Jellyfin: We're Good, Seriously
forum.jellyfin.org
forum.jellyfin.org
Once someone stops donating, it is unlikely they will put up the effort of continually researching on which client/dev to support. This would be much better handled by Jellyfin maintainers.
Especially in Europe where you can get a nice tax deduction but only if you do the donation to a well (and complexly) registered non profit
I think many have donated to Mozilla thinking they were donating to Firefox only to later realize donations never reach Firefox.
The Mozilla case shows why it's bad to not have transparency.
That signaled the last time I would ever donate to Wikipedia.
But as others have said, the hax office might not like it
(I also agree with various other reasons in other people's comments, most of all that this lets donors vote with their money on which third party projects that work on top of Jellyfin get the money, rather than Jellyfin having to decide which ones deserve what proportion of spare money.)
In fact their decision is pretty mature and nice : they have enough to support the project costs but they don’t want the project to become their job and that’s exactly what money flowing over a hobby does : changing it to a job.
Still directly supporting the code running in the project. Balances out that people seem happier to donate to the UI/product layer than something like ffmpeg. Might be a bad example, but I’m sure some of their dependencies are underfunded.
Like others said, they're hobbyists providing a service in spare time. Asking them to be money managers is not a trivial ask.
May I ask which open source projects you maintain?
There are more deserving projects in the world than there is money. If you don't want to manage who gets the money directly (this could be called micromanage!) then something like united way which redonates to projects that you haven't heard of is probably a good use of your money. (United way is controversial and they do not support open source but they are still a good use of your money if you want to do the most good with the least thought)
Is a donation even if the other party is upset about it.
You have posted an observation about non-profit organizations and described a defining characteristic of donations that go to them. You have not given a defining characteristic of donations.
> This is how donations are SUPPOSED to work: contribute money towards a COMMON goal
You mean like shoring up the Jellyfin ecosystem?
> Donations are not free money.
Donations are free money. (When the donation is money; donated clothes are obviously not free money—they're free clothes.)
Why would anyone feel deceived?
Make an announcement like this, but add that beyond x years of runway the remaining donations will be funneled to the community projects.
Seems like a perfectly good place for it to me.
The only thing you can say in favor of reddit is that most people already have a reddit account. Had, in my case. It is convenient in that sense, but reddit is not better than the forum. And reddit stands for everything that Jellyfin is against.
With all the practical and principal considerations summed together, ditching reddit was an easy, and the right, choice.
(I personally think they made the right choice, am just responding to your comment disagreeing that it would be a transparency issue if they changed how things worked moving forwards.)
Except the IRS may step in and spoil the idea ...
I couldn’t find evidence that they do. If you donate money to me (not a 501c3) because you like something I do and want me to keep doing it, I can do anything (legal) with that money without IRS comment. (However, your donation to me is not deductible to you.)
By donating directly, there's one income tax layer removed.
I remember reading an article about that, how Jimmy Wales was driving super expensive sportscars around and such - it made me pretty much resolve to never donate to them. Ever.
Not withstanding the super aggressive please for cash every September or whenever they do it.
What is the connection between Jimmy Wales’ personal spending choices and your decision to never donate to the Wikimedia Foundation? As far as I can tell, Wales is not paid by the Wikimedia Foundation.
What is the connection between Jimmy Wales’ personal lifestyle and the Wikimedia Foundation? Wales is not and has never been paid by the Wikimedia Foundation. He is not fundraising for himself.
Like, David Heinemeier Hansson drives super expensive sportscars - does that mean you don't use anything he works on?
I checked the Form 990s back to 2004 at https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200... . Wales has never received compensation from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Is your issue that he makes his personal wealth from some other source, and doesn't transfer enough of it to Wikipedia? If so, do you have the same views for board members of other non-profits?
I suspect you understand it pretty much perfectly, you just don't think the underlying premises of my position are correct.
> Wales has never received compensation from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Buying an expensive sportscar in the name of the foundation and then using it as though it were a personal car wouldn't show up as compensation.
I tried finding more, but the accusations against Wales are mentioned on the wiki page for wiki controversies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...
Maybe it's just accusations, although I remember reading articles as well. Although maybe if Jimmy was more transparent about where his wealth came from, and maybe if Wikipedia didn't disingenuously and constantly beg for money despite having a surplus, I'd be less skeptical.
What I don't know is if you are being that sort of a person specifically about Wales and Wikipedia, or about any sort of charitable organization, or if your disdain has some other reason.
I wasn't able to find a mention of Wikipedia using their money to buy him a sportcar. The link you pointed to mentions "Jimmy Wales was accused by former Wikimedia Foundation employee Danny Wool of misusing the foundation's funds for recreational purposes." then says "Brad Patrick denied any wrongdoing by Wales or the foundation, saying that Wales accounted for every expense and that, for items for which he lacked receipts, he paid out of his own pocket"
Is the article you read based on that accusation?
