ive been using kodi (xbmc was better moniker) since google killed sagetv. i recall attempting plex, but it seemed to lack some open/extensibility (its been awhile).
i have a side project i want to make as a modular plugin generating a cable layout with original air orders and networks/channels… kodi seems most optimal, but ill admit its been a long while since i looked at plex.
so why plex over kodi?
For me, Plex or Jellyfin is great if I want to share my library with some friends or family, especially non-technical people. Kodi really needs tinkering and you need debrid subscriptions and requires more local maintenance. It’s great for me but I wouldn’t want to teach my family how to use Kodi and me having to fix it when it breaks.
oh definitely. i use emby for remote access, but the tvs in the house all run a local (to the nas) instance of kodi
For local use it’s handy that those Kodi instances share their database so watched state and crucially how far into the episode/movie you are. You can do a shared database with just Kodi but I don’t think that’s optimal. Jellyfin integrates so well and handles the database stuff much better imo so I just use that.
You don’t need debrid for Kodi. There’s a torrent streaming app.
But yeah Kodi is a lot to teach if you’re talking about maintenance. I’ve also had some bugs on Ubuntu and Fedora.
I stay with Kodi because it’s faster ime and looks better (not the default skin) and works better with a remote. But I also keep jelly fin installed and running from the same nas.
Kodi for home, jellyfin for phones and guest homes. Trakt on both to keep them in sync.
Once I used Kodi with real-debrid, I don’t want to go back to streaming torrents. It is much faster and much more reliable.
My setup is a Shield TV Pro using Kodi with the Jellyfin plugin then use Umbrella for anything I don’t have locally. Gave my family a Firestick with Jellyfin and then they can request through Jellyseerr which then feeds through to *arr stack. I don’t mind if I have to fix my end but I don’t want to fix theirs.
oh definitely, im still on Emby, but it definitely required for remote access/viewing.
Totally different software solutions aimed at different users, and many people use both.
Plex is a Server software that handles media management, libraries, users, etc etc… and a range of player apps that have a somewhat beginner friendly layout requiring little to no setup
Personally, I run a large Plex server that provides content for my family across dozens of mixed devices in home and out of home, different users have access to different libraries and have different preferences. If needed it will automatically transcode content for remote users out of the home to fit my upload bandwidth and their available speed if they are on mobile. it keeps track of watched content and position for all users so they can move between devices seamlessly.
Kodi is an extensible media player frontend, it can play files from a remote server or NAS but there is no server management, it is just doing basic file access. there are addons for many common services and media sources but there is no user management, no transcoding, no sharing content with other clients etc etc. Having multiple kodi installs on multiple players requires each client to be configured more or less from scratch and no easy way to have multiple setups for different users with their own preferences, libraries and/or content restrictions. It is extremely powerful and configurable and has strong format support.
I have Kodi installed on one of my Nvidia Shield Pros but only use it for playback of surround music files (support for 5.1 flac on plex seems to be limited to audio within video containers for some reason) I find the interface (and all the skins I tried) extremely clunky for use as a music player, the way the remote works within the player itself is unintuitive and makes for an annoying experience restarting the track when you just want to move the playback a few seconds, a bit unfair of course as that isn’t what it was made for but that’s just my experience.
Same here. Plex just makes sharing with family so much simpler. My mom and dad can figure it out just as easily as my kids can and the amount of time I have to do tech support for anyone has been literal zero, which is a huge bonus for me, personally.
I prefer jellyfin myself
Ya Plex vs Kodi is really more an apples and oranges comparison. Should be Plex vs Jellyfin.
That said though, I did start off with Kodi as my own media center on a Raspberry Pi, but eventually discovered Jellyfin and have really enjoyed it. Kodi is great too, but I think Jellyfin is the more refined modern streaming equivalent akin to Netflix that’s fully open source unlike Plex.
Plex is just more user friendly than Kodi. And the real question should be why Plex instead of Jellyfin, and my answer to that is:
I’ve already set up the Plex server and it works, I don’t really want to go through the trouble of switching over if everything is working fine the way it is right nowEven though I’m big on FOSS, that seems like a completely reasonable take. Though I think Jellyfin integrates with Kodi much better. Last time I used Kodi + Plex, Plex was its own app inside Kodi. Meanwhile, with Jellyfin it just populates your regular Kodi with the media without you even noticing that the source is Jellyfin and not say your hdd.
