[HN Gopher] WiiFin - Jellyfin Client for Nintendo Wii
___________________________________________________________________
WiiFin - Jellyfin Client for Nintendo Wii
Author : throwawayk7h
Score : 239 points
Date : 2026-04-13 23:33 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| Synthetic7346 wrote:
| I can't believe the wifi got a client before ps5
| gkhartman wrote:
| Honestly surprised it took this long. I guess it's less than
| ideal, since the wii doesn't support modern tv resolutions.
| dmonitor wrote:
| The Wii supports 240p, though, which is very hard to
| replicate these days.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| Or 480i if you want to watch classic anime on a CRT.
| NathanielK wrote:
| It can't really decode 480p/i very well.
|
| The fact that it has component video out makes it a swiss
| army knife for everything else 240p/480i/480p.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| I watched a backup of a [480p24] DVD movie with a
| (hacked) Wii quite a long time ago, as a fallback after
| the PS3 I was using got tripped up on that film's
| Cinavia[1] watermarks.
|
| The Wii worked OK-ish, but it was evident that it was
| barely keeping up with decoding the MPEG 2 video from the
| disc and putting it on the screen. Perhaps there is or
| was better software for that job, but there were some
| glitches and brief hangs.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Man what can't you do with a Wii? Didn't someone post an article
| the other detailing how they booted Mac OS X on it?
| dddddaviddddd wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47691730
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Love it
| shrinks99 wrote:
| Noticed that Jellyfin had inched out Plex when sorting by
| popularity on the TrueNAS app catalogue the other day (45,178
| installs vs Plex's 42,225). The existance of this project seems
| to confirm that the dev ecosystem around it is getting stronger!
| monocasa wrote:
| And that plex really pissed off the community by changing its
| pricing model.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| I started out my home server journey with Plex but it just kept
| getting worse, forcing me to switch to Jellyfin, which imo
| works just as well and seems to not fall into the whole pay us
| to stream your media business practice yet. Paywalling such a
| core feature was pretty harsh
| shiroiuma wrote:
| It may seem "harsh", but this is simply the reality of using
| proprietary software. You don't have any control over it, and
| unless you stick with a particular version, it can change at
| any time (sometimes called a "rugpull"). And with anything
| internet-connected, it's not usually a good idea to stick
| with an old version because of security issues.
|
| With open-source software, this just isn't a problem. Even if
| the company behind it decides to turn evil, the community can
| fork it and continue on. Just look at Emby for example: it
| did a rugpull and changed to a proprietary license, so the
| community forked it and made Jellyfin.
| tech234a wrote:
| Can anyone comment on the security of Jellyfin? When I had last
| looked into it, it seemed like Jellyfin had a somewhat weak
| security model that made me question switching family members
| to it from Plex.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Don't expose it to the internet unless you know what you're
| doing, or put it on a VPS you don't care about.
|
| Ideally keep it behind a VPN and give your family members
| access to it that way, and let local devices on your LAN
| connect to it without a VPN.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Those are fine ideas.
|
| But I'm not all about getting something like Tailscale to
| work with my elderly mother's Roku device, nor teaching her
| how to use it.
| ray_v wrote:
| I set my dad up with a Linux box as a daily driver for
| him - he keeps the desktop on , and the roku jellyfin now
| has a clean proxy into jellyfin over the tailscale
| network. Giving him a desktop I can remote into was a
| great decision that paid dividends for him :)
| lamasery wrote:
| Get your elderly mother an Apple TV and infuse, then
| connect with Tailscale. It's pretty friggin' smooth in
| daily operation. Apple TV's UI is no easier to get lost
| in than Roku, and actually has fewer pitfalls if you
| toggle one setting (the one that makes one home tap open
| the Apple TV app, and a second press while in that app
| actually go home, by default; switch that to always go
| home on any press of that button no matter what)
|
| I dunno if Tailscale works on Roku but otherwise that
| would indeed be entirely viable too, last I saw
| Jellyfin's app on there is really good. Likely need a
| server powerful enough to transcode, though, lots of
| (all?) Roku devices don't have hardware decoding for
| newer codecs like h.265. That's one big benefit of an
| Apple TV, it can hardware decode damn near everything.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Perhaps.
|
| Y'all (collectively) have some good ideas.
|
| But she likes the Roku. She's even got silicone skins for
| the remotes (plural; spares!), and two of them are
| tethered near the chairs that her and dad tend to sit in.
|
| Also: The Roku stuff already exists, and is paid for, and
| it works with Plex (without a VPN, because my local Plex
| container didn't come with the caveat to avoid exposing
| it to the world).
