[HN Gopher] Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System
___________________________________________________________________
Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System
Author : doener
Score : 444 points
Date : 2025-02-15 22:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jellyfin.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (jellyfin.org)
| sergiotapia wrote:
| What benefits are there compared to Emby? Been using it for quite
| some time and very curious!
|
| How is av1 support on jellyfin?
| Cyph0n wrote:
| For your second question:
| https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/#vid...
| init2null wrote:
| They don't list Infuse on there, but it's pretty great in its
| support of pretty much everything. The Apple TV has certainly
| surprised me by being an excellent platform for in-home
| streaming.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Yes, Infuse is excellent, highly recommend it on iOS
| devices.
| nialv7 wrote:
| jellyfin is open source, that's enough reason for me.
| jchw wrote:
| Jellyfin is a fork of Emby. Emby used to be open source, when
| it went closed source Jellyfin was formed off of it.
|
| AV1 playback works on devices that support it. You'll need
| server-side transcoding for devices that don't. Jellyfin can do
| this by shelling out to FFMPEG, which can optionally use
| hardware accelerated codecs if they're available to it. So
| basically, "it depends", but Jellyfin itself supports AV1
| media.
| pygar wrote:
| If you want to use hardware acceleration in Emby you have to
| pay for "Emby Premiere". Jellyfin, not having tiered versions,
| provides this for free.
|
| This is obviously useful in general, but i rely on it to run a
| media server on my low-end minipc with Intel Quick Sync.
| RickHull wrote:
| My media center is a laptop with a broken screen, running Arch
| Linux and Kodi. Kodi has a web interface that you can stream to.
| Why might I want to add Jellyfin?
| muppetman wrote:
| Because you can give your friends a login, they can log in from
| anywhere, and watch your content. Same for you. You can log in
| from anywhere and do that. Kodi is more of a local thing, I
| find the two compliment each other very well. There are native
| apps for jellyfin as well. Loaded up and hit play. I guess you
| can probably do this with Kodi but it hasn't been designed from
| the ground up for this use case.
| mrcsharp wrote:
| And when they login you can watch content together in sync
| too. I use that feature a lot to remotely watch movies with
| mates.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| Thats a good idea for a damaged laptop, I often see those for
| sale for nothing
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah for quite a while I was using an old ThinkPad as a
| Valheim server lol, maybe not the most power-efficient, but
| not that bad either!
| ryandrake wrote:
| Same here. I never could figure out why I'd want to use
| anything else. Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, whatever. Nothing beats
| the simplicity of a couple of terrabytes on a local drive, or
| if you want to get fancy, a NFS share.
|
| Honestly, Kodi is even a little more heavyweight than I need,
| but I've been using it since long before the XBMC->Kodi name
| change and have been happy with it.
| Sakos wrote:
| The most useful part of Jellyfin is on-the fly transcoding to
| whatever bit rate I want at any particular time, no matter
| where I might be. I've watched stuff off my server on a train
| with terrible connectivity by setting it to 360p. If you only
| watch at home, then it's probably not that useful to you. I
| also like all the library features and tracking my per episode
| watch history for shows.
| lukevp wrote:
| Jellyfin is pretty good, and I've been using it in place of Plex
| for the last few years. However, I feel like there are some
| underlying limitations that I just can't get past:
|
| 1. the UI jank. The thumbnail tiles are slow to load, even on a
| local network. Searches and filters flicker as you type and take
| a while to return. Scrolling fast in the web UI gets
| choppy/laggy.
|
| 2. The native app (at least in the case of Apple TV) is either
| nonexistent or terrible. I've been using Swiftfin since it was
| one of the first alpha versions, and it constantly lost pairing
| with my Jellyfin instance. When it did work, which was very
| cryptic and usually required re-enrolling the client every time,
| it would randomly fail to load things, and the UI was very choppy
| as well. I haven't used the native apps on other platforms, but I
| imagine they are equally or more janky, because the Apple TV is
| comparatively very beefy hardware-wise vs. most other platforms.
|
| 3. The polling for new media is slow. I upped it to 10 minutes
| (the quickest possible setting) but I shudder to think what a
| full scan of a media library every 10 minutes is doing to my
| disks. Why doesn't it use file watchers and webhooks for new
| content notification?
|
| 4. The homepage has very little actionable info and doesn't work
| for browsing. It's not like Netflix or any of the other services
| where you can boot it up and see a bunch of different categories,
| as well as your "list". It has playlists, but you have to drill
| down to see them. You can go to "Movies -> Suggestions" and it
| has a little bit, but nothing like Netflix does. No real
| recommendation engine.
|
| 5. You have to maintain your own trailers or use an app like
| Infuse that can download its own trailers.
|
| 6. You have to separately configure tiles to be rendered if you
| want a nice seeking experience where it shows a live preview as
| you scrub through the timeline.
|
| 7. Movies and TV Shows are separated even though pretty much
| every other platform doesn't separate them, which requires you to
| click into one of 2 options before you can do almost anything.
|
| That said, it's still far better and less janky than Plex was
| before I switched, and Infuse actually plays back HDR / Dolby
| Vision content correctly.
|
| Does anyone else have qualms with Jellyfin? And how does Plex
| compare to any of these gripes?
| muppetman wrote:
| Plex has a lot more polish. However, Plex also tries to shove
| stuff down your throat. If you want to share your meeting with
| friends, you need to have a Kodi pass or some bollocks.
| Jellyfin is 100% free. Certainly it is not as polished though,
| but I managed to use it with my friend who are not very
| technically literate, and it works very well for them. Every
| release improve the polish a little!
|
| Edit: New media shows up for me pretty much straight away
| without having to do anything. Not sure what's happening there
| for you.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > However, Plex also tries to shove stuff down your throat
|
| Unpinning the trash every few months gets tedious. It turns
| out, I want the stuff I pinned, not anything else.
| RajT88 wrote:
| You are not wrong. But it is still an amazing piece of software
| for self hosting.
|
| My biggest gripe is the sometimes hilariously strange behavior
| picking artwork:
|
| https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/10494
|
| Other weird things I have been able to DIY. I wrote my own
| auto-updater and Live TV listing grabber.
| ycombinatornews wrote:
| Agree on the DIY too! Added a _fresh_ trailer before a movie
| and it makes the experience close to cinema
| patrickk wrote:
| For live tv listings, there are companion apps like Ersatztv
| and Tunarr (easier to use than Ersatztv but less features)
| which feed into the live tv section in Jellyfin. You create
| 24/7 "tv stations" running whichever collection of local
| media files you wish to have in a "channel". It's great if
| you plop down and can't decide what to watch, or want to
| replicate the look and feel of childhood cartsoon, right down
| to inserting 90s ads in between episodes.
|
| You can use Ersatztv to create an automatically updated
| playlist, based on a Trakt or IMDB list. Back in the day,
| there was/is a a cool addon for Kodi called "PseudoLiveTV"
| and these apps replicate this functionality.
|
| So you can have an always updated Christopher Nolan
| collection, Halloween movies, westerns, 24/7 90s cartoons,
| BBC nature documentaries or whatever.
|
| You can pull any imaginable tv or movie list from Kometa
| using Ersatztv:
|
| https://kometa.wiki/
|
| See here for one idea:
| https://youtu.be/Ibaj6NiS8xM?si=eiPhTzZuwGAwa8Id
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Hm, that sounds vastly jankier than Plex per your description.
| I have _never_ had to wait for any UI element to load in plex,
| local or remote, including thumbnails. Everything is almost
| always instantaneous. I 've tried the demo instance of Jellyfin
| a few times to see if it has improved and my impression was
| that it's a complete joke, not a serious plex alternative.
| danparsonson wrote:
| I have Jellyfin on my local network and it works like a
| dream. I used to use Plex and, at least for my needs, one was
| a straightforward replacement for the other. The web UI is
| clean and snappy and just works.
| lodovic wrote:
| I have the opposite experience. I tried to setup Plex a few
| times but always ran into issues with getting ads, having to
| make a Plex account, and dealing with free/paid features. I
| just couldn't get it to work without ads and all the hassle.
| Instead I installed Jellyfin on a NUC running Docker,
| downloaded the app from the play store onto my TV, and it
| just works, no delays, no lag.
| russelg wrote:
| Re:
|
| 2. https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin/issues/776
|
| 3. If you use radarr/sonarr, you can add Jellyfin as a
| connection. When they import a file, they will notify Jellyfin
| to process it.
| amatecha wrote:
| Whoaaa I was not aware of #3! Amazing, thanks. Got a few
| friends to share that information with as well :)
| bombcar wrote:
| I use Infuse as a front-end to Jellyfin on Apple TV - and don't
| even have to pay for it as I encode something it doesn't care
| to charge for.
|
| My server running Jellyfin has something setup with the kernel
| that it notices new files almost instantly.
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| As a jellyfin fan myself, I'd like to address a couple of your
| points.
|
| For 1, 2, 3(?), 4, you appear to be referring to the Apple TV
| client, which is written in an entirely different language and
| frameworks, and entirely different authors. (This is due to the
| excessive limitations on languages put in place by apple in
| their ecosystem).
|
| Jellyfin has dozens of other platforms.
|
| In regard to #3, Jellyfin does use file watchers.
|
| For #5, there is a setting to grab trailers. Additionally, if
| the default metadata providers aren't getting you what you
| want, there is a baked in library of more than a dozen
| alternative metadata providers and a variety of other things
| you can use to augment what your media library provides.
|
| For #6, I'm not sure if you're just referring to the Apple
| client again, but I'll add that the "Jellyscrub" feature is
| turned off by default, but if turned on, it will automatically
| generate video scrub images.
|
| For #7, idk. I guess it's a stylistic choice? Why is there
| Sonarr and Radarr?
|
| Anyway, I'm just a user, but, I'm also a Jelly-stan. So, I'd
| highly recommend you browse through the configuration options a
| bit more, particularly in regard to plugins and the many
| settings available in each of libraries' individual
| configurations.
| lukevp wrote:
| Thanks for the detailed reply, I'll look through my
| configuration and see if I can find where the issues are with
| the file watching. You're right, many of them are likely
| because I have to use Infuse, due to the native Apple TV
| client being so bad.
|
| When I say there is UI jank and lag, what I mean is that
| content re-renders and shifts around when you search, results
| flash in and out with loading animations. the placeholder
| tiles are clearly visible and I can see the tiles loading in
| when I scroll. This happens in both the web client and Apple
| TV. I believe the issue is the API design that's dictating
| how clients fetch and load data, some virtualization in the
| frontend implementation, and a lack of prefetching/caching.
|
| I have a 10 gig network to a very fast NAS setup and a very
| small media library. the image assets should be able to be
| cached/streamed/prefetched from the server so that I do not
| ever see a placeholder tile (maybe if you jump ahead like 1/2
| the library, then that makes sense).
|
| Perhaps this is one of those things where people haven't seen
| what's really possible performance-wise from a local server
| and they're OK with something that feels like a webpage. But
| nothing feels like a native app that just has all my content
| there all the time. It feels like a remote service even
| though it's < 1 ms away on a hardwired multigig network. Does
| that make sense? Do you agree with that?
