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I tried switching from Plex to Jellyfin, and one of the greatest limitations that I noticed with Jellyfin is that it doesn't seem to really give a shit about ma

I tried switching from Plex to Jellyfin, and one of the greatest limitations that I noticed with Jellyfin is that it doesn't seem to really give a shit about managing libraries, and seems overly opinionated about file structure. There's whole sections of the wiki dedicated to naming your files right that I don't have to deal with with Plex. Does Kyoo take a similar approach, or is it more user friendly? Plex's monetization efforts are silly, but Jellyfin seems very much not ready for prime time.

buggeryorkshire 3y ago
Had exactly the same issue. Jellyfish was very opinionated, Plex doesn't care.
slily 3y ago
Both Plex and Jellyfin refused to import my fairly standard and accurately tagged music library last time I tried, and Plex is definitely opinionated about structure in video libraries.
- petepete 3y ago
  Jellyfin wasn't happy with my music library either until I realised wanted the ReleaseGroup field to be set. I set Picard to work and an hour later it imported perfectly.
  - Modified3019 3y ago
    That jellyfin is that nitpicky with a prerequisite just to get a music library to work is horrifying.
    - Jochim 3y ago
      Jellyfin has handled the default Picard output format just fine for me. I don't see the expectation of a standard naming format as unreasonable, given that it's open source and they're fairly short on developers
      - slily 3y ago
        I saw discussions on GitHub where it was suggested that they refuse to match based on metadata over folder structure because they don't trust people to tag files properly. With my library, it generates multiple album entries per multi-disc album because I have them organized with a subfolder per disc, which not only makes no sense considering when you could easily match on disc number and parent folder, but is also a regression. "Short on developers" is a good excuse for lagging in features, not for poor design/implementation. Finally, relying on non-standard fields for matching is unnecessary and is in line with the "overly opinionated" complaint. I'd probably use Jellyfin if it got the basics right and lacked a thing or two, or if its opinionated implementation was limited to trivialities like how Plex refuses to use local images not named cover.jpg. But it's too opinionated, too inflexibly, about too many things, and I think its opinions are stupid, so it crosses the line as far as I'm concerned. Doesn't help that the code is convoluted and I couldn't figure out how to make changes to the way it analyzes files easily.
      - petepete 3y ago
        I think my problem was that I used Beets to organise my mp3s a long time ago - maybe 2011. It didn't write the ReleaseGroup because that might not have been present for all albums on MusicBrainz at the time. It still did a great job and Picard nicely filled in the blanks.
kyriakos 3y ago
According to it's feature list it's not. The fact that it advertises that gives me hope.
HumblyTossed 3y ago
I use Jellyfin, but I also use TMM (tiny media manager) to manage my files. Jellyfin seems to agree with what TMM produces just fine. I would like to see a slim Jellyfin that does not have any media management code at all, tbh. Just media streaming.
ramon156 3y ago
Just a question, why do you guys want sn unopinionated media server? I love that I click some buttons in jellyfin and it just does it's thing, I don't have to think of my own structure
- zoriya 3y ago
  I hate having to rename my files on an arbitrary pattern to have items show up in the media browser. I want a media browser to organize my media, not to ask me to organize it myself.
  - gedy 3y ago
    Maybe I'm not understanding, but they only organization I do is put each movie and related files like cover and SRT into its own folder named after the movie. Seems to work fine.
  - reaperducer 3y ago
    I hate having to rename my files on an arbitrary pattern to have items show up in the media browser. This is why I went back to iTunes. Full, robust metadata support and organization. It's 2024. Why are people still cramming metadata into file names like it's 1983?
rockostrich 3y ago
Out of curiosity, why are Plex's monetization efforts silly? Sure, the freemium model is less than ideal compared to OSS, but I gladly paid for a lifetime subscription to Plex Pass 4 years ago and haven't regretted it at all since.
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  They are pushing their free with ads offerings and data gathering (Discover) far more in the past year or two, to the point where I have to give instructions to some of my friends because the defaults are exclusively their own offerings.
  - BeetleB 3y ago
    That's because your friends are independent, separate Plex users from you, even though you and they don't want to think they are. Just because they can use the Plex app to connect to your server doesn't mean that they are not separate. I get the frustration - Plex didn't do it in the past, but if you look at it from 1000 ft, and are ignoring history, Plex isn't doing anything crazy here. If you install the app on your phone/Roku/whatever, it's on you to understand how to use it/customize it.
    - mynameisvlad 2y ago
      Except that it’s a massive change in behavior from what they have done for over a decade, which is to prioritize the product they built: a streaming media platform intended for personal collections. It isn’t about the users being Plex users “even though I and they don’t want to think they are” (an incredibly presumptuous way to phrase that, honestly) it’s about a fundamental change in behavior and execution in their product. Nobody said they weren’t within their right to do what they’re doing, but people should be allowed to point out when this happens. They are fundamentally changing the way their app works. That is an user-hostile action regardless of how you slice it. And that might be fine from their point of view, but it clearly is an issue for existing user, as this entire thread of comments shows.
- 3y ago
zoriya 3y ago
I find this extremely silly too. The goal of kyoo is to organize your library for you, you should be able to use your download folder as your library folder, and it should work right away without having anything to rename. There are still some edge cases, especially with extra which are not handled very well right now. It works even for weird anime naming, things like "[SomeGroup] Jojo's bizzare adventure - golden wings 12.mkv"
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
  I have a gazillion of those weird names in my library
- tetris11 3y ago
  What about folder structure. If I have something like: Videos ├── Anime │ ├── [EMBER] Frieren S01E14 [BDRip] [1080p Dual Audio HEVC 10 bits] (1).1080.mp4 │ ├── Apothecary Diaries │ │ └── S01E01.mkv │ └── KAGUYA-SAMA LOVE IS WAR Season 4 Episode 1.1080.mp4 └── Cartoon ├── Royal Crackers │ ├── Episode 1.mp4 │ └── Episode 2.mkv └── Sanjay and Craig ├── 1x01 The one with the lion.avi └── 1x02 Tufflips and Co.mp4 Does it build hierarchical collections in the same way?
_23sd 3y ago
YMMV of course but Jellyfin supports manual tagging well enough for my uses. No need to change filenames and break folder structures you set up for easier navigation in file browsers (as I did), you can click the "Identify" option on a file/folder and search your enabled databases by title or IMDB number. Once you tell it what TV show a folder is for, all the episodes seem to get automagically recognized. It's just that first step that doesn't happen by itself when the folders aren't named "correctly", and you could probably get around it by using Tiny Media Manager to mass-write NFO files (which Jellyfin recognizes).
- Arn_Thor 3y ago
  Honestly, any manual tagging is still too much work. Jellyfin would be a better Plex alternative if it got this right
  - finaard 3y ago
    They used to have an auto organize plugin which was doing that very well - but sadly it is no longer maintained (and no longer working on current versions). I did have quite a few things not correctly recognized with Plex which went away after going to Jellyfin and letting auto organize do its thing. On the plus side, lack of auto organize made me properly setup the complete arr stack, which throws things into correctly named directories, does support batch renaming for existing stuff, and handles a lot of other stuff on top of that.
gosub100 3y ago
Nobody has mentioned Emby yet. I switched from jellyfin to Emby and I am overall happier with the UX. I don't know if your specific grievance will be addressed but it's worth looking into. I wish they would add a feature to clone the metadata database (including pictures of movie covers and actors). My fear is that imdb will disallow scraping especially for people like "my friend" who has thousands of movies.

