99% coverage is achievable via a few straightforward regexes.
Don't get me wrong though, I really like and appreciate Jellyfin, especially on Apple TV with Swiftfin, it's my daily driver for big screen entertainment and it's amazing, 10e9 times better than Chromecasting from a laptop to GoogleTV, which is just a horrible UX (no pause button on the TV) and also would randomly freeze for 5-30 seconds every few minutes.
Plex was nice too, and works great if you are okay with being at the mercy of a closed system for your media center. Though I sure don't miss those pointless forced UI "downgrade in functionality" updates!
Jellyfin parses scene naming conventions fine. I have thousands of films and hundreds of TV shows (with thousands of episodes) all in scene name format and I can think of a handful of matching errors on Jellyfish but it's usually due to a commonish film name and a wrong year or something similar.
I use the full stack and all very grateful for the products.
The remaining annoyances are:
- lack of multi language support
- there is no connection between the systems when you want to remove a movie (you remove it in one place and everything knows about that and acts accordingly)
- I still did not make to fully grasp how and where to say "I do not want this particular release". I think I saw that in radarr but it never is obvious to me where it is.
Not OP, but you pretty much have to run the Celeron ones. I don't think the docker image would work with the Realtek ones (the ones that end in j). I have a DS220+ (J4025 with dual core only). It works ok, you pretty much max out one of the cores running a 4K stream. I would recommend separating the storage and server if you can afford it. The price difference between the quad core (4 bay) and 2 core (has 2 bay) is enough to get a 2 bay + a N95 mini pc that can handle 4 streams of 4K.
I switched to Jellyfin from Plex cause of it being open source and having AMD/VA-API transcoding support
I’ve enjoyed it a but more cause I feel like I can do more on the server end. I recently started to use Infuse on my Apple TV for it cause turns out that Swiftfin, still in development, doesn’t have a license for Dolby Audio formats.
But the development cycle for Jellyfin and the clients looks healthy, unlike Plex which seems to have stagnated. The next gen Jellyfin Web UI (Jellyfin Vue) is looking good too
Jellyfin is also pretty forgiving about my file names but I am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I have a complex script to process movie and tv show filenames and folders. You can also override the metadata with the Identify function on the media page context menu.
Unfortunately I had a pretty bad experience with jellyfin when trying to switch from plex. Plex works for me in almost all scenarios, mobile, desktop, chromecast, what have you. And I can play multiple feeds simultaneously from my cheap Nuc server. With Jellyfin I had trouble to get video even playing without stuttering/buffering on my phone when on the same network, let alone on mobile internet. I'll probably give it another go in a few months to see how they evolved.
That about lines up with my Jellyfin experience ~18 months ago, although I was coming from (and switched back to) Emby at the time, which Jellyfin was forked from (still evident by all the Emby/MediaBrowser references in folder and file names). Which, IMO, was really interesting, because the codebases were very close to identical for some time yet Emby was orders of magnitude more reliable. I have more and more family accessing my server each month to the point I've almost run out of 'devices' allowed by an Emby 'license,' making Jellyfin a more attractive offering going forward... assuming they've fixed the problems they had at the start.
Hmmm...I might suggest looking into the transcoding settings and changing some things next time you take a look. Because I run Plex alongside Jellyfin (the wife prefers Plex's UI once I tweak it), and it typically runs just as efficiently if not a bit more.
I had some issues with Jellyfin that weren't due to transcoding, still not sure what the cause was.
I had a 2nd gen chromecast that would play half a second and fail, something to do with the data format I think as there was some shenanigans with changing the media container but no real transcoding happening. Solved by getting a newer chromecast which was a nice upgrade anyway.
I also had problems playing on my phone, the integrated player in the app would play video fine while the UI was interacted with, so tapping continuously worked. The picture would freeze up though. Playing through the web UI on the phone worked fine, but I prefer the app. Changing the media player from the integrated to externally through VLC solved that.
So I've found it a bit rough in some cases for me, but there are a ton of Jellyfin apps with nice UI. The core work (transcoding etc) is done by ffmpeg by all the big players (plex, emby, jellyfin) so don't expect much differentiation there.
As other comments suggest, this might be due to transcoding. There is tool Tdarr which transcodes media in advance. h264 could be the safest choice for mobile (hw support) and web.
