The one trick is to make sure your file naming & organization is good. They have good documentation on it. Everything's pretty much automatic then, almost zero further work. The naming conventions aren't too bad, and the resulting file tree would be a reasonable way to organize your files regardless.

I gave Jellyfin up and went back to upnp/dlna after the Android and iOS clients would keep losing sync, or wouldn't show me some season of a show, or would pick a white background on white text for a show.

The pain just kept adding up. It was quite nice most of the time. But every single time I reached for my phone, I was wondering how badly it was going to go. Quitting Jellyfin seemed like an excellent choice.

Upnp/dlna is much cruder; very direct raw BubbleUPnP client. But it works so well for me. Their transcoding server also is quite good and I can run it on any machine I want, isn't coupled to anything, can switch between them easily.

Bubbleupnp is also great because it lets me turn tablets into cast screens. I love that so much. Good general protocols rock; having media server, media renderer, then separate control points was a great model, good job UPnP.

Heh, I just spent 15 minutes debugging a Jellyfin bug where my WebOS client thought that the startup wizard had not been completed yet (I tried restarting it several times, but the thing that did the trick was enabling debug logging and _then_ it started working properly--probably a coincidence). Jellyfin is the best in class, but the bar is in hell. It can't be run in any kind of a high availability configuration, so if your only instance goes down or has any kind of issue, you have to jump on and fix it immediately or you can't use it. When something goes wrong, some of the logs show up in stderr, but most are just written as plain files to a directory. It's free software, so you get what you pay for, but it's pretty buggy.

I love it mostly as well so far, the only sticking point on both my TVs is constantly having to re-enter my server IP address. It sticks around for a couple days, then it's gone again.

Agreed. I honestly chose Jellyfin over plex because I preferred the branding, not sure what I’m missing. I really enjoy Jellyfin, and thy seemingly have support for most devices in some way.

My GF has it set up on her iPad, phone, computer. App is on our TV and has no issues. We have Netflix at home. She’s non technical and hasn’t had any trouble once I gave her a login.

The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of her lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home ;) (for now)