16 ms·

Jellyfin: We're Good, Seriously

556 points by bo0tzz 2y ago

highmastdon 2y ago
Why wouldn't they redistribute to other maintainers of the plugins/clients. They have much more knowlegde of where money is needed or where resources are lacking. Or pay devs, not in their circle to build the features the community wants but they can't (lack of expertise, or otherwise) implement?
nknld 2y ago
[flagged]
tgjk 2y ago
[dead]
gigatexal 2y ago
Now this is what open source should be: well funded but also the community highlighting the projects building off of it — in this case the main project highlighting and advocating for the folks that build front ends to JellyFin.
bhaney 2y ago
Very respectable. It's behaviors like this that keep me on Jellyfin instead of Plex, even in the face of social pressures to switch.
deleted 2y ago
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Larrikin 2y ago
I hope the project succeeds and think this is a good move. But I have a lifetime Plex pass and Jellyfin still seems not as good. I have both on my box, but whenever I try to use Jellyfin theres just something missing. I will keep checking back.
- nolok 2y ago
  Do you have any specific exemples ?
  - yegle 2y ago
    I can give a couple examples: 1) Jellyfin supports reading NFO files to help determining matching the file with the correct metadata (https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/metadata/nfo/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/metadata/nfo/). This is arguably superior than Plex's way (you have to name your file with IMDb id or tmdb id https://support.plex.tv/articles/201018497-fix-match-match/#:~:text=of%20the%20search.-,Tips,-There%20are%20a https://support.plex.tv/articles/201018497-fix-match-match/#...), but I still constantly find media w/o metadata in Jellyfin. 2) The way you fix the matching in Jellyfin has a pretty terrible UX. You select the movie w/o metadata (there's no filter to "find all media that Jellyfin fail to match w/ metadata) and click "Identify" in the 3-dot menu, then fill in the information and search (why can't Jellyfin prefill useful metadata, at the very minimum the year that should be easily identified using regex?), then pick either IMDb or tmdb (why do I have to choose one of them? Can I bulk-switch my library to use IMDb instead of tmdb?), with a checkbox to confirm you want to "replace existing images" (why do I have any images to replace? Jellyfin did not match the media to any metadata right?) you now have some useful metadata. 3) When I need to force a rescan of a library, there's no way (that I can find) to do that when you are viewing the library. The only way to do this is to go to Settings -> Dashboard -> Scan All Libraries. 4) There's no offline media playback support (AFAIKT).
    - nolok 2y ago
      1 - I'm not sure what you mean. Jellyfin can use the NFO, and if not will do a normal search and match. 2 - I agree that Find all without set metadata in a library would be nice. However when identifying you don't need to chose one or the other, you just type whatever info you have (the name, or the year, or both, or ...) and search and it search in all providers it has a plugin for (so in your case, both imdb and tmdb) and show all results from both. The do you want to replace image is because it's very common to switch to another provider for obscure series for exemple, but want to keep you hand replaced image. It doesn't really apply to "blockbuster" series or movies, so I guess it could be nice to have a default you can set. 3 - It separates the admin part and the viewing part, I think it's good. If you're solo user it can feel bothersome, but for me it's a better thing. 4 - You can download the files for later viewing offline. Overall the only one I agree with is the figure out which movie or serie you didn't identify and let me fix that in bulk, that process could be improved, but it's also a one time thing at first setup.
stojano 2y ago
"stop donating" respect!
RandomThoughts3 2y ago
I think it’s a massive mistake. They currently have 3 years of runway but that’s ridding on the high of the announcement and this communication will dry up donations. Plus, they ask people to donate to clients instead of the core product but they could do so themselves with the money they receive.
- Retr0id 2y ago
  If I donated to project X and they redistributed my funds to related project Y, I'd be mildly peeved. Only mildly, mind, but the way they're doing it here is exactly the right way, imho.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- flumpcakes 2y ago
  Why? Not everything has to be a subscription or a hyper growth business, not every product needs to do everything. If they and their users are happy with the cadence, and have a war chest of 3 years operating costs assuming 100% of funding stopped then why not divert attention to other projects in the ecosystem that might need the funding more?
  - RandomThoughts3 2y ago
    3 years is nothing especially if you intentionally kill your donations. They won’t come back magically when they will need them. Plus as stated before, they can divert the money to other projects related to Jellyfin themselves. They don’t need the community to do that for them. Honestly, if you are a project the size of Jellyfin and you ask donations to stop because you have a measly three years of operational runway without funding anything and without any idea of what to do with the money, I seriously question your ability to survive.
    - s_dev 2y ago
      >They won’t come back magically when they will need them. With the kind of goodwill they're building here I'm inclined to doubt that. People want to naturally cheer for the good guy and it's hard not to see an open source passion project led by these fellas as not being the good guy.
deleted 2y ago
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sixhobbits 2y ago
(June, 2023)
- bhaney 2y ago
  No, this is from last month. You're looking at the date the poster's account was created.
arnath 2y ago
The $400/month doesn’t account for their labor, does it? I feel like that’s why people donate personally
- lozenge 2y ago
  This requires them to agree on how to pay out the money, which sounds like more trouble than it's worth.
  - wccrawford 2y ago
    IMO, there's nothing worse than paying people too little money. Well, other than unevenly paying everyone money. "But it's $100 a month they wouldn't have had!" Sure, but now there's something to value your time and effort against, and it will not stack up favorably.
    - diggan 2y ago
      > IMO, there's nothing worse than paying people too little money. In a for-profit project, I'd agree. Jellyfin isn't though, and they're pretty up-front about that, so "paying too little" doesn't really apply to the people who end up contributing.
      - wccrawford 2y ago
        You do not want your volunteers looking at the effort they put in and the money they get back for it. It's going to create negative feelings, and at the very least performance will suffer for a while. It's more likely that it'll cause a permanent problem instead, possibly even driving away volunteers.
        diggan 2y ago
        > You do not want your volunteers looking at the effort they put in and the money they get back for it. Why not? I think it's good for everyone to evaluate what you're spending your time on, and if that time is time well spent. What do you mean with "the money they get back for it"? It's a FOSS project that doesn't pay for engineering hours from volunteers or anyone. It's literally $0, and everyone contributes to Jellyfin with the expectation of getting back exactly $0.
giamma 2y ago
I have an android TV running Kodi. Kodi connects via SMB to my NAS (Odroid HC-4, OpenMediaVault) and can easily show all my content. Would Jellyfin improve my experience? I could run it on odroid without transcoding, and then use the official android-tv client. Would it be worth the effort of switching?
- Semaphor 2y ago
  Single-client is IMO where Kodi shines. This way you also have less complexity as Kodi doesn’t need a ton of things that are integrated in Jellyfin, I’d not switch if you don’t have any pain points with this set up.
- defrost 2y ago
