[HN Gopher] Jellyfin: Free software media system
___________________________________________________________________
Jellyfin: Free software media system
Author : majkinetor
Score : 517 points
Date : 2023-06-18 09:43 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| bastulos wrote:
| Been using Jellyfin daily for over a year now with over 30TB of
| media. It's been wonderful. It's not perfect like any OSS
| project, but it's better than every alternative I tried when
| standing up my media pipeline last year.
| asylteltine wrote:
| It's not better than Plex though, but it is free
| lost_tourist wrote:
| and no ads
| asylteltine wrote:
| [dead]
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| I really wanted to love it, but there was just one problem after
| another. Sure, they could be fixed if I only downloaded certain
| formats or or tweaked the settings just right, but that takes a
| ton of time to figure out and get right. If I kept fixing the
| issues I could eventually have a good experience in a few months
| or years. Plex has far fewer of these issues so I can spend less
| time troubleshooting and more time enjoying.
| syntaxing wrote:
| I use this with infuse and it works amazing. My server mounts to
| my NAS using NFS and with a flag in your fstab, it only mounts
| when it access the files. I'm on a 1G symmetrical line and with
| tailscale, there's minimal lag.
| rmdes wrote:
| I'm wondering how good Jellyfin is for music, mp3, flac, wav
| files..
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| It is good. I used Foobar2000 with UPNP for a few years. Now I
| am using Jellyfin to stream flac over my network.
| isthisfoss wrote:
| I hate that jellyfin does not sort films by categories like
| director or production company while plex does. Seems to be much
| more barebones than the alternatives
| 867-5309 wrote:
| I do lament for those needlessly hoarding movies and series when
| streaming with a debrid service and trakt would suffice
|
| why reinvent a netflix back-end when the front-end is all you
| really need?
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Switched from Plex to jellyfin and it's great.
|
| Just one (big) issue is that it loses it's Chromecast connection
| when switching between wifi => mobile => wifi.
|
| My terras doesn't have WiFi, so it's a big annoyance.
| Phlogi wrote:
| i never got Chromecast to work with it. There are issues, i
| tried from browser and Android app.
| bt4u wrote:
| [dead]
| pwpw wrote:
| I've been happily using jellyfin for awhile now. Overall it works
| great. It has a few issues that I would like to see
| implemented/fixed:
|
| - No offline downloading on iPad
|
| - The official Apple TV app logs me out of my server every day
|
| - Using the native player on the Apple TV app is still
| experimental and can have issues
|
| - No intro skip
| xbmcuser wrote:
| There is a introskip plugin for jellyfin it's in beta and does
| not work with all clients yet but it very good at intro
| detecting for most of my shows. Most of the client app
| developers have added support for the plugin apart for some
| that say the plugin is not official they will not add the intro
| skip button until it is officially accepted in jellyfin.
|
| https://github.com/ConfusedPolarBear/intro-skipper
| aquova wrote:
| I've been using this for a few months now. It works pretty
| well, although it only works through the web client, not some
| other ones like Roku. I do hope it gets officially merged at
| some point.
| longitudinal93 wrote:
| There's a completely acceptable intro skip available as a
| plugin.
| beingforthebene wrote:
| You mean the beta software with many bugs? Not remotely
| acceptable in my opinion.
| https://github.com/ConfusedPolarBear/intro-skipper/issues
| js2 wrote:
| I use Plex Server + Lifetime pass + Infuse. It is an excellent
| combination and has none of those issues. I point Infuse at
| Plex for TV shows to get the intro skip. For movies, I point
| Infuse at an NFS share since Infuse can handle more media types
| than Plex.
|
| Plex also lets me easily share my movie rips with family
| members across the country.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| What's the lifetime pass cost?
| throwanem wrote:
| $120, which seems a lot considering Infuse works with
| Jellyfin too.
| js2 wrote:
| I purchased it in 2014. It was $75 then. I also pay
| yearly for Infuse. It's worth it to me. Jellyfin is not
| (yet?) equivalent to Plex.
| throwanem wrote:
| I would be surprised to see anyone arguing for
| equivalence, although I admit I have not paid close
| attention to most of the comments in this thread. But
| Jellyfin's not half bad for free, too, enough so that
| after seeing it mentioned on HN a year or two ago and
| spending five minutes to write up a half-assed compose
| file (and four hours screwing around with systemd's
| infuriating approach to sshfs automount) so I could try
| it out, I haven't felt the need to look for more.
|
| Even my most recent ex, who's nearing fifty and has never
| been especially at home with tech, found nothing
| objectionable about using it via the iOS native app -
| with the content of my library, yes, but that's no more
| fairly blamed on Jellyfin than it would be on Plex.
| [deleted]
| js2 wrote:
| I meant that it's not equivalent for me. Plex has
| features that I use that Jellyfin does not.
| pwpw wrote:
| For the life of me, I cannot get infuse to connect to my
| jellyfin server, which is why I use the official jellyfin
| app. It might be how I set it up on my NAS.
|
| I've tried Plex in the past and wasn't a fan of the bloat and
| constant changes. I'll stick with jellyfin since it's free
| and doesn't have the negative incentives associated with
| pursuing profit. I find that annoying when o just want a
| clean way to watch my library.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| I mean isn't intro skip impossible? Is there something buried
| in the stream that indicates beginning/ending of an intro? I
| suspect the streaming services do that "manually" and not by AI
| or other automated means.
| pebble wrote:
| I believe Plex does it by finding similar segments across a
| season.
|
| Edit: they use audio https://support.plex.tv/articles/skip-
| content/
| Gareth321 wrote:
| Also I think there's still no tone mapping, meaning watching
| HDR content can look washed out on incompatible devices, or
| those transcoding.
| russelg wrote:
| I've had no issues transcoding with tone mapping in Jellyfin,
| on both an Intel iGPU and a GTX 1660.
| David_SQOX wrote:
| That was a show-stopper for me. I have so many 4k UHD files
| that play beautifully on plex but not so hot on jellyfin. I
| support jellyfin though, there needs to be competition in
| this space so plex doesn't run away with the 'ball'.
| stryan wrote:
| There's hardware accelerated tone-mapping [0], does that work
| for you?
|
| [0]
| https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-
| ac...
| Gareth321 wrote:
| Cool! Very much so!
| jmondi wrote:
| Interesting, recently the Android TV app started to do the same
| thing for me. It logs me out of my server every day.
| derrida wrote:
| Probably apple grifting for some $$$
| Drybones wrote:
| I switched to Jellyfin from Plex cause of it being open source
| and having AMD/VA-API transcoding support
|
| I've enjoyed it a but more cause I feel like I can do more on the
| server end. I recently started to use Infuse on my Apple TV for
| it cause turns out that Swiftfin, still in development, doesn't
| have a license for Dolby Audio formats.
|
| But the development cycle for Jellyfin and the clients looks
| healthy, unlike Plex which seems to have stagnated. The next gen
| Jellyfin Web UI (Jellyfin Vue) is looking good too
|
| Jellyfin is also pretty forgiving about my file names but I am
| meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct
| before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I
| have a complex script to process movie and tv show filenames and
| folders. You can also override the metadata with the Identify
| function on the media page context menu.
| Musky wrote:
| > I am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames
| are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the
| point where I have a complex script to process movie and tv
| show filenames and folders.
|
| I'm curious to know why you chose to write a custom (and
| complex) script yourself instead of using something like
| Sonarr/Radarr for this task? Does your script do something that
| the *arr apps are not capable off or is there another reason?
| growingentropy wrote:
| I hand-change every file name.
|
| Please tell me I'm an idiot and show me a better way. Lol it
| won't save me the hundreds of movies I've put in "Title
| (year).type" format, but it will save some future work.
| katbyte wrote:
| The *arr applications can automate it but I personally
| don't like doing it that way, unless you are good with your
| quality profiles bad files can overwrite good and it's not
| the best with removing unnecessary files
|
| I use a program called filebot which uses the same metadata
| sources as Emby/jellyfin and will automatically rename and
| move files.
|
| So sonarr/radarr queue things up in rutorrent that saves to
| a temporary location and then I drag to filebot to rename,
| skim the results for things going weird, and tell it to
| move em
| joexner wrote:
| Same here! But for me it was "Title (year in Sumerian Ur
| dynasty calendar).type"
|
| The only format that stands the test of time, IMO
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| something like tinymediamanager?
| growingentropy wrote:
| I'll look into it as well. Thank you.
| rodgerd wrote:
| I let the Ember Media Manager work out the hard stuff
| around this for me. It is (generally) extremely good about
| parsing things, scraping the right details, and producing
| INFO/NFO files that Kodi, Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, etc will
| recognise.
|
| The only irritation is that it's Windows-only, but it has
| saved so much pain and aggravation. It can also auto-
| rename/restructure your filesystem, but I've never been
| brave enough to try that feature.
| Musky wrote:
| The *arr suite of apps is made to automate the whole
| process of building up your media library. You have
| Prowlarr for managing your download sites and clients,
| Sonarr/Radarr for TV shows/movies, Lidarr for music,
| Readarr for books, etc.
|
| These apps can be self hosted and are fully open source.
| The basic workflow is that you add a movie/show, it
| automatically searches all of your download sites for the
| title, chooses the best download based on your filter
| criteria (resolution, size, etc.), sends it to your
| download client and then places the movie/show into your
| library based on the folder/file naming pattern you
| specified previously.
|
| You can choose to automate as much of the process as you
| want or do most of it manually. E.g. grabbing new episodes
| as soon as they air vs supplying your own files (if you rip
| your media yourself for example) and only letting the
| program do the part of renaming and moving your files.
| growingentropy wrote:
| Oh, I will most definitely be checking that out. Thank
| you so much.
|
| It's funny, I've heard of radarr and sonarr, but I never
| looked into them because I was learning other stuff.
| zeekaran wrote:
| Also check out Ombi once you have the arrs set up. It's a
| combined UI for your users (or just yourself) to request
| a movie or show and then you just wait a bit and it shows
| up in Plex/Jelly.
| RoundBlocks wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but ombi was no end of issues for me
| (and resource hungry). I switched to Overseerr a while
| back and haven't looked back. Would highly recommend
| giving it a try. I found it to be a very polished
| experience and has been set and forget.
| growingentropy wrote:
| ...super cool. Man, glad I had this conversation. I have
| projects again.
| majkinetor wrote:
| For me it recognizes basically all the movies without any
| intervention, downloaded from random places. For those few
| it can't find, I just put IMDB id in its metadata and its
| done. For music, I tagged all albums with Picard
| previously, so each has musicbrainz data and was instantly
| recognized fully. On boarding for 10TB media center lasted
| maybe an hour for video and 0 for audio.
