Jellyfin: A Free Software Media System | Hacker News Reader

Jellyfin: A Free Software Media System

jellyfin.org

318 pointsmatthberg173 comments

Having tried everything from Plex, Emby, and JellyFin to casting on various platforms and RaspPi with HDMI, I found the best experience for me was to get the VLC app on my AppleTV. It plays straight from my NAS over SMB, doesn’t need any transcoding, and let’s me download subtitles on screen directly.

I don’t much care about browsing through a pretty interface and would rather be able to rewind/forward as needed without buffering hell. I wish VLC app had some better features like saving settings or autoconnecting to my default server. But it is great for playing hidef videos. If you want to watch stuff more than organizing and polishing your library, give it a shot.

I really like Kodi on Anroid TV. It has a nice interface and just plays from my NAS via SMB or NFS.

The one thing that keeps me locked into a pretty interface is remembering:

1. What has and has not been watched 2. How far through a film/episode has been watched 3. One click to start watching the film/series from where I left off

If the VLC app can do that then I'm sold.

I have been really satisfied with Infuse on the AppleTV. It does the same thing as VLC, but in a way more polished, Apple-like way.

If you've pre-encoded videos correctly, they'll play in any player with zero seeking and zero loading times :)

-tune fastdecode and -movflags +faststart are the magic keywords

What keeps me locked into these solutions is that I'm totally sold on the ChromeCast concept where your TV is just a dumb screen with barely any interaction (on/off, volume and pause/resume (but only if the stars align and HDMI CEC works)) and your phone/pc tells it which content it should play. Haven't been able to get DLNA working on my current TV.

This is why I use Plex. I tried using Roku and other things with a remote, but using my phone to just cast things is amazing. I also love Plex/Jellyfin because I like organization and metadata and playlists, etc.

I tried Jellyfin, but the UX wasn't there for me. But it's still very young, so hopefully it gets better.

For Chromecast and DLNA, on Android I found that the "Web Video Cast" app by InstantBits works the best [1]. It can automatically transcode videos for DLNA devices. On iOS I haven't found anything that works as good as that app yet.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instantbit...

I use Plex with Infuse on my iOS devices and Apple TV and the Plex app for Android, this way all my devices know what I have and haven't watched.

There's no transcoding or buffering in Infuse (even with subtitles) but you'll sometimes need transcoding for subtitle rendering in the Android app.

> let’s me download subtitles on screen directly.

How do you do that directly from vlc?

It uses OpenSubtitles.org I believe. Swipe down when the video is playing to access the audio/subtitle menu. Then in the subtitle menu there is a download option.

Totally agree. I tried to use Plex on Nvidia shield but it was painful. Best was just use VLC directly.

For music I liked Kodi since it was able to get lyrics, but really haven't found a good use for Plex.

I highly recommend Jellyfin. I've been running it as a front end for my media server for about 2 months. There's some slight hiccups, but it's not Plex.

The only real downside is there are not a lot of native apps available yet.

I also recommend the linuxserver docker images that are a great shortcut to getting it set up along with a suite of complementary software.

> There's some slight hiccups, but it's not Plex.

Please elaborate -- is "it's not plex" supposed to be positive or negative?

I'm a heavy Plex user and I'd love to switch to an open source alternative. But Plex is really good, and I love the native Trakt.tv webhook integration (which means everything I watch automatically gets tracked on trakt.tv).

It uses FFMpeg vs Plexs proprietary transcoder. So, hardware/GPU transcoding can be done for free.

It also doesn't have the latest "free" stuff Plex has started adding in. Personally, I just want my movies or TV and that's it. If I want steaming or news, I'll go find it elsewhere.

PLEX’s is based on FFMpeg.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250377-transcoding-media...

Of all things to be concerned about I wouldn’t consider a media transcoder to be one of them.

I run both PLEX and Jellyfin in Docker containers on my homelab and I have found Jellyfin to "just work" better. The hardware acceleration from my Intel NUC just works for Jellyfin and was always a struggle in PLEX.

Hardware transcoding in Plex requires the paid Plex Pass or lifetime pass. I'm running Plex/Jellyfin on a 7th gen Intel CPU and until recently had a Quadro card in for hardware transcoding (Picked up a 7700 over the holidays and nixed the dGPU). The server also runs a few VMs and things as needed like PiHole.

Plex will default to a dGPU like the Quadro over Intel Quick Sync on the iGPU and on Windows can't be redirected.

Jellyfin has free transcoding out of the box and you can point it to a GPU of choice like Intel Quick Sync over Nvidia. I'm not 100% if that actually uses the Intel iGPU over the Nvidia card as I removed the dGPU before testing. So far both applications are happy with a few transcodes running on the iGPU with maybe 8-10% CPU usage for each.

It used to be a slightly modified fork of FFmpeg/libav. Is that no longer the case?

