Jellyfin: Free software media system | Hacker News Reader

Jellyfin: Free software media system

github.com

592 pointsmajkinetor393 comments

Have been using Jellyfin on my synology server for the past 2 years. It's a dream, but you do need to name your files/directories per their naming convention: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ -- https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/

I've always wondered why Jellyfin doesn't have better support for parsing Scene release names, which follow strict naming conventions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)

https://scenerules.org/t.html?id=2020_X265.nfo

99% coverage is achievable via a few straightforward regexes.

Don't get me wrong though, I really like and appreciate Jellyfin, especially on Apple TV with Swiftfin, it's my daily driver for big screen entertainment and it's amazing, 10e9 times better than Chromecasting from a laptop to GoogleTV, which is just a horrible UX (no pause button on the TV) and also would randomly freeze for 5-30 seconds every few minutes.

Plex was nice too, and works great if you are okay with being at the mercy of a closed system for your media center. Though I sure don't miss those pointless forced UI "downgrade in functionality" updates!

Jellyfin parses scene naming conventions fine. I have thousands of films and hundreds of TV shows (with thousands of episodes) all in scene name format and I can think of a handful of matching errors on Jellyfish but it's usually due to a commonish film name and a wrong year or something similar.

I agree it works most of the time, but sometimes falls flat on it's face. Especially for TV episodes and even entire seasons.

The same. I basically never edit metadata. I rarely add IMDB id when slip happens.

You can automate that with sonarr/radarr/lidarr. Works like a dream.

Add prowlarr and bazarr for the full win.

the full win would also include 2 instances of readarr, once for ebooks and one for audio books, whisparr for your 18+ needs, stash for your 18+ needs frontend, and I think audiobookshelf and kavita to play the audiobooks and ebooks respectively. If you're into comics you might also want to throw mylar3 in there and if you have multiple users (aka a spouse and/or offspring) you may want to throw ombi in there too.

Prowlarr is a deitysend. Instead of having to configure indexers in Sonarr, it does the heavy lifting for you. Goes in, configures an indexer, and that's your search setup done.

Toss in RDClient for real-debrid support via the qbitorrent plugin in sonaar/radarr and it's fantastic.

I use Prowlarr as it’s tightly integrated with the *arr stack, but Jackett is another great option if you don’t need that.

What do prowlarr and bazarr do

I use the full stack and all very grateful for the products.

The remaining annoyances are:

- lack of multi language support

- there is no connection between the systems when you want to remove a movie (you remove it in one place and everything knows about that and acts accordingly)

- I still did not make to fully grasp how and where to say "I do not want this particular release". I think I saw that in radarr but it never is obvious to me where it is.

Yeah I was initially surprised when learning about the *arr stack for the first time, as my intuition was very insistently telling me: "I must be gettint it wrong, these ought to be all a single service!!"

They all definitely feel like small parts of a single package, don't look like they merit being their own thing. But it's not my thing, so what do I know.

Honestly I just think the concept of Son/Radarr doesn't translate well to music, I find Lidarr fiddly in general.

In particular I'd add to your list that the overnight scans to update cover art are an absolute mess. It's not so big a deal on my libraries in Sonarr and Radarr, but for Lidarr? Jesus Christ. I have reasonably sized music library (~400/500 gig), and every night Lidarr starts phoning out to check, for every single album and artist, whether the associated cover art or artist image has changed. This takes hours, and is completely unnecessary, and cannot be turned off. I've resorted to just blocking the addresses it does this on, but this breaks things when I try and use it to add new music.

> there is no connection between the systems when you want to remove a movie (you remove it in one place and everything knows about that and acts accordingly)

Not following this. Settings -> Connections in Sonarr for example.

I’ve been using it for a year. I don’t name anything in a special way, and it just works.

Yup running it on RPi with external hard drive. No need to name anything.

As rPi 4Bs are hard to get still / overpriced, unless you’re absolutely married to the rPi, check out OrangePi 5B for a much faster CPU, more RAM, eMMC, and good wifi OR get the 5+ for the same minus wifi (it has an E-key m.2 to add it) but adds a 2280 m.2 so you could throw a 4TB m.2 SSD on there (which are about $200 now) and now you’ve got a pretty dang good little NAS that’s fast and fanless for about $350-400 all-in. Did I mention the 5+ has 2x 2.5G Ethernet?

My pi3b with 3 512GB flash drives streams perfectly in 720p and uses less power than the lamp next to the sofa, what a time to be alive

How would you rate the performance? Is it sufficient for 4K HDR streams over your network?

Which model Synology? I am looking into one of the dual/quad core Celeron models because I heard the iGPU is critical for any kind of transcoding.

Not OP, but you pretty much have to run the Celeron ones. I don't think the docker image would work with the Realtek ones (the ones that end in j). I have a DS220+ (J4025 with dual core only). It works ok, you pretty much max out one of the cores running a 4K stream. I would recommend separating the storage and server if you can afford it. The price difference between the quad core (4 bay) and 2 core (has 2 bay) is enough to get a 2 bay + a N95 mini pc that can handle 4 streams of 4K.

Another idea is to get a thin client with an i7 or i9 (you probably want at least 10th gen at this point) and either an external enclosure for a few SSDs or if you find one with a PCIE slot, a PCIE card to fit maybe 4x m.2 SSDs. Some good deals are out there on U.2 SSDs if you look as well, like 8TB for $400 from Intel or WD good.

Don’t forget that Asrock Rack and Supermicro sell Atom and Xeon-D boards, as well as some Ryzen AM4/5 models if you want to DIY. There are great cases out there (eg Fractal Node 304/804) these days that support full-size modular PSUs with 80+ Titanium ratings to sip power. That’s been my biggest gripe with x86 over ARM: idle power usage for something I expect to have on 24x7 with PG&Es 50c/kWh. I just rebuilt my old desktop 5950x into a NAS using a Silverstone RM44 with air cooling, but it’s made to support liquid as well. That’s got plenty of room to fit 4X full-size GPUs and a power supply to match if you dabble with AI on the side. RTX 4060s are coming soon for $300 and that should be more than enough power for transcodes for the whole family.

It worked on my older "DS 216+II". Could not stream more than 1 person at a time though. That was ok for my usage but not sure for yours.

I recently upgraded to "DS 423+" and it's a lot faster - can have multiple streams going if I want.

Do you ever notice/regret the fact that it only has 1GBe instead of 2.5?

It was the same thing with Emby.

I switched to Jellyfin from Plex cause of it being open source and having AMD/VA-API transcoding support

I’ve enjoyed it a but more cause I feel like I can do more on the server end. I recently started to use Infuse on my Apple TV for it cause turns out that Swiftfin, still in development, doesn’t have a license for Dolby Audio formats.

But the development cycle for Jellyfin and the clients looks healthy, unlike Plex which seems to have stagnated. The next gen Jellyfin Web UI (Jellyfin Vue) is looking good too

Jellyfin is also pretty forgiving about my file names but I am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I have a complex script to process movie and tv show filenames and folders. You can also override the metadata with the Identify function on the media page context menu.

Unfortunately I had a pretty bad experience with jellyfin when trying to switch from plex. Plex works for me in almost all scenarios, mobile, desktop, chromecast, what have you. And I can play multiple feeds simultaneously from my cheap Nuc server. With Jellyfin I had trouble to get video even playing without stuttering/buffering on my phone when on the same network, let alone on mobile internet. I'll probably give it another go in a few months to see how they evolved.

That about lines up with my Jellyfin experience ~18 months ago, although I was coming from (and switched back to) Emby at the time, which Jellyfin was forked from (still evident by all the Emby/MediaBrowser references in folder and file names). Which, IMO, was really interesting, because the codebases were very close to identical for some time yet Emby was orders of magnitude more reliable. I have more and more family accessing my server each month to the point I've almost run out of 'devices' allowed by an Emby 'license,' making Jellyfin a more attractive offering going forward... assuming they've fixed the problems they had at the start.

Hmmm...I might suggest looking into the transcoding settings and changing some things next time you take a look. Because I run Plex alongside Jellyfin (the wife prefers Plex's UI once I tweak it), and it typically runs just as efficiently if not a bit more.

I had some issues with Jellyfin that weren't due to transcoding, still not sure what the cause was.

I had a 2nd gen chromecast that would play half a second and fail, something to do with the data format I think as there was some shenanigans with changing the media container but no real transcoding happening. Solved by getting a newer chromecast which was a nice upgrade anyway.

I also had problems playing on my phone, the integrated player in the app would play video fine while the UI was interacted with, so tapping continuously worked. The picture would freeze up though. Playing through the web UI on the phone worked fine, but I prefer the app. Changing the media player from the integrated to externally through VLC solved that.