| pohuing wrote:
| About 6, jellyfin also landed trick play images recently,
| which gives you a preview image when hovering the progress
| bar.
| nativeit wrote:
| It's not really fair to blame Apple for those dev's poor
| product, nor for Jellyfin's choice not to support an iOS
| client of their own. Plex has a fantastic iOS app, the Plex
| Music app is one of the prettiest music players ever
| produced. VLC has a fully-functional iOS app. Home
| Assistant's iOS client is indistinguishable from its Android
| client. The list of self-hosted apps that have great iOS
| companion apps is long and diverse.
|
| This myth that Apple's ecosystem is so stifling isn't shared
| by the expansive developer community who work on Apple
| devices. It's far from perfect, to be sure, and they may
| overreach with some of their more stringent security and
| privacy controls (but none to my knowledge outright prevent
| apps like Jellyfin from being competitive). If Jellyfin
| _wanted_ to release a high-quality app for Apple devices,
| there 's nothing really stopping them.
|
| I don't mean to suggest that your primary motivation for your
| opinions re: Jellyfin on iOS are the result of blind
| fanaticism, I'm certainly not saying any of this out of some
| tribal loyalty for Apple, either. The frequent partisanship
| surrounding Apple and Microsoft/Android has always been
| strange to me. Among the devices I use every day are a
| custom-built Windows 11 box, an M2 Mac Mini, an older PC
| running PopOS (Ubuntu-based), an iPad, and a Google Pixel.
| They're all tools, and they excel in their own areas. I like
| some things that aren't available to all platforms, and
| attempts to find reasonable alternatives don't always
| prevail. I like my Windows box for MS Flight Simulator,
| Remote Desktop Manager, and Visual Studio. I like my Mac Mini
| for Logic Pro, native Bash terminal, and DEVONthink. I like
| Linux for its infinite versatility and freedom. I like
| Android's customization, and Apple's unbeatable device/OS
| integrations and sync.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| Apple TV doesn't support embedding a web browser
| (WKWebView/UIWebView), which means that the client app
| needs to be completely re-implemented. For a small team of
| volunteers this can be quite a challenging undertaking, and
| will take development time away from other apps.
| mbs159 wrote:
| It is in fact extremely limiting, since you must have a
| Macintosh to create a iOS app, meanwhile you can create
| Android apps on Windows / Macintosh / Linux
| bhaney wrote:
| I have a very different experience from most of your issues, to
| the point where I think something is wrong with your install.
|
| I can scroll through a page of >1000 movie cards and there's no
| choppiness or lag at all in the webUI. The cards have blurhash
| placeholders until the actual thumbnail loads, which is always
| very quick.
|
| Swiftfin for the Apple TV is admittedly very barebones and can
| be choppy when scrolling through big lists, but it has never
| lost pairing or failed to load anything for me.
|
| New media shows up pretty much immediately for me. Did you
| disable the "real time monitoring" setting in your libraries?
| Jellyfin will use something like ionotify or whatever your
| platform/fs supports when it's enabled.
|
| "separately configure tiles to be rendered" is one checkbox,
| assuming you're talking about trickplay images, which was a
| recently added feature and I _think_ is enabled by default for
| new installs.
| lukevp wrote:
| Having placeholders is part of what I'm talking about when I
| say lag, and jank is about dropping frames so that things do
| not appear smoothly animated. Not everyone is as sensitive to
| jank or they're ok with it, but if you use something that
| lacks jank in the animations it feels better even if you
| don't know what jank is.
|
| The media detection thing might be related to Infuse and not
| to Jellyfin itself, since it sounds like everyone else isn't
| having this issue, which is good to know.
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| What sort of hardware are you using to do transcoding of
| the content on the source box? You could try adjusting the
| quality (or type) of the transcoding to potentially improve
| this. Like, perhaps you are trying to transcode into a
| format for which your video card doesn't have built-in
| encoding? (Like, nvenc units on an nvidia chip, if that's
| what you have.)
|
| You could also try setting up directplay, if your stack
| supports that.
|
| Lastly, it might just be a limitation of your host
| hardware. What are you running your jellyfin server on?
| skerit wrote:
| Swiftfin constantly forgets my login on AppleTV too, but then
| again so do _a few_ other apps, so I blame Apple
| thearrow wrote:
| Echoing many of the other replies here - my experience has been
| very different (much better).
|
| The web UI is fine and snappy and using Infuse on Apple TV is
| simply delightful.
|
| The server uses file watchers to update the media library very
| quickly and is light on resources.
|
| I don't need a recommendation engine because... it's my media
| library, presumably I added things to it that I want to watch.
|
| And most importantly, it's open source and not likely to get
| enshittified in the near future like Plex.
| hapticmonkey wrote:
| Have you tried Infuse as the playback app on AppleTV?
|
| It's one of the few apps I'm happy to pay the subscription cost
| for. Well worth it for a well made AP.
|
| Not trying to make this sound like an ad. It's just a legit
| good app.
| radicality wrote:
| I use it too and also pay the subscription. Though I only
| connect to a local synology SMB share with it. Am I missing
| out by not running jellyfin and hooking up Infuse to that?
|
| Infuse is generally really good, but I wish it had a way to
| expose slightly more power user features such as: viewing
| detailed file info (codecs, resolutions, audio-video
| bitrates, stream info for all streams), ways to create
| arbitrary dynamic playlists/folders based on conditions, and
| viewing current stream debug info (MB/s, cache fill, ram
| usage, disk usage etc). Any debug info would be helpful when
| some files seem to kinda work but then crash Infuse. For
| example some 4k/6k/8k ProRes content at around 800Mb/s.
| Network/NAS isn't the issue as it's hardwired 1Gb/s. So then
| I don't even know if some specific variation of ProRes (or
| every) is just unsupported on the appleTV and it goes into
| software decoding, or whether the AppleTV is oom-ing, or what
| exactly is wrong.
| danparsonson wrote:
| Side question, something I've sometimes wondered - why do
| people want trailers? I only have things in my collection that
| I chose to put there, so I already know what they are. Not
| trying to be snarky, I'm honestly curious.
| FrinkleFrankle wrote:
| People making use of autodownloaders or just with very large
| collections generally aren't going to know everything that's
| in their library. It's also just easier when you're trying to
| decide what to watch with a group.
| eisa01 wrote:
| The Apple TV / tvOS app is seeing development towards a new
| release, this discussion is actively updated with the progress
| https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin/discussions/1294
|
| Worst case you may have to pay for Infuse another year,
| although it would have felt better to donate to the development
| of the Apple TV app instead
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Nah - very happy to support Plex with my lifetime pass thanks.
| muppetman wrote:
| Even with all the cruft they keep adding? Tv shows, Live TV,
| other random bollocks you have to keep turning off.
|
| I'm glad I never purchased a licence with the amount of useless
| stuff they keep shoe horning in.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I mean, I don't disagree that those things are silly but I
| haven't had to keep turning them off. I turned them off once,
| years ago when they were introduced, and they have never come
| back. I don't find that to be so onerous that it has kept me
| from enjoying the software. I have my misgivings about the
| direction the company is going, but at least for now they
| haven't ruined the core use case so I'm content.
| muppetman wrote:
| Sorry I wasn't clear I meant keep turning off as they add
| new dumb stuff. I agree once it's off it's off but I had
| that bollocks defaults to on.
| speff wrote:
| I'm not forced to use any of those and when turned off, never
| came back on. This is a commonly mentioned con by
| jellyfin...proponents, but I fail to see how turning a
| setting off is more cumbersome than the jellyfin setup as a
| whole. My users and I are more than satisfied with plex and
| their updates
| ValleZ wrote:
| Jellyfin is not able to group series together and on top of that
| shows everything in random order, why bother with it when there
| are alternatives that can do that?
| russelg wrote:
| What do you mean random order? You can choose the sort order
| for any library yourself.
| ValleZ wrote:
| I have one folder with movies and series. It shows as a
| randomized mix, maybe it uses something like modification
| time by default? It's definitely not by name.
| wang_li wrote:
| In my experience you have to sort shows into directories
| and sub-directories for a series.
|
| My entire jellyfin library is just symlinks into where my
| crap has accumulated over the years.
|
| https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/
| ValleZ wrote:
| I have the series in their own folders. I tried to do a
| more nested structure to no avail. After a day of
| attempts to fix it I switched to Plex and it despite
| having its own quirks just worked fine.
| Sheeny96 wrote:
| What do you mean group series together? If you mean seasons of
| a show, yes it does. If you mean collections, it has them.
| ValleZ wrote:
| Then I could not figure how to make it work. Plex did that
| without any effort from my side though
| fastily wrote:
| First hit on google:
| https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/
| ValleZ wrote:
| Thanks, I can google. For some reason Jellyfin totally
| ignores folder structures for me.
| ValleZ wrote:
| Actually after reading it more carefully I probably see
| why it didn't work for me, but the notes in the page are
| bizarre:
|
| * Avoid special characters such as * in M*A*S*H, use MASH
| instead.
|
| Since when a common ASCII character is a special one?
| What about more common unicode characters I use?
|
| * Do not abbreviate the Season folder with S01 or SE01 or
| alike.
|
| I.e. if I put anything not in the folder named "Season
| XX" it won't work? Ugh... really?
|
| * Season folders shouldn't contain the series name,
| otherwise Jellyfin can in certain cases (Stargate SG-1
| due to the dash and one, for instance) misdetect your
| episodes and put them all under the same season.
|
| Well, how about to fix it?
|
| * Episode numbering for specials may vary from metadata
| provider to metadata provider.
|
| Very helpful, so the "Series XX" required above won't
| always work.
|
| And even if everything above fails why not to sort by
| name? It should not be hard for any engineer, right?
| Larrikin wrote:
| Jellyfin feels like its almost to where Plex was 5 years ago.
| They are catching up fairly quickly and I think I wouldn't bother
| with a Plex pass if I was coming in completely fresh.
|
| But it is not as good as Plex currently. I have a lifetime pass
| and there is no reason for me to switch. I personally am fine
| with Plex adding features, so long as they are not taking
| anything away. They've had a couple missteps but absolutely
| nothing that would make me want to switch to an experience that
| is definitely worse.
|
| I'll give Jellyfin 3 years and then reevaluate and see how I
| feel.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Plex uses cloud-based authentication, which means Plex Inc. is
| holding the keys to your library. I switched to JellyFin
| because I was not comfortable with that arrangement.
| loughnane wrote:
| I said it elsewhere, but this was the turning point for me as
| well.
| Larrikin wrote:
| What meaningful keys do they hold to my library if everything
| is sitting on my hard drive waiting to be switched over the
| moment something better comes along or Plex makes themselves
| worse?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| As far as I'm aware Plex media server still has the option to
| whitelist subnets for auth bypass. I don't know if there is
| an option to do purely local authentication, but I don't
| believe it's accurate that the company is holding the keys to
| your library.