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| > Plex which seems to have stagnated
|
| Besides a pointless re-arranging of the UI, which we all hate,
| what should they be doing? I'll grant you "Bugs to be quashed",
| but fewer features to fill, fewer devs on the payroll, and less
| selling out to make payroll sounds perfect to me.
| manmal wrote:
| Plex might have been stagnating, but it works kinda flawlessly
| for me. I run it in Docker at home and through a reverse proxy
| on a cheap VPS (don't want to expose any ports at home) and
| even that works really well - the iOS app automagically
| switches between remote and local networks. Hardware
| transcoding (Intel) just works, even in Docker. Media scanning
| is very snappy. User management and parental controls look
| powerful enough, at least after having bought Plex Pass.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > Plex might have been stagnating,
|
| It's not stagnating, so much as they have decided that their
| initial market doesn't interest them. They were writing
| software for end users that let end users set up their own
| person Netflix. But maybe the revenue was unexciting or just
| insufficient, and now they want to be their own streaming
| service.
|
| Their streaming service sucks (they're probably at least two
| orders of magnitude too small to be able to afford to do it
| right, maybe even 3 or 4), and contaminates the searches on
| my server with their junk.
|
| Also, it might be true that they're just afraid of the
| liability of doubling down on their original market.
| Contributory infringement and all that. This is almost
| certainly the reason they haven't expanded to include media
| like ebooks and audio books and karaoke. I mean they have the
| perfect paradigm for all of these things... the same software
| that keeps track of where I am in a season of shows, or
| halfway through a movie could definitely keep track of where
| I am in a book, if they wanted to.
|
| This isn't entirely speculation on my part... at some point
| someone had asked them about preroll trailers for new seasons
| (Archer might be the most fun for these), but they said that
| they wouldn't add the feature because there was no legitimate
| source for those videos (even though just ripping them with
| youtube-dl is dead simple).
| manmal wrote:
| Insightful points, thank you. I only don't know about the
| infringement part - Hollywood seems to be the most
| litigative group, and Plex has them fully covered.
| beeb wrote:
| Unfortunately I had a pretty bad experience with jellyfin when
| trying to switch from plex. Plex works for me in almost all
| scenarios, mobile, desktop, chromecast, what have you. And I
| can play multiple feeds simultaneously from my cheap Nuc
| server. With Jellyfin I had trouble to get video even playing
| without stuttering/buffering on my phone when on the same
| network, let alone on mobile internet. I'll probably give it
| another go in a few months to see how they evolved.
| d21d3q wrote:
| As other comments suggest, this might be due to transcoding.
| There is tool Tdarr which transcodes media in advance. h264
| could be the safest choice for mobile (hw support) and web.
| FractalParadigm wrote:
| That about lines up with my Jellyfin experience ~18 months
| ago, although I was coming from (and switched back to) Emby
| at the time, which Jellyfin was forked from (still evident by
| all the Emby/MediaBrowser references in folder and file
| names). Which, IMO, was really interesting, because the
| codebases were very close to identical for some time yet Emby
| was orders of magnitude more reliable. I have more and more
| family accessing my server each month to the point I've
| almost run out of 'devices' allowed by an Emby 'license,'
| making Jellyfin a more attractive offering going forward...
| assuming they've fixed the problems they had at the start.
| growingentropy wrote:
| Hmmm...I might suggest looking into the transcoding settings
| and changing some things next time you take a look. Because I
| run Plex alongside Jellyfin (the wife prefers Plex's UI once
| I tweak it), and it typically runs just as efficiently if not
| a bit more.
| muti wrote:
| I had some issues with Jellyfin that weren't due to
| transcoding, still not sure what the cause was.
|
| I had a 2nd gen chromecast that would play half a second and
| fail, something to do with the data format I think as there
| was some shenanigans with changing the media container but no
| real transcoding happening. Solved by getting a newer
| chromecast which was a nice upgrade anyway.
|
| I also had problems playing on my phone, the integrated
| player in the app would play video fine while the UI was
| interacted with, so tapping continuously worked. The picture
| would freeze up though. Playing through the web UI on the
| phone worked fine, but I prefer the app. Changing the media
| player from the integrated to externally through VLC solved
| that.
|
| So I've found it a bit rough in some cases for me, but there
| are a ton of Jellyfin apps with nice UI. The core work
| (transcoding etc) is done by ffmpeg by all the big players
| (plex, emby, jellyfin) so don't expect much differentiation
| there.
| newsclues wrote:
| Sounds like a setup issue, which can be tricky on Jellyfin to
| get transcoding properly working.
| zeekaran wrote:
| Classic open source alternative feeling. I hope the near
| future of open source software is more stable and feels
| identical or better than the closed source options.
| asylteltine wrote:
| I still use Plex. I tried jellyfin for two weeks on my 30+ TB
| collection but there were so many little issues it wasn't worth
| it
|
| Most features are actually plugins made by the community. This
| felt buggy and cheap.
|
| It was lacking a lot of stuff like trailer support (no the
| community plug-in does not count)
|
| Also the metadata scanner is a lot worse. The interface is worse.
| There's a lot of setup needed for each device but Plex "Just
| works" (TVs, iPad, phones, etc)
|
| Overall JF is a great project for casual users but it's not as
| good as Plex
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I use Jellyfin and I totally agree that Plex is a better user
| experience.
|
| That said, some of the native clients (like Findroid) are
| excellent. They still lack in features compared to Plex, but
| they're very pleasant to use.
|
| Ever since I found out about the fact you need to pay a
| subscription to use hardware transcoding on your own, self-
| hosted Plex server, I've always ignored Plex as an option. The
| license situation has only gotten worse over the years too.
|
| I get that the Plex devs want to earn money, but I'm not paying
| a subscription to play files that never even need to touch
| their servers.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Same here. I'd love to use Jellyfin, but little things just
| didn't work. Some videos would not play either for some reason.
| Plex just works though.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Every 6 months or so I give Jellyfin a try, and always come back
| to Plex.
|
| I heavily use Plex DVR. Jellyfin is not even close in that
| regard.
|
| Beyond that, I _always_ find annoying bugs with Jellyfin. The
| last time I tried it, it couldn 't handle Photo libraries well.
|
| Also, I need it to work on Roku, and the experience has always
| been poor.
|
| I understand some people have very limited needs (stream files on
| their PC onto their phone), but many people pay for Plex to get
| other features. While Plex is somewhat user hostile, they have
| delivered, and continue to do so.
| nilespotter wrote:
| I barely use DVR because my OTA is so bad, but I do pay for
| ChannelsDVR and it's one of the best home server programs I've
| ever used.
| afavour wrote:
| Strongly agree with this. Plex's DVR functionality was very
| shaky to start with and I switched to using Channels, which to
| be honest is better than anything else at being a DVR. But it's
| $60 a year and Plex costs me nothing (because I bought a
| lifetime membership years ago) so I switched back.
|
| Every time I tried Jellyfin the DVR stuff had weird problems
| and the client apps were notably inferior. In fairness I
| haven't checked in a while.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Jellyfin is an admirable effort and I want to use it, but I use
| the "Play together" feature a lot and on Jellyfin it's just not
| that great. Desynchs occur and seeking will usually break the
| session. Plex handles this exactly as you'd expect. TBH it's
| still not perfect but it's a lot more reliable than Jellyfin.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Is the Plex home screen still shoddy as fuck? They suddenly
| shoved my hosted media into a random sidebar menu and started
| pushing their "free" content on homepage and also started doing
| purchases and rentals, so is it just getting close to being
| another Netflix/Hulu?
|
| Can't comment on Music, but JellyFin on my Dedicated Server has
| been very stable. It has indexed a large collection of movies
| and shows, makes decent recommendations, and tracks me well
| across devices. We use Infuse for iOS, Jellyfin on the Web and
| Android very frequently and we only very rarely found issues.
| opless wrote:
| You can unpin the value add stuff from the sidebar in Plex.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Will it come back after a few updates though?
| opless wrote:
| Perhaps, but once it's set for a client it seems to
| persist.
| rolobio wrote:
| My Plex app on Apple TV keeps adding their Discover tab to my
| home page. Keeps recommending nsfw content to my kids.
| Extremely frustrating because I have unpinned the tab a dozen
| times.
|
| I will move away from Plex once Jellyfin is good enough.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > They suddenly shoved my hosted media into a random sidebar
| menu and started pushing their "free" content on homepage and
| also started doing purchases and rentals, so is it just
| getting close to being another Netflix/Hulu?
|
| The main annoyance was done once, and you can just go to the
| settings and disable it. Every once in a while they make
| minor changes that seem to promote their services, but
| they're very ignorable. I've only had to go to the settings
| once to disable/hide their annoyances.
|
| I never quite understood the hostility towards them on this.
| I suppose if you insist on viewing Plex as _solely_ for
| playing your own content, sure. But ever since I signed up
| over 5 years ago (before the streaming services), I knew
| quite well that I was signing up for a _service_ and that I
| am not in control. I don 't see people getting anywhere near
| as upset at Netflix as they are with Plex.
|
| As much as they may have deprioritized local streaming - it's
| not at all dead. They continue to add features to it.
| res0nat0r wrote:
| Been running plex in docker from my Synology nas for a couple
| of years now and has been working great. I have a large
| library of stuff to index too. The homepage UI on the
| web,phone,iPad and TV app have been fine for me.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I have jellyfin on my Roku, and it seems consistent with the
| android app and web UI. I'm curious what specific problems you
| had?
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| > Also, I need it to work on Roku, and the experience has
| always been poor.
|
| I've been using it with Roku for the last year and it works
| well for me. It's much quicker than the other apps (Netflix,
| Hulu, Disney, and god awful Prime). Sounds like there's a
| specific feature that's missing for you or you dislike? I'm
| curious what that is.
| edude03 wrote:
| Whenever I see jellyfin trending on here or Twitter my first
| thought is "what did Plex do this time"
| femboy wrote:
| Relevant: Collection of potential security issues in Jellyfin[1]
|
| 1: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
| chaxor wrote:
| It seems that most of these issues are not really a problem if
| the system is used for a small set of people on LAN only, with
| VPN if needed elsewhere. Perhaps the browser local storage is
| an issue, but may be mitigated if the credentials are only
| useful for that LAN service, with no way for someone to access
| outside the LAN anyway. Although I'm not a security expert so I
| may be missing something here.
| Matl wrote:
| You should probably never expose a service like that directly,
| no matter what it is, to the internet, at least have it behind
| something like Tailscale.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Many of these don't seem too bad to be honest. A lot of these
| are information disclosures that require knowing very long
| tokens.
|
| The LDAP addon listing credentials is bad. The rest seems like
| it shouldn't be a problem for normal (in-home streaming) usage;
| i.e. users reading each other's last login time shouldn't be a
| problem if you trust the people you share the server with.
| GEBIRGE wrote:
| That's really the key point here: Trusting the people you
| share the server with.
|
| Jellyfin is kind of binary in that regard. Once you're
| authenticated - no matter the privileges - you can reach _a
| lot_ of places. I 've written about this recently, if
| anyone's interested.
|
| Like others have mentioned, you should probably only expose
| the server to a trusted group of users (ideally not directly
| on the Internet).