So I've found it a bit rough in some cases for me, but there are a ton of Jellyfin apps with nice UI. The core work (transcoding etc) is done by ffmpeg by all the big players (plex, emby, jellyfin) so don't expect much differentiation there.

As other comments suggest, this might be due to transcoding. There is tool Tdarr which transcodes media in advance. h264 could be the safest choice for mobile (hw support) and web.

Sounds like a setup issue, which can be tricky on Jellyfin to get transcoding properly working.

Classic open source alternative feeling. I hope the near future of open source software is more stable and feels identical or better than the closed source options.

Plex might have been stagnating, but it works kinda flawlessly for me. I run it in Docker at home and through a reverse proxy on a cheap VPS (don’t want to expose any ports at home) and even that works really well - the iOS app automagically switches between remote and local networks. Hardware transcoding (Intel) just works, even in Docker. Media scanning is very snappy. User management and parental controls look powerful enough, at least after having bought Plex Pass.

> Plex might have been stagnating,

It's not stagnating, so much as they have decided that their initial market doesn't interest them. They were writing software for end users that let end users set up their own person Netflix. But maybe the revenue was unexciting or just insufficient, and now they want to be their own streaming service.

Their streaming service sucks (they're probably at least two orders of magnitude too small to be able to afford to do it right, maybe even 3 or 4), and contaminates the searches on my server with their junk.

Also, it might be true that they're just afraid of the liability of doubling down on their original market. Contributory infringement and all that. This is almost certainly the reason they haven't expanded to include media like ebooks and audio books and karaoke. I mean they have the perfect paradigm for all of these things... the same software that keeps track of where I am in a season of shows, or halfway through a movie could definitely keep track of where I am in a book, if they wanted to.

This isn't entirely speculation on my part... at some point someone had asked them about preroll trailers for new seasons (Archer might be the most fun for these), but they said that they wouldn't add the feature because there was no legitimate source for those videos (even though just ripping them with youtube-dl is dead simple).

I paid Plex for a lifetime pass a long time ago and unless something changes, I will likely never pay them again and somehow I expect more features.

So it’s not surprising they’re looking at other sources of revenue if they expect to continue paying for developers, hosting and the entire company.

I also don’t see how ripping with youtube-dl is relevant. They need a legal source from somebody, maybe with a SLA, that they can sign a contract with, not set up some hack.

Insightful points, thank you. I only don’t know about the infringement part - Hollywood seems to be the most litigative group, and Plex has them fully covered.

There are excellent plugins to manage audiobooks and several spectacularly good apps for playback though. Don’t know about ebooks

> I run it in Docker at home and through a reverse proxy on a cheap VPS (don’t want to expose any ports at home)

What is the benefit of running the reverse proxy vs just opening the port? It would seem whatever attacks viable on the directly opened port could just as well be carried out on the proxy port.

If the attack is an application layer (Plex) exploit, then yes, I'll still have a problem. But, having a reverse proxy which handles TLS handshakes does provide extra security against a lot of attacks. I trust nginx to be better hardened than the Plex server.

Also, all traffic is tunneled through wireguard and my home IP has no ports open. Since I'm behind CGNAT, my home is really hard to DDoS now. If I'm ever attacked, I'll just turn off the VPS.

Ultimately, I had the choice between paying €2/month for a fixed IPv4 at my ISP, or spend a little more (€5) on a Hetzner VPS that would also give me space for hosting some websites with a great uplink. So I went with the latter.

I will likely add CrowdSec soon which will give additional protection. To my knowledge, it's not available for Plex without a reverse proxy.

I've also contemplated using Cloudflare Zero Trust (Cloudflare Access) instead, and might yet switch to it - I just refrained from it for now because I read on Reddit that running Plex through that might be a ToS violation (streaming). I've to check the ToS and see if that's true. Also, I run a Minecraft server for my kids and their friends, which isn't compatible with Cloudflare ZT, so - I need the reverse proxy anyway.

  > ...am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I have a complex script to...

I am the exact opposite, partly because I feel like it SHOULD BE the responsibility of the media library to maintain associations between the media files and their metadata, regardless of the filename.

It seems crazy to me that Plex and other media libraries effectively require you to follow persnickety file-naming conventions. I am very much in the minority of folks who think that you should just be able to point these media servers to a file, tell it what that file is, and then have it maintain associations so you can query your media in arbitrary ways to make a playlist or whatever-- no filenames changes needed.

I think you can do that, there is an informal standard for xml files which can live alongside the media with metadata info. I'm not sure if Jellyfin can create them directly but it can read them. See for example tinymediamanager

https://www.tinymediamanager.org/

Tinymediamanager looks really cool. Much nicer than filebot!

> I am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I have a complex script to process movie and tv show filenames and folders.

I'm curious to know why you chose to write a custom (and complex) script yourself instead of using something like Sonarr/Radarr for this task? Does your script do something that the *arr apps are not capable off or is there another reason?

I hand-change every file name.

Please tell me I'm an idiot and show me a better way. Lol it won't save me the hundreds of movies I've put in "Title (year).type" format, but it will save some future work.

The *arr suite of apps is made to automate the whole process of building up your media library. You have Prowlarr for managing your download sites and clients, Sonarr/Radarr for TV shows/movies, Lidarr for music, Readarr for books, etc.

These apps can be self hosted and are fully open source. The basic workflow is that you add a movie/show, it automatically searches all of your download sites for the title, chooses the best download based on your filter criteria (resolution, size, etc.), sends it to your download client and then places the movie/show into your library based on the folder/file naming pattern you specified previously.

You can choose to automate as much of the process as you want or do most of it manually. E.g. grabbing new episodes as soon as they air vs supplying your own files (if you rip your media yourself for example) and only letting the program do the part of renaming and moving your files.

The *arr applications can automate it but I personally don’t like doing it that way, unless you are good with your quality profiles bad files can overwrite good and it’s not the best with removing unnecessary files

I use a program called filebot which uses the same metadata sources as Emby/jellyfin and will automatically rename and move files.

So sonarr/radarr queue things up in rutorrent that saves to a temporary location and then I drag to filebot to rename, skim the results for things going weird, and tell it to move em

I let the Ember Media Manager work out the hard stuff around this for me. It is (generally) extremely good about parsing things, scraping the right details, and producing INFO/NFO files that Kodi, Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, etc will recognise.

The only irritation is that it's Windows-only, but it has saved so much pain and aggravation. It can also auto-rename/restructure your filesystem, but I've never been brave enough to try that feature.

For me it recognizes basically all the movies without any intervention, downloaded from random places. For those few it can't find, I just put IMDB id in its metadata and its done. For music, I tagged all albums with Picard previously, so each has musicbrainz data and was instantly recognized fully. On boarding for 10TB media center lasted maybe an hour for video and 0 for audio.

Same here! But for me it was "Title (year in Sumerian Ur dynasty calendar).type"

The only format that stands the test of time, IMO

something like tinymediamanager?

> am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library

Me too! General rules of thumb: as long as your content matches the name on https://www.themoviedb.org/ Jellyfin will recognize it and have excellent metadata, posters, etc. Even if you change the filenames later you can re-scan the library and it will be updated to reflect the new names.

Also see the Jellyfin documentation about media naming for TV series https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ and movies https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/.

> Plex which seems to have stagnated

Besides a pointless re-arranging of the UI, which we all hate, what should they be doing? I'll grant you "Bugs to be quashed", but fewer features to fill, fewer devs on the payroll, and less selling out to make payroll sounds perfect to me.

From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33579209 - Nov 2022 (344 comments)

Better than Netflix: Jellyfin on my NAS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33433880 - Nov 2022 (1 comment)

Why I use Jellyfin for my home media library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33362416 - Oct 2022 (228 comments)

Jellyfin Release – v10.8.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31720125 - June 2022 (14 comments)

Jellyfin: Free Software Media System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28664802 - Sept 2021 (199 comments)

Moving my home media library from iTunes to Jellyfin and Infuse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27462767 - June 2021 (171 comments)

Jellyfin: A Free Software Media System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21986282 - Jan 2020 (173 comments)

Jellyfin is an open source alternative for Plex - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20797851 - Aug 2019 (1 comment)

For years I just wanted a good user experience playing video files from my MBP to a TV, I spent a lot of money (on NAS, chromecasts etc), used a lot of software with objectively terrible user experiences (Plex I'm looking firmly at you).

Finally, I discovered the combination of Jellyfin and Infuse App. It works really well.

I’d be interested to know what you find terrible about the PLEX UX. I’ve been a happy user for years and have found the user interface to be reasonably intuitive. Perhaps dense in places, but certainly not terrible in my opinion.

I don't know how to navigate Plex anymore. I used to use it roughly 8 years ago, and it was simple - it showed me my media, I could navigate through it, watch it, and nothing more.

