14 ms·

Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

370 points by swat535 3mo ago

al_borland 3mo ago
Happy to see that it looks like a peaceful transition. I’m not currently a Jellyfin user, I tried it, but it didn’t seem capable of handling my library on my hardware. I’m sticking with Plex for now, but as they move more and more toward trying to be a streaming service instead of a media server, I’m hoping Jellyfin matures to the point where it’s viable when I need it.
- techaqua 3mo ago
  what is your hardware problem?
  - al_borland 3mo ago
    I’m running Plex via Docker on a Synology NAS. This has been working fine. When I tried to fire up a Jellyfin container, it was painfully slow. Clients barely worked. It wasn’t a good experience. It was several months ago, so I don’t remember all the details.
    - igor47 3mo ago
      I wonder if it was just a start up issue? Some kind of initial scan of your database?
      - al_borland 3mo ago
        I waited for all that to finish. I tried to help it along by going through everything so it would cache it all. It wasn’t as straightforward as Plex’s visual, flipping covers over as the metadata loads in for each movie, providing a clear queue and sense of progress. Once on the client side, it felt like those also needed to cache things. The only client that worked semi-well wasn’t a Jellyfin client, but could read from a Jellyfin server. I think it was called InFuse. With that as well, I spent hours simply navigating the app, going to every page, and waiting for it to cache everything so I could then navigate around. Then if I added something new, I needed to go to a page to show it and get it cached.
    - infecto 3mo ago
      I don’t know if it’s a synology related problem or just Jellyfin but I have never gotten it running well. Even when it’s running I always get hiccups like server crashed a week later but appears green and running. Or trouble logging into the server using a third party client. Plex has always been perfect for me.
    - klik99 3mo ago
      I just set up Jellyfin on an 1819 this weekend and so far it seems great, dunno if it’s improved or my device has bit more oomph - the ui on some devices is not as nice as plex but it’s been great
      - xbmcuser 3mo ago
        Jellyfin has a lot of alternative unofficial apps partly because of it ui as some people that did not like the look built something else. That is the case for almost every client OS
        klik99 3mo ago
        Hmmm, seems like that is not true for Roku which is specifically the one that is bad - maybe I'll just grab an Onn or something
    - addandsubtract 3mo ago
      I run Jellyfin in Docker on an N100 mini PC without problems.
      - Computer0 3mo ago
        My nas has an N100 because I wanted to avoid Synology's shite CPU offerings. I similarly have had no issues.
    - corranh 3mo ago
      I’ve been running Plex on various devices for many years and have been impressed by the stability and usefulness. Grandfathered on the old lifetime subscription but I get that $750 seems excessive.
    - clundin22 3mo ago
      Could be the hardware acceleration was not mounted to the container.
- 2muchtime 3mo ago
  What do you mean they’re moving toward trying to be a streaming service?
  - kortilla 3mo ago
    Plex is a piece of shit that rams dumb streaming stuff down your throat each time you sign in on a TV. This coincidentally happens every other month or so when the app seems to forget the account it’s signed into. It’s becoming hostile for people who want to work from their media alone.
    - Handy-Man 3mo ago
      Haven't been logged out of the app on my Apple TV in 4 years now.
      - kortilla 3mo ago
        Apple TV is not a TV. It’s the terrible quality of all of their TV apps that leads to this behavior.
        Handy-Man 3mo ago
        Apple TV the hardware!
    - infecto 3mo ago
      I am not so sure. Have used it for years for free( I have need to stream on the go) and it’s always been no issue. On first setup you are give the option to display streaming options or only your library. I cannot remember the last time I was logged. Super stable and zero time spent setting it up. On the flip side Jellyfin has never worked that well out of the box for me. Always some fiddling around and even when I get it right the server will crash unexpectedly and when I want to go watch something I have to manually reboot it.
      - al_borland 3mo ago
tclancy 3mo ago
Huge fan of Jellyfin and the whole related stack, glad to see this is all peaceful.
- timcobb 3mo ago
  What's the related stack
  - deejaaymac 3mo ago
    Jellyfin, sonarr, radarr, lidarr, sometimes jackett....aka the ArrStack
    - Krutonium 3mo ago
      Surely it should be the StackArr?
      - fakeBeerDrinker 3mo ago
        Arr, matey!
    - FabHK 3mo ago
      Suggest Prowlarr instead of jackett.
  - tclancy 3mo ago
    Yeah the arr stack plus seer. It all feels like cheating. Which it is.
    - NichoPaolucci 3mo ago
      Definitely cheating. I’ve taught my mostly-non-technical gf how to to load up sonarr and add something to the library. Anything we can do to avoid the hodgepodge of 8 different streaming services and rotating availability…
jbird99 3mo ago
Cool to see fellow Mohawk alum making the front page of HN. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors Joshua and team!
- Supercompressor 3mo ago
  Had no idea, that is cool! Thanks for pointing this out.
freetime2 3mo ago
Recently Plex increased the cost of a new Lifetime Plex Pass to $750 [1]. It seems like they really want to get most users paying recurring monthly or annual fees. But to me at least that kind of goes against the whole purpose of hosting my own media library. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative! [1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/ https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/
- judge2020 3mo ago
  Makes me feel lucky that I got it for $120 in 2021. But I appreciate that they still offer a lifetime pass at all.
  - ssl-3 3mo ago
    $120 isn't too bad. I paid $75 in July of 2019. $750 is nuts.
    - hack1312 3mo ago
      I paid $75 December 2013 and then a similar amount as you in 2021 when I set up a system for my parents. $750 is insane considering how little they care about user feedback.
      - theshrike79 3mo ago
        The lifetime model isn't sustainable, that's why they're pricing it out.
        ssl-3 3mo ago
        It had been sustained for something like 14 years, though?
        theshrike79 3mo ago
hankbond 3mo ago