| notatoad wrote:
| >holding the keys to your library
|
| but it's still on my hard drive. if i can't log in to plex
| for some reason, i'll install jellyfin. or mount it as a
| network drive and play the files with VLC. it's not like
| they're locking away my content behind their authentication,
| all they're locking away behind that auth is my ability to
| access my media _through plex_.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Are they not also injecting ad-supported streaming content
| into your library by default? Yes, there is an option to
| disable this, but it is the default and needs to be
| disabled at the user level (afaik).
| Larrikin wrote:
| This is introducing a distraction to the point and is
| entirely unrelated to the point being made. Voice this
| complaint as a top level discussion if you actually want
| it to be discussed.
| notatoad wrote:
| no?
| BeetleB wrote:
| This is all too often an invalid criticism.
|
| https://www.howtogeek.com/303282/how-to-use-plex-media-
| serve...
|
| It's a mere setting not to have to use cloud authentication
| within your home network.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Or even on the internetz if you wish
| apitman wrote:
| Fun fact: Jellyfin runs natively on Windows. Combined with
| something like Cloudflare Tunnel it's probably the easiest way to
| host a media server without needing to be a Linux admin.
| yegle wrote:
| Cloudflare Tunnel only works if you access it via a web browser
| right?
|
| I'd prefer using Tailscale so that I can also access it in
| their native apps on Android and Android TV.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Cloudflare Tunnel can be authenticated via other means like
| JWT, but that is definitely a non-starter since the apps
| don't support it. Tailscale would definitely be better.
| apitman wrote:
| I haven't tried it with Cloudflare specifically, but I
| believe you should be able to just put the domain name in as
| the server address in the mobile and TV apps.
| Sakos wrote:
| I'm not sure why it wouldn't work with the apps? I have my
| jellyfin server behind a CF tunnel and I can access it in the
| Android app by my domain.
| yegle wrote:
| Oh I see. I confused Cloudflare Tunnel with Cloudflare
| Access.
|
| Yes Cloudflare Tunnel can work with Jellyfin apps, but: 1)
| this exposed your Jellyfin to the world, and you are one
| vulnerable away to get owned, and 2) like other sibling
| posts mentioned, this is against their ToS to host
| streaming service on free plan on their platform.
| TomJansen wrote:
| I though Cloudflare forbade streaming via their network? Did
| their ToS change?
| gosub100 wrote:
| I was actually surprised to see how much .NET stuff it pulled
| in on the Linux install. Nothing wrong with that, just hadn't
| seen it before.
| robotburrito wrote:
| I've tried a few times to use software like this but nothing for
| me competes with the simplicity of a shared file folder and VLC.
| Sheeny96 wrote:
| I can run this via Kodi's jellyfin plugin, via OSMC on a
| raspberry pi, on my living room TV. It automatically uses my tv
| remote, and says in big letters "TV Shows" and "Movies". Anyone
| at my house can use it, with ease, even the absolute least
| technical.
| yegle wrote:
| Something like Plex/Jellyfin will make it simpler to share your
| library to your friends or family (over e.g. Tailscale).
|
| The whole *arr thing makes it even better with automated
| download and upgrade.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Jellyfin's "management" of my media catalog strongly drove me
| away from Jellyfin. It was terrible at dealing with seasons of
| shows, with dealing with subdirectories. So much frustration.
|
| Casting from my phone also got de-synced & broke a lot. I
| couldn't find a good way to skip/scrub forwards or backwards a
| little bit. Sometimes the themeing would break & the app became
| unusable without restart.
|
| It was really really cool having jellyfin-mpv-shim running on
| my desktop, and Chromecast elsewhere. But Jellyfin was straight
| up not working for me, not listing a bunch of my media, not
| making it navigable, and the Android app's dodginess all ruined
| things for me. I went back to UPnP/DLNA, whose apps are a
| little cruder (Gerbera for MediaServer, BubbleUPnP for control,
| Rygel PlayBin for MediaRenderer), everything basically just
| works and it's baked into many devices/tv's.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I tried Kodi a bunch of times. Nobody else in my house
| would/could use it. Half the time I'd end up stuck in some
| weird modal menu I couldn't get out of, so I can hardly blame
| them. Its ui is really weird.
|
| Jellyfin fixed that. Other people in my house use it easily, a
| friend uses the web ui over Tailscale, and my messing-with-tech
| versus watching-things ratio is finally looking good.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| I use Jellyfin and it just works but had problems with the client
| on iOS. Vidhub is a reliable client solution I've found, it's
| pretty inexpensive. Maybe the Jellyfin client is fine I didn't
| spend a lot of time with it.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| I tried jellyfin after my most recent nas upgrade (pi5 w/
| external drives). It seemed _really_ nice, but it also worked
| extremely badly for my specific use case. It seems to want a
| specific folder structure for all of your media, and its layout
| conflicted badly with my existing conventions. My partner has our
| media collection obsessively organized by country, then by genre.
| Jellyfin made some kind of attempt at categorizing this, and just
| ended up showing us tons of previews for things we did NOT have
| (eg, our British folder was interpreted as us having The Great
| British Baking Show, which we do NOT have). It seems like every
| media solution wants to ignore your folder structure and present
| some fake hierarchy, which really doesn't work at all for me.
|
| We ended up buying an apple tv and installing the vlc app which
| connects via smb and is happy to show us the original folder
| structure.
| triyambakam wrote:
| Well this is very timely and relevant. I usually access jellyfin
| on my network devices like `http://homecloud:8096` but now that I
| have been exploring adding other services, remembering the ports
| is getting tedious. I also am trying to be forward thinking about
| external access in the future.
|
| Looks like I could use some combination of Caddy, Nginx Proxy
| Manager, Tailscale? What's the simplest setup?
| dantetheinferno wrote:
| I expose my jellyfin to 80 via nginx. Other services stay not
| exposed, and only available on my local network. I don't bother
| with tailscale.
| dc3k wrote:
| im running a pihole so i take advantage of lighttpd that it
| uses, with the mod_proxy configuration. i can then do something
| like the following to have a friendly url on my local network
|
| $HTTP["host"] == "jellyfin.dc" { proxy.server = ( "" => ( (
| "host" => "192.168.1.99", "port" => "8096" ) ) ) }
| walthamstow wrote:
| If you run a DNS server on your Tailscale or use their Magic
| DNS you can navigate to http://jellyfin and it'll load.
|
| Personally I don't muck about with any of that and just have a
| link in my bookmarks bar that takes me to
| http://<tailscaleip>:port :D
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| DNS still needs to specify ports though?
| mattbaker wrote:
| I've been using caddy, very easy to set up reverse proxies, and
| it generates a local root CA you can install on your machines
| at home so you get SSL for free. Nothing you couldn't also rig
| with nginx, I just enjoyed the simplicity
|
| I've got pihole running so that's my home dns server, I have
| custom domains with a home-only TLD (I think ".internal" is
| cleared for use now?). So something like
| https://plex.homecloud.internal can load up plex, I can only
| assume jellyfin could do the same.
|
| I've actually been using ZeroTier instead of tailscale for
| external access and I've been very happy with it, but I know
| lots of people love tailscale and I'm sure it's great too
| gpspake wrote:
| Traefik has that same auto ssl with LE that caddy does.
| That's what originally drew me to caddy - which I still use
| for stuff - but I just recently started working on something
| configured for Traefik out of the box and discovered it was
| pretty much the same experience. Just FYI.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I just got mine working a few months ago on FreeBSD using
| cloudflared. I paid for a cloudflare DNS and run cloudflared
| (in a jail, which is optional). Here is a redacted example of
| my tunnel.yml file (should work similarly on other OS's)
|
| # cat /root/.cloudflared/fbsd0_tunnel.yml
| tunnel: <redacted UUID> credentials-file:
| /root/.cloudflared/<different UUID>.json ingress:
| # Example of an HTTP request over a Unix socket: -
| hostname: <redacted full cloudflare URL, no port appended>
| service: http://localhost:8096 #this is where jellyfin would
| normally run # Example of a rule responding to
| traffic with an HTTP status: - service:
| http_status:404
| solumos wrote:
| I'm able to do it with just Nginx -- jellyfin supports being
| proxied behind a subpath, but some other services might not.
| LelouBil wrote:
| I like traefik
| hagbard_c wrote:
| I've been using _nginx_ for more than a decade now, before that
| I used _lighttpd_. Both work well for the purpose of reverse
| proxying services like _Jellyfin_. I do not use Caddy because I
| prefer to keep certificate management centralised in its own
| (Proxmox-managed) container. I have about 50 services running
| in Proxmox-managed containers (some containers run more than a
| single service, others are service-specific) proxied through a
| single _nginx_ instance, the setup is reliable and performs
| well. Since _nginx_ is widely used there is usually a config
| file available which can be used to base your own installation
| on. Here 's what it looks like in my case: #
| kijkbuis.example.org server { listen
| 80; listen [::]:80; server_name
| kijkbuis.example.org; include
| /etc/nginx/snippets/enforcehttps.conf; }
| server { listen 443 ssl http2; listen
| [::]:443 ssl http2; server_name
| kijkbuis.example.org; ssl_certificate
| /etc/letsencrypt/live/kijkbuis.example.org/fullchain.pem;
| ssl_certificate_key
| /etc/letsencrypt/live/kijkbuis.example.org/privkey.pem;
| set $jellyfin 192.168.1.51; resolver 192.168.1.1
| valid=30; add_header X-Frame-Options
| "SAMEORIGIN"; add_header X-XSS-Protection "1;
| mode=block"; add_header X-Content-Type-Options
| "nosniff"; # the google-related domains are
| there to enable chromecast support add_header
| Content-Security-Policy "default-src https: data: blob:
| http://image.tmdb.org; style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline';
| script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline'
| https://www.gstatic.com/cv/js/sender/v1/cast_sender.js
| https://www.gstatic.com/eureka/clank/108/cast_sender.js
| https://www.gstatic.com/eureka/clank/107/cast_sender.js
| https://www.gstatic.com/eureka/clank/cast_sender.js
| https://www.youtube.com blob:; worker-src 'self' blob:;
| connect-src 'self'; object-src 'none'; frame-ancestors 'self'";
| location = / { return 302
| https://$host/web/; } location / {
| # Proxy main Jellyfin traffic proxy_pass
| http://$jellyfin:8096; proxy_set_header
| Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP
| $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-
| For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
| proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
| proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Protocol $scheme;
| proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $http_host;
| # Disable buffering when the nginx proxy gets very resource
| heavy upon streaming proxy_buffering off;
| } # location block for /web - This is purely
| for aesthetics so /web/#!/ works instead of having to go to
| /web/index.html/#!/ location = /web/ {
| # Proxy main Jellyfin traffic proxy_pass
| http://$jellyfin:8096/web/index.html;
| proxy_set_header Host $host;
| proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
| proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
| proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
| proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Protocol $scheme;
| proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $http_host; }
| location /socket { # Proxy Jellyfin
| Websockets traffic proxy_pass
| http://$jellyfin:8096; proxy_http_version
| 1.1; proxy_set_header Upgrade
| $http_upgrade; proxy_set_header Connection
| "upgrade"; proxy_set_header Host $host;
| proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
| proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
| proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
| proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Protocol $scheme;
| proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $http_host; }
| }
| c-hendricks wrote:
| I use traefik to proxy to containers, pihole to provide dns for
| "*.mydomain.com", and tailscale to avoid opening ports
|
| The end result is a valid HTTPS experience inside the network
| and outside (as long as tailscale is active on whatever device
| I'm using). And if I decide to ditch tailscale it's just a
| matter of mapping ports 80 and 443.
