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Comment by fastily | Hacker News Reader

Bemused by the number of people complaining about a free and open source project. A quick review of the git history tells me that it’s maintained by a very small group of people who generously work on this in their free time. Luckily jellyfin does accept PRs, so if you think the project needs improvements, then perhaps folks, you can do something about it

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Yes Jellyfin does accept PR's but they don't accept hacks ie workarounds for single issue for a particular device won't be accepted easily. The maintainers feel using hacks and workarounds is not the best way to go for the long term maintenance of the project. One of the reasons skip intro took so long to get into jellyfin and jellyfin clients as they wanted a universal media segment system that can be used for other plugin apart from skipintro. It's the same reason jellyfin android Tv app has not reached feature parity with Plex yet as the dev wants to do it right from the ground up so does not like to add device specific workarounds but try to fix it in way to not require workarounds.

Uh... just to be clear, this is a good thing - particularly for an open-source project maintained by volunteers, who can't (and shouldn't have to) maintain 100 hacks for 200 different devices. There's so many work that comes attached to doing it that way, from having to own the devices, to making sure every hack is updated, to providing support for them

sounds like you don't approve of the devs healthy approach to the development of this project, but would rather sacrifice long term sustainability for quick wins.

No I am with the devs on this. I am against people submitting code without discussing with the maintainers and then crapping on them later if the patches don't get accepted something like the arguments rust thing for Linux kernel. As it just will cause unnecessary friction and if the devs/maintainers stop enjoying on the project everyone suffers. I have seen hobby open source projects die with devs getting tired of arguments and then abandoning the project.

I think it sounded like that because of the lack of commas rather than a bias from GP

I've interacted with the project and maintainers and agree with their approach.

I think it's great that it's free and open source so it's available to as many people as possible.

I don't really care about the free part though. If I could pay for Jellyfin and it would be better, I would happily do it. I pay for Infuse so I have something usable on Apple TV even though Jellyfin itself is free. I don't care if other people don't pay for it.

I would rather pool various other people's money who have the same perspective as me to allow one of the Jellyfin contributors to prioritize and perform changes in the project that I and others value, which raises the boat for all. There's no world in which I am going to learn how to contribute to Jellyfin to fix something fundamental about the Jellyfin architecture, for example. It would take years to even get buy-in from the core contributors to have that access. Maybe I could spend a few months and clean up minor UI things or something, but what's the good of that?

I see this take a lot, where a project being free / OSS means that no one should have an opinion on it or that if they don't like something, they should fix it themselves. That's literally what money is for, so I can transfer wealth for some benefit to someone who is better at something than I am, so I can spend my time doing things I'm good at. Nothing about that prevents Jellyfin from remaining FOSS but at the same time, making improvements and receiving and prioritizing community feedback.

If anyone believes Jellyfin is worth paying for or donating, I think it's possible to donate to the Jellyfin project [1].

That's still a donation and shouldn't come attached with any expectations or obligations on either party. So, it may not be the best route to influence their roadmap.

DigitalOcean & JetBrains are listed as their sponsors. If you are their customer, you can share feedback on how much you appreciate their support.

1. https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-how-can-donate-money

I use jellyfin and love it. It's quality is actually pretty stunning for FOSS.

It’s disappointing to see this statement, perhaps a sign of the last 15 years.

The highest quality software has always been FOSS, outside of specialised niches.

I mostly meant that a media hosting/streaming service that is FOSS and has as much fit and finish as Jellyfin, and as many integrations as Jellyfin, feels like a huge accomplishment. This is a space where there is a ton of corporate investment because there's a ton of money to be made. And Jellyfin holds its own against offerings by Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, etc. That is incredible to me.

I'm a huge FOSS bigot, but even I can admit that FOSS frequently has bad UI design. FOSS is usually great for getting the fundamentals of the software right, making it reliable etc., but software experts usually are not very good at UI design.

Being free does not exempt a project from criticism. It's not like they were yelling about how terrible the project team was, just saying the issues they were having when trying to use it.

And that criticism gets you what?

Same thing that praise does. It's a discussion board, there's nothing wrong with people discussing the shortcomings of a project as well as its good points.

Agreed, but that’s not the point I’m making here. It’s not like this is some closed-source commercial product where the community can’t do anything about bugs/lack of features. My observation is simple: all of this time people spend complaining could be better spent helping to improve the project instead

Why can't people voice criticism and then work on the projects they want to work on instead of having homework and needing to learn the entire Jellyfin code base?

