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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[–] ButteryMonkey@piefed.social 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I have both technically running. The metadata matching on jellyfin is complete ass, so I have to manually match up like a third of my library, or reconfigure the files (absolutely not happening) which I just dgaf enough to do when vanishingly few people would be able to use it, so its only partially set up. It also can’t be accessed by anyone because I'm not dumb enough, nor smart enough, to open it up to the internet (I don’t know how to do it safely and I'm thus entirely not interested in trying).

Plex, by contrast, is already configured (and if I have to scrap the library and start over, as I've done several times, its pretty easy to reconfigure), the metadata linking is correct and automatic most of the time, everyone already has access to it, and it just works for them, and thus for me. I'm not giving it up just because a bunch of hyper-nerds on the internet say it’s bad for, frankly, nonsense reasons that don't apply or matter to me or honestly most people who use it. I’ll wait until it -actually- is bad for my use, or until jellyfin serves the use I have for it, which it absolutely does not do presently, and may never. (And no, a vpn or whatever setup is not a solution, it’s just one more thing to maintain and fuck with constantly to keep it working for people who don’t even know what a vpn is. Hard pass.)

I wouldn't pay for plex now, nor in the last several years, and I strongly discourage my users from doing so, but spent money is spent, so might as well keep using what I paid for until it doesn't work for me anymore. I mean really, why not? I genuinely haven't seen any valid reasons to get rid of it, and lots of reasons to keep it.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

The metadata matching on jellyfin is complete ass, so I have to manually match up like a third of my library

Does Plex somehow do a better job of figuring out special features metadata? Because other than that, you follow the naming schemes, and Jellyfin has had a 100% hit rate for me.

[–] ButteryMonkey@piefed.social 1 points 26 minutes ago (1 children)

I’m not really sure what you mean by special feature in this context, but plex pulls the meta largely without needing to rename files (some exceptions, but they are very obvious, like if there’s words/numbers before the title for some reason, like when I ripped my 13 hours of classic monster movies and they were numbered), and it usually doesn't care about extra stuff like encoding info and whatnot. Hardly need to manually match anything when it gets added, and never need to manually match shows. Handfull of stuff if I rebuild the server from scratch, but those files mostly don’t have metadata to begin with (some youtube rips, some documentaries that probably came out of a series, that sort of thing). It just seems to be a lot more forgiving, I guess.

I’m just not super interested at the moment in going through my entire library, which would take half of forever, to rename everything to make it work properly. Especially when I already did/do that for plex’s requirements, and it works fine. I assumed when I set jellyfin up it would pull the same, but it doesn’t, in my experience.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 points 6 minutes ago

I meant in the use case of ripping my entire Blu Ray library for a new Jellyfin install, the only thing that's been difficult for me to match has been the special features. So I guess the friction you're running into is that you've already got these files named for Plex, and the migration is the hard part?