If his money does not come from the Wikimedia Foundation, why would it affect things? Like, if he charges $80K speaking fees and gets invited to 4 of those talks per year, then he could easily rent an expensive sport car for a few days.
As I wrote, there are a lot of rich people who are on non-profit boards. They aren't transparent about all of their funding sources. Are you equally dismissive of them as well as their non-profits?
If you don't like their begging ads, don't give them money. The same holds for your local public radio station, which will have fund raising even when they have a surplus.
FWIW, Wikipedia is not currently asking me for money, even when I visit in a new private window.
It sounds like they have a general policy of "no paid dev". Further, it's possible that part of the motivation is the belief that if they did have it, it might lead to negative consequences (fewer contributions from non paid devs, squabbles over compensation, generally having to manage payouts etc)
- it'd be distracting, they're open source devs/maintainers not fund managers
- it could be divisive and they'd risk taking flak if they get it "wrong"
- it creates a class of "approved" clients and related projects
I think the Jellyfin team's approach is pretty reasonable.
That said, if I was them I'd probably do what the Helix devs do [0] and rather than telling people to stop donating, remind them that donations are a "tip" to the project and shouldn't be assumed to be buying you anything or paying to ramp up development (or marketing or anything else). I really appreciate that stance and their attitude that it's great to have the money and they'll spend it if and when they need it, while also encouraging people to consider donating elsewhere if they want to have a bigger impact.
Exactly this! It is extra responsibility which distracts from the core project.
I understand the argument that deciding who gets the money and how much is nontrivial and perhaps better left up to individual donors, but I disagree that it would be dishonest or misappropriating funds if you were to do so.
IMHO, most people donating to a software project would assume the funds are used for something related to that software project. Of course you can invent a narrative saying that the funds are now given to <developer> of the project, and now that he owns the money, he wants to donate to <some other project> -- it's probably a valid legal argument in case disputes arise, but it probably isn't what the original donors had in mind...
Disagree
> - it'd be distracting, they're open source devs/maintainers not fund managers
True. Dedicating time & effort to this would take away time & effort from development. But the harsh reality here is:
1. Client devs simply will not receive anywhere near as much funding as the drop Jellyfin are proposing/asking for.
2. It's clear from the article that Jellyfin's main devs would prefer a world where those client devs do receive such funds.
It's ultimately a trade-off: Jellyfin central dev would take a hit from taking on such a fiscal role, but the Client dev community would benefit, which sounds like it would benefit Jellyfin ultimately. Entirely up to Jellyfin's devs on whether they feel the hit would be worthwhile but I don't think it should be dismissed out of hand & it's worth suggesting.
Additional admin that will lead to more costs in a self-fulfilling cycle. This is a bad idea. People who are donating are already doing so with intent. Trying to gues where their money would be best placed is playing unnecessary financial games. They're a software developer, not a pension fund manager.
>Once someone stops donating, it is unlikely they will put up the effort of continually researching on which client/dev to support. This would be much better handled by Jellyfin maintainers.
They're already using the client just as they're using Jellyfin, how is this any more effort than what they've put into donating to Jellyfin directly?
The money doesn't have to be spent just because it's there. Personally I'd be a little annoyed if I donted to a project and the only change they made was to burn the cash on advertising that they otherwise didn't do.
Remember, Jellyfin is a fork of Emby which was a fork of Plex - both those projects were open source and then went paid. After being burnt twice like that I think it is understandable why many Jellyfin developers have had enough of that and will reject anything that even slightly could be seen as going paid. So while hiring someone might be possible and in the best interest of Jellyfin in a different world, they cannot do that in this world without losing support.
Probably not. The amount of money they are taking in is very small, and if they start to ramp up revenue, then they actually need to start paying people for non-core work, like lawyers and accountants. Assuming that the money is received in Canada, by an Ontario registered non-profit, then it is really easy to do the accounting work for small dollar amounts (I ran several Manitoba and BC based non-profits previously for conferences and community work). If you start paying people who can't invoice you, then you need to sort out cross-jurisdictional payroll, and if you are making alot of purchases through other services.
Comments like this are unhelpful because it assumes that the developer of the project has a desire to run a business (and non-profits are businesses) rather than building and shipping an open source tool that scratches an itch. It's cool to speculate on what could be, but if you think that is the right approach, fork it, run the business transparently, and allocate a portion of revenue to be held in reserve the moment the core team for the project you forked asks for it.
If I was running a popular open-source project, I wouldn't make it public that I've got extra money that I'm giving away. That comes with all sort of complications...
My only real complaint is that for whatever reason it really does not like my folder structure - most of my files work but it'll randomly decide that a bunch of episodes in a folder are a single "file" with multiple "versions". Reading their docs it seems like they really want you to conform to a specific folder structure, but not only would this take me forever (I've been growing this collection for 15+ years now!), I just don't want to change it; I'm happy with my folder layout and it makes sense to me, it's really surprising that Jellyfin can't just show me the raw files.
One might even argue that it is impossible to be "perfectly pedantic".
