I am hoping that jellyfin gets better over the next few years. I keep trying it and it keeps feeling broken to me. Lots of people have the same experience it seems but then there's also always a few people that act like I'm crazy. Nah, it's still not there, unless things have changed a lot in the past year.
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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What about it feels broken? I've been running Plex and Jellyfin together for a long time and always find myself using Jellyfin. I'm curious what problems people run into to see if I have the same problem or maybe I'm just overlooking something.
Same. Have run both for a while. Find the jellyfin customisation preferable to plex.
I use a 3rd party client called Wholphin and it works great.
Also it helps to set up profiles in sonarr/radarr to make sure you're getting media thats compatible with the devices that will interact with Jellyfin, and filter out formats that cause problems. I use Profilarr to load in community made quality profiles to sonarr/radarr and then i copy them and tweak them for myself.
Before i started doing this i had loads of problems with Jellyfin not being able to play stuff, and now everything runs perfectly.
The biggest discovery I made that was causing a lot of my problems was HDR formats. HDR10+ only really works on Samsung TVs for example. I dont have a Samsung TV, so anything I had that would try to play that content would come out a weird green/purple colour. Content with Dolby Vision Profile 5 would flat out not play on devices that don't support Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision Profile 7 falls back to regular HDR10 when the device doesnt accept DV, so that works, but DV Profile 5 doesnt do that.
I was able to filter out HDR10+ and DV Profile 5 using quality profiles and all my playback issues disappeared immediately.
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If you mean limitations in the client, I discovered that there's a Jellyfin for Kodi plugin.
Kodi has had decades of development. It's super customizable, has every feature you can think of, direct plays every video format, and is fast.
Having it act as a Jellyfin client has been amazing and given me the best of both worlds.
I had Kodi installed for a few weeks as my television media front-end, but it has:
- the worst UX that you could possibly imagine, with menu after menu arranged seemingly at random, and buttons doing different things at every level
- functionality delivered via plugins, at least half of which do not work
- directory scans failing seemingly at random, with the errors hidden away in log files that you have to shell in to retrieve
- terrible documentation, inevitably consisting of forum pages about how it used to work a decade ago
It may well have a huge amount of functionality, but configuring and using it is the exact opposite of slick. Have uninstalled in favour of KDE with VLC installed, and manipulated via the KDE Connect mobile app, which is somehow a much better big-screen experience.
I felt crazy when I tried to use Kodi. Everything was so convoluted to setup.
I was thinking of installing Linux on a mini-pc I have here and just buying a bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo to watch medias. I can run Firefox with ad blocking and easily access my server like that.
'Decades of development' is stretching it a bit 😅
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I’ve already had a Plex pass for ages, so I’ve just been running both concurrently.
Plex is a lot more accessible for my friends and family that are less tech inclined.
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Agree. I went directly with Jellyfin because I joined late the party, but never regret it.
So can't comment on Plex, because I never used it. But I see the news and see the enshittified path it's going on with Plex
I understand that they need revenue, specially if they actually provide the bandwidth to let you access your media from outside home. I also understand why people is mad, but I guess convenience come with a price, of you don't want to pay for it, there are alternatives I don't see anything bad in switching to jellyfin.
They don't provide much in terms of bandwidth for you to access your own media. Just a few bytes through their web services. Their bandwidth usage comes from their desire to be their own streaming service. They provide access to a whole bunch of other media you may have no interest in.
There's a relay but it limits the bandwidth allowed through. It can't be that expensive to run.
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I agree that the rest of plex is undergoing enshittification. But the core features are kinda the same? I use it outside my home a LOT, so I don’t know how jellyfin would work for that. I know Cloudflare tunnel has a bad relationship with streaming video. Does Tailscale too? How do you access jelly outside your home?
I use Tailscale and it is absolutely fine. The problem is with other non tech savy people - the setup process is not straightforward so you need to help them a bit. They can't just "connect". But after that, Tailscale is great.
Controversial opinion and I say that as someone who started with Jellyfin and keeps that local Wifi only, so I admit a certain bias: going with Tailscale and Jellyfin over using Plex isn't much better. Instead of enabling remote access via one company that wants to make money, you go via another company that wants to make money. How long is the free tier of Tailscale going to work out? How much do you trust them with your traffic? But I know it is a popular setup, so I am aware saying that here will not earn me any points.
FWIW, Tailscale is a private company that's been doing well, so it hasn't been going down the enshittification route yet. There's also headscale, which they support and which will serve as the canary in the mine if they ever start souring the deal.
Meanwhile, I see no reason not to use a perfectly good service just because it might be gone someday.
Why let perfect be the enemy of good?
"tailscale might enshittify in the future" is honestly a poor argument against "plex is enshittified right now"
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Nah man, this is self hosted, your points are valid and should be discussed. It is true that tailscale may enshittify, however it is only one out of many solutions. Like the other comment said there is head scale, and in the end you still have the possibility to go the way of a reverse proxy server and pipe Jellyfin through the open internet, which will be hard for many in the sense of configuration and hardening. But the underlying software which is Jellyfin is FOSS, that is the most important aspect.
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I tailscale in to my jellyfin. No probs.
Same here. The Tailscale app also easily passes the wife test which WG unfortunately does not.
I have a dedicated VPS with reverse proxy connected to my network via Wireguard. It acts as the front door to my network so I don't have to port forward or rely on Cloudflare etc. I used to use Tailscale as the go between but switched to WG recently. Both work fine for streaming content whilst self-hosting all other services including my website.
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NVMe | Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| VPN | Virtual Private Network |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
[Thread #5 for this comm, first seen 8th Jun 2026, 12:50] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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