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Definitely. I know there are people who share Plex servers
| with tens or even hundreds of people, and for those types
| of use cases you'll definitely want to avoid Jellyfin, but
| that's not what Jellyfin is intended to be used for.
|
| I don't think standard users can change important system
| settings, but I've always assumed that they can look at
| stuff like logged in users and the current state of the
| system.
| thejosh wrote:
| How much has been fixed for this, as of June 2023?
|
| I quite like it has a Plex replacement, it passes the "partner
| test" AND the "parent test" - they can both install the app and
| watch what they want (as long as they turn off the android
| player default, which is a terrible default).
|
| I have it behind a firewall so nothing can access it (it's just
| for home, or for those who need it, over Wireguard). When i
| have time, it could be a good experiment for Podman or some
| other way to run rootless containers/jails.
| David_SQOX wrote:
| I've given jellyfin a test-drive a few years ago, it was nice
| but I ended up back with plex. Thanks for the link (and thanks
| to those who compiled it!). Enumerating all the potential
| security issues is important for something that runs 24/7 from
| the home network. That's a decent sized list, would give me
| pause on giving JF another test run.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I'd be more worried about potential legal issues having a
| Jellyfin server internet accessible.
|
| And if my LAN is compromised, then Jellyfin isn't particularly
| high on my worry list. I (think I) run a relatively tight ship.
| jerojero wrote:
| I use findroid on android. I was using the jellyfin android
| client but it was missing some features when it comes to HDR and
| Dolby Digital (Atmos) audio.
|
| Findroid seems to solve these issues so I'm quite happy with it.
|
| Of course, these are open source software solutions so as long as
| they are under active development then I expect for the software
| to get better.
| basq wrote:
| I'm fairly new to the nas hobby, got one during covid and went
| with jellyfin because plex wasn't free. And honestly, using it
| has been really effortless and it's been a treat to find it
| supported in various places (like having the app on my tv. I
| haven't run into any issues with it so far.
| Teslazar wrote:
| Here's my personal experience switching from Plex to Jellyfin.
| Everyone's needs are different, but, for me, Jellyfin has been a
| much better experience.
|
| I used Plex for years and always hated it. It didn't let me
| customize the home screen in the way I wanted, so there was
| always a bunch of junk on there that I didn't want and couldn't
| remove. It also ran very slow on my Samsung TV (1), starting up
| slowly and responding to the press of a button after about a full
| second (it had done this for a long time through multiple
| versions of the app and factory resetting the TV without any
| improvement; also, the TV is only a few years old).
|
| I got frustrated enough to finally switch to Jellyfin about 4
| months ago. It was a pain to get the app installed on my TV (the
| app isn't in the TV's app library, so it needs to be installed as
| if you're a dev), but once I got it working it works well. The
| app starts up faster than the Plex app and is very responsive to
| button presses.
|
| Back when I was using Plex, I really wanted to customize the home
| screen to remove certain components and re-order what appears and
| spent a lot of time reading over settings/customization stuff
| which never actually let me do what I wanted. With Jellyfin, I
| simply went to settings > home and the intuitive options there
| let me do exactly what I wanted to do in seconds.
|
| I can't think of any major issues I've had with Jellyfin, but
| here are a couple of thoughts. With Jellyfin I needed to create
| separate folders for what what Plex called collections and add
| them as libraries instead of collections. At first, I thought
| this was a negative but ended up deciding it didn't really matter
| as it works fine. I had a series of videos that wouldn't play
| properly on Jellyfin until I used ffmpeg to strip out the extra
| subtitle tracks (they had 42!), but never tested them on Plex so
| not sure if Plex would have handled them.
|
| (1) I will never buy another Samsung TV, but that's a rant for
| another post. I considered buying an Nvidia Shield just to fix
| some issues with the TV, but probably won't bother now that
| Jellyfin is working well.
| zeekaran wrote:
| I got a Shield because neither the Chromecast 4k nor my LG TV
| could handle HDR content. Shield also replaced my Steam Link so
| that was nice. I changed the Netflix button on the remote to
| Plex with a button mapper app and then bought a properly sized
| Plex sticker to cover the Netflix button.
|
| What issues were you having with the Plex home screen?
| manmal wrote:
| > Shield also replaced my Steam Link so that was nice
|
| GameStream has been sunsetted though, right? I'm using
| Sunshine & Moonlight to great success, but not with a Shield.
| skrrtww wrote:
| Trying to move away from Plex on my Apple TV, I installed
| Jellyfin. Server-side, installation was painless. The Swiftfin
| Apple TV client, however, is basically unusable. It only allows
| you to connect to a server instance via unencrypted http://,
| including user and password. Indexing is buggy (it seems to think
| I don't have any TV shows), metadata lookup seems almost
| nonexistent, with base filenames everywhere and no organization.
| Playback, lastly, seems to crash with half my files. Which are
| nothing special, 1080p h264 encodes with normal settings.
| jsf01 wrote:
| I've personally been using Infuse as my Jellyfin Apple TV
| client and for the most part it addresses those issues, and
| more importantly it doesn't attempt to live transcode video,
| which may be what's causing the crashes you're describing. The
| main downside is that there's a monthly fee if you want it to
| support 4k video.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I use Infuse with Plex because the official Plex Apple TV app
| has a really annoying bug where a lot of videos have slightly
| desynced audio, and Plex refuses to fix it. Infuse does not
| have these issues and plays everything flawlessly.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > It only allows you to connect to a server instance via
| unencrypted http://
|
| Hmm, no, it doesn't. No idea why you believe that. It works
| perfectly fine with https url.
|
| I don't really understand the rest of your comment as indexing
| and metadata look ups are done by the server and not the
| client. Plus Swiftfin uses VLC under the hood so it shouldn't
| have issue with playback.
|
| Are you using the fairly recent stable version or are you
| experience on an older development version? Swiftfin has been
| officially available for only a month.
| skrrtww wrote:
| On my end, it definitely does not work with https. I'm using
| the main stable version on the tvOS app store that I
| downloaded about a week ago. The default connection url is
| http://, and changing it manually to https:// causes it to
| fail and throw no errors. FWIW, I can't connect with https
| via the web interace either, so in theory this could be just
| an issue with my server install.
|
| If the indexing and metadata is done by the server, then the
| server just is worse than Plex at figuring out what things
| are.
|
| I can't tell you why it crashes when I try to play back
| videos that work just fine via the web interface, but it
| does. They're normal 1080p h264 .mkv files.
| zeagle wrote:
| Cool software. I used it within/in parallel to Kodi to sync a
| couple devices but ended up removing this layer.
|
| I didn't like that you can't outright disable transcoding for
| content served via their app or in the browser. I serve mostly
| local client and my headless NAS has poor integrated graphics and
| runs Linux so this was very brittle. Kodi's jellyfin addon can
| play without transcoding by default so this seemed reasonable.
|
| However in case others want to go this route for a similar use
| case I hope I can save you some frustration: both this and the
| native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or passthrough
| atmos content properly. I also had odd tearing and av sync issues
| with some large 4k content that don't happen with maven kodi
| builds.
|
| After a lot of time trying to figure out it, I stripped it out
| and my shield has no further issues just using kodi despite being
| the ill famed 2019 tube model. Hdr10, Dolby vision, atmos pass
| through you name it just works.
| DarkCrusader2 wrote:
| > However in case others want to go this route for a similar
| use case I hope I can save you some frustration: both this and
| the native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or
| passthrough atmos content properly. I also had odd tearing and
| av sync issues with some large 4k content that don't happen
| with maven kodi builds.
|
| I also get audio sync issue with some media types. I am
| frustrated to the point that I now just copy things on a thumb
| drive to play on my TV.
|
| Just to understand you setup better, are you using kodi on TV
| or your server or both?
| zeagle wrote:
| I run Kodi on a 2019 Nvidia shield "tube" model. My media and
| previously jellyfin is on a NAS that serves the content over
| nfs to the shield. Shield--Receiver--TV. Look into the maven
| Kodi build if you have something similar. My sync issues went
| away using when I stopped using jellyfin and also maybe from
| removing path substitution when I redid it from scratch. I
| believe I have fixed output with passthrough in Kodi and
| upmixed turned off on the shield.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > I didn't like that you can't outright disable transcoding for
| content served via their app or in the browser.
|
| You can outright disable transcoding. That's a checkbox in the
| server option.
|
| > both this and the native Android app do not handle Dolby
| vision or passthrough atmos content properly
|
| They do out of the box. Never had an issue with either
| transcoding disabled. If you have properly configured the
| source content, Jellyfin is just a passthrough for Kodi and
| content is directly accessed using the network share.
| nijave wrote:
| I ran into this with HDR. I have a fork/branch that strips
| that logic block out and it works great (tldr; video gets
| transcoded breaking HDR for any transcode reason i.e.
| audio/subtitle)
|
| https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/8743
| zeagle wrote:
| Thanks I'll need to take a look next time I start tweaking
| my tv setup!
| zeagle wrote:
| I'm not sure what to say. Unless this is a recent change in
| my experience it does not work as intended. I spent a lot of
| time playing with the various transcoding settings and per
| user settings and direct path access or the regular way of
| accessing files.
|
| I'm happy it worked for you. I have specific content jellyfin
| doesn't work with where Kodi is fine and I am just sharing my
| experience with this software package.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| For the transcoding setting, they are indeed in the user
| profile and work since day-1 as inherited from the Emby
| fork. It does 100% disable all transcoding for this user.
|
| > I have specific content jellyfin doesn't work with where
| Kodi is fine
|
| Very surprising as Jellyfin is just a passthrough to Kodi.
| Did you open a bug report?
|
| > I am just sharing my experience with this software
| package.
|
| Every post here about an open source project be it Firefox
| or Jellyfin always see plenty of people sharing their
| experience with it from a decade ago and panning things
| that actually work. I usually just read them and move on
| but sometimes I like to give a counterpoint when it's about
| a piece of software I consider quite good.
| zeagle wrote:
| I appreciate it and the civilized discussion! I might
| need to take another look at the next major version
| release. The passthrough stuff if objectively easy to
| check : tv shows hdr/dv logo, receiver tells me the
| encoding. I wonder if it just slightly overtaxed the tube
| shield for the latency.
| ncrmro wrote:
| Been using it for awhile running on k3s in vm and replying this
| in the arrs using k8 at home helm charts.
|
| Big wish for jellyfin and the tvos was recommendation engine or
| randomizer as alphabetical and genre browsing is a little bland.
| This is after using the aarrs to download say all movies by a
| director.
| bradbeattie wrote:
| Sorting by random is coming in Jellyfin 10.9, if that's of any
| help.
| sam2426679 wrote:
| If you're interested in exposing your Jellyfin instance over the
| internet, I put together a guide:
|
| https://github.com/sam-6174/jellytin
| nyjah wrote:
| This github page strikes a pet peeve of mine which is that it has
| no screenshots of jellyfin running. Why not?
| doubled112 wrote:
| I was going to say that it is because the web client is a
| separate thing, but that repo doesn't have any pictures either.
|
| Consider me annoyed too.
| GranPC wrote:
| There's a demo on their official website:
| https://demo.jellyfin.org/stable/web/index.html
| vezycash wrote:
| The demo is passworded and they didn't provide the login
| details.
|
| Edit I don't care about cookies extension removed it. So
| username is demo. There's no password.
| takoid wrote:
| Just so you know, I Don't Care About Cookies was bought by
| Avast recently: https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/21/avas
| t_buys_i_dont_car...
| GranPC wrote:
| Looks like this rule from the extension removed it:
|
| #disclaimer,.disclaimer{display:none !important}
|
| I am not sure how wise it is to hide all elements with ID
| or class "disclaimer", to be honest. There are other rules
| that seem like a bad idea as well (same thing for
| 'notification', 'notifications', 'notice', 'notices',
| 'alert', 'overlay', 'modal'...).