Regarding the randomly merged episodes, perhaps the culprit isn't the folder structure or file name patterns, but metadata on the files themselves? I never had this particular situation, but I wasted my fair share of life dealing with assumptions music players make about ID3 tags, and how they're routinely broken by files sourced from random places on the Internet.
Musicbrainz Picard is a life-saver. I don't add any audio to my collection without putting it through Picard first.
Jellyfin will alter those to add paths to media it downloads and perhaps overwrite curated descriptions with those from theTVDB, IMDB, theMovieDB, etc.
YMMV test in isolation to be sure, etc.
I think there's a kind of disconnect between the kind of users that use these media libraries - a lot of people seem to really value the metadata aspect of it, how it collects all the info the IMDB or whatever and tries to sort and match stuff.
And then there's people like me who just want a server that can handle any file I throw at it and play it over the internet, I'm not too fussed about the other aspects. Part of me thinks that maybe I'm using the wrong tool for the job, but Jellyfin does otherwise work really well for what I want, folder gripes aside.
I just use nginx (with directory listing enabled), let's encrypt and HTTP basic auth. That basically gives you what you're asking for. But it won't do the fancy web sync so that you can watch it with your friends.
I've been thinking I'd like to expand to start capturing the YouTube channels I watch most and dump into series directories for them. I've gotten tired of trying to work around what YouTube seems fit to shove in my direction. I really wish there was a "don't show me content from this channel" option, as if you click on any bait, you keep getting that channel for weeks after under suggestions.
In a browser, tap the 3 dots on any video and "don't recommend channel" is right there.
It's very poorly laid out in a list, but I have found it useful before.
TV shows just need s01e01
Then import the folders and dont allow jellyfin to fetch online data.
A good tip is to include the imdb or tmdb ID in the file name for movies and in the directory for TV/Anime, it'll make things unambiguous
Hmm ? I've been having issues with SyncPlay since forever. Media stuck for some people, stuck at loading. Playing until some point, then freezing.
Basically whenever I'm doing something with SyncPlay it's "press play and if it does actually start never press pause"
But that's literally my only issue with Jellyfin, I've been using it for the past year and it's awesome.
Some very-well-requested features/clients have gotten no traction at all, with no one coming in willing to start/help developing them. We've had to abandon some (like Chromecast for a while, though it's getting new life in the last few weeks) because of this.
We're aware that probably the biggest complaints about Jellyfin are about the lack of client support, and the rough edges/lack of polish. We do hear you. We do want this to improve this just as much as you do.
But we need people to help us do so. We need more volunteers who can help make the code better, write new code, document, and generally improve things. We need your help to push past what I call the Development Bystander Problem, get some new blood into the project, and especially, help to make it better!
https://jellyfin.org/posts/a-call-for-developers/
Even without paying for development, money could be spent to improve the developer experience and attract new devs.
They have acknowledged client development is an issue in the OP and the link above. Could they not support client devs with hardware, licences, costs, etc...
Bad moral is bad for code.
If you have enough money, you can swallow that pill and push through. If you don't, it will make things worse.
They have enough money for what they do, but they haven't got nearly enough income (donations) to pay everyone market wages.
It doesn't have to be enough to sustain a developer, only enough to attract a developer who would have otherwise not bothered.
> but it is enough to make a project feel like work to a hobbyist
I really don't see how anyone would do something but then decide not to once they found out there is a reward.
The people who can realistically claim the reward realistically can get better rewards elsewhere.
Once you shift the thought process from considering how much fun you have hacking into accounting how much you can make, people start spending time in a way to that will optimize earning potential. You start losing.
How many people paint for fun? Do you think they'd do it if it was a job that paid $3/hour?
Yes, but why does that mean someone who was going to do something no longer would. Or that someone who was tempted but wouldn't, still won't now there is more incentive.
> Once you shift the thought process from ... how much you can make...
I'm talking about a reward / incentive, not employment. JellyFin has a merch store, offer contributors some merch via vouchers or something!
> How many people paint for fun? Do you think they'd do it if it was a job that paid $3/hour?
Do you think that if everyone automatically received $3/hour for all hobby painting they did that nobody would paint anymore? I think they'd get a coffee with it and take a moment to look back on their work.
They acknowledge they have issues they can't fix due to a manpower shortage, they also acknowledge they have more money than they can spend.
Paying market wage may not be realistic, but supporting or donating something to developers who support them would go a long way to attracting additional volunteers.
I mean, a silicon valley developer getting paid $200k/year might fix a bug in some open source software for free because it was bothering him and he wanted to give something back to the project.
But if I offer that same developer $100 to bail on date night with his wife to fix a bug for me? That's not an offer I'd expect him to take me up on.
But you made the point badly, confusing things by adding in the date night - so that instead of comparing "fix bug for free" vs "fix bug and be paid, but much less than their usual hourly rate", you instead compared "fix bug for free at a time that suits them" vs "fix bug at an inconvenient time and get paid less than their usual hourly rate".
