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Comment by nobody9999 | Hacker News Reader

And I use MythTV[0] myself. I've gotten a lot of hate from other HNers about that ("why aren't you using $MEDIAPLATFORM instead?" "That's so old, you should use Kodi, instead" -- when Kodi is older than MythTV.).

No, it's not the slickest interface. And no, it's not the most full-featured. But it doesn't spy on me (like Kodi, Emby and/or others) and it doesn't try to show me ads either.

I don't run it off a broken laptop (a fanless minipc for the front end and a VM for the back end), like in TFA, but it works nicely and does what I need of it -- and most of all, it doesn't spy on me or try to show me ads. That's a win!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythTV

Edit: Added missing link.

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Could you expand on Kodi, Emby, et al spying on you? I hadn't heard about this, but I don't watch the space closely.

IIRC, Emby requires a login to function even with just local content. And data is sent to them on what you do on your local system. No thanks.

And I meant Plex, not Kodi. Kodi doesn't (AFAIK) spy on their users, but Plex does. My apologies.

If you want an emby fork without the login etc, you can try Jellyfin out. I really think it's overtaken Emby in functionality already anyway.

>If you want an emby fork without the login etc, you can try Jellyfin out. I really think it's overtaken Emby in functionality already anyway.

Thanks for the suggestion. I did try jellyfin (for playing my 18,000+ audio tracks) and when I tried to shuffle them all (that's my use case) it crashed, every. single. time.

I'm sure it's fabulous for many folks, but it doesn't meet my needs.

Late response on my part, but I'm happy to report back that shuffling my 17,000 track library does not crash Jellyfin on the latest stable version. Give it another try maybe?

Thank you again for your suggestion.

And (as you already knew -- and now I do too!) you are correct. The Jellyfin server no longer crashes when trying to shuffle all my tracks (~20,000).

And when I view my music by "Songs", I can shuffle all the tracks without issue while using the web interface via Firefox. Hooray! I never got that far with jellyfin before.

Unfortunately, the Roku jellyfin client (again, this is my use case) doesn't have a view by "songs" option. As such, in order to shuffle all my tracks, I needed use a playlist (an actual m3u playlist rather than a jellyfin playlist -- as I don't really want to have to individually click on 20,000 tracks and add them to a jellyfin playlist -- which might or might not work anyway).

Which isn't a big deal, as I already used such playlists elsewhere. But attempting to play or shuffle such a playlist fails. Not just on the Roku client, but on Firefox as well.

So I guess I'm either going to have to wait for jellyfin clients to support such large m3u playlists, or until the Roku client has a "Songs" view.

Again, thanks for your heads up. It was much appreciated!

As a follow-up, it appears that once jellyfin had time to complete all its processing of the media I configured, Firefox was able to shuffle a playlist of ~20,000 tracks -- after an hour or so.

The Roku jellyfin client (not the server, it seems pretty stable) reliably crashes after ten minutes or so of attempting to load the same playlist.

Interestingly, jellyfin on Android appears to have the same behavior as the Firefox/web interface, although I didn't wait an hour to see if that was the case.

That said, Finamp[0] (also available on FDroid, FTW!) on Android loads up the playlist just fine and starts playing almost immediately. Which makes me wish Android was my use case. :(

All in all, it was rather disappointing. That said, I still do appreciate your suggestion.

[0] https://github.com/jmshrv/finamp

It's a shame it doesn't work for your use case :(

Finamp is a great app, it's well developed and works far better than the official Jellyfin app/site imo.

Jellyfin on android is pretty much just a webview, so it should behave similar to your browser.

>Finamp is a great app, it's well developed and works far better than the official Jellyfin app/site imo.

I agree! It worked so nicely that I'm going to expose jellyfin to the internet so I can access my full music collection via my phone (currently I have about 1/3 of it -- which was all that I could comfortably fit on my phone's storage).

Thanks again for the suggestions -- it opened up (with jellyfin/finamp) a new use case for me!

Thanks for the heads up!

Perhaps I will.

IIRC, Emby has also had some GPL compliance issues. Jellyfin is a fork with of Emby with all the crap removed.

I wasn't aware of Kodi spying, interested in a source here

Can you provide more context around Kodi spying on users?

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