It's still ffmpeg https://files.plexapp.com/elan/ffmpeg/plex-ffmpeg-2019-08-23...

If you look at the transcoder in htop, you can see the ffmpeg commands it uses.

It IS a fork of Emby, however, which is quite similar to Plex in how it behaves. Crucially, Jellyfin does not make you log into someone elses website for your own content. Don't you find that kinda weird about Plex?

But yes, the downside is the lack of smooth integrations. When I tried Jellyfin about a year ago they did not quite have Chromecast support nailed down, however as of now they've got a fully functional Android app and proper Chromecast integration.

I'm pretty sure you can use plex without logging in for many use cases.

You can whitelist certain private local IP's, however for any remote access it must be done through their app.plex.tv website or whatever unless you're going to setup a VPN.

I think that change was made a couple of years ago. I have ran plex on my freenas server for years and had an older version of it. When i upgraded my freenas to use iocage instead of jails recently, i was forced to update plex, and had no clue about this change. I was shocked to say the least and it is absolutely annoying compared how it was. Emby went closed source around the time as well.

I guess as they say, everyone's gotta eat, and filet and caviar are the menu items.

I will have to check out the IPTV streaming. Plex handles it incredibly poorly and rarely works, while with Emby I have to do hardly any maintenance.

One of the things I found I really like is that Jellyfin is really good at what it does. It doesn't do nearly as much as PLEX, but I am OK with that as I just want it to catalog my movies and TV shows, show some pretty artwork, and crucially play them.

I don't use trakt.tv myself so never looked to see if it has any integration with that.

Both Jellyfin and Emby have Trakt plugins that I use to keep my watch status in sync between servers

main problem is that x265 playback is supported in almost no browser and not supported in the Android app either.

Nitpick: x265 is an encoder for the HEVC video codec. When you play back the video, you're playing back HEVC, not x265.

I moved over to Jellyfin after Emby started sufficiently pissing me off. I don’t really want to pay a subscription fee to self host stuff, but I especially don’t want to be pushed to pay for something that was already free and open source. (I certainly do so voluntarily. Krita comes to mind.) Jellyfin lacks many of the native apps, but at least I don’t feel like I’m being pushed into someone’s annoying monetization scheme.

Jellyfin is also a dlna media server, so even devices that don't have an official client can still access your content in a pinch.

Plex can do that as well.

While true I don’t see how that is particularly relevant to this thread; I was only talking about Emby vs Jellyfin. Did you mean Emby? I know it does but if you were going to use Emby with no native apps you may as well use Jellyfin.

But Emby has a proper IOS client, Jellyfin does not. This is value I pay for. Plus I don't mind paying for quality software regardless.

There is a beta client for Jellyfin as well which you can install via testflight, it may be this one: https://testflight.apple.com/join/TcFUEVEb but I just googled that and did not get it from an official page.

I used this before, and it works decently enough.

I do wish there was a feature to download videos locally for watching on-the-go. (I'm not sure if the Plex or Emby apps have it.)

Plex does have that feature. Jellyfin devs have it high on their list, but it hasn't been built out yet.

I just downloaded it and it actually seems pretty good, albeit I haven’t done much yet. Thanks!

> Plus I don't mind paying for quality software regardless.

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/70869-emby-jus...

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/71240-emby-ser...

The website looks great, but does not offer a lot of detail.

Can someone explain: "Holds your entire movie collection" - does this mean it rips your DVDs onto a hard drive? Or just catalog them?

"Collect your TV Shows, and have them automatically organized by season." - is this over the air TV? Over the Top (Cable). Does it include Netflix, PrimeTV, Hulu? IS this just a catalog of what you like or does it Copy these to the hard drive as well?

"Enjoy your own music collection. Make playlists, and listen on the go." - Can I transfer songs I bought song on Apple, GooglePlay, or CDs?

"Watch Live TV and set automatic recordings to expand your media library" - is this over the air and/or cable? Can I record from streaming services? Once I record, can I watch it on my mobile?

Thank you for your help!

It catalogs and let's you play/transcode to devices. It's a replacement for Plex based off a fork of Emby; however, Jellyfin is completely open source.

I just installed it a few weeks back, and like it a lot. Much less clutter and overhead compared to Plex. The Roku app is what's missing for me, though. When that is finished (it's in development), this will be a great full replacement for Plex, for me.

There is also a live demo available. It sounds like soon the admin features will be exposed too. https://demo.jellyfin.org/stable/

It, and apps like it (plex, emby) are a fancy front end for all your pirated media or personal backups. It requires the media exist in digital form on a network attached device, be it your PC, NAS or server. It will not interface with any legit streaming services you have like spotify, netflix, et cetera. Think of it as a personal netflix-like UI for your local media, and nothing more.

But how does it support live TV?

There’s native support for HDHomeRun tuners, and M3U files.

There’s other plugins to enable TVHeadend access and more IPTV.