I tried using it again 2 years ago - and I simply couldn't find my media anymore. I logged in with my account, and the settings showed me that it was connected to my server, but it showed me a bunch of random media that I did not add to my server. I couldn't find a way to navigate to my media after a couple of minutes, so I uninstalled it, replaced it with Jellyfin, and never looked back.

Maybe I was too blind to find it, but showing me random media instead of my own is a no-go for a local media server.

This is exactly the issue. I’m sure most people who installed Plex did it to stream their own self-hosted media, but now Plex by default shoves in a bunch of streaming BS that they want you to watch, while hiding your own media behind a few clicks.

Plex has always had some minor frustrations, but this is probably enough to make me switch.

Yeah some time ago Plex started adding their own content or pushing you to streaming services, probably in an attempt to be more legitimate. I use Plex currently and I remember this being frustrating. With some configuration you can basically remove those options though. I mainly consume Plex through the Apple TV app and the UX (once configured) is above average.

When you’re setting up a new server, it shows you a bunch of default Libraries for their own media. Unselecting them then should remove them from your list. You can also edit your Libraries list later. Managing Libraries is a pretty import part of Plex UI (and Jellyfin for that matter)

If you don’t know which library on the list to click on or drag around, maybe you’ll have a hard time in general.

They show their hosted media first thing now, and hide your media behind some clicks.

I've used Plex for more than a decade, and I've seen it drop in quality over the years as Plex the company has pivoted towards being a streaming service.

Personally, my main beef is that as a client app, the streaming service stuff has bled into the personal library UI in obnoxious ways. For example, the default "tab" is called "Recommended". This shows some kind of algorithm-based feed of stuff they think you want to watch. This tab is the default even for your own private library. Why would it suggest stuff from a library that I curate? It's very strange. In the browser, it remembers your last active tab to some extent, but the native apps (like on AppleTV) does not. When I open the app and go to a folder, I just see recommended stuff. Similarly, if you go to the screen for a TV show in your library, it will show a "Related shows" section. It's my library, I know what is there, I don't want these spammy algorithmic things.

Occasionally I run into other parts of the app, which invariably try to steer me towards using their streaming service. It's just a constant reminder of how it's no longer designed for my purposes.

> Why would it suggest stuff > from a library that I curate?

Mostly to try and help save time, eg to suggest you could resume a couple of recently watched episodes that you haven’t finished yet.

Or that you might want to watch something that was just added to the library in the last few minutes.

In most cases this has proved useful to me and I’ve found it to be a timesaver.

I switch to Jellyfin because Plex was always spamming me to try some off-brand streaming service. I know this behavior is so normalized that even Ubuntu Linux does it now but actions have consequences and it does drive users away.

I mean to be fair it does need to find a way to pay for itself. I paid for a subscription, removed those streaming channels and I don’t think I have been pestered about them in a long time.

For me it's two things:

1. You have to use their login service to log into a server that's... self-hosted.

2. The Plex app has very limited codec support, at least on iOS. In particular, I rip directly from disc and Plex would require transcoding for UHDs, or Blu-rays with TrueHD/DTS/etc. audio. Infuse has support for all of that out of the box so my Jellyfin server doesn't do any transcoding at all, and AppleTV/iPad/etc. are more than capable of decoding even full bitrate UHD content.

Plex is cluttered, messy, not free, not available on all devices, and harder to run on Kubernetes.

I can watch my Jellyfin shows from a Flatpak local client on my desktop, pause and move to my phone, pause and move to my TV. That's three different operating systems, and at no point do they transcode, because it's not going through a browser.

The webOS client runs at an amazing 1fps.

For random episodes Plex decides it must transcode (even though they play just fine over DLNA). (I have transcoding disabled so it just refuses to play those.)

Randomly just a blank screen after the last episode in a deck is done playing.

Resuming from screensaver ends up in a broken user select screen half of the time. One time it was even showing the user select while the remote was still blindly controlling the UI hidden behind the logon, as the last user.

> I’d be interested to know what you find terrible about the PLEX UX

1) Adding new users is harder than it should be (the sharing tab takes me to ‘camera roll’ and ‘synced content’ on my phone. ‘Manage library access’ is the correct section to go to.

2) Getting new users to watch default res (not transcode) is not easy.

3) Deleting the pinned crap that gets added every so often is frustrating.

4) Finding a particular setting when you want it is way too hard - settings are too spread out.

5) Splitting out content is irritating (eg mine versus a library shared with me).

6) The server can end up chewing up an absolute mass of storage with its logs, and app data. This is hard (impossible?) to manage from the UI.

7) Probably not a UI bug, but Plex loses the sound/video sync sometimes. Making the show transcode is the only reliable fix I’ve found. I wish I could chose to advance or regard the audio in settings while watching. Or even better, just not break.

What does Jellyfin + Infuse give you over simply using Infuse?

I looked at Jellyfin about a year ago and settled on just playing media from my NAS using Infuse but maybe I need to take another look

Maybe this doesn’t happen to you but: my infuse app on my Apple TV constantly clears the cache because it gets full. This requires it to rescan my library before I have access to my media. Kind of a pain. Server side processing like with jelly fin would prevent this from happening. This is the reason I bounce back and forth between infuse and Plex on my Apple TV.

I also have this all the time. I think it stores the metadata in iCloud (if you configure it) so it does not rescan your media, but it does need to redownload the iCloud data. No other app suffers from this, so I think it’s a bug.

I have heard/read of people having the same issue but I’ve never experienced this myself thankfully

Recently checked the metadata cache which was about 1.9GB which felt a bit bigger than I’d have expected but I’m not sure what a typical value is

My favorite feature of Infuse is how it clears the Metadata cache every single time I launch the app. Takes about 30-45 seconds for it to show all of my media again. Even with plenty of storage space on my ATV4K.

This is why I stopped using it and switched back to the Emby app. It takes 5-10 min for it to reload for me.

Can you explain more? I am using Infuse with nfs mounted shares and have been pretty happy. Anthing to gain from jellyfin?

Not OP, but jellyfin gives you a web interface and multiple user access kinda like Netflix profiles.

Very helpful especially in a family where you might want to separate out libraries a bit.

The main advantage of Jellyfin is that it can transcode on-the-fly, which is important if you want to share with friends and family that have slower or metered internet.

But the unfortunate flipside is it seems like the best clients (so far) do not support transcoding very well, they want to direct stream.

Jellyfin can help with metadata and keeping track of progress for tv shows etc.

Yeah I run Jellyfin+Infuse at home. The biggest selling point for me is that Infuse has "all the codecs" and I can just throw anything, including full bitrate UHD content at the devices and the server doesn't need to do any transcoding.

I have put all my media on a WebDAV reachable machine and pointed Infuse towards it. For me it’s the most convenient option as I have to manage nothing, don’t need to run a server etc. and Incan stream directly on my Apple TV.

Did you try an Apple TV?

Not too long ago I found myself tired of how Plex on my server would periodically break itself and unhappy with how the company was continuing to pivot away from the core product, so I started looking into alternatives.

Jellyfin was the most promising option but unfortunately ended up being unviable for me, because my home server/NAS runs FreeBSD, and by virtue of C#/Mono being a pain to get running on FreeBSD so is Jellyfin. I could work around this with a Linux jail or moving the server over to Linux but I'd really rather not have to do either.

As an side it's a bit odd to me how all of the most complete media server packages heavily rely on either Python or C#, and also a bit frustrating because when they break it not infrequently has something to do with some quirk in either. Would really like to see a media server comparable to Plex written in something less prone to breakage.

> As an side it's a bit odd to me how all of the most complete media server packages heavily rely on either Python or C#

Why? Not trying to be an ass but there isn’t much in a media server that would warrant it all being written in a lower level language.

Personally I run Plex in a Docker container and basically don’t worry about it at all.

The language doesn't necessarily have to be lower level, just less finicky about the environment it's running in.

Docker might technically qualify as a fix, but I'd rather that the software be engineered well enough to not need it.

I'm not sure that ensuring BSD support is a requirement of well-engineered software. You're welcome to start your own project vs. complaining about Jellyfin, a free and open project. I just wouldn't confuse their product focus with badly engineered software on account of it using a modern language.

Anyway, there is Docker; You could spend the rest of your life shaking your fist, or you could just run it via Docker and be happy that someone else also developed free software to solve these problems for you.

> Plex in a Docker container

This... what's it matter if its hard to get running in linux? you only have to get it running once and bam - you run your server in a container of that.

Could take a rocket scientist working on it... but once it's done? it's done. the container maintainer occasionally releases updated versions doing the same thing that worked previously.

I have Plex running on docker on a QNAP with a dedicated graphics card and rarely have issues (other than my own stupidity).

