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Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

492 points by doener 2y ago

urbandw311er 2y ago
Nah - very happy to support Plex with my lifetime pass thanks.
- muppetman 2y ago
  Even with all the cruft they keep adding? Tv shows, Live TV, other random bollocks you have to keep turning off. I'm glad I never purchased a licence with the amount of useless stuff they keep shoe horning in.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    I mean, I don't disagree that those things are silly but I haven't had to keep turning them off. I turned them off once, years ago when they were introduced, and they have never come back. I don't find that to be so onerous that it has kept me from enjoying the software. I have my misgivings about the direction the company is going, but at least for now they haven't ruined the core use case so I'm content.
    - muppetman 2y ago
      Sorry I wasn't clear I meant keep turning off as they add new dumb stuff. I agree once it's off it's off but I had that bollocks defaults to on.
  - speff 2y ago
    I’m not forced to use any of those and when turned off, never came back on. This is a commonly mentioned con by jellyfin…proponents, but I fail to see how turning a setting off is more cumbersome than the jellyfin setup as a whole. My users and I are more than satisfied with plex and their updates
sergiotapia 2y ago
What benefits are there compared to Emby? Been using it for quite some time and very curious! How is av1 support on jellyfin?
- Cyph0n 2y ago
  For your second question: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/#video-compatibility https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/#vid...
  - init2null 2y ago
    They don't list Infuse on there, but it's pretty great in its support of pretty much everything. The Apple TV has certainly surprised me by being an excellent platform for in-home streaming.
    - Cyph0n 2y ago
      Yes, Infuse is excellent, highly recommend it on iOS devices.
- nialv7 2y ago
  jellyfin is open source, that's enough reason for me.
- jchw 2y ago
  Jellyfin is a fork of Emby. Emby used to be open source, when it went closed source Jellyfin was formed off of it. AV1 playback works on devices that support it. You'll need server-side transcoding for devices that don't. Jellyfin can do this by shelling out to FFMPEG, which can optionally use hardware accelerated codecs if they're available to it. So basically, "it depends", but Jellyfin itself supports AV1 media.
- pygar 2y ago
  If you want to use hardware acceleration in Emby you have to pay for "Emby Premiere". Jellyfin, not having tiered versions, provides this for free. This is obviously useful in general, but i rely on it to run a media server on my low-end minipc with Intel Quick Sync.
RickHull 2y ago
My media center is a laptop with a broken screen, running Arch Linux and Kodi. Kodi has a web interface that you can stream to. Why might I want to add Jellyfin?
- muppetman 2y ago
  Because you can give your friends a login, they can log in from anywhere, and watch your content. Same for you. You can log in from anywhere and do that. Kodi is more of a local thing, I find the two compliment each other very well. There are native apps for jellyfin as well. Loaded up and hit play. I guess you can probably do this with Kodi but it hasn't been designed from the ground up for this use case.
  - mrcsharp 2y ago
    And when they login you can watch content together in sync too. I use that feature a lot to remotely watch movies with mates.
- chadcmulligan 2y ago
  Thats a good idea for a damaged laptop, I often see those for sale for nothing
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Yeah for quite a while I was using an old ThinkPad as a Valheim server lol, maybe not the most power-efficient, but not that bad either!
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Same here. I never could figure out why I'd want to use anything else. Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, whatever. Nothing beats the simplicity of a couple of terrabytes on a local drive, or if you want to get fancy, a NFS share. Honestly, Kodi is even a little more heavyweight than I need, but I've been using it since long before the XBMC->Kodi name change and have been happy with it.
- 2y ago
lukevp 2y ago
Jellyfin is pretty good, and I've been using it in place of Plex for the last few years. However, I feel like there are some underlying limitations that I just can't get past: 1. the UI jank. The thumbnail tiles are slow to load, even on a local network. Searches and filters flicker as you type and take a while to return. Scrolling fast in the web UI gets choppy/laggy. 2. The native app (at least in the case of Apple TV) is either nonexistent or terrible. I've been using Swiftfin since it was one of the first alpha versions, and it constantly lost pairing with my Jellyfin instance. When it did work, which was very cryptic and usually required re-enrolling the client every time, it would randomly fail to load things, and the UI was very choppy as well. I haven't used the native apps on other platforms, but I imagine they are equally or more janky, because the Apple TV is comparatively very beefy hardware-wise vs. most other platforms. 3. The polling for new media is slow. I upped it to 10 minutes (the quickest possible setting) but I shudder to think what a full scan of a media library every 10 minutes is doing to my disks. Why doesn't it use file watchers and webhooks for new content notification? 4. The homepage has very little actionable info and doesn't work for browsing. It's not like Netflix or any of the other services where you can boot it up and see a bunch of different categories, as well as your "list". It has playlists, but you have to drill down to see them. You can go to "Movies -> Suggestions" and it has a little bit, but nothing like Netflix does. No real recommendation engine. 5. You have to maintain your own trailers or use an app like Infuse that can download its own trailers. 6. You have to separately configure tiles to be rendered if you want a nice seeking experience where it shows a live preview as you scrub through the timeline. 7. Movies and TV Shows are separated even though pretty much every other platform doesn't separate them, which requires you to click into one of 2 options before you can do almost anything. That said, it's still far better and less janky than Plex was before I switched, and Infuse actually plays back HDR / Dolby Vision content correctly. Does anyone else have qualms with Jellyfin? And how does Plex compare to any of these gripes?
- muppetman 2y ago
  Plex has a lot more polish. However, Plex also tries to shove stuff down your throat. If you want to share your meeting with friends, you need to have a Kodi pass or some bollocks. Jellyfin is 100% free. Certainly it is not as polished though, but I managed to use it with my friend who are not very technically literate, and it works very well for them. Every release improve the polish a little! Edit: New media shows up for me pretty much straight away without having to do anything. Not sure what's happening there for you.
ValleZ 2y ago
Jellyfin is not able to group series together and on top of that shows everything in random order, why bother with it when there are alternatives that can do that?
- russelg 2y ago
  What do you mean random order? You can choose the sort order for any library yourself.
  - ValleZ 2y ago
    I have one folder with movies and series. It shows as a randomized mix, maybe it uses something like modification time by default? It's definitely not by name.
    - wang_li 2y ago
      In my experience you have to sort shows into directories and sub-directories for a series. My entire jellyfin library is just symlinks into where my crap has accumulated over the years. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/
      - ValleZ 2y ago
        I have the series in their own folders. I tried to do a more nested structure to no avail. After a day of attempts to fix it I switched to Plex and it despite having its own quirks just worked fine.
- Sheeny96 2y ago
  What do you mean group series together? If you mean seasons of a show, yes it does. If you mean collections, it has them.
  - ValleZ 2y ago
    Then I could not figure how to make it work. Plex did that without any effort from my side though
Larrikin 2y ago
Jellyfin feels like its almost to where Plex was 5 years ago. They are catching up fairly quickly and I think I wouldn't bother with a Plex pass if I was coming in completely fresh. But it is not as good as Plex currently. I have a lifetime pass and there is no reason for me to switch. I personally am fine with Plex adding features, so long as they are not taking anything away. They've had a couple missteps but absolutely nothing that would make me want to switch to an experience that is definitely worse. I'll give Jellyfin 3 years and then reevaluate and see how I feel.
- pixxel 2y ago
  [dead]
- p1mrx 2y ago
  Plex uses cloud-based authentication, which means Plex Inc. is holding the keys to your library. I switched to JellyFin because I was not comfortable with that arrangement.
  - loughnane 2y ago
    I said it elsewhere, but this was the turning point for me as well.
  - Larrikin 2y ago
    What meaningful keys do they hold to my library if everything is sitting on my hard drive waiting to be switched over the moment something better comes along or Plex makes themselves worse?
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    As far as I'm aware Plex media server still has the option to whitelist subnets for auth bypass. I don't know if there is an option to do purely local authentication, but I don't believe it's accurate that the company is holding the keys to your library.
  - notatoad 2y ago
    >holding the keys to your library but it's still on my hard drive. if i can't log in to plex for some reason, i'll install jellyfin. or mount it as a network drive and play the files with VLC. it's not like they're locking away my content behind their authentication, all they're locking away behind that auth is my ability to access my media through plex.
apitman 2y ago
Fun fact: Jellyfin runs natively on Windows. Combined with something like Cloudflare Tunnel it's probably the easiest way to host a media server without needing to be a Linux admin.
- yegle 2y ago
  Cloudflare Tunnel only works if you access it via a web browser right? I'd prefer using Tailscale so that I can also access it in their native apps on Android and Android TV.
  - apitman 2y ago
    I haven't tried it with Cloudflare specifically, but I believe you should be able to just put the domain name in as the server address in the mobile and TV apps.
  - judge2020 2y ago
    Cloudflare Tunnel can be authenticated via other means like JWT, but that is definitely a non-starter since the apps don't support it. Tailscale would definitely be better.
  - Sakos 2y ago
    I'm not sure why it wouldn't work with the apps? I have my jellyfin server behind a CF tunnel and I can access it in the Android app by my domain.
    - yegle 2y ago
      Oh I see. I confused Cloudflare Tunnel with Cloudflare Access. Yes Cloudflare Tunnel can work with Jellyfin apps, but: 1) this exposed your Jellyfin to the world, and you are one vulnerable away to get owned, and 2) like other sibling posts mentioned, this is against their ToS to host streaming service on free plan on their platform.
  - TomJansen 2y ago
    I though Cloudflare forbade streaming via their network? Did their ToS change?
robotburrito 2y ago
I’ve tried a few times to use software like this but nothing for me competes with the simplicity of a shared file folder and VLC.
- Sheeny96 2y ago
  I can run this via Kodi's jellyfin plugin, via OSMC on a raspberry pi, on my living room TV. It automatically uses my tv remote, and says in big letters "TV Shows" and "Movies". Anyone at my house can use it, with ease, even the absolute least technical.
- yegle 2y ago