I’m one of the Core Team members of Jellyfin, if anyone had any questions. https://github.com/anthonylavado

From what I'm reading in comments, clients are the biggest UX gap. I'm planning on finally setting up a solution for my family and was initially leaning towards Plex for simplicity client-side.

If you were to convince me to try Jellyfin, what would your recommended setup for an LG WebOS TV? Ideally one that allows me to continue using the TV remote.

I tried Jellyfin but reluctantly had to switch to Emby so my family had the WebOS app for the TV.

I'd like to add a vote for Firefox OS for my Panasonic TV.

Most "boxes" that you get would let you use your TV remote through CEC. If you really wanted to add something on, then I would probably recommend anything from a Fire Stick 4K to an nVidia Shield.

That said, we have WebOS work in progress.

I have tried the Android TV Jellyfin app on my MiBox S and it was unwatchable because of the stutter. Is there any work beeing done on that?

Was it transcoding or direct playing the file?

This will actually be fixed in one of the next updates (once https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv/pull/244 is merged)

Samsung's tv app for plex is the reason why I've stuck with plex and become a lifetime pass holder. Is there something available for jellyfin?

Is this a Samsung Tizen TV? No one has come forward to help with one yet... We do have things in the works for most other platforms, and the browser is always a possibility.

Yes its a Tizen

Jellyfin is great, the project team is committed to keeping it open source and they're great to work with.

If anyone is looking to contribute, the React client needs some work and its success would open up support to more platforms.

Switched to Jellyfin a few weeks ago from PLEX and it has been rock solid so far. I especially love how much better managing users is. Having more control over who can download, stream, and transcode when doing either of those things is A+.

Does Jellyfin offer a way to watch from outside the local network alà app.plex.com? Or do I need to set up a vpn as well?

Just the usual ways of exposing a service to the public net. Port forwarding or VPN would both work fine. Jellyfin does support UPnP.

There's also fairly complete documentation on setting up a number of reverse proxies if you're considering port forwarding: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-pro...

Awesome thanks!

If you use a media player/manager like this, where do you get your movies? Is there a online movie store that you can download in appropriate format? There was a place for this before good streaming services existed but how do you legally obtain movies and store them on a NAS to feed into JellyFin? Are people ripping their blurays? I ot out of watching all the latest and greatest movies 10 years ago where we would just torrent everything into a folder called /movies. Now it's just the odd Netflix series so I am interested to know how people manage their movie collections and how they acquire them.

It's a valid point. I think it all boils down to:

a) Grab a copy of your favorite show or movie as a blu-ray and rip that (which is illegal in most jurisdictions, as you have to break the copy protection).

b) Watch it on Netflix and grab it from somewhere else (which is also illegal, because you don't own it if you have Netflix)

c) Don't care at all and just download the stuff "from sources".

d) Just watch open or initially free stuff. That's even harder.

It's pretty hard to stay on the safe side for this kind of thing.

Maybe we will see the same we had with the music industry some time ago: It's possible for me to get a FLAC album without DRM nowadays from perfectly legal sources. Not every album and every niche, but I can buy it and own it. Maybe the movie industry will have the same moment in the next decade.

OK so in practice, most people utilisting this type of software are either bending or breaking the law to organise their movie collection the way they want to. I would really like to be able to manage my media on a NAS with a great piece of OS software that organises them with no ML smarts (when did people forget about alphabetical order and a few tags/categories) but what you gain in privacy and other benefits there you loose in fighting the uphill battle in acquiring the files, time, management etc. It has to be a hobby.

This issue is exactly why (imo) Plex has shifted to focus on features it’s core base actually doesn’t care about.

They’ve been trying (desperately) to present Plex as a business supporting only legitimate and legal usage.

First it was “curated” podcasts and “web shows”, then News(??), TIDAL integration, ad-supported media, and so on.

Originally it was very clear that they wanted to help you organize and play all your content without judgement and with the most beautiful experience possible.

Clearly Not Any More.

> Grab a copy of your favorite show or movie as a blu-ray and rip that (which is illegal in most jurisdictions, as you have to break the copy protection).

I was fairly certain this was allowed in Europe as long as you own the discs (or otherwise has a permanent right to watch the content?)

Anyone knows the details?

It's technically illegal in most jurisdictions, but ignored if you're doing it for personal use - i.e. you're not burning 1000 copies, selling to your friends, or re-sharing on the network. The UK passed a law in 2018 that sort of decriminalised copying DVDs, but bypassing any DRM or TPM (technical protection measures) is still technically illegal. As far as I can tell.

In Germany, a copy for private purpose is allowed. However, breaking the copy protection isn't allowed. There is a lot of uncertainty though: The wording of the law could allow "breaking" the copy protection if it is not secure (where you technically wouldn't break it any more). For instance, the DeCSS case would have been such an exception. Perhaps.

