Seeing some noise about changes to Plex's subscription policy today. I'm out of the loop since converting to Jellyfin so not sure if there was an actual change or not.
Anyway...
The purpose of this message is to reassure Plex users that are considering switching to Jellyfin that it is worth the change.
I used a lifetime Plex Pass for something like 10+ years. I switched to Jellyfin about six months ago.
I have zero regrets.
Every little change to Plex in the last ~five years has been abrasive to the user. One thing that really bothered me was using their centralized sign-in mechanisms. For a locally hosted library why do I need to auth using something off-site, especially when I'm at a remote, low bandwidth site that has intermittent connectivity... and this causes issues. I get it, some of their auto-magic remote access features more or less requires this - still don't like.
What really put a sour taste for me was realizing they are farming usage data. Yeah, eff that noize.
Jellyfin can be a little rough around the edges at times. The UX is not at the same level as Plex. You know what though, this many months in I don't even notice any more. It is perfectly adequate and in the absence of Plex would probably be considered best in class.
Also, Jellyfin is noticeably improving release over release. I notice little tweaks here and there that make it nicer and there has been good improvements in the speed of the backend. A year ago Jellyfin was basically unusable for my large library. Now speed is a non-issue.
Embrace Jellyfin plugins. They are very helpful for meta data and tagging. Migrating my library was mostly painless. There were a dozen or so assets that needed manual intervention and when investigating it was like "how did this even work under Plex?".
Hope this is the "pep talk" needed to give Jellyfin a try.