buggeryorkshire 3y ago

Had exactly the same issue. Jellyfish was very opinionated, Plex doesn't care.

slily 3y ago

Both Plex and Jellyfin refused to import my fairly standard and accurately tagged music library last time I tried, and Plex is definitely opinionated about structure in video libraries.

petepete 3y ago
Jellyfin wasn't happy with my music library either until I realised wanted the ReleaseGroup field to be set. I set Picard to work and an hour later it imported perfectly.
- Modified3019 3y ago
  That jellyfin is that nitpicky with a prerequisite just to get a music library to work is horrifying.
  - Jochim 3y ago
    Jellyfin has handled the default Picard output format just fine for me. I don't see the expectation of a standard naming format as unreasonable, given that it's open source and they're fairly short on developers
    - slily 3y ago
      I saw discussions on GitHub where it was suggested that they refuse to match based on metadata over folder structure because they don't trust people to tag files properly. With my library, it generates multiple album entries per multi-disc album because I have them organized with a subfolder per disc, which not only makes no sense considering when you could easily match on disc number and parent folder, but is also a regression. "Short on developers" is a good excuse for lagging in features, not for poor design/implementation. Finally, relying on non-standard fields for matching is unnecessary and is in line with the "overly opinionated" complaint. I'd probably use Jellyfin if it got the basics right and lacked a thing or two, or if its opinionated implementation was limited to trivialities like how Plex refuses to use local images not named cover.jpg. But it's too opinionated, too inflexibly, about too many things, and I think its opinions are stupid, so it crosses the line as far as I'm concerned. Doesn't help that the code is convoluted and I couldn't figure out how to make changes to the way it analyzes files easily.
    - petepete 3y ago
      I think my problem was that I used Beets to organise my mp3s a long time ago - maybe 2011. It didn't write the ReleaseGroup because that might not have been present for all albums on MusicBrainz at the time. It still did a great job and Picard nicely filled in the blanks.

kyriakos 3y ago

According to it's feature list it's not. The fact that it advertises that gives me hope.