Kodi is horrible on touch devices. I also don’t want to have terabytes of files on every device I want to watch something on. Sure, there are workarounds, but I could also just use Jellyfin. Yeah I don’t use Plex, I use Jellyfin.
But it’s really just mainly because I dislike the UX of Kodi.
You don’t need to have local copies of all your media with kodi. A NAS works just fine.
Streaming a full 4k movie rip takes more bandwidth than most people would have available on the go. Plex/Jellyfin can offer transcoding on the server for such usecases.
Are you talking about on mobile? I don’t think people are hosting kodi and their content on their phones.
Because streaming on mobile is a huge usecase for many people
Yeah ik, I’m still not gonna use it anymore. Jellyfin is so much better for a lot of things.
Oh I agree completely. Plex and jellyfin are just much, much easier for almost everything and work better too.
Isn’t Kodi a streaming host? Why terabytes of files?
It isn’t. It’s a media center originally developed for the Xbox
I believe that Kodi, Emby, and Plex are all forks of XBMC… Not sure about Jellyfin but it wouldn’t surprise me to find that it also was.
Plex originally was a fork of XBMC for MacOSX and had the name OSXBMC, but I doubt they nowadays use a lot of code from XBMC
Kodi is the new name of XBMC
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby, but Emby isn’t a fork of Kodi/XBMC. It’s even written in a completely different language. People were mad that Emby went closed source, so they forked the latest open source code and called it Jellyfin.
Interesting… I was confident that Emby was an XMBC fork but it looks like you’re right.
Don’t it work with real-debrid though? I’m considering getting back into streaming instead of downloading, and thought this might work on Xbox for that. Last time I used it was in like 2016 with exodus
I guess it does. There probably is a plug in for kodi
Did some research, seems like Umbrella and Fen work on xbox. Seren does not work (on series X at least)
No it’s just a streaming host. Even as xbmc you could mount a network share library, you didn’t need it all stored on-device.
By default it isn’t
What do you mean? You can connect it to network shares “by default”.
The real question is why anyone would use Kodi/Plex/XBMC over Jellyfin
Because Plex makes it so much easier for me to share my stuff with my brother who doesn’t live in the same house.
Absolutely. For my non tech proficient family and friends, it’s easy for them to install an app on their streaming box/stick and send me the login code.
How is different from jellyfin? 🤔
They just need to create a Plex account. For jellyfin, they need my server’s up address, right?
I just created accounts for my family, so they didn’t need to create accounts or anything. And no you don’t need ip address specifically if that’s what you meant. You can use dynamic DNS services and reverse proxies so you just have a regular web address like “https://jellyfin.somewebsite.com”
Don’t they need your server’s address with Plex? 🤔 and wait, address or domain? Anyway, is it a problem to give them a link like jelly.john.com or watch.john.com
Have you used Plex before? No they don’t need to know anything. They sign up and you grant them access (or even just give them a user in your home and they just sign in by texting you a code). It is as easy or easier than signing into your typical streaming app. Just extremely easy. Jellyfin is great and I hope they keep going but they’re not at the same level as Plex. I’ve been using Plex for nearly a decade now and I’ve tried out jellyfin a few times. I’ll keep trying because I don’t want to use Plex forever but I’m not going to pretend they’re the same. Hopefully they will be eventually.
In the case we are talking about different self hosting things
I used to have Plex with a domain
It’s not a problem for me to connect domains, dns, reverse proxies, etc. Because i’m already hosting like everything, email, my own dns server, websites, nextcloud, basically everything
Plex has a reverse proxying service and can do upnp for you so it works with dynamic IPs out of the box with no need for a domain or forwarding ports. It defaults to upnp and falls back to the Plex hosted reverse proxy which also uses a dynamically generated subdomain and gives you a free SSL cert. Granted I prefer to host my own reverse proxy anyway with my own domain (when I had a static IP I just forwarded a port and set up an A record) but out of the box Plex does make it much easier for a non technical user to hit the ground running.
If I were you, I would just use jellyfin and don’t mess with Plex Jellyfin is opensource, doesn’t collect any data, and just faster in my experience
I do use jellyfin, I run it side by side with Plex on the same Intel nuc with quick sync - both with the exact same media folders added - and I let my friends choose. I don’t think a single one of them prefer jellyfin unfortunately.
And crashes more and has more annoying bugs, that they say working as intended. The one that bugs the hell out of me is when you download another copy of an old movie it gets added to the new category. It is my biggest issue but then there is the no intro skip no screen caps well fast forwarding. And yes I know there are plug-ins for both but the authors of the players don’t support third party plugins.