  Depends on how much you value your Kodi setup and how many "difficult to auto match" shows | movies you have. I wanted to run Kodi | JellyFin in parallel (two Kodi client Android TV's in house) so that visitors with iPhones | Androids | Tables could browse content. The local Kodi TV clients used the NAS box MariDB to hold meta data held in the local to content .NFO files (show ID's, descriptions, etc) I've held off on that as the JellyFin docs are not clear and the small experiments I tried in isolation proved tricky to resolve issues. The issues being getting JellyFin to load details from local.nfo files w/out making changes and|or getting JellyFin to not make additional .INFO files (more or less duplicates) and|or getting JellyFin to not trash existing artwork with new downloads. I'm sure there are solutions here (eg: JellyFin can use seperate directories for it's meta-data (but then doesn't read the local .nfo files to get ambiguous shows 'right')), I've yet to put the hard hours in and these are the kinds of hiccups you may face. It's moot if you have a small collection | don't care about existing artwork | etc. IIRC you can disable transcoding on fly by server and trust the network | viewing client to handle full original content, etc. I like JellyFin and used Emby in the past and use small JellyFin setups today - I just haven't resolved the issues in pointing it at a large curated collection and letting it rip making it's own parallel meta data w/out affecting pre-existing meta data.
- bestouff 2y ago
  I had the same setup until recently. I always had troubles with Kodi not indecing very well my movies; and also when wartching my moview far from home I had to copy them first, than think about marking them as "watched" in my library - and if I stopped watching mi-movie that was even more complicated. Really, Jellyfin has been quite the upgrade. The indexing is better, I can watch things far from home, everything is there. As a bonus, I can create accounts for close friends/family so they can watch what I download without hassle. Just try it.
poisonborz 2y ago
Not happy about this post. Instead of asking to stop, they should do just what they suggest, without further ado - distribute the income to the ecosystem devs the way they see fit. Make it transparent, make application to these funds posssible, make feature bounties, write it besides the donation button. Once someone stops donating, it is unlikely they will put up the effort of continually researching on which client/dev to support. This would be much better handled by Jellyfin maintainers.
- newsclues 2y ago
  Love jellyfin but don’t understand some of their choices like abandoning Reddit for a forum with no traffic
  - Chris2048 2y ago
    I understand abandoning reddit in any situation
  - specproc 2y ago
    A dedicated forum, open to read without login, and controlled by the project. They have easy access to all their data, decision-making power on features to support, and it's their call whether or not to allow advertising (they don't) or AI training of their data. Seems like a perfectly good place for it to me.
    - geerlingguy 2y ago
      We definitely need more forums. And with Discourse being a huge improvement over BB and other forum software from the 90s, it's not hard to set up multiple forum accounts and even tie them to some other login if you want.
  - iamacyborg 2y ago
    Reddit isn’t conducive to many types of conversations due to the voting mechanism for posts and comments.
  - 2y ago
worble 2y ago
I recently started using Jellyfin for friday movie nights with me and a few friends who no longer live near each other. The sync feature on the web UI works surprisingly well, we hang out on VC and it's as close to watching something physically together it can be. Overall I've found it to be really solid, although I've not really dabbled much with other media center software to compare it to. My only real complaint is that for whatever reason it really does not like my folder structure - most of my files work but it'll randomly decide that a bunch of episodes in a folder are a single "file" with multiple "versions". Reading their docs it seems like they really want you to conform to a specific folder structure, but not only would this take me forever (I've been growing this collection for 15+ years now!), I just don't want to change it; I'm happy with my folder layout and it makes sense to me, it's really surprising that Jellyfin can't just show me the raw files.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  What is VC?
  - shubb 2y ago
    Internet slang for voice chat
    - bovermyer 2y ago
      Otherwise known as an acronym.
      - rickcecil 2y ago
        To be perfectly pedantic, it’s an initialization. Acronyms are initializations that can be pronounced as words.
        dillydogg 2y ago
        To add to the pedantry, I believe the correct word is initialism.
pmlnr 2y ago
I've tried it all: Jellyfin, plex, Emby. They all want to transcode all the time. I ended up going back to minidlna, with a layout of images/etc it likes, combined with an android app called BubbleUpnp, and it's better, than all the other setups.
- kombine 2y ago
  I'm running Jellyfin on Raspberry Pi 4 and switched transcoding off. Never really had any problem with it.
- desro 2y ago
  What codec is your media in, and what are your players? I've virtually never had JF try to transcode something for me on the fly
- crtasm 2y ago
  On Jellyfin note that you need to turn off transcoding for each user account. Keeping 'allow ... conversion without re-encoding' turned on should be fine, and likely needed for some of your files.
InsomniacL 2y ago
Some very-well-requested features/clients have gotten no traction at all, with no one coming in willing to start/help developing them. We've had to abandon some (like Chromecast for a while, though it's getting new life in the last few weeks) because of this. We're aware that probably the biggest complaints about Jellyfin are about the lack of client support, and the rough edges/lack of polish. We do hear you. We do want this to improve this just as much as you do. But we need people to help us do so. We need more volunteers who can help make the code better, write new code, document, and generally improve things. We need your help to push past what I call the Development Bystander Problem, get some new blood into the project, and especially, help to make it better! https://jellyfin.org/posts/a-call-for-developers/ It's noble to want to be a 100% volunteer force but it's frustrating that they know they have issues and a big pot of money but won't solve them. Even without paying for development, money could be spent to improve the developer experience and attract new devs. They have acknowledged client development is an issue in the OP and the link above. Could they not support client devs with hardware, licences, costs, etc...
- IshKebab 2y ago
  I don't understand why they even care about not paying for development. Is paying for development somehow immoral? Of course not!
  - wccrawford 2y ago
    Not immoral, but it's a huge HR headache. Once people get paid, you have to deal with what people are worth. And everyone thinks everyone (including themselves) is worth different amounts. Coming to a consensus about that is a huge hassle, and will still end up with hurt feelings. Bad moral is bad for code. If you have enough money, you can swallow that pill and push through. If you don't, it will make things worse. They have enough money for what they do, but they haven't got nearly enough income (donations) to pay everyone market wages.
    - n3m4c 2y ago
      Could they go the tinygrad route and post bounties like "$1000 for fixing this major bug"
climb_stealth 2y ago
Switched from Plex to Jellyfin a few years ago and have been happy with it. Plex had issues with movies with subtitle files. It tried to constantly reencode stuff. Couldn't work it out. Jellyfin works fine. Also, I'm not getting nagged for features that I don't want anymore. I happily paid for my account, Plex, but just let me watch my local movies in peace. Leave me alone with television streaming, free movies or whatever else was the latest thing that was being pushed.
domh 2y ago