  Something like Plex/Jellyfin will make it simpler to share your library to your friends or family (over e.g. Tailscale). The whole *arr thing makes it even better with automated download and upgrade.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  Jellyfin's "management" of my media catalog strongly drove me away from Jellyfin. It was terrible at dealing with seasons of shows, with dealing with subdirectories. So much frustration. Casting from my phone also got de-synced & broke a lot. I couldn't find a good way to skip/scrub forwards or backwards a little bit. Sometimes the themeing would break & the app became unusable without restart. It was really really cool having jellyfin-mpv-shim running on my desktop, and Chromecast elsewhere. But Jellyfin was straight up not working for me, not listing a bunch of my media, not making it navigable, and the Android app's dodginess all ruined things for me. I went back to UPnP/DLNA, whose apps are a little cruder (Gerbera for MediaServer, BubbleUPnP for control, Rygel PlayBin for MediaRenderer), everything basically just works and it's baked into many devices/tv's.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  I tried Kodi a bunch of times. Nobody else in my house would/could use it. Half the time I’d end up stuck in some weird modal menu I couldn’t get out of, so I can hardly blame them. Its ui is really weird. Jellyfin fixed that. Other people in my house use it easily, a friend uses the web ui over Tailscale, and my messing-with-tech versus watching-things ratio is finally looking good.
chadcmulligan 2y ago
I use Jellyfin and it just works but had problems with the client on iOS. Vidhub is a reliable client solution I've found, it's pretty inexpensive. Maybe the Jellyfin client is fine I didn't spend a lot of time with it.
Octoth0rpe 2y ago
I tried jellyfin after my most recent nas upgrade (pi5 w/ external drives). It seemed _really_ nice, but it also worked extremely badly for my specific use case. It seems to want a specific folder structure for all of your media, and its layout conflicted badly with my existing conventions. My partner has our media collection obsessively organized by country, then by genre. Jellyfin made some kind of attempt at categorizing this, and just ended up showing us tons of previews for things we did NOT have (eg, our British folder was interpreted as us having The Great British Baking Show, which we do NOT have). It seems like every media solution wants to ignore your folder structure and present some fake hierarchy, which really doesn't work at all for me. We ended up buying an apple tv and installing the vlc app which connects via smb and is happy to show us the original folder structure.
triyambakam 2y ago
Well this is very timely and relevant. I usually access jellyfin on my network devices like `http://homecloud:8096 http://homecloud:8096` but now that I have been exploring adding other services, remembering the ports is getting tedious. I also am trying to be forward thinking about external access in the future. Looks like I could use some combination of Caddy, Nginx Proxy Manager, Tailscale? What's the simplest setup?
- dantetheinferno 2y ago
  I expose my jellyfin to 80 via nginx. Other services stay not exposed, and only available on my local network. I don't bother with tailscale.
- dc3k 2y ago
  im running a pihole so i take advantage of lighttpd that it uses, with the mod_proxy configuration. i can then do something like the following to have a friendly url on my local network $HTTP["host"] == "jellyfin.dc" { proxy.server = ( "" => ( ( "host" => "192.168.1.99", "port" => "8096" ) ) ) }
- walthamstow 2y ago
  If you run a DNS server on your Tailscale or use their Magic DNS you can navigate to http://jellyfin http://jellyfin and it'll load. Personally I don't muck about with any of that and just have a link in my bookmarks bar that takes me to http://<tailscaleip>:port http://<tailscaleip>:port :D
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    DNS still needs to specify ports though?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- mattbaker 2y ago
  I’ve been using caddy, very easy to set up reverse proxies, and it generates a local root CA you can install on your machines at home so you get SSL for free. Nothing you couldn’t also rig with nginx, I just enjoyed the simplicity I’ve got pihole running so that’s my home dns server, I have custom domains with a home-only TLD (I think “.internal” is cleared for use now?). So something like https://plex.homecloud.internal https://plex.homecloud.internal can load up plex, I can only assume jellyfin could do the same. I’ve actually been using ZeroTier instead of tailscale for external access and I’ve been very happy with it, but I know lots of people love tailscale and I’m sure it’s great too
calmoo 2y ago
To anyone considering using Jellyfin - it simply does not work properly for large libraries (1000+ movies/shows) in my experience.
- bhaney 2y ago
  I use Jellyfin for my 32TB media library of 1600 movies, 70 TV shows (5500 episodes), 500 music albums, and 10,000 books. It works perfectly fine with no issues or slowdowns.
  - eco 2y ago
    Yeah, my collection isn't that big, but my friend's Jellyfin which I use all the time has 4000+ movies and 400+ shows (11,000+ episodes). Works just as well as my significantly smaller collection.
  - dbetteridge 2y ago
    Agreed, have several tb of TV, movies and anime and no issues with sync or scroll. Most of my issues are with the Auth system and random log outs, but I suspect that's my own network.
  - fastily 2y ago
    I’ve got 90tb of Linux isos consisting of tens of thousands of files on 168tb of spinning rust. I’m running reasonably powerful hardware though (5600x + 128gb ram), suspect GP is bottlenecked by hardware
- nvllsvm 2y ago
  What about it isn't working well for you? I have ~2000 movies (21TB), 435 shows (22TB), ~26000 songs (1TB); all running on an Intel 4770k w/ 32GB of RAM, a SATA SSD for the Jellyfin database, and a Tesla P4 for transcoding. It works well now and even worked decently before switching to the Tesla P4 for transcoding.
loughnane 2y ago
Lot's of criticism on here, but I love Jellyfin. I came from Plex a few years ago after their login server had an outage and I was unable to access the media that was on my local computer. Before that I'd been annoyed by them pushing TV shows and since then I've heard about them giving reports on what people have watched. All in all I'm happy. My setup is Jellyfin in a docker container running on a debian machine with an i7-1165G7. It's got a mounted NFS link to my Synology NAS with all the files. The main client I used is Android TV running on an NVIDIA shield. All in all, it's been great. I've got a few nitpicks---loading on ios app isn't as fast as I like if I try to jump to the middle of a movie---but all in all it's great for just watching movies, tv shows, videos, &c. All without any link to the outside world. It's lovely. They also are producing new features at a nice clip and have a strong community. I expect it to keep getting better and better, but honestly even if it never changed I'd happily use it for years.
- ryanmcbride 2y ago
  Every once in a while I knock around the idea of migrating off Plex and onto Jellyfin. For a long time it was that sharing libraries with friends was a pain, but now literally the only thing stopping me is that they don't have a ps5 app, and that's how one of my friends uses my plex server lol. If they get one, it's all over for plex (in my friend group).
  - dbetteridge 2y ago
    Ps5 Web browser with a bookmark? But I hear ya, console support tends to lag behind because of the rules and costs of app dev for them
    - ryanmcbride 2y ago
      I mean I could also just tell him it's 2025 and there's 700 ways for him to use plex on his tv, but it's also just kind of funny to me so I keep it going.
  - bhaney 2y ago
    Keep in mind that you don't necessarily need to "migrate" all at once. There's nothing wrong with running both Plex and Jellyfin pointed at the same media library, and using whichever one has the better client for a particular platform.
fastily 2y ago
Bemused by the number of people complaining about a free and open source project. A quick review of the git history tells me that it’s maintained by a very small group of people who generously work on this in their free time. Luckily jellyfin does accept PRs, so if you think the project needs improvements, then perhaps folks, you can do something about it
- patmorgan23 2y ago
  Being free does not exempt a project from criticism. It's not like they were yelling about how terrible the project team was, just saying the issues they were having when trying to use it.
  - scns 2y ago
    And that criticism gets you what?
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
      Same thing that praise does. It's a discussion board, there's nothing wrong with people discussing the shortcomings of a project as well as its good points.
  - fastily 2y ago
    Agreed, but that’s not the point I’m making here. It’s not like this is some closed-source commercial product where the community can’t do anything about bugs/lack of features. My observation is simple: all of this time people spend complaining could be better spent helping to improve the project instead
    - Larrikin 2y ago
      Why can't people voice criticism and then work on the projects they want to work on instead of having homework and needing to learn the entire Jellyfin code base? Nobody is personally insulting the devs as being lazy or incompetent. The devs can listen or not and they should have absolute control on what they implement and when. Its entirely reasonable that things they think are fine are pain points they don't realize exist because they've just gotten used to them. They also might not realize that some "wouldn't that be nice" thing they were thinking about implementing in the far future is actually something a lot of people want in the near term instead. There might also be things they just never even thought of. The users of the software with criticism also aren't forced to use the software and should not be expected to implement anything they want unless they want to contribute. The project being open source ensures that in the future the project can be continued, if someone wants to continue it.
Mainsail 2y ago
What are people using this for? Pirated movies, shows, etc? Genuinely curious.
- loughnane 2y ago
  For movies and TV shows people either rip them off of personal collections and/or download them from the internet. When combined with `yt-dlp` you can use it to download videos from your favorite channels. This is especially valuable as there's no guarantee the videos will be there for free forever. It's also a nice place to put family videos and recorded sporting events.
- hyperhopper 2y ago
  Legally purchased DVDs and home video collections that have been legally backed up onto hard drives
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    Same. Illegally backed up, in my case, because the DMCA is ridiculous and prohibits backing things up unless you crack the DRM personally. But I don't care, as that is a stupid law and I have the moral right to rip my discs if I want. But the content was legally purchased originally which is what matters imo.
- furyofantares 2y ago
  I have a script that scrapes a few youtube channels which my kid uses jellyfin to watch. Youtube is otherwise not allowed, too easy to watch all sorts of crap.
  - spacebear 2y ago
    Same. Big fan of the YouTube metadata plugin.
    - furyofantares 2y ago
      Didn't know about that. Thanks.
Frotag 2y ago
I recently found out Jellyfin supports livestreams so I've been using it to "cast" my screen to the TV (simplescreenrecorder -> nginx's rtmp server -> jellyfin webpage). Theres a few seconds of latency I can't get rid of but ime more reliable than chromecast / the built-in device discovery.
- judge2020 2y ago
  I believe you could also use VLC (via DLNA I suppose), since VLC has a direct chromecast integration in the desktop app.
poglet 2y ago