I’m not 100% on the details (everytime there’s a legal win, there’s a dozen lobby groups fighting against it), BUT in Canada it’s likely legal to “format shift” discs that you own by using the internet to download unencrypted copies of them.

You’re not breaking encryption thus are safe from that can of worms, and assuming you’re not uploading (distributing is definitely a crime, even a single chunk of a torrent) and it’s for personal use I believe that the law is on your side.

People are doing exactly what you think they’re doing. They’re building collections of content illegally from torrenting.

With everyone creating their own subscription streaming service these days piracy is about to making a roaring come back and with the advances in software out there today it’s becoming easier than ever. You can go to reddit and find 100s of Plex servers that people open up to others for a small fee or even free. These servers contain nearly everything that’s popular. Why would you want to mess around with 2-3 HDMI dongles/boxes and 4-5 streaming services when you can have it all in one place for significantly cheaper and with little technical ability other than installing the Plex app and registering for a shared server? I suspect as time goes on Jellyfin will become the go to for these types of ‘services’.

> Why would you want to mess around with 2-3 HDMI dongles/boxes and 4-5 streaming services when you can have it all in one place for significantly cheaper and with little technical ability other than installing the Plex app and registering for a shared server? I suspect as time goes on Jellyfin will become the go to for these types of ‘services’.

This, except for most people maintaining their own private libraries, it probably makes more sense to use Kodi to play back files in a file system, than to rename everything to fit Jellyfin/Plex's fairly inflexible file naming requirements.

There's software that can rename and sort your library for you though

I haven't figured out the balance between using renaming software (I've tried the free version of Filebot, but it has horrible latency for some reason.), and being able to remain a contributing member to certain media communities.

My solution to this has been symlinks. All the media files I download maintain their original names and structures so they can continue seeding, and I maintain a separate folder structure that complies with Jellyfin's naming conventions. All the files are just symlinked so they don't take up any additional space, and I have a couple small scripts to check for missing/broken links.

As someone who ran Kodi for quite sometime I can tell you it just doesn’t quite meet the wife approval factor. Not to mention it has basically no utilities for on the fly transcoding and remote playback which was the killer feature that pulled me to Plex to begin with.

> As someone who ran Kodi for quite sometime I can tell you it just doesn’t quite meet the wife approval factor.

Have you tried manually adding the content to the "Movies" and "TV Shows" libraries in Kodi? Kodi seems to have much more robust and flexible library support, though the process is less "set it and go" as well.

(A huge gripe of mine is having to store TV show seasons in a prescribed format in Jellyfin — I'm just testing it with movies for now.)

> Not to mention it has basically no utilities for on the fly transcoding and remote playback which was the killer feature that pulled me to Plex to begin with.

But yes, it's lacking on the other points, and for discovery of "similar" stuff.

If you have terabytes of media already, possibly. If your music matches iTunes naming standards it'll import easily. I've kept on top of media naming and it's pretty easy unless you're bringing in a ton of files.

TITLE (YEAR) is easy to edit, then clear metadata for the original file name so that isn't picked up. I use Rename My TV Series for shows.

I agree. Once you would go to a video shop and all the popular titles were in one location (annoying to be physically there, but central). Now you need to find out which streaming service is on, have the app, subscription (then remember to cancel if just one show interested in). It's a mess.

I did not know about these shared servers. Makes Plex/JellyFin etc interesting. All the popular media one spot ready to stream.

Note: although it is fine to add friends to your Plex server, it is against the ToS to sell access and users are shut down. Those few are probably setting the rest of us up for legal action at some point.

Absolutely, and I don’t participate in that. It’s going to ruin it for all of us and all I can say is I’m glad I’ve already been able to get several years out of my lifetime PlexPass.

I’m speculating that the rise of Jellyfin is/will be because of the coming crackdown on Plex and Emby. Github and other repository services will eventually begin shunning Jellyfin much the way Popcorntime was pushed to shadier corners of the web.

In the end this is all driven by the media companies refusing to deliver an easy and reasonably priced way to have access to most video content.

Your last sentence is dead on.

I also have Plex Lifetime but wonder if I'd have more of a voice if I was month to month vs no longer paying in.

I have Jellyfin running side by side with Plex, though the library is much less curated. I find it works for about 90% of what I want to do once I set up remote access and link in friends and family already connected to Plex. I don't have any player issues (all PC based) so the lack of apps for some products doesn't bother me.

The only thing that keeps me from using Jellyfish over Plex is because of the TV apps. My Samsung Smart TV has a really outdated but functional Plex client, meanwhile, my Netflix and YouTube apps are updated regularly, although they're not as feature-rich as the Roku versions.

The Samsung Smart TV OS apparently is being cycled out for more modern alternatives. Surely the Jellyfish team knows this but with the ever-changing landscape of TV OS's, it seems like it's really difficult to support a large quantity of devices.

