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Jellyfin: Free software media system
- n0zmer 3y agoJellyfin is still so far behind Plex in media organization and just general reliability and polish. Also, Plexamp is by far the best music player to exist right now.
- number6 3y agoBut it doesn't trick you into an account or subscription
- afavour 3y agoI found that Plex was pretty upfront about how membership works. I was happy to pay for a lifetime membership given the usage I’ve gotten out of it. (though if I’m honest the lifetime membership concept feels like a bad idea on their side. Despite using their product regularly they now get no more money from me)
- stuckinhell 3y agoThis alone, finally got me and my husband to switch. Jellyfin is FANTASTIC, and I wrote a simple script with ChatGPT to help with tagging and metadata for our home collection.
- grep_name 3y agoWhat does it do exactly? I'm always always looking to improve my jellyfin setup
- stuckinhell 3y agocorrects metadata, and adds some custom stuff like our own reviews from our family google account spreadsheet.
- n0zmer 3y agoTwo things that work OOTB with Plex, might I add.
- stuckinhell 3y agoNot for me they didn't.
- apexalpha 3y agoCan't say I've ever had to script anything for Plex.
- asylteltine 3y agoWhere’s the trick? Pretty much every feature a typical user would use is free. Everything else is clearly outlined on their website. Just because you don’t want to pay for software you use doesn’t mean it’s a trick.
- n0zmer 3y agoI paid for lifetime over 7 years ago. So, I'm not worried about that.
- RoyGBivCap 3y agoAnd it doesn't require internet access to watch things on your local network. That was the last straw for me with plex. Having to log into a server on the internet to access local content isn't just bad, it's broken by design just like DRM.
- donatj 3y agoWhy? Do you not have an internet connection?
- RoyGBivCap 3y agoMy ISP went down. Nothing I could do about it.
- donatj 3y agoAnd you couldn’t just play the video over smb in VLC for the ten minutes it was down? Like it really seems like a non-issue that a paid SAAS would expect an internet connection.
- RoyGBivCap 3y agoThe server is running on my local network. It was blocking watching content on my local network from within my local network because it couldn't phone home. That's broken by design.
- number6 3y agoWhy does it have to be a paid says? It's locally hosted
- donatj 3y agoBecause developers have to eat? And my experience with Plex is that they handle all the network negotiation so you can smoothly stream from home anywhere, that’s the core of the service.
- amiga386 3y agoThat's a bold claim. Personally I'm very much liking Finamp (for Jellyfin), it's coming along nicely and it does a great job IMHO, especially its offline mode works robustly. Looking at the feature list of Plexamp, sure, it does have a few more niceties, but it doesn't look like Plexamp is free or open in any way, so I'm never going to run it.
- n0zmer 3y agoThat's great and all, but the quality difference is 100% there and there is absolutely nothing wrong with paying developers to make great software.
- colordrops 3y agoKind of a straw man. I keep seeing this comment, but haven't seen a single person say that there is something wrong with paying developers to make software.
- diffeomorphism 3y agoGreat, so pay the jellyfin devs. The "free" means freedom not price and you are very much encouraged to pay for free software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
- colordrops 3y agoBut Jellyfin is open source and doesn't try to force you to open an account. I'm at the point now where I will always choose open source if the product is "good enough" even if it is not the best. Jellyfin is "good enough" for my needs at least.
- n0zmer 3y agoI have no problem paying for great software. There is an obvious quality difference between the two and it's completely worth it.
- colordrops 3y agoSure, each person is free to have their own strategy. For me, I've been burned many times when commercial software was abondoned, or changed for the worst for financial reasons, or no longer works on my platform for some reason, or never gets some requested feature implemented, or is full of spy telemetry. But I am not against commercial software and have no problem with others using it. Just not for me.
- femboy 3y agoRelevant: Collection of potential security issues in Jellyfin[1] 1: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415 https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
- thejosh 3y agoHow much has been fixed for this, as of June 2023? I quite like it has a Plex replacement, it passes the "partner test" AND the "parent test" - they can both install the app and watch what they want (as long as they turn off the android player default, which is a terrible default). I have it behind a firewall so nothing can access it (it's just for home, or for those who need it, over Wireguard). When i have time, it could be a good experiment for Podman or some other way to run rootless containers/jails.
- David_SQOX 3y agoI've given jellyfin a test-drive a few years ago, it was nice but I ended up back with plex. Thanks for the link (and thanks to those who compiled it!). Enumerating all the potential security issues is important for something that runs 24/7 from the home network. That's a decent sized list, would give me pause on giving JF another test run.
- Matl 3y agoYou should probably never expose a service like that directly, no matter what it is, to the internet, at least have it behind something like Tailscale.
- jeroenhd 3y agoMany of these don't seem too bad to be honest. A lot of these are information disclosures that require knowing very long tokens. The LDAP addon listing credentials is bad. The rest seems like it shouldn't be a problem for normal (in-home streaming) usage; i.e. users reading each other's last login time shouldn't be a problem if you trust the people you share the server with.
- GEBIRGE 3y agoThat's really the key point here: Trusting the people you share the server with. Jellyfin is kind of binary in that regard. Once you're authenticated - no matter the privileges - you can reach a lot of places. I've written about this recently, if anyone's interested. Like others have mentioned, you should probably only expose the server to a trusted group of users (ideally not directly on the Internet).