Plex might have been stagnating, but it works kinda flawlessly for me. I run it in Docker at home and through a reverse proxy on a cheap VPS (don’t want to expose any ports at home) and even that works really well - the iOS app automagically switches between remote and local networks. Hardware transcoding (Intel) just works, even in Docker. Media scanning is very snappy. User management and parental controls look powerful enough, at least after having bought Plex Pass.
It's not stagnating, so much as they have decided that their initial market doesn't interest them. They were writing software for end users that let end users set up their own person Netflix. But maybe the revenue was unexciting or just insufficient, and now they want to be their own streaming service.
Their streaming service sucks (they're probably at least two orders of magnitude too small to be able to afford to do it right, maybe even 3 or 4), and contaminates the searches on my server with their junk.
Also, it might be true that they're just afraid of the liability of doubling down on their original market. Contributory infringement and all that. This is almost certainly the reason they haven't expanded to include media like ebooks and audio books and karaoke. I mean they have the perfect paradigm for all of these things... the same software that keeps track of where I am in a season of shows, or halfway through a movie could definitely keep track of where I am in a book, if they wanted to.
This isn't entirely speculation on my part... at some point someone had asked them about preroll trailers for new seasons (Archer might be the most fun for these), but they said that they wouldn't add the feature because there was no legitimate source for those videos (even though just ripping them with youtube-dl is dead simple).
> I run it in Docker at home and through a reverse proxy on a cheap VPS (don’t want to expose any ports at home)
What is the benefit of running the reverse proxy vs just opening the port? It would seem whatever attacks viable on the directly opened port could just as well be carried out on the proxy port.
> ...am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I have a complex script to...
I am the exact opposite, partly because I feel like it SHOULD BE the responsibility of the media library to maintain associations between the media files and their metadata, regardless of the filename.
It seems crazy to me that Plex and other media libraries effectively require you to follow persnickety file-naming conventions. I am very much in the minority of folks who think that you should just be able to point these media servers to a file, tell it what that file is, and then have it maintain associations so you can query your media in arbitrary ways to make a playlist or whatever-- no filenames changes needed.
I think you can do that, there is an informal standard for xml files which can live alongside the media with metadata info. I'm not sure if Jellyfin can create them directly but it can read them. See for example tinymediamanager
> I am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I have a complex script to process movie and tv show filenames and folders.
I'm curious to know why you chose to write a custom (and complex) script yourself instead of using something like Sonarr/Radarr for this task? Does your script do something that the *arr apps are not capable off or is there another reason?
Please tell me I'm an idiot and show me a better way. Lol it won't save me the hundreds of movies I've put in "Title (year).type" format, but it will save some future work.
> am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library
Me too! General rules of thumb: as long as your content matches the name on https://www.themoviedb.org/ Jellyfin will recognize it and have excellent metadata, posters, etc. Even if you change the filenames later you can re-scan the library and it will be updated to reflect the new names.
Besides a pointless re-arranging of the UI, which we all hate, what should they be doing? I'll grant you "Bugs to be quashed", but fewer features to fill, fewer devs on the payroll, and less selling out to make payroll sounds perfect to me.
For years I just wanted a good user experience playing video files from my MBP to a TV, I spent a lot of money (on NAS, chromecasts etc), used a lot of software with objectively terrible user experiences (Plex I'm looking firmly at you).
Finally, I discovered the combination of Jellyfin and Infuse App. It works really well.
I’d be interested to know what you find terrible about the PLEX UX. I’ve been a happy user for years and have found the user interface to be reasonably intuitive. Perhaps dense in places, but certainly not terrible in my opinion.
I don't know how to navigate Plex anymore. I used to use it roughly 8 years ago, and it was simple - it showed me my media, I could navigate through it, watch it, and nothing more.
I tried using it again 2 years ago - and I simply couldn't find my media anymore. I logged in with my account, and the settings showed me that it was connected to my server, but it showed me a bunch of random media that I did not add to my server. I couldn't find a way to navigate to my media after a couple of minutes, so I uninstalled it, replaced it with Jellyfin, and never looked back.
Maybe I was too blind to find it, but showing me random media instead of my own is a no-go for a local media server.
I've used Plex for more than a decade, and I've seen it drop in quality over the years as Plex the company has pivoted towards being a streaming service.
