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Jellyfin: A Free Software Media System

318 points by matthberg 7y ago

jmuguy 7y ago
Jellyfin is one of my fallbacks in case Plex ends up walking off the cliff of pointless bloat and unwanted partnerships. The current Tidal integration, that you can’t fully disable, was the first time I started considering alternatives.
- flatiron 7y ago
  I have it disabled on my server. It’s just a drop down and I set it to “disabled” and that was that.
  - xbmcuser 7y ago
    I uninstalled Plex when they disabled user plugins.
  - jmuguy 7y ago
    Yeah except now it’s suggesting songs on tidal that played during tv episodes. Haven’t found a way to get rid of that :/
    - Arn_Thor 7y ago
      Go to "manage libraries", then edit each library. Once the edit menu opens, go to the "advanced" section and untick "include related TIDAL content". That ought to sort it out
PenguinCoder 7y ago
I really want to use Jellyfin. There is one major thing holding me back right now which is no Roku app without hacking an emby app. I'd love to even help develop or test a Roku Jellyfin app, but I know nothing of their code base (or .NET)
- aleph- 7y ago
  Check the jellyfin-roku GitHub repo.
- bisby 7y ago
  https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-roku https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-roku Requires setting your Roku to dev mode and side loading. Didn't want to toss some half finished slop onto the app store. It's been in a semi idle state because it covers most of my use cases and I don't really know enough about other people's use cases to know what needs to be fixed or updated before people find it "acceptable". (I'm not a BrightScript dev, which gives a bit of extra imposter syndrome and makes me nervous to consider a thing shippable too). BrightScript is awful, but if you can help develop it would be great (the server is in .NET but the Roku app is in Roku's BrightScript). If not, testing and feedback and prioritization of feature requests also helps a ton.
  - mmcclure 7y ago
    We have to write some BrightScript at work in order to maintain an SDK for our QoS data analytics product. It's one of those things where you forget about it until you have to work on it again, then you get to go through all the stages of "why would someone do this" all over. I think Roku is actually one of the better OTT platforms out there, but that's absolutely in spite of BrightScript.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  Clients are a gap for sure. I have a PS4 and Wii U already under my TV; I'm in the process of motivating myself to set up a proper media server, and Plex seemed like a safe option given that there are phone and game console apps, and a web client for desktop use. Would love to try Jellyfin, but I'm definitely not setting up another box + remote for it, and it sounds like the web client is a little patchy in the PS4's browser. (looks like the web client does have a bunch of PS4-specific detection in it, so it's getting at least some testing/use— perhaps I'll check it out: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/search?q=PS4&type=Code https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/search?q=PS4&type=C...)
- 7y ago
heavyset_go 7y ago
Jellyfin is great, the project team is committed to keeping it open source and they're great to work with. If anyone is looking to contribute, the React client needs some work and its success would open up support to more platforms.
fixmycode 7y ago
The only thing that keeps me from using Jellyfish over Plex is because of the TV apps. My Samsung Smart TV has a really outdated but functional Plex client, meanwhile, my Netflix and YouTube apps are updated regularly, although they're not as feature-rich as the Roku versions. The Samsung Smart TV OS apparently is being cycled out for more modern alternatives. Surely the Jellyfish team knows this but with the ever-changing landscape of TV OS's, it seems like it's really difficult to support a large quantity of devices.
- heavyset_go 7y ago
  I've only hopped on to Samsung's TV platform with recent hardware, but it seems to me like they've gravitated towards shipping Tizen enabled TVs for the last few years. Is there significant fragmentation in Tizen land?
  - scrollaway 7y ago
    Honestly the Tizen software is just so horrendeously slow. Getting an nvidia shield and slapping it on the TV is well worth it just to have smooth UI interactions. And the shield also has a chromecast built into it…
    - mrmlz 7y ago
      We got a Samsung The Frame this Black Friday, which uses Tizen. It is our first really smart tv, the other we got is a 2012 Panasonic plasma.. Anyway, i'm quite pleasently suprised with the response and UI interactions.
      - Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
        My Samsung tizen based tv has gotten progressively slower over the years I've had it. Samsung's also forced an uninstallable tv plus app onto my tv.
- prplhaz4 7y ago
  Jellyfin also functions as a dlna media server so might be enough to get the job done (depending on what you're using it for). I use Jellyfin dlna with my Samsung TV to stream OTA, iptv, ipcams, movies and recorded TV. I have a bunch of other devices in the house that can access it this way as well.
ironarm 7y ago
I highly recommend Jellyfin. I've been running it as a front end for my media server for about 2 months. There's some slight hiccups, but it's not Plex. The only real downside is there are not a lot of native apps available yet. I also recommend the linuxserver docker images that are a great shortcut to getting it set up along with a suite of complementary software.
- scrollaway 7y ago
  > There's some slight hiccups, but it's not Plex. Please elaborate -- is "it's not plex" supposed to be positive or negative? I'm a heavy Plex user and I'd love to switch to an open source alternative. But Plex is really good, and I love the native Trakt.tv webhook integration (which means everything I watch automatically gets tracked on trakt.tv).
  - eblah 7y ago
    It uses FFMpeg vs Plexs proprietary transcoder. So, hardware/GPU transcoding can be done for free. It also doesn't have the latest "free" stuff Plex has started adding in. Personally, I just want my movies or TV and that's it. If I want steaming or news, I'll go find it elsewhere.
    - wronglebowski 7y ago
      PLEX’s is based on FFMpeg. https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250377-transcoding-media/ https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250377-transcoding-media... Of all things to be concerned about I wouldn’t consider a media transcoder to be one of them.
      - regnerba 7y ago
        I run both PLEX and Jellyfin in Docker containers on my homelab and I have found Jellyfin to "just work" better. The hardware acceleration from my Intel NUC just works for Jellyfin and was always a struggle in PLEX.
      - 7y ago
cfjgvjh 7y ago
Jellyfin is really good, I've switched from plex and haven't looked back; it doesn't really have a native client I liked but the jellyfin addon for kodi works pretty okay. It's also much faster to scan my library with jellyfin than plex, (few minutes vs an hour and a half) though I'm not sure why as I only have ~30 shows.
- mistermann 7y ago
  > jellyfin addon for kodi Is this how one would watch media from Jellyfish on TV, install Kodi+JellyFish AddOn for iOS/Android and then Chromecast to TV?
  - xbmcuser 7y ago
    Depends on the tv as it does have native apps for some tvs
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