Jellyfin is great for my needs, and I appreciate the effort that goes into it. Recently was having rendering issues doing HDR -> SDR tone mapping since I watch my content on a 2008 era Pioneer plasma display. I found that oddly enough while the server is pretty solid, the client experience is a bit hit or miss. I'm using the mpg-shim adapter, and I'm looking forward to them building a native app with better native render compositing.
postalcoder 3mo ago
I’m grateful for this team. Jellyfin is a great product. I’ve been using llm + Tailscale + Jellyfin to manage my media box and I couldn’t be more happy. I’ve got perfect metadata, perfect organization, and multimodal search on top of it. What a dream.
RAM-bunctious 3mo ago
Great that it's peaceful. Jellyfin is an amazing project, and works almost exactly how I want it to. By listing and playing my media without autoplaying trailers and other such stuff. I imagine many here who've never tried it will be of the same mindset
- pudgywalsh 3mo ago
  It's not amazing, it's as good as it is. Which is to say not great. There is a crazy amount of bugs which I have no confidence will ever get fixed. If you're the type that enjoys tinkering with obscure Linux settings for hours on end, which are certain to break if you dare to update anything, it may be for you.
  - tick_tock_tick 3mo ago
    > There is a crazy amount of bugs which I have no confidence will ever get fixed. Like what honestly I've been running one for years and have had nearly zero issues.
    - thaumasiotes 3mo ago
      My jellyfin installation chokes on audiobooks. There is a very noticeable pause between each track that it plays, despite the entire thing being queued. That pause is presumably also present when playing music, but no one notices because each song is its own track. Audiobook tracks split in places where a pause would never occur naturally. The second-most-annoying trait of Jellyfin in my experience is technically not a bug, but should definitely be fixed. It hardcodes expectations of how to determine what season and episode number to assign to files. And if you overwrite them, it will re-mangle them on scan unless you take precautions to stop it. As far as Jellyfin is concerned, your files must include a tag of the form S__E__ somewhere in the filename. Being located in a folder called "Season 2" with names like "11 - name of episode" won't work. Substrings like 第2集 won't work. Setting actual metadata tags on the file ( https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/FFmpeg_Metadata https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/FFmpeg_Metadata ) doesn't work; jellyfin ignores them. Let me provide a per-folder template for extracting season / episode information. Jellyfin already lets you prefer embedded artwork to whatever it finds on the internet. Why enforce hallucinated episode numbers when explicit ones are clearly present?
xrox 3mo ago
The three founders are all great people, but there is a gatekeeping issue within the project (I'm heavily involved, so this is a throwaway account). The constant mocking accusations and hostility toward third-party clients, plugins, themes, and other tools have made Jellyfin's official spaces unbearable. The atmosphere often revolves around the opinions of a small group of people, and anything that falls outside their preferences will result in a ban. There are two individuals are the primary drivers of this culture.
- declan_roberts 3mo ago
  Is it going to get better with these departures?
  - WD-42 3mo ago
    I believe the person leaving was vibe coding too much for other’s taste, so I assume they aren’t the one with strong opinions.
    - cvanelteren 3mo ago
      Not sure I would phrase it like this. For context see: https://github.com/andrewrabert/jellium-desktop/issues/109 https://github.com/andrewrabert/jellium-desktop/issues/109
    - MemoryHoleHQ 3mo ago
      [dead]
- cvanelteren 3mo ago
  Can attest to this with my recent interactions on the jellyfin-ios repo.
- r0ckarong 3mo ago
  > third-party clients Funny how this is the only thing that keeps me from switching from Emby to Jellyfin is the atrocious state of their "own" apps. My last attempt failed when I had to use their Android client. Since I've discovered Wolphin and Findroid it looks a lot more plausible but I just don't have enough pain and lifetime Emby Premiere was still reasonable when I bought it.
NichoPaolucci 3mo ago
I’m surprised people reach for plex, not sure what I’m missing - but a Jellyfin container set up has been fantastic for strictly at home usage (running on an old gaming PC). It’s fantastic software - the cross platform applications are pretty useable. Don’t think we’ve even had any major issues over the last 4 years using it. Many thanks to the builders and maintainers, hopefully Andrew can take some rest and know they help a lot of people!
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- sgc 3mo ago
  I have a problem that it constantly tries to re-encode video that could be played perfectly fine in their player or the mpv shim. I wound up just mounting my remote drives and playing in my local mpv. I don't really use it because of that. Unfortunate because otherwise I love a lot of things about it.
  - andwur 3mo ago
    I too have run into this problem on a number of devices. The client's supported codec/media format detection logic appears to be extremely pessimistic. To the point that the mere existence of certain audio track formats and subtitles can trigger transcoding, even when said tracks/subtitles aren't actively used. The same files played via MPV on a file share, i.e. no transcoding possible, play without issue. I've tried tweaking both the clients and server to be less pessimistic, i.e. see if the active media elements are supported, but even then it really fights it. I think the best approach would be rewrite the clients to adopt a (try || transcode) strategy rather than (guess || transcode), but that looked to be a major piece of work.
  - port11 3mo ago
    You can check why it’s re-encoding, there’s some guides out there. In my case it was the subtitles! Turns out Safari can’t handle all types of subtitles. Might be worth looking into it.
Varelion 3mo ago
This UI is YUMMYYY
AdmiralAsshat 3mo ago
> Now here we are 7-and-a-half years later, and it's the #1 FLOSS media server Source? How does its install base compare to Kodi's?
- Hobadee 3mo ago
  Kodi isn't a media server. Plex isn't FLOSS. Emby is what Jellyfin was forked from, and barely classifies as FLOSS anymore, and isn't as popular as Jellyfin from what I can tell. There isn't really anything else that I am aware of. Jellyfin being the #1 FLOSS media server makes sense to me, although I don't think there are really any viable #2s.
  - saint_yossarian 3mo ago
    Kodi does have bultin server functionality (both DNLA and a web interface), it's just less commonly used that way, and I don't think transcoding is supported without plugins.
