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Comment by pwpw | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

What’s the lifetime pass cost?

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

I purchased it in 2014. It was $75 then. I also pay yearly for Infuse. It's worth it to me. Jellyfin is not (yet?) equivalent to Plex.

I would be surprised to see anyone arguing for equivalence, although I admit I have not paid close attention to most of the comments in this thread. But Jellyfin's not half bad for free, too, enough so that after seeing it mentioned on HN a year or two ago and spending five minutes to write up a half-assed compose file (and four hours screwing around with systemd's infuriating approach to sshfs automount) so I could try it out, I haven't felt the need to look for more.

Even my most recent ex, who's nearing fifty and has never been especially at home with tech, found nothing objectionable about using it via the iOS native app - with the content of my library, yes, but that's no more fairly blamed on Jellyfin than it would be on Plex.

I meant that it's not equivalent for me. Plex has features that I use that Jellyfin does not.

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.

It looks like the Apple TV app is indeed Swiftfin. However, I wasn’t using Swiftfin on my iPad, so thanks for the heads up!

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.

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'.

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!

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

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