That’s what I use. Although I Have a Plex lifetime subscription, Jelliyfin is just too fantastic.
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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I'm using plex, how does it compare? What's better and what's worse?
I went from Emby -> Plex -> Jellyfin in the past few years.
It comes down to user preference really. I swapped from Plex to Jellyfin for two reasons:
- Didn't want to pay for hardware transcoding
- Didn't like the route Plex was heading with their opt-out free "Plex TV"
Major difference is that Jellyfin is free for everything, nothing locked behind a paywall. Plex definitely supports more devices though (ex: officially supporting Synology NAS) and a lot of people like the design better.
Both support ~~plugins~~, custom themes, etc.
Also, while Plex can be configured for offline/LAN use, by default I believe it requires an online account.
Plex stopped officially supporting plugins in 2018, FYI.
Jellyfin has Plex beat in that category for sure. As well as for theming IMO.
Would love to know too
Same here, Jellyfin is just faster.
Pair it with tailscale to access outside your network. I used it to create what is essentially a self hosted Spotify.
So what are the other services one needs to browse and stream fresh content to a device in a Netflix-like way? I hear Jellyfin, Sonarr and Radarr mentioned a lot but don’t really know where to start
I just got this stuff up and running in the last week. Here's the basic stuff I'm using and a quick breakdown:
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Jellyfin. This is just a media server. Got media files on a hard drive? Point Jellyfin at them, and it will index and serve them in a pretty web UI on your local network.
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qBittorrent. For downloading media files based on torrents.
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Sonarr/radarr. Keep track of shows (sonarr) and movies (radarr). Keeps track of the content you have, what's missing, and keeps up on upcoming releases. Is able to use torrent indexes to find torrents, and sends them to qBittorrent. Once the download is done, automatically moves the files to your media library to get picked up by Jellyfin
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Prowlarr. Easier way to find torrent indexes. Browse indexes, pick some, and it hands them off to sonarr and radarr so they can find torrents.
This is generally how my setup is working at the moment.
I mean general concept is they all are suppose to talk to each other in some sort. Prowlarr will provide indexers to Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr, etc (just going to call them the ARR’s) the ARR’s will associate the results of those indexers to TMDB/TVDB and whenever you decide to download something the ARR’s will communicate with your download/torrent client, once your download is complete the ARR’s will mark it as complete and move it to the directory/folder of your choosing making organization easy and let’s Jellyfin/Plex see the files in the way they should be shown. You can reverse proxy all these for security reasons or to avoid annoying ssl errors.
Honestly to start I would say learn the docker engine & docker compose first.
Stremio + torrent.io addon + optionally real Debrid (it's paid but very cheap and makes the experience better) will give you a service identical to Netflix without having to build a library of shows/movies yourself, and every show and movie available in one place.
Funny you should mention that, I just installed the stremio combo webui/server docker last night. After I got it hooked up to real debride it works surprisingly well. I do have a dedicated GPU. I was looking for something like Kodi in a webui, but I wanted to use debride and I found this app.
I'm now trying to shoehorn in IPTV and an EPG just to see if I can
I'm going on 2 years using Jellyfin for local streaming. I never used plex or anything before, I was just turned off my the paid models.