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Comment by skrrtww | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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