this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
124 points (89.7% liked)

Technology

58108 readers
4829 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] fuzzy_feeling@programming.dev 59 points 5 days ago (2 children)

all my homies use jellyfin...

[–] nullboi@lemmy.world 20 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (13 children)

Was going to say the same. Why use plex, when jellyfin exists.

Edit: spelling

[–] LordKitsuna@lemmy.world 23 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Because jellyfin has less device compatibility, worse transcoding performance, and still struggles with media matching. Oh and still had memory leak issues.

I have it installed, regularly update and test it, i want to ditch plex. But it's just got to many basic issues. Anime matching in particular is rough and yes even after adjusting match sources some anime just outright fails till i manually match, matches incorrectly, won't work either way.

No it's not the filenames. I use Sonarr, they are all very clean.

Series name(year) | Season folder (001) | SxxExx episode title

Edit: i give up figuring out how to make this stay treed, fucking hate reddit/lemmy formatting

[–] Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 7 points 4 days ago (9 children)

worse transcoding performance

You have to pay on Plex to use hardware acceleration for transcoding. Lmao

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] master_of_unlocking@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago (2 children)

i use Jellyfin but a big thing that Plex has is the ability to easily stream remotely. Its doable with Jellyfin but requires a lot of manual configuration that a non technical user just can't/won't do.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (11 replies)
[–] undercrust@lemmy.ca 9 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Is there a good walkthrough of how to set up Jellyfin on Linux? If I'm breaking away from a shit OS, I may as well try breaking away from an increasingly crummy Plex

[–] fuzzy_feeling@programming.dev 5 points 5 days ago

depends on your distro.
an internet search like "debian jellyfin install" should point you into the right direction.

if in doubt or having trouble: there's a friendly linux community around the corner.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Unmapped@lemmy.ml 15 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I don't care about the photos. But glad to hear they are taking photos and music out of the main app and making it less bloated.

[–] realitista@lemm.ee 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I wish they'd allow syncing of my full music library to my mobile app so I can finally get off Apple Music.

[–] FallenGrove@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Musicbee can pull your songs and playlists from itunes and allow syncing of them to your phone. It doesn't do streaming though.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] dan@upvote.au 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Put all songs in a playlist and then download that playlist?

[–] realitista@lemm.ee 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

But I need all my playlists, not just all my songs in one big useless playlist. I have around 50 of them.

[–] dan@upvote.au 2 points 3 days ago (4 children)

You can download all your playlists.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

K. You lost me years ago when your photos and camera upload function were total shit forever. I since moved all my crap to nextcloud camera upload and photoprism. Not gonna change any time soon

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 6 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Plex never fixes stuff and it's really bad. They don't even have a feedback system.

The login process for Plex photos (Android) was near im impossible, because it used the browser which closed/if I went away from the app such as if I wanted to copy my passqord from my password manager. I wouldn't be at all suprised if that wouldn't change until way after stable release.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] veeesix@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 days ago

Nice! The old photos feature in the main app felt too bloated so I stopped using it. Hopefully this one’s snappier cause I’ve been looking for a good way to access my old photos again.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 125 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Plex will do anything other than make their player easy to use.

[–] ccunning@lemmy.world 19 points 5 days ago (4 children)

My only real complaint is their app is laggy.

Do you have other complaints with it?

[–] Confused_Emus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Biggest issue I and my friends have with my Plex server is the constant buffer-play-for-a-minute-buffer issue with certain anime subtitle formats. Although the little bit of searching I’ve done with that indicates that may be more of an issue with the device being streamed on than with Plex itself. I dunno.

[–] FlightyPenguin@lemmy.world 23 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Certain subtitle formats cannot be directly streamed, so your server is probably re-encoding video on the fly to burn in the subtitles. PGS format is actually a series of images and will always require re-encoding video. Picking SRT should work with device direct streaming.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] Ugurcan@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

It’s terrible with direct streaming lossless Dolby Atmos (TrueHD) streams, not only where it’s not possible but there are workarounds (AppleTV / Infuse), but also on each and every platform it’s being done by other apps (Android, Xbox, PC / Kodi).