I can't actually work out why you bothered to bring bailing on a date night into it at all...
The time spent fixing a bug for $100 doesn't get magicked out of nowhere - that's time that could be spent meeting friends, doing sports, spending time with family, reading books, creating art, enjoying good food and wine, learning new things, or even sleeping!
For a similar concept expressed in a wordier way, read about Maslow's hierarchy of needs [1]. Our hypothetical developer's physiological and safety needs are fully met - and their unmet needs won't be much helped by $100. I avoided this and chose the wording I did because some of Maslow's wording like "self-actualization" and "transcendence" kinda invites confusion IMHO.
Far less confusing and questionable, I thought, to merely argue that sex is more fun than software development. But apparently not...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Others will look at that and calculate how far under minimum wage it was, and start to question if it's worth their time after all.
You end up with bad feelings on every side unless you pay market wages, and even then you end up with people questioning if they just took on another full-time job, instead of a hobby.
It's really, really hard to add money to the equation and not make things worse.
I think if they gave an incentive they would have benefited more so than lost.
Check the ultimatum game for proof that people are definitely able to prefer no money at all.
I’m not saying this is what is happening here, but money doesn’t come alone, and overall it might be worse than no money. My point is, money is not everything - sounds really old, but it’s surprisingly true still.
When I (and the other original folks) decided to fork Emby to make Jellyfin, we had seen exactly what trajectory other projects in this space had been taking:
1. Start off small and FLOSS. 2. Attract a userbase. 3. Start requesting more and more money. 4. Start "paying full-time developers" or similar. 5. Add nagscreens, premium features, and the like to "increase revenue". 6. Go proprietary.
My extremely hardline stance on this has been to nip this trend in the bud right at steps 3 and 4 by taking ALL money out of the development process.
What we use donations for is a very small list, as mentioned on the OpenCollective page:
1. Paying for Infrastructure. Domains, VPSes, etc. 2. Each team member (contributors who are distinguished and invited into the org) gets a single one-time $300 USD credit for buying a client device to help them work on the project.
And that's it.
This is why I made this post, to basically say - in many more words - "hey, we have enough runway for a few years. Donate to individual people or other projects instead".
So from a certain perspective, saying "no-one gets paid" is more consistent than saying "us developers get paid, those anime studios don't".
For another thing, if you pay for the upfront development of software, it still needs ongoing support. And that support commitment comes with a funding commitment; you don't just pay $x0,000 for an eastern european developer to spend a year adding smart TV support - to keep the developer around and the feature working, you've now got to raise that money every year, forever.
What they’re trying to do is really hard. As much great work as they’re putting into it, they’re really treading water with what they’re currently able to muster with people that are willing to volunteer their time. There’s obviously a lot of people that want to put money toward the effort.
Setting up a wider Jellyfin-ecosystem-donation-fund (or your favorite FLOSS project) is something anyone can do. Maybe someone reading this comment will get the motivation to step up? (And no, we don't need another platform, just plain honest human volunteering)
1) Jellyfin supports reading NFO files to help determining matching the file with the correct metadata (https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/metadata/nfo/). This is arguably superior than Plex's way (you have to name your file with IMDb id or tmdb id https://support.plex.tv/articles/201018497-fix-match-match/#...), but I still constantly find media w/o metadata in Jellyfin.
2) The way you fix the matching in Jellyfin has a pretty terrible UX. You select the movie w/o metadata (there's no filter to "find all media that Jellyfin fail to match w/ metadata) and click "Identify" in the 3-dot menu, then fill in the information and search (why can't Jellyfin prefill useful metadata, at the very minimum the year that should be easily identified using regex?), then pick either IMDb or tmdb (why do I have to choose one of them? Can I bulk-switch my library to use IMDb instead of tmdb?), with a checkbox to confirm you want to "replace existing images" (why do I have any images to replace? Jellyfin did not match the media to any metadata right?) you now have some useful metadata.
3) When I need to force a rescan of a library, there's no way (that I can find) to do that when you are viewing the library. The only way to do this is to go to Settings -> Dashboard -> Scan All Libraries.
4) There's no offline media playback support (AFAIKT).
2 - I agree that Find all without set metadata in a library would be nice. However when identifying you don't need to chose one or the other, you just type whatever info you have (the name, or the year, or both, or ...) and search and it search in all providers it has a plugin for (so in your case, both imdb and tmdb) and show all results from both.
The do you want to replace image is because it's very common to switch to another provider for obscure series for exemple, but want to keep you hand replaced image. It doesn't really apply to "blockbuster" series or movies, so I guess it could be nice to have a default you can set.
3 - It separates the admin part and the viewing part, I think it's good. If you're solo user it can feel bothersome, but for me it's a better thing.
4 - You can download the files for later viewing offline.
Overall the only one I agree with is the figure out which movie or serie you didn't identify and let me fix that in bulk, that process could be improved, but it's also a one time thing at first setup.