| WickyNilliams wrote:
| It says on that page the user is "demo" and the password is
| empty string
| nakdnen wrote:
| I cannot express enough how much I want to like Jellyfin. An
| open-source media system is exactly what I want.
|
| But the experience is so goddamn janky compared to Plex (which
| has a whole host of problems of its own) that it's --yet-- worth
| switching.
|
| I'll keep checking in on Jellyfin now and then; I wish them well.
| aquova wrote:
| I've been using Jellyfin for the past few years, migrating from a
| frankly janky setup involving samba and VLC clients. I've been
| very pleased with the experience for the most part, and it's
| become the most used application that I self host for my
| immediate family. Annoyingly, the lack of a PlayStation client
| (which seems to be Sony's fault rather than the devs) is the main
| reason I still use Roku.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Not too long ago I found myself tired of how Plex on my server
| would periodically break itself and unhappy with how the company
| was continuing to pivot away from the core product, so I started
| looking into alternatives.
|
| Jellyfin was the most promising option but unfortunately ended up
| being unviable for me, because my home server/NAS runs FreeBSD,
| and by virtue of C#/Mono being a pain to get running on FreeBSD
| so is Jellyfin. I could work around this with a Linux jail or
| moving the server over to Linux but I'd really rather not have to
| do either.
|
| As an side it's a bit odd to me how all of the most complete
| media server packages heavily rely on either Python or C#, and
| also a bit frustrating because when they break it not
| infrequently has something to do with some quirk in either. Would
| really like to see a media server comparable to Plex written in
| something less prone to breakage.
| afavour wrote:
| > As an side it's a bit odd to me how all of the most complete
| media server packages heavily rely on either Python or C#
|
| Why? Not trying to be an ass but there isn't much in a media
| server that would warrant it all being written in a lower level
| language.
|
| Personally I run Plex in a Docker container and basically don't
| worry about it at all.
| wernercd wrote:
| > Plex in a Docker container
|
| This... what's it matter if its hard to get running in linux?
| you only have to get it running once and bam - you run your
| server in a container of that.
|
| Could take a rocket scientist working on it... but once it's
| done? it's done. the container maintainer occasionally
| releases updated versions doing the same thing that worked
| previously.
|
| I have Plex running on docker on a QNAP with a dedicated
| graphics card and rarely have issues (other than my own
| stupidity).
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| The language doesn't necessarily have to be lower level, just
| less finicky about the environment it's running in.
|
| Docker might technically qualify as a fix, but I'd rather
| that the software be engineered well enough to not need it.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I'm not sure that ensuring BSD support is a requirement of
| well-engineered software. You're welcome to start your own
| project vs. complaining about Jellyfin, a free and open
| project. I just wouldn't confuse their product focus with
| badly engineered software on account of it using a modern
| language.
|
| Anyway, there is Docker; You could spend the rest of your
| life shaking your fist, or you could just run it via Docker
| and be happy that someone else also developed free software
| to solve these problems for you.
| teawrecks wrote:
| no one is saying bsd support is a requirement, no one is
| complaining about jellyfin existing for free, no one said
| it is badly engineered. they're just saying that there's
| not a good fit for their use case, which sounds like it's
| the same as mine: running in a truenas jail.
|
| so stop getting defensive. you could have just said
| "there is docker" and saved everyone the passive
| aggression.
| [deleted]
| bluGill wrote:
| If you google there is a jellyfin on truenas install that
| works well.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| It's not just on BSDs that these breakages occur. The
| forums are full of reports, many of which occur on Linux.
|
| And yes, I've actually considered starting a project of
| my own. The main thing that gives me pause is not writing
| the CRUD and server bits but learning ins and outs of the
| absolute beast that is FFMPEG.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| With gstreamer and it's webrtcbin stuff, it's
| _incredibly_ easy to hack something together that would
| get an MVP going.
|
| I'd love to see a modular, but integrated approach, and
| one that lets me treat the media server itself as
| fungible. I want a sqlite database that is easily
| syncable/backup/restorable, I want a small Rust component
| that does media scanning and writes metadata to the
| database, and another small server component that has
| "storage" plugins for accessing the actual media and then
| uses gstreamer to "simul-cast" it to any WebRTC capable
| client.
|
| Imagine being able to WHIP your media into an OBS
| session, or have it cast side-by-side with a webcam feed
| to an RPi hooked up to a TV. Etc.
|
| If I could clone myself, this is the project Clone #1
| would work on.
| selectodude wrote:
| It's enough of a beast that jellyfin actually created a
| custom spin of it.
| LeFantome wrote:
| Pretty sure recent Jellyfin uses dotnet ( actual Microsoft )
| and not Mono.
|
| Python, and increasingly dotnet are already packaged for every
| distribution I have tried recently.
|
| Dotnet is even being ported to Haiku right now.
|
| What is the challenge in getting these setup?
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| It's been several months so I forget the exact issue, but at
| that point whatever the C# runtime was didn't install cleanly
| without manually building a specific branch or somesuch, with
| no official package being available for FreeBSD.
| GlumWoodpecker wrote:
| Is Docker not an option? As far as I can tell, Docker is
| available on FreeBSD, and Jellyfin has a Docker image
| available, I've been using it for a few years at this point
| (on Linux, though).
| mishac wrote:
| Docker on freebsd's been abandonware for a few years now.
| 0ld wrote:
| Well, it was recently added to ports, JFYI
|
| https://www.freshports.org/multimedia/jellyfin/
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Good to hear, it was a few months ago when I was looking and
| it was still a mess back then. Will have to take another
| look.
| mikehotel wrote:
| It looks like the port was compiled with a binary SkiaSharp
| [0] since that requires Google tooling to build.
| Interesting to see the committer allowing this. Apparently
| it is not the first time.
|
| 0. https://github.com/mono/SkiaSharp
| [deleted]
| Vaslo wrote:
| I have Jellyfin on my home server and use it occasionally on my
| Apple stuff.
|
| It's good, but Plex is just better. In addition, it just won't
| play some media that Kodi will play. I feel like Kodi will play
| just about anything, Plex frequently gives me issues with certain
| formats.
| 404mm wrote:
| That sums up my experience. I found Jellyfin's media
| organization better for personal videos (ie. not movies or
| shows). Plex tries hard to make it match its brackets but the
| end result is a bit chaotic.
|
| I ended up choosing Plex because of Jellyfin's issues with
| transcoding (I'm lazy to pre-transcode all media to Apple
| native/ compatible formats). It would randomly just crash on
| me.
|
| And second reason was the really poor AppleTV app. (It was in
| TestFlight back then, not sure where it's at now).
|
| And third, unavailability of downloading to devices.
| tobylane wrote:
| In Plex I occasionally have to force disable Direct Play (which
| I think means it transcodes) even though it's a 264 from the
| same source as everything else. I'll try Kodi for the one thing
| I didn't manage to get working.
| dotBen wrote:
| a big issue is that Plex has managed to get onto the more closed
| systems (Vizio etc) and not Jelly. Makes it hard to use when some
| of the TVs in your home don't support it.
| u_boredom wrote:
| Jellyfin server is pretty decent. The client apps need tons of
| work, especially on iOS. Using Swiftfin/Jellyfin iOS app
| convinced me to buy Plex Pass lifetime.
|
| Probably less of an issue on android with the Kodi app
| integration.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I'm not a fan of Kodi on Android, but Findroid is my go-to for
| playing media files on my devices. The lack of Chromecast
| support is the only downside.
| skydhash wrote:
| Infuse is what you want if you only have movies and other video
| collections.
| maverwa wrote:
| Someone else in the comments here suggested the ,,Infuse" app
| on iOS. It can use multiple backends including jellyfin, plex,
| but also sftp etc. Cannot speak for its daily use as I just
| installed it myself, but looks good on the first glance.
| u_boredom wrote:
| This was my dilemma. Infuse is definitely better. However, if
| I'm paying to use a proprietary front end, I may as well just
| buy the software that natively works together.
|
| Infuse also does not support multi profiles on Apple TV.
| Which makes it essentially useless for multi-user devices.
| maverwa wrote:
| Yeah. Just found out that it doesn't even play anything
| from my jellyfin without buying the premium version. It
| lists all the things, but as soon as I want to play
| anything it asks for the InApp Purchase. Not sure what's
| going on there, but I don't like it.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| > Not sure what's going on there, but I don't like it.
|
| Infuse is a very decent _paid_ app. That's what's going
| on. It lets you play with the interface and test its
| integration with your services/media. But to use it you
| pay either a subscription or a one time fee. Very
| reasonable in my opinion.
| maverwa wrote:
| Oh, I have nothing agains paying for the app. I just find
| it funny that they let me install and configure
| everything then wont play anything. At first I thought
| its just needing that for 4k/HDR/HVEC stuff, but it also
| did not play SD h264 content. And at that point I just do
| not understand why it comes as a "free app" in the first
| place. Either let me install & test it for free and
| demand the pro update later (thats fine for me, if I know
| it works, I'll pay) or demand pay from the get go.
|
| Now, I am aware that it might just be the selection of
| codec and resolutions I happened to try are all paid-
| only. But the way it went, I indeed felt "cheated".
|
| Yes, Infuse may be a very good _paid_ app, but I do not
| like it the way it tells you that is a _paid_ app.
| skibble wrote:
| The premium version is needed for codec support
| (basically anything above basic Dolby, so all the
| lossless codecs and possibly Dolby digital+). It's well
| worth the annual cost, been using it for a few years now
| and it's a bulletproof setup for me. I use it with a
| local SMB share as I've no need for multi user support or
| remote access.