    - amiga386 3mo ago
      I tried it some time ago and found it was useless in that role. Kodi is 99% a TV-like frontend to a local-disk media collection, its web interface is an afterthought, its performance for remotely served media is atrocious. Jellyfin, Emby and Plex are media servers first and foremost.
      - NoGravitas 3mo ago
        I actually use Kodi 90% as a front-end to Jellyfin. If I only watched or listened to my media at my TV, just Kodi and a SMB or NFS share would be fine. But with Jellyfin I have the same media everywhere. This is somewhat more important for music than for movies and shows.
cr125rider 3mo ago
Small plug to ask for help with the Apple TV App? Swiftfin is really rough but the best option. It’s quite terrible, never refreshes, overlapping text constantly. It could use some love.
- JamesSwift 3mo ago
  I tried to get involved (in very minor ways) a while back but got basically no engagement from the project so I just let it be. I moved to infuse instead as my ios client and its been good overall. I really hate its list performance on large collections though.
  - magarnicle 3mo ago
    Yeah Infuse is actually usable.
  - dantetheinferno 3mo ago
    Same. I wrote a really big upgrade to the Jellyfin iOS App to support Chromecast (https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-ios/issues/16 https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-ios/issues/16), got crickets :( Best of luck to the folks leaving. Supporting OSS isn't easy.
- clayhacks 3mo ago
  There’s some alternatives. I like JellyTV, pretty smooth UI. Streamyfin has a beta for the TV as well, and continues to improve. But yeah definitely some of the tougher part of the ecosystem
- dd8601fn 3mo ago
  I had some issues with it too, though not as bad as you seem to have experienced. Good new is they're reworking it, heavily, and seem to be near a new release. For my own purposes I cloned it and pushed the build to my AppleTV... and it's considerably better than the last app store release (quite a while ago). I'm not suggesting anyone do the same, but just saying your problems might be about to solve themselves.
- 3mo ago
buffer_overlord 3mo ago
Checkout media streamer project on GitHub
- NegativeLatency 3mo ago
  Why? It’s got crypto stuff in it?
  - buffer_overlord 3mo ago
    https://github.com/profullstack/media-streamer https://github.com/profullstack/media-streamer
thaumasiotes 3mo ago
Note that the headline doesn't reflect the post. Here's the beginning: > Hello everyone. Effective yesterday, Anthony and I [Joshua Boniface] decided to depart from the project, myself as Project Leader, and he as a core team member. This is in addition to the resignation of Andrew on Friday. "Several core team members including the founder leave" looks a bit different from "founder leaves".
- Hobadee 3mo ago
  Also an important note is that they are leaving on good terms. Headline made me terrified that some bad drama was going down, but they are just ready to move on and committed to clean handoffs to whoever owns it going forward.
- no-name-here 3mo ago
  Plus the title only mentions 1 person while 98% of the linked article is about 2 other people, neither of which are only person mentioned in the title. And the linked article doesn’t even have any link to find out about the founder leaving, the only person named in the title.
- mvanbaak 3mo ago
  So, is there anyone left? /s
cube00 3mo ago
I simply could no longer provide the effort (mental or time-wise) that the role demanded, and thus I was not performing my duties to an acceptable degree, facing severe burnout, and risks to my mental health. [...] We've proven that FLOSS works, and is in demand. If "FLOSS works" maintainers shouldn't be "facing severe burnout", I've come across two more in the past week alone: * Filebrowser (Mar 2026): https://hacdias.com/2026/03/11/filebrowser/ https://hacdias.com/2026/03/11/filebrowser/ * axum-login / tower-sessions (last week): https://github.com/maxcountryman/axum-login/discussions/330 https://github.com/maxcountryman/axum-login/discussions/330
- squigz 3mo ago
  Do people doing non-FLOSS work not also sometimes face severe burnout?
  - ThrowawayTestr 3mo ago
    Yes but those people aren't doing it as a hobby.
    - hnarn 3mo ago
      What’s your point, or are you just engaging in a conversation while completely ignoring the context?
      - ThrowawayTestr 3mo ago
        Generally you wouldn't expect someone working on a hobby for free to experience burnout.
- hnarn 3mo ago
  > If "FLOSS works" maintainers shouldn't be "facing severe burnout" So your success criteria for ”FLOSS works” is that zero people involved in it experience stress related issues?
  - deleted 3mo ago
dingi 3mo ago
Appreciate your hard work over the years. Jellyfin is a great product that I have been self hosting for years. Wish you guys the best. Thank you.
luciana1u 3mo ago
[flagged]
bob1029 3mo ago
There's never been a better time to consider writing your own media server solution from scratch. I really don't like the idea of transcoding on demand. It has always created a janky experience on the client. I've been using a custom solution that runs everything through ffmpeg normalization as part of the media upload phase. Whenever a client wants to stream something we give them raw byte ranges directly from the block storage provider. In practice, this feels like flipping the channels on an analog tv. Every video starts and seeks nearly instantly. I've long since given up on the dream of maintaining lossless master copies of everything just in case. Every practical use of that 50 gb copy of Home Alone would have you transcoding it. Most clients would choke on that bit rate. When would you actually be able to use all of the available information? Why not just discard what you'll never use? I realize it feels offensive to kill information like this but you can do a much better job with the end experience if you do. You can get a modern chatbot to produce this experience in a single prompt. The code can run on anything slightly more powerful than a potato because you aren't transcoding at playback time anymore. A raspberry pi would be more than enough to serve a few clients on a LAN. If you remain humble in your list of demands (a simple directory browser that plays videos linked within), you can more easily achieve total autonomy.
- FrinkleFrankle 3mo ago
  Sounds cool. Care to share it?
  - bob1029 3mo ago
    I just did. Put the above into your favorite chat bot and append your preferred language, runtime environment and block storage provider.
    - worthless-trash 3mo ago
      Out of tokens.