|
| Buying them one or more Apple TV devices to use instead
| seems expensive and likely to fail somehow.
|
| Switching them to (cheap? linux?) PCs also sounds
| expensive and bad, particularly with my dad. He's
| certainly had more years to learn how to use a computer
| than I have, but he's spent most of the recent decades
| deliberately avoiding them. He hates them, and he doesn't
| want to learn them. He'd fall apart and give up on
| television entirely if I gave him a PC with a slick
| Logitech K400 to run it with. (He can drive a Roku with
| Youtube TV and Plex like a pro, but that's mostly only a
| D-pad and a back button.)
|
| ---
|
| But since you and others have mentioned it: Transcoding.
| That's really not a big problem for many vaguely-recent
| PCs. With Plex, at least: The quite old i7-6700k desktop
| box I use for this transcodes to h.264 like a beast using
| its paltry iGPU, and does h.265 just fine with an old
| nVidia RTX 2080 if I elect to use that instead. Either
| way works well and never breaks a sweat.
|
| It may have been a powerful machine a decade ago, but a
| used computer with a 6700k (or so) to serve media with is
| cheap these days. (And a brand-new power-sipping N150 box
| does transcoding waaaay better, even in credit-card form
| factor.)
| dmos62 wrote:
| Sad to hear about people getting stuck in weak
| ecosystems.
|
| By the way, I switched from Jellyfin to plain SMB + Nova
| Player (Android), which has basically the same interface,
| but no user profiles, and works over SMB, obviously. No
| transcoding, best format support, and best performance
| for large files I've found yet for my TCL Android TV.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I mean, for my TV at home where everything is connected
| with a gigabit LAN, I usually use Kodi on a Pi4, over
| SMB, with a Logitech KT400 to drive it from wherever I
| feel like sitting.
|
| It's silent, reasonably self-contained, and is appliance-
| like to get going (just dump OpenELEC onto an SD card,
| plug everything in, and then simply begin using it).
|
| Plus, there's two HDMI outputs: One that connects
| directly to the the dumb TV and sends only video, while
| the other sends only lossless PCM audio to the once-
| rather-high-end AV receiver (that gets choked up on more-
| modern HDMI bitrates).
|
| And that's great for me at my house, with my pile of
| gear, and with my technical proclivities.
|
| But I'm not my mom, and this isn't my mom's house. :)
| organsnyder wrote:
| A couple of other options:
|
| If their router supports it, configure the VPN there so
| it's available for the entire network.
|
| Set up a Raspberry Pi (or similar) on their network that
| is configured with the VPN and runs a reverse proxy to
| expose the Jellyfin instance.
|
| But yeah, either of those is going to increase your
| support burden.
| asixicle wrote:
| You can point Tailscale toward a $5 exit-node VPS and
| Caddy/nginx through a cheapo-but-memorable-domain to get
| a Jellyfin Dashboard up in a browser. I assume running
| the domain and port through the Jellyfin Roku app would
| work fine (can't be sure as I've never used a Roku).
|
| Just mind your ACLs
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I use Jellyfin and when it works it's great but a few
| small things make it totally unusable for a non-technical
| family member.
|
| One thing is when it can't see the server it doesn't just
| say it can't see it, it acts like the issue is you're not
| logged in and then when you log in (having to type your
| password manually each time, on a TV) it then fails.
|
| This is only really diagnosable if you can access both
| the client and server and is a complete failure and very
| tedious experience if you only have client access.
|
| Feels like I experience this at least once a month so
| couldn't ever set this up for family members remotely.
| voxic11 wrote:
| I put mine behind caddy on a long unguessable path prefix.
| So that acts as a sort of password that you need to know
| before you can access it at all. So far it's seemed to work
| great. The advantage to using a path prefix vs like caddy
| basic auth is that its compatible with all the normal
| jellyfin clients.
| RajT88 wrote:
| TLS is a must-have. They don't bother doing any kind of
| password hashing on login. It's sent in cleartext.
| teraflop wrote:
| That's no different from how just about any other webapp
| works.
|
| "Bothering" with client-side password hashing, in the
| absence of TLS, is security theater. It provides only the
| most trivial protection against eavesdroppers.
|
| If someone can steal an unhashed password, then they can
| also steal whatever hash you send instead. If you try to
| fix this with some kind of ad-hoc challenge-response
| protocol, then the attacker can just steal your session
| cookie after login.
|
| There shouldn't even be a question of using insecure HTTP
| for anything that requires authentication.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > "Bothering" with client-side password hashing, in the
| absence of TLS, is security theater.
|
| Filtering out unsophisticated attackers I would not
| classify as "theater".