Well, it was recently added to ports, JFYI

https://www.freshports.org/multimedia/jellyfin/

Good to hear, it was a few months ago when I was looking and it was still a mess back then. Will have to take another look.

It looks like the port was compiled with a binary SkiaSharp [0] since that requires Google tooling to build. Interesting to see the committer allowing this. Apparently it is not the first time.

0. https://github.com/mono/SkiaSharp

Pretty sure recent Jellyfin uses dotnet ( actual Microsoft ) and not Mono.

Python, and increasingly dotnet are already packaged for every distribution I have tried recently.

Dotnet is even being ported to Haiku right now.

What is the challenge in getting these setup?

It’s been several months so I forget the exact issue, but at that point whatever the C# runtime was didn’t install cleanly without manually building a specific branch or somesuch, with no official package being available for FreeBSD.

Is Docker not an option? As far as I can tell, Docker is available on FreeBSD, and Jellyfin has a Docker image available, I've been using it for a few years at this point (on Linux, though).

I happily run Jellyfin in a jail using: https://github.com/Thefrank/jellyfin-server-freebsd

It's not an official build, but its been very reliable for me.

I tried it, but ended up just using file shares. The biggest issue for me is that it does not automatically recognize many movies by their short names instead linking to some obscure thing with a similar name. For instance, since files can not have colon in the name, and many movies do, it gets confused about the title. Another similar issue is about shows and how it recognizes their folder and file structures.

In the end it seems easier for me to just navigate the folder structure and look up any metadata by googling, because I add shows and movies more often than have urges to look up random character's actor.

Oh, and web client doesn't play 5.1

Another "just share files" user checking in. There are dozens of us!

Old school NFS/SMB has "just worked" for me for decades. It's free, uses almost zero server resources, is easy to add content to (just copy a file), and it isn't going to change out from under you when its developer decides to monetize you.

If you really must have a pretty front-end for your TV or whatever, there's Kodi, which is also old-school, free, runs on everything, and so on. My only gripe with Kodi is the same gripe I have with every other media player system out there: They all seem to insist on grafting their own "library" concept onto your already-existing and perfectly-functioning filesystem. I just added that file to my filesystem. Why do I need to add it again to the in-app "library?"

Your filenames can't have colons in them? Sounds like a side-effect of keeping compatibility with 30 year-old Microsoft filesharing protocols. Samba is cool and everything but SMB has no advantages over NFS, SSHFS, or even bind mounts on the same host.

The Windows colon file limitation is annoying, but I've never had trouble with it. Autodetection always seems to work for me, even if the name gets a little mangled (unless tvdb doesn't know about a particular movie/show/season). Sometimes there's a weird extra (year) behind the title because of the way the folder got named, but the metadata itself still shows up right.

Then again, I do get most of my content through *arr so perhaps that automation already resolves the filename inconsistencies.

As for 5.1 audio, that's almost entirely unsupported by browsers. I think Edge and Safari support Dolby but I'm not sure if you need to feed those a special kind of format or not. Maybe the native applications get around this somehow?

If you follow their naming conventions it works great: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ -- https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/ ... but I admit that most people don't want to do that.

Yeah, I don't have time to rename every single one of 100+ episodes.

Also you can argue that the (original) filename itself is part of the metadata. It's useful to have what it was originally called when referencing elsewhere. So where to put this data? in a sidecar file during the rename process or something? We could just use content hash, but then online dashboards to redownload things from vendors, for example, won't necessarily have that there displayed on the page, or when you start downloading it in the browser.

In case it's helpful for anyone else having the issue: mmv [0] means you only have to run the command once to rename every file. It's pretty fantastic.

[0] https://ss64.com/bash/mmv.html

This is why I hammered out a bash script to do my music :)

Thankfully 99% of my visual media was already in the format, but there’s numerous utilities that can bulk rename media in the necessary format

Jellyfin is marginally better than Plex, but I also encountered a lot of quirks with Jellyfin which ended in me giving up on it for streaming my media to my other devices.

I just want something that automatically transcodes whatever I watch to account for poor bandwidth when I'm not home. All the library stuff feels so unnecessary and breaks in weird ways that are difficult (impossible?) to solve.

I also just share files on the server side and then use Kodi on an Nvidia Shield as the client for watching tv. Works well. I looked at Jellyfin/Plex but didn't really understand what it would offer, maybe if I had multiple tv's and wanted a more shared/transferable experience.

Frankly, you really should be fixing and cleaning the tags with a program like tiny media manager or the like. It improves the user experience vastly, from having cover art, background/preview art, plot overviews, actor / studio lists, and clean, consistent file/folder names.

It's a very fast and easy process, I was able to complete the task for 2tb of files in an hour or two, and that's because I was being thorough. It makes the experience close to netflix in terms of quality (in several ways better even). Jellyfin's default behavior of interpreting file names is fine as it is, but clean file names is truly the more bespoke solution.

Here's my personal experience switching from Plex to Jellyfin. Everyone's needs are different, but, for me, Jellyfin has been a much better experience.

I used Plex for years and always hated it. It didn't let me customize the home screen in the way I wanted, so there was always a bunch of junk on there that I didn't want and couldn't remove. It also ran very slow on my Samsung TV (1), starting up slowly and responding to the press of a button after about a full second (it had done this for a long time through multiple versions of the app and factory resetting the TV without any improvement; also, the TV is only a few years old).

I got frustrated enough to finally switch to Jellyfin about 4 months ago. It was a pain to get the app installed on my TV (the app isn't in the TV's app library, so it needs to be installed as if you're a dev), but once I got it working it works well. The app starts up faster than the Plex app and is very responsive to button presses.

Back when I was using Plex, I really wanted to customize the home screen to remove certain components and re-order what appears and spent a lot of time reading over settings/customization stuff which never actually let me do what I wanted. With Jellyfin, I simply went to settings > home and the intuitive options there let me do exactly what I wanted to do in seconds.

I can't think of any major issues I've had with Jellyfin, but here are a couple of thoughts. With Jellyfin I needed to create separate folders for what what Plex called collections and add them as libraries instead of collections. At first, I thought this was a negative but ended up deciding it didn't really matter as it works fine. I had a series of videos that wouldn't play properly on Jellyfin until I used ffmpeg to strip out the extra subtitle tracks (they had 42!), but never tested them on Plex so not sure if Plex would have handled them.

(1) I will never buy another Samsung TV, but that's a rant for another post. I considered buying an Nvidia Shield just to fix some issues with the TV, but probably won't bother now that Jellyfin is working well.

I got a Shield because neither the Chromecast 4k nor my LG TV could handle HDR content. Shield also replaced my Steam Link so that was nice. I changed the Netflix button on the remote to Plex with a button mapper app and then bought a properly sized Plex sticker to cover the Netflix button.

What issues were you having with the Plex home screen?

> Shield also replaced my Steam Link so that was nice

GameStream has been sunsetted though, right? I’m using Sunshine & Moonlight to great success, but not with a Shield.

Cool software. I used it within/in parallel to Kodi to sync a couple devices but ended up removing this layer.

I didn't like that you can't outright disable transcoding for content served via their app or in the browser. I serve mostly local client and my headless NAS has poor integrated graphics and runs Linux so this was very brittle. Kodi's jellyfin addon can play without transcoding by default so this seemed reasonable.

However in case others want to go this route for a similar use case I hope I can save you some frustration: both this and the native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or passthrough atmos content properly. I also had odd tearing and av sync issues with some large 4k content that don't happen with maven kodi builds.

After a lot of time trying to figure out it, I stripped it out and my shield has no further issues just using kodi despite being the ill famed 2019 tube model. Hdr10, Dolby vision, atmos pass through you name it just works.

> I didn't like that you can't outright disable transcoding for content served via their app or in the browser.

You can outright disable transcoding. That’s a checkbox in the server option.

> both this and the native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or passthrough atmos content properly

They do out of the box. Never had an issue with either transcoding disabled. If you have properly configured the source content, Jellyfin is just a passthrough for Kodi and content is directly accessed using the network share.

I ran into this with HDR. I have a fork/branch that strips that logic block out and it works great (tldr; video gets transcoded breaking HDR for any transcode reason i.e. audio/subtitle)

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/8743

Thanks I'll need to take a look next time I start tweaking my tv setup!

I'm not sure what to say. Unless this is a recent change in my experience it does not work as intended. I spent a lot of time playing with the various transcoding settings and per user settings and direct path access or the regular way of accessing files.

I'm happy it worked for you. I have specific content jellyfin doesn't work with where Kodi is fine and I am just sharing my experience with this software package.

For the transcoding setting, they are indeed in the user profile and work since day-1 as inherited from the Emby fork. It does 100% disable all transcoding for this user.