|
| https://github.com/mikew/homelab/tree/public/services/revers...
|
| https://github.com/mikew/homelab/tree/public/services/dns
|
| https://github.com/mikew/homelab/tree/public/services/tailsc...
| Valord wrote:
| The simplest setup is to run jellyfin and tailscale in docker
| with docker compose utilizing tailscale serve. You will get
| automatic https and a simple reverse proxy with tailscale
| serve.
|
| The Kuma example here is decent. Replace kuma image and ports
| with jellyfin. https://www.elliotblackburn.com/how-to-use-
| tailscale-serve-w...
| calmoo wrote:
| To anyone considering using Jellyfin - it simply does not work
| properly for large libraries (1000+ movies/shows) in my
| experience.
| bhaney wrote:
| I use Jellyfin for my 32TB media library of 1600 movies, 70 TV
| shows (5500 episodes), 500 music albums, and 10,000 books. It
| works perfectly fine with no issues or slowdowns.
| dbetteridge wrote:
| Agreed, have several tb of TV, movies and anime and no issues
| with sync or scroll.
|
| Most of my issues are with the Auth system and random log
| outs, but I suspect that's my own network.
| fastily wrote:
| I've got 90tb of Linux isos consisting of tens of thousands
| of files on 168tb of spinning rust. I'm running reasonably
| powerful hardware though (5600x + 128gb ram), suspect GP is
| bottlenecked by hardware
| eco wrote:
| Yeah, my collection isn't that big, but my friend's Jellyfin
| which I use all the time has 4000+ movies and 400+ shows
| (11,000+ episodes). Works just as well as my significantly
| smaller collection.
| nvllsvm wrote:
| What about it isn't working well for you?
|
| I have ~2000 movies (21TB), 435 shows (22TB), ~26000 songs
| (1TB); all running on an Intel 4770k w/ 32GB of RAM, a SATA SSD
| for the Jellyfin database, and a Tesla P4 for transcoding. It
| works well now and even worked decently before switching to the
| Tesla P4 for transcoding.
| loughnane wrote:
| Lot's of criticism on here, but I love Jellyfin.
|
| I came from Plex a few years ago after their login server had an
| outage and I was unable to access the media that was on my local
| computer. Before that I'd been annoyed by them pushing TV shows
| and since then I've heard about them giving reports on what
| people have watched. All in all I'm happy.
|
| My setup is Jellyfin in a docker container running on a debian
| machine with an i7-1165G7. It's got a mounted NFS link to my
| Synology NAS with all the files. The main client I used is
| Android TV running on an NVIDIA shield.
|
| All in all, it's been great. I've got a few nitpicks---loading on
| ios app isn't as fast as I like if I try to jump to the middle of
| a movie---but all in all it's great for just watching movies, tv
| shows, videos, &c. All without any link to the outside world.
| It's lovely.
|
| They also are producing new features at a nice clip and have a
| strong community. I expect it to keep getting better and better,
| but honestly even if it never changed I'd happily use it for
| years.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Every once in a while I knock around the idea of migrating off
| Plex and onto Jellyfin. For a long time it was that sharing
| libraries with friends was a pain, but now literally the only
| thing stopping me is that they don't have a ps5 app, and that's
| how one of my friends uses my plex server lol. If they get one,
| it's all over for plex (in my friend group).
| dbetteridge wrote:
| Ps5 Web browser with a bookmark?
|
| But I hear ya, console support tends to lag behind because of
| the rules and costs of app dev for them
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| I mean I could also just tell him it's 2025 and there's 700
| ways for him to use plex on his tv, but it's also just kind
| of funny to me so I keep it going.
| bhaney wrote:
| Keep in mind that you don't necessarily need to "migrate" all
| at once. There's nothing wrong with running both Plex and
| Jellyfin pointed at the same media library, and using
| whichever one has the better client for a particular
| platform.
| loughnane wrote:
| This is a good point. I did this for probably 6 months
| before switching over completely.
| walthamstow wrote:
| I tried this but using two servers means you lose or
| fragment all your watch history. If I have to remember
| where I am in a series myself, I might as well just use
| VLC.
| theossuary wrote:
| There is JellyPlexWatch, which will sync the databases
| between jellyfin and Plex. I've been using both next to
| each other for a while with that setup to sync watch
| history. Honestly I haven't been able to move over to
| Jellyfin after the drama around the integration of skip
| intro, but I hope things get better.
|
| https://github.com/luigi311/JellyPlex-Watched
| jillyboel wrote:
| > the drama around the integration of skip intro
|
| what are you referring to?
| defrost wrote:
| A project to integrate additional "media segments" to
| identify introductions and end credits for auto-skipping.
|
| There was something that worked, going forward the core
| team decided to focus on a tight stream lined core and
| decruft 'features'.
|
| Discussion:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1dbiw90/skip
| _in...
|
| https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-intro-skipper-project-dead
|
| Seems like a temporary (indefinite) suspension and a
| storm in a teacup from those attached to the feature.
| defrost wrote:
| More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43064585
| crobibero wrote:
| We contacted Sony asking about creating an app. The TLDR of
| that conversation is they said "Don't call us, we'll call
| you". Open source never really mattered, they're not
| interested.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Really? I assumed you'd just license an sdk similar to
| creating a game. They only allow certain apps?
| kelnos wrote:
| I love Jellyfin too, but there are a bunch of rough edges I run
| into often, like:
|
| Chromecast support is flaky. Most of the time when I cast from
| my Android phone, the app immediately "forgets" that there's
| something playing back on the Chromecast (even though it's
| still connected to it), so I can't control playback at all.
| It's also hit or miss if the Chromecast will successfully play
| the media if Jellyfin decides it needs to transcode it.
|
| So I got a little NUC-like box (Intel N100), and installed
| Jellyfin on it (it was previously running on an old 2012 Mac
| Mini running Linux). I connected it directly to the TV and
| installed jellyfin-media-player on it, set to auto-login and
| start X on boot, with a minimal session that just runs JMP only
| in fullscreen mode. I use JMP on my laptop, or the Android app,
| to control it. JMP will randomly lose its connection to the
| Jellyfin server (even though it's running on the same machine),
| and won't try to reconnect, so nearly every time I go to use
| it, I have to ssh in and restart JMP so it reconnects.
|
| On top of that, I get occasional audio dropouts when watching
| 4k content, and sometimes see 4k video stuttering (yes,
| hardware decoding is enabled for playback, and I've verified in
| the logs that it's being used). At those times, the box is
| around 40% idle, and intel_gpu_top shows that the decode and
| render bits have what I think should be more than enough
| headroom to avoid that sort of thing. I understand JMP uses
| libmpv for playback, so out of curiosity I tried playing video
| using mpv directly, and somehow JMP's player uses about 50%
| more CPU than mpv standalone does, and I don't hear any
| dropouts or see any stuttering on the same media. I get that a
| video player that's embedded in an application might have some
| overhead, but 50% is a bit much.
|
| I get that Jellyfin is maintained by volunteers (I also
| maintain open source in my spare time, so I know how tough it
| can be to be responsive to user requests), but these issues are
| quite frustrating. I don't want to use something closed like
| Plex or Emby (which may or may not be better), so it's still
| the right trade off for me. And what it can do is truly
| amazing. I love that I can play things while I'm on the go,
| VPN'ing to my home network, and Jellyfin will transcode down to
| a crappy-enough bitrate to fit within the confines of my
| garbage Comcast upload speed.
| thedanbob wrote:
| > Chromecast support is flaky. Most of the time when I cast
| from my Android phone, the app immediately "forgets" that
| there's something playing back on the Chromecast (even though
| it's still connected to it), so I can't control playback at
| all. It's also hit or miss if the Chromecast will
| successfully play the media if Jellyfin decides it needs to
| transcode it.
|
| This might be more the Chromecast's fault as I've had a
| similar experience with Plex.
| robhlt wrote:
| You should check out jellyfin-mpv-shim, it basically hooks up
| mpv to Jellyfin's cast system, so you can control mpv from
| other Jellyfin apps. I have a setup similar to your NUC and
| it works really well.
| s0rce wrote:
| I came from Kodi and Jellyfin has been great. I just run it on
| Ubuntu on a mini PC with an external hard drive and its working
| great. Stream to my TV with an nvidia shield.
| foobiekr wrote:
| I love jellyfin but their web model is just bizarre.
|
| Why on earth, when you go to 192.168.whatever:8096 does it ask
| you what server you want to connect to? Like.. THE ONE SERVING
| THE PAGE.
|
| Just now I decided to connect to Jellyfin over tailscale and
| it's asking me to add a server; on 100.xxx, which is the
| jellyfin server which served the UI. And it doesn't seem to
| want to accept any answer as to what the server URL is.
| polymo1 wrote:
| I am pretty sure that's a config option
| foobiekr wrote:
| It may be, but it's also the default behavior and ..
| really... makes no sense at all.
| bhaney wrote:
| While the most common jellyfin distribution bundles the
| server and web UI together, the web UI (jellyfin-web) is a
| separate project from the server (jellyfin) and can be used
| to connect to multiple backends (which can run on the same or
| different hosts), which is why that functionality and UI is
| there. For what its worth, the web client _should_ be
| autodetecting the server it was bundled with and using it
| without asking you each time. The only time it didn 't do
| that for me was when my network was misconfigured and some
| requests were getting swallowed, which confused the client
| and caused it to fall back to the server-connection UI.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| > Why on earth, when you go to 192.168.whatever:8096 does it
| ask you what server you want to connect to?
|
| This lets you connect to and play another friend's Jellyfin
| rather nicely. I think it's also so the HTML and JS that
| forms the web interface can basically be the app as well.
|
| > And it doesn't seem to want to accept any answer as to what
| the server URL is.
|
| Should be "http://192.168.100.xxx:8096" - make sure your
| jellyfin isn't just set to listen on localhost only though.
| foobiekr wrote:
| If you can connect to a friend's jellyfin, you can also get
| the UI package delivered from the friend's server.
|
| They've sort of conflated three different ideas - one, the
| non-browser clients are separate and need a way to select
| multiple servers from a common wrapper app; two, for
| development purposes separate the server of the UI package
| from the backend being accessed; three, have a server based
| application.
|
| None of these items are uncommon, they are just commonly
| solved by making the separate front-end server an exception
| rather than a weird and senseless default. Most people
| solve this by making the dev mode case an exception.
|
| Moreover, why not just add a button to the UI to
| automatically connect to the _UI serving server_ instead of
| having the user type it?
|
| I love jellyfin, but this stuff is just terrible design for
| out of box experience or connecting from a new client
| instance, and it breaks when you're traversing a network
| boundary with something like Tailscale.