|
| Read this, and let me know if the implications of port
| forwarding your server (or putting it on IP6) is readily
| apparent:
|
| https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-
| install/networking/#s...
|
| A lot of these users are not very sophisticated
| themselves. The least sophisticated attackers are likely
| to be the most numerous.
|
| This is bad. People who say it's not bad (or worse,
| suggesting anyone dumb enough to publicly expose their
| server without TLS) are engaging in security snobbery.
| random_human_ wrote:
| For whatever reason people here and on Reddit will tell you
| that you need to have Jellyfin pass through five VPNs,
| otherwise nasty things will happen. Meanwhile the actual devs
| suggests simply setting up a reverse proxy, which you can do
| in two lines with Caddy:
| https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-
| install/networking/re...
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| Reverse proxy itself will do barely any defense, what you
| need in combination is an authgate (authentik, authelia),
| and here we are moving from "simple reverse proxy" to fun
| weekend activity and then some getting it to work as
| expected. + it kills the app auth flow, so only web
| interface is suitable for this.
| notpushkin wrote:
| > Reverse proxy itself will do barely any defense, what
| you need in combination is an authgate
|
| What's your threat model?
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| Same as anyones: random bots scanning IP/ports to find
| established services and trying exploits from the book.
| random_human_ wrote:
| If you expose Jellyfin on 443, have HTTPS properly set up
| (which Caddy handles automatically), your admin password
| is not pswd1234 (or you straight up disable remote admin
| logins), and use a cheap .com domain rather than your IP
| --what is the actual attack surface in that case?
|
| As far as I can remember that is more or less what is
| usually suggested by Jellyfin's devs, and I have yet to
| see something that convinces me about its inadequacy.
| Mashimo wrote:
| He claims there are known exploits. Though I also want to
| know if this is really true.
| tech234a wrote:
| https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
| random_human_ wrote:
| The absolute worst thing I can see in there is that an
| third party who _somehow_ managed to get a link to one of
| your library items (either directly from you or from one
| of your users--or by spending the next decade
| bruteforcing it I guess) could stream said item: https://
| github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415#issuecommen...
|
| Everything else looks to me like unimportant issues, that
| would provide someone who's already logged in as a user
| minor details about your server.
| shiroiuma wrote:
| With a reverse proxy, I don't see how this would work.
| The whole way the reverse proxy works is you use a
| subdomain name ("jellyfin.yourdomain.org") to access
| Jellyfin, rather than some other service on your server.
| The reverse proxy sees the subdomain name that was used
| in the HTTP request, and routes the traffic based on
| that. Scanning only the IP address and port won't get
| attackers to Jellyfin; they need to know the subdomain
| name as well.
| notpushkin wrote:
| The only tricky part here would be to make sure you're
| doing a wildcard certificate, so that your subdomain
| doesn't appear in Certificate Transparency logs.
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| true, but I kinda dont want hiding from plain sight to be
| my only line of defence.
| bjackman wrote:
| You can use a reverse proxy and still have working app
| auth, I have set this up via Authelia with the OIDC
| Jellyfin plugin.
|
| However:
|
| - This is EVEN MORE complex than "just" a reverse proxy.
|
| - I'm not really sure it wins much security, because...
|
| - at least I'm not relying on Jellyfin's built-in auth
| but I'm now relying on its/the plugin's OIDC
| implementation to not be completely broken.
|
| - attackers can still access unauthenticated endpoints.
|
| Overall I really wish I could just do dumb proxy auth
| which would solve all these issues. But I dunno how that
| would work with authing from random clients like Wii (and
| more importantly for me, WebOS).
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| Yea its pretty bad, there are pages of non-fixed confirmed
| exploits, you really shouldnt let it face the net.
|
| VPN is one solution, and actually the only real solution for
| app-based jellyfin (TV, phone apps) I found so far.
|
| Another is to host Jellyfin behind reverse proxy, and have a
| completely independent authgatein front of it (authentik,
| authelia). Jellyfin even supports LDAP (trough plugin), so
| you dont have to login twice per visit. The downside is only
| web interface can be hidden this way, as apps will break
| expecting jellyfin auth page and finding something else.
| vachina wrote:
| To alleviate your concerns, I have a public facing Jellyfin
| instance hosted on a subdomain for almost a year now. So far
| zero pwns or bot activity.
| dawnerd wrote:
| It's still a mess and any suggestions to fix it are met with
| hostility which is a shame because I'd love to use it. Last I
| checked there were still endpoints not behind auth that
| exposed stuff you'd probably not want exposed.
| ndesaulniers wrote:
| I run it in a docker container behind traefik in another
| container. Getting that wired up and working in podman was
| quite the challenge. Docker container mounts my media as read
| only.