regnerba 7y ago
Switched to Jellyfin a few weeks ago from PLEX and it has been rock solid so far. I especially love how much better managing users is. Having more control over who can download, stream, and transcode when doing either of those things is A+.
- vxNsr 7y ago
  Does Jellyfin offer a way to watch from outside the local network alà app.plex.com? Or do I need to set up a vpn as well?
  - thekyle 7y ago
    Just the usual ways of exposing a service to the public net. Port forwarding or VPN would both work fine. Jellyfin does support UPnP.
    - prplhaz4 7y ago
      There's also fairly complete documentation on setting up a number of reverse proxies if you're considering port forwarding: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-proxy.html https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-pro...
    - vxNsr 7y ago
      Awesome thanks!
opendomain 7y ago
The website looks great, but does not offer a lot of detail. Can someone explain: "Holds your entire movie collection" - does this mean it rips your DVDs onto a hard drive? Or just catalog them? "Collect your TV Shows, and have them automatically organized by season." - is this over the air TV? Over the Top (Cable). Does it include Netflix, PrimeTV, Hulu? IS this just a catalog of what you like or does it Copy these to the hard drive as well? "Enjoy your own music collection. Make playlists, and listen on the go." - Can I transfer songs I bought song on Apple, GooglePlay, or CDs? "Watch Live TV and set automatic recordings to expand your media library" - is this over the air and/or cable? Can I record from streaming services? Once I record, can I watch it on my mobile? Thank you for your help!
- eblah 7y ago
  It catalogs and let's you play/transcode to devices. It's a replacement for Plex based off a fork of Emby; however, Jellyfin is completely open source. I just installed it a few weeks back, and like it a lot. Much less clutter and overhead compared to Plex. The Roku app is what's missing for me, though. When that is finished (it's in development), this will be a great full replacement for Plex, for me.
- prplhaz4 7y ago
  There is also a live demo available. It sounds like soon the admin features will be exposed too. https://demo.jellyfin.org/stable/ https://demo.jellyfin.org/stable/
- krisroadruck 7y ago
  It, and apps like it (plex, emby) are a fancy front end for all your pirated media or personal backups. It requires the media exist in digital form on a network attached device, be it your PC, NAS or server. It will not interface with any legit streaming services you have like spotify, netflix, et cetera. Think of it as a personal netflix-like UI for your local media, and nothing more.
  - surround 7y ago
    But how does it support live TV?
mopsi 7y ago
How does it compare to Emby? What's better, what's worse?
- Mashimo 7y ago
  Jellyfin is open source, based on Emby 2.4.X or something like that. It can do hardware encoding out of the box. With emby you have to pay for that. They now start with refactoring all the code, because apparently Emby code was really spagetti like. There is an Jellyfin Dev in this thread. Ask him about the Emby Database design where DB and XML files where all mixed :))) DL;DR: Not too much difference for the enduser right now. Might load a bit faster, because of website refactoring.
jchw 7y ago
I moved over to Jellyfin after Emby started sufficiently pissing me off. I don’t really want to pay a subscription fee to self host stuff, but I especially don’t want to be pushed to pay for something that was already free and open source. (I certainly do so voluntarily. Krita comes to mind.) Jellyfin lacks many of the native apps, but at least I don’t feel like I’m being pushed into someone’s annoying monetization scheme.
- prplhaz4 7y ago
  Jellyfin is also a dlna media server, so even devices that don't have an official client can still access your content in a pinch.
  - m-p-3 7y ago
    Plex can do that as well.
    - jchw 7y ago
      While true I don’t see how that is particularly relevant to this thread; I was only talking about Emby vs Jellyfin. Did you mean Emby? I know it does but if you were going to use Emby with no native apps you may as well use Jellyfin.
- rb666 7y ago
  But Emby has a proper IOS client, Jellyfin does not. This is value I pay for. Plus I don't mind paying for quality software regardless.
  - coppernoodles 7y ago
    There is a beta client for Jellyfin as well which you can install via testflight, it may be this one: https://testflight.apple.com/join/TcFUEVEb https://testflight.apple.com/join/TcFUEVEb but I just googled that and did not get it from an official page.
xfalcox 7y ago
Does this have an option to completely disable transcoding?
- smurfpandey 7y ago
  You can disable transcoding per-user, there's no option to disable it system wide.
nabeelms 7y ago
I've never used a media server before. What advantages does a media server offer over just storing stuff on a set of folders?
- Cyph0n 7y ago
  For me, a media server: (1) Pulls media metadata automatically (2) Can serve content to a variety of clients, including smart phones (3) Provides user access controls for when you want to share your content with others (4) Can transcode media on the fly for clients that don’t natively support a media format (5) Allows you to logically split up your content into libraries (6) Provides powerful search capabilities using metadata (e.g., by actor, by genre, by director) (7) Provides support for audio as well as video content
- uneekname 7y ago
  It's easier to browse and stream to other devices. It can also help organize your files and retrieve metadata about them.
- NortySpock 7y ago
  Flashy movie posters you can idly browse through while you are curling up against your significant other. There's a real emotional difference in clicking on a movie poster rather than squinting at text in a list of folder contents. Additionally the media server will generally pull lists of actors, directors, and other related works, as well as holding your place in the episode or series if you are working your way through a TV series on the weekend. "What episode where we on?" becomes a rhetorical question rather than a debate.
  - FreeKill 7y ago
    Also, other quality of life features such as searching your library, ordering your list by different criteria such as directors, critic reviews, release date, combining movies/tv shows into organized collections etc.
    - petepete 7y ago
krick 7y ago
How does it compare to Subsonic/Libresonic/Airsonic in terms of being a self-hosted Spotify?
- iotku 7y ago
  Music support exists but needs a lot of love. Currently for my usecase (streaming my music to my Android phone) transcoding doesn't currently work (streaming flac over a mobile data connection is bad news) so I've fallen back to using dsub/gonic (subsonic compatible server) until transcoding is resolved. It finds metadata pretty well (Artwork, artist info, and summaries) but playback leaves a fair bit to be desired and playlists aren't very well fleshed out.
  - krick 7y ago
    Thanks! First time I hear of gonic too. Why use it instead of Airsonic?
    - iotku 7y ago