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| For years I just wanted a good user experience playing video
| files from my MBP to a TV, I spent a lot of money (on NAS,
| chromecasts etc), used a lot of software with objectively
| terrible user experiences (Plex I'm looking firmly at you).
|
| Finally, I discovered the combination of Jellyfin and Infuse App.
| It works really well.
| xienze wrote:
| Yeah I run Jellyfin+Infuse at home. The biggest selling point
| for me is that Infuse has "all the codecs" and I can just throw
| anything, including full bitrate UHD content at the devices and
| the server doesn't need to do any transcoding.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| I'd be interested to know what you find terrible about the PLEX
| UX. I've been a happy user for years and have found the user
| interface to be reasonably intuitive. Perhaps dense in places,
| but certainly not terrible in my opinion.
| Timon3 wrote:
| I don't know how to navigate Plex anymore. I used to use it
| roughly 8 years ago, and it was simple - it showed me my
| media, I could navigate through it, watch it, and nothing
| more.
|
| I tried using it again 2 years ago - and I simply couldn't
| find my media anymore. I logged in with my account, and the
| settings showed me that it was connected to my server, but it
| showed me a bunch of random media that I did not add to my
| server. I couldn't find a way to navigate to my media after a
| couple of minutes, so I uninstalled it, replaced it with
| Jellyfin, and never looked back.
|
| Maybe I was too blind to find it, but showing me random media
| instead of my own is a no-go for a _local media server_.
| benglish11 wrote:
| Yeah some time ago Plex started adding their own content or
| pushing you to streaming services, probably in an attempt
| to be more legitimate. I use Plex currently and I remember
| this being frustrating. With some configuration you can
| basically remove those options though. I mainly consume
| Plex through the Apple TV app and the UX (once configured)
| is above average.
| mmanfrin wrote:
| > probably in an attempt to be more legitimate.
|
| I think you're correct, and this is why I forgive Plex
| its annoying transgressions.
| Timon3 wrote:
| Yeah, there are probably ways to mostly get it back to
| what it once was. The problem really is that a) these
| ways weren't obvious to me at the time, and b) I don't
| trust Plex to keep those ways. Enshittification is sadly
| a one-way street.
|
| If Plex kept my content frond-and-center and added useful
| features on top (e.g. Prime Videos additional information
| while pausing) I could even have seen myself subscribing
| to their service. But making the software annoying to use
| for its main purpose ensures I'll never spend a cent on
| it.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| The streaming integration is pretty handy, helps answer
| the "what service is this on" question.
|
| I don't think it's pushing you to them at all, if you're
| looking at a show or movie that's available to you via
| Plex, they're listed first.
| JadoJodo wrote:
| They show their hosted media first thing now, and hide your
| media behind some clicks.
| [deleted]
| atourgates wrote:
| This is exactly the issue. I'm sure most people who
| installed Plex did it to stream their own self-hosted
| media, but now Plex by default shoves in a bunch of
| streaming BS that they want you to watch, while hiding your
| own media behind a few clicks.
|
| Plex has always had some minor frustrations, but this is
| probably enough to make me switch.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| When you're setting up a new server, it shows you a bunch
| of default Libraries for their own media. Unselecting them
| then should remove them from your list. You can also edit
| your Libraries list later. Managing Libraries is a pretty
| import part of Plex UI (and Jellyfin for that matter)
|
| If you don't know which library on the list to click on or
| drag around, maybe you'll have a hard time in general.
| Timon3 wrote:
| > When you're setting up a new server, it shows you a
| bunch of default Libraries for their own media.
| Unselecting them then should remove them from your list.
|
| It's been a while since I last tried setting it up, but I
| can't remember anything during the setup talking about
| external streaming libraries. I tried setting it up in
| the way I expected it to work based on my previous
| knowledge.
|
| > If you don't know which library on the list to click on
| or drag around, maybe you'll have a hard time in general.
|
| I didn't see anything in the UI on my TV mentioning
| different libraries, or giving me the option to switch
| from the external Plex library to my own. At a certain
| point these things stop being user problems and become UX
| problems.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| "Libraries" is what Plex calls "collections" I think
| Emby/Jellyfin use the same terminology, but don't quote
| me on that.
|
| After you create a Plex instance, you still need to go
| and create a "Movies" library, a "TV Shows" library,
| maybe a "Music" library, an "Audiobooks" Library and so
| on. Those are the ones that show on the left panel in the
| Web UI, TV App etc. It's how you manage your media in
| general
|
| During initial setup, Plex will show you a list of
| "Default Libraries" that have names like "Discover",
| "Web", etc. You can unselect them. You can also remove
| them from your Library list later on.
| Timon3 wrote:
| I would have loved to go through the setup again and see
| where exactly I got confused. For this purpose I
| uninstalled Plex and re-installed it. Sadly for the last
| 20 minutes it only shows:
|
| <Response code="503" title="Maintenance" status="Plex
| Media Server is currently running startup maintenance
| tasks."/>
| manmal wrote:
| I just looked this up in the iOS app, and you can just
| un-pin all libraries except your own in the hamburger
| menu.
| xienze wrote:
| For me it's two things:
|
| 1. You have to use their login service to log into a server
| that's... self-hosted.
|
| 2. The Plex app has very limited codec support, at least on
| iOS. In particular, I rip directly from disc and Plex would
| require transcoding for UHDs, or Blu-rays with
| TrueHD/DTS/etc. audio. Infuse has support for all of that out
| of the box so my Jellyfin server doesn't do any transcoding
| at all, and AppleTV/iPad/etc. are more than capable of
| decoding even full bitrate UHD content.
| kaetemi wrote:
| The webOS client runs at an amazing 1fps.
|
| For random episodes Plex decides it must transcode (even
| though they play just fine over DLNA). (I have transcoding
| disabled so it just refuses to play those.)
|
| Randomly just a blank screen after the last episode in a deck
| is done playing.
|
| Resuming from screensaver ends up in a broken user select
| screen half of the time. One time it was even showing the
| user select while the remote was still blindly controlling
| the UI hidden behind the logon, as the last user.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I switch to Jellyfin because Plex was always spamming me to
| try some off-brand streaming service. I know this behavior is
| so normalized that even Ubuntu Linux does it now but actions
| have consequences and it does drive users away.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| I mean to be fair it does need to find a way to pay for
| itself. I paid for a subscription, removed those streaming
| channels and I don't think I have been pestered about them
| in a long time.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Then every user you onboard has to go through the same
| excercise and having your relatives go through all that
| is not fun at all
| horsawlarway wrote:
| It really doesn't though, and that's why I prefer an open
| source solution like Jellyfin.
|
| I'm already paying for everything that incurs costs: it's
| my hardware, streaming my media, on my local network.
|
| The only things left are users & developers donating time
| and energy to the project - and right now there are
| enough of us doing that to keep it alive.
|
| This is _absolutely_ not something that needs a
| subscription cost.
|
| If you want to help - https://jellyfin.org/contribute/
| sircastor wrote:
| Wasn't Plex's prime advantage was being able to stream
| your media _outside_ your local network? Which means the
| infrastructure and compatibility to keep that working,
| not to mention mobile apps which are locked down in app
| stores.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > This is absolutely not something that needs a
| subscription cost.
|
| Having a server you can stream from - you're right.
|
| For the other features, you're likely wrong. As in - the
| open source space hasn't come up with a viable solution.
| I use Plex for DVR, and beyond the one time fee it works.
| For DVR you need to get the OTA channel guide, and all
| the reliable services out there charge a subscription fee
| - which over time will cost more than the Plex one time
| fee.
|
| Also, how good is Jellyfin at skipping credits and ads?
|
| As I pointed out in another comment - I'll happily use
| Jellyfin once it is there. As of now, every time I try it
| the experience is worse than Plex. So Plex it will be
| till JF gets there.
| atombender wrote:
| I've used Plex for more than a decade, and I've seen it drop
| in quality over the years as Plex the company has pivoted
| towards being a streaming service.
|
| Personally, my main beef is that as a client app, the
| streaming service stuff has bled into the personal library UI
| in obnoxious ways. For example, the default "tab" is called
| "Recommended". This shows some kind of algorithm-based feed
| of stuff they think you want to watch. This tab is the
| default even for your own private library. Why would _it_
| suggest stuff from a library that _I_ curate? It 's very
| strange. In the browser, it remembers your last active tab to
| some extent, but the native apps (like on AppleTV) does not.
| When I open the app and go to a folder, I just see
| recommended stuff. Similarly, if you go to the screen for a
| TV show in your library, it will show a "Related shows"
| section. It's my library, I know what is there, I don't want
| these spammy algorithmic things.
|
| Occasionally I run into other parts of the app, which
| invariably try to steer me towards using their streaming
| service. It's just a constant reminder of how it's no longer
| designed for my purposes.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| > Why would it suggest stuff > from a library that I
| curate?
|
| Mostly to try and help save time, eg to suggest you could
| resume a couple of recently watched episodes that you
| haven't finished yet.
|
| Or that you might want to watch something that was just
| added to the library in the last few minutes.
|
| In most cases this has proved useful to me and I've found
| it to be a timesaver.
| atombender wrote:
| No, I disagree. On the Recommended tab for my TV show
| folder, the rows are:
|
| - "Recently released" and "Recently added", which I agree
| are useful -- but don't belong in a separate tab, as I
| always sort by recentness.
|
| - "Start watching": Shows it thinks I should start
| watching; why? I know what I have and what I intend to
| watch.
|
| - "Rediscover": Shows I have started watching but not
| finished, pointless. I could just browse.
|
| - "More in [random genre]": Pointless, I know my library,
| it's _my library_.
|
| - "Top rated TV": Ditto.
|
| - "Recently played": Never use this, doesn't belong under
| "Recommended".
|
| It's all just pointless stuff, and not appropriate as a
| default view when I'm navigating into my own library.
| trhr wrote:
| Plex is cluttered, messy, not free, not available on all
| devices, and harder to run on Kubernetes.
|
| I can watch my Jellyfin shows from a Flatpak local client on
| my desktop, pause and move to my phone, pause and move to my
| TV. That's three different operating systems, and at no point
| do they transcode, because it's not going through a browser.
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| [dead]
| treyg wrote:
| Did you try an Apple TV?
| jeanofthedead wrote:
| My favorite feature of Infuse is how it clears the Metadata
| cache every single time I launch the app. Takes about 30-45
| seconds for it to show all of my media again. Even with plenty
| of storage space on my ATV4K.
| gytisgreitai wrote:
| Can you explain more? I am using Infuse with nfs mounted shares
| and have been pretty happy. Anthing to gain from jellyfin?
| syntaxing wrote:
| Not OP, but jellyfin gives you a web interface and multiple
| user access kinda like Netflix profiles.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Very helpful especially in a family where you might want to
| separate out libraries a bit.
| cuban-frisbee wrote:
| Jellyfin can help with metadata and keeping track of progress
| for tv shows etc.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| The main advantage of Jellyfin is that it can transcode on-
| the-fly, which is important if you want to share with friends
| and family that have slower or metered internet.
|
| But the unfortunate flipside is it seems like the best
| clients (so far) do not support transcoding very well, they
| want to direct stream.
| peblos wrote:
| What does Jellyfin + Infuse give you over simply using Infuse?
|
| I looked at Jellyfin about a year ago and settled on just
| playing media from my NAS using Infuse but maybe I need to take
| another look
| stiltzkin wrote:
| I still have Jellyfin as a secondary choice, Plex experience is
| still painless specially remote play and sharing media.
| DarthNebo wrote:
| Absolutely love this on my Android TV, I just spin up a container
| on my laptop with mounted folders & I am able to play large files
| without plugging & copying anything to a USB drive. Android TVs
| for some reason cannot fathom that video files >4GB do exist
| along with other basic filesystems like ExFAT & NTFS......smh
| yrro wrote:
| I expect the manufacturers don't want to license Microsoft's
| patents.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| ExFAT and NTFS are in the Linux kernel already. I don't think
| they'd need to license them at this point.
| toast0 wrote:
| In the kernel doesn't mean you have a license to use it.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Technically yes, but companies can join the OIN for free
| and ship it for free.
|
| Lots of companies are in that list
| (https://openinventionnetwork.com/community-
| alphabetical/) including Google, Sony, Amazon, and
| hundreds of other companies.
| selectodude wrote:
| I think the GPL license kind of implies that you do have
| a license to use it.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| That's GPLv3, GPLv2 (which the exFAT code was licensed
| under) doesn't include patent rights.
| toast0 wrote:
| How does a copyright license imply a license of a third
| party's patent?