2) When I try to identify the media, I would expect Jellyfin to pre-fill the form with the name, year etc, basically anything it can find, either from parsing the filename or the NFO. But Jellyfin did nothing here to make it easier.
4) Oh I just found this functionality in the Android client! But this is over simplified, for TV shows it doesn't support "download the next N unwatched episodes". I also tried to download a movie just now and I got a notification "download unsuccessful" w/o more insight to debug the issue (although to be fair Plex is not better in giving a reason why download failed). And I don't see in the UI to manage all downloaded media (maybe because I haven't had a successful download?).
2) I understand what you mean,but I would disagree, usually it would get in the way for me (whatever it identified or thought it did was wrong).
4) The log will be on the server, admin, logs. There won't be a manage my upload though, it's a client thing and the current client does consider that outside of its scope.
Personnaly when needed it's download then use Vlc when I want to watch.
Are you advocating taking away an option other users might use because it confuses you?
I do not allow jellyfin to scrape online. Everything goes through tinymediamanager (kodi format). There isn't a single missing piece in my library .
1. I can't download shows from the iOS client. I can on my Android device
2. The music player doesn't interface with the device's media player. So you have to keep your phone open when listening to music
Source: am Fintunes dev.
[1]: https://fintunes.app [2]: https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp [3]: https://github.com/rasmuslos/AmpFin
I need a plex.com account to use my own self hosted instance? Uninstalled.
The best of Jellyfin is that it's truly self hosted. But no matter how much set up I do, the experience is still never too good. I don't really like the UI/UX but I could get used to it. My biggest issue is how it handles the folder structure and metadata for series. They will always have to be neatly organized in folders to be properly picked up. You can't throw an episode file here, an episode in a folder there, the rest of the season in another folder and so on. They're just seen as independent material, no metadata. This makes the watching experience very stunted.
Yes it is not perfect and they made mistakes along the way but comments as such just tend to ride on the sentiment that vilifies all non OSS products as if it's something inherently bad, the "us vs them" attitude is something I see time and time again here.
The fact that this is all it enables just reinforces the idea that it should be optional. All of the core functionality is possible to implement without requiring an account.
> The fact that this is all it enables
Not sure where you got the idea that linking is the /only/ thing an account gives you. One feature I quite enjoy is syncing watch status between servers. So if one has multiple servers they use (multiple they control or friend’s servers) their watch status can be synced. In my case I have a travel/portable Plex server and my main Plex server so it’s nice to have my watch state kept in sync.
And there are more features from having a central account, this is just one of them to disprove that linking is the only reason you need an account or that it’s the only feature of having an account.
Plex still seems slicker than Jellyfin in some ways but after that experience I'd certainly consider a switch. Offline is the only reason I still use plex, but their offline setup is pretty buggy too.
Yes, they keep adding cruft, I just ignore or hide it. That said, I didn't know I wanted Plexamp until they gave it to me, and now I love it.
I buy all my audiobooks on Audible, remove the DRM, then put them on my server so I can use Prologue instead of the default Audible app. Yes, you give up WhisperSync but I rarely use that anyway.
Even if they did have the account, the unforgivable part is that you cannot use the mobile app for your family and have people have different profiles because the plex pass is tied to a profile. That’s a sleazy cash grab that drove me off of plex.
An example of this is sunsetting Plex Sync and replacing it with Plex Downloads.
At the time they used the whole 'Sync never worked right' argument to justify why they got rid of it. In reality, Plex sync used to allow any user to download videos from any server where the server owner had plex pass.
Now with downlods, the user must have Plex Pass to download anything.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/downloads-sync-faq/
There are other examples where they have done this as well.
There are few environments that seem to attract the sort of discussion where every single person feels justified in writing a 12 paragraph vitriolic entitled screed drawing from the same bucket of recycled quips. To say that you actually like Plex is some sort of great offence that attracts at least a few replies telling you that you’re wrong.
I’m so incredibly confident that there’s a large contingent of people that wouldn’t care an iota that Plex phones home, if not for the fact that they’re so deep into the Plex Hate scene that they’ve learned to be up in arms about it.
I’m not a gamer but have interacted with gaming communities here and there as I’m sure we all have to varying extents. I see the Plex community as pretty similar. I think it attracts the same sort of ‘power user’.
And anybody could log into their plex account on my instance! The way they handle accounts for self-hosted instances is either deliberately convoluted or ineptly designed.
Wasn't this the case from the beginning?
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200430283-network/#:~:text=...
Hoping Jellyfin keeps going, maybe I'll check it out again at some point.
I know you can unfuck it, however I don't want to reward that toxic behaviour with usage
Non-techie family though prefers Plex, hands down. Looks good and really easy to setup on any machine.
Does Jellyfin work well on this platform?
I use Infuse with Jellyfin. My server’s way too weak for reliable transcoding, plus not using it avoids a large proportion of bugs in the Jellyfin issues tracker at any given time.
There’s a dedicated AppleTV app, which works great for a month, then reliably forgets its credentials. I use it, but the kids don’t want to learn how to type urls, usernames, and passwords so they don’t. That’s fair.