I’ve been using this for years, it’s almost perfect but there are a few little issues here in there. My TV automatically updated the jellfin client which no longer could connect to my server that was frustrating. Another update stopped supporting many of the plug-ins I enjoyed using. I have issues with thumbnails not loading and not knowing how buffering works. I find it difficult to troubleshoot issues. 99% of the time it is perfect and I love it.
Borealid 2y ago
Jellyfin's strategy for streaming blu-ray disc folders is to use ffmpeg to concatenate (and usually transcode) them to disc, then stream the result. It doesn't work very well - frequently, the concatenation process is sitting there running long after the client has disconnected. And the devs seem to break it entirely every second release or so, just failing to recognize the BDMV as a playable movie at all.
- phildenhoff 2y ago
  Please don’t take this as criticism of your setup, but why are you trying to stream Blu-ray Disc folders at all? Why not transcode the files?
  - Borealid 2y ago
    Firsly, I have multiple tens of terabytes of movies (painful to duplicate), and I watch them with their original menus in Kodi. Secondly, a BDMV can't be turned into a single correct linear representation - for example, the Star Trek TOS discs have the ability to toggle back and forth between original and CG-remastered graphics seamlessly. As another example, I have stereoscopic 3D blu-rays; should the transcode be the left eye view, or side-by-side 3D with an ultrawide file? Finally, transcoding necessarily sacrifices quality. Remuxing wouldn't, but Jellyfin usually refuses to stream remuxed containers and insists on transcoding to attach subtitles (their javascript web player and even app don't seem to handle the subs correctly?). To sum up, turning a disc folder into a single file requires losing content.
    - nativeit 2y ago
      This is an interesting take, thanks for describing it. I think most people, myself included, would find your setup a little odd, but I completely understand why you're doing it. It would make many (most?) home media servers a little hobbled, especially if you wanted to stream content to mobile devices outside of the home, but it sounds as if this is more of a replacement for the old pile of set-top boxes for you, rather than a general service to all your devices, is that a fair interpretation?
cfebs 2y ago
TY jellyfin maintainers. Been a happy user for years
- agnishom 2y ago
  Me too! Super easy to use and run. Has a ton of features and feels polished
haunter 2y ago
I've tried everything but ended up using the VLC app on my Apple TV and just accessing my NAS through Samba. Not as sophisticated (library management) as Jellyfin or Plex but performance wise it's probably the best one.
- thereisnospork 2y ago
  At least on the android client you can have jellyfin play the selected media in VLC (or other external player). Couples most of the library features with the playback performance of VLC. Somethings like playback resume don't work but for me it's a nice middle ground.
thedougd 2y ago
I switched from Plex to Jellyfin/Infuse for three reasons: 1) better tone mapping, allowing me to watch HDR movies on SDR without it looking bad. 2) Plex, on my variety of clients, had regular issues with audio out of sync. I’m very sensitive to this and it drove me nuts. I have no issues with Jellyfin. I fiddled with all kinds of platform and Plex settings but couldn’t find a solution that solved it for good. 3) It’s easier to access Jellyfin over Tailscale. Plex’s normally clever way of exposing itself to the Internet gets in the way. It’s not impossible though. Having said all this, Plex has better client UIs by far. They’re well organized, feature rich, and generally bug free. I still run Plex and plan to at least for the DVR functions.
- ninth_ant 2y ago
  Jellyfin+Infuse works really well for subtitles as well.
- BLKNSLVR 2y ago
  I still get occasional audio going out of sync, but it's usually solved by stopping and thinking the video. Doesn't happen very often, but it's usually with older format video files.
  - BLKNSLVR 2y ago
    Thinking = resuming. Eeesh.
- amatecha 2y ago
  It's so awesome to be able to stream from my NAS at home my "documentary" of my last europe trip to someone in-person when I'm out at a gathering or whatever. Jellyfin + tailscale + whatever else you want to link up, is just awesome++
- anon7000 2y ago
  Infuse is a great client for any Apple device; I like it way more than plex
  - 2y ago
darknavi 2y ago
The biggest thing that keeps me away from Plex alternatives is the simplicity ("it works everywhere on everything") and the experience ("it looks nice and feels polished"). There was a point where I could overlook some of these things but watching media is something that I want to feel slick and personal, and troubleshooting really kills that for me. Plex + AppleTV for me and my folks has been a rock solid setup for us. I really appreciate alternatives (especially OSS) like Jellyfin though and take a gander at them ~once a year.
djfergus 2y ago
Shoutout to streamyfin, a jellyfin iOS/Android client which adds a key missing feature (vs plex): the ability to download transcoded media.
- Carrok 2y ago
  News to me, thanks! Looks great.
zeagle 2y ago
It’s great. A stock Nvidia shield 2019 tube (!) plays 4K HDR/DV DTS content without stutter or issues with passthrough an AVR which is impressive. I can't say Kodi and various forks were able to do that, at least in the past. Lots of griping about the tube in general as well but it manages without transcoding.
Jordan-117 2y ago
As somebody who just got into Real Debrid, what's the best compatible frontend that makes managing the content firehouse easier? I started out with Stremio, which works okay but only lets you add movies/shows to a single Library that can be sorted a few ways, but that's it. Not great scrolling through a single horizontal list of titles. Ideally, there'd be a program that lets you add programs to playlists (favorite films, to-watch list, anime, documentaries, etc.) and then track the watch status, shuffle-play, show recommendations, display a big grid, etc. There's probably something like that out there but for a newcomer it's just a blizzard of "Sonarr, Radarr, Umbrella, Jellyfin, Plex, Kodi, Stremio, Roku, Seren, Overseer, Syncler," and other nonsense syllables (and seems like most of the guides are dated). (Nb: I subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, etc., just prefer having a unified player that doesn't yank stuff arbitrarily)
- Novosell 2y ago
  I've had a setup similar to what you're describing using Kodi with various addons. But it's really precarious and for too much effort. Stremio is treating me well these days.
tmiku 2y ago
Anyone care to share their experiences with some of the less common Jellyfin frontends? Which ones are most in need of contributions? I've had a decent experience with the Samsung TV (Tizen) client. It's annoying to not have it on the app store yet and to jump through the developer-mode hoops to get it installed, but to be fair it was a one time setup and I've been happy with it since then. Seen some occasional slightly janky menu navigation, but really it's been far better than I expected.
- themk 2y ago
  If you install the DLNA plugin for Jellyfin, you can cast to Samsung TVs. Just use your phone for the UI.
  - npodbielski 2y ago
    Too bad it works only as native package. Or at least for me I was unable to work with DLNA reliably for around 2-3 years. It was working then it was gradually doing worse and worse till completely stopped. But I am using custom Linux box for my audio setup now so I can just open browser and then control it directly via my phone app. Could be worse :)
BLKNSLVR 2y ago
I've been happily using Jellyfin since it forked from Emby a few years ago, and whilst initially it was a bit lumpy (but so was Emby) it's been almost maintenance free for the past three-odd years. I use it in a docker container, if that makes any difference, and my use case is almost identical to loughnane's mentioned up-thread.
laidoffamazon 2y ago
I'm deep into the Emby ecosystem now (have it hooked up to a dedicated server with transcode + a premium subscription) but Jellyfin's syncplay feature looks absolutely wicked. I may need to transition at some point.
austin-cheney 2y ago
I ridiculously love Jellyfin. I have found that if my Jellyfin box is IPv6 and I map a domain to that address, such as free DNS from Cloudflare, then I can access my personal media from anywhere on the internet. What I haven’t found is a way to restrict access to known devices, such as MAC address, so that big companies don’t sue me to death. Yes, I know Jellyfin has a login prompt, but I would prefer better security beyond Jellyfin as a just in case.
- nativeit 2y ago
  You could use TailScale or Zerotier, join all your devices to a private subnet, then use UFW on the Jellyfin server to deny all connections except those from your private subnet. Then all your devices in your Tailscale/Zerotier account can access one another from anywhere. Also works for shared folders in Windows, remote desktop, SSH, etc.. It's easy enough so that most enthusiasts can handle it without being 100% proficient in a Linux shell, VPNs, or firewalls. Should be lots of guides available with these ingredients.
  - chgs 2y ago
    Or you could just WireGuard to your jelling server direct
- danparsonson 2y ago
  You should absolutely hand off the security to something else - just exposing this publicly is asking to get hacked. I use Wireguard for my private online stuff, that works nicely. Expose Jellyfin only on the loopback address and use Nginx to forward your domain to it, then setup your DNS entry to be the VPN address of your server. Just be aware that if you have your own local DNS server then you might need to configure it to allow serving up DNS entries with private network addresses in them, as these are often blocked for security reasons; or else just modify your /etc/hosts equivalent to manually add the mapping.
  - mavamaarten 2y ago
    Can you easily use your services on mobile devices that way? I currently reverse proxy every service I need through nginx, but I kinda feel like this isn't enough security-wise. I did blacklist most countries and don't expose any port other than 80+443. Does it require you to run a VPN app on your phone constantly and does that cause troubles?
amatecha 2y ago
Jellyfin is awesome. I started to set up Plex server, then realized I have to have an account on some centralized service to access my own server?? Instant no-go, for me. Using Kodi as a client, almost problem-free. Super cool!
BubbleRings 2y ago
How many music files can it handle? I’ve got a very large collection of mp3s and flac and many of the similar programs I have tried have choked trying to handle the size of the collection.
- defrost 2y ago
  At least 8,000 (that's just what I can see mounted under Jellyfin here locally). Probably supports many more, for the collection here the thumbnail browsing, presentation, metadata display etc. isn't bad (MusicBee does it better) but as a media support under the Jellyfin umbrella component it's not the worst. It's weak on support of FullAlbum.flac with TrackIndex.Cue arrangements though. MusicBee present those as individual tracks with jump to track and shuffle options whereas Jellyfin (as of today) has them a single blob of audio start to finish. Cue support is on the issues list (although issue support has a slow turnover thanks to the small time). Any bored audio format programmers looking for open source support credits??
- amlib 2y ago