|
| Open source mpeg codecs don't come with a patent license
| from mpeg and friends. Neither does a open source file
| system driver come with a patent license from microsoft
| and friends.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| From what I can raad, the 4GB file limit for SMB seems to come
| from Samba using SMB 2 compatibility. You should disable SMB 2
| for security anyway, but it's possible the SMB client still
| messes up.
|
| In that case, if you're entering a hostname manually somewhere,
| try replacing smb:// with cifs://. That should force it to use
| a modern standard that's capable of 4GB+ files.
| johnnykree wrote:
| I would love to run this on my Arch Linux PC and stream to my
| Google Chromecast but I couldn't get it to run... I tried for 2
| weeks and gave up...
| Matl wrote:
| I'm running on an Arch Linux based home server, what in
| particular gave you trouble?
| ncallaway wrote:
| Do you have a domain, with a valid https cert? Chromecast needs
| to make a couple requests, and will only do it over https, and
| requires the cert to be valid.
|
| If you're running over http, or using a self-signed cert,
| Chromecast won't work.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Chromecast works reliably here (served from Debian). DLNA is
| broken, though, but that's probably a firewall rule.
|
| It took me a while to realize that Chromecast doesn't play from
| the phone itself, you need a server with a valid HTTPS
| certificate that's reachable from the Chromecast itself to play
| content. You can also use plain HTTP, as long as you don't use
| self-signed certificates. For the routing problem there's no
| solution, you can't, say, have a phone hooked up to a VPN and
| play to a Chromecast on the local WiFi.
|
| There's also an issue with putting Jellyfin in a different
| subdirectory (i.e. videoplayer.local/servers/jellyfin) but for
| me that still seems to work, luckily.
|
| Also make sure the Chromecast can resolve your domain through
| its DNS resolver. If you use a local DNS server (i.e. the one
| built into your router) to resolve hosts in the LAN, you need
| to block 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 so Chromecast doesn't have a
| choice but to use your normal DNS server.
|
| Firefox also doesn't seem to like my Chromecast but that's the
| case for every video I play.
| mdhen wrote:
| That's my exact setup. Works flawlessly.
| compsciphd wrote:
| jellyfin has some nice features that will probably never come to
| plex, but in the end plex is just so much more pleasant to use. i
| have both setup against same library and in practice all i barely
| use jellyfin except for some minor use cases
| marcrosoft wrote:
| I went the other direction. I got tired of Plex trying to jam
| live tv and other monetizing features down my throat.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| You can remove all of those with a few clicks.
| Macha wrote:
| Sure, but having to keep track of all things the vendor
| does against my interest and disable them every time they
| add a new one is a mental burden I'd rather not deal with.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| As I said in my other comment, I removed the screens two
| years ago, post-install, and none have appeared since.
| This falls significant short of 'mental burden' for me.
| crawsome wrote:
| I don't think being perpetually reactive is the right
| mentality. First it's esoteric. You need to know which menu
| it's in, and what the setting is called.
|
| And how does this scale? As more of those feature come, and
| you cannot opt-out of them, even as a paying customer.
|
| Plex has a horrible report with me, and though I still use
| it, I'm tempted to try other apps now.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| I removed the screens containing non-local content two
| years ago, immediately after install, and it's never
| reappeared since, nor has any newer version of non-local
| or ad-laden content.
|
| Maybe our use cases are different but there's nothing
| reactive needed for me.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| I can, but my other users in family and friends are getting
| mad about it
| GordonS wrote:
| I tried both a while back, and settled on Plex, as it seemed
| more fully featured, plus the there's an app for it on my TV,
| so the UI and UX were better too.
|
| What did you find JellyFin had, that Plex didn't?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| The Jellyfin Android TV app is much faster and more stable
| the Plex's. For me the Plex app keeps bogging down and
| crashing several times while I browse my library.
|
| That's a huge plus, however sadly Jellyfin doesn't handle
| subtitles well, and I really dislike the lack of a quick
| "skip forward" action. So I tend to still use Plex.
| GordonS wrote:
| Never had any issues with the Plex TV app myself, other
| than the number of updates being quite annoying at times.
| rglullis wrote:
| > What did you find JellyFin had, that Plex didn't?
|
| An Open source License
| GordonS wrote:
| I mean, while nice, the parent was talking about _features_
| , not the license.
| kkarakk wrote:
| that IS a feature esp considering how plex gets more and
| more arcane about new user onboarding to get you to buy
| their service
| sokoloff wrote:
| Pretty much the same here. I bought the Plex lifetime sub many
| years ago and periodically come across a suggestion to use
| jellyfin. So I setup the latest jellyfin (fast and easy), point
| it at the same libraries, install the latest apps on FireTV and
| mobile, and try it out. I always keep coming back to Plex as
| the jellyfin experience just seems to have more rough edges and
| those edges irritate at a time when I'm trying to relax with
| media.
|
| I just checked to see if I put my finger on the rough edges and
| the biggest one is around navigating through the library. While
| both Plex and Jellyfin can sometimes fail to find the "best"
| cover art, Jellyfin misses about 8-10x as often, often yielding
| random screenshots from the movie or a crazy zoomed-in view of
| some cover art. Plex far less often misses. (This is running
| the latest on both and giving both a full metadata refresh of
| the affected libraries and then the affected title again just
| to be sure: Jellyfin 10.8.10 and Plex 1.32.3.7192.)
| drewg123 wrote:
| question: How hard is it to get jellyfin to just present me a
| random video from my library that it cannot scrape metadata for?
|
| This has always been the sticking point to me for software like
| this that tries to make things "easy". I realize plex has (or
| had) a way to label folders as containing home videos, etc, but I
| vaguely recall problems with it.
|
| I'd much rather see the text "foo.mp4" for a video w/o metatada
| than have the server just hide the video.
| jsf01 wrote:
| For videos it can't find metadata for, Jellyfin will either
| display only the title (if you set the library type to
| "movies"), or it will extract a random frame from within the
| video to use as the image (if you set the library type to "home
| videos"). In both cases, the video isn't going to be hidden.
| entropie wrote:
| My mother is able to send a telegram bot youtube URLs. She sends
| links to audiobooks, yt-dlp extracts audio and saves it in an
| incoming folder and shes able to listen/download it via jellyfin.
| Works really well.
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| Is there source code for this?
| entropie wrote:
| The bot part is done in node red (and is a relatively simple
| flow) it just calls a script that ensures no parallel
| downloads via a little daemon/fifo.
|
| https://gist.github.com/entropie/d265e94136b9777cc6b3190189b.
| ..
| itsagavin wrote:
| The unfortunate reality of Jellyfish is unless it ever comes
| baked in to Xboxes and smart TVs it doesn't solve the problem all
| media centers that aren't Plex have. If you can't add it from an
| app store and use the tv remote or game controller to navigate it
| no one I know will use it. So its Plex and nothing else until
| dethroned because I'm sure like most I'm running an internet
| facing media server for others.
| ryanpandya wrote:
| I use an Nvidia shield and it has a Jellyfin app (along with
| basically anything else on Android, which is why it's been
| perfect for me). User friendly while still being flexible
| enough for most anything I want to throw at it.
| jjcon wrote:
| I'll second this, not to mention the first class support Plex
| has for audio content. I have dedicated apps for my music and
| my audiobooks. I haven't found anything close to that in the
| Emby or Jellyfin world.
| [deleted]
| LeFantome wrote:
| I downloaded it on both my Roku and Fire ( Amazon ) devices
| just as easily as any other app.
|
| Of course, the applications use the native remotes for these
| platforms. Since I am the one that puts all the content on
| Jellyfin, my less technical wife sees it like any other channel
| ( like Netflix, Disney, or Prime ).
|
| I do not use AppleTV anymore but I installed it on my iPhone as
| well. I had used Plex before. I did not a find Jellyfin any
| harder.
| krono wrote:
| Which is probably why they've invested so much time into
| getting their official clients for Android TV, Roku, LG's
| WebOS, iOS, Android, and more out there for people to download,
| and have clients for several additional platforms in various
| stages of development or app-store approval.
|
| https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients
| yboris wrote:
| semi-on-topic: I created _Video Hub App_ that is like YouTube for
| local files: shows you a gallery with scrub-able (preview on
| hover) thumbnails. But does not work streaming videos to TV /
| tablet - only for local consumption. Hope someone finds it
| useful.
|
| https://videohubapp.com/
|
| MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
| rapnie wrote:
| Nice. PS. From "See as filmstrips" on down the images don't
| load on the landing page, and show only the empty frame and
| shadow (in Firefox).
| lnauta wrote:
| My raspberry pi has been slowly dying lately. Last thursday I
| ordered an ODROID C4, because pi's are overpriced at the moment.
|
| At the same time I also moved from plex to jellyfin, and it's
| really nice, but some files stutter during playback in both the
| browser and on my chromecast.
|
| Trying different hardware accelerated decoders did not help, so
| now I'm not sure what to do and debating to go back to plex.
| Although plex felt like it was getting worse in terms of
| functionality (I can't put my finger on it exactly).
| mshockwave wrote:
| Jellyfin is my jam, it just works. Its administration interface
| is intuitive, pretty solid, personally I think the dashboard
| looks good aesthetically, and most importantly it's open source
| so if anything is broken I can just fix it myself. If anyone is
| interested in feel free to check out Swiftfin
| (https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin) a native iOS client
| louwrentius wrote:
| I'm running Jellyfin because I want to reduce my energy
| footprint. I'm happy to watch series on my iPad instead of a TV.
| I also don't need my disk-based NAS turned on if I put content on
| an external SSD hooked up to a Raspberry Pi4 with Jellyfin.
|
| I had an issue where my Mac or iPad could not stream anything in
| h265 (not 100% sure about the format) in the browser. The
| Raspberry Pi would start transcoding which it lacks the
| performance for.
|
| Fortunately the Jellyfin iOS client works perfectly, I'm guessing
| it uses hardware acceleration of the iPad.
| tetris11 wrote:
| My NAS goes into hibernation when its not used, and spins up
| when Jellyfin asks something of it. Its reasonably efficient
| IMO
| louwrentius wrote:
| My NAS is turned off and only turned on when required,
| nothing is more power efficient :-)
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| I have Plex running on a Pi 4, with some USB disks attached
| that spin down when not needed. Seems to also work fine.
| xattt wrote:
| Is it common for people to use web apps first when a native
| client is available?
| lost_tourist wrote:
| i do because it's a lot easier to limit what an "app" can do
| on your system. It's a sandbox of a sort.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| I like to save websites as "apps" on my devices and use it
| that way. I do generally prefer web-apps I suppose but I also
| greatly appreciate the distraction reduction of NOT being in
| a browser, as the internet has infinite distractions.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Yes. I refuse to use native apps when the functionality can
| be as good in a web app. Things like chat, email, watching
| videos, listening to music, etc.
|
| A lot of the time the "native" app is using electron anyway,
| so why go through the hassle of installing it when it is just
| a app-specific browser?