  - butvacuum 3mo ago
    sounds like a bastardized HTTP Live Streaming implementation- which is now fully supported by ffmpeg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming
karhuton 3mo ago
Big thank you for your work! Has made managing kid’s TV viewing at home easier over streaming services.
tomaskafka 3mo ago
Reminder that you don't need a powerful transcoding server and engine - I have been running for years with simple WebDAV on my NAS, and Infuse as a comfortable client on all apple devices.
amiga386 3mo ago
The title here is burying the lede and should be updated to something like "Jellyfin founder, project leader and core contributer all leave the project". It's not just Andrew [Rabert] leaving. This is an announcement by Joshua Boniface (the current project lead) and Anthony Lavado (a core contributor) announcing that they're leaving too. Boniface's and Lavado's reasons are mostly akin to burnout, or the need for a family life, which I totally understand, especially as Boniface has been the face of the project for quite some time. I use Jellyfin daily, and I know exactly who Boniface is, I hadn't actually heard of Rabert, though I'm grateful for him founding the project. Boniface in particular has lead Jellyfin through huge levels of internal changes, bugfixes and improvements. It is throwing off the janky architecture of Emby, one part at a time. Rabert's reasons are here: https://github.com/andrewrabert/jellium-desktop/issues/609 https://github.com/andrewrabert/jellium-desktop/issues/609 An obvious sore point is that Rabert has been AI-coding the Jellyfin desktop app, while the community (who bear the brunt of drive-by AI slop) have strongly opposed it. Even if he's a great coder and makes a wonderful desktop app with the aid of AI, that seems irreconcilable. Every wannabe contributor who shits up the project and wastes volunteers time with AI slop will say "you let that guy add his AI generated stuff, why not me?" So he's leaving the Jellyfin project and he's going to rename his desktop app, to see if it stands on its own merits as a third-party Jellyfin client, rather than an official project. I wish the best of luck to him. Even with that angle, it's true that the "Jellyfin community" (which includes all bug reporters, users on forums, etc.) can be very rude, directly to the contributors who may have inadvertantly added bugs. And Jellyfin is going through some growing pains, for example their 10.11.x series rewrote all the database handling to be a much better fit for the language (from raw SQL to .NET EF Core), which gives them a much more stable base to make changes upon, but it also had some performance regressions that rendered some third party Jellyfin apps unusable. (Those third parties' advice is not to upgrade). But at the same time, the project is getting there, supporting developers who are systematically fixing those regressions. The project has thousands of bug reports, but it also has thousands of fixes, and thousands of merged PRs. They are keeping up with the demand. I have every confidence Jellyfin 12.x will be great, and I'm looking forward to the new possibilities for plugins and enhancements it will open up.
aynyc 3mo ago
Please execute my ignorance. And this isn't an attack on anyone, just my own stupid limited understanding. Aren't JellyFin & Plex essentially just a catalog for your local data (most likely torrented movies, etc.) in a web app? If so, what's the big deal? edit: ah, i missed the BIG transcoding part.
- roygbiv2 3mo ago
  I can browse to jellyfin on my phone, ipad, laptop, TV etc watch any format (since it will transcode on the fly) and watch whatever I was watching from wherever I left it. It will also obviously know where I'm up to in any series so if I start watching something else I can go back to it at a later date.
- danpalmer 3mo ago
  They do a bit more than this. They do streaming and transcoding for a start, that's fairly essential for a functioning video platform. They also have native apps for a range of platforms. Support subtitles, multiple audio tracks, all sorts of codecs. And then there's all the metadata stuff as well, getting blurbs, posters, ratings, categorisations, episode naming (which has so many awkward edge cases) etc all from various metadata services. Oh and they do this all with multiple users and ACLs. Plex also then adds social features and curation. The value of that to its users is debatable, but it's additional complexity regardless. These are pretty big projects. A founder moving on is a fairly big deal.
- GolfPopper 3mo ago
  A friend or relative can stream the content over the internet via Plex or Jellyfin (through a Roku, or other streaming device) via a UI that is very, very easy to use. Plex is a way for my non-technical aunt to easily interact with my media server from her home three states away.
- Thev00d00 3mo ago
  Sure its a catalog of your local media served via an API, with metadata enrichment, built in transcoding (hardware support too) and multiple user support (watch history, recommendations etc). Its not just a web app, I would say most dont use the web app directly, instead they provide clients (Android/iOS/Roku/AndroidTV/WebOS/Tizen) that are in official app stores. This is the big thing for me, being able to just install the client on your TV and not worry about it is great. Often the clients are just wrappers of the web client with native integrations, but they work well. Plus there are loads of 3rd party plugins to extend it, and alternate clients, Im a fan of https://github.com/jeffvli/feishin https://github.com/jeffvli/feishin for music duties personally.
lorreyfum 3mo ago
I run a local iptv server that serves up all my content, easy peasy
farceSpherule 3mo ago
[dead]
IAmBroom 3mo ago
I'd prefer to be exclusively on Jellyfin. It simply has more features that I use - specifically, collections are great non-hierarchical groupings. But periodically my system will refuse to see the Tailscale server, and I'll have to do some black magic tech operation like reinstalling to get it back. Additionally, guiding a friend remotely through installing both Jellyfin and Tailscale is far more effort than saying, "Find Plex in your media sources."
lthi747 3mo ago
Well, good luck Andrew and Anthony! Jellyfin is great project and good software when is working, unfortunately for me it doesn’t works very well. Constantly have issues with playback, files indexing and watch statuses that not marked, but that are small issues compred to the hell with subtitles. Very often out of sync (if they load) So I switched to nova player and sharing my tv shows and music collection over SMB. It isn’t issueless, but at least more smooth amd leas complex.