Personally, my main beef is that as a client app, the streaming service stuff has bled into the personal library UI in obnoxious ways. For example, the default "tab" is called "Recommended". This shows some kind of algorithm-based feed of stuff they think you want to watch. This tab is the default even for your own private library. Why would it suggest stuff from a library that I curate? It's very strange. In the browser, it remembers your last active tab to some extent, but the native apps (like on AppleTV) does not. When I open the app and go to a folder, I just see recommended stuff. Similarly, if you go to the screen for a TV show in your library, it will show a "Related shows" section. It's my library, I know what is there, I don't want these spammy algorithmic things.
Occasionally I run into other parts of the app, which invariably try to steer me towards using their streaming service. It's just a constant reminder of how it's no longer designed for my purposes.
I switch to Jellyfin because Plex was always spamming me to try some off-brand streaming service. I know this behavior is so normalized that even Ubuntu Linux does it now but actions have consequences and it does drive users away.
1. You have to use their login service to log into a server that's... self-hosted.
2. The Plex app has very limited codec support, at least on iOS. In particular, I rip directly from disc and Plex would require transcoding for UHDs, or Blu-rays with TrueHD/DTS/etc. audio. Infuse has support for all of that out of the box so my Jellyfin server doesn't do any transcoding at all, and AppleTV/iPad/etc. are more than capable of decoding even full bitrate UHD content.
Plex is cluttered, messy, not free, not available on all devices, and harder to run on Kubernetes.
I can watch my Jellyfin shows from a Flatpak local client on my desktop, pause and move to my phone, pause and move to my TV. That's three different operating systems, and at no point do they transcode, because it's not going through a browser.
For random episodes Plex decides it must transcode (even though they play just fine over DLNA). (I have transcoding disabled so it just refuses to play those.)
Randomly just a blank screen after the last episode in a deck is done playing.
Resuming from screensaver ends up in a broken user select screen half of the time. One time it was even showing the user select while the remote was still blindly controlling the UI hidden behind the logon, as the last user.
> I’d be interested to know what you find terrible about the PLEX UX
1) Adding new users is harder than it should be (the sharing tab takes me to ‘camera roll’ and ‘synced content’ on my phone. ‘Manage library access’ is the correct section to go to.
2) Getting new users to watch default res (not transcode) is not easy.
3) Deleting the pinned crap that gets added every so often is frustrating.
4) Finding a particular setting when you want it is way too hard - settings are too spread out.
5) Splitting out content is irritating (eg mine versus a library shared with me).
6) The server can end up chewing up an absolute mass of storage with its logs, and app data. This is hard (impossible?) to manage from the UI.
7) Probably not a UI bug, but Plex loses the sound/video sync sometimes. Making the show transcode is the only reliable fix I’ve found. I wish I could chose to advance or regard the audio in settings while watching. Or even better, just not break.
Maybe this doesn’t happen to you but: my infuse app on my Apple TV constantly clears the cache because it gets full. This requires it to rescan my library before I have access to my media. Kind of a pain. Server side processing like with jelly fin would prevent this from happening. This is the reason I bounce back and forth between infuse and Plex on my Apple TV.
My favorite feature of Infuse is how it clears the Metadata cache every single time I launch the app. Takes about 30-45 seconds for it to show all of my media again. Even with plenty of storage space on my ATV4K.
The main advantage of Jellyfin is that it can transcode on-the-fly, which is important if you want to share with friends and family that have slower or metered internet.
But the unfortunate flipside is it seems like the best clients (so far) do not support transcoding very well, they want to direct stream.
Yeah I run Jellyfin+Infuse at home. The biggest selling point for me is that Infuse has "all the codecs" and I can just throw anything, including full bitrate UHD content at the devices and the server doesn't need to do any transcoding.
I have put all my media on a WebDAV reachable machine and pointed Infuse towards it. For me it’s the most convenient option as I have to manage nothing, don’t need to run a server etc. and Incan stream directly on my Apple TV.
Not too long ago I found myself tired of how Plex on my server would periodically break itself and unhappy with how the company was continuing to pivot away from the core product, so I started looking into alternatives.
Jellyfin was the most promising option but unfortunately ended up being unviable for me, because my home server/NAS runs FreeBSD, and by virtue of C#/Mono being a pain to get running on FreeBSD so is Jellyfin. I could work around this with a Linux jail or moving the server over to Linux but I'd really rather not have to do either.
As an side it's a bit odd to me how all of the most complete media server packages heavily rely on either Python or C#, and also a bit frustrating because when they break it not infrequently has something to do with some quirk in either. Would really like to see a media server comparable to Plex written in something less prone to breakage.
