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From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

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333 points indigodaddy | 6 comments | 13 Nov 22 02:02 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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jghn ◴[13 Nov 22 03:32 UTC] No.33579728[source]▶
I have used Plex for about 12-13 years but am very very far from a power user. I find it mildly annoying I need to login but other than that I've not noticed anything that annoys me. I admit this is most likely due to how little I use it and how non-advanced that usage is. Given this, is there any value add to Jellyfin for someone like myself?

My read on this article is that it gets back to an earlier, more raw state of Plex. For my use case my interpretation is that would mean extra work for potentially lower quality, and unlikely any value add given that nothing annoys me about current Plex. Does that sound right?

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russelg ◴[13 Nov 22 04:04 UTC] No.33579917[source]▶
If you don't want to pay for Plex then you don't have hardware transcoding. This is of course free in Jellyfin.
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dylan604 ◴[13 Nov 22 04:26 UTC] No.33580049[source]▶
Who has hardware for transcoding any more, and what hardware is modern for that?

Last dedicated hardware encoder I used was bad old days of MPEG2 for DVDs, but that went the way of the dodo when MPEG2 went native to the CPU. Never used hardware for h.264/5. I guess there was a board for J2k doing realtime lossless, but that was 2010ish.

So I'm legit curious what hardware transcoding looks like today, and that Plex charges for the pleasure

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snoopy_telex ◴[13 Nov 22 05:14 UTC] No.33580279[source]▶
I bought a GPU to get smooth 4k sources streaming to my devices.
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1. dylan604 ◴[13 Nov 22 06:09 UTC] No.33580540[source]▶
Why are you having to do realtime transcoding for streaming to devices? Why not just have a streaming version? Transcode one time at whatever speed, then it's ready for you whenever you want it anytime after that? Not that you can't do whatever you want to do with your own gear or anything. I've just never understood the desire for realtime encoding for everything
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2. Omniusaspirer ◴[13 Nov 22 07:02 UTC] No.33580742[source]▶
It's simpler and more space efficient to just transcode according to the desired quality setting and device profile of the viewer. Unless you're a large streaming service or have an extremely uniform profile of users it's not practical to store all the possible variants you might need to cover the full range of devices and stream qualities.
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3. aaravchen ◴[13 Nov 22 07:43 UTC] No.33580929[source]▶
Are you talking about manually pre-transcoding to a more streaming-friendly format? Since anyone taking about issues with transcoding is almost certainly talking about 4K formats (anything else is almost no load even on 10 year old hardware), I'd be interested to know what format you're picking that retains 4K Dolby Vision and/or HDR10 with the Atmos audio and is supported for more efficient non-transcoded transfer by the Plex client and server software. Certainly some are better but only work on specific clients, I haven't heard of a good efficient format that works on the majority of client devices.
4. FridgeSeal ◴[13 Nov 22 07:59 UTC] No.33580991[source]▶
> Why are you having to do realtime transcoding for streaming to devices?

Because I don't want multiple copies of the same thing wasting space on my drive? Cloud storage might be endlessly cheap, but local storage is still very finite.

Also, both my CPU and GPU have enough spare compute that they can do it without stressing out too much. I also might not watch something multiple times, and I might watch it across different devices and networks (not all of which support 4k), so paying the cost of compute + storage to generate the transcodes ahead of time doesn't make a lot of sense, especially if a movie gets watched once every 2 years or something.

5. aaravchen ◴[13 Nov 22 08:10 UTC] No.33581059[source]▶
It would be interesting for there to be the option to see what formats your historical clients do support, allow selection of a set of them to generate a best common format list for, and all configuring your server to automatically transcode new content to some of those formats. I suspect many of us have a few high-quantity or quality-outlier consumers that it would be useful to be able to pre-transcode newer content, that's the most likely to be consumed, for.
6. snoopy_telex ◴[13 Nov 22 18:43 UTC] No.33586016[source]▶
Really, I have multiple end profiles that are possible.

1. My phone 2. My wife's phone 3. My Tablet 4. My TV

They each have different screen geometries and even my tablet has two profiles really, local streaming at home or playing downloaded media on trips.

So I could transcode everything to 5 different formats and store it, or just transcode on demand and not worry about it.