I’ve been wanting to ditch Plex for a long time now, but there are a number of things in my way.

One of the main ones is the fact that I don’t know if it’s possible to migrate data such as what has and has not been watched. Just my anime collection alone is comprised of a little under 450 series, with many thousands of episodes. Not to mention sizable collection of regular cartoons, tv shows, etc. Keeping track of what I have already watched was the main motivator of finally moving to a media server 5 or so years ago, rather than continuing to just watch everything in VLC like I had been doing for many years before that.

So yeah, first question is whether or not there is a way to migrate all of that data. And any other data that can be migrated. There are more than a few titles, posters, etc that I had to set manually because the information scaped by Plex was wrong. I’d rather not have to do it all over again.

Next would be a question about subtitle/audio track management. With Plex, I can use PastaTool to batch set the audio track and subtitle for a single episode, a whole season, or an entire series, all at once. As you might guess, anime is my primary media consumption on Plex. So just changing some “default language” setting just isn’t good enough. The audio track language/title is often either unamed or named inconsistently, so it often never works. And for subtitles, you have the same issue, except you have to also include the fact that there can, and usually is, two or more English subtitles for dialogue, signs(on-screen text), commentary, etc. It’s far more enjoyable to take 30 seconds to batch change an entire series to the correct audio and subtitles for spending your day off watching 40 episodes of a show, than it is to have to manually change them every 20 minutes when the next episode starts. Is there a way/tool to do this on jellyfin?

The other main concern is transcoding. I watch on a desktop with a TV as a monitor. Not on Mobile/Android, not on some trash smart tv. So with Plex, I can only use their desktop app on Windows, because it is the only one that will direct-play videos without any transcoding. Plex in the browser refuses to play videos without transcoding, and I vaguely remember trying to access Plex libraries from other stuff(maybe Kodi), which would also not play without transcoding. My NAS hardware does not remotely have the power to transcode video. And quite frankly, it shouldn’t have to. It’s 2023. Every device I own is more than capable of playing every format, codec, etc that I could possibly need. And I don’t stream outside of my local network, so data rates are really not a concern either. So basically, what are my options for direct-play with jellyfin, if any?

And the easy question. Every time the Internet goes down for many hours, which with Comcast is apparently a constant occurrence, Plex decides that I don’t get to watch my own media, on my own server, on my own network, in my own home. When my Internet shits the bed, will I be able to keep watching my stuff, or will jellyfin throw a hissy fit and refuse to work, like Plex does.

And any other tips and tricks for migrating from Plex to jellyfin without having to do countless hours of manually configuring/editing my massive library, would be helpful. I’d really like to make the move. Aside from the issues I mentioned, there is also the fact that they keep shoving unwanted features down my throat, and making absolutely terrible UI changes with no way to change it back.