This is my first time hearing about Jellyfin, and wow what a breath of fresh air compared to the typical hyper growth model employed by a lot of OSS projects. Any Jellyfin users here that can vouch for it? I currently have a SMB share on a Raspberry Pi 4 and I connect to that on my Amazon Fire Stick using the VLC SMB features. It works ok but the VLC UI leaves much to be desired. Would Jellyfin be better for this? Is there a client that works on the Fire TV stick? (This one I think? https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv)
- BizarroLand 2y ago
  I run it from a docker container on my Truenas system. It works pretty well as all of my media is stored there. I use folders to separate out TV shows / Movies on the Nas and then set a collection for each one. Identifying the media was 80% automatic, the last 20% I had to do via identify and imdb searches, but that was a small hassle. I've had a few videos not play due to formatting issues. When that happens I fire up handbrake and re-encode for mp4 web playback and ~20 minutes later I'm in business.
- GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
  Absolutely, it's been running on my NAS (via Docker) for over a year now with no issues. It supports hardware transcoding which is nice for downscaling streams while watching outside of the house. Jellyfin integrates really well with other services like Radarr, Sonarr, and Jellyseer so you can request media, have it downloaded, indexed, and available automatically. Client-wise it's a mixed bag, Infuse is probably the best one out there, but it's only available for Apple TV / iOS.
  - desro 2y ago
    and macOS!
    - geerlingguy 2y ago
      Their Jellyfin client for iOS and Apple TV was a bit flaky for a while, but last year some update fixed those issues and it's been rock solid for me. I also bought Infuse and it's a decent alternative interface.
ramon156 2y ago
Love jellyfin, I'm even considering port forwarding so my friends can make use of it!
- GardenLetter27 2y ago
  You can use ProtonVPN for port forwarding if your ISP doesn't support it (or you want to protect your home IP).
- GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
  Don't port forward it's a pain in the ass to expose your home network to the internet. Just use something like Tailscale VPN (p2p wireguard) and buy a domain to point to the internal Tailscale IP.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Tailscale funnel?
    - GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
      I use Google as my SSO provider, all of my personal devices are under my own email. For friends, I just made a throwaway Gmail account which I give out the username and password for so they can connect their computers to the tailnet.
      - Ringz 2y ago
        Good idea. But how do you maintain those mail accounts, since G will “close” them after some months (24?).
        GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
        It's the default email address for all guest users on Jellyfin, so it gets notifications and other daily emails
    - 2y ago
GardenLetter27 2y ago
I wish they could get added as an official app to the Samsung TV app store, etc.
- perryizgr8 2y ago
  They are available on the official LG TV app store and Play store (Sony, etc.). I guess someone forgot about Samsung.
renegade-otter 2y ago
I need to take the time to finally switch from Emby (what Jellyfin was forked from).
Mistletoe 2y ago
Imagine if Wikipedia did this. Bravo to Jellyfin for being practical.
herunan 2y ago
40-month runway is not that long and doesn’t account for any exceptional issues that may arise…
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
  I was expecting a much bigger number than 40 months, but then again for an entirely donation supported project it's quite good. I don't think I can remember a project telling people to stop donating directly to them before, though. It's a little odd really. I get it, but seems like investing in the S&P500 and then withdrawing your money the moment you get the slightest gainz.
- djbon2112 2y ago
  To be honest, it's right around a line that I feel is fine to make this request. The thing that triggered this, that isn't really mentioned by me in the post, is that we've had a few sudden swells of donations around both the 10.9.0 release and the latest 2 Plex kerfuffles, and I get the very distinct impression that people donating are not reading all the "fine print" about what we use it for. We also have a lot of recurring donations which should pay for a huge chunk. The goal here is to basically just make another public "hey, we never really asked for donations, and we appreciate it, but hey for now we'd rather you donate to individuals than the org since the org can coast on this money for a few more years". Which we absolutely can. I can't envision any real situation that would require us to use a huge sum of this money in one go, so it's really just the monthly recurring costs to cover which are relatively stable and consistent.
s_dev 2y ago
Is there a Jelly Cloud solution? i.e a company that deploys Jellyfin to a EC2 instance and hooks up an S3 and gives you custom domain e.g: username.companyname.com and charges you a monthly fee for the S3/EC2 costs + other costs? I was thinking of creating it but wanted to see what demand there is? Most Devs can easily do this themselves but I want to extend and sell it to other people as a service who wouldn't be capable and just happy to pay. Plex and Emby would be competitors but not open source afaik.
- danielbln 2y ago
  I can't speak for a generic cloud solution. but various seedboxes (managed bittorrent providers) offer Plex and also Jellyfin as part of their offering. That's how I run Plex as well as Jellyfin, personally.
- nusl 2y ago
  Bytesized Hosting is close to this.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 2gremlin181 2y ago
  There are many providers who sell seedboxes, which is exactly what you're looking for. They generally include support for Jellyfin as well as other *arr apps. I personally use ultra.cc and have been mostly satisfied with the service.
- weberer 2y ago
  Every seedbox offers this. I've had a good experience with whatbox.ca
  - stiltzkin 2y ago
    This was my go-to too, I highly recommend them as well.
honeybadger1 2y ago
I have been a Plex fanatic for quite a few years but the tides of been changing in a way that worries me. I am also an ad blocking fanatic and I have noticed trends between Plex, content I watch, and ads. I know they do something but I haven't quite figured it out yet even when putting my Plex behind a really aggressive ad blocking DNS configuration. They also mess with suggestions, doing things like hiding my own content in favor of their own, some other little annoyances... I stood up a Jellyfin docker a few months back and instantly noticed for local playback is was swift, the UI is super fast, and also it just felt more polished in terms of overall experience in certain areas. I haven't switched yet but the project is so far more along in such a short time period that I will be watching very closely going forward. I love the humor and I love passion to build good software that respects a human.(privacy)
agilob 2y ago
They have money and lots of bugs and don't know what to do with one and another? Maybe do some bug fixing bounties?
- wibwobble12333 2y ago
  Read the page.
sam0x17 2y ago
$24k is not a lot to have in the bank for an org who is (whether they like it or not) mortal enemies with plex
- rpgbr 2y ago
  AFAIK, Jellyfin isn't an org, it's a non-profit project run by people who don't look for compensation.
  - sam0x17 2y ago
    So an org
  - djbon2112 2y ago
    Correct, we're not even an "org" in any official sense. Just a loose collection of people working on the project.
Aitech9 2y ago
[flagged]
squarefoot 2y ago
Why streaming? I can understand when one needs some media to play on different devices at the same time, also remotely, but for individual use I found a kodi box near my TV and configured to navigate NFS/SMB directories and filenames on my NAS, to be so immediate that I can't imagine doing things differently. Also, by streaming from box A (NAS) to box B (PC) it would probably need a lot more computing power from the usually smaller and less powerful hardware, and it would also move a lot more data on the home network because the video is transcoded by the weaker hardware and before being transmitted. ...Unless streaming in this context means a completely different thing and therefore I'm wrong.
