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From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

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333 points indigodaddy | 2 comments | 13 Nov 22 02:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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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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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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1. 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.
replies(1): >>33581059 #
2. 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.