Jellyfin is an amazing project, and works almost exactly how I want it to. By listing and playing my media without autoplaying trailers and other such stuff.
I imagine many here who've never tried it will be of the same mindset
There is a crazy amount of bugs which I have no confidence will ever get fixed.
If you're the type that enjoys tinkering with obscure Linux settings for hours on end, which are certain to break if you dare to update anything, it may be for you.
I've been using it on Windows for years with multiple devices and it's been working flawlessly.
Every so often, Jellyfin would choke ingesting a video. Worse, it would hang the whole ingestion process, so videos later in the list wouldn't get processed. Restarting didn't fix it, either, I had to delete the problematic video (which notably, played ok in things like VLC and IINA).
Biggest issue is it's not designed around transitory servers, like a laptop. It really wants a server with a static IP. Unfortunately, JellyFin had the exact same problem, so that's a wash. Mostly it just means logging in and out of the TV client every so often.
Like what honestly I've been running one for years and have had nearly zero issues.
That pause is presumably also present when playing music, but no one notices because each song is its own track. Audiobook tracks split in places where a pause would never occur naturally.
The second-most-annoying trait of Jellyfin in my experience is technically not a bug, but should definitely be fixed. It hardcodes expectations of how to determine what season and episode number to assign to files. And if you overwrite them, it will re-mangle them on scan unless you take precautions to stop it.
As far as Jellyfin is concerned, your files must include a tag of the form S__E__ somewhere in the filename. Being located in a folder called "Season 2" with names like "11 - name of episode" won't work. Substrings like 第2集 won't work. Setting actual metadata tags on the file ( https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/FFmpeg_Metadata ) doesn't work; jellyfin ignores them.
Let me provide a per-folder template for extracting season / episode information. Jellyfin already lets you prefer embedded artwork to whatever it finds on the internet. Why enforce hallucinated episode numbers when explicit ones are clearly present?
> Let me provide a per-folder template for extracting season / episode information.
That's frankly not what I would call a bug and a bunch of work for near zero benefit. Not to be mean but why do you care? and if it really bothers you just use hardlinks let jellyfin see what it needs and you can have your pretty version for youself.
It's a music player. How could it not support audiobooks? You think it will rate your tracks and refuse to play them if they're insufficiently "musical"?
> There is a very noticeable pause between each track that it plays, despite the entire thing being queued.
> That pause is presumably also present when playing music, but no one notices because each song is its own track. Audiobook tracks split in places where a pause would never occur naturally.
It would almost be like it wasn't really built with audio books in mind, but was rather designed around music.
If Jellyfin was designed around music, then I would expect it to support gap-less playback out of the box. Albums where each track seamlessly transitions into the next are not that rare
I think what you said is a fair response to me, but I wanted to respond to this specific phrasing.
I don't think Jellyfin was designed around music. I think music was an afterthought added after the fact, and shoehorned into the rest of the experience. And then I think audiobooks in jellyfin are basically an afterthought of an afterthought.
(Again, I'm just responding to clarify if I accidentally conveyed a misconception about Jellyfin's music support)
But the truly disgusting part is how XBMC/Kodi/Plex/Jellyfin just reassigns the files to another show and there is absolutely no way to audit what's going on other than realizing that some show has two files per episodes or some show you don't have is in the library. Why can't this be easier to inspect?
After two decades I just gave up and use the Home Video mode (just show me my directories mode) on Jellyfin to avoid having to deal with metadata.
Jellyfin has major problems dealing with this common situation. To Jellyfin, the source of truth is imdb. Imdb numbers Kim Possible episodes in the order they were aired. If you want the metadata that jellyfin scrapes from imdb, and you also want to watch the episodes in an appropriate order, you have to do this:
1. Number all of the episodes in airing order.
2. Ask Jellyfin to fetch the metadata.
3. Renumber the episodes into the correct order.
4. Remember never to ask Jellyfin to scan any directory that contains those episodes again.
If you mess up, Jellyfin will attach descriptions and preview images to every file that aren't, technically, related to the episode in that file.
I mean, I've got many like that and yes it does work. `s01/01 - Pilot.mkv` is recognized as season 1, episode 1, etc.
I only use it for movies and TV shows though, the live TV experience (with a HDHomeRun) was incredibly buggy and slow, and once you've tried it and failed, it seems like it's impossible to remove the remnants of it from your interface.
The music and audiobook support never felt like it was as polished as TV/movies either, so I gave up on that.
Now I use:
* Jellyfin for films/TV shows
* Channels for live TV
* Navidrome for music
* Audioookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts
It was crazy smooth for me. TMDB stuff just worked. Movies, TV, extras organization just worked. Apple TV, Roku, and iOS devices as clients just worked. The Apple TV client isn't great, but they're rewriting a big chunk of it now.
It doesn't do the sharing scenario that people are solving with Plex, but for my purposes it has been perfect.
I think a lot of people are doing stuff that's well beyond what I use it for. I just have my blurays and dvds on there, so it's possible I don't know I'm missing some important stuff that other people need.
This sort of underscores the ancestor's complaint: It's not exactly dead simple to set up and understand, the community recommends third-party apps that have only partial support, etc.
Jellyfin is a daily driver for me and works amazingly. I have thousands of films, TV shows, books, music, and it lets me navigate and use them perfectly well.
I have a wonderful little Linux media server.
What sort of bugs affect you?
Can you suggest an alternative?
I have been running Jellyfin in a container on a Linux server for three years now. I am streaming video to Infuse on three Apple TV boxes and music to a Kodi installation on a Raspberry Pi with no issues.
I can't actually even think of any bugs. Nor do I have the same patience for tinkering with settings these days. For me, it just works, with the obvious exceptions of allowing it through the firewall, but that's unavoidable.