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Comment by domh | Hacker News Reader

This is my first time hearing about Jellyfin, and wow what a breath of fresh air compared to the typical hyper growth model employed by a lot of OSS projects.

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)

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I've been using Jellyfin since the beginning and it's been a total joy to use. Even though I trust the project now, in the beginning when I was migrating off of Plex I had both running simultaneously in separate VMs referencing the same read-only library. This dual config worked great, though I didn't use Plex much at all after Jellyfin quickly proved itself even in the early days of its development.

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!

> Any Jellyfin users here that can vouch for it?

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.

I haven't noticed any difference or problems with the Android TV application vs the Android or web client. What exactly is broken or not great for you?

For me specific video files will freeze the app and render it unusable. It's really frustrating

The only thing that does on my end is 4k HDR DolbyVision (no transcoding) and that is because it runs on a shitty firetv 4k max gen2. Kodi also cannot handle this on that device

I abandoned a Shield for Apple TV over the many issues on it. Should-be-supported codecs had problems that made many videos unusable. Plus bad UI jank in general, not just in Jellyfin. Shouldn’t have tried to cheap out, it’s not like I’ve never used Android before (I’ve developed for it… including for set-top devices) so I ought to have known better.

If you encounter this, a good fix is to break out handbrake and to re-encode your files as web-optimized mp4. That helps with skipping video back and forth and quick loading.

The other thing to check is your transcoding setup. Sometimes the settings are not optimal and can cause playback issues.

The UI for selecting media only shows covers until you have your cursor over some specific media, which can leave you guessing if your album art isn't super descriptive.

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.

Absolutely, it's been running on my NAS (via Docker) for over a year now with no issues. It supports hardware transcoding which is nice for downscaling streams while watching outside of the house.

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.

and macOS!

Their Jellyfin client for iOS and Apple TV was a bit flaky for a while, but last year some update fixed those issues and it's been rock solid for me. I also bought Infuse and it's a decent alternative interface.

I switched from Plex to JF after being a plex user from the very beginning. It's not as polished as plex but it has none of the bloat and works flawlessly for me. It's super easy to manage my libraries and the meta scanners work 95% of the time, very rarely needing me to manually tweak data or images for media.

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 use it with a weak x86 server (used workstation off EBay) and stronger clients (Apple TV, iOS devices, browser on strong laptops) so I don’t need transcoding, since my server can’t manage real-time transcoding. Works great with that set-up, crazily better than XMBM/Kodi ever was in a dozen or so attempts, and people who aren’t me can pick it up and confidently use it, without immediately getting stuck in some weird UI mode and giving up forever, which is what Kodi always led to.

[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 run it from a docker container on my Truenas system. It works pretty well as all of my media is stored there.

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.

I've been using Jellyfin for several months now, for me it works nicely. I did a bit of tuning over time (e.g. "OK, now I'll spend a bit of time improving how subtitles work"), and after learning how to set that aspect up, it just trucks along working. I have a handful of friends using my setup too and haven't had complaints.

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.

I've been using XBMC (now Kodi) clients + a single NFS file server for 16 years, now installed on three media PCs throughout my house. Looking at Jellyfin's feature set, it's not clear what it offers over my current setup. It just seems like an apples-to-apples alternative, which is fine.

Yes it handles my library (~60tb) just fine but the Apple TV client isn't great. I run it and Plex side-by-side and switch between the two depending on which device I am using.

jellyfin handles my 12 TB media library with transparent ease. i use infuse as a client on my apple tvs, including devices at my family and partners' places via tailscale on aTV

I use Jellyfin, and it works good enough most of the times. Sometimes it just won't find subtitles, or metadata and it's highly annoying to fix it. The TV app is a bit rough sometimes. The android app feels very barebones. The HDR tone mapping is either horrible or non-existent (can't remember which, but I could never play proper HDR).

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.

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