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Comment by querez | Hacker News Reader

In contrast to most people in this thread, I don't find Jellyfin to be an all-around great experience. Maybe because I run the JF client on a Google Chromecast, and the "Jellyfin for Android TV" app is very unstable. I get roughly one crash a day, mostly when restarting a movie-watching. The UI is okay, but there are a lot of small annoyances (why is there no "restart from beginning" button? Why can't I use the "wheel/cursor thing" on my remote to go forward/back?, why does it so often fail to automatically recognize/parse filenames, or download cover art? Why can't a folder contain both movies and tv series?).... All in all, it's mediocre at best, but I'm still glad it exists: despite everything, I still use it over other alternatives, because it's open source and works well enough. I can live with having to restart the client every now and then.

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> Why can't a folder contain both movies and tv series?

While your other points I'd mostly agree with, this one you're swimming against the stream here.

It's a pretty standard convention to separate episodic and feature content. There's usually different data sources for each, as well as episodic content being different in structure.

It's probably possible to get all of them to live in the one directory, but if you want a better experience from just about any of the media centre software - you're going to have to get used to separating them.

Ideally something like:

/data/movies/<movie name>/

/data/tv/<series name>/season <season number>/

It might get a little bit weird when a TV show also has movies that are correlated to the show plot. Stargate SG-1 had a couple like that, if I recall correctly. It might be nice to display those movies with the show so they can be watched together in the appropriate order.

There is an extremely well written doc on the Plex site about how to handle this exact situation. There are lots of shows like this (Babylon 5 is another example) and it works great if you follow the simple instructions.

Do you have a link? Because I have the same issue with Emby as just split it out

I would recommend installing Kodi on your chromecast and using the jellyfin addon[1] into Kodi instead. The app is garbage and Kodi is awesome.

(Don't use the Jellyfin Connect addon, it's different and I wouldn't recommend it)

[1]https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-kodi

I'll check this out, thanks!

What makes you not recommend Jellyfin Connect? I've been on Connect ~1y now and I found it a smoother and hassle-free experience compared to Jellyfin Kodi (which I was on for ~1y prior to switching).

JC has less bells and whistles with library integration and metadata but I'm not missing anything, really.

I found the experience similar to what OP says about the app. Maybe it's better now, it's been a while.

Right! Yeah, I may just have been lucky in starting to use it when it had gotten stable.

I had frequent connectivity and syncing issues with the other one but for me Connect Just Works. YMMV of course :)

Kodi is awesome, but every time I try to use it on a set-top box-type thing, it promptly consumes the entire available storage. I'm going to have to concoct some type of just-in-time mini-library so that these things don't get overeager with posterization, indexing, artwork, etc., but still allow me to use them to watch things essentially on-demand. Sounds efforty so I just won't.

100%.

I’m glad JF exists, but it needs so much work. From the server to the client, it’s an awful experience.

I want to leave Plex so badly, they introduce bugs more frequently than their useless “features”, but the experience is still streets ahead of JF.

When did you last try? 10.6 -> 10.7 was a pretty big transition that took forever to complete and there were several issues around there.

For some there time every other release had something break bad while the team were all personally running test versions from the master branch...

After that settled down I've found it pretty much rock solid (since around June) and the team seem to have learned from the friction there and have a better release process now.

Have you tried Emby? Year ago I attempted to use plex and it was a disaster- Emby seemed like. Good middle ground between plex and jellyfin

> Why can't a folder contain both movies and tv series?

i don't understand this too... i just want to respect folder not have simple metadata control all

also subtitle SRT upload is broken (maybe fixed in source now)

and jellyfin want to own media plays ok with nextcloud but when i have permissions broken, after i fix chown jellyfin was 100% broken delete/add library didn't work (scan never started) had to entirely delete jellyfin db to work it again

jellyfin is good software, better to alternative, but needs work for improve

I run both Jellyfin and Plex at the same time with the same library. I personally don't like Jellyfin either. I often have problems with stream freezing (especially if fast forward/backward). I play both directly from the browser.

I feel like Jellyfin GUI reminders me of XBMC/Kodi GUI a bit and might make it a better fit for home media setups/tvs

I have tried it a few times, I still feel it lacking over emby which is what it was forked from when emby moved to a more closed license model.

I still use emby as my primary server, but I keep Jellyfin around to keep tabs on the project

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