- louwrentius 3y agoI’m running Jellyfin because I want to reduce my energy footprint. I’m happy to watch series on my iPad instead of a TV. I also don’t need my disk-based NAS turned on if I put content on an external SSD hooked up to a Raspberry Pi4 with Jellyfin. I had an issue where my Mac or iPad could not stream anything in h265 (not 100% sure about the format) in the browser. The Raspberry Pi would start transcoding which it lacks the performance for. Fortunately the Jellyfin iOS client works perfectly, I’m guessing it uses hardware acceleration of the iPad.
- xattt 3y agoIs it common for people to use web apps first when a native client is available?
- SahAssar 3y agoYes. I refuse to use native apps when the functionality can be as good in a web app. Things like chat, email, watching videos, listening to music, etc. A lot of the time the "native" app is using electron anyway, so why go through the hassle of installing it when it is just a app-specific browser?
- HumblyTossed 3y agoFrom commercial entities, hell yes. They don't need a permanent spot on my device.
- galleywest200 3y agoI like to save websites as "apps" on my devices and use it that way. I do generally prefer web-apps I suppose but I also greatly appreciate the distraction reduction of NOT being in a browser, as the internet has infinite distractions.
- lost_tourist 3y agoi do because it's a lot easier to limit what an "app" can do on your system. It's a sandbox of a sort.
- 3y ago
- zeagle 3y agoCool software. I used it within/in parallel to Kodi to sync a couple devices but ended up removing this layer. I didn't like that you can't outright disable transcoding for content served via their app or in the browser. I serve mostly local client and my headless NAS has poor integrated graphics and runs Linux so this was very brittle. Kodi's jellyfin addon can play without transcoding by default so this seemed reasonable. However in case others want to go this route for a similar use case I hope I can save you some frustration: both this and the native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or passthrough atmos content properly. I also had odd tearing and av sync issues with some large 4k content that don't happen with maven kodi builds. After a lot of time trying to figure out it, I stripped it out and my shield has no further issues just using kodi despite being the ill famed 2019 tube model. Hdr10, Dolby vision, atmos pass through you name it just works.
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago> I didn't like that you can't outright disable transcoding for content served via their app or in the browser. You can outright disable transcoding. That’s a checkbox in the server option. > both this and the native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or passthrough atmos content properly They do out of the box. Never had an issue with either transcoding disabled. If you have properly configured the source content, Jellyfin is just a passthrough for Kodi and content is directly accessed using the network share.
- zeagle 3y agoI'm not sure what to say. Unless this is a recent change in my experience it does not work as intended. I spent a lot of time playing with the various transcoding settings and per user settings and direct path access or the regular way of accessing files. I'm happy it worked for you. I have specific content jellyfin doesn't work with where Kodi is fine and I am just sharing my experience with this software package.
- WastingMyTime89 3y agoFor the transcoding setting, they are indeed in the user profile and work since day-1 as inherited from the Emby fork. It does 100% disable all transcoding for this user. > I have specific content jellyfin doesn't work with where Kodi is fine Very surprising as Jellyfin is just a passthrough to Kodi. Did you open a bug report? > I am just sharing my experience with this software package. Every post here about an open source project be it Firefox or Jellyfin always see plenty of people sharing their experience with it from a decade ago and panning things that actually work. I usually just read them and move on but sometimes I like to give a counterpoint when it’s about a piece of software I consider quite good.
- u_boredom 3y agoJellyfin server is pretty decent. The client apps need tons of work, especially on iOS. Using Swiftfin/Jellyfin iOS app convinced me to buy Plex Pass lifetime. Probably less of an issue on android with the Kodi app integration.
- maverwa 3y agoSomeone else in the comments here suggested the „Infuse“ app on iOS. It can use multiple backends including jellyfin, plex, but also sftp etc. Cannot speak for its daily use as I just installed it myself, but looks good on the first glance.
- u_boredom 3y agoThis was my dilemma. Infuse is definitely better. However, if I’m paying to use a proprietary front end, I may as well just buy the software that natively works together. Infuse also does not support multi profiles on Apple TV. Which makes it essentially useless for multi-user devices.
- maverwa 3y agoYeah. Just found out that it doesn’t even play anything from my jellyfin without buying the premium version. It lists all the things, but as soon as I want to play anything it asks for the InApp Purchase. Not sure what’s going on there, but I don’t like it.
- skibble 3y agoThe premium version is needed for codec support (basically anything above basic Dolby, so all the lossless codecs and possibly Dolby digital+). It’s well worth the annual cost, been using it for a few years now and it’s a bulletproof setup for me. I use it with a local SMB share as I’ve no need for multi user support or remote access.
- eddythompson80 3y ago> Not sure what’s going on there, but I don’t like it. Infuse is a very decent _paid_ app. That’s what’s going on. It lets you play with the interface and test its integration with your services/media. But to use it you pay either a subscription or a one time fee. Very reasonable in my opinion.
- PUSH_AX 3y agoFor years I just wanted a good user experience playing video files from my MBP to a TV, I spent a lot of money (on NAS, chromecasts etc), used a lot of software with objectively terrible user experiences (Plex I'm looking firmly at you). Finally, I discovered the combination of Jellyfin and Infuse App. It works really well.
- jeanofthedead 3y agoMy favorite feature of Infuse is how it clears the Metadata cache every single time I launch the app. Takes about 30-45 seconds for it to show all of my media again. Even with plenty of storage space on my ATV4K.
- katbyte 3y agoThis is why I stopped using it and switched back to the Emby app. It takes 5-10 min for it to reload for me.
- gytisgreitai 3y agoCan you explain more? I am using Infuse with nfs mounted shares and have been pretty happy. Anthing to gain from jellyfin?
