6 ms·

It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies. Shows wha

It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies. Shows what’s recently be added, recently released. Keeps track of where you’re at in a TV series, to always play the next episode. It can transcode as needed, to something like a mobile device or TV that might be more picky than VLC. Lots of quality of life improvements over list of files on a smb share.

physicles 3mo ago
Jellyfin does all these things too, and it’s free.
throwup238 3mo ago
Plex subscription also includes a “Skip Intro” for TV shows. That’s the only value I’ve gotten out of it other than being able to stream to my phone. Not sure if Jellyfin has an equivalent
- radcod3 3mo ago
  Jellyfin can support intro/outro skipping as well with a plugin. https://github.com/intro-skipper/intro-skipper https://github.com/intro-skipper/intro-skipper
  - 4ggr0 3mo ago
    i've used this plugin a lot, and it is nice, but a bit hit-or-miss. it analyzes all episodes of a show to start seeing a pattern in the beginning of shows, or checks chapters which my files rarely had. works well for most shows, but if a show has unique intros for every episode, it doesn't really work. also had trouble with 100% consistent intros, but i never really figured out why that happened. kind of a 50% solution, works a lot of times but a lot of other times you still end up scrubbing. (also consider that if you install this plugin onto a large existing library, it's going to take a considerable amount of compute and real-world time to do complete it for every show).
    - wccrawford 3mo ago
      That sounds like what I see with Plex, too. It definitely doesn't get it when the intros are unique. And if there's something later that's the same each show (an explanation of the game show, etc) it'll target it as the intro instead. It's good most of the time, but not 100%.
      - 4ggr0 3mo ago
        ah i see, then they must use a similar process. i wonder how big streaming sites do it. underpaid global south workers who manually tag the intro for every episode, or do the files come pre-tagged by the production. maybe a mix of both.
- Bluescreenbuddy 3mo ago
  It does. Has for a while.
- NoGravitas 3mo ago
  There is a plugin that is supposed to provide this, but I don't think it works with every client, and I'm moderately sure it doesn't work with Kodi. Oddly, skip credits/jump to next episode works fine.
  - entropicdrifter 3mo ago
    It does work with Kodi, you just need to add a client-side plugin for Kodi to support it: https://github.com/SgtJalau/service.jellyskip https://github.com/SgtJalau/service.jellyskip
FabHK 3mo ago
BTW, there was a variant of this discussion with the iPod and mp3 players back then. Some people wanted to manage music "by hand" in the file system, and had various schemes for doing so (folders for genre, then artists, then album, etc.), and wanted that reflected 1-to-1 in the mp3 player. iTunes (and the iPod) had a different idea: The app takes care of file management, and you have a frontend supported by a database containing all sorts of metadata to browse your music (both static metadata (artist, genre) and dynamic (play count, skip count, last heard)). iTunes has smart playlists which I love (all songs with 3 stars or more that I haven't heard in 6 weeks). I'm firmly in the latter camp, and similarly prefer Jellyfin over a pure SMB share for movies.
- walrus01 3mo ago
  The first version in the very early days of 128kbps mp3 seemed to be more popular before people were ripping and encoding music with proper id3 tags. Once it became a defacto standard for proper artist, albumname, tracknumber id3 trags to be embedded as metadata in the mp3, using some sort of automated tool very quickly took over. I do recall using several different tools about 20 years ago that took a bunch of horribly mangled filename .mp3 files (but which did have proper id3 tags in them, or where the user had manually corrected the id3 tags for the bare minimum of albumname, artistname and track numbers) and then rewrote their filenames on disk to something logically consistent to make them easier to find and move, store, copy manually if needed.
  - al_borland 3mo ago
    I remember going through and manually keying in the id3 tags on my mp3s using WinAmp, because without them the dash between the artist and song look slightly different. That was a lot of work over a dash.
    - NetOpWibby 3mo ago
      Worthwhile work, to me. I’m gonna listen to this music until I perish, might as well fix what’s bothering me.
  - 3mo ago
asimovDev 3mo ago
I have a HD TV from 2007 and I still vividly remember having to convert videos to a certain format because it was so picky. IIRC it only played .mp4, most of the movies I had on my external drive back then were .mkv and maybe some .avi , so almost nothing played
- IAmBroom 3mo ago
  Plex used to have that problem, but in the last few years it's gotten MUCH better at transcoding on-the-fly.
hn_throw2025 3mo ago
The only thing I value from that list is the played/unplayed status, and resuming a title from where I left off. My two preferred clients handle that for me on my various devices.
bambax 3mo ago
Yes. And with something like a GL.iNet travel router + Tailscale, you can watch Jellyfin from anywhere without ever exposing it to the Internet. You plug it in your hotel room, tell the hotel TV to connect to it, and voilà: Jellyfin on any random TV.