Any Jellyfin users here that can vouch for it? I currently have a SMB share on a Raspberry Pi 4 and I connect to that on my Amazon Fire Stick using the VLC SMB features. It works ok but the VLC UI leaves much to be desired. Would Jellyfin be better for this? Is there a client that works on the Fire TV stick? (This one I think? https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv)
Jellyfin integrates really well with other services like Radarr, Sonarr, and Jellyseer so you can request media, have it downloaded, indexed, and available automatically.
Client-wise it's a mixed bag, Infuse is probably the best one out there, but it's only available for Apple TV / iOS.
Jellyfin android works fine on firetv. The only thing you might struggle with if you run the server on a pi is transcoding, especially if you have 4k media files.
I've been using it since the fork from Emby and it works well for what I use it for.
That said, they're right IMO to redirect funds to the clients. The Android TV app is in a really rough state. The regular Android and Web interfaces work great, Roku as far as I recall works well...but the Android TV one is really not good.
The other thing to check is your transcoding setup. Sometimes the settings are not optimal and can cause playback issues.
Sync play is TERRIBLE with android TV. We tried watching a show over sync play on the LAN in two different rooms and it just constantly lost sync, commands didn't go through, etc. It was so bad we only tried it once.
Controlling the Android TV app from Jellyfin Mobile or web is awkward at best, basically unusable.
So yeah, there are a lot of rough edges, but I think this is the best on offer if you want a true self-hosted media library that mostly works out of the box across various platforms.
The diverse client support is awesome. In addition to streaming video content to various house devices, my favorite is my "jukebox" music listening setup consisting of a RPi 3B+ with ALLO Piano 2.1 DAC hat feeding separate speaker and subwoofer amps with desired crossover frequency. Running on the Pi is Mopidy with the Mopidy-Jellyfin extension to access Jellyfin's libraries along with the Mopidy-mowecl extension which provides a slick web front end for the DAC (you can also queue music from the Jellyfin GUI and "play to" the DAC). Highly configurable and fun to tinker with. For example, I have a USB numberpad keyboard plugged into the Pi with assigned hotkeys by way of the triggerhappy service. I love being able to keep the music playing if my desktop workstation is off or rebooting.
https://github.com/jellyfin/mopidy-jellyfin https://github.com/sapristi/mopidy-mowecl
The best thing is it's all FLOSS, so I don't have to worry about the rug being pulled out from under me!
Beware though that if any transcoding is needed, the RPi probably won't be up to it. Instead I shelled out a little bit for a small Intel NUC thing that can do hardware conversion.
[edit] I use the download links in the browser UI and then VLC playback on an iPad for kids’ movies on long road trips. It even (with an assist from VLC) fills that use case.
I use folders to separate out TV shows / Movies on the Nas and then set a collection for each one.
Identifying the media was 80% automatic, the last 20% I had to do via identify and imdb searches, but that was a small hassle.
I've had a few videos not play due to formatting issues. When that happens I fire up handbrake and re-encode for mp4 web playback and ~20 minutes later I'm in business.
Also, I'm not getting nagged for features that I don't want anymore. I happily paid for my account, Plex, but just let me watch my local movies in peace. Leave me alone with television streaming, free movies or whatever else was the latest thing that was being pushed.
"But it's $100 a month they wouldn't have had!" Sure, but now there's something to value your time and effort against, and it will not stack up favorably.
In a for-profit project, I'd agree. Jellyfin isn't though, and they're pretty up-front about that, so "paying too little" doesn't really apply to the people who end up contributing.
Why not? I think it's good for everyone to evaluate what you're spending your time on, and if that time is time well spent.
What do you mean with "the money they get back for it"? It's a FOSS project that doesn't pay for engineering hours from volunteers or anyone. It's literally $0, and everyone contributes to Jellyfin with the expectation of getting back exactly $0.
> No, this doesn't violate our policy of "no paid development", because donations are just that - donations. We will still not honour bug bounties or similar, and still not use our collective finance here for paid development.
If the project wants to be self-sufficient, they thus need ten times as much money. Then they can invest it, and cover expenses with the income from their investments.
If the project doesn’t want to be self-sufficient, that’s something else. Maybe they would prefer to think it will better align incentives for their users to keep them hungry? Personally, though, I think that self-sufficiency should be everyone’s goal.
If one has $24,000 and spend $600/month, then after 40 months there will be nothing at all left. On the other hand, if one invested that $24,000 in Treasury bonds one would have something like $26,229. So (ignoring inflation) one could spend ($24,000 - $26,229)/40 = $55.72 each month, and still have $24,000. Why would one want to do that? Because one could keep going, investing the money, collecting the interest and paying one’s expenses: that $24,000 can last forever, paying $55.72 a month.