| nyolfen wrote:
| i didn't have much trouble services:
| jellyfin: build: dockerfile:
| jellyfin.Dockerfile container_name: jellyfin
| group_add: - 44 - 993
| environment: - TZ=<redacted> -
| JELLYFIN_PublishedServerUrl=<redacted> -
| DOMAIN_NAME=<redacted> ports: -
| 8096:8096 - 8920:8920 -
| "7359:7359/udp" volumes: -
| ./config:/config - ./cache:/cache
| - ./config/index.html:/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/index.html
| - type: bind source: /mnt/storage/Video
| target: /media restart: always
| devices: - /dev/dri:/dev/dri
|
| the device and group_add were for integrated graphics
| passthrough for transcoding (very highly recommend if
| you're containerized)
|
| i also recommend seerr to pair with jellyfin:
| https://seerr.dev/
|
| my wife logs into the seerr ui with her jellyfin account,
| makes requests, they get grabbed by sonarr/radarr, which in
| turn place them in the correct library, and they're
| identified & labeled correctly on import
| tengbretson wrote:
| Plex could reverse this trend in a week if they decided to
| prioritize work on any feature that their core market actually
| wanted.
| zythyx wrote:
| What more does Plex need? I would consider myself a power
| user of Plex and it does everything I need it to do. I would
| think the only thing I can think of is fully self-hosted
| login instead of their cloud option, but I'm glad we have
| that option because I don't want to handle the authentication
| of my friends and family
| VonGuard wrote:
| The poster you're asking this to is probably talking about
| plug-ins. Plex, very long ago, supported plug-ins, but it
| no longer does. Plug-ins were usually for adding in support
| for other media scrapers (porn and anime), or even other
| media types, like audiobooks.
|
| Additionally, Plex tends to revise their UI and inner
| workings in a way that favors everything but the core media
| sharing platform. They add TV stations, they mix in their
| streaming ad-supported channels with your search results,
| and push them before the friends and family stuff, making
| it tough to help other navigate to shared libraries.
|
| I think, overall, Plex is a good shepherd for their
| product, but everyone knows the enshitificaiton process is
| inevitable. It's just a question of how long the timeline
| between "Plex is usable" and "Plex is sold to private
| equity and is now utter shit." I've been pleasantly
| surprised with the length, so far. But having an escape
| hatch is always a good idea, and Jellyfin seems to be
| nearing a parity.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| It needs more of the feature that makes it a networked
| player for the media I already have (which works great --
| once a person gets to it), and less of the misfeature that
| is the sideshow also-ran ad-supported and rental live
| streaming and on-demand offerings (which I will never, ever
| use -- and that Jellyfin lacks altogether).
|
| Plex been swinging in the wrong direction for a number of
| years now.
| necessary wrote:
| Here's an easy one: working downloads on mobile. Plex
| offline downloads are notoriously buggy.
| saturnite wrote:
| I don't even consider it an option anymore. I just turn
| to other software that sends the original file to me. It
| would be great to have Plex transcode my high res movies
| on the fly and send me smaller copies tailored for my
| device. I could save space on my mobile devices while
| having my progress synced back to Plex.
| chneu wrote:
| Plex offline simply does not work. If it does work, it'll
| stop working when you get service/connectivity. It is
| wild how bad it is.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The last time I was involved in a thread like this, I was
| banned from r/plex.
|
| I pointed out that Plex should do ebooks. It is a natural
| fit. They keep track of how far in a series or a show you
| are, they could keep track of where you are in a book. Many
| of the Plex idioms transfer well. It has a clear visual
| style that helps you to pick out the shows you might try,
| or shows like those you've already watched.
|
| _BUT IT 'S NOT EVEN MEDIA, YOU'RE STUPID_
|
| Books were the first media, you must be illiterate.
|
| _WHY WOULD I WANT TO READ BOOKS ON MY BIGSCREEN TV!_
|
| Plex runs on my iPhone. And on yours too.
|
| [banhammered]
|
| But if you need more than one feature, I'm sure that in 10
| or 15 minutes I could come up with a 90 page list of
| features. Without even trying.
|
| >I would think the only thing I can think of is fully self-
| hosted login instead of their cloud option
|
| Well shit. Even you can come up with _one_ thing. Plex was
| awesome, and then Plex wanted to be the shittiest version
| of whatever CBS is calling their streaming service.
| saturnite wrote:
| An even easier fit would be comic books. They already let
| you steam libraries of photos. I have never used that
| feature, but I would definitely stream some comics.
|
| Also, they could handle audiobooks since they already
| stream music.
