We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
I have had both a Plex and Emby lifetime subscription since around 2018 and relied on Emby for quite a while during Plexs shenanigans 5-6 years ago but still think Plex and Jellyfin are the only true options. Emby is just an amalgamation of the worst qualities of Plex and Jellyfin. It “just works” as a media player in the same way that VLC “just works” but doesn’t offer a whole lot outside of that especially nothing that these other two don’t offer. Plex is the “polished but expensive and limited” solution and Jellyfin is the “free, some work required, and open” solution.
Emby offers a more robust, polished experience than Jellyfin and it’s just not even close, I’m sorry. You can get sort of close with some third party Jellyfin clients but then you’re split up between multiple apps that look and operate with different design languages depending on whether you’re watching media, managing your server, or listening to music, etc.
With Emby, I get very polished, functional, good looking apps on mobile and Android TV. I can use the Emby IOS app to manage my Emby server, watch TV, Movies, and listen to my music collection. It looks great and works great with no fiddling or plugins needed for basic functionality like intro skip that Jellyfin still does not support without the help of plugins in the year of our lord 2025.
On the Jellyfin side however you have the official Jellyfin app which is just an uglier and more dated looking version of the Emby app, and it can’t play any of my music collection. StreamyFin is much nicer looking than the official app, but you can’t manage your server or play music so you still need the official app also. It also lists your music playlists as libraries, though it can’t play music so you’re just given errors. Now if I want to actually play my music I need a THIRD app, Finamp, which can actually play my music library but it struggles with metadata and needed hours of fiddling to get all the metadata right, but at the end of the day it’s just a fuck ugly knockoff of the music section of the official Emby app.
So the comparison between Jellyfin and Emby for me is, do I want one iOS app that just works, looks great, and functions great? Or do I want three separate apps, 2/3 of which look a college students very first app they threw together in a single weekend, and still end up with less functionality than Emby? Emby being the obvious winner here.
I would love to switch over to Jellyfin but it still just has so far to go before I could consider it a viable competitor to Emby or Plex. Unless Free and Open Source is your ultimate goal, at the expense of both form and function.