      Personally I'm just not a huge fan of java and the web interface was a bit on the annoying side, although it has a few more features like grabbing podcasts (which never really seemed to be implemented into other clients). As far as gonic goes I've been testing it out for a while and haven't run into any issues and I'm a bit of a fanboy for stuff made in go. It's still pretty bare-bones, but has been pretty stable and fast otherwise. Looking into it would seem that gonic might not actually do transcoding yet (airsonic could transcode into opus after some configuration which is nice) although, caching from dsub might have saved me there if that's the case. The main issue with jellyfin as far as mobile stuff goes is that it doesn't cache any tracks so if I was going between wifi signals audio would frequently cut out which was never a problem with airsonic/gonic as dsub will request a couple of tracks ahead of time to compensate for deadzones.
hbcondo714 7y ago
Any recommendations for a remote control when using it as a HTPC? Didn't see anything on the site but it's not specific to Jellyfin and IMO that's just as important as the media software itself.
- regnerba 7y ago
  I run Jellyfin in my home lab and just Chromecast it to my TV.
- lozaning 7y ago
  If you've got a newish there's change that your TV's remote will automatically work via HDMI using CEC. Kodi on an rpi worked out of the box with the remote from my store brand best buy tv for ~5 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control
- hbcondo714 7y ago
  I used to use a Gyration[1] universal remote control that had a trackpad built-in that allowed my thumb to easily move & click the mouse cursor on my HTPC. Alas I used it so much over the years that it eventually lost responsiveness to my thumb. The manufacturer doesn't make this remote anymore and I never found another computer that made remotes with this kind of mouse technology :( [1] https://www.newegg.com/gyration-gyr3101us-universal/p/N82E16880105001 https://www.newegg.com/gyration-gyr3101us-universal/p/N82E16...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
anthonylavado 7y ago
I’m one of the Core Team members of Jellyfin, if anyone had any questions. https://github.com/anthonylavado https://github.com/anthonylavado
- hysan 7y ago
  From what I'm reading in comments, clients are the biggest UX gap. I'm planning on finally setting up a solution for my family and was initially leaning towards Plex for simplicity client-side. If you were to convince me to try Jellyfin, what would your recommended setup for an LG WebOS TV? Ideally one that allows me to continue using the TV remote.
  - alias_neo 7y ago
    I tried Jellyfin but reluctantly had to switch to Emby so my family had the WebOS app for the TV.
  - gadders 7y ago
    I'd like to add a vote for Firefox OS for my Panasonic TV.
  - anthonylavado 7y ago
    Most "boxes" that you get would let you use your TV remote through CEC. If you really wanted to add something on, then I would probably recommend anything from a Fire Stick 4K to an nVidia Shield. That said, we have WebOS work in progress.
- BadBadJellyBean 7y ago
  I have tried the Android TV Jellyfin app on my MiBox S and it was unwatchable because of the stutter. Is there any work beeing done on that?
  - Mashimo 7y ago
    Was it transcoding or direct playing the file?
tomc1985 7y ago
How is this compared to Kodi?
- tryum 7y ago
  Kodi is a media player, not a media server. There's a plugin to use kodi as a front-end to jellyfin media server.
  - Blaiz0r 7y ago
    But Kodi can just play files off an attached/networked storage and collects all the metadata if need be, so what's the difference?
    - kingosticks 7y ago
      As answered at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21988656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21988656, it has benefits if you have multiple clients.
- Mashimo 7y ago
  If you just want to watch local, I would stick with kodi. I actually used both for some time. Emby / Jellyfin for remote + other users and kodi local Now I switched to Kodi + jellyfin addon for local.
nwithan8 7y ago
Slowly but surely transitioning to Jellyfin from Plex. A lot more development still needed, feel free to contribute.
skanga 7y ago
Is it possible to customize the movies screen to eliminate pagination and use a continuous scroll instead?
alias_neo 7y ago
I've given this a go, I'd love to use it over emby, but until it has an LG WebOS app, so my family can use it easily, I can't make the switch. They'd benefit hugely, I feel, from focusing effort on the native apps. Some of this is more challenging; WebOS for example never had an OSS app, so there's nothing for Jellyfin to fork
- zmix 7y ago
  A few comments up I read, that Jellyfin acts as a DLNA server. Can't you just connect your LG as a DLNA client/renderer?
  - alias_neo 7y ago
    Yes, but the experience is substantially worse; you get some ugly folder icons, no art-work, and names are based on folder/file names rather than Meta. Family (particularly little ones) love the beautiful artwork/cover art layout you get from the likes of Emby/Jellyfin/Plex.
    - zmix 7y ago
      Ah, ok, I see.
bitL 7y ago
Can you view stuff indexed on NAS, running Jellyfin, from a separate HTPC running Kodi? NAS is the best place for indexing media but not really for viewing them, HTPC is great for viewing media, but not for storing them.
chime 7y ago
Having tried everything from Plex, Emby, and JellyFin to casting on various platforms and RaspPi with HDMI, I found the best experience for me was to get the VLC app on my AppleTV. It plays straight from my NAS over SMB, doesn’t need any transcoding, and let’s me download subtitles on screen directly. I don’t much care about browsing through a pretty interface and would rather be able to rewind/forward as needed without buffering hell. I wish VLC app had some better features like saving settings or autoconnecting to my default server. But it is great for playing hidef videos. If you want to watch stuff more than organizing and polishing your library, give it a shot.
- BadBadJellyBean 7y ago
  I really like Kodi on Anroid TV. It has a nice interface and just plays from my NAS via SMB or NFS.
- zirobi 7y ago
  The one thing that keeps me locked into a pretty interface is remembering: 1. What has and has not been watched 2. How far through a film/episode has been watched 3. One click to start watching the film/series from where I left off If the VLC app can do that then I'm sold.
- jafingi 7y ago
  I have been really satisfied with Infuse on the AppleTV. It does the same thing as VLC, but in a way more polished, Apple-like way.
- kuschku 7y ago
  If you've pre-encoded videos correctly, they'll play in any player with zero seeking and zero loading times :) -tune fastdecode and -movflags +faststart are the magic keywords
- aequitas 7y ago
  What keeps me locked into these solutions is that I'm totally sold on the ChromeCast concept where your TV is just a dumb screen with barely any interaction (on/off, volume and pause/resume (but only if the stars align and HDMI CEC works)) and your phone/pc tells it which content it should play. Haven't been able to get DLNA working on my current TV.
benboughton1 7y ago
If you use a media player/manager like this, where do you get your movies? Is there a online movie store that you can download in appropriate format? There was a place for this before good streaming services existed but how do you legally obtain movies and store them on a NAS to feed into JellyFin? Are people ripping their blurays? I ot out of watching all the latest and greatest movies 10 years ago where we would just torrent everything into a folder called /movies. Now it's just the odd Netflix series so I am interested to know how people manage their movie collections and how they acquire them.
- MrGilbert 7y ago