|
| Instead, they want to sell me on streaming services when
| I started using Plex because I pirate my media.
|
| I do see one issue with books that other media doesn't
| have. That is the ability to interact. When I use my
| e-reader, I like features like highlighting, taking
| notes, dictionaries, and other features that are more
| complicated that just streaming rendered images from a
| book.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >An even easier fit would be comic books.
|
| That's just a book format issue, but I'm on board.
|
| >They already let you steam libraries of photos.
|
| Well, about that... they're kind of shit at it. Photos
| have always been their least favorite supported media.
| Not much in the way of metadata support, unable to
| organize them. But it brings me to another problem...
| they don't understand what media types are.
|
| They support audio, but call it music. This means, just
| for instance, that there's a shitty icon for the
| library... I made a comedy album library, Plex. Steve
| Martin the banjo player and Steven Martin the comedian
| are the same human, but I don't want one album
| recommended as related to the other. And I don't want to
| see the little music note icon for the library either.
| Think of audio as "audio that can have many types" rather
| than music. It's the same with images... what if I want
| to have a library full of van Gogh's works? Why are you
| trying to mix these in with pictures of my nieces?
|
| >Also, they could handle audiobooks since they already
| stream music.
|
| But they can't, not really. Because they think all audio
| is music, their interface doesn't handle it... no one
| wants to randomize the play order of the chapters of a
| book. And they'd actually like to keep a bookmark of
| where they stopped listening. But because "all audio is
| music" their model is fundamentally broken.
|
| >When I use my e-reader, I like features like
| highlighting, taking notes, dictionaries, and other
| features that are more complicated that just streaming
| rendered images from a book.
|
| Well, if they implemented it correctly, it wouldn't be
| exactly "streaming images from a book". And they already
| do stuff with related media in a sophisticated fashion.
| If you want to see the trailers and making-ofs for a a
| movie, those are available right from the menu.
| Dictionaries or highlighting or note-taking just isn't
| that big of a deal. They could do it, they don't want to.
| They'd rather be a streaming service.
| majora2007 wrote:
| I just want to throw out that you might like Kavita for a
| comic/book server. It's built to feel like Plex.
| https://www.kavitareader.com/
|
| I do agree that Plex doesn't seem like a good fit for
| books and comics. The first major hurdle is the lack of a
| singular metadata source that Plex can hook into for
| metadata - although this year has shifted with Hardcover
| and MangaBaka. Plex also uses a filename parsing
| mechanism (like Kavita does) which has drawbacks since
| books and comics have an extremely wide variety of naming
| conventions and lack of good tooling.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Thanks for this. First I've heard of it. I'd prefer
| something more general for books (though there are comics
| too). I have about 22,000 titles, filenames well-
| constructed, that I don't have anything to serve them up
| remotely. I was using Nextcloud for awhile, but it's
| subpar.
|
| >which has drawbacks since books and comics have an
| extremely wide variety of naming conventions
|
| I actually have that part figured out. For periodicals
| too, like comics. The real trick with those is that it's
| often not that easy to find the ISSNs for them, they
| mostly don't list them on the inside cover.
| noxvilleza wrote:
| Have you checked out Audiobookshelf? Relatively easy to
| self-host, can do podcasts, audiobooks, ebooks, comics. A
| few different clients you can use
| (https://abstoolbox.vito0912.de/clients has some of the
| more popular ones - Plappa is pretty nice).
| Larrikin wrote:
| I disagree personally and feel there are better solutions
| already out there
|
| I was furious when they removed podcasts as they are a
| fit for the platform and it seems like they just didn't
| want to maintain them anymore.
| QGQBGdeZREunxLe wrote:
| * IPTV support (xtream codes etc.) yes proxies exist like
| Dispatcharr but first class support would be better
|
| * Better iOS/tvOS/OSX video playback (just buy Infuse
| because it can play so many titles the Plex player cannot)
|
| * Add full context menus everywhere. Playlists are
| virtually useless for anything other than playback in order
| or randomly. Why can't I multi-select items on a playlist
| and move them to another playlist?
|
| * Subtitle settings turn off between episodes
|
| * Let me sort by file size so I can watch the disk gobbling
| files first
|
| Thank God for python-plexapi and a bunch of scripts I use
| to organize an unwieldy library.
| illegalbyte2 wrote:
| Highly recommend Infuse on Apple TV. Since I was running
| Plex on my NAS it would often be very buggy and slow with
| buffering. One day I got fed up and tried infuse, pointed
| it at the same network share, and bam- instant playback
| that worked consistently, and way better native controls
| for subtitles etc. I'm sure there are good reasons to use
| Plex, I did so for years, but honestly streaming has been
| so much easier since moving off it.
