- Jellyfin lets me keep track of what i watched regardless of where. I can watch half a show in my office, and resume where i left off in my family room.
- Jellyfin fully supports multiple users, so my kids can have their own profiles, there own "in progress" management, etc.
- There is no need to setup anything like NFS/Samba to share the library, jellyfin connects to the central server which stores the media and runs the jellyfin server.
Some of this can be done in Kodi, via a mysql connection but it is baked into jellyfin.
If i was starting out building a home media server from scratch, jellyfin would be high on my list.
Just my 5 cents.
It's worth mentioning that, if you love / are invested in Kodi, there's a jellyfin plugin for it that will allow you to access the JF library directly. It supports realtime transcoding for stuff that the browser (or client) doesn't know how to play.
A lot of the features that work "out of the box" in JF are technically possible to add to Kodi through existing plugins, but that's a lot more care and feeding than just installing JF and connecting to it.
Kodi can serve as either a Jellyfin client or as a local replacement. One thing to note is that the Kodi plugin ecosystem is much larger than that of Jellyfin, or any other media server solution for that matter.
My use case(s) for Plex:
1. I have media on my HD. Plex organizes it, figures out what show/movie it is, gets relevant metadata, and remembers how much I've watched it.
2. I then watch it on my TV. I don't want to watch it on my PC.
3. It lets me watch said media when I'm away from home (e.g. from a hotel room when I'm traveling). This is critical for me and what got me on to Plex.
4. It lets me share media with other users.
5. DVR: I pick the shows I like, and it records them for me. This is critical for me as well.
Do you use Plex as a client in all cases?
There's a decent chance I just don't get it because I'm excessively particular in how I want things set up. Using a different video player on my PC is a non-starter for me. As is granting a third party access to files on my local network. So I've built my own solutions for pretty much any feature Plex has, except possibly user friendliness (which is the most likely reason I may use jellyfin, but not for personal use).
I use Plex on my Roku so I can watch my media on my TV instead of on a monitor. Occasionally (pretty rarely), I use it on my Android for the same reason.
And I take the Roku with me whenever I travel so I can watch things wherever I go.
> Using a different video player on my PC is a non-starter for me.
I don't use Plex to play videos on my PC. The experience is better on my TV, so I don't consume entertainment media via my monitor. To watch random video files on my PC, I use mplayer.
So how do you watch the media on your PC remotely?
For stuff I'm planning to watch on my PC I just let sonarr/radarr import the files directly to my PC.
For stuff I want to view elsewhere I have a NAS and a raspberry pi with wireguard configured to make a VPN I can use to access my local network.
I don't want it organized for me. I don't want to "search" for the show/movie that I want to watch. I don't like seeing the movie poster where I might only be able to fit 12 items on the screen at once, I want to be able to see 50+ items in a directory list. I don't like/want all the Database back-end stuff that gets done in plex/jellyfin (IMDB lookups, rotten tomatoes reviews, etc.)
I use Jellyfin for my kids shows. I use Kodi for my TV.
And the thing I despise the most, I dont' want to rename/restructure/reorganize 100TB of media just so JellyFin can auto-guess incorrectly the movie/tv show/season/episode.
All of the kids crap? Dumped into a single folder and Jellyfin guessed most of it. The stuff it got wrong, I don't care about.
My stuff, that's been carefully curated over years? Even if I just feed jellyFin the content 1 directory at a time, it can't get seasons/episodes straight.
I don't watch my media when I'm away from home. I don't share my media.
> I don't like seeing the movie poster where I might only be able to fit 12 items on the screen at once, I want to be able to see 50+ items in a directory list.
Been a while since I used Jellyfin, but you can set Plex to show it in list view. I would be surprised if Jellyfin didn't have that capability.
I spent many hours previously curating, but as a human it's very inefficient when IMDB, TheTVDB, etc all have the info you need and can almost always get it right.