  It's a valid point. I think it all boils down to: a) Grab a copy of your favorite show or movie as a blu-ray and rip that (which is illegal in most jurisdictions, as you have to break the copy protection). b) Watch it on Netflix and grab it from somewhere else (which is also illegal, because you don't own it if you have Netflix) c) Don't care at all and just download the stuff "from sources". d) Just watch open or initially free stuff. That's even harder. It's pretty hard to stay on the safe side for this kind of thing. Maybe we will see the same we had with the music industry some time ago: It's possible for me to get a FLAC album without DRM nowadays from perfectly legal sources. Not every album and every niche, but I can buy it and own it. Maybe the movie industry will have the same moment in the next decade.
  - benboughton1 7y ago
    OK so in practice, most people utilisting this type of software are either bending or breaking the law to organise their movie collection the way they want to. I would really like to be able to manage my media on a NAS with a great piece of OS software that organises them with no ML smarts (when did people forget about alphabetical order and a few tags/categories) but what you gain in privacy and other benefits there you loose in fighting the uphill battle in acquiring the files, time, management etc. It has to be a hobby.
    - joshspankit 7y ago
Havoc 7y ago
What kind of device would be best for attaching to a TV? Rasp4 or something like that?
throwaway-9320 7y ago
Has anyone have any overview of how robust the security situation is? I attempted to setup Jellyfin behind an nginx proxy with basic auth enabled because I didn't know how trustworthy their security is, but ran into various issues with the setup that couldn't be resolved at the time. It sometimes worked, but mostly ran into issues. This was around the time when the fork happened and Jellyfin was very much a new thing, I have not tried it after that.
mrmlz 7y ago
My biggest gripe with Jellyfin, Emby, Plex etc. is the lack of .rar-support. It annoys me to no end. Kodi has had support for ages (back in the XBMC-days) but the feature-request and bountys seems to fall on deaf ears. Other than that i've found the meta-data to be "better" in emby/jellfin compared to Kodi.
- racingmars 7y ago
  RAR is a proprietary format... there is no free-software code to decompress RAR archives (the license agreement for the code that is available prohibits using the code to 'reverse engineer' the RAR format itself, and I'm guessing most projects don't want to have to change their license agreement to a non-free-software license to be able to include RAR support). Not sure why anyone actually uses RAR these days...I really don't get it.
  - mrmlz 7y ago
    I still have tonnes of .rar. Exclusively for legacy reasons (you can google why .rar exists), sure i could spend the time extracting everything, or continue using Kodi which is my current solution. I don't think the license is the issue, Kodi has solved it with a external dep if i'm not mistaken. The reason is more related to your last sentence. They don't get it, and thus doesn't want to spend time on solving it. Which is their prerogative of course, but it still annoys _me_ :)
    - ValentineC 7y ago
      > I still have tonnes of .rar. Exclusively for legacy reasons (you can google why .rar exists), sure i could spend the time extracting everything, or continue using Kodi which is my current solution. I don't understand why you'd want to keep media files in .rar, unless you are part of scene distribution. It's not like ROM emulation, where there's tangible savings to be had storing the individual ROMs in a compressed format.
      - mrmlz 7y ago
bsharitt 7y ago
I'm in the process of trying to move to Jellyfin from Plex, especially as Plex tries to shove in more "features". Right now the only thing that's holding me back is the state of the Roku and iOS apps, which are still pretty rough around the edges(and neither officially available yet).
branon 7y ago
I've been using Jellyfin for about six months and have been overjoyed with it. Amazing alternative to the nasty proprietary apps like Plex and Emby. Previously, I was pointing Kodi at an SFTP server which worked fine, similar to the guy who had a good experience with VLC. Those are both great standalone solutions. However, adding "media server" software like Jellyfin into the mix gives my users a much wider variety of clients to choose from (including the Jellyfin addon for Kodi) without compromising freedom. Various other perks include tracking watched status across devices, Chromecast support, and re-encoding video files so they play on old clients or slower connections. The playback reporting plugin is fun as well. Keep up the great work everybody!
- SamBam 7y ago
  Just so the rest of us know, what's "nasty" about Plex and Emby?
  - branon 7y ago
    I speak mainly in regards to their closed-source, proprietary nature. I used Plex briefly some years ago, but became dissatisfied with nag screens, paywalls, and the inability to conduct user authentication on my own terms. Usage of a Plex account (or Google/Facebook integration) is mandatory, which is uncool. Emby used to be alright but as of version 3.6, the project was taken closed-source[0]. Thankfully the Jellyfin developers stepped in, and are working to continue the legacy. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20181212100152/https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby/issues/3479 https://web.archive.org/web/20181212100152/https://github.co...
- charwalker 7y ago
  How are you handling remote access to Jellyfin? I have it set up internally but not yet accessible to friends/family.
  - branon 7y ago
    I've got nginx running and acting as a reverse proxy[0]. I've found it's an easy way to manage TLS certificates, and using a memorable subdomain is a bonus for my users as well. The Jellyfin server is configured so no user tiles are shown on the login screen. Everybody who logs in must type both a username and password. My upstream bandwidth is not great, so WAN streams are choked to 4 Mbps each, for all users except myself of course ;) [0] https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-proxy.html#nginx https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-pro...
coppernoodles 7y ago
Since the audience here is developer-centric, I would like to share that I contributed a small amount of code to jellyfin and the interaction with the developers was very positive.
yboris 7y ago
Shameless plug: I built Video Hub App that does something similar: gives you a nice YouTube-like layout (and many more previewing and searching capabilities) for videos on your computer (no streaming though). Website: https://videohubapp.com/ https://videohubapp.com/ MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
- majora2007 7y ago
  This actually looks pretty nice. I'll try this out tonight. Thanks.
ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago
I personally don't see much use for all those fancy features over a simple but adequate minidlna server, except I don't get why after all those years no one implemented proper automatic library rescan for it. There are workarounds but it should work OOTB!
charwalker 7y ago
As many of us long time Plex users see new, unwanted features vs having issues fixed (like syncing or a method to run it as a service), Jellyfin has become my next step. I haven't set it up for external access yet but so far I'm enjoying the simplicity. I'm not limited by lack of certain apps/players as I do everything on PC but I'm excited to see where this crew can go.

