I use Plex Server + Lifetime pass + Infuse. It is an excellent combination and has none of those issues. I point Infuse at Plex for TV shows to get the intro skip. For movies, I point Infuse at an NFS share since Infuse can handle more media types than Plex.
Plex also lets me easily share my movie rips with family members across the country.
For the life of me, I cannot get infuse to connect to my jellyfin server, which is why I use the official jellyfin app. It might be how I set it up on my NAS.
I’ve tried Plex in the past and wasn’t a fan of the bloat and constant changes. I’ll stick with jellyfin since it’s free and doesn’t have the negative incentives associated with pursuing profit. I find that annoying when o just want a clean way to watch my library.
I would be surprised to see anyone arguing for equivalence, although I admit I have not paid close attention to most of the comments in this thread. But Jellyfin's not half bad for free, too, enough so that after seeing it mentioned on HN a year or two ago and spending five minutes to write up a half-assed compose file (and four hours screwing around with systemd's infuriating approach to sshfs automount) so I could try it out, I haven't felt the need to look for more.
Even my most recent ex, who's nearing fifty and has never been especially at home with tech, found nothing objectionable about using it via the iOS native app - with the content of my library, yes, but that's no more fairly blamed on Jellyfin than it would be on Plex.
There is a introskip plugin for jellyfin it's in beta and does not work with all clients yet but it very good at intro detecting for most of my shows. Most of the client app developers have added support for the plugin apart for some that say the plugin is not official they will not add the intro skip button until it is officially accepted in jellyfin.
I've been using this for a few months now. It works pretty well, although it only works through the web client, not some other ones like Roku. I do hope it gets officially merged at some point.
That was a show-stopper for me. I have so many 4k UHD files that play beautifully on plex but not so hot on jellyfin. I support jellyfin though, there needs to be competition in this space so plex doesn't run away with the 'ball'.
I mean isn't intro skip impossible? Is there something buried in the stream that indicates beginning/ending of an intro? I suspect the streaming services do that "manually" and not by AI or other automated means.
- No offline downloading on iPad
- The official Apple TV app logs me out of my server every day
- Using the native player on the Apple TV app is still experimental and can have issues
- No intro skip