This... what's it matter if its hard to get running in linux? you only have to get it running once and bam - you run your server in a container of that.
Could take a rocket scientist working on it... but once it's done? it's done. the container maintainer occasionally releases updated versions doing the same thing that worked previously.
I have Plex running on docker on a QNAP with a dedicated graphics card and rarely have issues (other than my own stupidity).
It’s been several months so I forget the exact issue, but at that point whatever the C# runtime was didn’t install cleanly without manually building a specific branch or somesuch, with no official package being available for FreeBSD.
I tried it, but ended up just using file shares. The biggest issue for me is that it does not automatically recognize many movies by their short names instead linking to some obscure thing with a similar name. For instance, since files can not have colon in the name, and many movies do, it gets confused about the title. Another similar issue is about shows and how it recognizes their folder and file structures.
In the end it seems easier for me to just navigate the folder structure and look up any metadata by googling, because I add shows and movies more often than have urges to look up random character's actor.
Another "just share files" user checking in. There are dozens of us!
Old school NFS/SMB has "just worked" for me for decades. It's free, uses almost zero server resources, is easy to add content to (just copy a file), and it isn't going to change out from under you when its developer decides to monetize you.
If you really must have a pretty front-end for your TV or whatever, there's Kodi, which is also old-school, free, runs on everything, and so on. My only gripe with Kodi is the same gripe I have with every other media player system out there: They all seem to insist on grafting their own "library" concept onto your already-existing and perfectly-functioning filesystem. I just added that file to my filesystem. Why do I need to add it again to the in-app "library?"
Your filenames can't have colons in them? Sounds like a side-effect of keeping compatibility with 30 year-old Microsoft filesharing protocols. Samba is cool and everything but SMB has no advantages over NFS, SSHFS, or even bind mounts on the same host.
The Windows colon file limitation is annoying, but I've never had trouble with it. Autodetection always seems to work for me, even if the name gets a little mangled (unless tvdb doesn't know about a particular movie/show/season). Sometimes there's a weird extra (year) behind the title because of the way the folder got named, but the metadata itself still shows up right.
Then again, I do get most of my content through *arr so perhaps that automation already resolves the filename inconsistencies.
As for 5.1 audio, that's almost entirely unsupported by browsers. I think Edge and Safari support Dolby but I'm not sure if you need to feed those a special kind of format or not. Maybe the native applications get around this somehow?
Jellyfin is marginally better than Plex, but I also encountered a lot of quirks with Jellyfin which ended in me giving up on it for streaming my media to my other devices.
I just want something that automatically transcodes whatever I watch to account for poor bandwidth when I'm not home. All the library stuff feels so unnecessary and breaks in weird ways that are difficult (impossible?) to solve.
I also just share files on the server side and then use Kodi on an Nvidia Shield as the client for watching tv. Works well. I looked at Jellyfin/Plex but didn't really understand what it would offer, maybe if I had multiple tv's and wanted a more shared/transferable experience.
Frankly, you really should be fixing and cleaning the tags with a program like tiny media manager or the like. It improves the user experience vastly, from having cover art, background/preview art, plot overviews, actor / studio lists, and clean, consistent file/folder names.
It's a very fast and easy process, I was able to complete the task for 2tb of files in an hour or two, and that's because I was being thorough. It makes the experience close to netflix in terms of quality (in several ways better even). Jellyfin's default behavior of interpreting file names is fine as it is, but clean file names is truly the more bespoke solution.
Here's my personal experience switching from Plex to Jellyfin. Everyone's needs are different, but, for me, Jellyfin has been a much better experience.
I used Plex for years and always hated it. It didn't let me customize the home screen in the way I wanted, so there was always a bunch of junk on there that I didn't want and couldn't remove. It also ran very slow on my Samsung TV (1), starting up slowly and responding to the press of a button after about a full second (it had done this for a long time through multiple versions of the app and factory resetting the TV without any improvement; also, the TV is only a few years old).
I got frustrated enough to finally switch to Jellyfin about 4 months ago. It was a pain to get the app installed on my TV (the app isn't in the TV's app library, so it needs to be installed as if you're a dev), but once I got it working it works well. The app starts up faster than the Plex app and is very responsive to button presses.
Back when I was using Plex, I really wanted to customize the home screen to remove certain components and re-order what appears and spent a lot of time reading over settings/customization stuff which never actually let me do what I wanted. With Jellyfin, I simply went to settings > home and the intuitive options there let me do exactly what I wanted to do in seconds.