- Fnoord 3mo ago
  Connect a random TV to your home LAN over a VPN? No thank you! I would rather use HDMI in. You can also cache data locally. Or just watch on a smaller screen or tablet. There are a lot of jurisdictions where I would not want to take private keys or passwords with me.
  - qlte 3mo ago
    I just bring a $25 Onn 4k Google TV “box” I use for travel that’s roughly half the size of a deck of cards and pre-configured with Jellyfin/ad-free home screen/etc in addition to the travel router linked to my VPN. Less due to security and more because I’ve seen hotel TVs that literally had like 5 sec latency for any button press and are full of ads so I don’t want to deal with that.
tmountain 3mo ago
Yup, it’s a great UX and it makes the media experience feel finished, not hacky.
- bityard 3mo ago
  I wonder if we are starting to see a generational gap in how we consume media. When I was growing up, there was no "media experience," you just turned on the TV, selected your channel, and there was your show. Or your turned on the TV, pushed the VHS tape into the VCR, and your movie started playing. Every once in a while I start looking into things like jellyfin and after a few hours poking around, eventually start to wonder if the heaviest users of these platforms enjoy the process of organizating their media and finding the perfect UI theme for that particular week _more_ than they enjoy actually sitting down and watching their shows.
  - jnovek 3mo ago
    Jellyfin took me 20 minutes to setup with docker-compose. I’ve never customized anything about it aside from pointing it at my media library. It’s way less effort than making an SMB share play nice with a smart TV.
    - entropicdrifter 3mo ago
      And you can stream to your phone. And I set my elderly aunt up to be able to stream it from her Apple TV ~80 miles away from me. And there are phone apps that let you download stuff in advance to watch on a plane. And I've been able to cast Jellyfin from my phone to the TV in a hotel before
  - al_borland 3mo ago
    I would equate browsing for a movie to watch in a Jellyfin library (or Netflix, etc) on the TV to someone browsing at Blockbuster to find a movie to rent, seeing what is available on their DVR, or maybe even the TV Guide. I think the media servers started as a way to avoid tapes/DVDs and making it easier to get content on the TV. It’s a much better experience than a 100 DVD changer. Now, it evolved based on anxiety around streaming services and never knowing when the TV show you’re watching will get pulled, or your favorite movie will lose availability… and wanting to maintain access. This is especially true as companies, like Sony, remove digital copies of movies people “bought”. So any digital file with DRM from a company is only good as long as they decide to keep offering it, which isn’t forever.
freetonik 3mo ago
>It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies. Infuse [1] is a nice way to get these features on Apple TV and iOS devices while simply sharing files via SMB. 1. https://firecore.com/infuse https://firecore.com/infuse
- theshrike79 3mo ago
  Infuse also supports some codecs on Apple TV that the official Plex client doesn't. And it connects to both Plex and Jellyfin too.
b3lvedere 3mo ago
This is not a rant or an attack on you. I get the point of easyness that Plex and/or Jellyfin offer. I merely would like to explain why i do not need it. I tried both Jellyfin and Plex, but i could not find a huge benefit in using them in our household. Again, not a rant. I think it's an extra layer on top of things i do not need. I do not need cover art, descriptions or trailers. The smb shares have a folder hierarchy that's very logical and easy to our household so sorting and reindexing is not needed. Kodi (Windows,Linux, Android) keeps track of where i was, but i don't really care that much. Usually i remember what i was watching. File Explorer Pro (paid version) on IOS plays anything. I do not need transcoding, because all the players can play anything i throw at it. My wife and kids know how to use Kodi both on the pcs and the chromecasts. Mp3's go to a Sonos at the moment. If more mp3 devices would be needed in the future, i'm kinda curious about the CrowdSupply Esparagus systems [1][2] 1: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-media-center https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-media-center 2: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-audio-brick https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-audio-brick
- theshrike79 3mo ago
  > "Usually i remember what i was watching" You must not watch that many TV shows or Anime then. Or you have the memory of a savant. Without an automated system I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking.
  - 4ggr0 3mo ago
    > I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking curious question then - do you remember the content of what you were watching? i totally get that you don't know on what episode you are and i used and love Jellyfin myself, but if you're watching 100+ series "at once" i'm starting to wonder if you even remember the last episode of a show if you rotate so heavily, know what i mean? i barely remember an episode after a week, even if i exclusively watch one show. so either my memory is even worse than i thought, or - you have the memory of a savant ;)
    - 3mo ago

physicles 3mo ago

Jellyfin does all these things too, and it’s free.