- syntaxing 3y agoNot OP, but jellyfin gives you a web interface and multiple user access kinda like Netflix profiles.
- geerlingguy 3y agoVery helpful especially in a family where you might want to separate out libraries a bit.
- cuban-frisbee 3y agoJellyfin can help with metadata and keeping track of progress for tv shows etc.
- DarthNebo 3y agoAbsolutely love this on my Android TV, I just spin up a container on my laptop with mounted folders & I am able to play large files without plugging & copying anything to a USB drive. Android TVs for some reason cannot fathom that video files >4GB do exist along with other basic filesystems like ExFAT & NTFS......smh
- yrro 3y agoI expect the manufacturers don't want to license Microsoft's patents.
- jeroenhd 3y agoExFAT and NTFS are in the Linux kernel already. I don't think they'd need to license them at this point.
- toast0 3y agoIn the kernel doesn't mean you have a license to use it.
- selectodude 3y agoI think the GPL license kind of implies that you do have a license to use it.
- toast0 3y agoHow does a copyright license imply a license of a third party's patent? Open source mpeg codecs don't come with a patent license from mpeg and friends. Neither does a open source file system driver come with a patent license from microsoft and friends.
- jeroenhd 3y agoThat's GPLv3, GPLv2 (which the exFAT code was licensed under) doesn't include patent rights.
- johnnykree 3y agoI would love to run this on my Arch Linux PC and stream to my Google Chromecast but I couldn't get it to run... I tried for 2 weeks and gave up...
- mdhen 3y agoThat's my exact setup. Works flawlessly.
- Matl 3y agoI'm running on an Arch Linux based home server, what in particular gave you trouble?
- ncallaway 3y agoDo you have a domain, with a valid https cert? Chromecast needs to make a couple requests, and will only do it over https, and requires the cert to be valid. If you’re running over http, or using a self-signed cert, Chromecast won’t work.
- jeroenhd 3y agoChromecast works reliably here (served from Debian). DLNA is broken, though, but that's probably a firewall rule. It took me a while to realize that Chromecast doesn't play from the phone itself, you need a server with a valid HTTPS certificate that's reachable from the Chromecast itself to play content. You can also use plain HTTP, as long as you don't use self-signed certificates. For the routing problem there's no solution, you can't, say, have a phone hooked up to a VPN and play to a Chromecast on the local WiFi. There's also an issue with putting Jellyfin in a different subdirectory (i.e. videoplayer.local/servers/jellyfin) but for me that still seems to work, luckily. Also make sure the Chromecast can resolve your domain through its DNS resolver. If you use a local DNS server (i.e. the one built into your router) to resolve hosts in the LAN, you need to block 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 so Chromecast doesn't have a choice but to use your normal DNS server. Firefox also doesn't seem to like my Chromecast but that's the case for every video I play.
- compsciphd 3y agojellyfin has some nice features that will probably never come to plex, but in the end plex is just so much more pleasant to use. i have both setup against same library and in practice all i barely use jellyfin except for some minor use cases
- marcrosoft 3y agoI went the other direction. I got tired of Plex trying to jam live tv and other monetizing features down my throat.
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoYou can remove all of those with a few clicks.
- Macha 3y agoSure, but having to keep track of all things the vendor does against my interest and disable them every time they add a new one is a mental burden I'd rather not deal with.
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoAs I said in my other comment, I removed the screens two years ago, post-install, and none have appeared since. This falls significant short of 'mental burden' for me.
- footlose_3815 3y agoI don't think being perpetually reactive is the right mentality. First it's esoteric. You need to know which menu it's in, and what the setting is called. And how does this scale? As more of those feature come, and you cannot opt-out of them, even as a paying customer. Plex has a horrible report with me, and though I still use it, I'm tempted to try other apps now.
- 3y ago
- syntaxing 3y agoI use this with infuse and it works amazing. My server mounts to my NAS using NFS and with a flag in your fstab, it only mounts when it access the files. I’m on a 1G symmetrical line and with tailscale, there’s minimal lag.
- lostmsu 3y agoI tried it, but ended up just using file shares. The biggest issue for me is that it does not automatically recognize many movies by their short names instead linking to some obscure thing with a similar name. For instance, since files can not have colon in the name, and many movies do, it gets confused about the title. Another similar issue is about shows and how it recognizes their folder and file structures. In the end it seems easier for me to just navigate the folder structure and look up any metadata by googling, because I add shows and movies more often than have urges to look up random character's actor. Oh, and web client doesn't play 5.1
- https443 3y agoIf you follow their naming conventions it works great: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ -- https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/ ... but I admit that most people don't want to do that.
- lostmsu 3y agoYeah, I don't have time to rename every single one of 100+ episodes.
- NamTaf 3y agoThis is why I hammered out a bash script to do my music :) Thankfully 99% of my visual media was already in the format, but there’s numerous utilities that can bulk rename media in the necessary format
- llanowarelves 3y agoAlso you can argue that the (original) filename itself is part of the metadata. It's useful to have what it was originally called when referencing elsewhere. So where to put this data? in a sidecar file during the rename process or something? We could just use content hash, but then online dashboards to redownload things from vendors, for example, won't necessarily have that there displayed on the page, or when you start downloading it in the browser.
- rcarmo 3y agoI have tried it a couple of years ago (maybe less), but went back to Plex because of higher polish and family sharing features (which are a little clunky on Plex, but usable). Also, I have PlexAmp set up everywhere (including some Android desktop displays) for music. How does Jellyfin tackle closed user groups, family photos/videos, remote access, etc?