  I've got a ~80k library and it seems to handle it ok. Scanning isn't very fast, but it does pull up a lot of cover art and artist profile pictures, so that may be why. It doesn't seem to respond at all to changing tags for files it has already scanned, so far the only solution was removing the library entirely and re-adding it which is tedious. It supports drilling down by Album Artists which is a minimum requirement for nay big and diverse music library. Genres seem to work fine, you can select one and it will at least list all albums under that, but no option to change the grouping to artists or something else exists. The web interface does ok at first when loading a big playlist. For example, trying to play my OC-Remix collection which is essentially an album composed of ~4k songs works for the first few songs and moving around the playlists is somewhat smooth, but picking a song at 1000 place or so just awaits forever. I don't know whats up with that. The playing queue is very terse and doesn't like listing the track number, artist nor even the album (it does show a thumb sized album art for each entry but good luck with that). This is a very dumbed down mobile centric design, could do much better here... All in all I would advise just trying out more than one media server. Jellyfin is ok-ish for music and great for videos but if you are gonna go trough all the work of setting that up it doesn't cost much more to also setup something like Navidrome which will give you a decent subsonic instance which is compatible with many clients and will likely give you a better experience when handling big and diverse music libraries. That said, Navidrome's built-in web client is pretty bare-bones, so you are gonna have to rely on the "native" clients more. For example, you can use Strawberry's subsonic feature to access your Navidrome's library on a pretty damn good interface for music nerds who feel comfortable on "spreadsheet" like interfaces. No tag editing, but you don't usually want to expose your library with write permission on these services anyway. But it does pick up on tag changes if you tell it to a complete re-scan which takes ~15 minutes.
BeetleB 2y ago
Have they made watching OTA broadcasts, with EPG and DVR work as well as Plex? It's what keeps me on Plex.
- craniumslows 2y ago
  I use Silicon Dusts HD home run and it works great. Live TV from home while I'm travelling is one of my primary use cases. I subscribe to a TV listing service. The DVR function is good too. My biggest issue was that I had to get a graphics card that could transcode on the fly then TV worked perfectly.
  - petepete 2y ago
    I have the same setup and TV works well but changing channel takes a few seconds. Not been able to work out why. I have an Nvidia card which is more than capable of transcoding. How long does yours take to switch?
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    So not on Jellyfin, right? With the Plex Pass, it was a one time fee (Lifetime Membership), and I've been enjoying it since (6+ years). I use CPU for transcoding. Well, to be frank, even Plex's DVR could be better (e.g. I tell it to record a certain TV show, but I can't tell it not to record certain episodes, etc). I imagine other services do better on that count. But my memory was that Jellyfin was terrible at it.
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
I've been impressed at the performance of the live re-encoding, but at the same time annoyed that it happens rather than streaming the original media (I think it always transcodes?). The upside is that it will play anything on anything. My main gripe is with how hard it is to actually get it to find the files - you can't just feed it a folder full of media and expect it to play it, it needs to be some carefully crafted structure that I haven't yet fully figured out. So instead of dropping a file then watching it on the TV, I drop it, try to watch it, then have to go back to the PC to fiddle.
- indigodaddy 2y ago
  Pretty sure there is direct play? Believe the client has it enabled by default
- eco 2y ago
  It does not always transcode. It transcodes if your client reports it doesn't support the format or if the bitrate cap on your client is lower than the source media. It says why transcoding is happening in the Administration Dashboard for any currently playing media.
indigodaddy 2y ago
Anyone looking for an easy public spin-up of JF, et al, this is super easy to set up and works a treat https://github.com/EdyTheCow/docker-media-center https://github.com/EdyTheCow/docker-media-center
issafram 2y ago
I hate that so many people don't know about Universal Media Server
- integricho 2y ago
  I used Universal Media Server for 3 years, not knowing about jellyfin actually. UMS was a most of the time non-functional piece of crap. Refreshing the library was a pain and always felt that it required restarting services and devices on both sides and a blessing from the local priest. Then comes the frequent disappearance of the server itself which again requires service restarts. Then the mid-movie playback stops or stutters. Not recognizing the subtitles and again requiring service restarts. I spent more time fiddling with the app, holding it together with duct-tape and sticks rather the watching media through it. It is a very unstable and unreliable piece of software. Then came jellyfin, and as a breath of fresh air, all my problems were gone. In maybe 2 years since I switched to it, I can count on my fingers how many times did I have to fiddle with it for some reason. It just works, in the most common sense of ways, no crashes, no discoverability problems, nothing, just pure stable performance, I cannot emphasize enough how much of a chasm exists in quality and usability between jellyfin and UMS. While UMS feels like a piece of early alpha software that was abandoned, jellyfin is the rock solid , actively maintained alternative that got your back. Universal Media Server is just bad software.
philips 2y ago
I love Jellyfin. I have been using it with Tailscale, MakeMKV, Handbrake, Filebot and some other little utilities: I have also built two things on top: A super simple PWA for my kids to use: https://github.com/philips/jellykids?tab=readme-ov-file#jellykids-a-super-simple-jellyfin-frontend https://github.com/philips/jellykids?tab=readme-ov-file#jell... A NFC card based player for my kids to use: https://github.com/philips/homeassistant-nfc-chromecast https://github.com/philips/homeassistant-nfc-chromecast It is so nice to just have my content on an API driven thing where I can control the UX my kids experience without a bunch of hassle.
- squigz 2y ago
  I remember reading about that card based player a while back - an absolutely wonderful idea! I love it!
ramon156 2y ago
Haven't checked the comments yet but I just want to say thanks to the jellyfin maintainers. You guys are doing god's work <3
webworker 2y ago
In an alternate universe, Apple had built out a networked media library system and integrated it directly into their Time Capsule router hw.
slopslinger 2y ago
Funny how people nitpick. At the end of the day, jellyfin is free to use, ad free, has more config options than we need, and it does an outstanding job. I switched from Kodi, Plex, then Emby years ago. No reason to look back.
grubrunner 2y ago
Funny how people nitpick. At the end of the day, jellyfin is free to use, ad free, has more config options than we need, and it does an outstanding job. I switched from Kodi, Plex, then Emby years ago. No reason to look back.
grubrunner666 2y ago
Funny how people nitpick. At the end of the day, jellyfin is free to use, ad free, has more config options than we need, and it does an outstanding job. I switched from Kodi, Plex, then Emby years ago. No reason to look back.
gutomotta 2y ago
How do you usually go about acquiring the media? I know there are people that simply download movies via torrent, but what are the legal ways of buying video files of TV shows or movies, specially the more recent ones?
- laleck 2y ago
  You’re limited to buying Blu rays and ripping to digital. Technically, that might not even be legal in the US because the digital millenium copyright act (DMCA) forbids circumventing DRM. https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/circumventing-copyright-controls https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/circumventing-copyright-con... > In the end, I'm mystified it's still so hard to buy older movies so I can watch them on my networked devices. You'd think Hollywood would've learned from the music industry that if you just let people legally pay for non-DRM media, and make the process easy and convenient (certainly more convenient than sailing the seven seas or ripping discs), people will pay. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/how-i-rip-dvds-and-blu-rays-my-mac-2022-edition https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/how-i-rip-dvds-and-bl...
jfplexembi 2y ago
I really want to switch to Jellyfin. Plex has gone off the deep end with all their user hostile garbage. But Jellyfin is just not good. The clients are all afterthoughts and audio pass-through fails to work on every device I’ve tried it on. 4K HDR studders like mad, when the same video plays perfectly via Plex (no transcoding) I’m convinced that the people who “love Jellyfin” watch it using their phone or laptop. Where sdr and stereo audio is all they’ve ever known. I’m rooting for Jellyfin, but they have a long way to go. I wish they’d focus on a unified client experience and stop adding junk to the media server.
johnea 2y ago
I don't know anything about jellyfin. My LAN media server is sshfs. But I'm AMAZED to see the phrase "Free Software" in an HN link description. Thank You jellyfin.org!!!
akho 2y ago
I wish it only transcoded things on explicit request, not based on its opinion. The LG TV profile it ships with is incorrect, and it's not at all clear how to stop it transcoding.
- defrost 2y ago
  Probably by choosing Transcoding: Direct Play in the admin account settings options for the Server. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/transcoding/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/transcoding/ I recently setup Jellyfin pretty thoroughly on a small form media centre with 4 x 2TB SSD drives for the media and went through all of this for direct to TV, via client to iPhones and to an XBox etc. I passed that on three weeks back to a son for his household so I don't have local server to log into anymore and double check (the documentation online tends bear an approximate resemblance to current versions). This might also shed some light : https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-purpose-of-force-transcode-in-user-settings https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-purpose-of-force-transcode-in-u... as it talks about the manual editing of the preference | option files for servers and users.
  - akho 2y ago
    Your first link is a not a list of settings, it's an explanation. You can disable transcoding for a specific device (or user). However, it just means that the client will not show some videos, even though it can play them in reality. This is determined by the device profile shipped with the DLNA plugin (!). You used to be able to replace that, but that broke for me with the recent changes wrt DLNA. I don’t even mind transcoding, except that it also maps hdr to sdr, which is just awful. So I now use jellyfin on computers and mobile, and a minidlna setup on my main tv. That's ridiculous, but seems like the only way to make it work within the hour or two I had for that.
    - defrost 2y ago
      > Your first link is a not a list of settings, it's an explanation. The Jellyfin documentation is poor and lags. I would screen shot what I worked out for myself but that ship's sailed and moved on. I did have to tweak some profiles but ultimately I got all media playing on pass through with no transcoding so it is doable. My apologies for not being in a position to cough up details, that was my second pass through Jellyfin, I now like it much better than I did the first time through. If I set up a third instance for someone else I'll take to the time make notes and maybe feed them back into the community docs (if they're relatively easy to update).
Refusing23 2y ago
I like jellyfin but it still lacked some of the features that made me stick to plex (over VLC) It'll become better over time, and probably much better than plex. plex dont do many new features, and there's still a ton of issues with it (like... audio is at like -50 dB and you cant hear shit)