318 points by matthberg 7y ago

Jellyfin is one of my fallbacks in case Plex ends up walking off the cliff of pointless bloat and unwanted partnerships. The current Tidal integration, that you can’t fully disable, was the first time I started considering alternatives.

flatiron 7y ago
I have it disabled on my server. It’s just a drop down and I set it to “disabled” and that was that.
- xbmcuser 7y ago
  I uninstalled Plex when they disabled user plugins.
- jmuguy 7y ago
  Yeah except now it’s suggesting songs on tidal that played during tv episodes. Haven’t found a way to get rid of that :/
  - Arn_Thor 7y ago
    Go to "manage libraries", then edit each library. Once the edit menu opens, go to the "advanced" section and untick "include related TIDAL content". That ought to sort it out

PenguinCoder 7y ago

I really want to use Jellyfin. There is one major thing holding me back right now which is no Roku app without hacking an emby app. I'd love to even help develop or test a Roku Jellyfin app, but I know nothing of their code base (or .NET)

aleph- 7y ago
Check the jellyfin-roku GitHub repo.
bisby 7y ago
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-roku https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-roku Requires setting your Roku to dev mode and side loading. Didn't want to toss some half finished slop onto the app store. It's been in a semi idle state because it covers most of my use cases and I don't really know enough about other people's use cases to know what needs to be fixed or updated before people find it "acceptable". (I'm not a BrightScript dev, which gives a bit of extra imposter syndrome and makes me nervous to consider a thing shippable too). BrightScript is awful, but if you can help develop it would be great (the server is in .NET but the Roku app is in Roku's BrightScript). If not, testing and feedback and prioritization of feature requests also helps a ton.
- mmcclure 7y ago
  We have to write some BrightScript at work in order to maintain an SDK for our QoS data analytics product. It's one of those things where you forget about it until you have to work on it again, then you get to go through all the stages of "why would someone do this" all over. I think Roku is actually one of the better OTT platforms out there, but that's absolutely in spite of BrightScript.
mikepurvis 7y ago
Clients are a gap for sure. I have a PS4 and Wii U already under my TV; I'm in the process of motivating myself to set up a proper media server, and Plex seemed like a safe option given that there are phone and game console apps, and a web client for desktop use. Would love to try Jellyfin, but I'm definitely not setting up another box + remote for it, and it sounds like the web client is a little patchy in the PS4's browser. (looks like the web client does have a bunch of PS4-specific detection in it, so it's getting at least some testing/use— perhaps I'll check it out: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/search?q=PS4&type=Code https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/search?q=PS4&type=C...)
7y ago

heavyset_go 7y ago

Jellyfin is great, the project team is committed to keeping it open source and they're great to work with. If anyone is looking to contribute, the React client needs some work and its success would open up support to more platforms.

fixmycode 7y ago

The only thing that keeps me from using Jellyfish over Plex is because of the TV apps. My Samsung Smart TV has a really outdated but functional Plex client, meanwhile, my Netflix and YouTube apps are updated regularly, although they're not as feature-rich as the Roku versions. The Samsung Smart TV OS apparently is being cycled out for more modern alternatives. Surely the Jellyfish team knows this but with the ever-changing landscape of TV OS's, it seems like it's really difficult to support a large quantity of devices.

heavyset_go 7y ago
I've only hopped on to Samsung's TV platform with recent hardware, but it seems to me like they've gravitated towards shipping Tizen enabled TVs for the last few years. Is there significant fragmentation in Tizen land?
- scrollaway 7y ago
  Honestly the Tizen software is just so horrendeously slow. Getting an nvidia shield and slapping it on the TV is well worth it just to have smooth UI interactions. And the shield also has a chromecast built into it…
  - mrmlz 7y ago
    We got a Samsung The Frame this Black Friday, which uses Tizen. It is our first really smart tv, the other we got is a 2012 Panasonic plasma.. Anyway, i'm quite pleasently suprised with the response and UI interactions.
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
      My Samsung tizen based tv has gotten progressively slower over the years I've had it. Samsung's also forced an uninstallable tv plus app onto my tv.
prplhaz4 7y ago
Jellyfin also functions as a dlna media server so might be enough to get the job done (depending on what you're using it for). I use Jellyfin dlna with my Samsung TV to stream OTA, iptv, ipcams, movies and recorded TV. I have a bunch of other devices in the house that can access it this way as well.

ironarm 7y ago

I highly recommend Jellyfin. I've been running it as a front end for my media server for about 2 months. There's some slight hiccups, but it's not Plex. The only real downside is there are not a lot of native apps available yet. I also recommend the linuxserver docker images that are a great shortcut to getting it set up along with a suite of complementary software.

scrollaway 7y ago
> There's some slight hiccups, but it's not Plex. Please elaborate -- is "it's not plex" supposed to be positive or negative? I'm a heavy Plex user and I'd love to switch to an open source alternative. But Plex is really good, and I love the native Trakt.tv webhook integration (which means everything I watch automatically gets tracked on trakt.tv).
- eblah 7y ago
  It uses FFMpeg vs Plexs proprietary transcoder. So, hardware/GPU transcoding can be done for free. It also doesn't have the latest "free" stuff Plex has started adding in. Personally, I just want my movies or TV and that's it. If I want steaming or news, I'll go find it elsewhere.
  - wronglebowski 7y ago
    PLEX’s is based on FFMpeg. https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250377-transcoding-media/ https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250377-transcoding-media... Of all things to be concerned about I wouldn’t consider a media transcoder to be one of them.
    - regnerba 7y ago
      I run both PLEX and Jellyfin in Docker containers on my homelab and I have found Jellyfin to "just work" better. The hardware acceleration from my Intel NUC just works for Jellyfin and was always a struggle in PLEX.
    - 7y ago

cfjgvjh 7y ago

Jellyfin is really good, I've switched from plex and haven't looked back; it doesn't really have a native client I liked but the jellyfin addon for kodi works pretty okay. It's also much faster to scan my library with jellyfin than plex, (few minutes vs an hour and a half) though I'm not sure why as I only have ~30 shows.

mistermann 7y ago
> jellyfin addon for kodi Is this how one would watch media from Jellyfish on TV, install Kodi+JellyFish AddOn for iOS/Android and then Chromecast to TV?
- xbmcuser 7y ago
  Depends on the tv as it does have native apps for some tvs