- asylteltine 3y agoAgree with this. Same experience
- princevegeta89 3y agoLook into jfa-go. I run it on the side and it hard-integrates into Jellyfin and adds a lot of account management stuff and the group/policy specific config you're mentioning https://github.com/hrfee/jfa-go https://github.com/hrfee/jfa-go
- NicoJuicy 3y agoSwitched from Plex to jellyfin and it's great. Just one (big) issue is that it loses it's Chromecast connection when switching between wifi => mobile => wifi. My terras doesn't have WiFi, so it's a big annoyance.
- jerojero 3y agoI use findroid on android. I was using the jellyfin android client but it was missing some features when it comes to HDR and Dolby Digital (Atmos) audio. Findroid seems to solve these issues so I'm quite happy with it. Of course, these are open source software solutions so as long as they are under active development then I expect for the software to get better.
- rmdes 3y agoI'm wondering how good Jellyfin is for music, mp3, flac, wav files..
- heresie-dabord 3y agoIt is good. I used Foobar2000 with UPNP for a few years. Now I am using Jellyfin to stream flac over my network.
- https443 3y agoHave been using Jellyfin on my synology server for the past 2 years. It's a dream, but you do need to name your files/directories per their naming convention: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ -- https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/
- snapplebobapple 3y agoYou can automate that with sonarr/radarr/lidarr. Works like a dream.
- nicoco 3y agoAdd prowlarr and bazarr for the full win.
- croutonwagon 3y agoWhat do prowlarr and bazarr do
- bastulos 3y agoBeen using Jellyfin daily for over a year now with over 30TB of media. It's been wonderful. It's not perfect like any OSS project, but it's better than every alternative I tried when standing up my media pipeline last year.
- asylteltine 3y agoIt’s not better than Plex though, but it is free
- lost_tourist 3y agoand no ads
- asylteltine 3y ago[dead]
- Arn_Thor 3y agoTwo minutes of interface management and Plex doesn’t show anything but my own media either. (I would prefer it if Plex didn’t advertise its streaming content at all of course, but I’ve paid for my lifetime pass so I’m not contributing revenue)
- asylteltine 3y agoI still use Plex. I tried jellyfin for two weeks on my 30+ TB collection but there were so many little issues it wasn’t worth it Most features are actually plugins made by the community. This felt buggy and cheap. It was lacking a lot of stuff like trailer support (no the community plug-in does not count) Also the metadata scanner is a lot worse. The interface is worse. There’s a lot of setup needed for each device but Plex “Just works” (TVs, iPad, phones, etc) Overall JF is a great project for casual users but it’s not as good as Plex
- MattPalmer1086 3y agoSame here. I'd love to use Jellyfin, but little things just didn't work. Some videos would not play either for some reason. Plex just works though.
- jeroenhd 3y agoI use Jellyfin and I totally agree that Plex is a better user experience. That said, some of the native clients (like Findroid) are excellent. They still lack in features compared to Plex, but they're very pleasant to use. Ever since I found out about the fact you need to pay a subscription to use hardware transcoding on your own, self-hosted Plex server, I've always ignored Plex as an option. The license situation has only gotten worse over the years too. I get that the Plex devs want to earn money, but I'm not paying a subscription to play files that never even need to touch their servers.
- FuriouslyAdrift 3y agoI've been running Kodi ever since it was Xbox Media Center and have yet to find anything more polished. I run via nVida Shield devices as endpoints with attached drives connected to standard audio-video setups (TVs, speakers, receiver/amp, etc.)
- ekianjo 3y agoJellyfin is a totally different use case
- FuriouslyAdrift 3y agoThey are direct competitors in the same space
- MikusR 3y agoLike apples and oranges
- jeroenhd 3y agoI disagree. Jellyfin takes on Plex, not Kodi. A normal Jellyfin install doesn't even come with a player, you need to launch a browser on your machine or download a separate client.
- ekianjo 3y agoWhat space is that ? Showing videos on a screen ? I hope you can allow some more granularity to have a productive discussion
- FuriouslyAdrift 3y agoIt appears there's a plugin to use Kodi as an endpoint for a Jellyfish server... nice! https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/kodi/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/kodi/
- Geezus_42 3y agoI really wanted to love it, but there was just one problem after another. Sure, they could be fixed if I only downloaded certain formats or or tweaked the settings just right, but that takes a ton of time to figure out and get right. If I kept fixing the issues I could eventually have a good experience in a few months or years. Plex has far fewer of these issues so I can spend less time troubleshooting and more time enjoying.
- aquova 3y agoI've been using Jellyfin for the past few years, migrating from a frankly janky setup involving samba and VLC clients. I've been very pleased with the experience for the most part, and it's become the most used application that I self host for my immediate family. Annoyingly, the lack of a PlayStation client (which seems to be Sony's fault rather than the devs) is the main reason I still use Roku.
- m3Lith 3y agoI love Jellyfin, though it often struggles with subtitles embedded in the container. They are recognized, but it fails to load them. If I retry it two-three times, it usually manages to do that. Also, recently discovered it has plugins too, like syncing status with Trakt.