I can't think of any major issues I've had with Jellyfin, but here are a couple of thoughts. With Jellyfin I needed to create separate folders for what what Plex called collections and add them as libraries instead of collections. At first, I thought this was a negative but ended up deciding it didn't really matter as it works fine. I had a series of videos that wouldn't play properly on Jellyfin until I used ffmpeg to strip out the extra subtitle tracks (they had 42!), but never tested them on Plex so not sure if Plex would have handled them.
(1) I will never buy another Samsung TV, but that's a rant for another post. I considered buying an Nvidia Shield just to fix some issues with the TV, but probably won't bother now that Jellyfin is working well.
I got a Shield because neither the Chromecast 4k nor my LG TV could handle HDR content. Shield also replaced my Steam Link so that was nice. I changed the Netflix button on the remote to Plex with a button mapper app and then bought a properly sized Plex sticker to cover the Netflix button.
What issues were you having with the Plex home screen?
Cool software. I used it within/in parallel to Kodi to sync a couple devices but ended up removing this layer.
I didn't like that you can't outright disable transcoding for content served via their app or in the browser. I serve mostly local client and my headless NAS has poor integrated graphics and runs Linux so this was very brittle. Kodi's jellyfin addon can play without transcoding by default so this seemed reasonable.
However in case others want to go this route for a similar use case I hope I can save you some frustration: both this and the native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or passthrough atmos content properly. I also had odd tearing and av sync issues with some large 4k content that don't happen with maven kodi builds.
After a lot of time trying to figure out it, I stripped it out and my shield has no further issues just using kodi despite being the ill famed 2019 tube model. Hdr10, Dolby vision, atmos pass through you name it just works.
> I didn't like that you can't outright disable transcoding for content served via their app or in the browser.
You can outright disable transcoding. That’s a checkbox in the server option.
> both this and the native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or passthrough atmos content properly
They do out of the box. Never had an issue with either transcoding disabled. If you have properly configured the source content, Jellyfin is just a passthrough for Kodi and content is directly accessed using the network share.
I ran into this with HDR. I have a fork/branch that strips that logic block out and it works great (tldr; video gets transcoded breaking HDR for any transcode reason i.e. audio/subtitle)
I'm not sure what to say. Unless this is a recent change in my experience it does not work as intended. I spent a lot of time playing with the various transcoding settings and per user settings and direct path access or the regular way of accessing files.
I'm happy it worked for you. I have specific content jellyfin doesn't work with where Kodi is fine and I am just sharing my experience with this software package.
> However in case others want to go this route for a similar use case I hope I can save you some frustration: both this and the native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or passthrough atmos content properly. I also had odd tearing and av sync issues with some large 4k content that don't happen with maven kodi builds.
I also get audio sync issue with some media types. I am frustrated to the point that I now just copy things on a thumb drive to play on my TV.
Just to understand you setup better, are you using kodi on TV or your server or both?
I run Kodi on a 2019 Nvidia shield "tube" model. My media and previously jellyfin is on a NAS that serves the content over nfs to the shield. Shield--Receiver--TV. Look into the maven Kodi build if you have something similar. My sync issues went away using when I stopped using jellyfin and also maybe from removing path substitution when I redid it from scratch. I believe I have fixed output with passthrough in Kodi and upmixed turned off on the shield.
Readit News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)
https://scenerules.org/t.html?id=2020_X265.nfo
99% coverage is achievable via a few straightforward regexes.
Don't get me wrong though, I really like and appreciate Jellyfin, especially on Apple TV with Swiftfin, it's my daily driver for big screen entertainment and it's amazing, 10e9 times better than Chromecasting from a laptop to GoogleTV, which is just a horrible UX (no pause button on the TV) and also would randomly freeze for 5-30 seconds every few minutes.
Plex was nice too, and works great if you are okay with being at the mercy of a closed system for your media center. Though I sure don't miss those pointless forced UI "downgrade in functionality" updates!
Deleted Comment
The remaining annoyances are:
- lack of multi language support
- there is no connection between the systems when you want to remove a movie (you remove it in one place and everything knows about that and acts accordingly)
- I still did not make to fully grasp how and where to say "I do not want this particular release". I think I saw that in radarr but it never is obvious to me where it is.
I recently upgraded to "DS 423+" and it's a lot faster - can have multiple streams going if I want.