- Mashimo 2y ago
  > probably need a lot more computing power from the usually smaller and less powerful hardware Streaming does not mean it forces a transcode. I mean it can, but if you watch from a decent client it often just sends the raw media file. And you can change from PC to phone, to tv and it remembers what you watched. I actually use kodi as a client for jellyfin.
- hencoappel 2y ago
  I mainly use Plex, but the key benefits are that it remembers what you've watched, allows for multiple accounts, allows for easily continuation of a film or series without having to remember what time/episode you were on. Also allows for easy remote viewing.
  - squarefoot 2y ago
    Kodi does all of this, except remote viewing that possibly could be done through external addons, but I'm not sure about that. Some features like remembering what you were watching requires it not to be turned off. Sleep is fine however, and on my mini PC it goes to sleep when it detects I turned off the TV via HDMI/CEC connection. When you wake it up you'll be in the same place and it remembers also the time watched, while if you turned it off you have to navigate back to the place you were watching, but it still keeps the time of that file and any other one, prompting you to continue from when you left or start over. Watched files and time are saved as part of the backup that can be scheduled to run automatically in the background, so one can upgrade it, then restore the backup to get back every change to the interface, addons, configuration, etc. It also runs on phones, and I installed it also on my Pixel with GrapheneOS along with some addons, but the interface is really hard to operate there.
vbwork 2y ago
[dead]
deleted 2y ago
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cchance 2y ago
I mean, if people are so heavily donating... why not implement a full time dev ?
nullfrigid 2y ago
Is Jellyfin an all in one solution for media management and streaming? I normally just use transmission and serviio (vastly superior to Plex IMO), and only recently found out about sonarr, radarr, etc. Really though, is there not any 'all in one' solution, instead of all these various programs chained together? I get keeping the serviio bit separate, and maybe the torrent client, but the rest could easily be integrated into one app.
- TheCoelacanth 2y ago
  No, it's only for the streaming aspect. It combines extremely well with sonarr/radarr, though.
zeroq 2y ago
I had a very weird experience with Jellyfins team. Recently I decided to give the app a try, and it worked fine, but I have serious issues with their media scanner (nested structures, a lot of misc content like interviews, etc.). Years ago I wrote my own script that scans my drives, downloads imdb database, and 100% accurately matches media to imdb-id and fetches all auxilary data like cast, synopsis, posters, and so on. I asked on their forum if I could use that to somehow bypass the scanner, prepopulate the database or write my own scanner based on theirs. I was repedatley said it would be impossible and to not touch the code. "Seriously, do not do this" said one of the team members. I mean I do understand they were trying to save me a lot of headache, but at the same time they're running a campaign for developers. I just found it very odd.
- Mashimo 2y ago
  > I asked on their forum if I could use that to somehow bypass the scanner, Oh that is easy. I think jellyfin can read from a sidecard file that you can place next to the media file.
- andrew_eu 2y ago
  I can't speak for their developer/support team, but that kind of feedback indeed feels strange. Even more so because this kind of intervention is possible without touching any of Jellyfin's code. In particular you can create an NFO file (same stem, next to the media, with a .info extension) that contains this data. With stuff like the IMDB ID given, Jellyfin is pretty good at extracting metadata from there; without it, false matches aren't uncommon. It's even documented. [1] [1] https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/metadata/nfo/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/metadata/nfo/
- djbon2112 2y ago
  The reason is that, it's basically impossible. The issue comes down to the Library handling code. It's legacy Emby code that we've been slowly but surely trying to replace but it's a huge task. This is huge chunk of Jellyfin. Writing your own parser is a great idea, but directly hooking it into Jellyfin will just be giving yourself a lot of headaches and will NOT be easy to do. You're best to write out NFOs and then let Jellyfin just import those with all external metadata providers removed.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
andrewmcwatters 2y ago
No you're not. You need at a minimum approximately $180,000 for a project with your expenses to be self-sustaining. With this burn rate, you'll end up asking for donations again in three years. Further still, you'd need those reserves to grow at more than 2% per year, and more realistically somewhere much higher than that, just to ensure your donation reserves keep the project self-sustaining in the face of inflation. How do we get so many smart people in tech who don't know how to manage finances?
stiltzkin 2y ago
I always had Jellyfin as second option with my Plex Lifetime membership. Glad they improved a lot since the first days on their reddit community. Now I prefer using Stremio+Read Debrid, Kodi as my main player for local movies.
eadmund 2y ago
I’m a happy user of Jellyfin, and I’d like to amplify what others have said about $24,000 or 40 months’ expenses being not nearly enough. At a conservative safe withdrawal rate, $24,000 of capital is only $60/month — in other words, a tenth of what the project needs to cover its monthly expenses. If the project wants to be self-sufficient, they thus need ten times as much money. Then they can invest it, and cover expenses with the income from their investments. If the project doesn’t want to be self-sufficient, that’s something else. Maybe they would prefer to think it will better align incentives for their users to keep them hungry? Personally, though, I think that self-sufficiency should be everyone’s goal.
- fiznool 2y ago
  $24k over 40 months is $600/month. Am I missing something?
  - eadmund 2y ago
    Yes. ‘Safe withdrawal rate’ is the annual fraction of an investment which one can sell while maintaining the principal’s value, adjusted for inflation. That might sound very complex, so here’s an attempt to explain it simply. If one has $24,000 and spend $600/month, then after 40 months there will be nothing at all left. On the other hand, if one invested that $24,000 in Treasury bonds one would have something like $26,229. So (ignoring inflation) one could spend ($24,000 - $26,229)/40 = $55.72 each month, and still have $24,000. Why would one want to do that? Because one could keep going, investing the money, collecting the interest and paying one’s expenses: that $24,000 can last forever, paying $55.72 a month. Now, in real life one can’t ignore inflation, and that $24,000 will be worth less than $22,000 in 40 months. In real life inflation tends to outpace the risk-free rate of return one can get lending money to the U.S. Treasury. So one needs to get more return by taking one more risk, for example by investing in the stock market as a whole. But that exposes one to economic downturns. To make a long story short (too late!) folks have run the numbers and figured that one can conservatively invest one’s money in some broad indices, withdraw about 3–4% a year and maintain the post-inflation value of one’s capital. More than that, and one runs out of capital; less than that, and the capital continues to increase, but you have less money to spend today. If Jellyfin wants to be able to pay their $600 (in 2024 dollars) hosting bill forever, they need to invest $240,000 today. And then they’ll never need to ask for money again (assuming all sorts of things, like no decade-long recession, no world war, an asteroid doesn’t crash into the Earth and so forth). For the same reason, an American making the average wage of $63,795 needs a $2.2 million nest egg to never work again.