370 points by swat535 3mo ago

Happy to see that it looks like a peaceful transition. I’m not currently a Jellyfin user, I tried it, but it didn’t seem capable of handling my library on my hardware. I’m sticking with Plex for now, but as they move more and more toward trying to be a streaming service instead of a media server, I’m hoping Jellyfin matures to the point where it’s viable when I need it.

techaqua 3mo ago
what is your hardware problem?
- al_borland 3mo ago
  I’m running Plex via Docker on a Synology NAS. This has been working fine. When I tried to fire up a Jellyfin container, it was painfully slow. Clients barely worked. It wasn’t a good experience. It was several months ago, so I don’t remember all the details.
  - igor47 3mo ago
    I wonder if it was just a start up issue? Some kind of initial scan of your database?
    - al_borland 3mo ago
      I waited for all that to finish. I tried to help it along by going through everything so it would cache it all. It wasn’t as straightforward as Plex’s visual, flipping covers over as the metadata loads in for each movie, providing a clear queue and sense of progress. Once on the client side, it felt like those also needed to cache things. The only client that worked semi-well wasn’t a Jellyfin client, but could read from a Jellyfin server. I think it was called InFuse. With that as well, I spent hours simply navigating the app, going to every page, and waiting for it to cache everything so I could then navigate around. Then if I added something new, I needed to go to a page to show it and get it cached.
  - infecto 3mo ago
    I don’t know if it’s a synology related problem or just Jellyfin but I have never gotten it running well. Even when it’s running I always get hiccups like server crashed a week later but appears green and running. Or trouble logging into the server using a third party client. Plex has always been perfect for me.
  - klik99 3mo ago
    I just set up Jellyfin on an 1819 this weekend and so far it seems great, dunno if it’s improved or my device has bit more oomph - the ui on some devices is not as nice as plex but it’s been great
    - xbmcuser 3mo ago
      Jellyfin has a lot of alternative unofficial apps partly because of it ui as some people that did not like the look built something else. That is the case for almost every client OS
      - klik99 3mo ago
        Hmmm, seems like that is not true for Roku which is specifically the one that is bad - maybe I'll just grab an Onn or something
  - addandsubtract 3mo ago
    I run Jellyfin in Docker on an N100 mini PC without problems.
    - Computer0 3mo ago
      My nas has an N100 because I wanted to avoid Synology's shite CPU offerings. I similarly have had no issues.
  - corranh 3mo ago
    I’ve been running Plex on various devices for many years and have been impressed by the stability and usefulness. Grandfathered on the old lifetime subscription but I get that $750 seems excessive.
  - clundin22 3mo ago
    Could be the hardware acceleration was not mounted to the container.
2muchtime 3mo ago
What do you mean they’re moving toward trying to be a streaming service?
- kortilla 3mo ago
  Plex is a piece of shit that rams dumb streaming stuff down your throat each time you sign in on a TV. This coincidentally happens every other month or so when the app seems to forget the account it’s signed into. It’s becoming hostile for people who want to work from their media alone.
  - Handy-Man 3mo ago
    Haven't been logged out of the app on my Apple TV in 4 years now.
    - kortilla 3mo ago
      Apple TV is not a TV. It’s the terrible quality of all of their TV apps that leads to this behavior.
      - Handy-Man 3mo ago
        Apple TV the hardware!
  - infecto 3mo ago
    I am not so sure. Have used it for years for free( I have need to stream on the go) and it’s always been no issue. On first setup you are give the option to display streaming options or only your library. I cannot remember the last time I was logged. Super stable and zero time spent setting it up. On the flip side Jellyfin has never worked that well out of the box for me. Always some fiddling around and even when I get it right the server will crash unexpectedly and when I want to go watch something I have to manually reboot it.
    - al_borland 3mo ago

tclancy 3mo ago

Huge fan of Jellyfin and the whole related stack, glad to see this is all peaceful.

timcobb 3mo ago
What's the related stack
- deejaaymac 3mo ago
  Jellyfin, sonarr, radarr, lidarr, sometimes jackett....aka the ArrStack
  - Krutonium 3mo ago
    Surely it should be the StackArr?
    - fakeBeerDrinker 3mo ago
      Arr, matey!
  - FabHK 3mo ago
    Suggest Prowlarr instead of jackett.
- tclancy 3mo ago
  Yeah the arr stack plus seer. It all feels like cheating. Which it is.
  - NichoPaolucci 3mo ago
    Definitely cheating. I’ve taught my mostly-non-technical gf how to to load up sonarr and add something to the library. Anything we can do to avoid the hodgepodge of 8 different streaming services and rotating availability…

jbird99 3mo ago

Cool to see fellow Mohawk alum making the front page of HN. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors Joshua and team!

Supercompressor 3mo ago
Had no idea, that is cool! Thanks for pointing this out.

freetime2 3mo ago

Recently Plex increased the cost of a new Lifetime Plex Pass to $750 [1]. It seems like they really want to get most users paying recurring monthly or annual fees. But to me at least that kind of goes against the whole purpose of hosting my own media library. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative! [1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/ https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/

judge2020 3mo ago
Makes me feel lucky that I got it for $120 in 2021. But I appreciate that they still offer a lifetime pass at all.
- ssl-3 3mo ago
  $120 isn't too bad. I paid $75 in July of 2019. $750 is nuts.
  - hack1312 3mo ago
    I paid $75 December 2013 and then a similar amount as you in 2021 when I set up a system for my parents. $750 is insane considering how little they care about user feedback.
    - theshrike79 3mo ago
      The lifetime model isn't sustainable, that's why they're pricing it out.
      - ssl-3 3mo ago
        It had been sustained for something like 14 years, though?
        theshrike79 3mo ago

hankbond 3mo ago

Jellyfin is great for my needs, and I appreciate the effort that goes into it. Recently was having rendering issues doing HDR -> SDR tone mapping since I watch my content on a 2008 era Pioneer plasma display. I found that oddly enough while the server is pretty solid, the client experience is a bit hit or miss. I'm using the mpg-shim adapter, and I'm looking forward to them building a native app with better native render compositing.

postalcoder 3mo ago

I’m grateful for this team. Jellyfin is a great product. I’ve been using llm + Tailscale + Jellyfin to manage my media box and I couldn’t be more happy. I’ve got perfect metadata, perfect organization, and multimodal search on top of it. What a dream.

