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Comment by manifoldgeo | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely rooting for Jellyfin to overtake Plex in functionality and popularity; someone needs to. Plex isn't even fully FLOSS.

That said, I don't actually like Jellyfin, and I wish it weren't implemented in such a Windows-centric language framework.

Once I found out that Jellyfin existed, I excitedly spun up an instance and put all my media on it. It can't handle any AVI videos and lags a lot more than my Plex VM with exactly the same specs. Worst of all, it can't detect my external Chromecast, only the one built into my smart TV.

After assessing how well Jellyfin worked, I had to hang my head in defeat and return to using Plex. I can see that Jellyfin has a very active user / developer community on Matrix, and I bet things will get better.

EDIT: I accidentally said Windows-centric above, but what I meant was Microsoft-centric. I meant the company and not their OS. Leaving it the "wrong" way above for posterity.

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I'm in the same boat, I actually like Plex, but want a truly open source solution so we can keep up to date with FFMPEG and a more clear roadmap. But in the 2 years I've been following, I haven't seen much improvement. They are very active, but from a UX and ease of use, it doesn't come anywhere close to Plex.

Also just a note, C#/.NET is cross platform and totally open source. I run an open source app that is in .NET, like Jellyfin, but just for reading and it runs of everything, including Pis.

> That said, I don't actually like Jellyfin, and I wish it weren't implemented in such a Windows-centric language framework.

That's an unfortunate holdover from it's origin as an Emby fork.

> Once I found out that Jellyfin existed, I excitedly spun up an instance and put all my media on it. It can't handle any AVI videos and lags a lot more than my Plex VM with exactly the same specs.

AVI is just a container format and Jellyfin leverages ffmpeg to do most of the actual decoding work, so that sounds like an issue with the VM's ffmpeg. Jellyfin also doesn't enable hardware decoding by default; could be related? I'm not sure what Plex does (for codecs/etc).

> That's an unfortunate holdover from it's origin as an Emby fork.

Unfortunate? My initial guess on first contact with the project was that it'd be some Node thing. I was so relieved to see it wasn't. My unkind but honest and built-on-experience assessment is that it's a big part of why it's so not-shitty. C#'s a great choice for a backend language.

I realized AVI and AV1 is confusing.

> I'm genuinely rooting for Jellyfin to overtake Plex in functionality and popularity; someone needs to. Plex isn't even fully FLOSS.

XBMC (now called Kodi) still exist and is open source. I’ve been using it for going on 15 years now and it’s never disappointed.

Different niches. Jellyfin's a server first, with a built-in (but I think, technically, removable) web UI, and optional clients for a variety of platforms, including set-top boxes like Roku and Android TV and (I think) Apple TV—and Kodi, actually.

Kodi's for running on your set-top box, mostly. Like, yes, you can link Kodi instances together and stuff like that, but it's mainly for running attached to a TV.

I've tried with Kodi off and on, never really being happy with it, since it was still XBMC. I much prefer the Jellyfin model of operation. I spend a lot more time using it and a lot less time having to mess around with it, while using more features than I ever even tried to with Kodi.

I even use both, Jellyfin as a backend and easy web interface, Kodi as a frontend on my htpc thats kept in sync (Jellyfin for Kodi plugin). Best of both worlds. Mainly because streaming JF from Firefox doesn't seem to support surround sound, maybe it's a browser limitation?

C# and .net 6 are not windows-centric.

Here is the very first sentence of the Wikipedia entry [0] for .NET Framework:

"The .NET Framework (pronounced as 'dot net') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows".

The official documentation for both C# [1] and .NET Framework [2] live on Microsoft.com.

I would say the above constitutes a pretty Windows-centric existence relative to some other vendor-agnostic languages, but maybe we're saying different things. What did you mean?

Refs

----

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework

1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/

2: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet-framework

Jellyfin is written in .NET 6, not .NET Framework. .NET Framework is the legacy Windows only version, but .NET 6 is FOSS and cross-platform.

And the documentation is on Microsoft's site because it was originally developed at Microsoft.

The .NET Framework is not quite the same thing as .NET, and they have separate Wikipedia pages which reflect that distinction.

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

Here is the very first sentence from https://dotnet.microsoft.com:

"Free. Cross-platform. Open source. A developer platform for building all your apps."

The download page for .NET which includes downloads for Windows, MacOS and Linux is https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download

What the GP meant is exactly what they said, "C# and .net 6 are not windows-centric.", sadly it shares a name with .Net Framework which was windows centric.

That sentence has perhaps not been edited in a while. .NET has been multi-platform for years. (edit: my bad, I didn't see that you'd linked to the .NET Framework, which is the Windows-only legacy runtime.)

There are several GUI libraries that are still Windows-only (e.g. Winform, WPF, etc.), but the latest one MAUI targets MacOS as well as Windows desktops, in addition to iOS and Android.

Just glancing at the code on GitHub, Jellyfin is primarily an ASP.NET web server targeting .NET 6. The download <https://jellyfin.org/downloads/> page shows a wealth of platforms, of which Windows is only one.

The original statement suggested the Jellyfin was somehow weaker on other platforms than Windows when there's nothing to suggest that there isn't parity on all supported platforms.

The .NET team has put a lot of effort into shedding its Windows-only past. I'm honestly not sure how FOSS the platform is, but at least some of it is open-source.

I made the mistake of saying "Windows" instead of "Microsoft". I didn't mean to indicate that it somehow works better on Windows. I'm running it on Linux and don't have Windows, so I couldn't even be the judge of that. Thank you for this clarifying statement, it helped me to understand.

I was also not aware that .NET 6 is not the same as .NET Framework, so that was my mistake. I'm partly going to blame my ignorance on Microsoft for that one; for us folks that don't develop in M$ land, these distinctions can be subtle.

What I _meant_ to say was that I wish it weren't such a Microsoft-centric language framework.

Then MSSQL or PowerShell are technically not Windows-centric since they have native Linux ports? While cross-platform, the .Net ecosystem is decidedly Windows first. Zero of the .Net developers I know develop on a non-Windows machine.

I think those are very different. .Net 6 (formerly core) is specifically branched to get away from being tied to windows only. In fact the initial versions lacked many of the windows API supports! It is open source and cross platform by design.

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