556 points by bo0tzz 2y ago

Why wouldn't they redistribute to other maintainers of the plugins/clients. They have much more knowlegde of where money is needed or where resources are lacking. Or pay devs, not in their circle to build the features the community wants but they can't (lack of expertise, or otherwise) implement?

nknld 2y ago

[flagged]

tgjk 2y ago

[dead]

gigatexal 2y ago

Now this is what open source should be: well funded but also the community highlighting the projects building off of it — in this case the main project highlighting and advocating for the folks that build front ends to JellyFin.

bhaney 2y ago

Very respectable. It's behaviors like this that keep me on Jellyfin instead of Plex, even in the face of social pressures to switch.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Larrikin 2y ago

I hope the project succeeds and think this is a good move. But I have a lifetime Plex pass and Jellyfin still seems not as good. I have both on my box, but whenever I try to use Jellyfin theres just something missing. I will keep checking back.

nolok 2y ago
Do you have any specific exemples ?
- yegle 2y ago
  I can give a couple examples: 1) Jellyfin supports reading NFO files to help determining matching the file with the correct metadata (https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/metadata/nfo/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/metadata/nfo/). This is arguably superior than Plex's way (you have to name your file with IMDb id or tmdb id https://support.plex.tv/articles/201018497-fix-match-match/#:~:text=of%20the%20search.-,Tips,-There%20are%20a https://support.plex.tv/articles/201018497-fix-match-match/#...), but I still constantly find media w/o metadata in Jellyfin. 2) The way you fix the matching in Jellyfin has a pretty terrible UX. You select the movie w/o metadata (there's no filter to "find all media that Jellyfin fail to match w/ metadata) and click "Identify" in the 3-dot menu, then fill in the information and search (why can't Jellyfin prefill useful metadata, at the very minimum the year that should be easily identified using regex?), then pick either IMDb or tmdb (why do I have to choose one of them? Can I bulk-switch my library to use IMDb instead of tmdb?), with a checkbox to confirm you want to "replace existing images" (why do I have any images to replace? Jellyfin did not match the media to any metadata right?) you now have some useful metadata. 3) When I need to force a rescan of a library, there's no way (that I can find) to do that when you are viewing the library. The only way to do this is to go to Settings -> Dashboard -> Scan All Libraries. 4) There's no offline media playback support (AFAIKT).
  - nolok 2y ago
    1 - I'm not sure what you mean. Jellyfin can use the NFO, and if not will do a normal search and match. 2 - I agree that Find all without set metadata in a library would be nice. However when identifying you don't need to chose one or the other, you just type whatever info you have (the name, or the year, or both, or ...) and search and it search in all providers it has a plugin for (so in your case, both imdb and tmdb) and show all results from both. The do you want to replace image is because it's very common to switch to another provider for obscure series for exemple, but want to keep you hand replaced image. It doesn't really apply to "blockbuster" series or movies, so I guess it could be nice to have a default you can set. 3 - It separates the admin part and the viewing part, I think it's good. If you're solo user it can feel bothersome, but for me it's a better thing. 4 - You can download the files for later viewing offline. Overall the only one I agree with is the figure out which movie or serie you didn't identify and let me fix that in bulk, that process could be improved, but it's also a one time thing at first setup.

stojano 2y ago

"stop donating" respect!

RandomThoughts3 2y ago

I think it’s a massive mistake. They currently have 3 years of runway but that’s ridding on the high of the announcement and this communication will dry up donations. Plus, they ask people to donate to clients instead of the core product but they could do so themselves with the money they receive.

Retr0id 2y ago
If I donated to project X and they redistributed my funds to related project Y, I'd be mildly peeved. Only mildly, mind, but the way they're doing it here is exactly the right way, imho.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
flumpcakes 2y ago
Why? Not everything has to be a subscription or a hyper growth business, not every product needs to do everything. If they and their users are happy with the cadence, and have a war chest of 3 years operating costs assuming 100% of funding stopped then why not divert attention to other projects in the ecosystem that might need the funding more?
- RandomThoughts3 2y ago
  3 years is nothing especially if you intentionally kill your donations. They won’t come back magically when they will need them. Plus as stated before, they can divert the money to other projects related to Jellyfin themselves. They don’t need the community to do that for them. Honestly, if you are a project the size of Jellyfin and you ask donations to stop because you have a measly three years of operational runway without funding anything and without any idea of what to do with the money, I seriously question your ability to survive.
  - s_dev 2y ago
    >They won’t come back magically when they will need them. With the kind of goodwill they're building here I'm inclined to doubt that. People want to naturally cheer for the good guy and it's hard not to see an open source passion project led by these fellas as not being the good guy.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sixhobbits 2y ago

(June, 2023)

bhaney 2y ago
No, this is from last month. You're looking at the date the poster's account was created.

arnath 2y ago

The $400/month doesn’t account for their labor, does it? I feel like that’s why people donate personally

lozenge 2y ago
This requires them to agree on how to pay out the money, which sounds like more trouble than it's worth.
- wccrawford 2y ago
  IMO, there's nothing worse than paying people too little money. Well, other than unevenly paying everyone money. "But it's $100 a month they wouldn't have had!" Sure, but now there's something to value your time and effort against, and it will not stack up favorably.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > IMO, there's nothing worse than paying people too little money. In a for-profit project, I'd agree. Jellyfin isn't though, and they're pretty up-front about that, so "paying too little" doesn't really apply to the people who end up contributing.
    - wccrawford 2y ago
      You do not want your volunteers looking at the effort they put in and the money they get back for it. It's going to create negative feelings, and at the very least performance will suffer for a while. It's more likely that it'll cause a permanent problem instead, possibly even driving away volunteers.
      - diggan 2y ago
        > You do not want your volunteers looking at the effort they put in and the money they get back for it. Why not? I think it's good for everyone to evaluate what you're spending your time on, and if that time is time well spent. What do you mean with "the money they get back for it"? It's a FOSS project that doesn't pay for engineering hours from volunteers or anyone. It's literally $0, and everyone contributes to Jellyfin with the expectation of getting back exactly $0.

giamma 2y ago

I have an android TV running Kodi. Kodi connects via SMB to my NAS (Odroid HC-4, OpenMediaVault) and can easily show all my content. Would Jellyfin improve my experience? I could run it on odroid without transcoding, and then use the official android-tv client. Would it be worth the effort of switching?