I've only hopped on to Samsung's TV platform with recent hardware, but it seems to me like they've gravitated towards shipping Tizen enabled TVs for the last few years. Is there significant fragmentation in Tizen land?

Honestly the Tizen software is just so horrendeously slow. Getting an nvidia shield and slapping it on the TV is well worth it just to have smooth UI interactions. And the shield also has a chromecast built into it…

We got a Samsung The Frame this Black Friday, which uses Tizen. It is our first really smart tv, the other we got is a 2012 Panasonic plasma.. Anyway, i'm quite pleasently suprised with the response and UI interactions.

My Samsung tizen based tv has gotten progressively slower over the years I've had it. Samsung's also forced an uninstallable tv plus app onto my tv.

Jellyfin also functions as a dlna media server so might be enough to get the job done (depending on what you're using it for). I use Jellyfin dlna with my Samsung TV to stream OTA, iptv, ipcams, movies and recorded TV. I have a bunch of other devices in the house that can access it this way as well.

Does your TV support DLNA, Plex supports it, and Jellyfin does too so if the app stops working, you could fallback to this.

Same, and there is no playstation 4 client planned that I can see.

I'm not aware of any official investigations into this by the team, but here's my two cents:

* PS4 development requires purchase of an expensive development kit (2500$, although they sometimes lend them to developers for a year as well), which is probably just not financially viable for most contributors as there is no way to make back this money for them

* The PS4 SDK and everything related to it is under NDA and open sourcing code linking against it seems to be forbidden (e.g. the Unreal Engine excludes these parts from their public source code releases as well)

This is correct. There's a bunch of stuff that would require significant investment and also closed source components. It's telling when even Emby doesn't have a client in the PS4 store.

They've made it pretty clear in a number of threads on Reddit that native apps for Samsung and LG are very low on the priority list. The standard advice tossed around is either to drop some coin on a shield, or cast from another device. I eventually ended up buying a shield, but once I did that, the main things that were annoying me on plex that originally motivated me to investigate Jellyfin turned out to be issues with the native TV apps, with the android version on the shield having none of the problems, so I ended up just switching back to plex. shrug

> They've made it pretty clear in a number of threads on Reddit that native apps for Samsung and LG are very low on the priority list.

Low in priority insofar as there are not many developers with that hardware contributing to the project. If you have the hardware and free time to contribute, please do.

Both Samsung and LG have emulators that are fine for feature development. You don’t need the hardware and there are too many variations to even make that worthwhile.

I guess technically that might work but developing software for a platform you don't use yourself is hard work when you're usually only rewarded with user complaints i.e. when you are not getting paid.

That's a real shame, and I had to switch to Emby for the WebOS app so my family could use it easily from the TV remote, at least I know the situation isn't likely to change in the near future.

I think it's a mistake for them not to put huge effort into TV apps; on the TV is, after all the main use case for this.

Suggesting people buy other devices isn't going to fly either.

I have a hundred devices in my home that can run an Android app or web site, but convincing my family that any of them are effortless to use is another matter, I suspect a lot of the technical people here have families similarly disinterested in the complexity of a 3rd, 4th or Nth remote control to deal with.

I use the Plex app as well as VLC (and netflix, spotify etc) on my Amazon Firestick and it works great. I guess the only downside is that its related to amazon (as in that they will probably know what i watch etc, not sure if thats true for plex / vlc).

I am pretty sure you can sideload jellyfin on that trhrough adb as well.

I don't really understand the complaints about TV apps for jellyfin: it's pretty much a given for these walled gardens. You're usually better off just hooking up a raspberrypi or firetv stick to your TV, smart or dumb. And CEC is an awesome tool to control everything together.

Jellyfin's available on the Amazon App Store for Fire TV devices: https://www.amazon.com/Jellyfin-for-Fire-TV/dp/B07TX7Z725

I've been using Jellyfin for about six months and have been overjoyed with it. Amazing alternative to the nasty proprietary apps like Plex and Emby.

Previously, I was pointing Kodi at an SFTP server which worked fine, similar to the guy who had a good experience with VLC. Those are both great standalone solutions.

However, adding "media server" software like Jellyfin into the mix gives my users a much wider variety of clients to choose from (including the Jellyfin addon for Kodi) without compromising freedom.

Various other perks include tracking watched status across devices, Chromecast support, and re-encoding video files so they play on old clients or slower connections. The playback reporting plugin is fun as well.

Keep up the great work everybody!

Just so the rest of us know, what's "nasty" about Plex and Emby?

I speak mainly in regards to their closed-source, proprietary nature.

I used Plex briefly some years ago, but became dissatisfied with nag screens, paywalls, and the inability to conduct user authentication on my own terms. Usage of a Plex account (or Google/Facebook integration) is mandatory, which is uncool.

Emby used to be alright but as of version 3.6, the project was taken closed-source[0].

