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There's a really strong bias on Lemmy for OSS projects. I'm glad they get so much love here, but everything people say here about Jellyfin has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. It works and you can use it. Depending on your needs, it may even work perfectly for you. There are tons of rough edges though.
Here's a few:
Jellyfin is improving all the time, and I hope the recent EFCore update improves performance and development velocity. I'm also holding out hope it will eventually lead to externally hosted databases and active-active servers.
Disclaimer: I run Plex and Jellyfin and regularly check in on the state of things in Jellyfin. I donate to Jellyfin. I want Jellyfin to be better than Plex. I don't think any objective measure bears this out yet.
pretty much just works for me on intel QSV. as long as you have drivers and hardware support it seems perfectly fine. Maybe plex has a cleaner implementation? Not sure, never used it.
depending on your network configuration, and routing of the network, this is most likely to be plex relays, this wouldn't be a jellyfin issue, it would be a plex feature. You could easily fix this with a relay VPN server or something like that. (you probably shouldn't publicly expose services these days anyway.)
The performance of hardware acceleration in Jellyfin is markedly worse in my experience. My A380 can handle 2-3x more streams in Plex than it can in Jellyfin. My theory is that it's the jellyfin ffmpeg port slowing things down, but I admittedly don't have much evidence to back that up beyond the fact that Plex's transcoder is built on ffmpeg as well.
Plex Relays are a feature, but that's sort of the point. You get that stability from Plex by default and it works on all clients. There is no realistic way you're going to get all remote client devices on a VPN for Jellyfin. Maybe one day Jellyfin can offer that as a paid option, a la Nabu Casa for Homeassistant.
Media servers tend to get shared around with friends and family and these edges will start to drive you nuts if you have more than a handful of users. I do not want to try to walk a family member through setting up a VPN on their smart TV.
In the plex PLAYER, I constantly have to restart my tv, glitches, audio out of sync, black screen etc, stutters randomly. Incredibly annoying when I’m trying to watch something. I haven’t had a single playback issue yet with the jellyfin player. It just works
Edit: oh and how can I forget: in the plex player, sometimes “pause” just… didn’t fucking work?! Lmao. I had to exit the player and re enter. So annoying.
I have been looking at JellyFin as a replacement for my aging Emby install, but the over-the-air TV support is weak and mostly broken. I am a FOSS fanboy, but first and foremost TV has to work for my household, not just for me with glitches. I suppose the correct answer is to contribute to improving it, but like most folks, free time is not copious.
One thing Jellyfin is way better at is offline viewing. I have frequent internet outages at my house and I've run into issues multiple times where Plex wouldn't stream my own local media because it couldn't connect to the internet. For this, Jellyfin has always just worked.
jellyfin is quite literally seamless in this regard, the only thing that wont work is metadata scraping (which if like me you run a yt archive, can be relatively frequent, but often isn't even a huge problem) I only notice network outages when other shit breaks lmao.
Yeah, that part about Plex has always bugged me. You can disable logins for your server with allow-listed networks, but most of the non-desktop apps have to log into the Plex platform to run.
I think it sounds like you want a paid product that just works out of the box. Jellyfin has some rough edges sure, but it's also a volunteer project for the most part.
I've got to disagree or clarify with some of these points. These points seem subjective and I feel the need to say something in case others are trying to compare plex/jellyfin.
Hardware acceleration works just fine? Unless there's some hardware specific issue?
The difference in apps is because there's two platforms. The web player (with CSS themeing) and the native (like on Android, which is a straight up android app, not a web page). There's some capabilities that you can only get on Android if you build an app instead of a web player. There's only like one guy building the android TV app.
Unfortunately just one guy working in his spare time on the android TV app. I've never had subtitle issues either (might be a good time to open a bug in report?)
Jellyfin "remote" is pretty rudimentary. You'd be better off just accessing it through a tunnel anyways -- and then youd have access to your own just not your server.
This isn't about want, it's a reality check. OP said jellyfin is better than Plex now, and by objective measure it is not better for most people yet. False expectations hurt Jellyfin adoption, you need to try it with the expectation of jankiness or you'll just be annoyed by the edges.
Op's criteria wasn't "is it a good product?", it was "is it better than Plex?". Stop taking valid criticism as if it were an attack. If we want software to improve we have to be honest about its shortcomings.