Semaphor 2y ago
Single-client is IMO where Kodi shines. This way you also have less complexity as Kodi doesn’t need a ton of things that are integrated in Jellyfin, I’d not switch if you don’t have any pain points with this set up.
defrost 2y ago
Depends on how much you value your Kodi setup and how many "difficult to auto match" shows | movies you have. I wanted to run Kodi | JellyFin in parallel (two Kodi client Android TV's in house) so that visitors with iPhones | Androids | Tables could browse content. The local Kodi TV clients used the NAS box MariDB to hold meta data held in the local to content .NFO files (show ID's, descriptions, etc) I've held off on that as the JellyFin docs are not clear and the small experiments I tried in isolation proved tricky to resolve issues. The issues being getting JellyFin to load details from local.nfo files w/out making changes and|or getting JellyFin to not make additional .INFO files (more or less duplicates) and|or getting JellyFin to not trash existing artwork with new downloads. I'm sure there are solutions here (eg: JellyFin can use seperate directories for it's meta-data (but then doesn't read the local .nfo files to get ambiguous shows 'right')), I've yet to put the hard hours in and these are the kinds of hiccups you may face. It's moot if you have a small collection | don't care about existing artwork | etc. IIRC you can disable transcoding on fly by server and trust the network | viewing client to handle full original content, etc. I like JellyFin and used Emby in the past and use small JellyFin setups today - I just haven't resolved the issues in pointing it at a large curated collection and letting it rip making it's own parallel meta data w/out affecting pre-existing meta data.
bestouff 2y ago
I had the same setup until recently. I always had troubles with Kodi not indecing very well my movies; and also when wartching my moview far from home I had to copy them first, than think about marking them as "watched" in my library - and if I stopped watching mi-movie that was even more complicated. Really, Jellyfin has been quite the upgrade. The indexing is better, I can watch things far from home, everything is there. As a bonus, I can create accounts for close friends/family so they can watch what I download without hassle. Just try it.

poisonborz 2y ago

Not happy about this post. Instead of asking to stop, they should do just what they suggest, without further ado - distribute the income to the ecosystem devs the way they see fit. Make it transparent, make application to these funds posssible, make feature bounties, write it besides the donation button. Once someone stops donating, it is unlikely they will put up the effort of continually researching on which client/dev to support. This would be much better handled by Jellyfin maintainers.

newsclues 2y ago
Love jellyfin but don’t understand some of their choices like abandoning Reddit for a forum with no traffic
- Chris2048 2y ago
  I understand abandoning reddit in any situation
- specproc 2y ago
  A dedicated forum, open to read without login, and controlled by the project. They have easy access to all their data, decision-making power on features to support, and it's their call whether or not to allow advertising (they don't) or AI training of their data. Seems like a perfectly good place for it to me.
  - geerlingguy 2y ago
    We definitely need more forums. And with Discourse being a huge improvement over BB and other forum software from the 90s, it's not hard to set up multiple forum accounts and even tie them to some other login if you want.
- iamacyborg 2y ago
  Reddit isn’t conducive to many types of conversations due to the voting mechanism for posts and comments.
- 2y ago

worble 2y ago

I recently started using Jellyfin for friday movie nights with me and a few friends who no longer live near each other. The sync feature on the web UI works surprisingly well, we hang out on VC and it's as close to watching something physically together it can be. Overall I've found it to be really solid, although I've not really dabbled much with other media center software to compare it to. My only real complaint is that for whatever reason it really does not like my folder structure - most of my files work but it'll randomly decide that a bunch of episodes in a folder are a single "file" with multiple "versions". Reading their docs it seems like they really want you to conform to a specific folder structure, but not only would this take me forever (I've been growing this collection for 15+ years now!), I just don't want to change it; I'm happy with my folder layout and it makes sense to me, it's really surprising that Jellyfin can't just show me the raw files.

actionfromafar 2y ago
What is VC?
- shubb 2y ago
  Internet slang for voice chat
  - bovermyer 2y ago
    Otherwise known as an acronym.
    - rickcecil 2y ago
      To be perfectly pedantic, it’s an initialization. Acronyms are initializations that can be pronounced as words.
      - dillydogg 2y ago
        To add to the pedantry, I believe the correct word is initialism.

pmlnr 2y ago

I've tried it all: Jellyfin, plex, Emby. They all want to transcode all the time. I ended up going back to minidlna, with a layout of images/etc it likes, combined with an android app called BubbleUpnp, and it's better, than all the other setups.

kombine 2y ago
I'm running Jellyfin on Raspberry Pi 4 and switched transcoding off. Never really had any problem with it.
desro 2y ago
What codec is your media in, and what are your players? I've virtually never had JF try to transcode something for me on the fly
crtasm 2y ago
On Jellyfin note that you need to turn off transcoding for each user account. Keeping 'allow ... conversion without re-encoding' turned on should be fine, and likely needed for some of your files.

InsomniacL 2y ago

Some very-well-requested features/clients have gotten no traction at all, with no one coming in willing to start/help developing them. We've had to abandon some (like Chromecast for a while, though it's getting new life in the last few weeks) because of this. We're aware that probably the biggest complaints about Jellyfin are about the lack of client support, and the rough edges/lack of polish. We do hear you. We do want this to improve this just as much as you do. But we need people to help us do so. We need more volunteers who can help make the code better, write new code, document, and generally improve things. We need your help to push past what I call the Development Bystander Problem, get some new blood into the project, and especially, help to make it better! https://jellyfin.org/posts/a-call-for-developers/ It's noble to want to be a 100% volunteer force but it's frustrating that they know they have issues and a big pot of money but won't solve them. Even without paying for development, money could be spent to improve the developer experience and attract new devs. They have acknowledged client development is an issue in the OP and the link above. Could they not support client devs with hardware, licences, costs, etc...

IshKebab 2y ago
I don't understand why they even care about not paying for development. Is paying for development somehow immoral? Of course not!
- wccrawford 2y ago
  Not immoral, but it's a huge HR headache. Once people get paid, you have to deal with what people are worth. And everyone thinks everyone (including themselves) is worth different amounts. Coming to a consensus about that is a huge hassle, and will still end up with hurt feelings. Bad moral is bad for code. If you have enough money, you can swallow that pill and push through. If you don't, it will make things worse. They have enough money for what they do, but they haven't got nearly enough income (donations) to pay everyone market wages.
  - n3m4c 2y ago
    Could they go the tinygrad route and post bounties like "$1000 for fixing this major bug"

climb_stealth 2y ago

Switched from Plex to Jellyfin a few years ago and have been happy with it. Plex had issues with movies with subtitle files. It tried to constantly reencode stuff. Couldn't work it out. Jellyfin works fine. Also, I'm not getting nagged for features that I don't want anymore. I happily paid for my account, Plex, but just let me watch my local movies in peace. Leave me alone with television streaming, free movies or whatever else was the latest thing that was being pushed.