| 0xc133 wrote:
| > Subtitle settings turn off between episodes
|
| There is actually a way to fix this! Log in and navigate
| to: https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/settings/account
|
| On this page, scroll down past the Security section to
| Audio & Subtitle Settings under Settings, and edit the
| account-wide language settings there.
|
| One caveat; any movies or shows you've already watched
| with subtitles not enabled will still have subtitles not
| enabled.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Adding to the list: postgres (or any real db) support.
| I've had to repair their SQLite db so many times. It's so
| common they have a help guide on it too and folks have
| made automated scripts to do it for you.
| throwaway27448 wrote:
| How do they manage to get their sqlite database in such a
| state where it would need "repair"? how would psql fix
| this?
|
| > or any real db
|
| sqlite is literally _the state of the art database_. I
| suspect you mean "database server" or something
| gunalx wrote:
| I'm guessing incomplete migrations or similar problems
| where stuff is just partially written, or out of sync.
| The Plex db is kinda complex under the hood.
| fyrabanks wrote:
| _Subtitle settings turn off between episodes_
|
| you can enable global subtitles in settings.
|
| _Let me sort by file size so I can watch the disk
| gobbling files first_
|
| you can kinda deduce that if you sort by bitrate.
|
| it sounds like you figured out a solution for yourself,
| already, but there's a lot of existing utilities like
| tinyMediaManager, WebTools-NG, Raddarr, Sonarr, etc. for
| doing media management. Plex is just a media
| server/player.
| chneu wrote:
| They removed plugins which severely hamstrung their
| ecosystem. They quickly lost a ton of useful features and
| started to lock everything into their preferences.
| seany wrote:
| Having mobile downloads work in any kind of same way.
| Honestly just offering a download file with quality drop
| downs would solve the issue for most people
| outime wrote:
| When I had to decide between Plex and Jellyfin, I noticed that
| with Plex it was mandatory to have an account even when self-
| hosting (!) so I'm not sure whether it's better or worse than
| Jellyfin, I just didn't bother trying it out because of that.
| chneu wrote:
| I was camping without service last year. I wanted to watch
| some House MD I had downloaded in the plex app before I left.
| I fire up plex ...it can't connect. Why does it need to
| connect? Bye Plex. Hello Jellyfin.
| majora2007 wrote:
| Plex is aimed for a simple ease-of-use experience, so if you
| aren't technical enough to setup a reverse proxy, Plex offers
| all the authentication and proxying for you.
|
| It's not a true self-hosted software. It just depends on what
| matters most to you.
| lamasery wrote:
| Forced server transcoding for everything. Ouch. Thought maybe at
| least mpeg2 or something would play directly.
| mystraline wrote:
| Intel ARC 380's are ideal at 4k realtime transcoded streams.
| And theyre cheap as well.
|
| You could probably do a sticky round robin reverse proxy with a
| few backends doing transcode.
|
| The biggest issue is bandwidth, but you probably knew that.
| haunter wrote:
| Even better is a passive cooled GPU like the Palit 3050 KalmX
| https://www.palit.com/palit/vgapro.php?id=5147 Too bad they
| are not producing them anymore
| mystraline wrote:
| Absolutely not.
|
| Nvidia arbitrarily locks number of encodes between 2 to 5
| streams, depending if you're willing to run hacked firmware
| and drivers.
|
| Multi-encoding on nvidia is a "professional card option"
| only.
|
| Intel's ARC line has no such arbitrary encode/decode limit.
| And they are significantly cheaper as well.
|
| https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-
| install/transcoding/h...
| ruined wrote:
| it's 480p. every box i've used in the last two decades could do
| that on the fly without breaking a sweat.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The Wii is just barely within the last 2 decades but it does
| very much struggle with 480p decoding of most anything (and
| even sweats a decent amount on 240p) as it was pretty low end
| for even 20 years ago.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| You can disable transcoding in the server settings or at the
| user level. Your client device would have to support the file
| being directly played of course.
| nout wrote:
| Jellyfin is great in that it just works. I managed to install it
| on Samsung TV with Tizen OS and it has been just solid experience
| for many years now.
| nerptastic wrote:
| Agreed. I honestly chose Jellyfin over plex because I preferred
| the branding, not sure what I'm missing. I really enjoy
| Jellyfin, and thy seemingly have support for most devices in
| some way.
|
| My GF has it set up on her iPad, phone, computer. App is on our
| TV and has no issues. We have Netflix at home. She's non
| technical and hasn't had any trouble once I gave her a login.