Thankfully the Jellyfin developers stepped in, and are working to continue the legacy.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20181212100152/https://github.co...

How are you handling remote access to Jellyfin? I have it set up internally but not yet accessible to friends/family.

I've got nginx running and acting as a reverse proxy[0]. I've found it's an easy way to manage TLS certificates, and using a memorable subdomain is a bonus for my users as well.

The Jellyfin server is configured so no user tiles are shown on the login screen. Everybody who logs in must type both a username and password.

My upstream bandwidth is not great, so WAN streams are choked to 4 Mbps each, for all users except myself of course ;)

[0] https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-pro...

I really want to use Jellyfin. There is one major thing holding me back right now which is no Roku app without hacking an emby app. I'd love to even help develop or test a Roku Jellyfin app, but I know nothing of their code base (or .NET)

Check the jellyfin-roku GitHub repo.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-roku

Requires setting your Roku to dev mode and side loading. Didn't want to toss some half finished slop onto the app store. It's been in a semi idle state because it covers most of my use cases and I don't really know enough about other people's use cases to know what needs to be fixed or updated before people find it "acceptable". (I'm not a BrightScript dev, which gives a bit of extra imposter syndrome and makes me nervous to consider a thing shippable too).

BrightScript is awful, but if you can help develop it would be great (the server is in .NET but the Roku app is in Roku's BrightScript). If not, testing and feedback and prioritization of feature requests also helps a ton.

We have to write some BrightScript at work in order to maintain an SDK for our QoS data analytics product. It's one of those things where you forget about it until you have to work on it again, then you get to go through all the stages of "why would someone do this" all over.

I think Roku is actually one of the better OTT platforms out there, but that's absolutely in spite of BrightScript.

Clients are a gap for sure. I have a PS4 and Wii U already under my TV; I'm in the process of motivating myself to set up a proper media server, and Plex seemed like a safe option given that there are phone and game console apps, and a web client for desktop use.

Would love to try Jellyfin, but I'm definitely not setting up another box + remote for it, and it sounds like the web client is a little patchy in the PS4's browser.

(looks like the web client does have a bunch of PS4-specific detection in it, so it's getting at least some testing/use— perhaps I'll check it out: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/search?q=PS4&type=C...)

It's not exactly as nice as a custom built app but I just discovered today that the official Roku Media Player app will automatically discover Jellyfin servers on the local network with zero configuration.

I just happened to stumble upon this while browsing around and suddenly a Jellyfin logo popped up and all my movies were there.

I'm not familiar with the Roku platform, can it see DLNA servers?

I'm in the process of trying to move to Jellyfin from Plex, especially as Plex tries to shove in more "features". Right now the only thing that's holding me back is the state of the Roku and iOS apps, which are still pretty rough around the edges(and neither officially available yet).

Since the audience here is developer-centric, I would like to share that I contributed a small amount of code to jellyfin and the interaction with the developers was very positive.

I've never used a media server before. What advantages does a media server offer over just storing stuff on a set of folders?

For me, a media server:

(1) Pulls media metadata automatically

(2) Can serve content to a variety of clients, including smart phones

(3) Provides user access controls for when you want to share your content with others

(4) Can transcode media on the fly for clients that don’t natively support a media format

(5) Allows you to logically split up your content into libraries

(6) Provides powerful search capabilities using metadata (e.g., by actor, by genre, by director)

(7) Provides support for audio as well as video content

It's easier to browse and stream to other devices. It can also help organize your files and retrieve metadata about them.

Flashy movie posters you can idly browse through while you are curling up against your significant other.

There's a real emotional difference in clicking on a movie poster rather than squinting at text in a list of folder contents.

Additionally the media server will generally pull lists of actors, directors, and other related works, as well as holding your place in the episode or series if you are working your way through a TV series on the weekend. "What episode where we on?" becomes a rhetorical question rather than a debate.

Also, other quality of life features such as searching your library, ordering your list by different criteria such as directors, critic reviews, release date, combining movies/tv shows into organized collections etc.

Plus your library marking what you've seen and bringing what's next to the fore. Kodi does this very well

Plus gives you the optional ability to watch your media from anywhere, even outside your network.

I use Archos video player on a firetv and connect to my miniDLNA instance. Archos gives you all of the movie posters, imdb descriptions, actor info etc etc. my dvr recordings are also served from minidlna which allows archos to pop up “new episodes!” on recently added series episodes

What is the benefit of this being a server side function?

Remote access and a single library of truth across multiple clients - keeping track of what’s been watched and when. There’s other bits, but that’s the most important.

Am I the only one in this thread doesn't regularly fall asleep or get distracted watching a show/movie? Multiple times a week in having to fight to find which episode or where in the movie I was. This is painful with the atrociously slow uis of every app I use.

Archos flys and this is in the face of Amazon's Fire OS which is not the fastest UI at all.