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| From commercial entities, hell yes. They don't need a
| permanent spot on my device.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I've been running Kodi ever since it was Xbox Media Center and
| have yet to find anything more polished.
|
| I run via nVida Shield devices as endpoints with attached drives
| connected to standard audio-video setups (TVs, speakers,
| receiver/amp, etc.)
| ekianjo wrote:
| Jellyfin is a totally different use case
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| They are direct competitors in the same space
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I disagree. Jellyfin takes on Plex, not Kodi. A normal
| Jellyfin install doesn't even come with a player, you need
| to launch a browser on your machine or download a separate
| client.
| MikusR wrote:
| Like apples and oranges
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| It appears there's a plugin to use Kodi as an endpoint for a
| Jellyfish server... nice!
| https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/kodi/
| getcrunk wrote:
| I love Jellyfin. But they need seek thumbnails/preview
| lostmsu wrote:
| I tried it, but ended up just using file shares. The biggest
| issue for me is that it does not automatically recognize many
| movies by their short names instead linking to some obscure thing
| with a similar name. For instance, since files can not have colon
| in the name, and many movies do, it gets confused about the
| title. Another similar issue is about shows and how it recognizes
| their folder and file structures.
|
| In the end it seems easier for me to just navigate the folder
| structure and look up any metadata by googling, because I add
| shows and movies more often than have urges to look up random
| character's actor.
|
| Oh, and web client doesn't play 5.1
| s0rce wrote:
| I also just share files on the server side and then use Kodi on
| an Nvidia Shield as the client for watching tv. Works well. I
| looked at Jellyfin/Plex but didn't really understand what it
| would offer, maybe if I had multiple tv's and wanted a more
| shared/transferable experience.
| Sakos wrote:
| Jellyfin is marginally better than Plex, but I also encountered
| a lot of quirks with Jellyfin which ended in me giving up on it
| for streaming my media to my other devices.
|
| I just want something that automatically transcodes whatever I
| watch to account for poor bandwidth when I'm not home. All the
| library stuff feels so unnecessary and breaks in weird ways
| that are difficult (impossible?) to solve.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Another "just share files" user checking in. There are _dozens_
| of us!
|
| Old school NFS/SMB has "just worked" for me for decades. It's
| free, uses almost zero server resources, is easy to add content
| to (just copy a file), and it isn't going to change out from
| under you when its developer decides to monetize you.
|
| If you really must have a pretty front-end for your TV or
| whatever, there's Kodi, which is also old-school, free, runs on
| everything, and so on. My only gripe with Kodi is the same
| gripe I have with every other media player system out there:
| They all seem to insist on grafting their own "library" concept
| onto your already-existing and perfectly-functioning
| filesystem. I just added that file to my filesystem. Why do I
| need to add it again to the in-app "library?"
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| [dead]
| asylteltine wrote:
| [dead]
| jeroenhd wrote:
| The Windows colon file limitation is annoying, but I've never
| had trouble with it. Autodetection always seems to work for me,
| even if the name gets a little mangled (unless tvdb doesn't
| know about a particular movie/show/season). Sometimes there's a
| weird extra (year) behind the title because of the way the
| folder got named, but the metadata itself still shows up right.
|
| Then again, I do get most of my content through *arr so perhaps
| that automation already resolves the filename inconsistencies.
|
| As for 5.1 audio, that's almost entirely unsupported by
| browsers. I think Edge and Safari support Dolby but I'm not
| sure if you need to feed those a special kind of format or not.
| Maybe the native applications get around this somehow?
| https443 wrote:
| If you follow their naming conventions it works great:
| https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ --
| https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/ ... but
| I admit that most people don't want to do that.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Yeah, I don't have time to rename every single one of 100+
| episodes.
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| In case it's helpful for anyone else having the issue: mmv
| [0] means you only have to run the command once to rename
| every file. It's pretty fantastic.
|
| [0] https://ss64.com/bash/mmv.html
| llanowarelves wrote:
| Also you can argue that the (original) filename itself is
| part of the metadata. It's useful to have what it was
| originally called when referencing elsewhere. So where to
| put this data? in a sidecar file during the rename process
| or something? We could just use content hash, but then
| online dashboards to redownload things from vendors, for
| example, won't necessarily have that there displayed on the
| page, or when you start downloading it in the browser.
| NamTaf wrote:
| This is why I hammered out a bash script to do my music :)
|
| Thankfully 99% of my visual media was already in the
| format, but there's numerous utilities that can bulk rename
| media in the necessary format
| branon wrote:
| Your filenames can't have colons in them? Sounds like a side-
| effect of keeping compatibility with 30 year-old Microsoft
| filesharing protocols. Samba is cool and everything but SMB has
| no advantages over NFS, SSHFS, or even bind mounts on the same
| host.
| https443 wrote:
| Have been using Jellyfin on my synology server for the past 2
| years. It's a dream, but you do need to name your
| files/directories per their naming convention:
| https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ --
| https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/
| ufish235 wrote:
| Which model Synology? I am looking into one of the dual/quad
| core Celeron models because I heard the iGPU is critical for
| any kind of transcoding.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Not OP, but you pretty much have to run the Celeron ones. I
| don't think the docker image would work with the Realtek ones
| (the ones that end in j). I have a DS220+ (J4025 with dual
| core only). It works ok, you pretty much max out one of the
| cores running a 4K stream. I would recommend separating the
| storage and server if you can afford it. The price difference
| between the quad core (4 bay) and 2 core (has 2 bay) is
| enough to get a 2 bay + a N95 mini pc that can handle 4
| streams of 4K.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Another idea is to get a thin client with an i7 or i9 (you
| probably want at least 10th gen at this point) and either
| an external enclosure for a few SSDs or if you find one
| with a PCIE slot, a PCIE card to fit maybe 4x m.2 SSDs.
| Some good deals are out there on U.2 SSDs if you look as
| well, like 8TB for $400 from Intel or WD good.
|
| Don't forget that Asrock Rack and Supermicro sell Atom and
| Xeon-D boards, as well as some Ryzen AM4/5 models if you
| want to DIY. There are great cases out there (eg Fractal
| Node 304/804) these days that support full-size modular
| PSUs with 80+ Titanium ratings to sip power. That's been my
| biggest gripe with x86 over ARM: idle power usage for
| something I expect to have on 24x7 with PG&Es 50c/kWh. I
| just rebuilt my old desktop 5950x into a NAS using a
| Silverstone RM44 with air cooling, but it's made to support
| liquid as well. That's got plenty of room to fit 4X full-
| size GPUs and a power supply to match if you dabble with AI
| on the side. RTX 4060s are coming soon for $300 and that
| should be more than enough power for transcodes for the
| whole family.
| syntaxing wrote:
| I actually think buying a first gen Mac Mini M1 is a
| better idea with a thunderbolt drive storage. I have
| friends in California that does this for the reasons you
| mentioned. The utility price has made homelab servers and
| 3D printing pretty much non viable unless you want to pay
| a $300+ electricity bill.
| https443 wrote:
| It worked on my older "DS 216+II". Could not stream more than
| 1 person at a time though. That was ok for my usage but not
| sure for yours.
|
| I recently upgraded to "DS 423+" and it's a lot faster - can
| have multiple streams going if I want.
| zackify wrote:
| I've been using it for a year. I don't name anything in a
| special way, and it just works.
| quaintdev wrote:
| Yup running it on RPi with external hard drive. No need to
| name anything.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| As rPi 4Bs are hard to get still / overpriced, unless
| you're absolutely married to the rPi, check out OrangePi 5B
| for a much faster CPU, more RAM, eMMC, and good wifi OR get
| the 5+ for the same minus wifi (it has an E-key m.2 to add
| it) but adds a 2280 m.2 so you could throw a 4TB m.2 SSD on
| there (which are about $200 now) and now you've got a
| pretty dang good little NAS that's fast and fanless for
| about $350-400 all-in. Did I mention the 5+ has 2x 2.5G
| Ethernet?
| randomluck040 wrote:
| How would you rate the performance? Is it sufficient for 4K
| HDR streams over your network?
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| You can automate that with sonarr/radarr/lidarr. Works like a
| dream.
| nicoco wrote:
| Add prowlarr and bazarr for the full win.
| politelemon wrote:
| Prowlarr is a deitysend. Instead of having to configure
| indexers in Sonarr, it does the heavy lifting for you. Goes
| in, configures an indexer, and that's your search setup
| done.
| graftak wrote:
| I would also prefer to manage my download clients from
| prowlarr but for some reason the maintainers are
| conceptually opposed to that.
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| How many indexers do you have for this to become a
| problem ? I never considered the indexer setup to be a
| pain point, genuinely curious.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| I use Prowlarr as it's tightly integrated with the *arr
| stack, but Jackett is another great option if you don't
| need that.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| the full win would also include 2 instances of readarr,
| once for ebooks and one for audio books, whisparr for your
| 18+ needs, stash for your 18+ needs frontend, and I think
| audiobookshelf and kavita to play the audiobooks and ebooks
| respectively. If you're into comics you might also want to
| throw mylar3 in there and if you have multiple users (aka a
| spouse and/or offspring) you may want to throw ombi in
| there too.
| midasz wrote:
| Some may prefer Overseerr to Ombi.
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| Indeed there are probably multiple paths to the full win.
| I like to use airsonic-advanced to feed music to my
| legacy sonos systems (can somebody please make an easy to
| use, pretty opensource alternative to the sonos multiroom
| software stack that can output to hifiberry's or ideally
| a cheaper alternative? even better would be an included
| best at each price level alternative speaker to double
| sided tape the hifiberry to). I also prefer to use beets
| and a cron job to convert my whole music collection into
| decent quality opus files and syncthing to get them onto
| my phone rather than using a frontend and mobile data to
| stream the flac files from my house.
| [deleted]
| gadders wrote:
| Readarr is weird. Turned it off after I started get
| messages from it saying it was deleting my ebooks. I
| don't know why it can't just work like Sonarr.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Some additional recommendations:
|
| - Setup two Radarr instances (normal and 4K) and two
| Sonarr instances (TV and anime)
|
| - Follow the TRaSH guides to improve media quality
|
| - Komga to read manga and comics
|
| - Readarr Calibre integration to delegate parsing &
| metadata to Calibre
|
| - Jellyseerr or Overseerr instead of Ombi
|
| - Unpackerr to catch and handle compressed media
|
| - autobrr if you're looking to build ratio
| IceSentry wrote:
| Why use a separate instance for 4k? Can't you just use a
| separate quality profile? And why a separate one for
| anime? It seems unnecessary to me.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| For Radarr, it's for cleaner separation and easier
| automation. Also, keep in mind that you cannot have the
| _same_ movie with two qualities on the same instance.
|
| My 4K instance has one root path (different from non-4K)
| and one quality profile that's auto-selected by default.
| Using the Radarr connect option, I have a quality profile
| on the non-4K instance that automatically adds the movie
| to the 4K instance. This way, you can ensure you have
| both 4K and non-4K copies of certain movies (e.g., for
| external access/transcoding). You also ~never need to
| actually interact with the 4K instance. See this page for
| details: https://trash-
| guides.info/Radarr/Tips/Sync-2-radarr-sonarr/
|
| For Sonarr, it's also for separation, but less of an
| issue if you're on Sonarr v4. The one thing you gain even
| on v4 is the ability to have different quality
| definitions for anime and non-anime content. See:
| https://trash-guides.info/Sonarr/Sonarr-Quality-Settings-
| Fil...