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

regnerba 7y ago

Switched to Jellyfin a few weeks ago from PLEX and it has been rock solid so far. I especially love how much better managing users is. Having more control over who can download, stream, and transcode when doing either of those things is A+.

vxNsr 7y ago
Does Jellyfin offer a way to watch from outside the local network alà app.plex.com? Or do I need to set up a vpn as well?
- thekyle 7y ago
  Just the usual ways of exposing a service to the public net. Port forwarding or VPN would both work fine. Jellyfin does support UPnP.
  - prplhaz4 7y ago
    There's also fairly complete documentation on setting up a number of reverse proxies if you're considering port forwarding: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-proxy.html https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-pro...
  - vxNsr 7y ago
    Awesome thanks!

opendomain 7y ago

The website looks great, but does not offer a lot of detail. Can someone explain: "Holds your entire movie collection" - does this mean it rips your DVDs onto a hard drive? Or just catalog them? "Collect your TV Shows, and have them automatically organized by season." - is this over the air TV? Over the Top (Cable). Does it include Netflix, PrimeTV, Hulu? IS this just a catalog of what you like or does it Copy these to the hard drive as well? "Enjoy your own music collection. Make playlists, and listen on the go." - Can I transfer songs I bought song on Apple, GooglePlay, or CDs? "Watch Live TV and set automatic recordings to expand your media library" - is this over the air and/or cable? Can I record from streaming services? Once I record, can I watch it on my mobile? Thank you for your help!

eblah 7y ago
It catalogs and let's you play/transcode to devices. It's a replacement for Plex based off a fork of Emby; however, Jellyfin is completely open source. I just installed it a few weeks back, and like it a lot. Much less clutter and overhead compared to Plex. The Roku app is what's missing for me, though. When that is finished (it's in development), this will be a great full replacement for Plex, for me.
prplhaz4 7y ago
There is also a live demo available. It sounds like soon the admin features will be exposed too. https://demo.jellyfin.org/stable/ https://demo.jellyfin.org/stable/
krisroadruck 7y ago
It, and apps like it (plex, emby) are a fancy front end for all your pirated media or personal backups. It requires the media exist in digital form on a network attached device, be it your PC, NAS or server. It will not interface with any legit streaming services you have like spotify, netflix, et cetera. Think of it as a personal netflix-like UI for your local media, and nothing more.
- surround 7y ago
  But how does it support live TV?

mopsi 7y ago

How does it compare to Emby? What's better, what's worse?

Mashimo 7y ago
Jellyfin is open source, based on Emby 2.4.X or something like that. It can do hardware encoding out of the box. With emby you have to pay for that. They now start with refactoring all the code, because apparently Emby code was really spagetti like. There is an Jellyfin Dev in this thread. Ask him about the Emby Database design where DB and XML files where all mixed :))) DL;DR: Not too much difference for the enduser right now. Might load a bit faster, because of website refactoring.

jchw 7y ago

I moved over to Jellyfin after Emby started sufficiently pissing me off. I don’t really want to pay a subscription fee to self host stuff, but I especially don’t want to be pushed to pay for something that was already free and open source. (I certainly do so voluntarily. Krita comes to mind.) Jellyfin lacks many of the native apps, but at least I don’t feel like I’m being pushed into someone’s annoying monetization scheme.

prplhaz4 7y ago
Jellyfin is also a dlna media server, so even devices that don't have an official client can still access your content in a pinch.
- m-p-3 7y ago
  Plex can do that as well.
  - jchw 7y ago
    While true I don’t see how that is particularly relevant to this thread; I was only talking about Emby vs Jellyfin. Did you mean Emby? I know it does but if you were going to use Emby with no native apps you may as well use Jellyfin.
rb666 7y ago
But Emby has a proper IOS client, Jellyfin does not. This is value I pay for. Plus I don't mind paying for quality software regardless.
- coppernoodles 7y ago
  There is a beta client for Jellyfin as well which you can install via testflight, it may be this one: https://testflight.apple.com/join/TcFUEVEb https://testflight.apple.com/join/TcFUEVEb but I just googled that and did not get it from an official page.

xfalcox 7y ago

Does this have an option to completely disable transcoding?

smurfpandey 7y ago
You can disable transcoding per-user, there's no option to disable it system wide.

nabeelms 7y ago

I've never used a media server before. What advantages does a media server offer over just storing stuff on a set of folders?

Cyph0n 7y ago
For me, a media server: (1) Pulls media metadata automatically (2) Can serve content to a variety of clients, including smart phones (3) Provides user access controls for when you want to share your content with others (4) Can transcode media on the fly for clients that don’t natively support a media format (5) Allows you to logically split up your content into libraries (6) Provides powerful search capabilities using metadata (e.g., by actor, by genre, by director) (7) Provides support for audio as well as video content
uneekname 7y ago
It's easier to browse and stream to other devices. It can also help organize your files and retrieve metadata about them.
NortySpock 7y ago
Flashy movie posters you can idly browse through while you are curling up against your significant other. There's a real emotional difference in clicking on a movie poster rather than squinting at text in a list of folder contents. Additionally the media server will generally pull lists of actors, directors, and other related works, as well as holding your place in the episode or series if you are working your way through a TV series on the weekend. "What episode where we on?" becomes a rhetorical question rather than a debate.
- FreeKill 7y ago
  Also, other quality of life features such as searching your library, ordering your list by different criteria such as directors, critic reviews, release date, combining movies/tv shows into organized collections etc.
  - petepete 7y ago

krick 7y ago

How does it compare to Subsonic/Libresonic/Airsonic in terms of being a self-hosted Spotify?

iotku 7y ago
Music support exists but needs a lot of love. Currently for my usecase (streaming my music to my Android phone) transcoding doesn't currently work (streaming flac over a mobile data connection is bad news) so I've fallen back to using dsub/gonic (subsonic compatible server) until transcoding is resolved. It finds metadata pretty well (Artwork, artist info, and summaries) but playback leaves a fair bit to be desired and playlists aren't very well fleshed out.
- krick 7y ago
  Thanks! First time I hear of gonic too. Why use it instead of Airsonic?
  - iotku 7y ago
    Personally I'm just not a huge fan of java and the web interface was a bit on the annoying side, although it has a few more features like grabbing podcasts (which never really seemed to be implemented into other clients). As far as gonic goes I've been testing it out for a while and haven't run into any issues and I'm a bit of a fanboy for stuff made in go. It's still pretty bare-bones, but has been pretty stable and fast otherwise. Looking into it would seem that gonic might not actually do transcoding yet (airsonic could transcode into opus after some configuration which is nice) although, caching from dsub might have saved me there if that's the case. The main issue with jellyfin as far as mobile stuff goes is that it doesn't cache any tracks so if I was going between wifi signals audio would frequently cut out which was never a problem with airsonic/gonic as dsub will request a couple of tracks ahead of time to compensate for deadzones.

