Jellyfin 12.0 | Hacker News Reader

Jellyfin 12.0

jellyfin.org

623 points0xC0ncord355 comments

As a long time plex user with a lifetime pass, I always enjoy seeing the good progress with Jellyfin as it will increasingly give me a soft landing for when Plex finally does something to make me move. At the very least it will hopefully keep some of plex’s most user hostile behavior in check.

As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my *arr stack and it has helped tremendously. I used to have to babysit and manually intervene on maybe 10% of requests, now it’s near zero, plus I got audiobook requests and subtitles working great. Granted a big part of the increased success was signing up for a Usenet service but of course Claude was able to configure it all and make it work. I was a little worried Claude would demur in the face of the task, but it was more than happy to help me acquire media in this way

Feels like only a matter of time with Plex doesn't it!

I've got the lifetime pass, but it really does feel like a Sword of Damocles situation...

Yes it really does, and I intend to switch eventually but from what I heard the last time I looked into it, the end user clients are a big area where plex still beats Jellyfin. Since that’s where my non technical friends and family mostly interact with the system, it’s the area I need to be the most polished and hands off.

Jellyfin's Android clients seem to be fine. Android TV and smartphone at least. Have been fine for at least five years.

Can't speak to other platforms though.

Yes, this is the big one for me. Seemingly unlike a lot of folks, Plex is my main music server. Years ago I ripped all my CDs (1800+, IIRC) and Plex + Plexamp is really, really, really good for listening. I haven't yet found anything else that works as well.

I use Plexamp on desktop/laptop computers and then the Android and iOS apps for on-the-go music. I tried Symfonium [1] because it seemed promising and would give me a Jellyfin path, but it was weird and kinda buggy and ate my phone's battery.

I'm hopeful there'll be a good replacement available eventually, but for now, I just have to stick with Plex.

[1] https://www.symfonium.app/

yeah I'm in a boat of similar shape. plex and plexamp is very simple and plug and play - it handles the IP stuff for remote play, which is the tough part for me.

I don't mind lacking features in the server or the client honestly, if I can find and play an album or playlist I'm good. But the connectivity piece can be hard if you're not familiar with self host stuff. I tried to do Jellyfin and Tailscale and some client and it... kind of worked? But it was definitely not as seamless.

I do hope every year that it's my last year paying for Plex. Maybe this year!

I'm fortunate that somehow I ended up with a lifetime PlexPass for... I want to say like $50 a bunch of years back?

Because yes, the remote stuff -- and PlexAmp just working the same wherever I am -- is the huge part of it. Music sits on my NAS and things... just work.

I also really like how easy the caching and offline mode is, because I frequently find myself driving in areas without mobile data service. I keep a couple favorite albums downloaded to my phone, then knowing the app will cache the next ~2 albums of queued tracks generally makes it Just Work.

Yeah PlexAmp is amazing. Feels like it's the only music client around these days that has a functional "shuffle by album" option, instead of treating my library as only a collection of individual songs.

woahhh this exists? I have an Apple Music playlist called Sunday Albums and have always wanted exactly this.

Lyrion (fka Logitech Media Server ) does album shuffle

Another up-vote from me for Plexamp.

I find the mainstream subscription players to be excruciating to use to play what I want at the time.

Yeah me to... Also I love plexamp for the android auto support.

> Feels like it's the only music client around these days that has a functional "shuffle by album" option

foobar2000 has this!

After trying dozens of music clients (including PlexAmp) I eventually settled on simply using foobar2000 pointed to an smb share - nothing else seems capable of properly handling playback by folder structure. (e.g. I've got all my Led Zeppelin albums in the "Led Zeppelin" folder, and I want to just select it and play their discography in album release order.)

I use (and contribute to) Finamp the Jellyfin PlexAmp alternative and it's just done a 1.0.0 release which brings it up to parity with PlexAmp for me. I've previously been a long time PlexAmp user but FinAmp now does everything I want it to.

That 1.0.0, and 1.0.1 is in Beta. Is that ready to be moved into stable? Or am I looking at the wrong project? https://github.com/finamp-app/finamp/releases#release-1.0.1-...

This is promising. Thanks! I'll check it out. I hope it gets the major features and works well.

Looks like it isn't on the android play store though? Any info on this? Play tells me there is a version for a prior version of android, which is won't let me install. Not helpful...

My audio needs have been satisfied for many years with subsonic, then airsonic, and now navidrome. They all expose the same subsonic API, which gives quite some flexibility on the audio player client to use. At the moment, Tempus (Android) seems well maintained, but I miss from DSub the lower clarity as to what is cached for offline consumption.

This gave me an idea, what if I let an agent make a proxy for Jellyfin to act like Plex? Best of both worlds!

Maybe worth a try.

I’m interested in helping with this. Let me know if you start a repo. I was considering the same approach, though I’m not sure how feasible it is.

I don’t think it’ll work because Plex gates everything with a sign in to their online accounts, so auth would have to go through them and there might be server-to-Plex verification going on too.

That said, I’m very interested in this space - I’ve been building a music server that provides compatible APIs for Synology and QNAP mobile apps, with a few more on my todo list. I’d love to include Plexamp so if it is possible please let me know!

> I don’t think it’ll work because Plex gates everything with a sign in to their online accounts...

That isn't true. You can configure the server with which subnets are trusted, and do not require auth.