> I have specific content jellyfin doesn't work with where Kodi is fine

Very surprising as Jellyfin is just a passthrough to Kodi. Did you open a bug report?

> I am just sharing my experience with this software package.

Every post here about an open source project be it Firefox or Jellyfin always see plenty of people sharing their experience with it from a decade ago and panning things that actually work. I usually just read them and move on but sometimes I like to give a counterpoint when it’s about a piece of software I consider quite good.

> However in case others want to go this route for a similar use case I hope I can save you some frustration: both this and the native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or passthrough atmos content properly. I also had odd tearing and av sync issues with some large 4k content that don't happen with maven kodi builds.

I also get audio sync issue with some media types. I am frustrated to the point that I now just copy things on a thumb drive to play on my TV.

Just to understand you setup better, are you using kodi on TV or your server or both?

I run Kodi on a 2019 Nvidia shield "tube" model. My media and previously jellyfin is on a NAS that serves the content over nfs to the shield. Shield--Receiver--TV. Look into the maven Kodi build if you have something similar. My sync issues went away using when I stopped using jellyfin and also maybe from removing path substitution when I redid it from scratch. I believe I have fixed output with passthrough in Kodi and upmixed turned off on the shield.

I have tried it a couple of years ago (maybe less), but went back to Plex because of higher polish and family sharing features (which are a little clunky on Plex, but usable). Also, I have PlexAmp set up everywhere (including some Android desktop displays) for music.

How does Jellyfin tackle closed user groups, family photos/videos, remote access, etc?

Look into jfa-go. I run it on the side and it hard-integrates into Jellyfin and adds a lot of account management stuff and the group/policy specific config you're mentioning

https://github.com/hrfee/jfa-go

Agree with this. Same experience

I've been happily using jellyfin for awhile now. Overall it works great. It has a few issues that I would like to see implemented/fixed:

- No offline downloading on iPad

- The official Apple TV app logs me out of my server every day

- Using the native player on the Apple TV app is still experimental and can have issues

- No intro skip

I use Plex Server + Lifetime pass + Infuse. It is an excellent combination and has none of those issues. I point Infuse at Plex for TV shows to get the intro skip. For movies, I point Infuse at an NFS share since Infuse can handle more media types than Plex.

Plex also lets me easily share my movie rips with family members across the country.

For the life of me, I cannot get infuse to connect to my jellyfin server, which is why I use the official jellyfin app. It might be how I set it up on my NAS.

I’ve tried Plex in the past and wasn’t a fan of the bloat and constant changes. I’ll stick with jellyfin since it’s free and doesn’t have the negative incentives associated with pursuing profit. I find that annoying when o just want a clean way to watch my library.

> which is why I use the official jellyfin app

Not sure about AppleTV, but fyi note that there's currently 2 official apps: "Jellyfin" and "SwiftFin".

SwiftFin is better but very new and doesn't have all features yet, etc.

What’s the lifetime pass cost?

$120, which seems a lot considering Infuse works with Jellyfin too.

There is a introskip plugin for jellyfin it's in beta and does not work with all clients yet but it very good at intro detecting for most of my shows. Most of the client app developers have added support for the plugin apart for some that say the plugin is not official they will not add the intro skip button until it is officially accepted in jellyfin.

https://github.com/ConfusedPolarBear/intro-skipper

I've been using this for a few months now. It works pretty well, although it only works through the web client, not some other ones like Roku. I do hope it gets officially merged at some point.

Also I think there's still no tone mapping, meaning watching HDR content can look washed out on incompatible devices, or those transcoding.

There's hardware accelerated tone-mapping [0], does that work for you?

[0] https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-ac...

Cool! Very much so!

That was a show-stopper for me. I have so many 4k UHD files that play beautifully on plex but not so hot on jellyfin. I support jellyfin though, there needs to be competition in this space so plex doesn't run away with the 'ball'.

I've had no issues transcoding with tone mapping in Jellyfin, on both an Intel iGPU and a GTX 1660.

I mean isn't intro skip impossible? Is there something buried in the stream that indicates beginning/ending of an intro? I suspect the streaming services do that "manually" and not by AI or other automated means.

I believe Plex does it by finding similar segments across a season.

Edit: they use audio https://support.plex.tv/articles/skip-content/

Interesting, recently the Android TV app started to do the same thing for me. It logs me out of my server every day.

Probably apple grifting for some $$$

This is how companies compete for space they sometimes disable functionality on the user side to like push people over to their devices.

There's a completely acceptable intro skip available as a plugin.

You mean the beta software with many bugs? Not remotely acceptable in my opinion. https://github.com/ConfusedPolarBear/intro-skipper/issues

Absolutely love this on my Android TV, I just spin up a container on my laptop with mounted folders & I am able to play large files without plugging & copying anything to a USB drive. Android TVs for some reason cannot fathom that video files >4GB do exist along with other basic filesystems like ExFAT & NTFS......smh

I expect the manufacturers don't want to license Microsoft's patents.

Linux has support for exFAT via FUSE since 2009. In 2013, Samsung Electronics published a Linux driver for exFAT under GPL. On 28 August 2019, Microsoft published the exFAT specification and released the patent to the Open Invention Network members. The Linux kernel introduced native exFAT support with the 5.4 release in November 2019.

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

ExFAT and NTFS are in the Linux kernel already. I don't think they'd need to license them at this point.

In the kernel doesn't mean you have a license to use it.

From what I can raad, the 4GB file limit for SMB seems to come from Samba using SMB 2 compatibility. You should disable SMB 2 for security anyway, but it's possible the SMB client still messes up.

In that case, if you're entering a hostname manually somewhere, try replacing smb:// with cifs://. That should force it to use a modern standard that's capable of 4GB+ files.

My mother is able to send a telegram bot youtube URLs. She sends links to audiobooks, yt-dlp extracts audio and saves it in an incoming folder and shes able to listen/download it via jellyfin. Works really well.

Is there source code for this?

The bot part is done in node red (and is a relatively simple flow) it just calls a script that ensures no parallel downloads via a little daemon/fifo.

https://gist.github.com/entropie/d265e94136b9777cc6b3190189b...

Been using Jellyfin daily for over a year now with over 30TB of media. It's been wonderful. It's not perfect like any OSS project, but it's better than every alternative I tried when standing up my media pipeline last year.

It’s not better than Plex though, but it is free

and no ads

Two minutes of interface management and Plex doesn’t show anything but my own media either. (I would prefer it if Plex didn’t advertise its streaming content at all of course, but I’ve paid for my lifetime pass so I’m not contributing revenue)

This github page strikes a pet peeve of mine which is that it has no screenshots of jellyfin running. Why not?

There's a demo on their official website: https://demo.jellyfin.org/stable/web/index.html

I think this is such an interesting comment. If you read my comment I didn't ask for a demo. I asked for a screenshot.

I'm posting this pretty late, so doubt many will read this, but I just want to make a point that the attitude of "I don't need a screenshot, there is a demo 3 clicks away behind a username and password that is murky to find the details" is a terrible message to send.

When you don't bother to put a screenshot of an app as large and as beautiful as jellyfish, for me, it screams, "this is NOT going to beworth your while to install. If you have the knowledge, fine, otherwise, there's a great barrier to entry here. Just to see it, it's 3 clicks and some keystrokes away, imagine what installing and running is like."

The screenshot on the other hand would say to the user, "here is this beautiful app. Now decide if it's worth it to check out the demo and maybe read a few of the docs."

It's open source, so, go take action.

The demo is passworded and they didn't provide the login details.

Edit I don't care about cookies extension removed it. So username is demo. There's no password.

Looks like this rule from the extension removed it:

#disclaimer,.disclaimer{display:none !important}

I am not sure how wise it is to hide all elements with ID or class "disclaimer", to be honest. There are other rules that seem like a bad idea as well (same thing for 'notification', 'notifications', 'notice', 'notices', 'alert', 'overlay', 'modal'...).

Just so you know, I Don't Care About Cookies was bought by Avast recently: https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/21/avast_buys_i_dont_car...

It says on that page the user is "demo" and the password is empty string

I was going to say that it is because the web client is a separate thing, but that repo doesn’t have any pictures either.

Consider me annoyed too.

Jellyfin is still so far behind Plex in media organization and just general reliability and polish.

Also, Plexamp is by far the best music player to exist right now.

That's a bold claim. Personally I'm very much liking Finamp (for Jellyfin), it's coming along nicely and it does a great job IMHO, especially its offline mode works robustly. Looking at the feature list of Plexamp, sure, it does have a few more niceties, but it doesn't look like Plexamp is free or open in any way, so I'm never going to run it.

That's great and all, but the quality difference is 100% there and there is absolutely nothing wrong with paying developers to make great software.