- pwpw 3y agoI've been happily using jellyfin for awhile now. Overall it works great. It has a few issues that I would like to see implemented/fixed: - No offline downloading on iPad - The official Apple TV app logs me out of my server every day - Using the native player on the Apple TV app is still experimental and can have issues - No intro skip
- js2 3y agoI use Plex Server + Lifetime pass + Infuse. It is an excellent combination and has none of those issues. I point Infuse at Plex for TV shows to get the intro skip. For movies, I point Infuse at an NFS share since Infuse can handle more media types than Plex. Plex also lets me easily share my movie rips with family members across the country.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoWhat’s the lifetime pass cost?
- throwanem 3y ago$120, which seems a lot considering Infuse works with Jellyfin too.
- js2 3y agoI purchased it in 2014. It was $75 then. I also pay yearly for Infuse. It's worth it to me. Jellyfin is not (yet?) equivalent to Plex.
- throwanem 3y agoI would be surprised to see anyone arguing for equivalence, although I admit I have not paid close attention to most of the comments in this thread. But Jellyfin's not half bad for free, too, enough so that after seeing it mentioned on HN a year or two ago and spending five minutes to write up a half-assed compose file (and four hours screwing around with systemd's infuriating approach to sshfs automount) so I could try it out, I haven't felt the need to look for more. Even my most recent ex, who's nearing fifty and has never been especially at home with tech, found nothing objectionable about using it via the iOS native app - with the content of my library, yes, but that's no more fairly blamed on Jellyfin than it would be on Plex.
- nyjah 3y agoThis github page strikes a pet peeve of mine which is that it has no screenshots of jellyfin running. Why not?
- doubled112 3y agoI was going to say that it is because the web client is a separate thing, but that repo doesn’t have any pictures either. Consider me annoyed too.
- GranPC 3y agoThere's a demo on their official website: https://demo.jellyfin.org/stable/web/index.html https://demo.jellyfin.org/stable/web/index.html
- vezycash 3y agoThe demo is passworded and they didn't provide the login details. Edit I don't care about cookies extension removed it. So username is demo. There's no password.
- WickyNilliams 3y agoIt says on that page the user is "demo" and the password is empty string
- GranPC 3y agoLooks like this rule from the extension removed it: #disclaimer,.disclaimer{display:none !important} I am not sure how wise it is to hide all elements with ID or class "disclaimer", to be honest. There are other rules that seem like a bad idea as well (same thing for 'notification', 'notifications', 'notice', 'notices', 'alert', 'overlay', 'modal'...).
- takoid 3y agoJust so you know, I Don't Care About Cookies was bought by Avast recently: https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/21/avast_buys_i_dont_care_about_cookies_addon/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/21/avast_buys_i_dont_car...
- drewg123 3y agoquestion: How hard is it to get jellyfin to just present me a random video from my library that it cannot scrape metadata for? This has always been the sticking point to me for software like this that tries to make things "easy". I realize plex has (or had) a way to label folders as containing home videos, etc, but I vaguely recall problems with it. I'd much rather see the text "foo.mp4" for a video w/o metatada than have the server just hide the video.
- jsf01 3y agoFor videos it can’t find metadata for, Jellyfin will either display only the title (if you set the library type to “movies”), or it will extract a random frame from within the video to use as the image (if you set the library type to “home videos”). In both cases, the video isn’t going to be hidden.
- edude03 3y agoWhenever I see jellyfin trending on here or Twitter my first thought is “what did Plex do this time”
- entropie 3y agoMy mother is able to send a telegram bot youtube URLs. She sends links to audiobooks, yt-dlp extracts audio and saves it in an incoming folder and shes able to listen/download it via jellyfin. Works really well.
- noveltyaccount 3y agoIs there source code for this?
- entropie 3y agoThe bot part is done in node red (and is a relatively simple flow) it just calls a script that ensures no parallel downloads via a little daemon/fifo. https://gist.github.com/entropie/d265e94136b9777cc6b3190189b30050 https://gist.github.com/entropie/d265e94136b9777cc6b3190189b...
- kitsunesoba 3y agoNot too long ago I found myself tired of how Plex on my server would periodically break itself and unhappy with how the company was continuing to pivot away from the core product, so I started looking into alternatives. Jellyfin was the most promising option but unfortunately ended up being unviable for me, because my home server/NAS runs FreeBSD, and by virtue of C#/Mono being a pain to get running on FreeBSD so is Jellyfin. I could work around this with a Linux jail or moving the server over to Linux but I'd really rather not have to do either. As an side it's a bit odd to me how all of the most complete media server packages heavily rely on either Python or C#, and also a bit frustrating because when they break it not infrequently has something to do with some quirk in either. Would really like to see a media server comparable to Plex written in something less prone to breakage.
- 0ld 3y agoWell, it was recently added to ports, JFYI https://www.freshports.org/multimedia/jellyfin/ https://www.freshports.org/multimedia/jellyfin/
- kitsunesoba 3y agoGood to hear, it was a few months ago when I was looking and it was still a mess back then. Will have to take another look.
- mikehotel 3y agoIt looks like the port was compiled with a binary SkiaSharp [0] since that requires Google tooling to build. Interesting to see the committer allowing this. Apparently it is not the first time. 0. https://github.com/mono/SkiaSharp https://github.com/mono/SkiaSharp
- afavour 3y ago> As an side it's a bit odd to me how all of the most complete media server packages heavily rely on either Python or C# Why? Not trying to be an ass but there isn’t much in a media server that would warrant it all being written in a lower level language. Personally I run Plex in a Docker container and basically don’t worry about it at all.
