I use Plex every day. Lately, I’ve been wondering if I should stop.
The software, which lets you turn your personal collection of TV shows and movies into a Netflix-style streaming service, is extremely convenient. But Plex is offered by a company that, as of late, seems more focused on adding features than improving the cluttered user interface. Recently, it added a social platform and user reviews, two features I quickly disabled. I want to watch stuff—not talk about it with strangers (I have friends for that). The company keeps making design choices that push its ad-supported streaming choices over the personal media collection and DVR functionality I use the service to enjoy.
This might make sense from a business perspective. But it doesn’t make sense for my personal use of Plex, which is watching live TV and the TV shows I’ve recorded and stored on my own computer. I pay an annual subscription fee of $ 70 for this. I could avoid the annual subscription by buying a lifetime pass, but Plex just raised the price from $250 to $750. That’s more than a decade of annual passes, assuming Plex lasts the next decade.
All of which is to say there are reasons to be frustrated with Plex. And that’s enough to look into Jellyfin, a free and open source application that offers many of the features that make Plex so compelling. Is Jellyfin a good alternative? It depends.
Solid Basics, Rocky Remote Access
If the main thing you want is to watch your digital collection of TV shows and movies in your home, I have good news for you: Jellyfin works great. You can download the server, point it toward your media, and access that media on other devices on your network, all in a couple of minutes.
The scanning works well. In my case, a few things were labeled incorrectly, but I dealt with similar issues setting up Plex and know I can fix it without too much bother—it’s a matter of naming the files correctly.
You can access your server on the local network by typing the local IP into your address bar, which is handy. And there are Jellyfin clients for every major desktop, mobile, and smart TV platform you can think of. Put simply, you can get local media streaming working very quickly. If that’s your main use and you’re tired of Plex, I can confidently say Jellyfin is ready for you without fuss.
But sometimes you’re not home. Surprising, I know. One of the nice things about Plex is relatively simple remote access, which allows you to watch your media outside of your home network. With most modern routers, you won’t need to do much—the networking is taken care of. This is possible because Plex, the company, operates infrastructure that points other devices toward your home server.
Jellyfin has no such infrastructure. If you want to access your Jellyfin server when you’re away from home, you need to set up the networking infrastructure yourself. This could mean paying for a domain name and redirecting it to your server; it could mean setting up a VPN, or it could mean messing around with port forwarding. There are instructions, but they’re very clearly intended for power users.
Basically, you’re going to have to tinker. Now, the kind of person who runs their own Plex server can probably navigate all of this. But if you share access to your Plex server with others, Jellyfin will be harder for them to set up and use.
This is particularly true for people who access multiple media servers. Plex makes this easy: one account gives you access to every server. Jellyfin is a little different—every client needs to be set up to connect to each server individually. It’s not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it’s a barrier worth thinking about.
Your Live TV Setup Might Not Work
My favorite Plex feature is Live TV and DVR. I have a tuner card in my PC and a heavy-duty antenna wired to it from across the house. This works perfectly for watching live TV on all my devices, even when I’m away from home. A lot of Airbnbs don’t have live television, only streaming, and I’ve used this feature many times to stream sporting events to TVs that otherwise couldn’t get them. TV shows I record are added to my Plex library, with commercials automatically skipped.
I use this functionality just about every day, but I wasn’t really able to get it working in Jellyfin—and I tried. My TV card is a Hauppauge device that works flawlessly in Plex. Jellyfin officially only supports one hardware device for watching live TV channels: HDHomeRun. This means I can’t natively point Jellyfin at my TV card—I need to buy an HDHomeRun or find a workaround. Thankfully, I did find a workaround. I was able to set up another application called NextPVR, using instructions from the forum, and point Jellyfin to it. With this, I could watch live TV via Jellyfin.
That’s a lot of fiddling for a feature that’s easy to set up in Plex. And I wasn’t done. NextPVR supports pulling in TV listings from the antenna, which, depending on the channel, gives you a few hours of the schedule. It’s a good idea, if you’re trying to use a Personal Video Recorder (PVR), to have more data than that—and that information isn’t free. Plex bundles these listings, which is part of why I pay for Plex Pass.
But there are other services. Schedules Direct is the best-known such service, offering Electronic Program Guide (EPG) data for $35 a year (half the price of an annual Plex pass). The problem? Schedules Direct states that using Jellyfin could get you blocked because of a bug. This is before I set up more complex things, like skipping commercials, which require tweaking in Jellyfin. I am certain that, with enough digging, I could get this working. It might even keep working for a while. But Plex makes it all so easy, making it hard to switch.
A caveat I would add, though, is that Jellyfin’s PVR supports Internet Protocol television (IPTV), something Plex does not without equally elaborate workarounds. IPTV isn’t broadly offered for legal TV streaming in North America the way it is in other regions of the world. But it’s still a nice feature to have (my NextPVR workaround relied on it, for example). So Jellyfin might work better for some setups.
An Imperfect Replacement
It may sound like I’m being hard on Jellyfin, and I don’t mean to be. It’s a very capable tool for certain things—it’s just not the right fit for everyone. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys endlessly tweaking things, Jellyfin is a dream.
There are so many customizations out there for Jellyfin. There’s a built-in plugin repository and support for adding third-party ones. You can theme the web interface to look however you like, even design your own branding for your server. Plugins make it easy to do things like download subtitles, watch trailers before movies, or create a newsletter of new media added to your server.
This is the strength of an open source ecosystem—the community builds a lot of cool stuff on top of it. If that appeals to you, Jellyfin might feel like an upgrade over Plex.
Gardiner Bryant, a free software advocate and Jellyfin fan, outlined Jellyfin’s flaws pretty well—his post is well worth reading. He mentions a few things I don’t talk about here, like how Plex offers simpler downloads for offline viewing and dedicated smartphone apps for music and photos. He also points out a few bugs.
Even with all these caveats, I think Jellyfin is a perfectly viable alternative to Plex if you’re willing to put in the work. If you’re the kind of person who loves endlessly tweaking things, it might even be better than Plex in some ways. But if you want things to work, without a lot of mucking about, Plex has a very real edge. This is particularly true if you’re a big user of the live TV feature, at least in my experience.
I will probably keep paying for Plex. But I’ll also keep an eye on Jellyfin, because I have to imagine it’s going to keep improving (and that Plex may keep getting worse).
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