I never used that feature. Sometimes less is more. Anyone actively using it in plex or Jelly?
I never used it, but it was a popular third party add-on before the feature was integrated.
Yeah I don’t even used the SharePlay on Apple. Question for people using it: How do you start that? First do you start over phone/whatsapp/messengers? Or do you see people online in plex and propose to watch? For me either people are in different timezone so not practical or will be home and we watch it irl sync on the same tv.
I text my buddy, and say “hey do you wanna watch xyz, when you’re done with work?”. We hop on discord to chat and watch it. An hour or two timezone is not an issue, and for someone ‘local’ I’m probably not driving half an hour to their house after work. I do prefer watching together in-person, but thats not always as convenient.
Probably around 40% of my watching is via syncplay on Jellyfin, as I like watching with buddies.
Sans jellyfin you have to find a way for both of you to access the same file/stream and manually sync across snack/bathroom breaks or use the external and separate syncplay app.
I do like the external syncplay app but if I’m going to have to get the file to them anyways, why not just stream it synced? In my mind this is a really convenient feature.
It is not perfect, in my experience;
- on rare occasions, it gets ‘stuck’ and won’t sync correctly, so one will play but noth the other, pausing one unpauses the other, etc. Usually rebooting helps, but if not, I just manually sync
- there was 1 occassion which made no sense. I played a movie with a friend, we were watching together, but they were ahead of me by a whole ~15 minutes by the end of the film. Neither of us felt it was fast/slow or skipping anything.
- I haven’t had luck using syncplay on my TV. The feature exists but it doesn’t actually work.
But these are rare, minor gripes IMO. I’m glad Jellyfin has this feature.
Thanks for sharing
Obviously they got outside pressure to remove this because of muh ease of piracy sharing
Honestly I really don’t like how self hosted streaming services have been lumped into the same category as piracy. I have no issue buying media. If the law says I can’t share it outside my household I will comply without arbitrary software locks.
My concern is that media companies will go after Jellyfin. They don’t really need to win all they need to due is bankrupt everyone involved.
Don’t worry, there are countries where it’s perfectly legal to rip your own physical media and use it in a digital library. There are some countries where it’s even legal to download a pirated digital copy of your owned media.
Jellyfin will remain, and even if the capitalist pigs try and go after it - which is already close to impossible - they’ll find shelter in a country with moral values.
Yeah that’s not how that works.
That’s exactly how it works.
Lame. I’ve used this feature a lot. It feels like such a basic thing to include.
SharePlay is a standard feature in Apple devices, and it handles it. But only in supported apps.
The pandemic showed how nice such a feature can be for a lot of people.
LoL. That feature is literally the only reason I also have a Plex docker pointing to my library. But they’ve definitely not been supporting it for a while, because I don’t think it’s worked well in forever. Last few times I tried it with friends, we ended up having to just try to hit play at the same time.
Oh well. One less container now.
What hell is wrong with these idiots?
Don’t spend time maintaining niche features seems smart.
I would agree if the features they did work on made sense.
How come every time I open Plex there is another social media integration, yet device downloads haven’t worked for literal years.
Plex itself is niche software, offering niche features is why Plex gained popularity, watch together is a great feature, I often use when I’m cleaning house so I can watch a show even as I move around rooms, same thing when cooking, which let’s the person in the kitchen watch while others may be in the living room.
They took private investment.
I’m seeing a lot of love for Jellyfin in the comments. Seems like Jellyfin is finally mature enough to give a real shot.
Does anyone know how Emby is doing in relation to Plex feature parity?
I can confirm jellyfin is great… But I have moved onto burning onto physical Media (BD) to avoid HDD / SSD failure with data loss
Optical disks rot even in perfect storage conditions. There’s no failure proof storage solution easily available.
Yeah disc rot is a problem… But luckily it’s A LOT longer (50-100 years)
This is compared to HDD (6 years) and SSD (10 years)
Why not both? BD for backup, Jellyfin for convenience.
I have both currently but it’s an HDD so it won’t last forever
That’s what RAID is for. When a disk fails, hopefully you’re fast enough with the replacement so the array never fails.