HumblyTossed 3y ago

I use Jellyfin, but I also use TMM (tiny media manager) to manage my files. Jellyfin seems to agree with what TMM produces just fine. I would like to see a slim Jellyfin that does not have any media management code at all, tbh. Just media streaming.

ramon156 3y ago

Just a question, why do you guys want sn unopinionated media server? I love that I click some buttons in jellyfin and it just does it's thing, I don't have to think of my own structure

zoriya 3y ago
I hate having to rename my files on an arbitrary pattern to have items show up in the media browser. I want a media browser to organize my media, not to ask me to organize it myself.
- gedy 3y ago
  Maybe I'm not understanding, but they only organization I do is put each movie and related files like cover and SRT into its own folder named after the movie. Seems to work fine.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  I hate having to rename my files on an arbitrary pattern to have items show up in the media browser. This is why I went back to iTunes. Full, robust metadata support and organization. It's 2024. Why are people still cramming metadata into file names like it's 1983?

rockostrich 3y ago

Out of curiosity, why are Plex's monetization efforts silly? Sure, the freemium model is less than ideal compared to OSS, but I gladly paid for a lifetime subscription to Plex Pass 4 years ago and haven't regretted it at all since.

mynameisvlad 3y ago
They are pushing their free with ads offerings and data gathering (Discover) far more in the past year or two, to the point where I have to give instructions to some of my friends because the defaults are exclusively their own offerings.
- BeetleB 3y ago
  That's because your friends are independent, separate Plex users from you, even though you and they don't want to think they are. Just because they can use the Plex app to connect to your server doesn't mean that they are not separate. I get the frustration - Plex didn't do it in the past, but if you look at it from 1000 ft, and are ignoring history, Plex isn't doing anything crazy here. If you install the app on your phone/Roku/whatever, it's on you to understand how to use it/customize it.
  - mynameisvlad 2y ago
    Except that it’s a massive change in behavior from what they have done for over a decade, which is to prioritize the product they built: a streaming media platform intended for personal collections. It isn’t about the users being Plex users “even though I and they don’t want to think they are” (an incredibly presumptuous way to phrase that, honestly) it’s about a fundamental change in behavior and execution in their product. Nobody said they weren’t within their right to do what they’re doing, but people should be allowed to point out when this happens. They are fundamentally changing the way their app works. That is an user-hostile action regardless of how you slice it. And that might be fine from their point of view, but it clearly is an issue for existing user, as this entire thread of comments shows.
3y ago

zoriya 3y ago

I find this extremely silly too. The goal of kyoo is to organize your library for you, you should be able to use your download folder as your library folder, and it should work right away without having anything to rename. There are still some edge cases, especially with extra which are not handled very well right now. It works even for weird anime naming, things like "[SomeGroup] Jojo's bizzare adventure - golden wings 12.mkv"

Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
I have a gazillion of those weird names in my library
tetris11 3y ago
What about folder structure. If I have something like: Videos ├── Anime │ ├── [EMBER] Frieren S01E14 [BDRip] [1080p Dual Audio HEVC 10 bits] (1).1080.mp4 │ ├── Apothecary Diaries │ │ └── S01E01.mkv │ └── KAGUYA-SAMA LOVE IS WAR Season 4 Episode 1.1080.mp4 └── Cartoon ├── Royal Crackers │ ├── Episode 1.mp4 │ └── Episode 2.mkv └── Sanjay and Craig ├── 1x01 The one with the lion.avi └── 1x02 Tufflips and Co.mp4 Does it build hierarchical collections in the same way?

_23sd 3y ago

YMMV of course but Jellyfin supports manual tagging well enough for my uses. No need to change filenames and break folder structures you set up for easier navigation in file browsers (as I did), you can click the "Identify" option on a file/folder and search your enabled databases by title or IMDB number. Once you tell it what TV show a folder is for, all the episodes seem to get automagically recognized. It's just that first step that doesn't happen by itself when the folders aren't named "correctly", and you could probably get around it by using Tiny Media Manager to mass-write NFO files (which Jellyfin recognizes).

Arn_Thor 3y ago
Honestly, any manual tagging is still too much work. Jellyfin would be a better Plex alternative if it got this right
- finaard 3y ago
  They used to have an auto organize plugin which was doing that very well - but sadly it is no longer maintained (and no longer working on current versions). I did have quite a few things not correctly recognized with Plex which went away after going to Jellyfin and letting auto organize do its thing. On the plus side, lack of auto organize made me properly setup the complete arr stack, which throws things into correctly named directories, does support batch renaming for existing stuff, and handles a lot of other stuff on top of that.

gosub100 3y ago

Nobody has mentioned Emby yet. I switched from jellyfin to Emby and I am overall happier with the UX. I don't know if your specific grievance will be addressed but it's worth looking into. I wish they would add a feature to clone the metadata database (including pictures of movie covers and actors). My fear is that imdb will disallow scraping especially for people like "my friend" who has thousands of movies.