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Comment by shiroiushi | Hacker News Reader

I haven't tried Plex, and use Jellyfin, but I have to say, the UI on Jellyfin is absolutely atrocious.

I wish there was simply a way to make it show me the files I have available, for instance. There seems to be no way to do that. Instead, it insists on auto-detecting everything and then showing some preview image for that, along with some info scraped from the internet somewhere. It sounds nice, but instead when I want to watch "Space: 1999", it tells me I only have episodes of "Space Jam" or some other show I've never heard of. Or, it tells me I have no shows at all, but the shows are instead in the "Movies" section, or somewhere else entirely in the UI. It's bizarre.

I can see why a lot of people would get frustrated with it.

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>show me the files I have available

This is what I want most of the time too, so I love Kodi (media scanning/detection disabled. direct play from a share on my LAN).

We installed Jellyfin recently and noticed an option in Dashboard - Libraries -Display - "Display a folder view to show plain media folders". Haven't tested that fully yet.

Plex friends inform me it can't do a folders/files view at all :(

I'm busy moving from Plex to Jellyfin.

The Plex UI is better but only a little bit better. On the other hand they are really REALLY irritating with re-enabling their online adverts. Every time you upgrade its comes back again. Or your actual content ends up deep in a menu but the online nonsense is always there. Also you end up having to create a plex account to access your stuff and I don't know how much information they are tracking.

I just got tired of having to re-set it up all the time. Jellyfin seems much better so far, but its still early days for me.

How are your files organized? Do you have them as one big mixed library? I use Jellyfin and haven't had any issues like that. I organize things into several libraries like Television, Movies, etc.

Yes, they're just in my ~/Videos directory. I copy stuff in there when I want to watch it immediately, or in the near future, and then delete it when I'm done, with my main archive on offline storage. I guess I don't fit their assumed use-case which is having your entire library online for your whole extended family to watch; I just want something I can use from my TV so I don't have to copy files onto USB sticks, and can watch files > 4GB.

Jellyfish is just nowhere near Plex’s UX. All the clients crash seemingly at random, and the server side is no better.

Yeah, I forgot about that: the client on my Android TV frequently crashes on start-up.

I haven't had any trouble at all with the server side though (Linux).

UI/UX is the achilles heel of many open source projects not backed by a business unfortunately. Gimp comes to mind, which has almost all features of its competitors but the UI will never let it grow.

These days when someone Jellyfin it just tells me that we care about very very very different things. Some people have a tolerance for bad UIs. I don’t. I also never really seem to have the Plex issues that everyone else does. I disable the “free” content and it pretty much entirely stays away. I can’t member the last time I saw it.

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