I’ve enjoyed it a but more cause I feel like I can do more on the server end. I recently started to use Infuse on my Apple TV for it cause turns out that Swiftfin, still in development, doesn’t have a license for Dolby Audio formats.
But the development cycle for Jellyfin and the clients looks healthy, unlike Plex which seems to have stagnated. The next gen Jellyfin Web UI (Jellyfin Vue) is looking good too
Jellyfin is also pretty forgiving about my file names but I am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I have a complex script to process movie and tv show filenames and folders. You can also override the metadata with the Identify function on the media page context menu.
I had a 2nd gen chromecast that would play half a second and fail, something to do with the data format I think as there was some shenanigans with changing the media container but no real transcoding happening. Solved by getting a newer chromecast which was a nice upgrade anyway.
I also had problems playing on my phone, the integrated player in the app would play video fine while the UI was interacted with, so tapping continuously worked. The picture would freeze up though. Playing through the web UI on the phone worked fine, but I prefer the app. Changing the media player from the integrated to externally through VLC solved that.
So I've found it a bit rough in some cases for me, but there are a ton of Jellyfin apps with nice UI. The core work (transcoding etc) is done by ffmpeg by all the big players (plex, emby, jellyfin) so don't expect much differentiation there.
It's not stagnating, so much as they have decided that their initial market doesn't interest them. They were writing software for end users that let end users set up their own person Netflix. But maybe the revenue was unexciting or just insufficient, and now they want to be their own streaming service.
Their streaming service sucks (they're probably at least two orders of magnitude too small to be able to afford to do it right, maybe even 3 or 4), and contaminates the searches on my server with their junk.
Also, it might be true that they're just afraid of the liability of doubling down on their original market. Contributory infringement and all that. This is almost certainly the reason they haven't expanded to include media like ebooks and audio books and karaoke. I mean they have the perfect paradigm for all of these things... the same software that keeps track of where I am in a season of shows, or halfway through a movie could definitely keep track of where I am in a book, if they wanted to.
This isn't entirely speculation on my part... at some point someone had asked them about preroll trailers for new seasons (Archer might be the most fun for these), but they said that they wouldn't add the feature because there was no legitimate source for those videos (even though just ripping them with youtube-dl is dead simple).
What is the benefit of running the reverse proxy vs just opening the port? It would seem whatever attacks viable on the directly opened port could just as well be carried out on the proxy port.
It seems crazy to me that Plex and other media libraries effectively require you to follow persnickety file-naming conventions. I am very much in the minority of folks who think that you should just be able to point these media servers to a file, tell it what that file is, and then have it maintain associations so you can query your media in arbitrary ways to make a playlist or whatever-- no filenames changes needed.
https://www.tinymediamanager.org/
I'm curious to know why you chose to write a custom (and complex) script yourself instead of using something like Sonarr/Radarr for this task? Does your script do something that the *arr apps are not capable off or is there another reason?
Please tell me I'm an idiot and show me a better way. Lol it won't save me the hundreds of movies I've put in "Title (year).type" format, but it will save some future work.
Me too! General rules of thumb: as long as your content matches the name on https://www.themoviedb.org/ Jellyfin will recognize it and have excellent metadata, posters, etc. Even if you change the filenames later you can re-scan the library and it will be updated to reflect the new names.
Also see the Jellyfin documentation about media naming for TV series https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ and movies https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/.
Besides a pointless re-arranging of the UI, which we all hate, what should they be doing? I'll grant you "Bugs to be quashed", but fewer features to fill, fewer devs on the payroll, and less selling out to make payroll sounds perfect to me.
From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33579209 - Nov 2022 (344 comments)
Better than Netflix: Jellyfin on my NAS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33433880 - Nov 2022 (1 comment)
Why I use Jellyfin for my home media library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33362416 - Oct 2022 (228 comments)
Jellyfin Release – v10.8.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31720125 - June 2022 (14 comments)
Jellyfin: Free Software Media System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28664802 - Sept 2021 (199 comments)
Moving my home media library from iTunes to Jellyfin and Infuse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27462767 - June 2021 (171 comments)
Jellyfin: A Free Software Media System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21986282 - Jan 2020 (173 comments)
Jellyfin is an open source alternative for Plex - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20797851 - Aug 2019 (1 comment)
Finally, I discovered the combination of Jellyfin and Infuse App. It works really well.
