Jellyfin is great & amazing. Been using the Debian repo for a while now & overall just a huge upgrade to my life. Especially with (non-iphone) devices being able to control & cast.
I still kind of want to burn it all down though. It's such a thick & heavy system. I just want a better world where there's media vaults exposed, that various clients can consume & push to devices. (I want the browser to be able to be both intermediary here and target ideally.)
The huge monolith feels so cumbersome. So much is close but full of gnits. The browsing interface frequently makes it very difficult to get to the next episode; it wants to be smart & just doesn't always cut it & leaves no fall backs. The remote control interface desyncs. The remote control interface tries to adjust colors, I think, but sometimes creates a low contrast or zero contrast interface that's impossible to use.
It's just so big. This fork of an old old huge Emby app... It feels like smaller pieces would work better. It's wild that DLNA for so close, but didn't really cut it; that it's small pieces loosely coupled haven't quite become good enough, somehow. I think a bunch of that is that the controllers on each device never connected, where-as Jellyfin is a centralized system that keeps track of what you're watching.
Jellyfin is probably the most dualistic of softwares that I run. Most loved, most hated. Incredibly thick to try to wrangle; hope of evolvability is low; the monolith has landed and isn't likely to be heavily moving from here. Beware monoliths.
I feel like the sole reason jellyfin exists is because some people don't want to fork over the cash for lifetime plex. Plex just works. Jellyfin is constantly in a state of failure or bad state.
I ran plex for a long time and had a lifetime plex membership. They pushed their services so hard, but I let it pass until they stated emailing out to all my friends what I've been watching.
They violated their promises. They stated that they didn't track or know what people watched. This is absolutely a lie. They have to track it to email it out to friends.
I deleted my account, destroying my lifetime plex pass and moved to Jellyfin. Yes, it's not as polished, but it preserves my privacy and I don't get ads filled free crap tv shoved in my face all the time. Plus Jellyfin generally does just work. I don't miss Plex at all.
I think the opposite, the developers see people willing to pay 100s for Plex lifetime and probably willing to pay 100s more when they have to jump ship as Plex layers shit ontop of just works, while not meaningfully making things work better. Jellyfin is definitely not there yet, but I'm open to moving away from Plex, after spending $$ on lifetime pass.
So many negative comments in this thread when it's pretty fuckin great. Yeah, Jellyfin is rough around the edges and needs some handholding but that's what containers are for. Updates don't work? roll it back. No biggie.
Without Jellyfin I'd probably still be using a SMB share with a VPN, not having access to resumable playback/tracking, easily sharing with other people, convenience of using web/apps, etc.
One thing I want Jellyfin to have is the ability to link a specific file with a specific timestamp, similar to how on youtube you can do domain.tld/videoID?&t=timestamp
It is undoubtedly one of the best media apps out there. What I really like about this project is the attitude of the maintainers towards open software and donations [0].
Kodi is also an alternative that IMO would work better than SMB and VLC, but I personally don't like the Kodi user interface.
What they're missing from the announcement: HOW YOU GET THE NEW TRICKPLAY FEATURE (preview images as you scrub along the seek bar)
1. Upgrade Jellyfin
2. If you configured hardware decoding, go to Dashboard -> Playback -> Trickplay and enable hardware decoding. Note that the hardware decoding needed is MJPEG, it's quite possible the hardware decoding your system supports does _not_ support that even though it supports other formats, so check before you enable this.
3. Go to Dashboard -> Libraries and for each library, chose ... -> Manage Library, scroll down to the new Trickplay section, and tick "Enable Trickplay" and "Extract trickplay images during the scan" (as it makes clear, this does not slow the scan down, it just kicks off the asynchronous task immediately during scan rather than as a scheduled daily task later)
4. Go to Dashboard -> Advanced -> Scheduled Tasks and run Generate Trickplay Images
This is about the only time I'd be OK with those (otherwise obnoxious) popups you get in apps once they've updated version. If Jellyfin showed a "major changes" popup when an admin logs in the dashboard after an update, they could perhaps include a special call-to-action button just for enabling the new feature.