|
| The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of her
| lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home ;)
| (for now)
| lamasery wrote:
| > The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of
| her lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home
| ;) (for now)
|
| Tailscale got me outside-the-home Jellyfin with a grand total
| of maybe 30 minutes of effort, including signing up, getting
| my server connected, and getting it on my MacBook, AppleTV,
| and phone. I'd never used it before.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Combine with a $5 VPS and nginix reverse proxy to make this
| true for any device, even ones without tailscale!
| 542458 wrote:
| Or Cloudflare Argo tunnels for $0/mo :)
| ZeWaka wrote:
| That's against their ToS.
| lamasery wrote:
| I'd not put Jellyfin on a public IP, even indirectly. I'd
| be surprised if it's not full of exploits.
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| There was just another one recently actually. It was the
| final straw that convinced me to stop making my Jellyfin
| server publicly accessible (for my family abroad) and
| move to a VPN based solution instead (WireGuard or
| Tailscale I haven't set it up yet).
| ZeWaka wrote:
| I whitelist my friends IP blocks, seems to work well
| enough.
|
| No way in hell I'm convincing them to install tailscale
| or similar on their TV / router.
| lamasery wrote:
| How's the bandwidth and transfer limits on that $5 VPS,
| would be my next concern? One approximately-perfect-
| Bluray-quality 4K movie can be north of 50GB, decent
| quality, still 20+GB. Very-high-quality 1080p is gonna be
| like 8-12GB for a movie, OK quality, 4.5-6GB.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Only for outgoing - 2TB included, each additional TB is
| $1. It was 20TB included when I set this up in 2024, but
| they've since changed their policies.
|
| If I used their (Hetzner) servers in the EU it's still be
| 20TB, but I prefer having the server 10 miles from my
| house.
|
| Plenty fine with that pricing since I also use it to un-
| CGNAT services on my home server (I'd run this through
| Tunnels if it was significant)
|
| Generally ~22GB 4k hdr muxes or ~8gb 1080p.
| lamasery wrote:
| Damn, that's decent, yeah that'd get you a ways. Imma
| stick with free peer-to-peer VPN via Tailscale because
| it's already working for me, but I can see the appeal of
| that.
| lamasery wrote:
| The _one_ trick is to make sure your file naming &
| organization is good. They have good documentation on it.
| Everything's pretty much automatic then, almost zero further
| work. The naming conventions aren't too bad, and the resulting
| file tree would be a reasonable way to organize your files
| regardless.
| nout wrote:
| I actually like the conventions. Movie name and a year in
| parentheses and then it can be whatever. E.g.
|
| Movie (2016).whatever.zzz/whatever.mkv
| lamasery wrote:
| Yeah in my case it mostly just encouraged me to clean up
| some nonsense I'd been meaning to anyway.
|
| I think some folks who have strong opinions about things
| like organizing their files under folders by director or
| something find it grating, but it did nothing but help my
| structure.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I gave Jellyfin up and went back to upnp/dlna after the Android
| and iOS clients would keep losing sync, or wouldn't show me
| some season of a show, or would pick a white background on
| white text for a show.
|
| The pain just kept adding up. It was quite nice most of the
| time. But every single time I reached for my phone, I was
| wondering how badly it was going to go. Quitting Jellyfin
| seemed like an excellent choice.
|
| Upnp/dlna is much cruder; very direct raw BubbleUPnP client.
| But it works so well for me. Their transcoding server also is
| quite good and I can run it on any machine I want, isn't
| coupled to anything, can switch between them easily.
|
| Bubbleupnp is also great because it lets me turn tablets into
| cast screens. I love that so much. Good general protocols rock;
| having media server, media renderer, then separate control
| points was a great model, good job UPnP.
| tym0 wrote:
| Yeah the poor Jellyfin clients (on xbox) are what's keeping
| me on Plex despite all the accumulating paper cuts...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Heh, I just spent 15 minutes debugging a Jellyfin bug where my
| WebOS client thought that the startup wizard had not been
| completed yet (I tried restarting it several times, but the
| thing that did the trick was enabling debug logging and _then_
| it started working properly--probably a coincidence). Jellyfin
| is the best in class, but the bar is in hell. It can't be run
| in any kind of a high availability configuration, so if your
| only instance goes down or has any kind of issue, you have to
| jump on and fix it immediately or you can't use it. When
| something goes wrong, some of the logs show up in stderr, but
| most are just written as plain files to a directory. It's free
| software, so you get what you pay for, but it's pretty buggy.
| zhivota wrote:
| I love it mostly as well so far, the only sticking point on
| both my TVs is constantly having to re-enter my server IP
| address. It sticks around for a couple days, then it's gone
| again.
