this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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Plex is starting to enforce its new rules, which prevent users from remotely accessing a personal media server without a subscription fee.

If anyone needs it: https://jellyfin.org/

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[–] abfarid@startrek.website 11 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (2 children)

Currently my biggest complain with Jellyfin and the reason I can't switch to it completely is the bad subtitle support. There's a bunch of clients and some subtitles work on one, but not the other and vise versa. It's annoying to jump clients depending on what you watch. Sometimes subtitles just don't want to load by default and you have turn them on for each episode. And even though I have Bazaar, sometimes I still need to download subtitles, and Plex has that built-in.

Either way, I already have lifetime subscription, there's no point in switching. At this point I'll only switch if JF becomes better or Plex becomes worse.

[–] ethicallysliced@lemmy.zip 3 points 10 hours ago

Yeah, I would love to use Jellyfin over Plex but the ability to reliably select subtitles on Apple TV is crucial. I can’t do this currently.

[–] sonofearth@lemmy.world 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

JF becomes better or Plex becomes worse

Both will happen.

Besides.

some subtitles work on one, but not the other and vise versa

For me it has worked everywhere. All of my media is in .mkv so it already contains the subtitles. It works in all browsers clients, Desktop clients, TV and Mobile clients. Works in VLC and MPV as well on desktop, TV and Mobile. Works with Kodi as well. Works on same network (via both host IP and reverse proxy) as well as remotely via Pangolin.

So you can try putting everything in one MKV Container or maybe change the subtitle formats (if that's a thing).

[–] abfarid@startrek.website 4 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (2 children)

Both will happen.

🤞. Hopefully it's just JF getting better, of course, but that last app redesign on Plex was really rough. I had to downgrade the app to make it work well again.

Of course I can put extra work into formatting my subtitles to make them work everywhere. Sometimes they are embedded, sometimes they are an .srt file next to the video file. And I don't want to spend time normalizing all of them. It already just works all the time on Plex, so I'll simply wait until JF fixes the support.

[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I don't think Jellyfins focus is currently to support irregular naming schemes. Naming media correctly with a proper scheme is the way to go.

Just so you know I wouldn't hold my breath.

[–] abfarid@startrek.website 3 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I'm not talking about naming schemes. The subtitles are detected, but they either crash the client or render improperly or just don't show up despite being selected. I guess I'm really waiting for a decent multi-platform client that just works.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

That's odd because the clients are just web apps I think. That should work without crashing on a stable OS. I use them on Android mobile and Android TV with extensive subtitle usage and haven't seen instability.

A funny thing I noticed is that the client distributed in F-Droid is extremely old even though it says it's updated recently.

[–] abfarid@startrek.website 2 points 14 hours ago

I think the official client might be a webapp, but other clients on iOS are mostly native apps. Honestly, maybe it's better on other platforms, but since my gf and I do most of our watching on iPads we don't see the full picture.

[–] punkibas@lemmy.zip 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

You can also try Wholphin, it's a jellyfin client with subtitle search like Plex.

[–] abfarid@startrek.website 2 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

Thank you for your suggestion. That seems like a very nice JF client, but unfortunately it's Android-only, and we do most of our watching on iPads.

I will definitely try it on my Android TV though.