Is it different from jellyfin in sharing?
Because my current TV is a Samsung so runs Tizen OS and thus doesn’t have an official Jellyfin app.
(I bought it before I ever got into NAS stuff and it still works fine so I’ll be damned if I buy another TV before this one stops working.)
Edit: A word.
Jellyfin is great and I follow its development and test it every now an then but it is nowhere near fully featured or well supported enough or me to transfer my family over to.
I will eventually, when it’s ready.
Kodi has a nicer interface imo. Kodi as the player and Jellyfin as the “backend” is a great combo imo.
Kodi works way better for local network content in my experience
In what way? Curious because I’ve never had any issues with plex on my local network.
Plex is based on XBMC/ KODI, and both excel at basically being a VLC - playing anything and everything locally or over the LAN. Jellyfin on the other hand is excellent at creating a personal Netflix you can access from outside your network, but because it runs through the browser youre more likely to have transcoding issues and you’re not going to have that Swiss-army knife, can-play-everything-you-throw-at-it like Kodi and Plex can. I use both.
kodi is more ‘media center’…audio/video/static imaging…hell, plugins to gaming… jellyfin/emby is an excellent transcoding/end-user-streaming platform. i see them as complimentary to eachother
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There’s an addon for that (I haven’t used it)
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And here I just press the right arrow key lol
Plex has so many antifeatures I can’t ever imagine using it, and Jellyfin is okay enough to use.
Only for the web
The real question is why people pay for Plex when Jellyfin is free and open source
Plex lifetime pass for 60 bucks in 2014
I know they could close up shop tomorrow, but the one-time-purchase of plexpass beats any sort of ongoing subscription. It does a great job of finding subtitles, it doesn’t care how shit my file/folder structure is, and the client is user friendly for the rest of the house.
I prefer jellyfin, but I haven’t taken the time to get my library in the right layout for jellyfin to display it right.
Been using Plex for 13+ years, have yet to pay a dime.
So much for hardware transcoding eh? lol
Have never needed it, almost all my media is just x264 so it’s working on every potato around. Not the same answer for everyone obviously, but useless for me.
Thats fair
h264 and H265 (not 10bit) is so well supported that it is hardly an issue.
You don’t have to pay for Plex.
Because some people prefer plex and being a (optionally) paid product it will very likely receive more and better updates.
Well, I use plex, because I have used plex for a decade, and it just works.
That being said, if I were to use an alternative, Jellyfin is quite fantastic. I actually have a pod running it, just in the event that plex pulls a stupid move, causing me to lose faith in its platform.
But, that being said, I like the plex interface more then Jellyfin, and have grown accustomed to it.
Also, Kodi while powerful and extensible… just feels like a bear compared to Jellyfin.
They’re for different things: Kodi is supposed to be used only on one system inside your network and is full of eye candy. It’s roots are as a media app and dashboard for the original Xbox. It doesn’t have any streaming functionality, it expects the media to be available locally (either physically attached or over a network share attached to the local system).
Plex was originally designed as a media server and has a Client-Server model to support multiple clients both inside and outside the network. It’s more about functionality than looks. It was built from the ground up for streaming.
You can use the Kodi frontend with the Plex backend with a Kodi plugin called PlexForKodi. Same goes for Jellyfin.
those arent even the same thing
I can use Plex on my PS5 and share it with my friends without having to do DevOps work.
Plex was an easy to set up Netflix at home deal with apps on all my devices already for viewing ($5 one time fee for Android, less than a burger) and had some nice tutorials for setting up on a Pi.
Adding stuff is literally drag drop thanks to Samba. Stupid easy for me.
Because I paid for a lifetime sub like a decade ago and my parents and a few friends connect to my instance. I can’t be arsed to move myself and everybody else to a new system when this shit just works.
I never had what I felt was good performance from Kodi. Of course it might have just been my configuration across the times I used it, but Kodi always felt laggy / slow.
I moved from plex to jellyfin, both of which feel more snappy
the emby/jellyfin scrapers are top notch
My issue with Kodi is that each client had to scan the library and generate thumbnails etc. That should be the server’s job which is why I chose Jellyfin. Nicer UI too and more responsive with apps in stores so I don’t have to load it manually to fire sticks
I use jellycon plugin with Kodi; best of both worlds.
This is true, it’s just not that much of a hassle if you only have 1 or 2 clients. Anymore, and yeah I can appreciate Kodi setup can get messy.