492 points by doener 2y ago

urbandw311er 2y ago

Nah - very happy to support Plex with my lifetime pass thanks.

muppetman 2y ago
Even with all the cruft they keep adding? Tv shows, Live TV, other random bollocks you have to keep turning off. I'm glad I never purchased a licence with the amount of useless stuff they keep shoe horning in.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  I mean, I don't disagree that those things are silly but I haven't had to keep turning them off. I turned them off once, years ago when they were introduced, and they have never come back. I don't find that to be so onerous that it has kept me from enjoying the software. I have my misgivings about the direction the company is going, but at least for now they haven't ruined the core use case so I'm content.
  - muppetman 2y ago
    Sorry I wasn't clear I meant keep turning off as they add new dumb stuff. I agree once it's off it's off but I had that bollocks defaults to on.
- speff 2y ago
  I’m not forced to use any of those and when turned off, never came back on. This is a commonly mentioned con by jellyfin…proponents, but I fail to see how turning a setting off is more cumbersome than the jellyfin setup as a whole. My users and I are more than satisfied with plex and their updates

sergiotapia 2y ago

What benefits are there compared to Emby? Been using it for quite some time and very curious! How is av1 support on jellyfin?

Cyph0n 2y ago
For your second question: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/#video-compatibility https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/#vid...
- init2null 2y ago
  They don't list Infuse on there, but it's pretty great in its support of pretty much everything. The Apple TV has certainly surprised me by being an excellent platform for in-home streaming.
  - Cyph0n 2y ago
    Yes, Infuse is excellent, highly recommend it on iOS devices.
nialv7 2y ago
jellyfin is open source, that's enough reason for me.
jchw 2y ago
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby. Emby used to be open source, when it went closed source Jellyfin was formed off of it. AV1 playback works on devices that support it. You'll need server-side transcoding for devices that don't. Jellyfin can do this by shelling out to FFMPEG, which can optionally use hardware accelerated codecs if they're available to it. So basically, "it depends", but Jellyfin itself supports AV1 media.
pygar 2y ago
If you want to use hardware acceleration in Emby you have to pay for "Emby Premiere". Jellyfin, not having tiered versions, provides this for free. This is obviously useful in general, but i rely on it to run a media server on my low-end minipc with Intel Quick Sync.

RickHull 2y ago

My media center is a laptop with a broken screen, running Arch Linux and Kodi. Kodi has a web interface that you can stream to. Why might I want to add Jellyfin?

muppetman 2y ago
Because you can give your friends a login, they can log in from anywhere, and watch your content. Same for you. You can log in from anywhere and do that. Kodi is more of a local thing, I find the two compliment each other very well. There are native apps for jellyfin as well. Loaded up and hit play. I guess you can probably do this with Kodi but it hasn't been designed from the ground up for this use case.
- mrcsharp 2y ago
  And when they login you can watch content together in sync too. I use that feature a lot to remotely watch movies with mates.
chadcmulligan 2y ago
Thats a good idea for a damaged laptop, I often see those for sale for nothing
- amatecha 2y ago
  Yeah for quite a while I was using an old ThinkPad as a Valheim server lol, maybe not the most power-efficient, but not that bad either!
ryandrake 2y ago
Same here. I never could figure out why I'd want to use anything else. Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, whatever. Nothing beats the simplicity of a couple of terrabytes on a local drive, or if you want to get fancy, a NFS share. Honestly, Kodi is even a little more heavyweight than I need, but I've been using it since long before the XBMC->Kodi name change and have been happy with it.
2y ago

lukevp 2y ago

Jellyfin is pretty good, and I've been using it in place of Plex for the last few years. However, I feel like there are some underlying limitations that I just can't get past: 1. the UI jank. The thumbnail tiles are slow to load, even on a local network. Searches and filters flicker as you type and take a while to return. Scrolling fast in the web UI gets choppy/laggy. 2. The native app (at least in the case of Apple TV) is either nonexistent or terrible. I've been using Swiftfin since it was one of the first alpha versions, and it constantly lost pairing with my Jellyfin instance. When it did work, which was very cryptic and usually required re-enrolling the client every time, it would randomly fail to load things, and the UI was very choppy as well. I haven't used the native apps on other platforms, but I imagine they are equally or more janky, because the Apple TV is comparatively very beefy hardware-wise vs. most other platforms. 3. The polling for new media is slow. I upped it to 10 minutes (the quickest possible setting) but I shudder to think what a full scan of a media library every 10 minutes is doing to my disks. Why doesn't it use file watchers and webhooks for new content notification? 4. The homepage has very little actionable info and doesn't work for browsing. It's not like Netflix or any of the other services where you can boot it up and see a bunch of different categories, as well as your "list". It has playlists, but you have to drill down to see them. You can go to "Movies -> Suggestions" and it has a little bit, but nothing like Netflix does. No real recommendation engine. 5. You have to maintain your own trailers or use an app like Infuse that can download its own trailers. 6. You have to separately configure tiles to be rendered if you want a nice seeking experience where it shows a live preview as you scrub through the timeline. 7. Movies and TV Shows are separated even though pretty much every other platform doesn't separate them, which requires you to click into one of 2 options before you can do almost anything. That said, it's still far better and less janky than Plex was before I switched, and Infuse actually plays back HDR / Dolby Vision content correctly. Does anyone else have qualms with Jellyfin? And how does Plex compare to any of these gripes?

muppetman 2y ago
Plex has a lot more polish. However, Plex also tries to shove stuff down your throat. If you want to share your meeting with friends, you need to have a Kodi pass or some bollocks. Jellyfin is 100% free. Certainly it is not as polished though, but I managed to use it with my friend who are not very technically literate, and it works very well for them. Every release improve the polish a little! Edit: New media shows up for me pretty much straight away without having to do anything. Not sure what's happening there for you.

ValleZ 2y ago

Jellyfin is not able to group series together and on top of that shows everything in random order, why bother with it when there are alternatives that can do that?

russelg 2y ago
What do you mean random order? You can choose the sort order for any library yourself.
- ValleZ 2y ago
  I have one folder with movies and series. It shows as a randomized mix, maybe it uses something like modification time by default? It's definitely not by name.
  - wang_li 2y ago
    In my experience you have to sort shows into directories and sub-directories for a series. My entire jellyfin library is just symlinks into where my crap has accumulated over the years. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/
    - ValleZ 2y ago
      I have the series in their own folders. I tried to do a more nested structure to no avail. After a day of attempts to fix it I switched to Plex and it despite having its own quirks just worked fine.
Sheeny96 2y ago
What do you mean group series together? If you mean seasons of a show, yes it does. If you mean collections, it has them.
- ValleZ 2y ago
  Then I could not figure how to make it work. Plex did that without any effort from my side though

Larrikin 2y ago

Jellyfin feels like its almost to where Plex was 5 years ago. They are catching up fairly quickly and I think I wouldn't bother with a Plex pass if I was coming in completely fresh. But it is not as good as Plex currently. I have a lifetime pass and there is no reason for me to switch. I personally am fine with Plex adding features, so long as they are not taking anything away. They've had a couple missteps but absolutely nothing that would make me want to switch to an experience that is definitely worse. I'll give Jellyfin 3 years and then reevaluate and see how I feel.

pixxel 2y ago
[dead]
p1mrx 2y ago
Plex uses cloud-based authentication, which means Plex Inc. is holding the keys to your library. I switched to JellyFin because I was not comfortable with that arrangement.
- loughnane 2y ago
  I said it elsewhere, but this was the turning point for me as well.
- Larrikin 2y ago
  What meaningful keys do they hold to my library if everything is sitting on my hard drive waiting to be switched over the moment something better comes along or Plex makes themselves worse?
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  As far as I'm aware Plex media server still has the option to whitelist subnets for auth bypass. I don't know if there is an option to do purely local authentication, but I don't believe it's accurate that the company is holding the keys to your library.
- notatoad 2y ago
  >holding the keys to your library but it's still on my hard drive. if i can't log in to plex for some reason, i'll install jellyfin. or mount it as a network drive and play the files with VLC. it's not like they're locking away my content behind their authentication, all they're locking away behind that auth is my ability to access my media through plex.

apitman 2y ago

Fun fact: Jellyfin runs natively on Windows. Combined with something like Cloudflare Tunnel it's probably the easiest way to host a media server without needing to be a Linux admin.

yegle 2y ago
Cloudflare Tunnel only works if you access it via a web browser right? I'd prefer using Tailscale so that I can also access it in their native apps on Android and Android TV.
- apitman 2y ago
  I haven't tried it with Cloudflare specifically, but I believe you should be able to just put the domain name in as the server address in the mobile and TV apps.
- judge2020 2y ago
  Cloudflare Tunnel can be authenticated via other means like JWT, but that is definitely a non-starter since the apps don't support it. Tailscale would definitely be better.
- Sakos 2y ago
  I'm not sure why it wouldn't work with the apps? I have my jellyfin server behind a CF tunnel and I can access it in the Android app by my domain.
  - yegle 2y ago
    Oh I see. I confused Cloudflare Tunnel with Cloudflare Access. Yes Cloudflare Tunnel can work with Jellyfin apps, but: 1) this exposed your Jellyfin to the world, and you are one vulnerable away to get owned, and 2) like other sibling posts mentioned, this is against their ToS to host streaming service on free plan on their platform.
- TomJansen 2y ago
  I though Cloudflare forbade streaming via their network? Did their ToS change?

robotburrito 2y ago

I’ve tried a few times to use software like this but nothing for me competes with the simplicity of a shared file folder and VLC.