RAM-bunctious 3mo ago

Great that it's peaceful. Jellyfin is an amazing project, and works almost exactly how I want it to. By listing and playing my media without autoplaying trailers and other such stuff. I imagine many here who've never tried it will be of the same mindset

pudgywalsh 3mo ago
It's not amazing, it's as good as it is. Which is to say not great. There is a crazy amount of bugs which I have no confidence will ever get fixed. If you're the type that enjoys tinkering with obscure Linux settings for hours on end, which are certain to break if you dare to update anything, it may be for you.
- tick_tock_tick 3mo ago
  > There is a crazy amount of bugs which I have no confidence will ever get fixed. Like what honestly I've been running one for years and have had nearly zero issues.
  - thaumasiotes 3mo ago
    My jellyfin installation chokes on audiobooks. There is a very noticeable pause between each track that it plays, despite the entire thing being queued. That pause is presumably also present when playing music, but no one notices because each song is its own track. Audiobook tracks split in places where a pause would never occur naturally. The second-most-annoying trait of Jellyfin in my experience is technically not a bug, but should definitely be fixed. It hardcodes expectations of how to determine what season and episode number to assign to files. And if you overwrite them, it will re-mangle them on scan unless you take precautions to stop it. As far as Jellyfin is concerned, your files must include a tag of the form S__E__ somewhere in the filename. Being located in a folder called "Season 2" with names like "11 - name of episode" won't work. Substrings like 第2集 won't work. Setting actual metadata tags on the file ( https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/FFmpeg_Metadata https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/FFmpeg_Metadata ) doesn't work; jellyfin ignores them. Let me provide a per-folder template for extracting season / episode information. Jellyfin already lets you prefer embedded artwork to whatever it finds on the internet. Why enforce hallucinated episode numbers when explicit ones are clearly present?

xrox 3mo ago

The three founders are all great people, but there is a gatekeeping issue within the project (I'm heavily involved, so this is a throwaway account). The constant mocking accusations and hostility toward third-party clients, plugins, themes, and other tools have made Jellyfin's official spaces unbearable. The atmosphere often revolves around the opinions of a small group of people, and anything that falls outside their preferences will result in a ban. There are two individuals are the primary drivers of this culture.

declan_roberts 3mo ago
Is it going to get better with these departures?
- WD-42 3mo ago
  I believe the person leaving was vibe coding too much for other’s taste, so I assume they aren’t the one with strong opinions.
  - cvanelteren 3mo ago
    Not sure I would phrase it like this. For context see: https://github.com/andrewrabert/jellium-desktop/issues/109 https://github.com/andrewrabert/jellium-desktop/issues/109
  - MemoryHoleHQ 3mo ago
    [dead]
cvanelteren 3mo ago
Can attest to this with my recent interactions on the jellyfin-ios repo.
r0ckarong 3mo ago
> third-party clients Funny how this is the only thing that keeps me from switching from Emby to Jellyfin is the atrocious state of their "own" apps. My last attempt failed when I had to use their Android client. Since I've discovered Wolphin and Findroid it looks a lot more plausible but I just don't have enough pain and lifetime Emby Premiere was still reasonable when I bought it.

NichoPaolucci 3mo ago

I’m surprised people reach for plex, not sure what I’m missing - but a Jellyfin container set up has been fantastic for strictly at home usage (running on an old gaming PC). It’s fantastic software - the cross platform applications are pretty useable. Don’t think we’ve even had any major issues over the last 4 years using it. Many thanks to the builders and maintainers, hopefully Andrew can take some rest and know they help a lot of people!

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
sgc 3mo ago
I have a problem that it constantly tries to re-encode video that could be played perfectly fine in their player or the mpv shim. I wound up just mounting my remote drives and playing in my local mpv. I don't really use it because of that. Unfortunate because otherwise I love a lot of things about it.
- andwur 3mo ago
  I too have run into this problem on a number of devices. The client's supported codec/media format detection logic appears to be extremely pessimistic. To the point that the mere existence of certain audio track formats and subtitles can trigger transcoding, even when said tracks/subtitles aren't actively used. The same files played via MPV on a file share, i.e. no transcoding possible, play without issue. I've tried tweaking both the clients and server to be less pessimistic, i.e. see if the active media elements are supported, but even then it really fights it. I think the best approach would be rewrite the clients to adopt a (try || transcode) strategy rather than (guess || transcode), but that looked to be a major piece of work.
- port11 3mo ago
  You can check why it’s re-encoding, there’s some guides out there. In my case it was the subtitles! Turns out Safari can’t handle all types of subtitles. Might be worth looking into it.

Varelion 3mo ago

This UI is YUMMYYY

AdmiralAsshat 3mo ago

> Now here we are 7-and-a-half years later, and it's the #1 FLOSS media server Source? How does its install base compare to Kodi's?