domh 2y ago

This is my first time hearing about Jellyfin, and wow what a breath of fresh air compared to the typical hyper growth model employed by a lot of OSS projects. Any Jellyfin users here that can vouch for it? I currently have a SMB share on a Raspberry Pi 4 and I connect to that on my Amazon Fire Stick using the VLC SMB features. It works ok but the VLC UI leaves much to be desired. Would Jellyfin be better for this? Is there a client that works on the Fire TV stick? (This one I think? https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv)

BizarroLand 2y ago
I run it from a docker container on my Truenas system. It works pretty well as all of my media is stored there. I use folders to separate out TV shows / Movies on the Nas and then set a collection for each one. Identifying the media was 80% automatic, the last 20% I had to do via identify and imdb searches, but that was a small hassle. I've had a few videos not play due to formatting issues. When that happens I fire up handbrake and re-encode for mp4 web playback and ~20 minutes later I'm in business.
GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
Absolutely, it's been running on my NAS (via Docker) for over a year now with no issues. It supports hardware transcoding which is nice for downscaling streams while watching outside of the house. Jellyfin integrates really well with other services like Radarr, Sonarr, and Jellyseer so you can request media, have it downloaded, indexed, and available automatically. Client-wise it's a mixed bag, Infuse is probably the best one out there, but it's only available for Apple TV / iOS.
- desro 2y ago
  and macOS!
  - geerlingguy 2y ago
    Their Jellyfin client for iOS and Apple TV was a bit flaky for a while, but last year some update fixed those issues and it's been rock solid for me. I also bought Infuse and it's a decent alternative interface.

ramon156 2y ago

Love jellyfin, I'm even considering port forwarding so my friends can make use of it!

GardenLetter27 2y ago
You can use ProtonVPN for port forwarding if your ISP doesn't support it (or you want to protect your home IP).
GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
Don't port forward it's a pain in the ass to expose your home network to the internet. Just use something like Tailscale VPN (p2p wireguard) and buy a domain to point to the internal Tailscale IP.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Tailscale funnel?
  - GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
    I use Google as my SSO provider, all of my personal devices are under my own email. For friends, I just made a throwaway Gmail account which I give out the username and password for so they can connect their computers to the tailnet.
    - Ringz 2y ago
      Good idea. But how do you maintain those mail accounts, since G will “close” them after some months (24?).
      - GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
        It's the default email address for all guest users on Jellyfin, so it gets notifications and other daily emails
  - 2y ago

GardenLetter27 2y ago

I wish they could get added as an official app to the Samsung TV app store, etc.

perryizgr8 2y ago
They are available on the official LG TV app store and Play store (Sony, etc.). I guess someone forgot about Samsung.

renegade-otter 2y ago

I need to take the time to finally switch from Emby (what Jellyfin was forked from).

Mistletoe 2y ago

Imagine if Wikipedia did this. Bravo to Jellyfin for being practical.

herunan 2y ago

40-month runway is not that long and doesn’t account for any exceptional issues that may arise…

beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
I was expecting a much bigger number than 40 months, but then again for an entirely donation supported project it's quite good. I don't think I can remember a project telling people to stop donating directly to them before, though. It's a little odd really. I get it, but seems like investing in the S&P500 and then withdrawing your money the moment you get the slightest gainz.
djbon2112 2y ago
To be honest, it's right around a line that I feel is fine to make this request. The thing that triggered this, that isn't really mentioned by me in the post, is that we've had a few sudden swells of donations around both the 10.9.0 release and the latest 2 Plex kerfuffles, and I get the very distinct impression that people donating are not reading all the "fine print" about what we use it for. We also have a lot of recurring donations which should pay for a huge chunk. The goal here is to basically just make another public "hey, we never really asked for donations, and we appreciate it, but hey for now we'd rather you donate to individuals than the org since the org can coast on this money for a few more years". Which we absolutely can. I can't envision any real situation that would require us to use a huge sum of this money in one go, so it's really just the monthly recurring costs to cover which are relatively stable and consistent.

s_dev 2y ago

Is there a Jelly Cloud solution? i.e a company that deploys Jellyfin to a EC2 instance and hooks up an S3 and gives you custom domain e.g: username.companyname.com and charges you a monthly fee for the S3/EC2 costs + other costs? I was thinking of creating it but wanted to see what demand there is? Most Devs can easily do this themselves but I want to extend and sell it to other people as a service who wouldn't be capable and just happy to pay. Plex and Emby would be competitors but not open source afaik.

danielbln 2y ago
I can't speak for a generic cloud solution. but various seedboxes (managed bittorrent providers) offer Plex and also Jellyfin as part of their offering. That's how I run Plex as well as Jellyfin, personally.
nusl 2y ago
Bytesized Hosting is close to this.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
2gremlin181 2y ago
There are many providers who sell seedboxes, which is exactly what you're looking for. They generally include support for Jellyfin as well as other *arr apps. I personally use ultra.cc and have been mostly satisfied with the service.
weberer 2y ago
Every seedbox offers this. I've had a good experience with whatbox.ca
- stiltzkin 2y ago
  This was my go-to too, I highly recommend them as well.

honeybadger1 2y ago

I have been a Plex fanatic for quite a few years but the tides of been changing in a way that worries me. I am also an ad blocking fanatic and I have noticed trends between Plex, content I watch, and ads. I know they do something but I haven't quite figured it out yet even when putting my Plex behind a really aggressive ad blocking DNS configuration. They also mess with suggestions, doing things like hiding my own content in favor of their own, some other little annoyances... I stood up a Jellyfin docker a few months back and instantly noticed for local playback is was swift, the UI is super fast, and also it just felt more polished in terms of overall experience in certain areas. I haven't switched yet but the project is so far more along in such a short time period that I will be watching very closely going forward. I love the humor and I love passion to build good software that respects a human.(privacy)

agilob 2y ago

They have money and lots of bugs and don't know what to do with one and another? Maybe do some bug fixing bounties?

wibwobble12333 2y ago
Read the page.

sam0x17 2y ago

$24k is not a lot to have in the bank for an org who is (whether they like it or not) mortal enemies with plex

rpgbr 2y ago
AFAIK, Jellyfin isn't an org, it's a non-profit project run by people who don't look for compensation.
- sam0x17 2y ago
  So an org
- djbon2112 2y ago
  Correct, we're not even an "org" in any official sense. Just a loose collection of people working on the project.

Aitech9 2y ago

[flagged]

squarefoot 2y ago

Why streaming? I can understand when one needs some media to play on different devices at the same time, also remotely, but for individual use I found a kodi box near my TV and configured to navigate NFS/SMB directories and filenames on my NAS, to be so immediate that I can't imagine doing things differently. Also, by streaming from box A (NAS) to box B (PC) it would probably need a lot more computing power from the usually smaller and less powerful hardware, and it would also move a lot more data on the home network because the video is transcoded by the weaker hardware and before being transmitted. ...Unless streaming in this context means a completely different thing and therefore I'm wrong.

