From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server

For me, the main thing that's lacking in Plex is good support for audiobooks.

The storage and metadata backend are good, but I'm on Android and just couldn't find a good app that would:

1. work with Plex

2. play books both online and offline (by pre-downloading)

3. not require the Plex server to be exposed to the internet

4. (nice to have) sync reading position across devices

I played with the Plex app (doesn't remember where I left off), Chronicle (buggy to the point of unusable), Bookcamp (very fiddly to set up, requires the Plex server to be remotely accessible even when on the same LAN).

How's the Jellyfin ecosystem in this regard?

Jellyfin is just a dumb server, as in you can do the routing to it in any way you like. (Wireguard VPN, Tailscale, etc)

Offline playback is rather rare still. I know of Finamp and S2 [1] for music that support offline playback. You can download media in the official app, but you'll need a different player for playback. If you do offline playback, I don't think the reading position is synced to the server when you go online later.

Jellyfin's support for Audiobooks is still fairly rudimentary. Most of the features mentioned depend on the client app's level of support.

There's a feature request that details some of the support already in place: https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/243/audiobook-support

Support for resuming Audiobooks appears to have been added: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/2084

Sadly offline playback isn't really supported. The app can download files to your phone's Downloads folder but you'd have to play them elsewhere. There's no way of so through Jellyfin at the moment.