Hobadee 3mo ago
Kodi isn't a media server. Plex isn't FLOSS. Emby is what Jellyfin was forked from, and barely classifies as FLOSS anymore, and isn't as popular as Jellyfin from what I can tell. There isn't really anything else that I am aware of. Jellyfin being the #1 FLOSS media server makes sense to me, although I don't think there are really any viable #2s.
- saint_yossarian 3mo ago
  Kodi does have bultin server functionality (both DNLA and a web interface), it's just less commonly used that way, and I don't think transcoding is supported without plugins.
  - amiga386 3mo ago
    I tried it some time ago and found it was useless in that role. Kodi is 99% a TV-like frontend to a local-disk media collection, its web interface is an afterthought, its performance for remotely served media is atrocious. Jellyfin, Emby and Plex are media servers first and foremost.
    - NoGravitas 3mo ago
      I actually use Kodi 90% as a front-end to Jellyfin. If I only watched or listened to my media at my TV, just Kodi and a SMB or NFS share would be fine. But with Jellyfin I have the same media everywhere. This is somewhat more important for music than for movies and shows.

cr125rider 3mo ago

Small plug to ask for help with the Apple TV App? Swiftfin is really rough but the best option. It’s quite terrible, never refreshes, overlapping text constantly. It could use some love.

JamesSwift 3mo ago
I tried to get involved (in very minor ways) a while back but got basically no engagement from the project so I just let it be. I moved to infuse instead as my ios client and its been good overall. I really hate its list performance on large collections though.
- magarnicle 3mo ago
  Yeah Infuse is actually usable.
- dantetheinferno 3mo ago
  Same. I wrote a really big upgrade to the Jellyfin iOS App to support Chromecast (https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-ios/issues/16 https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-ios/issues/16), got crickets :( Best of luck to the folks leaving. Supporting OSS isn't easy.
clayhacks 3mo ago
There’s some alternatives. I like JellyTV, pretty smooth UI. Streamyfin has a beta for the TV as well, and continues to improve. But yeah definitely some of the tougher part of the ecosystem
dd8601fn 3mo ago
I had some issues with it too, though not as bad as you seem to have experienced. Good new is they're reworking it, heavily, and seem to be near a new release. For my own purposes I cloned it and pushed the build to my AppleTV... and it's considerably better than the last app store release (quite a while ago). I'm not suggesting anyone do the same, but just saying your problems might be about to solve themselves.
3mo ago

buffer_overlord 3mo ago

Checkout media streamer project on GitHub

NegativeLatency 3mo ago
Why? It’s got crypto stuff in it?
- buffer_overlord 3mo ago
  https://github.com/profullstack/media-streamer https://github.com/profullstack/media-streamer

thaumasiotes 3mo ago

Note that the headline doesn't reflect the post. Here's the beginning: > Hello everyone. Effective yesterday, Anthony and I [Joshua Boniface] decided to depart from the project, myself as Project Leader, and he as a core team member. This is in addition to the resignation of Andrew on Friday. "Several core team members including the founder leave" looks a bit different from "founder leaves".

Hobadee 3mo ago
Also an important note is that they are leaving on good terms. Headline made me terrified that some bad drama was going down, but they are just ready to move on and committed to clean handoffs to whoever owns it going forward.
no-name-here 3mo ago
Plus the title only mentions 1 person while 98% of the linked article is about 2 other people, neither of which are only person mentioned in the title. And the linked article doesn’t even have any link to find out about the founder leaving, the only person named in the title.
mvanbaak 3mo ago
So, is there anyone left? /s

cube00 3mo ago

I simply could no longer provide the effort (mental or time-wise) that the role demanded, and thus I was not performing my duties to an acceptable degree, facing severe burnout, and risks to my mental health. [...] We've proven that FLOSS works, and is in demand. If "FLOSS works" maintainers shouldn't be "facing severe burnout", I've come across two more in the past week alone: * Filebrowser (Mar 2026): https://hacdias.com/2026/03/11/filebrowser/ https://hacdias.com/2026/03/11/filebrowser/ * axum-login / tower-sessions (last week): https://github.com/maxcountryman/axum-login/discussions/330 https://github.com/maxcountryman/axum-login/discussions/330

squigz 3mo ago
Do people doing non-FLOSS work not also sometimes face severe burnout?
- ThrowawayTestr 3mo ago
  Yes but those people aren't doing it as a hobby.
  - hnarn 3mo ago
    What’s your point, or are you just engaging in a conversation while completely ignoring the context?
    - ThrowawayTestr 3mo ago
      Generally you wouldn't expect someone working on a hobby for free to experience burnout.
hnarn 3mo ago
> If "FLOSS works" maintainers shouldn't be "facing severe burnout" So your success criteria for ”FLOSS works” is that zero people involved in it experience stress related issues?
- deleted 3mo ago

dingi 3mo ago

Appreciate your hard work over the years. Jellyfin is a great product that I have been self hosting for years. Wish you guys the best. Thank you.

luciana1u 3mo ago

[flagged]

bob1029 3mo ago

There's never been a better time to consider writing your own media server solution from scratch. I really don't like the idea of transcoding on demand. It has always created a janky experience on the client. I've been using a custom solution that runs everything through ffmpeg normalization as part of the media upload phase. Whenever a client wants to stream something we give them raw byte ranges directly from the block storage provider. In practice, this feels like flipping the channels on an analog tv. Every video starts and seeks nearly instantly. I've long since given up on the dream of maintaining lossless master copies of everything just in case. Every practical use of that 50 gb copy of Home Alone would have you transcoding it. Most clients would choke on that bit rate. When would you actually be able to use all of the available information? Why not just discard what you'll never use? I realize it feels offensive to kill information like this but you can do a much better job with the end experience if you do. You can get a modern chatbot to produce this experience in a single prompt. The code can run on anything slightly more powerful than a potato because you aren't transcoding at playback time anymore. A raspberry pi would be more than enough to serve a few clients on a LAN. If you remain humble in your list of demands (a simple directory browser that plays videos linked within), you can more easily achieve total autonomy.