- yboris 3y agosemi-on-topic: I created Video Hub App that is like YouTube for local files: shows you a gallery with scrub-able (preview on hover) thumbnails. But does not work streaming videos to TV / tablet - only for local consumption. Hope someone finds it useful. https://videohubapp.com/ https://videohubapp.com/ MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
- rapnie 3y agoNice. PS. From "See as filmstrips" on down the images don't load on the landing page, and show only the empty frame and shadow (in Firefox).
- yboris 3y agoThank you for the bug report! I've known about this one for a while -- I think it appeared after I updated Gatsby to the latest version. https://github.com/whyboris/video-hub-app-gatsby-website https://github.com/whyboris/video-hub-app-gatsby-website I'd love to migrate to Hugo (which I've been loving) but it will be a hassle with moving every page into 20+ languages.
- infogulch 3y agoIs there an oss Chromecast-like system that you can use to cast media from jellyfin?
- isthisfoss 3y agoI hate that jellyfin does not sort films by categories like director or production company while plex does. Seems to be much more barebones than the alternatives
- BeetleB 3y agoEvery 6 months or so I give Jellyfin a try, and always come back to Plex. I heavily use Plex DVR. Jellyfin is not even close in that regard. Beyond that, I always find annoying bugs with Jellyfin. The last time I tried it, it couldn't handle Photo libraries well. Also, I need it to work on Roku, and the experience has always been poor. I understand some people have very limited needs (stream files on their PC onto their phone), but many people pay for Plex to get other features. While Plex is somewhat user hostile, they have delivered, and continue to do so.
- afavour 3y agoStrongly agree with this. Plex’s DVR functionality was very shaky to start with and I switched to using Channels, which to be honest is better than anything else at being a DVR. But it’s $60 a year and Plex costs me nothing (because I bought a lifetime membership years ago) so I switched back. Every time I tried Jellyfin the DVR stuff had weird problems and the client apps were notably inferior. In fairness I haven’t checked in a while.
- princevegeta89 3y agoIs the Plex home screen still shoddy as fuck? They suddenly shoved my hosted media into a random sidebar menu and started pushing their "free" content on homepage and also started doing purchases and rentals, so is it just getting close to being another Netflix/Hulu? Can't comment on Music, but JellyFin on my Dedicated Server has been very stable. It has indexed a large collection of movies and shows, makes decent recommendations, and tracks me well across devices. We use Infuse for iOS, Jellyfin on the Web and Android very frequently and we only very rarely found issues.
- opless 3y agoYou can unpin the value add stuff from the sidebar in Plex.
- princevegeta89 3y agoWill it come back after a few updates though?
- skrrtww 3y agoTrying to move away from Plex on my Apple TV, I installed Jellyfin. Server-side, installation was painless. The Swiftfin Apple TV client, however, is basically unusable. It only allows you to connect to a server instance via unencrypted http:// http://, including user and password. Indexing is buggy (it seems to think I don't have any TV shows), metadata lookup seems almost nonexistent, with base filenames everywhere and no organization. Playback, lastly, seems to crash with half my files. Which are nothing special, 1080p h264 encodes with normal settings.
- jsf01 3y agoI’ve personally been using Infuse as my Jellyfin Apple TV client and for the most part it addresses those issues, and more importantly it doesn’t attempt to live transcode video, which may be what’s causing the crashes you’re describing. The main downside is that there’s a monthly fee if you want it to support 4k video.
- kitsunesoba 3y agoI use Infuse with Plex because the official Plex Apple TV app has a really annoying bug where a lot of videos have slightly desynced audio, and Plex refuses to fix it. Infuse does not have these issues and plays everything flawlessly.
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago> It only allows you to connect to a server instance via unencrypted http:// http:// Hmm, no, it doesn’t. No idea why you believe that. It works perfectly fine with https url. I don’t really understand the rest of your comment as indexing and metadata look ups are done by the server and not the client. Plus Swiftfin uses VLC under the hood so it shouldn’t have issue with playback. Are you using the fairly recent stable version or are you experience on an older development version? Swiftfin has been officially available for only a month.
- skrrtww 3y agoOn my end, it definitely does not work with https. I'm using the main stable version on the tvOS app store that I downloaded about a week ago. The default connection url is http:// http://, and changing it manually to https:// https:// causes it to fail and throw no errors. FWIW, I can't connect with https via the web interace either, so in theory this could be just an issue with my server install. If the indexing and metadata is done by the server, then the server just is worse than Plex at figuring out what things are. I can't tell you why it crashes when I try to play back videos that work just fine via the web interface, but it does. They're normal 1080p h264 .mkv files.
- Vaslo 3y agoI have Jellyfin on my home server and use it occasionally on my Apple stuff. It’s good, but Plex is just better. In addition, it just won’t play some media that Kodi will play. I feel like Kodi will play just about anything, Plex frequently gives me issues with certain formats.
- 404mm 3y agoThat sums up my experience. I found Jellyfin’s media organization better for personal videos (ie. not movies or shows). Plex tries hard to make it match its brackets but the end result is a bit chaotic. I ended up choosing Plex because of Jellyfin’s issues with transcoding (I’m lazy to pre-transcode all media to Apple native/ compatible formats). It would randomly just crash on me. And second reason was the really poor AppleTV app. (It was in TestFlight back then, not sure where it’s at now). And third, unavailability of downloading to devices.
- tobylane 3y agoIn Plex I occasionally have to force disable Direct Play (which I think means it transcodes) even though it’s a 264 from the same source as everything else. I’ll try Kodi for the one thing I didn’t manage to get working.