Great, so pay the jellyfin devs. The "free" means freedom not price and you are very much encouraged to pay for free software.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

Kind of a straw man. I keep seeing this comment, but haven't seen a single person say that there is something wrong with paying developers to make software.

But Jellyfin is open source and doesn't try to force you to open an account.

I'm at the point now where I will always choose open source if the product is "good enough" even if it is not the best. Jellyfin is "good enough" for my needs at least.

I have no problem paying for great software. There is an obvious quality difference between the two and it's completely worth it.

Sure, each person is free to have their own strategy. For me, I've been burned many times when commercial software was abondoned, or changed for the worst for financial reasons, or no longer works on my platform for some reason, or never gets some requested feature implemented, or is full of spy telemetry.

But I am not against commercial software and have no problem with others using it. Just not for me.

But it doesn't trick you into an account or subscription

And it doesn't require internet access to watch things on your local network.

That was the last straw for me with plex.

Having to log into a server on the internet to access local content isn't just bad, it's broken by design just like DRM.

Why? Do you not have an internet connection?

This alone, finally got me and my husband to switch. Jellyfin is FANTASTIC, and I wrote a simple script with ChatGPT to help with tagging and metadata for our home collection.

What does it do exactly? I'm always always looking to improve my jellyfin setup

Can't say I've ever had to script anything for Plex.

I found that Plex was pretty upfront about how membership works. I was happy to pay for a lifetime membership given the usage I’ve gotten out of it.

(though if I’m honest the lifetime membership concept feels like a bad idea on their side. Despite using their product regularly they now get no more money from me)

I paid for lifetime over 7 years ago. So, I'm not worried about that.

Where’s the trick? Pretty much every feature a typical user would use is free. Everything else is clearly outlined on their website. Just because you don’t want to pay for software you use doesn’t mean it’s a trick.

Relevant: Collection of potential security issues in Jellyfin[1]

1: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415

How much has been fixed for this, as of June 2023?

I quite like it has a Plex replacement, it passes the "partner test" AND the "parent test" - they can both install the app and watch what they want (as long as they turn off the android player default, which is a terrible default).

I have it behind a firewall so nothing can access it (it's just for home, or for those who need it, over Wireguard). When i have time, it could be a good experiment for Podman or some other way to run rootless containers/jails.

You should probably never expose a service like that directly, no matter what it is, to the internet, at least have it behind something like Tailscale.

Many of these don't seem too bad to be honest. A lot of these are information disclosures that require knowing very long tokens.

The LDAP addon listing credentials is bad. The rest seems like it shouldn't be a problem for normal (in-home streaming) usage; i.e. users reading each other's last login time shouldn't be a problem if you trust the people you share the server with.

That's really the key point here: Trusting the people you share the server with.

Jellyfin is kind of binary in that regard. Once you're authenticated - no matter the privileges - you can reach a lot of places. I've written about this recently, if anyone's interested.

Like others have mentioned, you should probably only expose the server to a trusted group of users (ideally not directly on the Internet).

Definitely. I know there are people who share Plex servers with tens or even hundreds of people, and for those types of use cases you'll definitely want to avoid Jellyfin, but that's not what Jellyfin is intended to be used for.

I don't think standard users can change important system settings, but I've always assumed that they can look at stuff like logged in users and the current state of the system.

It seems that most of these issues are not really a problem if the system is used for a small set of people on LAN only, with VPN if needed elsewhere. Perhaps the browser local storage is an issue, but may be mitigated if the credentials are only useful for that LAN service, with no way for someone to access outside the LAN anyway. Although I'm not a security expert so I may be missing something here.

I'd be more worried about potential legal issues having a Jellyfin server internet accessible.

And if my LAN is compromised, then Jellyfin isn't particularly high on my worry list. I (think I) run a relatively tight ship.

I've given jellyfin a test-drive a few years ago, it was nice but I ended up back with plex. Thanks for the link (and thanks to those who compiled it!). Enumerating all the potential security issues is important for something that runs 24/7 from the home network. That's a decent sized list, would give me pause on giving JF another test run.

semi-on-topic: I created Video Hub App that is like YouTube for local files: shows you a gallery with scrub-able (preview on hover) thumbnails. But does not work streaming videos to TV / tablet - only for local consumption. Hope someone finds it useful.

https://videohubapp.com/

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

Nice. PS. From "See as filmstrips" on down the images don't load on the landing page, and show only the empty frame and shadow (in Firefox).

Thank you for the bug report! I've known about this one for a while -- I think it appeared after I updated Gatsby to the latest version.

https://github.com/whyboris/video-hub-app-gatsby-website

I'd love to migrate to Hugo (which I've been loving) but it will be a hassle with moving every page into 20+ languages.

jellyfin has some nice features that will probably never come to plex, but in the end plex is just so much more pleasant to use. i have both setup against same library and in practice all i barely use jellyfin except for some minor use cases

I went the other direction. I got tired of Plex trying to jam live tv and other monetizing features down my throat.

You can remove all of those with a few clicks.

Sure, but having to keep track of all things the vendor does against my interest and disable them every time they add a new one is a mental burden I'd rather not deal with.

I don't think being perpetually reactive is the right mentality. First it's esoteric. You need to know which menu it's in, and what the setting is called.

And how does this scale? As more of those feature come, and you cannot opt-out of them, even as a paying customer.

Plex has a horrible report with me, and though I still use it, I'm tempted to try other apps now.

I can, but my other users in family and friends are getting mad about it

Pretty much the same here. I bought the Plex lifetime sub many years ago and periodically come across a suggestion to use jellyfin. So I setup the latest jellyfin (fast and easy), point it at the same libraries, install the latest apps on FireTV and mobile, and try it out. I always keep coming back to Plex as the jellyfin experience just seems to have more rough edges and those edges irritate at a time when I'm trying to relax with media.

I just checked to see if I put my finger on the rough edges and the biggest one is around navigating through the library. While both Plex and Jellyfin can sometimes fail to find the "best" cover art, Jellyfin misses about 8-10x as often, often yielding random screenshots from the movie or a crazy zoomed-in view of some cover art. Plex far less often misses. (This is running the latest on both and giving both a full metadata refresh of the affected libraries and then the affected title again just to be sure: Jellyfin 10.8.10 and Plex 1.32.3.7192.)

I tried both a while back, and settled on Plex, as it seemed more fully featured, plus the there's an app for it on my TV, so the UI and UX were better too.

What did you find JellyFin had, that Plex didn't?

> What did you find JellyFin had, that Plex didn't?

An Open source License

I mean, while nice, the parent was talking about features, not the license.

The Jellyfin Android TV app is much faster and more stable the Plex's. For me the Plex app keeps bogging down and crashing several times while I browse my library.

That's a huge plus, however sadly Jellyfin doesn't handle subtitles well, and I really dislike the lack of a quick "skip forward" action. So I tend to still use Plex.

Never had any issues with the Plex TV app myself, other than the number of updates being quite annoying at times.

So confusing, there is also Jellyfish [0] which is also a media server written in Elixir.

Use case is obv different but close enough that I needed to triple check that I'm not going mad.

[0] https://github.com/jellyfish-dev/jellyfish

Jellyfish appears to be a much newer and smaller project.

I have Jellyfin on my home server and use it occasionally on my Apple stuff.

It’s good, but Plex is just better. In addition, it just won’t play some media that Kodi will play. I feel like Kodi will play just about anything, Plex frequently gives me issues with certain formats.

In Plex I occasionally have to force disable Direct Play (which I think means it transcodes) even though it’s a 264 from the same source as everything else. I’ll try Kodi for the one thing I didn’t manage to get working.

That sums up my experience. I found Jellyfin’s media organization better for personal videos (ie. not movies or shows). Plex tries hard to make it match its brackets but the end result is a bit chaotic.

I ended up choosing Plex because of Jellyfin’s issues with transcoding (I’m lazy to pre-transcode all media to Apple native/ compatible formats). It would randomly just crash on me.

And second reason was the really poor AppleTV app. (It was in TestFlight back then, not sure where it’s at now).

And third, unavailability of downloading to devices.

Trying to move away from Plex on my Apple TV, I installed Jellyfin. Server-side, installation was painless. The Swiftfin Apple TV client, however, is basically unusable. It only allows you to connect to a server instance via unencrypted http://, including user and password. Indexing is buggy (it seems to think I don't have any TV shows), metadata lookup seems almost nonexistent, with base filenames everywhere and no organization. Playback, lastly, seems to crash with half my files. Which are nothing special, 1080p h264 encodes with normal settings.

> It only allows you to connect to a server instance via unencrypted http://

Hmm, no, it doesn’t. No idea why you believe that. It works perfectly fine with https url.

I don’t really understand the rest of your comment as indexing and metadata look ups are done by the server and not the client. Plus Swiftfin uses VLC under the hood so it shouldn’t have issue with playback.