It’s only a single extern HDd from western digital
Emby I feel is more mature then jellyfin in the sense of every device my family or I have just works on emby but has some issues on jellyfin. Also emby has features closer to plex that jellyfin doesn’t have, like offline downloads and, at least in the emby beta, smart playlists. Jellyfin gives you more settings options for things like transcoding and per user settings than emby or plex. Both programs do some things better than plex too, like scheduling individual server tasks or outright disabling them. Overall from my experience a direct competitor to plex right now is emby while I would say a few more features are needed for jellyfin to be a direct competitor.
That’s interesting, I wonder why no one in these comments mentioned it if it’s a bit farther along than Jellyfin. Maybe just good word-of-mouth marketing?
Jellyfin is actually open source and free. Totally self hosted. Emby is closed source and has a licensing model similar to Plex’s.
Ah, that would do it! Thanks for the information.
Maybe I’m not understanding offline downloads, but I’m able to download media on jellyfin and watch it offline.
Do you mean on an iPhone or android device or only on pc? And have it set to download x amount of episodes and when you watch an episode download the next one automatically? When I checked out jellyfin a few months ago that wasn’t a feature
I’m doing it on my android. Don’t have an iPhone to debug sadly. I click on the three dots next to the episode and it is an option there. Just checked and I can also do it by the season. I am on an administrator account
For anyone in that spot of being savvy-ish but having fellow users that finally got used to plex:
A work around is Xteve and owncast. I was successfully able to make an owncast broadcast into a “DVR channel”.
Its cluegy but it does work. My tech level in this stuff is spotty. I’m used to stacks of tech but more for physical control systems (NOT consumer facing). But I was able to get that to work.
cluegy
I believe the word you’re looking for is “kludgey.”
I’ve been in a multi year process to move my users off plex onto jellyfin. They just keep doing things I’m not a fan of
Jellyfin is absolute dogshit though.
Sauce: I just installed it on my media server that concurrently runs plex. I run the app on a fire tv cube to use it… and it crushes constantly.
Works great here, and my users are very happy with it. Not disputing your experience, just saying it’s not universal.
Could be a compatibility issue with amazon’s android fork? I have only used the android client on google pixel, samsung phones and AOSP builds.
I had a few metadata issues with Jellyfin until I changed the primary metadata source to be the same as what Radarr/Sonarr use so they all the file names match up and I’ve had no issues since.
I also don’t have a notable issues with subtitles in Jellyfin, but maybe your requirements have more friction. Have you tried the (iirc included by default) Jellyfin plugin to automatically download subtitles for your stuff? Or the *arr program that handles subtitles (I forget its name)?
“We’ve spent two years requiring our apps from the ground up to boost our development speed, which should enable us to bring new features to you more efficiently, across more platforms,”
… “and that’s why we’re deleting a bunch of features never to bring them back. Because we’re just so efficient!” Crazy how many companies use this awful excuse.
Also is that a misquote by the write or did they really write “requiring”?
Removing old features so we can bring them back as paid features later on.
Misquotes are unlikely thanks to copy-paste. The post from Plex has been edited, so I think it was to correct that typo.
It’s wild to me. I’ve been in software development for almost 8 years now. The number one thing that we’re told across both companies (one small company and one huge company) is to not remove existing features or APIs.
More often than not that is corporate speak for “we fired the old team and replaced them with cheaper workers. And we didn’t want to pay them to learn the old code/they tried but failed, so we are dumping features now”
Ah, that makes sense. I didn’t realize we had asked for a new UI, here I was thinking we just wanted basic quality of life updates
My friends and I use syncplay + mpv for this. It works well, and even though it’s designed around local file playback, you can add https URLs to the playlist. So this with nginx serving the files has been a great solution.
You can even play YouTube videos by adding yt-dlp to mpv, but that doesn’t reliably work right now as far as I can tell.
The eternal problem of open source: people will happily pay for proprietary software and services, complain that open source isn’t ready. Then when it is, they will not donate a single cent to continue development but instead create passive aggressive posts and issues demanding features or shitting on the project.
First they removed downloads and now this? Feels shitty. I used this feature weekly to watch a show with a remote friend.
Downloads havent been removed
In 2022 they added a paywall to the feature which was previously free to all users of a Plex Pass server. https://support.plex.tv/articles/downloads-sync-faq/
Downloads definitely haven’t been removed. I use it virtually every day to watch stuff on my iPad at work.
