Everyone talks about Jellyfin, but I just switched to Emby and I couldn’t be happier (no connect cloud stuff). Can someone please let me know why and how I just made the worst decision of my life please.
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby before they closed the code, so most likely everything you have on Emby you would have on Jellyfin but without the worry that tomorrow Emby will pull a Plex onto you. Up until a while ago they were so alike that you could use Emby client on a Jellyfin server, not sure if that’s still possible though.
The main reason is that if you switch from Plex to Emby you’re going from paid licenseware (fully enshittified) to paid licenseware (not fully enshittified yet). It’s like when everyone finally dropped Skype and moved to… Discord. Which hey it’s closed source and owned by venture capital, but it doesn’t suck yet!!! And now in 2026, Discord is what Discord is.
But I haven’t paid anything to Emby (I don’t need the code behind that key) and without cloud, I could continue using this version forever and they can’t enshitify it
Until they make a code change that forces a key to stream to an app or run at all. Jellyfin is actually a fork of the original Emby code before they closed sourced it and started down the bad path.
IDK why everyone here is in love with Jellyfin when we have Stremio/Nuvio. Jellyfin is a lot of work; with Nuvio all you do is browse like Netflix, and stream. No existing media library required.
Ah yes, the better option is to… use a streaming service that works by downloading random bittorrents in a completely opaque manner you have little to no control over.
I’m stoked on my Jellyfin setup, but I’ll check on Stremio again in case I want to recommend it to anyone. Never heard of Nuvio, but at a glance it seems like you have to connect it to a media library.
Nuvio is the same as Stremio except better, because it has more quality of life features (like a “Who’s watching” feature). I only mentioned Stremio because it’s more well-known than Nuvio, but both work the same way. If anyone remembers Popcorn Time, it’s kinda like that.
Yeah I loved popcorn time. I’m looking into Stremio, and I’m already down a rabbit-hole of add-ons, debrid providers, and reading between the lines. Doesn’t seem like anything I can recommend to nontechnical folks.
Oh god, its the new Arch isn’t it…
I’m waiting to see the elusive Arch, Jellyfin Vegan stack in the wild. We know they exist and they are fucking telling everyone
You will find them in their natural habitat, the crossfit/hyrox gym.
No nix is the new arch.
Lol
Except it makes sense to use
I used to use Arch, now I use Nix, so that checks out
I think it’s not a widely used phrase yet
So what you’re saying is that you’re using it before it’s cool…
It definitely is in this community
Idk, I think I heard peppe rice cream say it…
I have everything locally and watch on VLC fwiw /s
Now that is the arch of the self hosted streaming community.
If VLC is arch, what is MPV?
BSD
And MPC is Windows?
I can only vouch for old mpc and i think i remember it being clunky but decent. It’s been a very long time though
Everyone talks about Jellyfin, but I just switched to Emby and I couldn’t be happier (no connect cloud stuff). Can someone please let me know why and how I just made the worst decision of my life please.
Jellyfin is based on the Emby-codebase before they relicensed it as closed source.
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby before they closed the code, so most likely everything you have on Emby you would have on Jellyfin but without the worry that tomorrow Emby will pull a Plex onto you. Up until a while ago they were so alike that you could use Emby client on a Jellyfin server, not sure if that’s still possible though.
The main reason is that if you switch from Plex to Emby you’re going from paid licenseware (fully enshittified) to paid licenseware (not fully enshittified yet). It’s like when everyone finally dropped Skype and moved to… Discord. Which hey it’s closed source and owned by venture capital, but it doesn’t suck yet!!! And now in 2026, Discord is what Discord is.
But I haven’t paid anything to Emby (I don’t need the code behind that key) and without cloud, I could continue using this version forever and they can’t enshitify it
Until they make a code change that forces a key to stream to an app or run at all. Jellyfin is actually a fork of the original Emby code before they closed sourced it and started down the bad path.
I just stream over SMB, much less fuckery tbh.
IDK why everyone here is in love with Jellyfin when we have Stremio/Nuvio. Jellyfin is a lot of work; with Nuvio all you do is browse like Netflix, and stream. No existing media library required.
Ah yes, the better option is to… use a streaming service that works by downloading random bittorrents in a completely opaque manner you have little to no control over.
my jellyfin server continues to work if my internet is down. the choice is simple.
Because a lot of us watch things that cant be found easily, or home movies, or prefer to have it readily available at any time.
There are many reasons. Dont assume your use case is the only one.
I’m stoked on my Jellyfin setup, but I’ll check on Stremio again in case I want to recommend it to anyone. Never heard of Nuvio, but at a glance it seems like you have to connect it to a media library.
Nuvio is the same as Stremio except better, because it has more quality of life features (like a “Who’s watching” feature). I only mentioned Stremio because it’s more well-known than Nuvio, but both work the same way. If anyone remembers Popcorn Time, it’s kinda like that.
Yeah I loved popcorn time. I’m looking into Stremio, and I’m already down a rabbit-hole of add-ons, debrid providers, and reading between the lines. Doesn’t seem like anything I can recommend to nontechnical folks.
Well like I said, please look into Nuvio instead. I’m about to ditch Stremio and switch
Nope