hbcondo714 7y ago

Any recommendations for a remote control when using it as a HTPC? Didn't see anything on the site but it's not specific to Jellyfin and IMO that's just as important as the media software itself.

regnerba 7y ago
I run Jellyfin in my home lab and just Chromecast it to my TV.
lozaning 7y ago
If you've got a newish there's change that your TV's remote will automatically work via HDMI using CEC. Kodi on an rpi worked out of the box with the remote from my store brand best buy tv for ~5 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control
hbcondo714 7y ago
I used to use a Gyration[1] universal remote control that had a trackpad built-in that allowed my thumb to easily move & click the mouse cursor on my HTPC. Alas I used it so much over the years that it eventually lost responsiveness to my thumb. The manufacturer doesn't make this remote anymore and I never found another computer that made remotes with this kind of mouse technology :( [1] https://www.newegg.com/gyration-gyr3101us-universal/p/N82E16880105001 https://www.newegg.com/gyration-gyr3101us-universal/p/N82E16...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

anthonylavado 7y ago

I’m one of the Core Team members of Jellyfin, if anyone had any questions. https://github.com/anthonylavado https://github.com/anthonylavado

hysan 7y ago
From what I'm reading in comments, clients are the biggest UX gap. I'm planning on finally setting up a solution for my family and was initially leaning towards Plex for simplicity client-side. If you were to convince me to try Jellyfin, what would your recommended setup for an LG WebOS TV? Ideally one that allows me to continue using the TV remote.
- alias_neo 7y ago
  I tried Jellyfin but reluctantly had to switch to Emby so my family had the WebOS app for the TV.
- gadders 7y ago
  I'd like to add a vote for Firefox OS for my Panasonic TV.
- anthonylavado 7y ago
  Most "boxes" that you get would let you use your TV remote through CEC. If you really wanted to add something on, then I would probably recommend anything from a Fire Stick 4K to an nVidia Shield. That said, we have WebOS work in progress.
BadBadJellyBean 7y ago
I have tried the Android TV Jellyfin app on my MiBox S and it was unwatchable because of the stutter. Is there any work beeing done on that?
- Mashimo 7y ago
  Was it transcoding or direct playing the file?

tomc1985 7y ago

How is this compared to Kodi?

tryum 7y ago
Kodi is a media player, not a media server. There's a plugin to use kodi as a front-end to jellyfin media server.
- Blaiz0r 7y ago
  But Kodi can just play files off an attached/networked storage and collects all the metadata if need be, so what's the difference?
  - kingosticks 7y ago
    As answered at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21988656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21988656, it has benefits if you have multiple clients.
Mashimo 7y ago
If you just want to watch local, I would stick with kodi. I actually used both for some time. Emby / Jellyfin for remote + other users and kodi local Now I switched to Kodi + jellyfin addon for local.

nwithan8 7y ago

Slowly but surely transitioning to Jellyfin from Plex. A lot more development still needed, feel free to contribute.

skanga 7y ago

Is it possible to customize the movies screen to eliminate pagination and use a continuous scroll instead?

alias_neo 7y ago

I've given this a go, I'd love to use it over emby, but until it has an LG WebOS app, so my family can use it easily, I can't make the switch. They'd benefit hugely, I feel, from focusing effort on the native apps. Some of this is more challenging; WebOS for example never had an OSS app, so there's nothing for Jellyfin to fork

zmix 7y ago
A few comments up I read, that Jellyfin acts as a DLNA server. Can't you just connect your LG as a DLNA client/renderer?
- alias_neo 7y ago
  Yes, but the experience is substantially worse; you get some ugly folder icons, no art-work, and names are based on folder/file names rather than Meta. Family (particularly little ones) love the beautiful artwork/cover art layout you get from the likes of Emby/Jellyfin/Plex.
  - zmix 7y ago
    Ah, ok, I see.

bitL 7y ago

Can you view stuff indexed on NAS, running Jellyfin, from a separate HTPC running Kodi? NAS is the best place for indexing media but not really for viewing them, HTPC is great for viewing media, but not for storing them.

chime 7y ago

Having tried everything from Plex, Emby, and JellyFin to casting on various platforms and RaspPi with HDMI, I found the best experience for me was to get the VLC app on my AppleTV. It plays straight from my NAS over SMB, doesn’t need any transcoding, and let’s me download subtitles on screen directly. I don’t much care about browsing through a pretty interface and would rather be able to rewind/forward as needed without buffering hell. I wish VLC app had some better features like saving settings or autoconnecting to my default server. But it is great for playing hidef videos. If you want to watch stuff more than organizing and polishing your library, give it a shot.

BadBadJellyBean 7y ago
I really like Kodi on Anroid TV. It has a nice interface and just plays from my NAS via SMB or NFS.
zirobi 7y ago
The one thing that keeps me locked into a pretty interface is remembering: 1. What has and has not been watched 2. How far through a film/episode has been watched 3. One click to start watching the film/series from where I left off If the VLC app can do that then I'm sold.
jafingi 7y ago
I have been really satisfied with Infuse on the AppleTV. It does the same thing as VLC, but in a way more polished, Apple-like way.
kuschku 7y ago
If you've pre-encoded videos correctly, they'll play in any player with zero seeking and zero loading times :) -tune fastdecode and -movflags +faststart are the magic keywords
aequitas 7y ago
What keeps me locked into these solutions is that I'm totally sold on the ChromeCast concept where your TV is just a dumb screen with barely any interaction (on/off, volume and pause/resume (but only if the stars align and HDMI CEC works)) and your phone/pc tells it which content it should play. Haven't been able to get DLNA working on my current TV.

benboughton1 7y ago

If you use a media player/manager like this, where do you get your movies? Is there a online movie store that you can download in appropriate format? There was a place for this before good streaming services existed but how do you legally obtain movies and store them on a NAS to feed into JellyFin? Are people ripping their blurays? I ot out of watching all the latest and greatest movies 10 years ago where we would just torrent everything into a folder called /movies. Now it's just the odd Netflix series so I am interested to know how people manage their movie collections and how they acquire them.