throwup238 3mo ago

Plex subscription also includes a “Skip Intro” for TV shows. That’s the only value I’ve gotten out of it other than being able to stream to my phone. Not sure if Jellyfin has an equivalent

radcod3 3mo ago
Jellyfin can support intro/outro skipping as well with a plugin. https://github.com/intro-skipper/intro-skipper https://github.com/intro-skipper/intro-skipper
- 4ggr0 3mo ago
  i've used this plugin a lot, and it is nice, but a bit hit-or-miss. it analyzes all episodes of a show to start seeing a pattern in the beginning of shows, or checks chapters which my files rarely had. works well for most shows, but if a show has unique intros for every episode, it doesn't really work. also had trouble with 100% consistent intros, but i never really figured out why that happened. kind of a 50% solution, works a lot of times but a lot of other times you still end up scrubbing. (also consider that if you install this plugin onto a large existing library, it's going to take a considerable amount of compute and real-world time to do complete it for every show).
  - wccrawford 3mo ago
    That sounds like what I see with Plex, too. It definitely doesn't get it when the intros are unique. And if there's something later that's the same each show (an explanation of the game show, etc) it'll target it as the intro instead. It's good most of the time, but not 100%.
    - 4ggr0 3mo ago
      ah i see, then they must use a similar process. i wonder how big streaming sites do it. underpaid global south workers who manually tag the intro for every episode, or do the files come pre-tagged by the production. maybe a mix of both.
Bluescreenbuddy 3mo ago
It does. Has for a while.
NoGravitas 3mo ago
There is a plugin that is supposed to provide this, but I don't think it works with every client, and I'm moderately sure it doesn't work with Kodi. Oddly, skip credits/jump to next episode works fine.
- entropicdrifter 3mo ago
  It does work with Kodi, you just need to add a client-side plugin for Kodi to support it: https://github.com/SgtJalau/service.jellyskip https://github.com/SgtJalau/service.jellyskip

FabHK 3mo ago

BTW, there was a variant of this discussion with the iPod and mp3 players back then. Some people wanted to manage music "by hand" in the file system, and had various schemes for doing so (folders for genre, then artists, then album, etc.), and wanted that reflected 1-to-1 in the mp3 player. iTunes (and the iPod) had a different idea: The app takes care of file management, and you have a frontend supported by a database containing all sorts of metadata to browse your music (both static metadata (artist, genre) and dynamic (play count, skip count, last heard)). iTunes has smart playlists which I love (all songs with 3 stars or more that I haven't heard in 6 weeks). I'm firmly in the latter camp, and similarly prefer Jellyfin over a pure SMB share for movies.

walrus01 3mo ago
The first version in the very early days of 128kbps mp3 seemed to be more popular before people were ripping and encoding music with proper id3 tags. Once it became a defacto standard for proper artist, albumname, tracknumber id3 trags to be embedded as metadata in the mp3, using some sort of automated tool very quickly took over. I do recall using several different tools about 20 years ago that took a bunch of horribly mangled filename .mp3 files (but which did have proper id3 tags in them, or where the user had manually corrected the id3 tags for the bare minimum of albumname, artistname and track numbers) and then rewrote their filenames on disk to something logically consistent to make them easier to find and move, store, copy manually if needed.
- al_borland 3mo ago
  I remember going through and manually keying in the id3 tags on my mp3s using WinAmp, because without them the dash between the artist and song look slightly different. That was a lot of work over a dash.
  - NetOpWibby 3mo ago
    Worthwhile work, to me. I’m gonna listen to this music until I perish, might as well fix what’s bothering me.
- 3mo ago

asimovDev 3mo ago

I have a HD TV from 2007 and I still vividly remember having to convert videos to a certain format because it was so picky. IIRC it only played .mp4, most of the movies I had on my external drive back then were .mkv and maybe some .avi , so almost nothing played

IAmBroom 3mo ago
Plex used to have that problem, but in the last few years it's gotten MUCH better at transcoding on-the-fly.

hn_throw2025 3mo ago

The only thing I value from that list is the played/unplayed status, and resuming a title from where I left off. My two preferred clients handle that for me on my various devices.

bambax 3mo ago

Yes. And with something like a GL.iNet travel router + Tailscale, you can watch Jellyfin from anywhere without ever exposing it to the Internet. You plug it in your hotel room, tell the hotel TV to connect to it, and voilà: Jellyfin on any random TV.