Are you using the fairly recent stable version or are you experience on an older development version? Swiftfin has been officially available for only a month.

On my end, it definitely does not work with https. I'm using the main stable version on the tvOS app store that I downloaded about a week ago. The default connection url is http://, and changing it manually to https:// causes it to fail and throw no errors. FWIW, I can't connect with https via the web interace either, so in theory this could be just an issue with my server install.

If the indexing and metadata is done by the server, then the server just is worse than Plex at figuring out what things are.

I can't tell you why it crashes when I try to play back videos that work just fine via the web interface, but it does. They're normal 1080p h264 .mkv files.

I’ve personally been using Infuse as my Jellyfin Apple TV client and for the most part it addresses those issues, and more importantly it doesn’t attempt to live transcode video, which may be what’s causing the crashes you’re describing. The main downside is that there’s a monthly fee if you want it to support 4k video.

I use Infuse with Plex because the official Plex Apple TV app has a really annoying bug where a lot of videos have slightly desynced audio, and Plex refuses to fix it. Infuse does not have these issues and plays everything flawlessly.

I still use Plex. I tried jellyfin for two weeks on my 30+ TB collection but there were so many little issues it wasn’t worth it

Most features are actually plugins made by the community. This felt buggy and cheap.

It was lacking a lot of stuff like trailer support (no the community plug-in does not count)

Also the metadata scanner is a lot worse. The interface is worse. There’s a lot of setup needed for each device but Plex “Just works” (TVs, iPad, phones, etc)

Overall JF is a great project for casual users but it’s not as good as Plex

I use Jellyfin and I totally agree that Plex is a better user experience.

That said, some of the native clients (like Findroid) are excellent. They still lack in features compared to Plex, but they're very pleasant to use.

Ever since I found out about the fact you need to pay a subscription to use hardware transcoding on your own, self-hosted Plex server, I've always ignored Plex as an option. The license situation has only gotten worse over the years too.

I get that the Plex devs want to earn money, but I'm not paying a subscription to play files that never even need to touch their servers.

Same here. I'd love to use Jellyfin, but little things just didn't work. Some videos would not play either for some reason. Plex just works though.

Jellyfin is my jam, it just works. Its administration interface is intuitive, pretty solid, personally I think the dashboard looks good aesthetically, and most importantly it’s open source so if anything is broken I can just fix it myself. If anyone is interested in feel free to check out Swiftfin (https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin) a native iOS client

I use findroid on android. I was using the jellyfin android client but it was missing some features when it comes to HDR and Dolby Digital (Atmos) audio.

Findroid seems to solve these issues so I'm quite happy with it.

Of course, these are open source software solutions so as long as they are under active development then I expect for the software to get better.

I love Jellyfin, though it often struggles with subtitles embedded in the container. They are recognized, but it fails to load them. If I retry it two-three times, it usually manages to do that.

Also, recently discovered it has plugins too, like syncing status with Trakt.

Switched from Plex to jellyfin and it's great.

Just one (big) issue is that it loses it's Chromecast connection when switching between wifi => mobile => wifi.

My terras doesn't have WiFi, so it's a big annoyance.

i never got Chromecast to work with it. There are issues, i tried from browser and Android app.

My raspberry pi has been slowly dying lately. Last thursday I ordered an ODROID C4, because pi's are overpriced at the moment.

At the same time I also moved from plex to jellyfin, and it's really nice, but some files stutter during playback in both the browser and on my chromecast.

Trying different hardware accelerated decoders did not help, so now I'm not sure what to do and debating to go back to plex. Although plex felt like it was getting worse in terms of functionality (I can't put my finger on it exactly).

I’m running Jellyfin because I want to reduce my energy footprint. I’m happy to watch series on my iPad instead of a TV. I also don’t need my disk-based NAS turned on if I put content on an external SSD hooked up to a Raspberry Pi4 with Jellyfin.

I had an issue where my Mac or iPad could not stream anything in h265 (not 100% sure about the format) in the browser. The Raspberry Pi would start transcoding which it lacks the performance for.

Fortunately the Jellyfin iOS client works perfectly, I’m guessing it uses hardware acceleration of the iPad.

My NAS goes into hibernation when its not used, and spins up when Jellyfin asks something of it. Its reasonably efficient IMO

My NAS is turned off and only turned on when required, nothing is more power efficient :-)

Is it common for people to use web apps first when a native client is available?

Yes. I refuse to use native apps when the functionality can be as good in a web app. Things like chat, email, watching videos, listening to music, etc.

A lot of the time the "native" app is using electron anyway, so why go through the hassle of installing it when it is just a app-specific browser?

From commercial entities, hell yes. They don't need a permanent spot on my device.

I like to save websites as "apps" on my devices and use it that way. I do generally prefer web-apps I suppose but I also greatly appreciate the distraction reduction of NOT being in a browser, as the internet has infinite distractions.

i do because it's a lot easier to limit what an "app" can do on your system. It's a sandbox of a sort.

I have Plex running on a Pi 4, with some USB disks attached that spin down when not needed. Seems to also work fine.

Every 6 months or so I give Jellyfin a try, and always come back to Plex.

I heavily use Plex DVR. Jellyfin is not even close in that regard.

Beyond that, I always find annoying bugs with Jellyfin. The last time I tried it, it couldn't handle Photo libraries well.

Also, I need it to work on Roku, and the experience has always been poor.

I understand some people have very limited needs (stream files on their PC onto their phone), but many people pay for Plex to get other features. While Plex is somewhat user hostile, they have delivered, and continue to do so.

Is the Plex home screen still shoddy as fuck? They suddenly shoved my hosted media into a random sidebar menu and started pushing their "free" content on homepage and also started doing purchases and rentals, so is it just getting close to being another Netflix/Hulu?

Can't comment on Music, but JellyFin on my Dedicated Server has been very stable. It has indexed a large collection of movies and shows, makes decent recommendations, and tracks me well across devices. We use Infuse for iOS, Jellyfin on the Web and Android very frequently and we only very rarely found issues.

My Plex app on Apple TV keeps adding their Discover tab to my home page. Keeps recommending nsfw content to my kids. Extremely frustrating because I have unpinned the tab a dozen times.

I will move away from Plex once Jellyfin is good enough.

> They suddenly shoved my hosted media into a random sidebar menu and started pushing their "free" content on homepage and also started doing purchases and rentals, so is it just getting close to being another Netflix/Hulu?

The main annoyance was done once, and you can just go to the settings and disable it. Every once in a while they make minor changes that seem to promote their services, but they're very ignorable. I've only had to go to the settings once to disable/hide their annoyances.

I never quite understood the hostility towards them on this. I suppose if you insist on viewing Plex as solely for playing your own content, sure. But ever since I signed up over 5 years ago (before the streaming services), I knew quite well that I was signing up for a service and that I am not in control. I don't see people getting anywhere near as upset at Netflix as they are with Plex.

As much as they may have deprioritized local streaming - it's not at all dead. They continue to add features to it.

Been running plex in docker from my Synology nas for a couple of years now and has been working great. I have a large library of stuff to index too. The homepage UI on the web,phone,iPad and TV app have been fine for me.

You can unpin the value add stuff from the sidebar in Plex.

Strongly agree with this. Plex’s DVR functionality was very shaky to start with and I switched to using Channels, which to be honest is better than anything else at being a DVR. But it’s $60 a year and Plex costs me nothing (because I bought a lifetime membership years ago) so I switched back.

Every time I tried Jellyfin the DVR stuff had weird problems and the client apps were notably inferior. In fairness I haven’t checked in a while.

> Also, I need it to work on Roku, and the experience has always been poor.

I've been using it with Roku for the last year and it works well for me. It's much quicker than the other apps (Netflix, Hulu, Disney, and god awful Prime). Sounds like there's a specific feature that's missing for you or you dislike? I'm curious what that is.

Jellyfin is an admirable effort and I want to use it, but I use the "Play together" feature a lot and on Jellyfin it's just not that great. Desynchs occur and seeking will usually break the session. Plex handles this exactly as you'd expect. TBH it's still not perfect but it's a lot more reliable than Jellyfin.

I barely use DVR because my OTA is so bad, but I do pay for ChannelsDVR and it's one of the best home server programs I've ever used.

I have jellyfin on my Roku, and it seems consistent with the android app and web UI. I'm curious what specific problems you had?

question: How hard is it to get jellyfin to just present me a random video from my library that it cannot scrape metadata for?

This has always been the sticking point to me for software like this that tries to make things "easy". I realize plex has (or had) a way to label folders as containing home videos, etc, but I vaguely recall problems with it.

I'd much rather see the text "foo.mp4" for a video w/o metatada than have the server just hide the video.