MrGilbert 7y ago
It's a valid point. I think it all boils down to: a) Grab a copy of your favorite show or movie as a blu-ray and rip that (which is illegal in most jurisdictions, as you have to break the copy protection). b) Watch it on Netflix and grab it from somewhere else (which is also illegal, because you don't own it if you have Netflix) c) Don't care at all and just download the stuff "from sources". d) Just watch open or initially free stuff. That's even harder. It's pretty hard to stay on the safe side for this kind of thing. Maybe we will see the same we had with the music industry some time ago: It's possible for me to get a FLAC album without DRM nowadays from perfectly legal sources. Not every album and every niche, but I can buy it and own it. Maybe the movie industry will have the same moment in the next decade.
- benboughton1 7y ago
  OK so in practice, most people utilisting this type of software are either bending or breaking the law to organise their movie collection the way they want to. I would really like to be able to manage my media on a NAS with a great piece of OS software that organises them with no ML smarts (when did people forget about alphabetical order and a few tags/categories) but what you gain in privacy and other benefits there you loose in fighting the uphill battle in acquiring the files, time, management etc. It has to be a hobby.
  - joshspankit 7y ago

Havoc 7y ago

What kind of device would be best for attaching to a TV? Rasp4 or something like that?

throwaway-9320 7y ago

Has anyone have any overview of how robust the security situation is? I attempted to setup Jellyfin behind an nginx proxy with basic auth enabled because I didn't know how trustworthy their security is, but ran into various issues with the setup that couldn't be resolved at the time. It sometimes worked, but mostly ran into issues. This was around the time when the fork happened and Jellyfin was very much a new thing, I have not tried it after that.

mrmlz 7y ago

My biggest gripe with Jellyfin, Emby, Plex etc. is the lack of .rar-support. It annoys me to no end. Kodi has had support for ages (back in the XBMC-days) but the feature-request and bountys seems to fall on deaf ears. Other than that i've found the meta-data to be "better" in emby/jellfin compared to Kodi.

racingmars 7y ago
RAR is a proprietary format... there is no free-software code to decompress RAR archives (the license agreement for the code that is available prohibits using the code to 'reverse engineer' the RAR format itself, and I'm guessing most projects don't want to have to change their license agreement to a non-free-software license to be able to include RAR support). Not sure why anyone actually uses RAR these days...I really don't get it.
- mrmlz 7y ago
  I still have tonnes of .rar. Exclusively for legacy reasons (you can google why .rar exists), sure i could spend the time extracting everything, or continue using Kodi which is my current solution. I don't think the license is the issue, Kodi has solved it with a external dep if i'm not mistaken. The reason is more related to your last sentence. They don't get it, and thus doesn't want to spend time on solving it. Which is their prerogative of course, but it still annoys _me_ :)
  - ValentineC 7y ago
    > I still have tonnes of .rar. Exclusively for legacy reasons (you can google why .rar exists), sure i could spend the time extracting everything, or continue using Kodi which is my current solution. I don't understand why you'd want to keep media files in .rar, unless you are part of scene distribution. It's not like ROM emulation, where there's tangible savings to be had storing the individual ROMs in a compressed format.
    - mrmlz 7y ago

bsharitt 7y ago

I'm in the process of trying to move to Jellyfin from Plex, especially as Plex tries to shove in more "features". Right now the only thing that's holding me back is the state of the Roku and iOS apps, which are still pretty rough around the edges(and neither officially available yet).

branon 7y ago

I've been using Jellyfin for about six months and have been overjoyed with it. Amazing alternative to the nasty proprietary apps like Plex and Emby. Previously, I was pointing Kodi at an SFTP server which worked fine, similar to the guy who had a good experience with VLC. Those are both great standalone solutions. However, adding "media server" software like Jellyfin into the mix gives my users a much wider variety of clients to choose from (including the Jellyfin addon for Kodi) without compromising freedom. Various other perks include tracking watched status across devices, Chromecast support, and re-encoding video files so they play on old clients or slower connections. The playback reporting plugin is fun as well. Keep up the great work everybody!

SamBam 7y ago
Just so the rest of us know, what's "nasty" about Plex and Emby?
- branon 7y ago
  I speak mainly in regards to their closed-source, proprietary nature. I used Plex briefly some years ago, but became dissatisfied with nag screens, paywalls, and the inability to conduct user authentication on my own terms. Usage of a Plex account (or Google/Facebook integration) is mandatory, which is uncool. Emby used to be alright but as of version 3.6, the project was taken closed-source[0]. Thankfully the Jellyfin developers stepped in, and are working to continue the legacy. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20181212100152/https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby/issues/3479 https://web.archive.org/web/20181212100152/https://github.co...
charwalker 7y ago
How are you handling remote access to Jellyfin? I have it set up internally but not yet accessible to friends/family.
- branon 7y ago
  I've got nginx running and acting as a reverse proxy[0]. I've found it's an easy way to manage TLS certificates, and using a memorable subdomain is a bonus for my users as well. The Jellyfin server is configured so no user tiles are shown on the login screen. Everybody who logs in must type both a username and password. My upstream bandwidth is not great, so WAN streams are choked to 4 Mbps each, for all users except myself of course ;) [0] https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-proxy.html#nginx https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-pro...

coppernoodles 7y ago

Since the audience here is developer-centric, I would like to share that I contributed a small amount of code to jellyfin and the interaction with the developers was very positive.

yboris 7y ago

Shameless plug: I built Video Hub App that does something similar: gives you a nice YouTube-like layout (and many more previewing and searching capabilities) for videos on your computer (no streaming though). Website: https://videohubapp.com/ https://videohubapp.com/ MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

majora2007 7y ago
This actually looks pretty nice. I'll try this out tonight. Thanks.

ZoomZoomZoom 7y ago

I personally don't see much use for all those fancy features over a simple but adequate minidlna server, except I don't get why after all those years no one implemented proper automatic library rescan for it. There are workarounds but it should work OOTB!

charwalker 7y ago

As many of us long time Plex users see new, unwanted features vs having issues fixed (like syncing or a method to run it as a service), Jellyfin has become my next step. I haven't set it up for external access yet but so far I'm enjoying the simplicity. I'm not limited by lack of certain apps/players as I do everything on PC but I'm excited to see where this crew can go.