Fnoord 3mo ago
Connect a random TV to your home LAN over a VPN? No thank you! I would rather use HDMI in. You can also cache data locally. Or just watch on a smaller screen or tablet. There are a lot of jurisdictions where I would not want to take private keys or passwords with me.
- qlte 3mo ago
  I just bring a $25 Onn 4k Google TV “box” I use for travel that’s roughly half the size of a deck of cards and pre-configured with Jellyfin/ad-free home screen/etc in addition to the travel router linked to my VPN. Less due to security and more because I’ve seen hotel TVs that literally had like 5 sec latency for any button press and are full of ads so I don’t want to deal with that.

tmountain 3mo ago

Yup, it’s a great UX and it makes the media experience feel finished, not hacky.

bityard 3mo ago
I wonder if we are starting to see a generational gap in how we consume media. When I was growing up, there was no "media experience," you just turned on the TV, selected your channel, and there was your show. Or your turned on the TV, pushed the VHS tape into the VCR, and your movie started playing. Every once in a while I start looking into things like jellyfin and after a few hours poking around, eventually start to wonder if the heaviest users of these platforms enjoy the process of organizating their media and finding the perfect UI theme for that particular week _more_ than they enjoy actually sitting down and watching their shows.
- jnovek 3mo ago
  Jellyfin took me 20 minutes to setup with docker-compose. I’ve never customized anything about it aside from pointing it at my media library. It’s way less effort than making an SMB share play nice with a smart TV.
  - entropicdrifter 3mo ago
    And you can stream to your phone. And I set my elderly aunt up to be able to stream it from her Apple TV ~80 miles away from me. And there are phone apps that let you download stuff in advance to watch on a plane. And I've been able to cast Jellyfin from my phone to the TV in a hotel before
- al_borland 3mo ago
  I would equate browsing for a movie to watch in a Jellyfin library (or Netflix, etc) on the TV to someone browsing at Blockbuster to find a movie to rent, seeing what is available on their DVR, or maybe even the TV Guide. I think the media servers started as a way to avoid tapes/DVDs and making it easier to get content on the TV. It’s a much better experience than a 100 DVD changer. Now, it evolved based on anxiety around streaming services and never knowing when the TV show you’re watching will get pulled, or your favorite movie will lose availability… and wanting to maintain access. This is especially true as companies, like Sony, remove digital copies of movies people “bought”. So any digital file with DRM from a company is only good as long as they decide to keep offering it, which isn’t forever.

freetonik 3mo ago

>It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies. Infuse [1] is a nice way to get these features on Apple TV and iOS devices while simply sharing files via SMB. 1. https://firecore.com/infuse https://firecore.com/infuse

theshrike79 3mo ago
Infuse also supports some codecs on Apple TV that the official Plex client doesn't. And it connects to both Plex and Jellyfin too.

b3lvedere 3mo ago

This is not a rant or an attack on you. I get the point of easyness that Plex and/or Jellyfin offer. I merely would like to explain why i do not need it. I tried both Jellyfin and Plex, but i could not find a huge benefit in using them in our household. Again, not a rant. I think it's an extra layer on top of things i do not need. I do not need cover art, descriptions or trailers. The smb shares have a folder hierarchy that's very logical and easy to our household so sorting and reindexing is not needed. Kodi (Windows,Linux, Android) keeps track of where i was, but i don't really care that much. Usually i remember what i was watching. File Explorer Pro (paid version) on IOS plays anything. I do not need transcoding, because all the players can play anything i throw at it. My wife and kids know how to use Kodi both on the pcs and the chromecasts. Mp3's go to a Sonos at the moment. If more mp3 devices would be needed in the future, i'm kinda curious about the CrowdSupply Esparagus systems [1][2] 1: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-media-center https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-media-center 2: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-audio-brick https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-audio-brick

theshrike79 3mo ago
> "Usually i remember what i was watching" You must not watch that many TV shows or Anime then. Or you have the memory of a savant. Without an automated system I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking.
- 4ggr0 3mo ago
  > I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking curious question then - do you remember the content of what you were watching? i totally get that you don't know on what episode you are and i used and love Jellyfin myself, but if you're watching 100+ series "at once" i'm starting to wonder if you even remember the last episode of a show if you rotate so heavily, know what i mean? i barely remember an episode after a week, even if i exclusively watch one show. so either my memory is even worse than i thought, or - you have the memory of a savant ;)
  - 3mo ago