Nobody is personally insulting the devs as being lazy or incompetent. The devs can listen or not and they should have absolute control on what they implement and when. Its entirely reasonable that things they think are fine are pain points they don't realize exist because they've just gotten used to them. They also might not realize that some "wouldn't that be nice" thing they were thinking about implementing in the far future is actually something a lot of people want in the near term instead. There might also be things they just never even thought of.

The users of the software with criticism also aren't forced to use the software and should not be expected to implement anything they want unless they want to contribute. The project being open source ensures that in the future the project can be continued, if someone wants to continue it.

More people are capable of pinpointing pain points during usage than actual implementation of patch fix. That's reasonable, no?

I do not disagree, there are horrible free projects with actively user-hostile documentation out there. But jellyfin is not that. Most criticism of it that I have heard falls either under a matter of taste ("I would do it differently"), a specific hardware setup not being supported or a skill issue during the installation which has more to do with administration of networks and Linux servers than with jellyfin.

And as a user of jellyfin myself I don't think these are particularly fair points of criticism.

our time still has value, even if the developer of the (often time-wasting app) isn't remunerated. I don't have a bone to pick with JellyFin, but there have been FOSS apps that are best avoided and it's fully within our rights to signal that to others.

It’s an excellent OSS project. One of the few I have donated to.

In my experience, the majority of people who complain loudly about Jellyfin are tied up in the Plex ecosystem and cannot fathom leaving it for some reason.

I mean, imagine living with ad-supported streaming content being injected into your private instance by default and having to tell your users to opt-out of that. Admittedly, it is hard to leave such a slippery slope of an ecosystem, especially as a paying customer.

I tried switching to Jellyfin. But the feature parity between Plex and Jellyfin just isn’t there. This was roughly 6-9 months ago.

I have a 5.1 surround sound setup with Dolby atmos and 4k HDR 10 with Nvidia Shield Pro android TVs as clients. I have Blu-ray rips that play completely fine on Plex, but stutter, have no sound, or downscale to 2.0 sound on JellyFin.

There are some fixes that involve using a JellyFin server and a Kodi media client on Google TV’s. This does enable DTS and Ddd+ sound. While that technically works, it is very involved and feels like many more steps than just using Plex.

If you use a basic 1080p tv with two speakers and lazy encodes of media, Jellyfin probably works great for you. If you have anything a little more complex then you will inevitably see some problems.

This is similar to other open source projects like Ashai. The basic features are easy enough to build, but the more complicated use cases always require more time and effort, and people aren’t always willing to do that complicated extra effort for free.

The client story is lacking for sure. But they seem to be prioritizing that now. Regardless, what they’ve achieved as an OSS Emby fork is astonishing imo.

On Apple TV, Infuse bridges the client gap. I personally prefer paying for a third-party client (for now) to paying for a media server that locks transcoding behind a paywall and ties my private server to a remote service. YMMV of course.

I’m lucky, I have a tube 2019 running jellyfin into a 5.1.2 setup through my avr and DTS/atmos + HDR10/DV work with jellyfin. I switched from kodi a few years. Do you have Dolby processing and up mix 2.0 turned off in the shield settings? Those cause stutters and some issues for me.

Are there a lot of people complaining loudly about Jellyfin?

Yes, I see this quite frequently on r/selfhosted and r/plex.

Where on /r/selfhosted?

In the last week, most of the posts are pro-Jellyfin[0][1][2] - nearing anti-plex.

https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ilqh6u/one_yea...

https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1ip8twc/jellyfi...

https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1iaqqv9/jellyfi...

I have been reading the subreddit for years. I don’t bookmark threads or comments for later review. And I made it clear upfront that this is my personal impression.

>I feel it in my gut despite evidence that I'm wrong

Plex users are all people who are fine self hosting and all the problems with that. Plex lifetime pass holders are invested for 75 dollars. Nobody is entrenched or unwilling to switch if something is better.

Maybe some people also run AdGuard/PiHole on their entire network and block all of the injected ads/tracking that Plex and your employer inject into our lives. We know that companies will always have people doing negative things and try to take the good and fight against the bad.

Maybe you are just overvaluing something that most people don't. Or its a problem only if you just lay down and let advertising invade your home.

Cherrypicked threads from the last week from one of two subreddits I mentioned is now “evidence”? Low bar eh.

Is it lower than "trust me I saw it" on a fully indexed website with advanced search tools that is also one of the most famous sources of LLM learning.

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