this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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Honest question, because I know multiple people who are not looking to jump ship since they already have the Plex Pass.

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[–] emmy67@lemmy.world 16 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

This is all a fascinating thread because everyone says Plex "just works"

I started using jellyfin about 6 months ago. I don't really know anything about plex use. However, jellyfin worked out of the box for me. Set up with a docker container and have never had any problems with it.

Its never failed to load media, or loaded duplicates or any of the other random things others have mentioned here.

For the most part it feels like people in the thread have just used Plex for a long time and had their first impression of jellyfin years ago and probably haven't checked it out since.

Which, fair play to them, life gets busy and setting up and migrating a media library is something that takes at least a couple hours which could be spent doing anything else.

If people are new, I'm sure they won't even bother with Plex and their ridiculously high fees. I cannot see Plex maintaining their userbase at this rate.

With them unable to maintain their userbase, I give it a year before they cancel lifetime passes and 2 years or so before it's completely enshitified and unusable.

[–] FinalRemix@lemmy.world 6 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

I'm at the user level of "people keep saying docker... what the fuck is a docker?" -looks it up- "this explains nothing."

Plus, I got lifetime Plex a while back, and can use it to stream videos to my remote classroom for examples in class.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 4 hours ago

docker means that the software is so brittle that it only works on the developer's machines. So they ship the developer's machine too.

Docker is not a software distribution medium

[–] emmy67@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago

Yeah I understand that. I was also at that level when I started. It did take me a while to understand the docker compose syntax. But was pretty simple once I got into it. I understand not wanting to dive that deep though.

[–] PmMeFrogMemes@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

yeah as a former plex user I can confirm the setup is way more annoying. for me "just works" means I spin up the container, point it at my media library, and I'm done. never had to make an online account or pay for anything with jellyfin. I agree with ppl that say the plex web UI and native apps are more polished but that's about the only positive

[–] beeb@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Not it's mostly about remote access anywhere without VPN. Forcing your friends and family to use a VPN to access a jellyfin instance securely is not something everyone is willing to do (and might be impossible on some devices).

[–] 1371113@lemmy.world -1 points 9 hours ago

I tried jellyfin/emby for the third time about 6 months back. I had heaps of encoding issues (not playing) with x265 and lots of issues with dolby encodes (running it through my home theatre from a 2017 nVidia shield using the official client). I even went so far as to run a separate ffmpeg instance but no dice. Until it’s not a hobby project and ‘just works’ I’m not interested.