For videos it can’t find metadata for, Jellyfin will either display only the title (if you set the library type to “movies”), or it will extract a random frame from within the video to use as the image (if you set the library type to “home videos”). In both cases, the video isn’t going to be hidden.

I really wanted to love it, but there was just one problem after another. Sure, they could be fixed if I only downloaded certain formats or or tweaked the settings just right, but that takes a ton of time to figure out and get right. If I kept fixing the issues I could eventually have a good experience in a few months or years. Plex has far fewer of these issues so I can spend less time troubleshooting and more time enjoying.

I've been using Jellyfin for the past few years, migrating from a frankly janky setup involving samba and VLC clients. I've been very pleased with the experience for the most part, and it's become the most used application that I self host for my immediate family. Annoyingly, the lack of a PlayStation client (which seems to be Sony's fault rather than the devs) is the main reason I still use Roku.

I switched to this from plex a year ago, despite having a lifetime membership, because plex is much too chatty with their servers and I just don't trust it not to invade my privacy. I bought infuse for apple tv and haven't looked back. Honestly I don't really notice much of a difference, the combo is quite good.

Edit: I still run a plex server for just my music library. Plexamp is the undisputed king.

I still have Jellyfin as a secondary choice, Plex experience is still painless specially remote play and sharing media.

I'm fairly new to the nas hobby, got one during covid and went with jellyfin because plex wasn't free. And honestly, using it has been really effortless and it's been a treat to find it supported in various places (like having the app on my tv. I haven't run into any issues with it so far.

I found Jellyfin easy to set-up using docker and intuitive to use. Have bumped into a few bugs now and then but so far it has not disappointed.

The only thing I’m missing is iOS Chromecast support which was the only thing I actually wanted. Anyone has a solution for that which doesn’t include buying apps?

Been using it for awhile running on k3s in vm and replying this in the arrs using k8 at home helm charts.

Big wish for jellyfin and the tvos was recommendation engine or randomizer as alphabetical and genre browsing is a little bland. This is after using the aarrs to download say all movies by a director.

Sorting by random is coming in Jellyfin 10.9, if that's of any help.

I cannot express enough how much I want to like Jellyfin. An open-source media system is exactly what I want.

But the experience is so goddamn janky compared to Plex (which has a whole host of problems of its own) that it’s —yet— worth switching.

I’ll keep checking in on Jellyfin now and then; I wish them well.

Love it except for the fact that for whatever the reason my Google Chromecast Jellyfin client tends to break subtitle synchronization if forwarding or rewinding a movie. After that, there's no way to get them back in sync :/

Whenever I see jellyfin trending on here or Twitter my first thought is “what did Plex do this time”

I've been running Kodi ever since it was Xbox Media Center and have yet to find anything more polished.

I run via nVida Shield devices as endpoints with attached drives connected to standard audio-video setups (TVs, speakers, receiver/amp, etc.)

It appears there's a plugin to use Kodi as an endpoint for a Jellyfish server... nice! https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/kodi/

Jellyfin is a totally different use case

They are direct competitors in the same space

I tried using it, but removed it after I encountered a bug that after exiting full screen on my secondary monitor it always moves the app to the primary monitor. This bug has been in a Windows app for a couple of years.

I just run an HTPC/NAS hybrid device with Kodi.

Can't be bothered to mess around with transcoding and no need for streaming to multiple locations in the house so I don't need a transcoding-based solution like this.

I use this with infuse and it works amazing. My server mounts to my NAS using NFS and with a flag in your fstab, it only mounts when it access the files. I’m on a 1G symmetrical line and with tailscale, there’s minimal lag.

If you're interested in exposing your Jellyfin instance over the internet, I put together a guide:

https://github.com/sam-6174/jellytin

Jellyfin server is pretty decent. The client apps need tons of work, especially on iOS. Using Swiftfin/Jellyfin iOS app convinced me to buy Plex Pass lifetime.

Probably less of an issue on android with the Kodi app integration.

Someone else in the comments here suggested the „Infuse“ app on iOS. It can use multiple backends including jellyfin, plex, but also sftp etc. Cannot speak for its daily use as I just installed it myself, but looks good on the first glance.

This was my dilemma. Infuse is definitely better. However, if I’m paying to use a proprietary front end, I may as well just buy the software that natively works together.

Infuse also does not support multi profiles on Apple TV. Which makes it essentially useless for multi-user devices.

Yeah. Just found out that it doesn’t even play anything from my jellyfin without buying the premium version. It lists all the things, but as soon as I want to play anything it asks for the InApp Purchase. Not sure what’s going on there, but I don’t like it.

I'm not a fan of Kodi on Android, but Findroid is my go-to for playing media files on my devices. The lack of Chromecast support is the only downside.

Infuse is what you want if you only have movies and other video collections.

I'm wondering how good Jellyfin is for music, mp3, flac, wav files..

It is good. I used Foobar2000 with UPNP for a few years. Now I am using Jellyfin to stream flac over my network.

a big issue is that Plex has managed to get onto the more closed systems (Vizio etc) and not Jelly. Makes it hard to use when some of the TVs in your home don't support it.

I hate that jellyfin does not sort films by categories like director or production company while plex does. Seems to be much more barebones than the alternatives

I would love to run this on my Arch Linux PC and stream to my Google Chromecast but I couldn't get it to run... I tried for 2 weeks and gave up...

Chromecast works reliably here (served from Debian). DLNA is broken, though, but that's probably a firewall rule.

It took me a while to realize that Chromecast doesn't play from the phone itself, you need a server with a valid HTTPS certificate that's reachable from the Chromecast itself to play content. You can also use plain HTTP, as long as you don't use self-signed certificates. For the routing problem there's no solution, you can't, say, have a phone hooked up to a VPN and play to a Chromecast on the local WiFi.

There's also an issue with putting Jellyfin in a different subdirectory (i.e. videoplayer.local/servers/jellyfin) but for me that still seems to work, luckily.

Also make sure the Chromecast can resolve your domain through its DNS resolver. If you use a local DNS server (i.e. the one built into your router) to resolve hosts in the LAN, you need to block 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 so Chromecast doesn't have a choice but to use your normal DNS server.

Firefox also doesn't seem to like my Chromecast but that's the case for every video I play.

I'm running on an Arch Linux based home server, what in particular gave you trouble?

Do you have a domain, with a valid https cert? Chromecast needs to make a couple requests, and will only do it over https, and requires the cert to be valid.

If you’re running over http, or using a self-signed cert, Chromecast won’t work.

That's my exact setup. Works flawlessly.

I've tried Jellyfin but still using Plex. As much as I hate Plex with a passion, it does work.

Jellyfin is buggy and laggy and full of security issues... it's difficult to even play content on my TV. Music doesn't even play on Android app without some weird jittering bug. Plex just works. It's interface kind of sucks, and it has its occasional hiccups, and they insult your Taiwanese content with "Taiwan, Province of China", but at the very least it does what it claims to do... play my content.

edit: playtime came to an end, over 100 sessions created in 30 minutes. Lots of demand!

If you want to run it yourself, I have a fairly easily modifiable docker-compose[1] file for you to adapt to your needs.

1: https://keeb.dev/static/docker-compose-jellyfin.yml

The unfortunate reality of Jellyfish is unless it ever comes baked in to Xboxes and smart TVs it doesn't solve the problem all media centers that aren't Plex have. If you can't add it from an app store and use the tv remote or game controller to navigate it no one I know will use it. So its Plex and nothing else until dethroned because I'm sure like most I'm running an internet facing media server for others.

Which is probably why they've invested so much time into getting their official clients for Android TV, Roku, LG's WebOS, iOS, Android, and more out there for people to download, and have clients for several additional platforms in various stages of development or app-store approval.

https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients

I’ll second this, not to mention the first class support Plex has for audio content. I have dedicated apps for my music and my audiobooks. I haven’t found anything close to that in the Emby or Jellyfin world.

I downloaded it on both my Roku and Fire ( Amazon ) devices just as easily as any other app.

Of course, the applications use the native remotes for these platforms. Since I am the one that puts all the content on Jellyfin, my less technical wife sees it like any other channel ( like Netflix, Disney, or Prime ).

I do not use AppleTV anymore but I installed it on my iPhone as well. I had used Plex before. I did not a find Jellyfin any harder.

I use an Nvidia shield and it has a Jellyfin app (along with basically anything else on Android, which is why it's been perfect for me). User friendly while still being flexible enough for most anything I want to throw at it.

Is there an oss Chromecast-like system that you can use to cast media from jellyfin?

I love Jellyfin. But they need seek thumbnails/preview

I do lament for those needlessly hoarding movies and series when streaming with a debrid service and trakt would suffice

why reinvent a netflix back-end when the front-end is all you really need?

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