| WXLCKNO wrote:
| Pretty sure the 4k thing is a hard limitation due to not
| being able to select the same root path or something. I
| don't remember tbh.
|
| For anime first time I've heard that suggestion but anime
| in general is super annoying to download due to not
| having real seasons or whatever often. Wonder how it
| helps..
| Zircom wrote:
| I have a separate radarr for anime because there's are
| anime specific trackers that are much better for
| downloading anime, especially if you are looking for non-
| English subs, but radarr doesn't have a way to pick a
| specific tracker to download a particular series from. So
| my anime radarr instance only has those specific trackers
| on it so it will download from them everytime.
| Zircom wrote:
| There are anime specific trackers that are better for
| downloading anime from, especially if you're looking for
| non-English subs, but radarr doesn't have a way to tell
| it to use a specific tracker for a particular series, so
| having a separate radarr instance with only those
| trackers on it ensures it downloads from them everytime.
| civilitty wrote:
| Jesus christ. Thank you for the Unpackerr recommendation,
| that was pissing me off, but jesus christ.
|
| I'd pay an extra $10/mo for my seedbox to have just a
| single interface for all of this without having to manage
| all these independent apps. Trying to debug why
| sonarr->prowlarr->flaresolvrr don't work is a nightmare.
| That reminds me:
|
| - flaresolverr: proxy that handles cloudflare bot checks
| for torrent trackers that are starting to put it up
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Haha yeah, it can be definitely become a rabbit hole if
| you have the interest and time :)
|
| I think the base setup of Radarr + Sonarr +
| SABnzbd/qBittorrent + Prowlarr is a _huge_ improvemenet
| over doing things manually. A lot stuff on top of that is
| helpful, but the benefit vs. effort ratio diminishes
| quite quickly.
|
| I haven't had to setup Flaresolverr just yet, but might
| do that soon.
| rashkov wrote:
| I set up radarr + sonarr after a few years of doing it
| manually. Really glad I did -- adding something from my
| phone and then having it pop into plex on my tv is
| delightful.
| inkahootz wrote:
| Why do you recommend Jellyseerr or Overseerr instead of
| Ombi?
| croutonwagon wrote:
| What do prowlarr and bazarr do
| JadoJodo wrote:
| Bazarr seems to be a subtitle downloader, and Prowlarr an
| "Index Manager" (though I'm unsure what that means).
| trhr wrote:
| Means you can say "Here's my API key for these private
| trackers" in one spot instead of 8. "Indexer Manager" is
| probably a better description.
| heyoni wrote:
| Ooooooh.
| wernercd wrote:
| Prowlarr is also important if you do multiple *arr.
| Sonarr, Radarr, Readarr. instead of configuring your
| indexers (multiple) in multiple places? You point the
| searches at Prowlarr and then keep it updated.
|
| I personally run a fairly modified version HTPC on a QNAP
| (was synology but upgraded earlier this year - better
| base board + dedicated graphics card)
|
| https://github.com/sebgl/htpc-download-box
| Remmy wrote:
| Toss in RDClient for real-debrid support via the qbitorrent
| plugin in sonaar/radarr and it's fantastic.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I use the full stack and all very grateful for the products.
|
| The remaining annoyances are:
|
| - lack of multi language support
|
| - there is no connection between the systems when you want to
| remove a movie (you remove it in one place and everything
| knows about that and acts accordingly)
|
| - I still did not make to fully grasp how and where to say "I
| do not want this particular release". I think I saw that in
| radarr but it never is obvious to me where it is.
| lavezzi wrote:
| > there is no connection between the systems when you want
| to remove a movie (you remove it in one place and
| everything knows about that and acts accordingly)
|
| Not following this. Settings -> Connections in Sonarr for
| example.
| j1elo wrote:
| Yeah I was initially surprised when learning about the *arr
| stack for the first time, as my intuition was _very
| insistently_ telling me: "I must be gettint it wrong,
| these ought to be all a single service!!"
|
| They all definitely feel like small parts of a single
| package, don't look like they merit being their own thing.
| But it's not _my_ thing, so what do I know.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| The architecture of how they work together is a lot more
| functional than lots of the software at Fortune 500
| companies
| faangsticle wrote:
| For some reason the developed hate symlinks, which would
| fix most of the issues.
| coldacid wrote:
| It was the same thing with Emby.
| metadat wrote:
| I've always wondered why Jellyfin doesn't have better support
| for parsing Scene release names, which follow strict naming
| conventions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)
|
| https://scenerules.org/t.html?id=2020_X265.nfo
|
| 99% coverage is achievable via a few straightforward regexes.
|
| Don't get me wrong though, I really like and appreciate
| Jellyfin, especially on Apple TV with Swiftfin, it's my daily
| driver for big screen entertainment and it's amazing, 10e9
| times better than Chromecasting from a laptop to GoogleTV,
| which is just a horrible UX (no pause button on the TV) and
| also would randomly freeze for 5-30 seconds every few minutes.
|
| Plex was nice too, and works great if you are okay with being
| at the mercy of a closed system for your media center. Though I
| sure don't miss those pointless forced UI "downgrade in
| functionality" updates!
| [deleted]
| deadbunny wrote:
| Jellyfin parses scene naming conventions fine. I have
| thousands of films and hundreds of TV shows (with thousands
| of episodes) all in scene name format and I can think of a
| handful of matching errors on Jellyfish but it's usually due
| to a commonish film name and a wrong year or something
| similar.
| majkinetor wrote:
| The same. I basically never edit metadata. I rarely add
| IMDB id when slip happens.
| metadat wrote:
| I agree it works most of the time, but sometimes falls flat
| on it's face. Especially for TV episodes and even entire
| seasons.
| m3Lith wrote:
| I love Jellyfin, though it often struggles with subtitles
| embedded in the container. They are recognized, but it fails to
| load them. If I retry it two-three times, it usually manages to
| do that.
|
| Also, recently discovered it has plugins too, like syncing status
| with Trakt.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33579209 - Nov 2022 (344
| comments)
|
| _Better than Netflix: Jellyfin on my NAS_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33433880 - Nov 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Why I use Jellyfin for my home media library_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33362416 - Oct 2022 (228
| comments)
|
| _Jellyfin Release - v10.8.0_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31720125 - June 2022 (14
| comments)
|
| _Jellyfin: Free Software Media System_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28664802 - Sept 2021 (199
| comments)
|
| _Moving my home media library from iTunes to Jellyfin and
| Infuse_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27462767 - June
| 2021 (171 comments)
|
| _Jellyfin: A Free Software Media System_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21986282 - Jan 2020 (173
| comments)
|
| _Jellyfin is an open source alternative for Plex_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20797851 - Aug 2019 (1
| comment)
| rcarmo wrote:
| I have tried it a couple of years ago (maybe less), but went back
| to Plex because of higher polish and family sharing features
| (which are a little clunky on Plex, but usable). Also, I have
| PlexAmp set up everywhere (including some Android desktop
| displays) for music.
|
| How does Jellyfin tackle closed user groups, family
| photos/videos, remote access, etc?
| asylteltine wrote:
| Agree with this. Same experience
| infogulch wrote:
| Is there an oss Chromecast-like system that you can use to cast
| media from jellyfin?
| nilespotter wrote:
| I switched to this from plex a year ago, despite having a
| lifetime membership, because plex is much too chatty with their
| servers and I just don't trust it not to invade my privacy. I
| bought infuse for apple tv and haven't looked back. Honestly I
| don't really notice much of a difference, the combo is quite
| good.
|
| Edit: I still run a plex server for just my music library.
| Plexamp is the undisputed king.
| n0zmer wrote:
| Jellyfin is still so far behind Plex in media organization and
| just general reliability and polish.
|
| Also, Plexamp is by far the best music player to exist right now.
| number6 wrote:
| But it doesn't trick you into an account or subscription
| afavour wrote:
| I found that Plex was pretty upfront about how membership
| works. I was happy to pay for a lifetime membership given the
| usage I've gotten out of it.
|
| (though if I'm honest the lifetime membership concept feels
| like a bad idea on their side. Despite using their product
| regularly they now get no more money from me)
| stuckinhell wrote:
| This alone, finally got me and my husband to switch. Jellyfin
| is FANTASTIC, and I wrote a simple script with ChatGPT to
| help with tagging and metadata for our home collection.
| apexalpha wrote:
| Can't say I've ever had to script anything for Plex.
| grep_name wrote:
| What does it do exactly? I'm always always looking to
| improve my jellyfin setup
| stuckinhell wrote:
| corrects metadata, and adds some custom stuff like our
| own reviews from our family google account spreadsheet.
| n0zmer wrote:
| Two things that work OOTB with Plex, might I add.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| Not for me they didn't.
| asylteltine wrote:
| Where's the trick? Pretty much every feature a typical user
| would use is free. Everything else is clearly outlined on
| their website. Just because you don't want to pay for
| software you use doesn't mean it's a trick.
| n0zmer wrote:
| I paid for lifetime over 7 years ago. So, I'm not worried
| about that.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| And it doesn't require internet access to watch things on
| your local network.
|
| That was the last straw for me with plex.
|
| Having to log into a server on the internet to access local
| content isn't just bad, it's broken by design just like DRM.
| colordrops wrote:
| But Jellyfin is open source and doesn't try to force you to
| open an account.
|
| I'm at the point now where I will always choose open source if
| the product is "good enough" even if it is not the best.
| Jellyfin is "good enough" for my needs at least.
| n0zmer wrote:
| I have no problem paying for great software. There is an
| obvious quality difference between the two and it's
| completely worth it.
| colordrops wrote:
| Sure, each person is free to have their own strategy. For
| me, I've been burned many times when commercial software
| was abondoned, or changed for the worst for financial
| reasons, or no longer works on my platform for some reason,
| or never gets some requested feature implemented, or is
| full of spy telemetry.
|
| But I am not against commercial software and have no
| problem with others using it. Just not for me.
| amiga386 wrote:
| That's a bold claim. Personally I'm very much liking Finamp
| (for Jellyfin), it's coming along nicely and it does a great
| job IMHO, especially its offline mode works robustly. Looking
| at the feature list of Plexamp, sure, it does have a few more
| niceties, but it doesn't look like Plexamp is free or open in
| any way, so I'm never going to run it.
| n0zmer wrote:
| That's great and all, but the quality difference is 100%
| there and there is absolutely nothing wrong with paying
| developers to make great software.
| kahnclusions wrote:
| I've tried Jellyfin but still using Plex. As much as I hate Plex
| with a passion, it does work.
|
| Jellyfin is buggy and laggy and full of security issues... it's
| difficult to even play content on my TV. Music doesn't even play
| on Android app without some weird jittering bug. Plex just works.
| It's interface kind of sucks, and it has its occasional hiccups,
| and they insult your Taiwanese content with "Taiwan, Province of
| China", but at the very least it does what it claims to do...
| play my content.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| So confusing, there is also Jellyfish [0] which is also a media
| server written in Elixir.
|
| Use case is obv different but close enough that I needed to
| triple check that I'm not going mad.
|
| [0] https://github.com/jellyfish-dev/jellyfish
| hamandcheese wrote:
| Jellyfish appears to be a much newer and smaller project.
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