Sheeny96 2y ago
I can run this via Kodi's jellyfin plugin, via OSMC on a raspberry pi, on my living room TV. It automatically uses my tv remote, and says in big letters "TV Shows" and "Movies". Anyone at my house can use it, with ease, even the absolute least technical.
yegle 2y ago
Something like Plex/Jellyfin will make it simpler to share your library to your friends or family (over e.g. Tailscale). The whole *arr thing makes it even better with automated download and upgrade.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Jellyfin's "management" of my media catalog strongly drove me away from Jellyfin. It was terrible at dealing with seasons of shows, with dealing with subdirectories. So much frustration. Casting from my phone also got de-synced & broke a lot. I couldn't find a good way to skip/scrub forwards or backwards a little bit. Sometimes the themeing would break & the app became unusable without restart. It was really really cool having jellyfin-mpv-shim running on my desktop, and Chromecast elsewhere. But Jellyfin was straight up not working for me, not listing a bunch of my media, not making it navigable, and the Android app's dodginess all ruined things for me. I went back to UPnP/DLNA, whose apps are a little cruder (Gerbera for MediaServer, BubbleUPnP for control, Rygel PlayBin for MediaRenderer), everything basically just works and it's baked into many devices/tv's.
alabastervlog 2y ago
I tried Kodi a bunch of times. Nobody else in my house would/could use it. Half the time I’d end up stuck in some weird modal menu I couldn’t get out of, so I can hardly blame them. Its ui is really weird. Jellyfin fixed that. Other people in my house use it easily, a friend uses the web ui over Tailscale, and my messing-with-tech versus watching-things ratio is finally looking good.

chadcmulligan 2y ago

I use Jellyfin and it just works but had problems with the client on iOS. Vidhub is a reliable client solution I've found, it's pretty inexpensive. Maybe the Jellyfin client is fine I didn't spend a lot of time with it.

Octoth0rpe 2y ago

I tried jellyfin after my most recent nas upgrade (pi5 w/ external drives). It seemed _really_ nice, but it also worked extremely badly for my specific use case. It seems to want a specific folder structure for all of your media, and its layout conflicted badly with my existing conventions. My partner has our media collection obsessively organized by country, then by genre. Jellyfin made some kind of attempt at categorizing this, and just ended up showing us tons of previews for things we did NOT have (eg, our British folder was interpreted as us having The Great British Baking Show, which we do NOT have). It seems like every media solution wants to ignore your folder structure and present some fake hierarchy, which really doesn't work at all for me. We ended up buying an apple tv and installing the vlc app which connects via smb and is happy to show us the original folder structure.

triyambakam 2y ago

Well this is very timely and relevant. I usually access jellyfin on my network devices like `http://homecloud:8096 http://homecloud:8096` but now that I have been exploring adding other services, remembering the ports is getting tedious. I also am trying to be forward thinking about external access in the future. Looks like I could use some combination of Caddy, Nginx Proxy Manager, Tailscale? What's the simplest setup?

dantetheinferno 2y ago
I expose my jellyfin to 80 via nginx. Other services stay not exposed, and only available on my local network. I don't bother with tailscale.
dc3k 2y ago
im running a pihole so i take advantage of lighttpd that it uses, with the mod_proxy configuration. i can then do something like the following to have a friendly url on my local network $HTTP["host"] == "jellyfin.dc" { proxy.server = ( "" => ( ( "host" => "192.168.1.99", "port" => "8096" ) ) ) }
walthamstow 2y ago
If you run a DNS server on your Tailscale or use their Magic DNS you can navigate to http://jellyfin http://jellyfin and it'll load. Personally I don't muck about with any of that and just have a link in my bookmarks bar that takes me to http://<tailscaleip>:port http://<tailscaleip>:port :D
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  DNS still needs to specify ports though?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
mattbaker 2y ago
I’ve been using caddy, very easy to set up reverse proxies, and it generates a local root CA you can install on your machines at home so you get SSL for free. Nothing you couldn’t also rig with nginx, I just enjoyed the simplicity I’ve got pihole running so that’s my home dns server, I have custom domains with a home-only TLD (I think “.internal” is cleared for use now?). So something like https://plex.homecloud.internal https://plex.homecloud.internal can load up plex, I can only assume jellyfin could do the same. I’ve actually been using ZeroTier instead of tailscale for external access and I’ve been very happy with it, but I know lots of people love tailscale and I’m sure it’s great too

calmoo 2y ago

To anyone considering using Jellyfin - it simply does not work properly for large libraries (1000+ movies/shows) in my experience.

bhaney 2y ago
I use Jellyfin for my 32TB media library of 1600 movies, 70 TV shows (5500 episodes), 500 music albums, and 10,000 books. It works perfectly fine with no issues or slowdowns.
- eco 2y ago
  Yeah, my collection isn't that big, but my friend's Jellyfin which I use all the time has 4000+ movies and 400+ shows (11,000+ episodes). Works just as well as my significantly smaller collection.
- dbetteridge 2y ago
  Agreed, have several tb of TV, movies and anime and no issues with sync or scroll. Most of my issues are with the Auth system and random log outs, but I suspect that's my own network.
- fastily 2y ago
  I’ve got 90tb of Linux isos consisting of tens of thousands of files on 168tb of spinning rust. I’m running reasonably powerful hardware though (5600x + 128gb ram), suspect GP is bottlenecked by hardware
nvllsvm 2y ago
What about it isn't working well for you? I have ~2000 movies (21TB), 435 shows (22TB), ~26000 songs (1TB); all running on an Intel 4770k w/ 32GB of RAM, a SATA SSD for the Jellyfin database, and a Tesla P4 for transcoding. It works well now and even worked decently before switching to the Tesla P4 for transcoding.

loughnane 2y ago

Lot's of criticism on here, but I love Jellyfin. I came from Plex a few years ago after their login server had an outage and I was unable to access the media that was on my local computer. Before that I'd been annoyed by them pushing TV shows and since then I've heard about them giving reports on what people have watched. All in all I'm happy. My setup is Jellyfin in a docker container running on a debian machine with an i7-1165G7. It's got a mounted NFS link to my Synology NAS with all the files. The main client I used is Android TV running on an NVIDIA shield. All in all, it's been great. I've got a few nitpicks---loading on ios app isn't as fast as I like if I try to jump to the middle of a movie---but all in all it's great for just watching movies, tv shows, videos, &c. All without any link to the outside world. It's lovely. They also are producing new features at a nice clip and have a strong community. I expect it to keep getting better and better, but honestly even if it never changed I'd happily use it for years.

ryanmcbride 2y ago
Every once in a while I knock around the idea of migrating off Plex and onto Jellyfin. For a long time it was that sharing libraries with friends was a pain, but now literally the only thing stopping me is that they don't have a ps5 app, and that's how one of my friends uses my plex server lol. If they get one, it's all over for plex (in my friend group).
- dbetteridge 2y ago
  Ps5 Web browser with a bookmark? But I hear ya, console support tends to lag behind because of the rules and costs of app dev for them
  - ryanmcbride 2y ago
    I mean I could also just tell him it's 2025 and there's 700 ways for him to use plex on his tv, but it's also just kind of funny to me so I keep it going.
- bhaney 2y ago
  Keep in mind that you don't necessarily need to "migrate" all at once. There's nothing wrong with running both Plex and Jellyfin pointed at the same media library, and using whichever one has the better client for a particular platform.

fastily 2y ago

Bemused by the number of people complaining about a free and open source project. A quick review of the git history tells me that it’s maintained by a very small group of people who generously work on this in their free time. Luckily jellyfin does accept PRs, so if you think the project needs improvements, then perhaps folks, you can do something about it

patmorgan23 2y ago
Being free does not exempt a project from criticism. It's not like they were yelling about how terrible the project team was, just saying the issues they were having when trying to use it.
- scns 2y ago
  And that criticism gets you what?
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    Same thing that praise does. It's a discussion board, there's nothing wrong with people discussing the shortcomings of a project as well as its good points.
- fastily 2y ago
  Agreed, but that’s not the point I’m making here. It’s not like this is some closed-source commercial product where the community can’t do anything about bugs/lack of features. My observation is simple: all of this time people spend complaining could be better spent helping to improve the project instead
  - Larrikin 2y ago
    Why can't people voice criticism and then work on the projects they want to work on instead of having homework and needing to learn the entire Jellyfin code base? Nobody is personally insulting the devs as being lazy or incompetent. The devs can listen or not and they should have absolute control on what they implement and when. Its entirely reasonable that things they think are fine are pain points they don't realize exist because they've just gotten used to them. They also might not realize that some "wouldn't that be nice" thing they were thinking about implementing in the far future is actually something a lot of people want in the near term instead. There might also be things they just never even thought of. The users of the software with criticism also aren't forced to use the software and should not be expected to implement anything they want unless they want to contribute. The project being open source ensures that in the future the project can be continued, if someone wants to continue it.

Mainsail 2y ago

What are people using this for? Pirated movies, shows, etc? Genuinely curious.

loughnane 2y ago
For movies and TV shows people either rip them off of personal collections and/or download them from the internet. When combined with `yt-dlp` you can use it to download videos from your favorite channels. This is especially valuable as there's no guarantee the videos will be there for free forever. It's also a nice place to put family videos and recorded sporting events.
hyperhopper 2y ago
Legally purchased DVDs and home video collections that have been legally backed up onto hard drives
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Same. Illegally backed up, in my case, because the DMCA is ridiculous and prohibits backing things up unless you crack the DRM personally. But I don't care, as that is a stupid law and I have the moral right to rip my discs if I want. But the content was legally purchased originally which is what matters imo.
furyofantares 2y ago
I have a script that scrapes a few youtube channels which my kid uses jellyfin to watch. Youtube is otherwise not allowed, too easy to watch all sorts of crap.
- spacebear 2y ago
  Same. Big fan of the YouTube metadata plugin.
  - furyofantares 2y ago
    Didn't know about that. Thanks.