> There's a real emotional difference in clicking on a movie poster rather than squinting at text in a list of folder contents.

Sounds like the opposite of a feature. Never judge a book...

Grabs metadata for shows and movies (episode titles, actors, summaries, thumbnails, etc)

Handles organization and searching for various media

Additionally, clients available for smartphones and Android TV devices.

And most importantly for some people is being an endpoint for accessing their media remotely

For me the significant advantage is showing me a list of films I haven't seen yet, or the latest unwatched episode of a show.

Another nice aspect is collections with access controls per user, useful if you have kids.

Shameless plug: I built Video Hub App that does something similar: gives you a nice YouTube-like layout (and many more previewing and searching capabilities) for videos on your computer (no streaming though).

Website: https://videohubapp.com/

MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

This actually looks pretty nice. I'll try this out tonight. Thanks.

Has anyone have any overview of how robust the security situation is? I attempted to setup Jellyfin behind an nginx proxy with basic auth enabled because I didn't know how trustworthy their security is, but ran into various issues with the setup that couldn't be resolved at the time. It sometimes worked, but mostly ran into issues. This was around the time when the fork happened and Jellyfin was very much a new thing, I have not tried it after that.

Jellyfin is really good, I've switched from plex and haven't looked back; it doesn't really have a native client I liked but the jellyfin addon for kodi works pretty okay.

It's also much faster to scan my library with jellyfin than plex, (few minutes vs an hour and a half) though I'm not sure why as I only have ~30 shows.

> jellyfin addon for kodi

Is this how one would watch media from Jellyfish on TV, install Kodi+JellyFish AddOn for iOS/Android and then Chromecast to TV?

Depends on the tv as it does have native apps for some tvs

Any recommendations for a remote control when using it as a HTPC? Didn't see anything on the site but it's not specific to Jellyfin and IMO that's just as important as the media software itself.

I run Jellyfin in my home lab and just Chromecast it to my TV.

If you've got a newish there's change that your TV's remote will automatically work via HDMI using CEC. Kodi on an rpi worked out of the box with the remote from my store brand best buy tv for ~5 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Electronics_Control

I used to use a Gyration[1] universal remote control that had a trackpad built-in that allowed my thumb to easily move & click the mouse cursor on my HTPC. Alas I used it so much over the years that it eventually lost responsiveness to my thumb. The manufacturer doesn't make this remote anymore and I never found another computer that made remotes with this kind of mouse technology :(

[1] https://www.newegg.com/gyration-gyr3101us-universal/p/N82E16...

I've given this a go, I'd love to use it over emby, but until it has an LG WebOS app, so my family can use it easily, I can't make the switch.

They'd benefit hugely, I feel, from focusing effort on the native apps. Some of this is more challenging; WebOS for example never had an OSS app, so there's nothing for Jellyfin to fork

A few comments up I read, that Jellyfin acts as a DLNA server. Can't you just connect your LG as a DLNA client/renderer?

Yes, but the experience is substantially worse; you get some ugly folder icons, no art-work, and names are based on folder/file names rather than Meta.

Family (particularly little ones) love the beautiful artwork/cover art layout you get from the likes of Emby/Jellyfin/Plex.

Ah, ok, I see.

My biggest gripe with Jellyfin, Emby, Plex etc. is the lack of .rar-support.

It annoys me to no end. Kodi has had support for ages (back in the XBMC-days) but the feature-request and bountys seems to fall on deaf ears.

Other than that i've found the meta-data to be "better" in emby/jellfin compared to Kodi.

RAR is a proprietary format... there is no free-software code to decompress RAR archives (the license agreement for the code that is available prohibits using the code to 'reverse engineer' the RAR format itself, and I'm guessing most projects don't want to have to change their license agreement to a non-free-software license to be able to include RAR support).

Not sure why anyone actually uses RAR these days...I really don't get it.

I still have tonnes of .rar. Exclusively for legacy reasons (you can google why .rar exists), sure i could spend the time extracting everything, or continue using Kodi which is my current solution.

I don't think the license is the issue, Kodi has solved it with a external dep if i'm not mistaken. The reason is more related to your last sentence. They don't get it, and thus doesn't want to spend time on solving it. Which is their prerogative of course, but it still annoys _me_ :)

> I still have tonnes of .rar. Exclusively for legacy reasons (you can google why .rar exists), sure i could spend the time extracting everything, or continue using Kodi which is my current solution.

I don't understand why you'd want to keep media files in .rar, unless you are part of scene distribution.

It's not like ROM emulation, where there's tangible savings to be had storing the individual ROMs in a compressed format.

Well, for the longest time, like a decade+, there was no point to spend the time unpacking the files. I could watch them with unrar| mplayer without any problems. Then XBMC came along and everything continued to work without a hitch, it isn't until now the need to unpack them has actually presented itself so i of course see this as a step back and degradation in my personal user experience.