Mashimo 2y ago
> probably need a lot more computing power from the usually smaller and less powerful hardware Streaming does not mean it forces a transcode. I mean it can, but if you watch from a decent client it often just sends the raw media file. And you can change from PC to phone, to tv and it remembers what you watched. I actually use kodi as a client for jellyfin.
hencoappel 2y ago
I mainly use Plex, but the key benefits are that it remembers what you've watched, allows for multiple accounts, allows for easily continuation of a film or series without having to remember what time/episode you were on. Also allows for easy remote viewing.
- squarefoot 2y ago
  Kodi does all of this, except remote viewing that possibly could be done through external addons, but I'm not sure about that. Some features like remembering what you were watching requires it not to be turned off. Sleep is fine however, and on my mini PC it goes to sleep when it detects I turned off the TV via HDMI/CEC connection. When you wake it up you'll be in the same place and it remembers also the time watched, while if you turned it off you have to navigate back to the place you were watching, but it still keeps the time of that file and any other one, prompting you to continue from when you left or start over. Watched files and time are saved as part of the backup that can be scheduled to run automatically in the background, so one can upgrade it, then restore the backup to get back every change to the interface, addons, configuration, etc. It also runs on phones, and I installed it also on my Pixel with GrapheneOS along with some addons, but the interface is really hard to operate there.

vbwork 2y ago

[dead]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cchance 2y ago

I mean, if people are so heavily donating... why not implement a full time dev ?

nullfrigid 2y ago

Is Jellyfin an all in one solution for media management and streaming? I normally just use transmission and serviio (vastly superior to Plex IMO), and only recently found out about sonarr, radarr, etc. Really though, is there not any 'all in one' solution, instead of all these various programs chained together? I get keeping the serviio bit separate, and maybe the torrent client, but the rest could easily be integrated into one app.

TheCoelacanth 2y ago
No, it's only for the streaming aspect. It combines extremely well with sonarr/radarr, though.

zeroq 2y ago

I had a very weird experience with Jellyfins team. Recently I decided to give the app a try, and it worked fine, but I have serious issues with their media scanner (nested structures, a lot of misc content like interviews, etc.). Years ago I wrote my own script that scans my drives, downloads imdb database, and 100% accurately matches media to imdb-id and fetches all auxilary data like cast, synopsis, posters, and so on. I asked on their forum if I could use that to somehow bypass the scanner, prepopulate the database or write my own scanner based on theirs. I was repedatley said it would be impossible and to not touch the code. "Seriously, do not do this" said one of the team members. I mean I do understand they were trying to save me a lot of headache, but at the same time they're running a campaign for developers. I just found it very odd.

Mashimo 2y ago
> I asked on their forum if I could use that to somehow bypass the scanner, Oh that is easy. I think jellyfin can read from a sidecard file that you can place next to the media file.
andrew_eu 2y ago
I can't speak for their developer/support team, but that kind of feedback indeed feels strange. Even more so because this kind of intervention is possible without touching any of Jellyfin's code. In particular you can create an NFO file (same stem, next to the media, with a .info extension) that contains this data. With stuff like the IMDB ID given, Jellyfin is pretty good at extracting metadata from there; without it, false matches aren't uncommon. It's even documented. [1] [1] https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/metadata/nfo/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/metadata/nfo/
djbon2112 2y ago
The reason is that, it's basically impossible. The issue comes down to the Library handling code. It's legacy Emby code that we've been slowly but surely trying to replace but it's a huge task. This is huge chunk of Jellyfin. Writing your own parser is a great idea, but directly hooking it into Jellyfin will just be giving yourself a lot of headaches and will NOT be easy to do. You're best to write out NFOs and then let Jellyfin just import those with all external metadata providers removed.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

andrewmcwatters 2y ago

No you're not. You need at a minimum approximately $180,000 for a project with your expenses to be self-sustaining. With this burn rate, you'll end up asking for donations again in three years. Further still, you'd need those reserves to grow at more than 2% per year, and more realistically somewhere much higher than that, just to ensure your donation reserves keep the project self-sustaining in the face of inflation. How do we get so many smart people in tech who don't know how to manage finances?

stiltzkin 2y ago

I always had Jellyfin as second option with my Plex Lifetime membership. Glad they improved a lot since the first days on their reddit community. Now I prefer using Stremio+Read Debrid, Kodi as my main player for local movies.

eadmund 2y ago

I’m a happy user of Jellyfin, and I’d like to amplify what others have said about $24,000 or 40 months’ expenses being not nearly enough. At a conservative safe withdrawal rate, $24,000 of capital is only $60/month — in other words, a tenth of what the project needs to cover its monthly expenses. If the project wants to be self-sufficient, they thus need ten times as much money. Then they can invest it, and cover expenses with the income from their investments. If the project doesn’t want to be self-sufficient, that’s something else. Maybe they would prefer to think it will better align incentives for their users to keep them hungry? Personally, though, I think that self-sufficiency should be everyone’s goal.

fiznool 2y ago
$24k over 40 months is $600/month. Am I missing something?
- eadmund 2y ago
  Yes. ‘Safe withdrawal rate’ is the annual fraction of an investment which one can sell while maintaining the principal’s value, adjusted for inflation. That might sound very complex, so here’s an attempt to explain it simply. If one has $24,000 and spend $600/month, then after 40 months there will be nothing at all left. On the other hand, if one invested that $24,000 in Treasury bonds one would have something like $26,229. So (ignoring inflation) one could spend ($24,000 - $26,229)/40 = $55.72 each month, and still have $24,000. Why would one want to do that? Because one could keep going, investing the money, collecting the interest and paying one’s expenses: that $24,000 can last forever, paying $55.72 a month. Now, in real life one can’t ignore inflation, and that $24,000 will be worth less than $22,000 in 40 months. In real life inflation tends to outpace the risk-free rate of return one can get lending money to the U.S. Treasury. So one needs to get more return by taking one more risk, for example by investing in the stock market as a whole. But that exposes one to economic downturns. To make a long story short (too late!) folks have run the numbers and figured that one can conservatively invest one’s money in some broad indices, withdraw about 3–4% a year and maintain the post-inflation value of one’s capital. More than that, and one runs out of capital; less than that, and the capital continues to increase, but you have less money to spend today. If Jellyfin wants to be able to pay their $600 (in 2024 dollars) hosting bill forever, they need to invest $240,000 today. And then they’ll never need to ask for money again (assuming all sorts of things, like no decade-long recession, no world war, an asteroid doesn’t crash into the Earth and so forth). For the same reason, an American making the average wage of $63,795 needs a $2.2 million nest egg to never work again.