- nilespotter 3y agoI switched to this from plex a year ago, despite having a lifetime membership, because plex is much too chatty with their servers and I just don't trust it not to invade my privacy. I bought infuse for apple tv and haven't looked back. Honestly I don't really notice much of a difference, the combo is quite good. Edit: I still run a plex server for just my music library. Plexamp is the undisputed king.
- sam2426679 3y agoIf you're interested in exposing your Jellyfin instance over the internet, I put together a guide: https://github.com/sam-6174/jellytin https://github.com/sam-6174/jellytin
- mshockwave 3y agoJellyfin is my jam, it just works. Its administration interface is intuitive, pretty solid, personally I think the dashboard looks good aesthetically, and most importantly it’s open source so if anything is broken I can just fix it myself. If anyone is interested in feel free to check out Swiftfin (https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin) a native iOS client
- dotBen 3y agoa big issue is that Plex has managed to get onto the more closed systems (Vizio etc) and not Jelly. Makes it hard to use when some of the TVs in your home don't support it.
- Teslazar 3y agoHere's my personal experience switching from Plex to Jellyfin. Everyone's needs are different, but, for me, Jellyfin has been a much better experience. I used Plex for years and always hated it. It didn't let me customize the home screen in the way I wanted, so there was always a bunch of junk on there that I didn't want and couldn't remove. It also ran very slow on my Samsung TV (1), starting up slowly and responding to the press of a button after about a full second (it had done this for a long time through multiple versions of the app and factory resetting the TV without any improvement; also, the TV is only a few years old). I got frustrated enough to finally switch to Jellyfin about 4 months ago. It was a pain to get the app installed on my TV (the app isn't in the TV's app library, so it needs to be installed as if you're a dev), but once I got it working it works well. The app starts up faster than the Plex app and is very responsive to button presses. Back when I was using Plex, I really wanted to customize the home screen to remove certain components and re-order what appears and spent a lot of time reading over settings/customization stuff which never actually let me do what I wanted. With Jellyfin, I simply went to settings > home and the intuitive options there let me do exactly what I wanted to do in seconds. I can't think of any major issues I've had with Jellyfin, but here are a couple of thoughts. With Jellyfin I needed to create separate folders for what what Plex called collections and add them as libraries instead of collections. At first, I thought this was a negative but ended up deciding it didn't really matter as it works fine. I had a series of videos that wouldn't play properly on Jellyfin until I used ffmpeg to strip out the extra subtitle tracks (they had 42!), but never tested them on Plex so not sure if Plex would have handled them. (1) I will never buy another Samsung TV, but that's a rant for another post. I considered buying an Nvidia Shield just to fix some issues with the TV, but probably won't bother now that Jellyfin is working well.
- zeekaran 3y agoI got a Shield because neither the Chromecast 4k nor my LG TV could handle HDR content. Shield also replaced my Steam Link so that was nice. I changed the Netflix button on the remote to Plex with a button mapper app and then bought a properly sized Plex sticker to cover the Netflix button. What issues were you having with the Plex home screen?
- 3y ago
- 867-5309 3y agoI do lament for those needlessly hoarding movies and series when streaming with a debrid service and trakt would suffice why reinvent a netflix back-end when the front-end is all you really need?
- nakdnen 3y agoI cannot express enough how much I want to like Jellyfin. An open-source media system is exactly what I want. But the experience is so goddamn janky compared to Plex (which has a whole host of problems of its own) that it’s —yet— worth switching. I’ll keep checking in on Jellyfin now and then; I wish them well.
- itsagavin 3y agoThe unfortunate reality of Jellyfish is unless it ever comes baked in to Xboxes and smart TVs it doesn't solve the problem all media centers that aren't Plex have. If you can't add it from an app store and use the tv remote or game controller to navigate it no one I know will use it. So its Plex and nothing else until dethroned because I'm sure like most I'm running an internet facing media server for others.
- ryanpandya 3y agoI use an Nvidia shield and it has a Jellyfin app (along with basically anything else on Android, which is why it's been perfect for me). User friendly while still being flexible enough for most anything I want to throw at it.
- jjcon 3y agoI’ll second this, not to mention the first class support Plex has for audio content. I have dedicated apps for my music and my audiobooks. I haven’t found anything close to that in the Emby or Jellyfin world.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- LeFantome 3y agoI downloaded it on both my Roku and Fire ( Amazon ) devices just as easily as any other app. Of course, the applications use the native remotes for these platforms. Since I am the one that puts all the content on Jellyfin, my less technical wife sees it like any other channel ( like Netflix, Disney, or Prime ). I do not use AppleTV anymore but I installed it on my iPhone as well. I had used Plex before. I did not a find Jellyfin any harder.
- krono 3y agoWhich is probably why they've invested so much time into getting their official clients for Android TV, Roku, LG's WebOS, iOS, Android, and more out there for people to download, and have clients for several additional platforms in various stages of development or app-store approval. https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients
- Drybones 3y agoI switched to Jellyfin from Plex cause of it being open source and having AMD/VA-API transcoding support I’ve enjoyed it a but more cause I feel like I can do more on the server end. I recently started to use Infuse on my Apple TV for it cause turns out that Swiftfin, still in development, doesn’t have a license for Dolby Audio formats. But the development cycle for Jellyfin and the clients looks healthy, unlike Plex which seems to have stagnated. The next gen Jellyfin Web UI (Jellyfin Vue) is looking good too Jellyfin is also pretty forgiving about my file names but I am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I have a complex script to process movie and tv show filenames and folders. You can also override the metadata with the Identify function on the media page context menu.