But i guess times are changing, kids these days etc. :)

I think the problem with these products is that they build on the assumptions a file is a file and not that a folder can be a file and a file can be a folder.

The assumptions you need to do to make a folder into a file requires a lot of extra work.

An example of a folder that is actually a file could be a folder named "A Good Movie" with a bunch of .rar files in it.

I've built a streaming plugin for deluge that tries to work around these assumptions but only for a playback scenario and not an indexing scenario. That allows streaming of multi-rar file torrents.

There's also the problem that many rar parsing libraries reads the beginning and end of each part of a split .rar file. That can cause a lot of latency with e.g. 100 files.

Edit: all this applies only to rar files with no compression. With compression you can't do much with regards to seeking and whatnot.

I know way to little about the stuff, but if you want to be my personal hero you are more than welcome on tryin to solve it :)

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/85

I think that summarizes the current status afaik!

// mrmlz

As many of us long time Plex users see new, unwanted features vs having issues fixed (like syncing or a method to run it as a service), Jellyfin has become my next step. I haven't set it up for external access yet but so far I'm enjoying the simplicity. I'm not limited by lack of certain apps/players as I do everything on PC but I'm excited to see where this crew can go.

How does it compare to Subsonic/Libresonic/Airsonic in terms of being a self-hosted Spotify?

Music support exists but needs a lot of love. Currently for my usecase (streaming my music to my Android phone) transcoding doesn't currently work (streaming flac over a mobile data connection is bad news) so I've fallen back to using dsub/gonic (subsonic compatible server) until transcoding is resolved.

It finds metadata pretty well (Artwork, artist info, and summaries) but playback leaves a fair bit to be desired and playlists aren't very well fleshed out.

Thanks! First time I hear of gonic too. Why use it instead of Airsonic?

Personally I'm just not a huge fan of java and the web interface was a bit on the annoying side, although it has a few more features like grabbing podcasts (which never really seemed to be implemented into other clients).

As far as gonic goes I've been testing it out for a while and haven't run into any issues and I'm a bit of a fanboy for stuff made in go. It's still pretty bare-bones, but has been pretty stable and fast otherwise.

Looking into it would seem that gonic might not actually do transcoding yet (airsonic could transcode into opus after some configuration which is nice) although, caching from dsub might have saved me there if that's the case.

The main issue with jellyfin as far as mobile stuff goes is that it doesn't cache any tracks so if I was going between wifi signals audio would frequently cut out which was never a problem with airsonic/gonic as dsub will request a couple of tracks ahead of time to compensate for deadzones.

I personally don't see much use for all those fancy features over a simple but adequate minidlna server, except I don't get why after all those years no one implemented proper automatic library rescan for it. There are workarounds but it should work OOTB!

Jellyfin is one of my fallbacks in case Plex ends up walking off the cliff of pointless bloat and unwanted partnerships. The current Tidal integration, that you can’t fully disable, was the first time I started considering alternatives.

I have it disabled on my server. It’s just a drop down and I set it to “disabled” and that was that.

I uninstalled Plex when they disabled user plugins.

Yeah except now it’s suggesting songs on tidal that played during tv episodes. Haven’t found a way to get rid of that :/

Go to "manage libraries", then edit each library. Once the edit menu opens, go to the "advanced" section and untick "include related TIDAL content". That ought to sort it out

Can you view stuff indexed on NAS, running Jellyfin, from a separate HTPC running Kodi? NAS is the best place for indexing media but not really for viewing them, HTPC is great for viewing media, but not for storing them.

How is this compared to Kodi?

Kodi is a media player, not a media server. There's a plugin to use kodi as a front-end to jellyfin media server.

But Kodi can just play files off an attached/networked storage and collects all the metadata if need be, so what's the difference?

As answered at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21988656, it has benefits if you have multiple clients.

If you just want to watch local, I would stick with kodi. I actually used both for some time. Emby / Jellyfin for remote + other users and kodi local Now I switched to Kodi + jellyfin addon for local.

How does it compare to Emby? What's better, what's worse?

Jellyfin is open source, based on Emby 2.4.X or something like that. It can do hardware encoding out of the box. With emby you have to pay for that. They now start with refactoring all the code, because apparently Emby code was really spagetti like.

There is an Jellyfin Dev in this thread. Ask him about the Emby Database design where DB and XML files where all mixed :)))

DL;DR: Not too much difference for the enduser right now. Might load a bit faster, because of website refactoring.

Slowly but surely transitioning to Jellyfin from Plex.

A lot more development still needed, feel free to contribute.

What kind of device would be best for attaching to a TV? Rasp4 or something like that?

Does this have an option to completely disable transcoding?

You can disable transcoding per-user, there's no option to disable it system wide.

Is it possible to customize the movies screen to eliminate pagination and use a continuous scroll instead?

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