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Comment by fixmycode | Hacker News Reader

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 My Samsung Smart TV has a really outdated but functional Plex client, meanwhile, my Netflix and YouTube apps are updated regularly, although they're not as feature-rich as the Roku versions.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.

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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

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

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.

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.

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.

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