I tried using it again 2 years ago - and I simply couldn't find my media anymore. I logged in with my account, and the settings showed me that it was connected to my server, but it showed me a bunch of random media that I did not add to my server. I couldn't find a way to navigate to my media after a couple of minutes, so I uninstalled it, replaced it with Jellyfin, and never looked back.
Maybe I was too blind to find it, but showing me random media instead of my own is a no-go for a local media server.
Personally, my main beef is that as a client app, the streaming service stuff has bled into the personal library UI in obnoxious ways. For example, the default "tab" is called "Recommended". This shows some kind of algorithm-based feed of stuff they think you want to watch. This tab is the default even for your own private library. Why would it suggest stuff from a library that I curate? It's very strange. In the browser, it remembers your last active tab to some extent, but the native apps (like on AppleTV) does not. When I open the app and go to a folder, I just see recommended stuff. Similarly, if you go to the screen for a TV show in your library, it will show a "Related shows" section. It's my library, I know what is there, I don't want these spammy algorithmic things.
Occasionally I run into other parts of the app, which invariably try to steer me towards using their streaming service. It's just a constant reminder of how it's no longer designed for my purposes.
1. You have to use their login service to log into a server that's... self-hosted.
2. The Plex app has very limited codec support, at least on iOS. In particular, I rip directly from disc and Plex would require transcoding for UHDs, or Blu-rays with TrueHD/DTS/etc. audio. Infuse has support for all of that out of the box so my Jellyfin server doesn't do any transcoding at all, and AppleTV/iPad/etc. are more than capable of decoding even full bitrate UHD content.
I can watch my Jellyfin shows from a Flatpak local client on my desktop, pause and move to my phone, pause and move to my TV. That's three different operating systems, and at no point do they transcode, because it's not going through a browser.
For random episodes Plex decides it must transcode (even though they play just fine over DLNA). (I have transcoding disabled so it just refuses to play those.)
Randomly just a blank screen after the last episode in a deck is done playing.
Resuming from screensaver ends up in a broken user select screen half of the time. One time it was even showing the user select while the remote was still blindly controlling the UI hidden behind the logon, as the last user.
1) Adding new users is harder than it should be (the sharing tab takes me to ‘camera roll’ and ‘synced content’ on my phone. ‘Manage library access’ is the correct section to go to.
2) Getting new users to watch default res (not transcode) is not easy.
3) Deleting the pinned crap that gets added every so often is frustrating.
4) Finding a particular setting when you want it is way too hard - settings are too spread out.
5) Splitting out content is irritating (eg mine versus a library shared with me).
6) The server can end up chewing up an absolute mass of storage with its logs, and app data. This is hard (impossible?) to manage from the UI.
7) Probably not a UI bug, but Plex loses the sound/video sync sometimes. Making the show transcode is the only reliable fix I’ve found. I wish I could chose to advance or regard the audio in settings while watching. Or even better, just not break.
I looked at Jellyfin about a year ago and settled on just playing media from my NAS using Infuse but maybe I need to take another look
But the unfortunate flipside is it seems like the best clients (so far) do not support transcoding very well, they want to direct stream.
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Jellyfin was the most promising option but unfortunately ended up being unviable for me, because my home server/NAS runs FreeBSD, and by virtue of C#/Mono being a pain to get running on FreeBSD so is Jellyfin. I could work around this with a Linux jail or moving the server over to Linux but I'd really rather not have to do either.
As an side it's a bit odd to me how all of the most complete media server packages heavily rely on either Python or C#, and also a bit frustrating because when they break it not infrequently has something to do with some quirk in either. Would really like to see a media server comparable to Plex written in something less prone to breakage.
Why? Not trying to be an ass but there isn’t much in a media server that would warrant it all being written in a lower level language.
Personally I run Plex in a Docker container and basically don’t worry about it at all.
Docker might technically qualify as a fix, but I'd rather that the software be engineered well enough to not need it.
This... what's it matter if its hard to get running in linux? you only have to get it running once and bam - you run your server in a container of that.
Could take a rocket scientist working on it... but once it's done? it's done. the container maintainer occasionally releases updated versions doing the same thing that worked previously.
I have Plex running on docker on a QNAP with a dedicated graphics card and rarely have issues (other than my own stupidity).
https://www.freshports.org/multimedia/jellyfin/
Python, and increasingly dotnet are already packaged for every distribution I have tried recently.
Dotnet is even being ported to Haiku right now.
What is the challenge in getting these setup?
It's not an official build, but its been very reliable for me.