Frotag 2y ago

I recently found out Jellyfin supports livestreams so I've been using it to "cast" my screen to the TV (simplescreenrecorder -> nginx's rtmp server -> jellyfin webpage). Theres a few seconds of latency I can't get rid of but ime more reliable than chromecast / the built-in device discovery.

judge2020 2y ago
I believe you could also use VLC (via DLNA I suppose), since VLC has a direct chromecast integration in the desktop app.

poglet 2y ago

I’ve been using this for years, it’s almost perfect but there are a few little issues here in there. My TV automatically updated the jellfin client which no longer could connect to my server that was frustrating. Another update stopped supporting many of the plug-ins I enjoyed using. I have issues with thumbnails not loading and not knowing how buffering works. I find it difficult to troubleshoot issues. 99% of the time it is perfect and I love it.

Borealid 2y ago

Jellyfin's strategy for streaming blu-ray disc folders is to use ffmpeg to concatenate (and usually transcode) them to disc, then stream the result. It doesn't work very well - frequently, the concatenation process is sitting there running long after the client has disconnected. And the devs seem to break it entirely every second release or so, just failing to recognize the BDMV as a playable movie at all.

phildenhoff 2y ago
Please don’t take this as criticism of your setup, but why are you trying to stream Blu-ray Disc folders at all? Why not transcode the files?
- Borealid 2y ago
  Firsly, I have multiple tens of terabytes of movies (painful to duplicate), and I watch them with their original menus in Kodi. Secondly, a BDMV can't be turned into a single correct linear representation - for example, the Star Trek TOS discs have the ability to toggle back and forth between original and CG-remastered graphics seamlessly. As another example, I have stereoscopic 3D blu-rays; should the transcode be the left eye view, or side-by-side 3D with an ultrawide file? Finally, transcoding necessarily sacrifices quality. Remuxing wouldn't, but Jellyfin usually refuses to stream remuxed containers and insists on transcoding to attach subtitles (their javascript web player and even app don't seem to handle the subs correctly?). To sum up, turning a disc folder into a single file requires losing content.
  - nativeit 2y ago
    This is an interesting take, thanks for describing it. I think most people, myself included, would find your setup a little odd, but I completely understand why you're doing it. It would make many (most?) home media servers a little hobbled, especially if you wanted to stream content to mobile devices outside of the home, but it sounds as if this is more of a replacement for the old pile of set-top boxes for you, rather than a general service to all your devices, is that a fair interpretation?

cfebs 2y ago

TY jellyfin maintainers. Been a happy user for years

agnishom 2y ago
Me too! Super easy to use and run. Has a ton of features and feels polished

haunter 2y ago

I've tried everything but ended up using the VLC app on my Apple TV and just accessing my NAS through Samba. Not as sophisticated (library management) as Jellyfin or Plex but performance wise it's probably the best one.

thereisnospork 2y ago
At least on the android client you can have jellyfin play the selected media in VLC (or other external player). Couples most of the library features with the playback performance of VLC. Somethings like playback resume don't work but for me it's a nice middle ground.

thedougd 2y ago

I switched from Plex to Jellyfin/Infuse for three reasons: 1) better tone mapping, allowing me to watch HDR movies on SDR without it looking bad. 2) Plex, on my variety of clients, had regular issues with audio out of sync. I’m very sensitive to this and it drove me nuts. I have no issues with Jellyfin. I fiddled with all kinds of platform and Plex settings but couldn’t find a solution that solved it for good. 3) It’s easier to access Jellyfin over Tailscale. Plex’s normally clever way of exposing itself to the Internet gets in the way. It’s not impossible though. Having said all this, Plex has better client UIs by far. They’re well organized, feature rich, and generally bug free. I still run Plex and plan to at least for the DVR functions.

ninth_ant 2y ago
Jellyfin+Infuse works really well for subtitles as well.
BLKNSLVR 2y ago
I still get occasional audio going out of sync, but it's usually solved by stopping and thinking the video. Doesn't happen very often, but it's usually with older format video files.
- BLKNSLVR 2y ago
  Thinking = resuming. Eeesh.
amatecha 2y ago
It's so awesome to be able to stream from my NAS at home my "documentary" of my last europe trip to someone in-person when I'm out at a gathering or whatever. Jellyfin + tailscale + whatever else you want to link up, is just awesome++
anon7000 2y ago
Infuse is a great client for any Apple device; I like it way more than plex
- 2y ago

darknavi 2y ago

The biggest thing that keeps me away from Plex alternatives is the simplicity ("it works everywhere on everything") and the experience ("it looks nice and feels polished"). There was a point where I could overlook some of these things but watching media is something that I want to feel slick and personal, and troubleshooting really kills that for me. Plex + AppleTV for me and my folks has been a rock solid setup for us. I really appreciate alternatives (especially OSS) like Jellyfin though and take a gander at them ~once a year.

djfergus 2y ago

Shoutout to streamyfin, a jellyfin iOS/Android client which adds a key missing feature (vs plex): the ability to download transcoded media.

Carrok 2y ago
News to me, thanks! Looks great.

zeagle 2y ago

It’s great. A stock Nvidia shield 2019 tube (!) plays 4K HDR/DV DTS content without stutter or issues with passthrough an AVR which is impressive. I can't say Kodi and various forks were able to do that, at least in the past. Lots of griping about the tube in general as well but it manages without transcoding.

Jordan-117 2y ago

As somebody who just got into Real Debrid, what's the best compatible frontend that makes managing the content firehouse easier? I started out with Stremio, which works okay but only lets you add movies/shows to a single Library that can be sorted a few ways, but that's it. Not great scrolling through a single horizontal list of titles. Ideally, there'd be a program that lets you add programs to playlists (favorite films, to-watch list, anime, documentaries, etc.) and then track the watch status, shuffle-play, show recommendations, display a big grid, etc. There's probably something like that out there but for a newcomer it's just a blizzard of "Sonarr, Radarr, Umbrella, Jellyfin, Plex, Kodi, Stremio, Roku, Seren, Overseer, Syncler," and other nonsense syllables (and seems like most of the guides are dated). (Nb: I subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, etc., just prefer having a unified player that doesn't yank stuff arbitrarily)

Novosell 2y ago
I've had a setup similar to what you're describing using Kodi with various addons. But it's really precarious and for too much effort. Stremio is treating me well these days.

tmiku 2y ago

Anyone care to share their experiences with some of the less common Jellyfin frontends? Which ones are most in need of contributions? I've had a decent experience with the Samsung TV (Tizen) client. It's annoying to not have it on the app store yet and to jump through the developer-mode hoops to get it installed, but to be fair it was a one time setup and I've been happy with it since then. Seen some occasional slightly janky menu navigation, but really it's been far better than I expected.

themk 2y ago
If you install the DLNA plugin for Jellyfin, you can cast to Samsung TVs. Just use your phone for the UI.
- npodbielski 2y ago
  Too bad it works only as native package. Or at least for me I was unable to work with DLNA reliably for around 2-3 years. It was working then it was gradually doing worse and worse till completely stopped. But I am using custom Linux box for my audio setup now so I can just open browser and then control it directly via my phone app. Could be worse :)

BLKNSLVR 2y ago

I've been happily using Jellyfin since it forked from Emby a few years ago, and whilst initially it was a bit lumpy (but so was Emby) it's been almost maintenance free for the past three-odd years. I use it in a docker container, if that makes any difference, and my use case is almost identical to loughnane's mentioned up-thread.

laidoffamazon 2y ago

I'm deep into the Emby ecosystem now (have it hooked up to a dedicated server with transcode + a premium subscription) but Jellyfin's syncplay feature looks absolutely wicked. I may need to transition at some point.

austin-cheney 2y ago

I ridiculously love Jellyfin. I have found that if my Jellyfin box is IPv6 and I map a domain to that address, such as free DNS from Cloudflare, then I can access my personal media from anywhere on the internet. What I haven’t found is a way to restrict access to known devices, such as MAC address, so that big companies don’t sue me to death. Yes, I know Jellyfin has a login prompt, but I would prefer better security beyond Jellyfin as a just in case.

nativeit 2y ago
You could use TailScale or Zerotier, join all your devices to a private subnet, then use UFW on the Jellyfin server to deny all connections except those from your private subnet. Then all your devices in your Tailscale/Zerotier account can access one another from anywhere. Also works for shared folders in Windows, remote desktop, SSH, etc.. It's easy enough so that most enthusiasts can handle it without being 100% proficient in a Linux shell, VPNs, or firewalls. Should be lots of guides available with these ingredients.
- chgs 2y ago
  Or you could just WireGuard to your jelling server direct
danparsonson 2y ago
You should absolutely hand off the security to something else - just exposing this publicly is asking to get hacked. I use Wireguard for my private online stuff, that works nicely. Expose Jellyfin only on the loopback address and use Nginx to forward your domain to it, then setup your DNS entry to be the VPN address of your server. Just be aware that if you have your own local DNS server then you might need to configure it to allow serving up DNS entries with private network addresses in them, as these are often blocked for security reasons; or else just modify your /etc/hosts equivalent to manually add the mapping.
- mavamaarten 2y ago
  Can you easily use your services on mobile devices that way? I currently reverse proxy every service I need through nginx, but I kinda feel like this isn't enough security-wise. I did blacklist most countries and don't expose any port other than 80+443. Does it require you to run a VPN app on your phone constantly and does that cause troubles?

amatecha 2y ago

Jellyfin is awesome. I started to set up Plex server, then realized I have to have an account on some centralized service to access my own server?? Instant no-go, for me. Using Kodi as a client, almost problem-free. Super cool!