| jchw wrote:
| Just for what it's worth, I've never had that screen pop up
| on my Jellyfin instance. I'm just using the official OCI
| image with a pretty boring configuration. Maybe there's
| something weird going on? I don't think it's expected in the
| basic use case.
| behringer wrote:
| It may show up on first login. It should auto detect the
| server and offer that as an option to click on.
| jchw wrote:
| I just gave it a shot, by running: $
| podman run --rm -it -p 8096:8096/tcp jellyfin/jellyfin
|
| And I get the "Welcome to Jellyfin!" page, which lets you
| set the language/setup a user account. So I think in
| general if you are just running the OCI image it is not
| typically expected to see the server list. (I'm sure it's
| still possible to get to, and presumably you can wind up
| there if some RPC fails.)
|
| That said, I might've found a clue: if you re-run it, you
| get another randomized hostname, and _then_ you get the
| server select page. If I clear cookies and reload, it
| again skips the server select page. So it seems like if
| you have the hostname of your jellyfin instance change,
| say, by starting a new Docker container with a different
| name, but have it accessible at the same place, that
| might cause this weirdness.
|
| Other issues may include improperly configured reverse
| proxies. (If you're using a reverse proxy, you should
| make sure it's configured right for Jellyfin's websockets
| and CORS usage and potentially some other stuff.)
| behringer wrote:
| Correct. I usually only see it when I have a proxy issue,
| eg, my jellyfin is flat out down and my proxy is still
| up.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Because they separate the client from the server. You can
| connect to any other local instance of jellyfin locally, not
| just the one that is served at the current address
| foobiekr wrote:
| This is silly however for the typical use case of a web
| browser connecting to a server and very silly as default
| behavior.
| phito wrote:
| I literally have seen that screen only once and then
| forgot about it. It's really not a big deal.
| __float wrote:
| Well, that commenter seems to have chosen it as their
| single pet peeve against Jellyfin.
| stevenwalton wrote:
| > Why on earth, when you go to 192.168.whatever:8096 does it
| ask you what server you want to connect to?
|
| I don't know what the answer is, but I ran into this when I
| was trying to harden my systemd settings. I'll link my
| override below and maybe someone can give something more
| conclusive (and any suggestions to my override or for other
| services are greatly welcomed. I'm happy to add even ones I
| don't use). Where I hit this error was when messing with
| RestrictAddressFamilies, which are network socket addresses.
| For example, when I restrict AF_PPPOX or AF_UNIX I get that
| issue. IIRC I also hit that issue when I had moved a file,
| but I forgot which one (I noticed it got autogenerated
| again). So I suspect it has to do with access to some file
| location where it stashes a config file. Fwiw, this works
| with tailscale just fine.
|
| https://github.com/stevenwalton/.dotfiles/blob/master/skelet.
| ..
|
| (docs for RestrictAddressFamilies) https://www.freedesktop.or
| g/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
| dagi3d wrote:
| Depending on your needs, you can also connect to your
| 192.168.x.y machine while connected to tailscale by
| advertising that subnet
| ews wrote:
| I have the exact same setup, with tailscale I can watch my
| media from anywhere on my phone or web. Highly recommended and
| I honestly do not understand the criticism.
| mmcnl wrote:
| I made the transition the other way around. I tried Emby, then
| Jellyfin, and finally Plex. Plex is just much better,
| especially with Plex Pass. The apps are everywhere and they
| just work (Tizen, iOS, web, etc.). The Jellyfin apps are
| subpar, poorly translated, buggy, and not available on all
| platforms (looking at you Tizen). Plex is basically Dropbox in
| the infamous Dropbox HN comment.
| crtasm wrote:
| You could note the price difference too.
| atombender wrote:
| I was a Plex user for the longest time, with PMS on a Linux
| box and the Plex app on Apple TV and iPhone. However:
|
| * It's always been quite slow and flaky. Library not scanning
| things, media library not connectable, etc.
|
| * Often very long delay from starting a show until it
| actually plays. Often very slow scrubbing/skipping.
|
| * The automatic subtitle downloading never works. The manual
| subtitle downloading never works.
|
| * The UI was getting on my nerves trying to offer
| "recommendations" -- I download my own stuff and don't need
| an app to try to push my own media through some kind of
| algorithm that's broken -- and constantly promoting the Plex
| streaming service.
|
| I got fed up and set up Jellyfin with Infuse as the client.
| Now shows start immediately with no buffering delay, never
| have any glitchy library issues, and the subtitle downloading
| just works.
|
| My main issue is that Jellyfin's matching can be quite poor.
| It often doesn't understand when episodes belong to a show.
| Also, Infuse's UI is pretty bad and doesn't align at all with
| how I think media should be accessed.
| fastily wrote:
| Bemused by the number of people complaining about a _free_ and
| open source project. A quick review of the git history tells me
| that it's maintained by a very small group of people who
| generously work on this in their free time. Luckily jellyfin does
| accept PRs, so if you think the project needs improvements, then
| perhaps folks, you can do something about it
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Being free does not exempt a project from criticism. It's not
| like they were yelling about how terrible the project team was,
| just saying the issues they were having when trying to use it.
| scns wrote:
| And that criticism gets you what?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Same thing that praise does. It's a discussion board,
| there's nothing wrong with people discussing the
| shortcomings of a project as well as its good points.
| fastily wrote:
| Agreed, but that's not the point I'm making here. It's not
| like this is some closed-source commercial product where the
| community can't do anything about bugs/lack of features. My
| observation is simple: all of this time people spend
| complaining could be better spent helping to improve the
| project instead
| Larrikin wrote:
| Why can't people voice criticism and then work on the
| projects they want to work on instead of having homework
| and needing to learn the entire Jellyfin code base?
|
| Nobody is personally insulting the devs as being lazy or
| incompetent. The devs can listen or not and they should
| have absolute control on what they implement and when. Its
| entirely reasonable that things they think are fine are
| pain points they don't realize exist because they've just
| gotten used to them. They also might not realize that some
| "wouldn't that be nice" thing they were thinking about
| implementing in the far future is actually something a lot
| of people want in the near term instead. There might also
| be things they just never even thought of.
|
| The users of the software with criticism also aren't forced
| to use the software and should not be expected to implement
| anything they want unless they want to contribute. The
| project being open source ensures that in the future the
| project can be continued, if someone wants to continue it.
| atoav wrote:
| I do not disagree, there are horrible free projects with
| actively user-hostile documentation out there. But jellyfin
| is not that. Most criticism of it that I have heard falls
| either under a matter of taste (" _I_ would do it differently
| "), a specific hardware setup not being supported or a skill
| issue during the installation which has more to do with
| administration of networks and Linux servers than with
| jellyfin.
|
| And as a user of jellyfin myself I don't think these are
| particularly fair points of criticism.
| PessimalDecimal wrote:
| I use jellyfin and love it. It's quality is actually pretty
| stunning for FOSS.
| chgs wrote:
| It's disappointing to see this statement, perhaps a sign of
| the last 15 years.
|
| The highest quality software has always been FOSS, outside of
| specialised niches.
| PessimalDecimal wrote:
| I mostly meant that a media hosting/streaming service that
| is FOSS and has as much fit and finish as Jellyfin, and as
| many integrations as Jellyfin, feels like a huge
| accomplishment. This is a space where there is a ton of
| corporate investment because there's a ton of money to be
| made. And Jellyfin holds its own against offerings by
| Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, etc. That is incredible to
| me.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| It's an excellent OSS project. One of the few I have donated
| to.
|
| In my experience, the majority of people who complain loudly
| about Jellyfin are tied up in the Plex ecosystem and cannot
| fathom leaving it for some reason.
|
| I mean, imagine living with ad-supported streaming content
| being injected into your private instance by default and having
| to tell your users to opt-out of that. Admittedly, it is hard
| to leave such a slippery slope of an ecosystem, especially as a
| paying customer.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| I tried switching to Jellyfin. But the feature parity between
| Plex and Jellyfin just isn't there. This was roughly 6-9
| months ago.
|
| I have a 5.1 surround sound setup with Dolby atmos and 4k HDR
| 10 with Nvidia Shield Pro android TVs as clients. I have Blu-
| ray rips that play completely fine on Plex, but stutter, have
| no sound, or downscale to 2.0 sound on JellyFin.
|
| There are some fixes that involve using a JellyFin server and
| a Kodi media client on Google TV's. This does enable DTS and
| Ddd+ sound. While that technically works, it is very involved
| and feels like many more steps than just using Plex.
|
| If you use a basic 1080p tv with two speakers and lazy
| encodes of media, Jellyfin probably works great for you. If
| you have anything a little more complex then you will
| inevitably see some problems.
|
| This is similar to other open source projects like Ashai. The
| basic features are easy enough to build, but the more
| complicated use cases always require more time and effort,
| and people aren't always willing to do that complicated extra
| effort for free.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| The client story is lacking for sure. But they seem to be
| prioritizing that now. Regardless, what they've achieved as
| an OSS Emby fork is astonishing imo.
|
| On Apple TV, Infuse bridges the client gap. I personally
| prefer paying for a third-party client (for now) to paying
| for a media server that locks transcoding behind a paywall
| and ties my private server to a remote service. YMMV of
| course.
| zeagle wrote:
| I'm lucky, I have a tube 2019 running jellyfin into a 5.1.2
| setup through my avr and DTS/atmos + HDR10/DV work with
| jellyfin. I switched from kodi a few years. Do you have
| Dolby processing and up mix 2.0 turned off in the shield
| settings? Those cause stutters and some issues for me.
| nativeit wrote:
| Are there a lot of people complaining loudly about Jellyfin?
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Yes, I see this quite frequently on r/selfhosted and
| r/plex.
| speff wrote:
| Where on /r/selfhosted?
|
| In the last week, most of the posts are pro-
| Jellyfin[0][1][2] - nearing anti-plex.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ilqh6u/one_
| yea...
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ip8twc/jell
| yfi...