I only use it because I paid peanuts for lifetime premium and alternatives have egregious UX that I can withstand but my extended family cannot.

[–] BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)

My main complaint is when it decides to just stop casting to Chromecast in the middle of episodes randomly - then I have to open the app, reconnect, and resume.

Also I find the Chromecast controls stop responding frequently making it so I can't pause what I'm watching - it'll like disconnect from the Chromecast but keep playing.

My partner also complains about lots of bugs on the iOS app.

[–] Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I've been having trouble with this too.

So far my best assessment is that the problem stems from the Chromecast not playing well with my router. Resetting the Wi-Fi on my router tends to fix the problem, but it's seriously annoying.

Separately, I also have issues with the play/pause not working when casting and some other weird interface behaviors sometimes. But all in all, it's worth complaining, but it still works better than everything else.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

My biggest complaint is that it defaults to "recommended" instead of "library" which means for new users (family members you are trying to help remotely) don't see the videos in your collection but instead a random unordered list to scroll sideways.

After you select library to see everything, it doesn't save that view as default unless you go into settings and change it to remember changes.

A new annoying feature they added is when setting up a new account, the default is to send every video you watch to all friends/family unless you select disable. So you can't even setup quickly by putting in a user/password and being ready to go. You have to talk family members through setup or everyone with access to your Plex will get email spammed with everything that person watched.

I have home videos on my server and this means lengthy phone calls to family so they can actually see the videos.

[–] JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca -1 points 5 days ago (6 children)

My biggest complaint is that it defaults to "recommended" instead of "library"... it doesn't save that view as default unless you go into settings and change it to remember changes.

That's a pretty minor gripe considering there is a setting for it. Also, given that it's a you-get-it-one-way-or-the-other kind of setting, they're always going to be upsetting someone.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Do you actually use their "recommended" view?

Do you primarily watch Plex live TV or their other ad supported movies?

[–] JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca 1 points 4 days ago

Do you actually use their "recommended" view?

Yes, it lists shows I'm currently watching and takes me directly to the next episode.

Do you primarily watch Plex live TV or their other ad supported movies?

No, never.

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Wxfisch@lemmy.world 27 points 5 days ago (6 children)

So still not addressing the myriad problems the player has, especially on AppleTV where it’s been reported for nearly half a decade to not work well. But hey you get yet another place to do photos things (which they admit literally no one wants or uses, they’d be better off dropping support for photos altogether).

This is super frustrating because plex is very polished despite its clear bugs and misdirection. I just switched over to JellyFin and it’s faster and much more focused but just still has a lot of rough edges. I’m not sure which will be my long term solution but plex needs to attract folks to subscribe and focusing on features that 1/5 of a percent of users utilize is not how you do that.

[–] random72guy@lemmy.world 14 points 5 days ago

As a longtime Plex user, I also hate their lack of focus and tendancy to priorotize bad features (like paid streaming and VR). But this one feels more like a way to re-focus on video by removing photo code from the main (video) app's codebase, making it easier to maintain.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I genuinely love PlexAmp. I’m curious about the photos thing and might give it a try.

[–] realitista@lemm.ee 2 points 3 days ago

I just wish it had local sync for my whole music library, not just some small slice of it.

[–] adonkeystomple@lemmy.ml 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

At this point the only thing holding me back from switching to Jellyfin is Plex’s transcoded download function.

[–] cyberic@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I've found emby to be a good compromise.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] fanzel@lemm.ee 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I only recently started using Plex because they added the Drew Carey Show. I didn't know they were anything other than a streaming service.

[–] dan@upvote.au 18 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Their main product is a server that you run on a computer and lets you stream your own content.

[–] PetteriPano@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Their main product is telemetry and selling your watch history to advertisers.

That's why Plex doesn't work without an active internet connection.

load more comments
view more: next ›