BubbleRings 2y ago

How many music files can it handle? I’ve got a very large collection of mp3s and flac and many of the similar programs I have tried have choked trying to handle the size of the collection.

defrost 2y ago
At least 8,000 (that's just what I can see mounted under Jellyfin here locally). Probably supports many more, for the collection here the thumbnail browsing, presentation, metadata display etc. isn't bad (MusicBee does it better) but as a media support under the Jellyfin umbrella component it's not the worst. It's weak on support of FullAlbum.flac with TrackIndex.Cue arrangements though. MusicBee present those as individual tracks with jump to track and shuffle options whereas Jellyfin (as of today) has them a single blob of audio start to finish. Cue support is on the issues list (although issue support has a slow turnover thanks to the small time). Any bored audio format programmers looking for open source support credits??
amlib 2y ago
I've got a ~80k library and it seems to handle it ok. Scanning isn't very fast, but it does pull up a lot of cover art and artist profile pictures, so that may be why. It doesn't seem to respond at all to changing tags for files it has already scanned, so far the only solution was removing the library entirely and re-adding it which is tedious. It supports drilling down by Album Artists which is a minimum requirement for nay big and diverse music library. Genres seem to work fine, you can select one and it will at least list all albums under that, but no option to change the grouping to artists or something else exists. The web interface does ok at first when loading a big playlist. For example, trying to play my OC-Remix collection which is essentially an album composed of ~4k songs works for the first few songs and moving around the playlists is somewhat smooth, but picking a song at 1000 place or so just awaits forever. I don't know whats up with that. The playing queue is very terse and doesn't like listing the track number, artist nor even the album (it does show a thumb sized album art for each entry but good luck with that). This is a very dumbed down mobile centric design, could do much better here... All in all I would advise just trying out more than one media server. Jellyfin is ok-ish for music and great for videos but if you are gonna go trough all the work of setting that up it doesn't cost much more to also setup something like Navidrome which will give you a decent subsonic instance which is compatible with many clients and will likely give you a better experience when handling big and diverse music libraries. That said, Navidrome's built-in web client is pretty bare-bones, so you are gonna have to rely on the "native" clients more. For example, you can use Strawberry's subsonic feature to access your Navidrome's library on a pretty damn good interface for music nerds who feel comfortable on "spreadsheet" like interfaces. No tag editing, but you don't usually want to expose your library with write permission on these services anyway. But it does pick up on tag changes if you tell it to a complete re-scan which takes ~15 minutes.

BeetleB 2y ago

Have they made watching OTA broadcasts, with EPG and DVR work as well as Plex? It's what keeps me on Plex.

craniumslows 2y ago
I use Silicon Dusts HD home run and it works great. Live TV from home while I'm travelling is one of my primary use cases. I subscribe to a TV listing service. The DVR function is good too. My biggest issue was that I had to get a graphics card that could transcode on the fly then TV worked perfectly.
- petepete 2y ago
  I have the same setup and TV works well but changing channel takes a few seconds. Not been able to work out why. I have an Nvidia card which is more than capable of transcoding. How long does yours take to switch?
- BeetleB 2y ago
  So not on Jellyfin, right? With the Plex Pass, it was a one time fee (Lifetime Membership), and I've been enjoying it since (6+ years). I use CPU for transcoding. Well, to be frank, even Plex's DVR could be better (e.g. I tell it to record a certain TV show, but I can't tell it not to record certain episodes, etc). I imagine other services do better on that count. But my memory was that Jellyfin was terrible at it.

tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago

I've been impressed at the performance of the live re-encoding, but at the same time annoyed that it happens rather than streaming the original media (I think it always transcodes?). The upside is that it will play anything on anything. My main gripe is with how hard it is to actually get it to find the files - you can't just feed it a folder full of media and expect it to play it, it needs to be some carefully crafted structure that I haven't yet fully figured out. So instead of dropping a file then watching it on the TV, I drop it, try to watch it, then have to go back to the PC to fiddle.

indigodaddy 2y ago
Pretty sure there is direct play? Believe the client has it enabled by default
eco 2y ago
It does not always transcode. It transcodes if your client reports it doesn't support the format or if the bitrate cap on your client is lower than the source media. It says why transcoding is happening in the Administration Dashboard for any currently playing media.

indigodaddy 2y ago

Anyone looking for an easy public spin-up of JF, et al, this is super easy to set up and works a treat https://github.com/EdyTheCow/docker-media-center https://github.com/EdyTheCow/docker-media-center

issafram 2y ago

I hate that so many people don't know about Universal Media Server

integricho 2y ago
I used Universal Media Server for 3 years, not knowing about jellyfin actually. UMS was a most of the time non-functional piece of crap. Refreshing the library was a pain and always felt that it required restarting services and devices on both sides and a blessing from the local priest. Then comes the frequent disappearance of the server itself which again requires service restarts. Then the mid-movie playback stops or stutters. Not recognizing the subtitles and again requiring service restarts. I spent more time fiddling with the app, holding it together with duct-tape and sticks rather the watching media through it. It is a very unstable and unreliable piece of software. Then came jellyfin, and as a breath of fresh air, all my problems were gone. In maybe 2 years since I switched to it, I can count on my fingers how many times did I have to fiddle with it for some reason. It just works, in the most common sense of ways, no crashes, no discoverability problems, nothing, just pure stable performance, I cannot emphasize enough how much of a chasm exists in quality and usability between jellyfin and UMS. While UMS feels like a piece of early alpha software that was abandoned, jellyfin is the rock solid , actively maintained alternative that got your back. Universal Media Server is just bad software.

philips 2y ago

I love Jellyfin. I have been using it with Tailscale, MakeMKV, Handbrake, Filebot and some other little utilities: I have also built two things on top: A super simple PWA for my kids to use: https://github.com/philips/jellykids?tab=readme-ov-file#jellykids-a-super-simple-jellyfin-frontend https://github.com/philips/jellykids?tab=readme-ov-file#jell... A NFC card based player for my kids to use: https://github.com/philips/homeassistant-nfc-chromecast https://github.com/philips/homeassistant-nfc-chromecast It is so nice to just have my content on an API driven thing where I can control the UX my kids experience without a bunch of hassle.

squigz 2y ago
I remember reading about that card based player a while back - an absolutely wonderful idea! I love it!

ramon156 2y ago

Haven't checked the comments yet but I just want to say thanks to the jellyfin maintainers. You guys are doing god's work <3

webworker 2y ago

In an alternate universe, Apple had built out a networked media library system and integrated it directly into their Time Capsule router hw.

slopslinger 2y ago

Funny how people nitpick. At the end of the day, jellyfin is free to use, ad free, has more config options than we need, and it does an outstanding job. I switched from Kodi, Plex, then Emby years ago. No reason to look back.

grubrunner 2y ago

grubrunner666 2y ago

gutomotta 2y ago

How do you usually go about acquiring the media? I know there are people that simply download movies via torrent, but what are the legal ways of buying video files of TV shows or movies, specially the more recent ones?

laleck 2y ago
You’re limited to buying Blu rays and ripping to digital. Technically, that might not even be legal in the US because the digital millenium copyright act (DMCA) forbids circumventing DRM. https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/circumventing-copyright-controls https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/circumventing-copyright-con... > In the end, I'm mystified it's still so hard to buy older movies so I can watch them on my networked devices. You'd think Hollywood would've learned from the music industry that if you just let people legally pay for non-DRM media, and make the process easy and convenient (certainly more convenient than sailing the seven seas or ripping discs), people will pay. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/how-i-rip-dvds-and-blu-rays-my-mac-2022-edition https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/how-i-rip-dvds-and-bl...

jfplexembi 2y ago

I really want to switch to Jellyfin. Plex has gone off the deep end with all their user hostile garbage. But Jellyfin is just not good. The clients are all afterthoughts and audio pass-through fails to work on every device I’ve tried it on. 4K HDR studders like mad, when the same video plays perfectly via Plex (no transcoding) I’m convinced that the people who “love Jellyfin” watch it using their phone or laptop. Where sdr and stereo audio is all they’ve ever known. I’m rooting for Jellyfin, but they have a long way to go. I wish they’d focus on a unified client experience and stop adding junk to the media server.

johnea 2y ago

I don't know anything about jellyfin. My LAN media server is sshfs. But I'm AMAZED to see the phrase "Free Software" in an HN link description. Thank You jellyfin.org!!!

akho 2y ago

I wish it only transcoded things on explicit request, not based on its opinion. The LG TV profile it ships with is incorrect, and it's not at all clear how to stop it transcoding.

defrost 2y ago
Probably by choosing Transcoding: Direct Play in the admin account settings options for the Server. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/transcoding/ https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/transcoding/ I recently setup Jellyfin pretty thoroughly on a small form media centre with 4 x 2TB SSD drives for the media and went through all of this for direct to TV, via client to iPhones and to an XBox etc. I passed that on three weeks back to a son for his household so I don't have local server to log into anymore and double check (the documentation online tends bear an approximate resemblance to current versions). This might also shed some light : https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-purpose-of-force-transcode-in-user-settings https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-purpose-of-force-transcode-in-u... as it talks about the manual editing of the preference | option files for servers and users.
- akho 2y ago
  Your first link is a not a list of settings, it's an explanation. You can disable transcoding for a specific device (or user). However, it just means that the client will not show some videos, even though it can play them in reality. This is determined by the device profile shipped with the DLNA plugin (!). You used to be able to replace that, but that broke for me with the recent changes wrt DLNA. I don’t even mind transcoding, except that it also maps hdr to sdr, which is just awful. So I now use jellyfin on computers and mobile, and a minidlna setup on my main tv. That's ridiculous, but seems like the only way to make it work within the hour or two I had for that.
  - defrost 2y ago
    > Your first link is a not a list of settings, it's an explanation. The Jellyfin documentation is poor and lags. I would screen shot what I worked out for myself but that ship's sailed and moved on. I did have to tweak some profiles but ultimately I got all media playing on pass through with no transcoding so it is doable. My apologies for not being in a position to cough up details, that was my second pass through Jellyfin, I now like it much better than I did the first time through. If I set up a third instance for someone else I'll take to the time make notes and maybe feed them back into the community docs (if they're relatively easy to update).

Refusing23 2y ago

I like jellyfin but it still lacked some of the features that made me stick to plex (over VLC) It'll become better over time, and probably much better than plex. plex dont do many new features, and there's still a ton of issues with it (like... audio is at like -50 dB and you cant hear shit)