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1iaqqv9/jell
| yfi...
| Cyph0n wrote:
| I have been reading the subreddit for years. I don't
| bookmark threads or comments for later review. And I made
| it clear upfront that this is my personal impression.
| Larrikin wrote:
| >I feel it in my gut despite evidence that I'm wrong
|
| Plex users are all people who are fine self hosting and
| all the problems with that. Plex lifetime pass holders
| are invested for 75 dollars. Nobody is entrenched or
| unwilling to switch if something is better.
|
| Maybe some people also run AdGuard/PiHole on their entire
| network and block all of the injected ads/tracking that
| Plex and your employer inject into our lives. We know
| that companies will always have people doing negative
| things and try to take the good and fight against the
| bad.
|
| Maybe you are just overvaluing something that most people
| don't. Or its a problem only if you just lay down and let
| advertising invade your home.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Cherrypicked threads from the last week from one of two
| subreddits I mentioned is now "evidence"? Low bar eh.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Is it lower than "trust me I saw it" on a fully indexed
| website with advanced search tools that is also one of
| the most famous sources of LLM learning.
| gosub100 wrote:
| our time still has value, even if the developer of the (often
| time-wasting app) isn't remunerated. I don't have a bone to
| pick with JellyFin, but there have been FOSS apps that are best
| avoided and it's fully within our rights to signal that to
| others.
| lukevp wrote:
| I think it's great that it's free and open source so it's
| available to as many people as possible.
|
| I don't really care about the free part though. If I could pay
| for Jellyfin and it would be better, I would happily do it. I
| pay for Infuse so I have something usable on Apple TV even
| though Jellyfin itself is free. I don't care if other people
| don't pay for it.
|
| I would rather pool various other people's money who have the
| same perspective as me to allow one of the Jellyfin
| contributors to prioritize and perform changes in the project
| that I and others value, which raises the boat for all. There's
| no world in which I am going to learn how to contribute to
| Jellyfin to fix something fundamental about the Jellyfin
| architecture, for example. It would take years to even get buy-
| in from the core contributors to have that access. Maybe I
| could spend a few months and clean up minor UI things or
| something, but what's the good of that?
|
| I see this take a lot, where a project being free / OSS means
| that no one should have an opinion on it or that if they don't
| like something, they should fix it themselves. That's literally
| what money is for, so I can transfer wealth for some benefit to
| someone who is better at something than I am, so I can spend my
| time doing things I'm good at. Nothing about that prevents
| Jellyfin from remaining FOSS but at the same time, making
| improvements and receiving and prioritizing community feedback.
| devsda wrote:
| If anyone believes Jellyfin is worth paying for or donating,
| I think it's possible to donate to the Jellyfin project [1].
|
| That's still a donation and shouldn't come attached with any
| expectations or obligations on either party. So, it may not
| be the best route to influence their roadmap.
|
| DigitalOcean & JetBrains are listed as their sponsors. If you
| are their customer, you can share feedback on how much you
| appreciate their support.
|
| 1. https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-how-can-donate-money
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Yes Jellyfin does accept PR's but they don't accept hacks ie
| workarounds for single issue for a particular device won't be
| accepted easily. The maintainers feel using hacks and
| workarounds is not the best way to go for the long term
| maintenance of the project. One of the reasons skip intro took
| so long to get into jellyfin and jellyfin clients as they
| wanted a universal media segment system that can be used for
| other plugin apart from skipintro. It's the same reason
| jellyfin android Tv app has not reached feature parity with
| Plex yet as the dev wants to do it right from the ground up so
| does not like to add device specific workarounds but try to fix
| it in way to not require workarounds.
| squigz wrote:
| Uh... just to be clear, this is a good thing - particularly
| for an open-source project maintained by volunteers, who
| can't (and shouldn't have to) maintain 100 hacks for 200
| different devices. There's so many work that comes attached
| to doing it that way, from having to own the devices, to
| making sure every hack is updated, to providing support for
| them
| integricho wrote:
| sounds like you don't approve of the devs healthy approach to
| the development of this project, but would rather sacrifice
| long term sustainability for quick wins.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| No I am with the devs on this. I am against people
| submitting code without discussing with the maintainers and
| then crapping on them later if the patches don't get
| accepted something like the arguments rust thing for Linux
| kernel. As it just will cause unnecessary friction and if
| the devs/maintainers stop enjoying on the project everyone
| suffers. I have seen hobby open source projects die with
| devs getting tired of arguments and then abandoning the
| project.
| alt187 wrote:
| I think it sounded like that because of the lack of commas
| rather than a bias from GP
| Mainsail wrote:
| What are people using this for? Pirated movies, shows, etc?
|
| Genuinely curious.
| loughnane wrote:
| For movies and TV shows people either rip them off of personal
| collections and/or download them from the internet.
|
| When combined with `yt-dlp` you can use it to download videos
| from your favorite channels. This is especially valuable as
| there's no guarantee the videos will be there for free forever.
|
| It's also a nice place to put family videos and recorded
| sporting events.
| hyperhopper wrote:
| Legally purchased DVDs and home video collections that have
| been legally backed up onto hard drives
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Same. Illegally backed up, in my case, because the DMCA is
| ridiculous and prohibits backing things up unless you crack
| the DRM personally. But I don't care, as that is a stupid law
| and I have the moral right to rip my discs if I want. But the
| content was legally purchased originally which is what
| matters imo.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I have a script that scrapes a few youtube channels which my
| kid uses jellyfin to watch. Youtube is otherwise not allowed,
| too easy to watch all sorts of crap.
| spacebear wrote:
| Same. Big fan of the YouTube metadata plugin.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Didn't know about that. Thanks.
| Frotag wrote:
| I recently found out Jellyfin supports livestreams so I've been
| using it to "cast" my screen to the TV (simplescreenrecorder ->
| nginx's rtmp server -> jellyfin webpage). Theres a few seconds of
| latency I can't get rid of but ime more reliable than chromecast
| / the built-in device discovery.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I believe you could also use VLC (via DLNA I suppose), since
| VLC has a direct chromecast integration in the desktop app.
| poglet wrote:
| I've been using this for years, it's almost perfect but there are
| a few little issues here in there. My TV automatically updated
| the jellfin client which no longer could connect to my server
| that was frustrating. Another update stopped supporting many of
| the plug-ins I enjoyed using. I have issues with thumbnails not
| loading and not knowing how buffering works. I find it difficult
| to troubleshoot issues. 99% of the time it is perfect and I love
| it.
| Borealid wrote:
| Jellyfin's strategy for streaming blu-ray disc folders is to use
| ffmpeg to concatenate (and usually transcode) them to disc, then
| stream the result.
|
| It doesn't work very well - frequently, the concatenation process
| is sitting there running long after the client has disconnected.
| And the devs seem to break it entirely every second release or
| so, just failing to recognize the BDMV as a playable movie at
| all.
| phildenhoff wrote:
| Please don't take this as criticism of your setup, but why are
| you trying to stream Blu-ray Disc folders at all? Why not
| transcode the files?
| Borealid wrote:
| Firsly, I have multiple tens of terabytes of movies (painful
| to duplicate), and I watch them with their original menus in
| Kodi.
|
| Secondly, a BDMV can't be turned into a single correct linear
| representation - for example, the Star Trek TOS discs have
| the ability to toggle back and forth between original and CG-
| remastered graphics seamlessly. As another example, I have
| stereoscopic 3D blu-rays; should the transcode be the left
| eye view, or side-by-side 3D with an ultrawide file?
|
| Finally, transcoding necessarily sacrifices quality. Remuxing
| wouldn't, but Jellyfin usually refuses to stream remuxed
| containers and insists on transcoding to attach subtitles
| (their javascript web player and even app don't seem to
| handle the subs correctly?).
|
| To sum up, turning a disc folder into a single file requires
| losing content.
| nativeit wrote:
| This is an interesting take, thanks for describing it. I
| think most people, myself included, would find your setup a
| little odd, but I completely understand why you're doing
| it. It would make many (most?) home media servers a little
| hobbled, especially if you wanted to stream content to
| mobile devices outside of the home, but it sounds as if
| this is more of a replacement for the old pile of set-top
| boxes for you, rather than a general service to all your
| devices, is that a fair interpretation?
| Borealid wrote:
| Yes, what I've got is like a streaming service, but at
| much higher quality and with a selection that doesn't
| rotate out as rights lapse.
|
| The stuff that Jellyfin would provide - being able to
| watch from a device using just a web browser and no
| client install - is nice-to-have, not need-to-have.
| robhlt wrote:
| The "Jellyfin for Kodi" plugin (not Jellycon!) supports a
| "native path" streaming mode that just directly passes the
| raw video file to Kodi, avoiding Jellyfin's transcoding
| entirely. I've never used it with BDMV's, but it does work
| with other formats Jellyfin can't transcode properly like
| Dolby Vision.
|
| Also, if you do ever want to remux those discs, mkv does
| support both those features now (player support is lacking
| though). You'll want to look for "3D MVC" support, and
| including 2 video tracks in one mkv is no problem.
| Borealid wrote:
| The reason I'd use Jellyfin is to stream things to a non-
| Kodi client (a web browser). If I have a Kodi client, I
| would just read the files as-is.
|
| I don't believe that mkv supports bd-j menus. Happy to be
| proven wrong on that if you have some further reading I
| could do.
| protimewaster wrote:
| I'm glad they're at least trying to support disc folders,
| though. Plex just doesn't.
| nativeit wrote:
| I believe the big selling-point for Plex is that it can
| stream content to every single device you own no matter where
| you are, which requires on-the-fly transcoding. It's my
| understanding that the performance requirements for realtime
| transcoding necessitates something like an MKV or MP4 file,
| although I'm happy to be proven wrong by someone with more
| direct knowledge of the process.
| Borealid wrote:
| The blu-rays contains m2ts files, which have the same video
| data in them as an mp4 container would (h264, usually, vc-1
| sometimes).
|
| Remuxing them can be done a NUC-class CPU. Transcoding them
| requires hardware support to do in real time with today's
| hardware, but the hardware support is quite light - an AMD
| iGPU can chew through a 4K BDMV no problem, so long as the
| codecs on both the input and output side are supported for
| acceleration.
|
| Jellyfin tries to prefer Intel Quicksync for some reason
| but it works with other GPU accel too. The problem isn't
| the performance envelope, it's how poorly the code is
| implemented on the Jellyfin side: it's not reliable at
| starting and managing the concat process, and it forces a
| transcode to embed subtitles for no logical reason I can
| see.
| ramon156 wrote:
| I know this isn't a solution for everyone, but I just stopped
| downloading blu-ray altogether. I don't need a bit more quality
| for 3x the storage size and way more gpu churning.
| cfebs wrote:
| TY jellyfin maintainers. Been a happy user for years
| agnishom wrote:
| Me too! Super easy to use and run. Has a ton of features and
| feels polished
| haunter wrote:
| I've tried everything but ended up using the VLC app on my Apple
| TV and just accessing my NAS through Samba. Not as sophisticated
| (library management) as Jellyfin or Plex but performance wise
| it's probably the best one.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| At least on the android client you can have jellyfin play the
| selected media in VLC (or other external player). Couples most
| of the library features with the playback performance of VLC.
|
| Somethings like playback resume don't work but for me it's a
| nice middle ground.
| thedougd wrote:
| I switched from Plex to Jellyfin/Infuse for three reasons:
|
| 1) better tone mapping, allowing me to watch HDR movies on SDR
| without it looking bad.
|
| 2) Plex, on my variety of clients, had regular issues with audio
| out of sync. I'm very sensitive to this and it drove me nuts. I
| have no issues with Jellyfin. I fiddled with all kinds of
| platform and Plex settings but couldn't find a solution that
| solved it for good.
|
| 3) It's easier to access Jellyfin over Tailscale. Plex's normally
| clever way of exposing itself to the Internet gets in the way.
| It's not impossible though.
|
| Having said all this, Plex has better client UIs by far. They're
| well organized, feature rich, and generally bug free. I still run
| Plex and plan to at least for the DVR functions.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I still get occasional audio going out of sync, but it's
| usually solved by stopping and thinking the video.