- manmal 3y agoPlex might have been stagnating, but it works kinda flawlessly for me. I run it in Docker at home and through a reverse proxy on a cheap VPS (don’t want to expose any ports at home) and even that works really well - the iOS app automagically switches between remote and local networks. Hardware transcoding (Intel) just works, even in Docker. Media scanning is very snappy. User management and parental controls look powerful enough, at least after having bought Plex Pass.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago> Plex might have been stagnating, It's not stagnating, so much as they have decided that their initial market doesn't interest them. They were writing software for end users that let end users set up their own person Netflix. But maybe the revenue was unexciting or just insufficient, and now they want to be their own streaming service. Their streaming service sucks (they're probably at least two orders of magnitude too small to be able to afford to do it right, maybe even 3 or 4), and contaminates the searches on my server with their junk. Also, it might be true that they're just afraid of the liability of doubling down on their original market. Contributory infringement and all that. This is almost certainly the reason they haven't expanded to include media like ebooks and audio books and karaoke. I mean they have the perfect paradigm for all of these things... the same software that keeps track of where I am in a season of shows, or halfway through a movie could definitely keep track of where I am in a book, if they wanted to. This isn't entirely speculation on my part... at some point someone had asked them about preroll trailers for new seasons (Archer might be the most fun for these), but they said that they wouldn't add the feature because there was no legitimate source for those videos (even though just ripping them with youtube-dl is dead simple).
- stiltzkin 3y agoI still have Jellyfin as a secondary choice, Plex experience is still painless specially remote play and sharing media.
- jnsaff2 3y agoSo confusing, there is also Jellyfish [0] which is also a media server written in Elixir. Use case is obv different but close enough that I needed to triple check that I'm not going mad. [0] https://github.com/jellyfish-dev/jellyfish https://github.com/jellyfish-dev/jellyfish
- hamandcheese 3y agoJellyfish appears to be a much newer and smaller project.
- lnauta 3y agoMy raspberry pi has been slowly dying lately. Last thursday I ordered an ODROID C4, because pi's are overpriced at the moment. At the same time I also moved from plex to jellyfin, and it's really nice, but some files stutter during playback in both the browser and on my chromecast. Trying different hardware accelerated decoders did not help, so now I'm not sure what to do and debating to go back to plex. Although plex felt like it was getting worse in terms of functionality (I can't put my finger on it exactly).
- dang 3y agoRelated: From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33579209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33579209 - Nov 2022 (344 comments) Better than Netflix: Jellyfin on my NAS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33433880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33433880 - Nov 2022 (1 comment) Why I use Jellyfin for my home media library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33362416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33362416 - Oct 2022 (228 comments) Jellyfin Release – v10.8.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31720125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31720125 - June 2022 (14 comments) Jellyfin: Free Software Media System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28664802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28664802 - Sept 2021 (199 comments) Moving my home media library from iTunes to Jellyfin and Infuse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27462767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27462767 - June 2021 (171 comments) Jellyfin: A Free Software Media System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21986282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21986282 - Jan 2020 (173 comments) Jellyfin is an open source alternative for Plex - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20797851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20797851 - Aug 2019 (1 comment)
- ncrmro 3y agoBeen using it for awhile running on k3s in vm and replying this in the arrs using k8 at home helm charts. Big wish for jellyfin and the tvos was recommendation engine or randomizer as alphabetical and genre browsing is a little bland. This is after using the aarrs to download say all movies by a director.
- bradbeattie 3y agoSorting by random is coming in Jellyfin 10.9, if that's of any help.
- kahnclusions 3y agoI've tried Jellyfin but still using Plex. As much as I hate Plex with a passion, it does work. Jellyfin is buggy and laggy and full of security issues... it's difficult to even play content on my TV. Music doesn't even play on Android app without some weird jittering bug. Plex just works. It's interface kind of sucks, and it has its occasional hiccups, and they insult your Taiwanese content with "Taiwan, Province of China", but at the very least it does what it claims to do... play my content.
- getcrunk 3y agoI love Jellyfin. But they need seek thumbnails/preview
- basq 3y agoI'm fairly new to the nas hobby, got one during covid and went with jellyfin because plex wasn't free. And honestly, using it has been really effortless and it's been a treat to find it supported in various places (like having the app on my tv. I haven't run into any issues with it so far.
- nickstinemates 3y agoedit: playtime came to an end, over 100 sessions created in 30 minutes. Lots of demand! If you want to run it yourself, I have a fairly easily modifiable docker-compose[1] file for you to adapt to your needs. 1: https://keeb.dev/static/docker-compose-jellyfin.yml https://keeb.dev/static/docker-compose-jellyfin.yml
- OOPMan 3y agoI just run an HTPC/NAS hybrid device with Kodi. Can't be bothered to mess around with transcoding and no need for streaming to multiple locations in the house so I don't need a transcoding-based solution like this.
- Humberd 3y agoI tried using it, but removed it after I encountered a bug that after exiting full screen on my secondary monitor it always moves the app to the primary monitor. This bug has been in a Windows app for a couple of years.
- meteyor 3y agoI found Jellyfin easy to set-up using docker and intuitive to use. Have bumped into a few bugs now and then but so far it has not disappointed. The only thing I’m missing is iOS Chromecast support which was the only thing I actually wanted. Anyone has a solution for that which doesn’t include buying apps?
- rreyes1979 3y agoLove it except for the fact that for whatever the reason my Google Chromecast Jellyfin client tends to break subtitle synchronization if forwarding or rewinding a movie. After that, there's no way to get them back in sync :/