Now, in real life one can’t ignore inflation, and that $24,000 will be worth less than $22,000 in 40 months. In real life inflation tends to outpace the risk-free rate of return one can get lending money to the U.S. Treasury. So one needs to get more return by taking one more risk, for example by investing in the stock market as a whole. But that exposes one to economic downturns.
To make a long story short (too late!) folks have run the numbers and figured that one can conservatively invest one’s money in some broad indices, withdraw about 3–4% a year and maintain the post-inflation value of one’s capital. More than that, and one runs out of capital; less than that, and the capital continues to increase, but you have less money to spend today.
If Jellyfin wants to be able to pay their $600 (in 2024 dollars) hosting bill forever, they need to invest $240,000 today. And then they’ll never need to ask for money again (assuming all sorts of things, like no decade-long recession, no world war, an asteroid doesn’t crash into the Earth and so forth). For the same reason, an American making the average wage of $63,795 needs a $2.2 million nest egg to never work again.
I was thinking of creating it but wanted to see what demand there is? Most Devs can easily do this themselves but I want to extend and sell it to other people as a service who wouldn't be capable and just happy to pay.
Plex and Emby would be competitors but not open source afaik.
I stood up a Jellyfin docker a few months back and instantly noticed for local playback is was swift, the UI is super fast, and also it just felt more polished in terms of overall experience in certain areas. I haven't switched yet but the project is so far more along in such a short time period that I will be watching very closely going forward. I love the humor and I love passion to build good software that respects a human.(privacy)
I get that you like Kodi, but listen to yourself. Kodi does all of this! Except you might need a plugin that doesn't exist for the one big feature that spurred the existence and popularity of Plex, except that some features work but not reliably, except that you need to actively manage the backend, except that the phone UI sucks.
So, there's your answer?
I like Kodi too, I've been using it since the XBMP days on modded Xboxes and still do for certain things, but eventually I needed something more flexible and something that worked over the internet. Being able to share my movies with my grandma or my next door neighbors wasn't really achievable with Kodi.
Streaming does not mean it forces a transcode. I mean it can, but if you watch from a decent client it often just sends the raw media file.
And you can change from PC to phone, to tv and it remembers what you watched.
I actually use kodi as a client for jellyfin.
The thing that triggered this, that isn't really mentioned by me in the post, is that we've had a few sudden swells of donations around both the 10.9.0 release and the latest 2 Plex kerfuffles, and I get the very distinct impression that people donating are not reading all the "fine print" about what we use it for.
We also have a lot of recurring donations which should pay for a huge chunk. The goal here is to basically just make another public "hey, we never really asked for donations, and we appreciate it, but hey for now we'd rather you donate to individuals than the org since the org can coast on this money for a few more years". Which we absolutely can. I can't envision any real situation that would require us to use a huge sum of this money in one go, so it's really just the monthly recurring costs to cover which are relatively stable and consistent.
What you’ve described is a pain in the ass from a setup perspective. I think what you were trying to say is “be careful about jellyfin vulnerabilities”, but that’s definitely not what came out.
In my situation at home, port forwarding is stupid-simple and just works.
My ISP does not saddle me with CGNAT (or any other form of NAT). I don't use UPnP.
I have a real (dynamic, but just-for-me and almost never changing) IPv4 address to use, and I simply use it.
It works predictably. It works reliably. It is not even a little bit flaky. There is no voodoo involved.
And it doesn't require me to teach my elderly mother how to use Tailscale with her Roku STB.
(I recognize that others may have different situations. But the existence of different situations doesn't mean that one must declare a particular solution to be the "best", does it? KISS.)
E.g. lego supports many different dns providers
https://go-acme.github.io/lego/
And then internally inside of tailscale you could have your own dns server, which serves subdomains of your domain, and for all subdomains you can use the same wildcard certificate.
This also does not 'expose' your subdomains on Certificate Transparency logs
Otherwise you could use solutions like AdGuard Home or PiHole, which both have a Web Interface for configuration, and the ability to block ads and tracking domains.
Note that I don't use Tailscale myself, so I don't know if Tailscale 'needs' something else. But I use pure wireguard, and all of the services mentioned above work with 'pure wireguard'.
I normally just use transmission and serviio (vastly superior to Plex IMO), and only recently found out about sonarr, radarr, etc.
Really though, is there not any 'all in one' solution, instead of all these various programs chained together? I get keeping the serviio bit separate, and maybe the torrent client, but the rest could easily be integrated into one app.
Would Jellyfin improve my experience? I could run it on odroid without transcoding, and then use the official android-tv client. Would it be worth the effort of switching?
I wanted to run Kodi | JellyFin in parallel (two Kodi client Android TV's in house) so that visitors with iPhones | Androids | Tables could browse content.
The local Kodi TV clients used the NAS box MariDB to hold meta data held in the local to content .NFO files (show ID's, descriptions, etc)
I've held off on that as the JellyFin docs are not clear and the small experiments I tried in isolation proved tricky to resolve issues.
The issues being getting JellyFin to load details from local.nfo files w/out making changes and|or getting JellyFin to not make additional .INFO files (more or less duplicates) and|or getting JellyFin to not trash existing artwork with new downloads.
