibreELEC, which is a barebones OS providing just enough to run Kodi. Media is fetched from a samba share on the home server. It’s been far better for me than Plex ever was, and way easier to set-up than Jellyfin. Kodi is essentially a standalone player, so not the right solution if you’re wanting to stream to multiple devices or remote clients. Just throwing another option out there for anyone looking.
You can easily integrate the jellyfin to kodi, and have both - consistent library across multiple devices AND beautiful UI.
There are 2 addons for it.
One will allow you to browse your jellyfin media using the api, and to reencode on the fly, but it’s annoyingly slow to browse the library this way.
The other one will integrate your jellyfin library to local kodi database. You just need to specify the path to your samba share in the jellyfin library. It’ll fetch the metadata from jellyfin, but access the media using SMB directly. It’s pretty fast, since kodi doesn’t have to scrape the metadata itself, and it keeps itself up to date, no need for periodic library rescans.
To add to that, it is possible to use Kodi as a front-end for the plex server. This is what I do and it’s great.
I like using plex server because for my use case it makes media management super easy and it works flawlessly, I just put all my media in movies/shows folder and it takes care of the rest automatically.
I have set up Kodi with PlexKodiConnect (props to the creator, it’s fantastic) on a NUC clone plugged to my TV. Kodi is by far a much better player than the plex one, especially when playing 4K, so I get the best of both worlds.
On top of that it still leaves me the possibility to use the plex player on other devices if needed.