In 2022 they added a paywall to the feature which was previously free to all users of a Plex Pass server. https://support.plex.tv/articles/downloads-sync-faq/
Jellyfin is love, Jellyfin is life.
It’s bad. But it’s the best we’ve got.
Speak for yourself, Jellyfin has been awesome for me. Fantastic piece of software.
Extremely slow and clunky UI on Android. Music has no star rating as every other software including Plex and Navidrome has. It sometimes starts transcoding for no apparent reason.
Not perfect but the best we’ve got.
Jellyfin is the sever bro. You can implement your own client and choose from a pretty decent variety of clients on Android and most platforms. Only Android TV really suffers from required first party support, but the api is documented and we encourage you to make your own or port it to whatever front end you’d like.
Why are there official clients then? Better not to provide any client at all than bad clients based on the web UI.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of open source. This is something someone made for the community out of the goodness of their heart and a desire to create. You can build on top of it or use it as a base and completely remake it if you want, but they’re not making money off this… So your attitude towards them and what they’re offering to everyone for free is honestly quite rude and entitled.
I understand the purpose of open-source. I can voice my opinion and say the software isn’t good in some ways. The developer should be able to handle criticism.
people still use plex after the last sneaky they pulled?
Got a plex lifetime sub like 7 years ago… As soon as Jellyfin allows downloads for offline viewing, I’m jumping ship. I know I’ll have to figure out TV listing data for OTA recordings, but that seems like a small price to pay. I’ve already got Jellyfin setup and running in my Kubernetes cluster for my video backups, but plex thus far “just works”.
I know Findroid allows easy downloading and offline watching. Fladder (another newer Android client) also has downloading, haven’t tried it myself yet.
As soon as Jellyfin allows downloads for offline viewing, I’m jumping ship.
For music, offline play is already available via Finamp. For everything else I’m personally making due with the regular Download feature that just gives yout the raw files. But then again it doesn’t really come up often, since I don’t really consume anything but audiobooks when I’m on the go.
Just an FYI that you can definitely download shows/movies to any device via Jellyfin - just did so on my tablet yesterday…jump ship!!
Did it download the original file or are there download options transcoded on the server?
default apps download original files, no transcode options.
Streamyfin claims download any file transcoded as long as your server can transcode it. Haven’t tested it myself.
As soon as Jellyfin allows downloads for offline viewing
Time to jump ship then…
The android app has had downloads for years, they just download the entire file to your phone.
Streamyfin is a newer android app that also works very well with downloads.
Findroid has been around longer with downloads working well too. Just has an issue where it doesn’t download the images of the items, which is a bit silly.
I’ve had a Lifetime PlexPass since 2013, so I’ve definitely had my moneys worth and then some, but for the last 2 years I’ve been dual wielding Jellyfin and watching it slowly get to the point where I can move over entirely.
I’m 100% Jellyfin now for my personal playback at home, and will be transitioning users over to it as soon as it gets a few more user management features for remote users.
Gotta provide details. Don’t leave us hanging.
What sneaky?
I paid for a lifetime pass like six years ago or more. It was definitely before Jellyfin was well known or well developed.
I’m probably keep using it until they do the whole “lifetime is over” crap these kind of companies usually do.
I’ll at least have gotten my moneys worth.
I paid for it and literally never used it.
I paid for the lifetime pass maybe, 10 years ago? I dunno, it’s been a very long time. It’s still my primary. I’ve been trialing Jellyfin, but there are still enough quirks that my wife (non-techie at all) won’t put up with, so yeah. That, and Plex makes it too easy to share outside my house, not sure where Jellyfin is at with it. I appreciate Jellyfin for what it is though, it has a lot of potential.
Just because you paid for it doesn’t mean you can’t switch to the better, free option.
Jellyfin is nowhere near the better option, it’s just a not-terrible dev.
Plex is refined and easy to get external users not familiar with tech up and running. Plex looks better. Plex transcodes better.
No hate for Jellyfin, just calling it how I see it.
Similarly, I feel the same way about Jellyfin but Plex is making it really hard to be a Lifetime Pass member as well.
Good thing I chose jellyfin over plex. This is the main reason I got jellyfin.