|
| Doesn't happen very often, but it's usually with older format
| video files.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Thinking = resuming.
|
| Eeesh.
| ninth_ant wrote:
| Jellyfin+Infuse works really well for subtitles as well.
| amatecha wrote:
| It's so awesome to be able to stream from my NAS at home my
| "documentary" of my last europe trip to someone in-person when
| I'm out at a gathering or whatever. Jellyfin + tailscale +
| whatever else you want to link up, is just awesome++
| anon7000 wrote:
| Infuse is a great client for any Apple device; I like it way
| more than plex
| inversetelecine wrote:
| I love that I dont even need more software like plex or
| jellyfin. I just expose a smb share and point infuse to it.
| Usually its a windows server but using truenas atm.
| vladgur wrote:
| Exactly, infuse plays anything thrown at it
|
| what's even a point of jellyfin/plex if you have access to
| a player like Infuse on apple devices or Nova on android
| codys wrote:
| On audio sync issues, I unfortunately see them with jellyfin
| rather frequently on apple tv when using homepods as audio
| output. I end up having to enable the "native player" in the
| experimental settings to get the audio in-sync.
|
| I've previously reported this to the developers of the app, and
| they've closed the issue saying it was a bug in one of their
| dependencies, without fixing the issue. It remains unfixed.
| LiamPowell wrote:
| > better tone mapping, allowing me to watch HDR movies on SDR
| without it looking bad.
|
| I've never really understood why it's a desirable feature to
| have automatic HDR-to-SDR in the first place. No one is making
| HDR-only content and the official SDR master for every movie
| and TV show done by a human is always going to beat a fancy
| LUT.
|
| When performing colour grading you're always deciding what
| parts of the image need what amount of contrast etc. based on
| what's important to see in the context of the scene. When
| grading to HDR you're going to make different choices simply
| due to the fact that you have a wider dynamic range available.
| Even putting aside the fact that you're not starting from the
| same raw inputs that the production studio is working with,
| automatic tone-mapping is never going to be able to look at a
| scene in the same way that a human does and decide which parts
| are important and which parts aren't.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| I imagine people have multiple screens but don't want to keep
| multiple copies of a video?
| LiamPowell wrote:
| In this case I would think people would prefer to just have
| the SDR version which will look good on all displays rather
| than the HDR version that will look better on a HDR display
| but will look horrible on a SDR display. It's down to
| personal preference of course, but I can't imagine someone
| caring about having HDR videos while simultaneously putting
| up with the bad results of automatic HDR-to-SDR.
|
| Just as an example since I didn't include one before: Which
| of the two below images using different algorithms is
| correctly tone-mapped? Do we care more about showing the
| details of the car and the driver or do we care more about
| the rest of the scene? It's simply not possible to decide
| which of these is better without context, which an
| algorithm will never have. A human watching the scene can
| make that decision, or pick something completely different.
|
| https://user-
| images.githubusercontent.com/41094733/105145848...
|
| https://user-
| images.githubusercontent.com/41094733/105145851...
| izacus wrote:
| Why are you so consistently telling other people what
| their preferences should be and why?
| LiamPowell wrote:
| As I said already, it's down to personal preference. I
| just don't imagine that most people care about having the
| best looking video they can get on one device but don't
| care on another to the point where they'd sacrifice
| quality on device A for better quality on device B.
| thedougd wrote:
| It's exactly the case. Every room isn't a home theater.
| We want the best quality for the home theater and "good
| enough" for the rest. To my surprise, others do notice
| the washed out effect of watching HDR content on an SDR
| TV, or worse the wrong colors when watching DV content on
| an SDR TV.
|
| Acquiring, storing, and organizing multiple files for the
| same video is a hassle. Even more hassle is asking others
| to know which is the right one for that TV.
| SomeoneOnTheWeb wrote:
| Nope. I personally have two HDR devices and two non-HDR
| ones. I don't want to keep two separate copies as this
| takes up more storage, requires me to get two different
| versions whcih means the progress won't be synced
| ebtweent the two, the subtitles may not be exactly the
| same either, etc.
|
| I want to have one and only file that will optimally on
| my main device (HDR) but which also work reasonably well
| on a secondary non-HDR device.
| LiamPowell wrote:
| Ideally Jellyfin would handle the latter two points (and
| I think it does), but the first two are good reasons.
| darknavi wrote:
| The biggest thing that keeps me away from Plex alternatives is
| the simplicity ("it works everywhere on everything") and the
| experience ("it looks nice and feels polished").
|
| There was a point where I could overlook some of these things but
| watching media is something that I want to feel slick and
| personal, and troubleshooting really kills that for me.
|
| Plex + AppleTV for me and my folks has been a rock solid setup
| for us.
|
| I really appreciate alternatives (especially OSS) like Jellyfin
| though and take a gander at them ~once a year.
| djfergus wrote:
| Shoutout to streamyfin, a jellyfin iOS/Android client which adds
| a key missing feature (vs plex): the ability to download
| transcoded media.
| Carrok wrote:
| News to me, thanks! Looks great.
| zeagle wrote:
| It's great. A stock Nvidia shield 2019 tube (!) plays 4K HDR/DV
| DTS content without stutter or issues with passthrough an AVR
| which is impressive. I can't say Kodi and various forks were able
| to do that, at least in the past. Lots of griping about the tube
| in general as well but it manages without transcoding.
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| As somebody who just got into Real Debrid, what's the best
| compatible frontend that makes managing the content firehouse
| easier? I started out with Stremio, which works okay but only
| lets you add movies/shows to a single Library that can be sorted
| a few ways, but that's it. Not great scrolling through a single
| horizontal list of titles.
|
| Ideally, there'd be a program that lets you add programs to
| playlists (favorite films, to-watch list, anime, documentaries,
| etc.) and then track the watch status, shuffle-play, show
| recommendations, display a big grid, etc. There's probably
| something like that out there but for a newcomer it's just a
| blizzard of "Sonarr, Radarr, Umbrella, Jellyfin, Plex, Kodi,
| Stremio, Roku, Seren, Overseer, Syncler," and other nonsense
| syllables (and seems like most of the guides are dated).
|
| (Nb: I subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, etc., just prefer
| having a unified player that doesn't yank stuff arbitrarily)
| Novosell wrote:
| I've had a setup similar to what you're describing using Kodi
| with various addons. But it's really precarious and for too
| much effort. Stremio is treating me well these days.
| tmiku wrote:
| Anyone care to share their experiences with some of the less
| common Jellyfin frontends? Which ones are most in need of
| contributions?
|
| I've had a decent experience with the Samsung TV (Tizen) client.
| It's annoying to not have it on the app store yet and to jump
| through the developer-mode hoops to get it installed, but to be
| fair it was a one time setup and I've been happy with it since
| then. Seen some occasional slightly janky menu navigation, but
| really it's been far better than I expected.
| themk wrote:
| If you install the DLNA plugin for Jellyfin, you can cast to
| Samsung TVs. Just use your phone for the UI.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I've been happily using Jellyfin since it forked from Emby a few
| years ago, and whilst initially it was a bit lumpy (but so was
| Emby) it's been almost maintenance free for the past three-odd
| years.
|
| I use it in a docker container, if that makes any difference, and
| my use case is almost identical to loughnane's mentioned up-
| thread.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| I'm deep into the Emby ecosystem now (have it hooked up to a
| dedicated server with transcode + a premium subscription) but
| Jellyfin's syncplay feature looks absolutely wicked. I may need
| to transition at some point.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I ridiculously love Jellyfin. I have found that if my Jellyfin
| box is IPv6 and I map a domain to that address, such as free DNS
| from Cloudflare, then I can access my personal media from
| anywhere on the internet.
|
| What I haven't found is a way to restrict access to known
| devices, such as MAC address, so that big companies don't sue me
| to death. Yes, I know Jellyfin has a login prompt, but I would
| prefer better security beyond Jellyfin as a just in case.
| nativeit wrote:
| You could use TailScale or Zerotier, join all your devices to a
| private subnet, then use UFW on the Jellyfin server to deny all
| connections except those from your private subnet. Then all
| your devices in your Tailscale/Zerotier account can access one
| another from anywhere. Also works for shared folders in
| Windows, remote desktop, SSH, etc.. It's easy enough so that
| most enthusiasts can handle it without being 100% proficient in
| a Linux shell, VPNs, or firewalls. Should be lots of guides
| available with these ingredients.
| chgs wrote:
| Or you could just WireGuard to your jelling server direct
| danparsonson wrote:
| You should absolutely hand off the security to something else -
| just exposing this publicly is asking to get hacked.
|
| I use Wireguard for my private online stuff, that works nicely.
| Expose Jellyfin only on the loopback address and use Nginx to
| forward your domain to it, then setup your DNS entry to be the
| VPN address of your server. Just be aware that if you have your
| own local DNS server then you might need to configure it to
| allow serving up DNS entries with private network addresses in
| them, as these are often blocked for security reasons; or else
| just modify your /etc/hosts equivalent to manually add the
| mapping.
| mavamaarten wrote:
| Can you easily use your services on mobile devices that way?
| I currently reverse proxy every service I need through nginx,
| but I kinda feel like this isn't enough security-wise. I did
| blacklist most countries and don't expose any port other than
| 80+443.
|
| Does it require you to run a VPN app on your phone constantly
| and does that cause troubles?
| danparsonson wrote:
| Yes you would need the Wireguard app on your phone, and
| certainly for me it works beautifully (I use Android - I
| can't speak for the iOS app but there is one). I don't
| actually remotely host Jellyfin, but I do use a range of
| other things like Bitwarden, Nextcloud, Dovecot/Postfix,
| and some small web apps, and it's really smooth. The only
| public port on the server is the VPN.
| TheDong wrote:
| iOS etc have wireguard clients, but I personally have found
| it much easier to configure a long random path as part of
| the server URL and use that as a "password".
| (https://server.com/$randomPath/
|
| It's not ideal, since the password's obviously saved in any
| user's browser history, but it's less of a pain than
| dealing with a VPN, especially since I let friends use the
| server, and it's secure enough for my threat model.
| danparsonson wrote:
| The trouble with that is that you still have to make
| 80/443 public, which means you have to trust that your
| web server will stand up to 24/7 probing. I guess I'm a
| bit more paranoid than I really need to be but if the
| port isn't open then the chances of a bad guy getting in
| that way because of a zero-day or because I forgot
| something should be zero.
|
| Hopefully you at least have something like fail2ban
| installed?
| anon7000 wrote:
| You can use a reverse proxy like Caddy or nginx to block, eg,
| non-local IPs, do subdomain routing, manage certs.
| nazgul17 wrote:
| I setup a VPN with OpenVPN, I can access Jellyfin from anywhere
| provided I have a login and key.
| atoav wrote:
| You want a VPN (nost likely wireguard) with an exit point in
| your LAN. My router has that option.
| jrace wrote:
| you can whitelist incoming IPs on Jellyfin.
| Sanzig wrote:
| I use Tailscale for this, it works great.
|
| It's super simple to set up, you can do it in 15 minutes.