FrinkleFrankle 3mo ago
Sounds cool. Care to share it?
- bob1029 3mo ago
  I just did. Put the above into your favorite chat bot and append your preferred language, runtime environment and block storage provider.
  - worthless-trash 3mo ago
    Out of tokens.
- butvacuum 3mo ago
  sounds like a bastardized HTTP Live Streaming implementation- which is now fully supported by ffmpeg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

karhuton 3mo ago

Big thank you for your work! Has made managing kid’s TV viewing at home easier over streaming services.

tomaskafka 3mo ago

Reminder that you don't need a powerful transcoding server and engine - I have been running for years with simple WebDAV on my NAS, and Infuse as a comfortable client on all apple devices.

amiga386 3mo ago

The title here is burying the lede and should be updated to something like "Jellyfin founder, project leader and core contributer all leave the project". It's not just Andrew [Rabert] leaving. This is an announcement by Joshua Boniface (the current project lead) and Anthony Lavado (a core contributor) announcing that they're leaving too. Boniface's and Lavado's reasons are mostly akin to burnout, or the need for a family life, which I totally understand, especially as Boniface has been the face of the project for quite some time. I use Jellyfin daily, and I know exactly who Boniface is, I hadn't actually heard of Rabert, though I'm grateful for him founding the project. Boniface in particular has lead Jellyfin through huge levels of internal changes, bugfixes and improvements. It is throwing off the janky architecture of Emby, one part at a time. Rabert's reasons are here: https://github.com/andrewrabert/jellium-desktop/issues/609 https://github.com/andrewrabert/jellium-desktop/issues/609 An obvious sore point is that Rabert has been AI-coding the Jellyfin desktop app, while the community (who bear the brunt of drive-by AI slop) have strongly opposed it. Even if he's a great coder and makes a wonderful desktop app with the aid of AI, that seems irreconcilable. Every wannabe contributor who shits up the project and wastes volunteers time with AI slop will say "you let that guy add his AI generated stuff, why not me?" So he's leaving the Jellyfin project and he's going to rename his desktop app, to see if it stands on its own merits as a third-party Jellyfin client, rather than an official project. I wish the best of luck to him. Even with that angle, it's true that the "Jellyfin community" (which includes all bug reporters, users on forums, etc.) can be very rude, directly to the contributors who may have inadvertantly added bugs. And Jellyfin is going through some growing pains, for example their 10.11.x series rewrote all the database handling to be a much better fit for the language (from raw SQL to .NET EF Core), which gives them a much more stable base to make changes upon, but it also had some performance regressions that rendered some third party Jellyfin apps unusable. (Those third parties' advice is not to upgrade). But at the same time, the project is getting there, supporting developers who are systematically fixing those regressions. The project has thousands of bug reports, but it also has thousands of fixes, and thousands of merged PRs. They are keeping up with the demand. I have every confidence Jellyfin 12.x will be great, and I'm looking forward to the new possibilities for plugins and enhancements it will open up.

aynyc 3mo ago

Please execute my ignorance. And this isn't an attack on anyone, just my own stupid limited understanding. Aren't JellyFin & Plex essentially just a catalog for your local data (most likely torrented movies, etc.) in a web app? If so, what's the big deal? edit: ah, i missed the BIG transcoding part.

roygbiv2 3mo ago
I can browse to jellyfin on my phone, ipad, laptop, TV etc watch any format (since it will transcode on the fly) and watch whatever I was watching from wherever I left it. It will also obviously know where I'm up to in any series so if I start watching something else I can go back to it at a later date.
danpalmer 3mo ago
They do a bit more than this. They do streaming and transcoding for a start, that's fairly essential for a functioning video platform. They also have native apps for a range of platforms. Support subtitles, multiple audio tracks, all sorts of codecs. And then there's all the metadata stuff as well, getting blurbs, posters, ratings, categorisations, episode naming (which has so many awkward edge cases) etc all from various metadata services. Oh and they do this all with multiple users and ACLs. Plex also then adds social features and curation. The value of that to its users is debatable, but it's additional complexity regardless. These are pretty big projects. A founder moving on is a fairly big deal.
GolfPopper 3mo ago
A friend or relative can stream the content over the internet via Plex or Jellyfin (through a Roku, or other streaming device) via a UI that is very, very easy to use. Plex is a way for my non-technical aunt to easily interact with my media server from her home three states away.
Thev00d00 3mo ago
Sure its a catalog of your local media served via an API, with metadata enrichment, built in transcoding (hardware support too) and multiple user support (watch history, recommendations etc). Its not just a web app, I would say most dont use the web app directly, instead they provide clients (Android/iOS/Roku/AndroidTV/WebOS/Tizen) that are in official app stores. This is the big thing for me, being able to just install the client on your TV and not worry about it is great. Often the clients are just wrappers of the web client with native integrations, but they work well. Plus there are loads of 3rd party plugins to extend it, and alternate clients, Im a fan of https://github.com/jeffvli/feishin https://github.com/jeffvli/feishin for music duties personally.

lorreyfum 3mo ago

I run a local iptv server that serves up all my content, easy peasy

farceSpherule 3mo ago

[dead]

IAmBroom 3mo ago

I'd prefer to be exclusively on Jellyfin. It simply has more features that I use - specifically, collections are great non-hierarchical groupings. But periodically my system will refuse to see the Tailscale server, and I'll have to do some black magic tech operation like reinstalling to get it back. Additionally, guiding a friend remotely through installing both Jellyfin and Tailscale is far more effort than saying, "Find Plex in your media sources."

lthi747 3mo ago

Well, good luck Andrew and Anthony! Jellyfin is great project and good software when is working, unfortunately for me it doesn’t works very well. Constantly have issues with playback, files indexing and watch statuses that not marked, but that are small issues compred to the hell with subtitles. Very often out of sync (if they load) So I switched to nova player and sharing my tv shows and music collection over SMB. It isn’t issueless, but at least more smooth amd leas complex.