I'm sure there are solutions here (eg: JellyFin can use seperate directories for it's meta-data (but then doesn't read the local .nfo files to get ambiguous shows 'right')), I've yet to put the hard hours in and these are the kinds of hiccups you may face.
It's moot if you have a small collection | don't care about existing artwork | etc.
IIRC you can disable transcoding on fly by server and trust the network | viewing client to handle full original content, etc.
I like JellyFin and used Emby in the past and use small JellyFin setups today - I just haven't resolved the issues in pointing it at a large curated collection and letting it rip making it's own parallel meta data w/out affecting pre-existing meta data.
Really, Jellyfin has been quite the upgrade. The indexing is better, I can watch things far from home, everything is there. As a bonus, I can create accounts for close friends/family so they can watch what I download without hassle.
Just try it.
I can connect to my media server from literally anywhere in the world, using basically any device. I have a Chromecast with Google TV that I pack with me when we go away, and I pop it in the TV, configure wifi and I have my entire media collection right there. My phone, laptop, tablet and the wife's devices all have the client installed & configured.
I have friends and family that I share my media collection with and they are on the other side of the planet. All I give them is a URL, username+password and they are off to the races.
If this is not your use case, then Kodi with SMB is probably more than good enough.
Another benefit I've found is it's much easier to add new subtitle to a show/movie, without needing to setup specific subtitle databases as I did with Kodi.
The only issue of note is the occasional crash, but given the level of polish with Jellyfin, and zero cost, it feels absurd to mention it. Oh, and if you have multiple household members, checkout Jellyseerr [0]. It lets others easily request shows/movies (which you can get notified about and approve) without bugging you.
The main difference is that it works everywhere, from any device on the LAN (browser, iPad, Android phone, you name it), and even remotely (using Tailscale, to avoid exposing Jellyfin to the world). It's like you have your own little Netflix that you can access from absolutely anywhere.
Now I prefer using Stremio+Read Debrid, Kodi as my main player for local movies.
Or pay devs, not in their circle to build the features the community wants but they can't (lack of expertise, or otherwise) implement?
They currently have 3 years of runway but that’s ridding on the high of the announcement and this communication will dry up donations. Plus, they ask people to donate to clients instead of the core product but they could do so themselves with the money they receive.
Plus as stated before, they can divert the money to other projects related to Jellyfin themselves. They don’t need the community to do that for them.
Honestly, if you are a project the size of Jellyfin and you ask donations to stop because you have a measly three years of operational runway without funding anything and without any idea of what to do with the money, I seriously question your ability to survive.
With the kind of goodwill they're building here I'm inclined to doubt that. People want to naturally cheer for the good guy and it's hard not to see an open source passion project led by these fellas as not being the good guy.
People give to projects they know about and have visibility. Now, if Jellyfin actually needs money, they will have to do a huge outreach push to overcome their own message that they don't need money.
What announcement?
Three years is nothing, and money isn't always reliable coming in.
Nor does it factor in some unexpected expenses.
As they point out in the post, Jellyfins No1 problem is keeping their clients up to date with new features and design polish.
They have identified that the money being donated to them would be much better donated to the maintainers of the clients to encourage them to do more/better work, but they dont feel its right that they choose how that is distributed and they want the users to donate to the client they favour most. I think this is great, and hopefully some of the clients which have been dragging recently can get some donations and encourage some fresh development on them.
I really good way of doing it if you ask me.
They are losing moneytary support they will probably never recover and refusing to actually be stewards of their own ecosystem.
Keeping 'allow ... conversion without re-encoding' turned on should be fine, and likely needed for some of your files.
Recently I decided to give the app a try, and it worked fine, but I have serious issues with their media scanner (nested structures, a lot of misc content like interviews, etc.).
Years ago I wrote my own script that scans my drives, downloads imdb database, and 100% accurately matches media to imdb-id and fetches all auxilary data like cast, synopsis, posters, and so on.
I asked on their forum if I could use that to somehow bypass the scanner, prepopulate the database or write my own scanner based on theirs.
I was repedatley said it would be impossible and to not touch the code. "Seriously, do not do this" said one of the team members. I mean I do understand they were trying to save me a lot of headache, but at the same time they're running a campaign for developers. I just found it very odd.
In particular you can create an NFO file (same stem, next to the media, with a .info extension) that contains this data. With stuff like the IMDB ID given, Jellyfin is pretty good at extracting metadata from there; without it, false matches aren't uncommon. It's even documented. [1]
You're best to write out NFOs and then let Jellyfin just import those with all external metadata providers removed.
Oh that is easy. I think jellyfin can read from a sidecard file that you can place next to the media file.
Further still, you'd need those reserves to grow at more than 2% per year, and more realistically somewhere much higher than that, just to ensure your donation reserves keep the project self-sustaining in the face of inflation.
How do we get so many smart people in tech who don't know how to manage finances?