| Install Tailscale on your Jellyfin server and on your personal
| devices, create a tailnet and connect them to it. That's it,
| you're done. You can now access Jellyfin from any of the
| devices using the Tailscale IP or hostname of the Jellyfin
| server.
| ang_cire wrote:
| I've been using CF tunnels to expose my jellyfin instance, with
| github oauth in front to prevent brute forcing.
| TheDong wrote:
| A lot of people are suggesting VPNs, or putting oauth or such
| in front of it.
|
| Unfortunately, oauth doesn't work since the jellyfin clients
| (like the android tv client, iOS client, etc) don't understand
| oauth.
|
| Using VPNs is annoying if you want to share it with a friend,
| or you want to use it on a random third-party device, like a TV
| in a hotel or something.
|
| I think all Jellyfin clients all support appending a path to
| the URL, so adding a password in the form of a long random path
| works pretty well in my opinion, i.e.
| https://my-jellyfin-server.com/ahY9eig3/
|
| And you can then just have the server return 404 or such to all
| other requests, you can send the link like normal to friends,
| and you can manually type it in if you need to.
|
| That should be enough to avoid some random copyright scanner.
| amatecha wrote:
| Jellyfin is awesome. I started to set up Plex server, then
| realized I have to have an account on some centralized service to
| access my own server?? Instant no-go, for me. Using Kodi as a
| client, almost problem-free. Super cool!
| BubbleRings wrote:
| How many music files can it handle? I've got a very large
| collection of mp3s and flac and many of the similar programs I
| have tried have choked trying to handle the size of the
| collection.
| defrost wrote:
| At least 8,000 (that's just what I can see mounted under
| Jellyfin here locally).
|
| Probably supports many more, for the collection here the
| thumbnail browsing, presentation, metadata display etc. isn't
| bad (MusicBee does it better) but as a media support under the
| Jellyfin umbrella component it's not the worst.
|
| It's weak on support of FullAlbum.flac with TrackIndex.Cue
| arrangements though.
|
| MusicBee present those as individual tracks with jump to track
| and shuffle options whereas Jellyfin (as of today) has them a
| single blob of audio start to finish.
|
| Cue support is on the issues list (although issue support has a
| slow turnover thanks to the small time).
|
| Any bored audio format programmers looking for open source
| support credits??
| amlib wrote:
| I've got a ~80k library and it seems to handle it ok. Scanning
| isn't very fast, but it does pull up a lot of cover art and
| artist profile pictures, so that may be why. It doesn't seem to
| respond at all to changing tags for files it has already
| scanned, so far the only solution was removing the library
| entirely and re-adding it which is tedious.
|
| It supports drilling down by Album Artists which is a minimum
| requirement for nay big and diverse music library. Genres seem
| to work fine, you can select one and it will at least list all
| albums under that, but no option to change the grouping to
| artists or something else exists.
|
| The web interface does ok at first when loading a big playlist.
| For example, trying to play my OC-Remix collection which is
| essentially an album composed of ~4k songs works for the first
| few songs and moving around the playlists is somewhat smooth,
| but picking a song at 1000 place or so just awaits forever. I
| don't know whats up with that.
|
| The playing queue is very terse and doesn't like listing the
| track number, artist nor even the album (it does show a thumb
| sized album art for each entry but good luck with that). This
| is a very dumbed down mobile centric design, could do much
| better here...
|
| All in all I would advise just trying out more than one media
| server. Jellyfin is ok-ish for music and great for videos but
| if you are gonna go trough all the work of setting that up it
| doesn't cost much more to also setup something like Navidrome
| which will give you a decent subsonic instance which is
| compatible with many clients and will likely give you a better
| experience when handling big and diverse music libraries. That
| said, Navidrome's built-in web client is pretty bare-bones, so
| you are gonna have to rely on the "native" clients more.
|
| For example, you can use Strawberry's subsonic feature to
| access your Navidrome's library on a pretty damn good interface
| for music nerds who feel comfortable on "spreadsheet" like
| interfaces. No tag editing, but you don't usually want to
| expose your library with write permission on these services
| anyway. But it does pick up on tag changes if you tell it to a
| complete re-scan which takes ~15 minutes.
| mqus wrote:
| My main gripe with handling music on jellyfin is that it
| expects your music to be stored in a certain folder
| structure[1] meaning it uses a kinda weird mix of metadata and
| folder structure to scan. This seems to be foundational so this
| probably won't get fixed in the near future (not because they
| like it this way, but because it's a lot of effort).
|
| Not sure if you need some effort to "convert" your library to
| this structure.
|
| [1] https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/music/#discs
| BeetleB wrote:
| Have they made watching OTA broadcasts, with EPG and DVR work as
| well as Plex? It's what keeps me on Plex.
| craniumslows wrote:
| I use Silicon Dusts HD home run and it works great. Live TV
| from home while I'm travelling is one of my primary use cases.
| I subscribe to a TV listing service. The DVR function is good
| too. My biggest issue was that I had to get a graphics card
| that could transcode on the fly then TV worked perfectly.
| petepete wrote:
| I have the same setup and TV works well but changing channel
| takes a few seconds. Not been able to work out why.
|
| I have an Nvidia card which is more than capable of
| transcoding. How long does yours take to switch?
| BeetleB wrote:
| So not on Jellyfin, right?
|
| With the Plex Pass, it was a one time fee (Lifetime
| Membership), and I've been enjoying it since (6+ years). I
| use CPU for transcoding.
|
| Well, to be frank, even Plex's DVR could be better (e.g. I
| tell it to record a certain TV show, but I can't tell it
| _not_ to record certain episodes, etc). I imagine other
| services do better on that count.
|
| But my memory was that Jellyfin was terrible at it.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I've been impressed at the performance of the live re-encoding,
| but at the same time annoyed that it happens rather than
| streaming the original media (I think it always transcodes?). The
| upside is that it will play anything on anything.
|
| My main gripe is with how hard it is to actually get it to find
| the files - you can't just feed it a folder full of media and
| expect it to play it, it needs to be some carefully crafted
| structure that I haven't yet fully figured out. So instead of
| dropping a file then watching it on the TV, I drop it, try to
| watch it, then have to go back to the PC to fiddle.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Pretty sure there is direct play? Believe the client has it
| enabled by default
| eco wrote:
| It does not always transcode. It transcodes if your client
| reports it doesn't support the format or if the bitrate cap on
| your client is lower than the source media. It says why
| transcoding is happening in the Administration Dashboard for
| any currently playing media.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Anyone looking for an easy public spin-up of JF, et al, this is
| super easy to set up and works a treat
|
| https://github.com/EdyTheCow/docker-media-center
| issafram wrote:
| I hate that so many people don't know about Universal Media
| Server
| integricho wrote:
| I used Universal Media Server for 3 years, not knowing about
| jellyfin actually. UMS was a most of the time non-functional
| piece of crap. Refreshing the library was a pain and always
| felt that it required restarting services and devices on both
| sides and a blessing from the local priest. Then comes the
| frequent disappearance of the server itself which again
| requires service restarts. Then the mid-movie playback stops or
| stutters. Not recognizing the subtitles and again requiring
| service restarts. I spent more time fiddling with the app,
| holding it together with duct-tape and sticks rather the
| watching media through it. It is a very unstable and unreliable
| piece of software.
|
| Then came jellyfin, and as a breath of fresh air, all my
| problems were gone. In maybe 2 years since I switched to it, I
| can count on my fingers how many times did I have to fiddle
| with it for some reason. It just works, in the most common
| sense of ways, no crashes, no discoverability problems,
| nothing, just pure stable performance, I cannot emphasize
| enough how much of a chasm exists in quality and usability
| between jellyfin and UMS. While UMS feels like a piece of early
| alpha software that was abandoned, jellyfin is the rock solid ,
| actively maintained alternative that got your back.
|
| Universal Media Server is just bad software.
| philips wrote:
| I love Jellyfin. I have been using it with Tailscale, MakeMKV,
| Handbrake, Filebot and some other little utilities:
|
| I have also built two things on top:
|
| A super simple PWA for my kids to use:
| https://github.com/philips/jellykids?tab=readme-ov-file#jell...
|
| A NFC card based player for my kids to use:
| https://github.com/philips/homeassistant-nfc-chromecast
|
| It is so nice to just have my content on an API driven thing
| where I can control the UX my kids experience without a bunch of
| hassle.
| squigz wrote:
| I remember reading about that card based player a while back -
| an absolutely wonderful idea! I love it!
| ramon156 wrote:
| Haven't checked the comments yet but I just want to say thanks to
| the jellyfin maintainers. You guys are doing god's work <3
| webworker wrote:
| In an alternate universe, Apple had built out a networked media
| library system and integrated it directly into their Time Capsule
| router hw.
| slopslinger wrote:
| Funny how people nitpick. At the end of the day, jellyfin is free
| to use, ad free, has more config options than we need, and it
| does an outstanding job. I switched from Kodi, Plex, then Emby
| years ago. No reason to look back.
| grubrunner wrote:
| Funny how people nitpick. At the end of the day, jellyfin is free
| to use, ad free, has more config options than we need, and it
| does an outstanding job. I switched from Kodi, Plex, then Emby
| years ago. No reason to look back.
| grubrunner666 wrote:
| Funny how people nitpick. At the end of the day, jellyfin is free
| to use, ad free, has more config options than we need, and it
| does an outstanding job. I switched from Kodi, Plex, then Emby
| years ago. No reason to look back.
| gutomotta wrote:
| How do you usually go about acquiring the media? I know there are
| people that simply download movies via torrent, but what are the
| legal ways of buying video files of TV shows or movies, specially
| the more recent ones?
| laleck wrote:
| You're limited to buying Blu rays and ripping to digital.
| Technically, that might not even be legal in the US because the
| digital millenium copyright act (DMCA) forbids circumventing
| DRM.
|
| https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/circumventing-copyright-con...
|
| > In the end, I'm mystified it's still so hard to buy older
| movies so I can watch them on my networked devices. You'd think
| Hollywood would've learned from the music industry that if you
| just let people legally pay for non-DRM media, and make the
| process easy and convenient (certainly more convenient than
| sailing the seven seas or ripping discs), people will pay.
|
| https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/how-i-rip-dvds-and-bl...
| jfplexembi wrote:
| I really want to switch to Jellyfin. Plex has gone off the deep
| end with all their user hostile garbage.
|
| But Jellyfin is just not good. The clients are all afterthoughts
| and audio pass-through fails to work on every device I've tried
| it on. 4K HDR studders like mad, when the same video plays
| perfectly via Plex (no transcoding)
|
| I'm convinced that the people who "love Jellyfin" watch it using
| their phone or laptop. Where sdr and stereo audio is all they've
| ever known.
|
| I'm rooting for Jellyfin, but they have a long way to go. I wish
| they'd focus on a unified client experience and stop adding junk
| to the media server.
| johnea wrote:
| I don't know anything about jellyfin. My LAN media server is
| sshfs.
|
| But I'm AMAZED to see the phrase "Free Software" in an HN link
| description.
|
| Thank You jellyfin.org!!!
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