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■ Jellyfin
So let’s take a look at Swiftfin… which is an “official” Jellyfin player for AppleTV. I’ve briefly mentioned Jellyfin running on my iPad and I said it “loads up pretty quickly, and playback was smooth” in April 2024. The free Swiftfin is buggy. Sometimes it works, sometime it experiences network error -10001. If you see that Network error, just refresh and leave Swiftin on – sometimes it’ll work. Kind of annoying, but, again it’s free and it was created with love.

Getting’ Jelly Wit It

With the recent $750 price hike for Plex Lifetime, it has really put a spotlight on the free alternative Jellyfin. As a fairly recent Jellyfin user (since 2024), I have to say I love Jellyfin. It’s much faster than Kodi (which is largely abandoned) and the volunteer-built “company” have developed software for PC (desktop client), Android, Android TV, iOS (sadly no support for Apple TV, but there is an “official” Swiftfin, which I wrote about here), Roku, WebOS (some TV uses this operating system), and Xbox.

Once you setup your Jellyfin server, it will index your movie and pulling data from the internet and tagging your file with metadata. The client software, say from your Xbox, will then show you beautiful high resolution poster artwork. If you drill down, it will display a description of the film, the release date, director, actors, and “related” films. I know this sort of thing is probably standard in most movie webpage, but all this work was formatted by Jellyfin. You don’t have to do any work; it just automatically assigns the data. It’s not perfect, of course, because if your movie file has a wrong title or similar title to another movie, it might pull the wrong data. For example, recently The Mummy 2026 film pulled a forthcoming Mummy film instead of Lee Cronin’s Mummy. You’ll have to manually ask Jellyfin to pull down the right movie data… but it’s easy to do.

The other cool thing is seeing all the actors or directors working on a film. I clicked on David Cronenberg’s name to see other films that I own that he worked on – and was surprised he had a hand in Ready or Not 2! I didn’t know (or recognized) that he played the old man at the beginning of the film. That’s a pretty cool cameo! I also noticed that I had duplicate movies – which is entirely my fault. For example, Naked Lunch is listed twice, because I have the film in both Drama and Horror folders. I can fix this by deleting it out of Horror or finding duplicate files and deleting it from my server. Also, sometime having duplicates is necessary because I might have a Bluray Rip and a DVD rip, or they contain different audio commentaries or alternate cuts.

One of my biggest complaints about Jellyfin is that you need to know your network IP address or what port to use. Once you figure it out, it is easy… but for someone new, they might find the user experience not good. So, I hope they improve on making it easier for new users. For example, maybe someone can just build in an automatic server detection and have that information available to choose from, or have the default port populate in. Like I said, once you figure it all out, it’s not so bad to manually type in the IP address.

The good news is that based on their State of the Fin 2026-05-24 article, Jellyfin Team team are working on some updates to improve Jellyfin. Since I’m primarily interested in Xbox and AppleTV, I’m only including those forthcoming updates:

As mentioned in the last State of the Fin, we’re dropping the major version “10” from our naming scheme. With 10.11.x being the final release branch to use it, the next major release will move directly to 12.0. The primary reason for this is to reduce confusion about what a “major” version is and eliminate the redundancy of a never-changing 10. version prefix.

(Excerpt)

Jellyfin for Xbox – Notable Changes

UI Refresh: Various UX fixes and improvements throughout the app interface.
Log File Upload Dialog: A new dialog allows uploading any of the last 6 log files directly from within the app.
Translation Support: Jellyfin for Xbox now supports localization!

Swiftfin – Notable Changes

Many iOS player bug fixes and additional supplement information & customization.
Structural changes to better unify iOS and tvOS development moving forward.
Lots of work towards our next tvOS release including the resolution of some longstanding and high profile issues!

Known Issues: In the final version of Jellyfin 12.0, Swiftfin tvOS will not be able to authenticate without enabling legacy authentication. This is resolved for iOS/iPadOS and will be resolved in the next tvOS release. It is our goal to have a new tvOS release before 12.0 is out of testing.

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■ Plex
Perplexed: Plex is the worst software I’ve ever used. They recently announced Plex for the PS4, which made me so happy to be able to stream my media to the PS4 (because, as of this writing, PS4 does not play local media files).

Perplexed

You might have heard that Plex raised their Lifetime Plex Pass to $750 USD a few weeks ago. They’re doing this because they’re greedy and they want people to pay them a subscription fee. Believe me, they’ll raise their subscription fee every few years, so you’ll end up eventually paying more and more… and for what? To watch your own movies.

I first mentioned Plex in 2015 when I called it “the worst software I’ve ever used.” The software took over 7 hours to index my movie files, and then when I tried to watch a movie on my PS4, Plex asks me to pay them a $40 annual subscription to view my content. When I got the workaround (by using a browser), it was slow and they compressed the video file. I have never understood why people love and swear by Plex (because I think it sucked then).

When I got an upgraded NAS in 2024, I gave Plex another go. Once again, Plex asks me for money – this time $115, so I can watch movies on my Apple TV. No, thank you very much. I don’t want to pay that much, or any price, to watch a movie I ripped from my DVD.

For people who paid for their original “Lifetime Plex Pass”, Plex can eliminate the old passes and force those users to go subscription, or remove or disallow new features to old timers (forcing them to subscribe for the new features). As someone who had several of my apps force subscription on me (even though I paid for a “lifetime” purchase), you cannot trust these companies to honor their commitment.

Look, some of you can flex that you can afford the $750 Plex fee, you’ll tell me how great Plex is. I think you are insane to want to pay that much to watch movies you already own … but I guess it’s your money.

P.S. There is a recent article in response to the $750 Plex Price called Plex wants you to pay $750 for everything Jellyfin can do for free, which goes over how great Jellyfin is… despite a little “elbow grease”. It also breaks down all the Plex “features” that you can do on Jellyfin by using the basic software or by adding plugins. Also, worth reading is from a former big Plex fan declaring that Jellyfin just won the streaming wars without lifting a finger thanks to Plex’s controversial decision.