| monocasa wrote:
| Has anyone tried to horizontally scale jellyfin to running on a
| multi node cluster?
|
| I'm wanting to set it up for around 20 households to share, and
| with transcoding that exceeds a single (cheap) node.
| rtpg wrote:
| For hardware acceleration you might be interested in the remote
| hardware acceleration strategy...
|
| https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/h...
|
| The jellyfin DB itself is unfortunately sqlite instead of being
| DB agnostic. Maybe you could hack together something such that
| only one node handles writes and everyone else handles reads...
| if getting multiple cheap nodes gets your more bandwidth. I
| have to imagine that jellyfin fairly quickly stops being in
| charge of the media stream directly.
|
| But yeah I think the transcoding and the size of your data pipe
| is the only "hard" part. The DB read/writes themselves are
| going to not be an issue (I think)
| circularfoyers wrote:
| The database changes late last year is laying the grounds for
| other database engines[1].
|
| [1] https://jellyfin.org/posts/jellyfin-release-10.11.0/#the-
| lib...
| chneu wrote:
| If Jellyfin ever fixes the mountain of bugs from the
| "upgrade". They aren't even acknowledging major bugs that
| make Jellyfin unusable for like 20% of users.
|
| Do not upgrade Jellyfin if you have a sizeable library.
| Backup first if you do.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Yes, it was annoying, SQLite sucks as single source of truth
| for clusters, and it cost less than $100 to just buy hardware
| that can handle multiple high res transcoding sessions at once,
| but not 20 households' worth.
| galbar wrote:
| FWIW, I have managed 10 simultaneous live transcoded streams on
| a ARC B580 and it could have managed a few more. With couple of
| them you cold be fine.
|
| The other aspect is you could share the media storage over NFS
| and have multiple jellyfin instances running for different
| houeshold groups.
|
| With 2 or 3 nodes like that I think you could make it work.
| stijnveken wrote:
| I only have an cpu with hardware acceleration that is used for
| transcoding and even that can handle a couple of streams
| transcoding simultaneously. The biggest thing is getting people
| to use clients that support direct play.
| rauland wrote:
| Jellyfin isn't designed to be clustered.
|
| For your use case, deploying multiple instances would be the
| way to go.
| zdw wrote:
| It would be great to get one of these that supports the
| OpenSubsonic API, which has become a defacto standard for
| opensource music servers.
|
| Would be music-only, which is sometimes ideal for older devices.
| sbinnee wrote:
| I love this kind of project. I am pretty sure the developer had a
| Wii console sitting around somewhere and thought about how to
| make it useful again. Wait, I have a PS2 sitting around
| somewhere...
| poglet wrote:
| If you're using Dolphin, it may be worth testing Better-Wii-Menu-
| DE (https://github.com/Gavin-S-Dev/Better-Wii-Menu-DE).
|
| You could probably have your Wii computer boot directly into
| Jellyfin using a startup shortcut with 'dolphin-emu -e
| WiiFin.dol', then switch out of the app to play Wii games using
| the better menu app.
|
| Then you can your Wiimote for both media + gaming with out
| needing a keyboard / mouse.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Now we just need a tvOS client that can play music...
| OuterVale wrote:
| I built a little Jellyfin plugin for KOReader [1] so I can access
| my books from my Kindle. Jellyfin proved really nice to work with
| (though there was some poorly documented auth stuff they were in
| the process of deprecating).
|
| If anyone has been thinking of building something in the Jellyfin
| ecosystem, I very much recommend it.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/DeclanChidlow/KOReader-Jellyfin-Plugin/
| agarmash wrote:
| It absolutely should be ported to GameCube and be called DolFin
| (the GameCube's codename is Dolphin)
| _joel wrote:
| Never realised Wii had a .WAD format. I guess it can run doom
| though :)
| aayushdutt wrote:
| Really looking forward to a Jellyfin client on PS5
| aquova wrote:
| Speak of the devil, I was just looking for something just like
| this earlier this week. I may have even have ran into this exact
| project, but it didn't have functioning playback until now. I
| have a spare CRT in my office that I use for some old consoles,
| and thought it would be neat to stream some 4:3 media onto it,
| but didn't want to bother with getting some client box and HDMI
| to composite converter. If this works well, it would solve that
| problem nicely.
| hnarn wrote:
| We really got a client for the Nintendo Wii before a usable one
| for tvOS.
| clayhacks wrote:
| Yeah, I've been beta testing the Streamyfin tvOS app. it's now
| about on par with the official tvOS client, but feels like it's
| making more progress regularly
| hungryhobbit wrote:
| But can it still play Wii games?
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