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In the end it seems easier for me to just navigate the folder structure and look up any metadata by googling, because I add shows and movies more often than have urges to look up random character's actor.
Oh, and web client doesn't play 5.1
Old school NFS/SMB has "just worked" for me for decades. It's free, uses almost zero server resources, is easy to add content to (just copy a file), and it isn't going to change out from under you when its developer decides to monetize you.
If you really must have a pretty front-end for your TV or whatever, there's Kodi, which is also old-school, free, runs on everything, and so on. My only gripe with Kodi is the same gripe I have with every other media player system out there: They all seem to insist on grafting their own "library" concept onto your already-existing and perfectly-functioning filesystem. I just added that file to my filesystem. Why do I need to add it again to the in-app "library?"
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Then again, I do get most of my content through *arr so perhaps that automation already resolves the filename inconsistencies.
As for 5.1 audio, that's almost entirely unsupported by browsers. I think Edge and Safari support Dolby but I'm not sure if you need to feed those a special kind of format or not. Maybe the native applications get around this somehow?
I just want something that automatically transcodes whatever I watch to account for poor bandwidth when I'm not home. All the library stuff feels so unnecessary and breaks in weird ways that are difficult (impossible?) to solve.
It's a very fast and easy process, I was able to complete the task for 2tb of files in an hour or two, and that's because I was being thorough. It makes the experience close to netflix in terms of quality (in several ways better even). Jellyfin's default behavior of interpreting file names is fine as it is, but clean file names is truly the more bespoke solution.
I used Plex for years and always hated it. It didn't let me customize the home screen in the way I wanted, so there was always a bunch of junk on there that I didn't want and couldn't remove. It also ran very slow on my Samsung TV (1), starting up slowly and responding to the press of a button after about a full second (it had done this for a long time through multiple versions of the app and factory resetting the TV without any improvement; also, the TV is only a few years old).
I got frustrated enough to finally switch to Jellyfin about 4 months ago. It was a pain to get the app installed on my TV (the app isn't in the TV's app library, so it needs to be installed as if you're a dev), but once I got it working it works well. The app starts up faster than the Plex app and is very responsive to button presses.
Back when I was using Plex, I really wanted to customize the home screen to remove certain components and re-order what appears and spent a lot of time reading over settings/customization stuff which never actually let me do what I wanted. With Jellyfin, I simply went to settings > home and the intuitive options there let me do exactly what I wanted to do in seconds.
I can't think of any major issues I've had with Jellyfin, but here are a couple of thoughts. With Jellyfin I needed to create separate folders for what what Plex called collections and add them as libraries instead of collections. At first, I thought this was a negative but ended up deciding it didn't really matter as it works fine. I had a series of videos that wouldn't play properly on Jellyfin until I used ffmpeg to strip out the extra subtitle tracks (they had 42!), but never tested them on Plex so not sure if Plex would have handled them.
(1) I will never buy another Samsung TV, but that's a rant for another post. I considered buying an Nvidia Shield just to fix some issues with the TV, but probably won't bother now that Jellyfin is working well.
What issues were you having with the Plex home screen?
GameStream has been sunsetted though, right? I’m using Sunshine & Moonlight to great success, but not with a Shield.
I didn't like that you can't outright disable transcoding for content served via their app or in the browser. I serve mostly local client and my headless NAS has poor integrated graphics and runs Linux so this was very brittle. Kodi's jellyfin addon can play without transcoding by default so this seemed reasonable.
However in case others want to go this route for a similar use case I hope I can save you some frustration: both this and the native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or passthrough atmos content properly. I also had odd tearing and av sync issues with some large 4k content that don't happen with maven kodi builds.
After a lot of time trying to figure out it, I stripped it out and my shield has no further issues just using kodi despite being the ill famed 2019 tube model. Hdr10, Dolby vision, atmos pass through you name it just works.
You can outright disable transcoding. That’s a checkbox in the server option.
> both this and the native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or passthrough atmos content properly
They do out of the box. Never had an issue with either transcoding disabled. If you have properly configured the source content, Jellyfin is just a passthrough for Kodi and content is directly accessed using the network share.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/8743
I'm happy it worked for you. I have specific content jellyfin doesn't work with where Kodi is fine and I am just sharing my experience with this software package.
I also get audio sync issue with some media types. I am frustrated to the point that I now just copy things on a thumb drive to play on my TV.
Just to understand you setup better, are you using kodi on TV or your server or both?