Of course, they could also have a help documentation page for telling upgraders how to enable the feature, and link it in the announcement. After all, the announcement is how I found out there was even an upgrade to apply.
Nonetheless, I'm just glad that the upgrade didn't break anything! I think it's also the right choice to keep existing metadata as-is, and leave it to the admin to turn on options, plugins, etc. and refresh it at their leisure to pick up these new code paths.
Yet another major version without fixing the lack of sane defaults for filtering and sorti g and the lack of user configurable and permanent settings for filters... how are you guys so awesome and terrible at the same time?
I gave up on reporting this yeaes ago when they repeatedly closed issues without fixing it. Go in the web client or linux client and notice the default is show all sorted by something. Change it to u watched o ly by something else. Now navigate away and back and notice your filters are gone. Now go look in settings for any spot to change the default settings and notice its not there.
Readit News
I still kind of want to burn it all down though. It's such a thick & heavy system. I just want a better world where there's media vaults exposed, that various clients can consume & push to devices. (I want the browser to be able to be both intermediary here and target ideally.)
The huge monolith feels so cumbersome. So much is close but full of gnits. The browsing interface frequently makes it very difficult to get to the next episode; it wants to be smart & just doesn't always cut it & leaves no fall backs. The remote control interface desyncs. The remote control interface tries to adjust colors, I think, but sometimes creates a low contrast or zero contrast interface that's impossible to use.
It's just so big. This fork of an old old huge Emby app... It feels like smaller pieces would work better. It's wild that DLNA for so close, but didn't really cut it; that it's small pieces loosely coupled haven't quite become good enough, somehow. I think a bunch of that is that the controllers on each device never connected, where-as Jellyfin is a centralized system that keeps track of what you're watching.
Jellyfin is probably the most dualistic of softwares that I run. Most loved, most hated. Incredibly thick to try to wrangle; hope of evolvability is low; the monolith has landed and isn't likely to be heavily moving from here. Beware monoliths.
They violated their promises. They stated that they didn't track or know what people watched. This is absolutely a lie. They have to track it to email it out to friends.
I deleted my account, destroying my lifetime plex pass and moved to Jellyfin. Yes, it's not as polished, but it preserves my privacy and I don't get ads filled free crap tv shoved in my face all the time. Plus Jellyfin generally does just work. I don't miss Plex at all.
Without Jellyfin I'd probably still be using a SMB share with a VPN, not having access to resumable playback/tracking, easily sharing with other people, convenience of using web/apps, etc.
One thing I want Jellyfin to have is the ability to link a specific file with a specific timestamp, similar to how on youtube you can do domain.tld/videoID?&t=timestamp
Kodi is also an alternative that IMO would work better than SMB and VLC, but I personally don't like the Kodi user interface.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/jellyfin/comments/10pe5pd/a_quick_n...
What they're missing from the announcement: HOW YOU GET THE NEW TRICKPLAY FEATURE (preview images as you scrub along the seek bar)
1. Upgrade Jellyfin
2. If you configured hardware decoding, go to Dashboard -> Playback -> Trickplay and enable hardware decoding. Note that the hardware decoding needed is MJPEG, it's quite possible the hardware decoding your system supports does _not_ support that even though it supports other formats, so check before you enable this.
3. Go to Dashboard -> Libraries and for each library, chose ... -> Manage Library, scroll down to the new Trickplay section, and tick "Enable Trickplay" and "Extract trickplay images during the scan" (as it makes clear, this does not slow the scan down, it just kicks off the asynchronous task immediately during scan rather than as a scheduled daily task later)
4. Go to Dashboard -> Advanced -> Scheduled Tasks and run Generate Trickplay Images
Of course, they could also have a help documentation page for telling upgraders how to enable the feature, and link it in the announcement. After all, the announcement is how I found out there was even an upgrade to apply.
Nonetheless, I'm just glad that the upgrade didn't break anything! I think it's also the right choice to keep existing metadata as-is, and leave it to the admin to turn on options, plugins, etc. and refresh it at their leisure to pick up these new code paths.
Finally. Now all they need to do is fix the iOS and Android clients so they don’t crash every 30m or so.
How does that work in the age of IPTV? Are there DRM free IPS'?
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