I would be interested to hear from anyone who set it and can still access Plex over their LAN in a network outage. I have set this multiple times according to docs, and it worked only once ever, thereafter apparently resetting to online login. Of course, they do not make this an easy setting to change!

You need plex pass to do this now. They changed it recently you didnt used to need it.

I have had lifetime pass about ten years.

The mobile apps require signing in through the Plex website before you can do anything?

Performance was also a big issue for me the last time I tried running Jellyfin on the same hardware as my Plex server. I’m happy to see that has been their focus.

really is just the normies access to it via samsung and LG TV's that hold me back.

There is a nice Jellyfin app for LG now

I am currently on vacation and used jellyfin via the browser on all the smart TV. And it just works great. I didn't expect it to work this good.

Newer TiZEN models has a jellyfin app now in the appstore!

I have a lifetime pass as well, but switched to Jellyfin years ago.

Maybe I'm naive, but I feel like if Plex was going to do anything to existing lifetime subscriptions, they would have done it by now. I think we're fine for now.

they'll eventually come out with a completely new overhauled version of plex that's sub only but your lifetime pass will still be good for "plex classic" which they'll stop supporting

Or just end the lifetime tier and make people pay like fastmail did. If even the HN beloved fastmail would do it I pretty much expect it from everyone.

I think this already happened. They increased Plex lifetime to 750 bucks. That’s effectively an end.

I mean, I have a lifetime license for Plex, but even I would happily pay some nominal amount every year if Plex stopped making their software worse intentionally.

Fair, I mean, I still use fastmail :)

Or if like PlayOn, they’ll simply replace your legacy lifetime license software with their new version that no longer does the core functionality that has to be kept up to date — recording different providers — without upgrading to their new extra-special monthly cloud licensing that replaces your “lifetime” license you bought to support their fledgling business. One thing is almost certain, any software claimed to be “Lifetime” will become a lie if given time and one should assume “lifetime” in software almost never means more than 5-10 years before a new executive has a bright idea to generate more revenue.

The Plex rug-pull is just around the corner. I've been running Jellyfin pointed at the same content as Plex for some time now. I still find some rough edges on Jellyfin but they smooth out a few more with each release so I'm confident I'll be just fine when I need to switch. The clients are getting better too, I'm using Infuse on Apple TV and Moonfin for everything else.

> The Plex rug-pull is just around the corner.

I've been hearing that for as long as Jellyfin has existed :-)

Until they handle OTA (along with its EPG), and DVR properly, it's the inferior option for me.

Its hard to tell if the folks at Plex understand the position they're in. They definitely are dancing right up to the line of pushing people too far. I could see them trying to boil the frog with stuff like putting their garbage free streaming stuff front and center more. Like so there won't be one specific thing they do that makes everyone realize its time to leave.

I think one silver lining is that whenever it does reach a tipping point there's going to be a ton of support for projects like Jellyfin, so hopefully we see more feature parity - in particular for shared access for friends and family.

I left this year when they told me I'd have to re-buy my lifetime pass. I suspect they rolled it back, but as you said that was the last straw. All of these streaming nonsense that keeps getting re-enabled, totally troublesome to help friends with the same settings

I couldn't help but think with all the ads they were serving me directly, that they must be selling my data as well. That's not the point of self-host. No thank you.

Jellyfin still missing download w/ transcode, but with space getting so cheap I don't miss it. I do need to improve the music side though

The "vendor" page for their data collection is... impressive.

https://www.plex.tv/vendors-us/

I (also a lifetime Plex Pass user) decided to try it out ~6 months ago, and I've switched over. I haven't had any gaps in functionality yet, though YMMV of course. While it isn't better than Plex (which is still fine for now), it isn't worse either, and I trust the Jellyfin devs a lot more than the Plex devs at this point.

I must be old school. I never got on board with Plex, because my "lifetime" licenses for PlayOn, TVersity and Twonky all ended up completely useless. Yes, those licenses still work, but you can't get the latest versions which provide support for the latest codecs, features, etc. There's a cutoff on the versions that "lifetime" license allows you to upgrade to, and some of those licenses were not that cheap at the time.

So of course, Plex is going to engage in the fuckery that they are. JellyFin on the other hand, for the amount it costs is surprisingly low on janky behavior.

Yes, eventually, all of them will end up this way. But the attitude lacks nuance. I paid $120 for Plex 8 years ago, and if it becomes utter crap tomorrow, it's been totally worth it.

Don't think of any such thing as "lifetime". Just ask: "For the amount they are charging me, how long does it need to last for it to have been worth my money?" With the price I paid, one year would have been enough.

I switched to jellyfin about 6 months ago and I can say it is definitely worse. I’m constantly fighting to fix thumbnails, fix episodes to be in the same show, force rescans to get it to even recognize a show that already exists. I never had any of these problems with plex. Plex also defaults to transcoding which fixes a lot of gaps with clients that don’t support certain codecs. I’m often running into issues where infuse can’t play DTS so I need to reencode before I can play the movies.

Also in the process of ditching plex I switched to audiobookshelf for my audiobooks and I have to say it’s also crap. It’s constantly refusing to start playing, or pausing for a really long time before playing.

All that being said I’m not switching back. It’s been a pain but it was worth it.

That's fair. It got most of my stuff without issues, but there were a fair few I needed to fix.

However, compared to Plex, I've found the remote experience (through Tailscale) to be a lot easier and better performing than the Plex equivalent for me personally. I never have any issues connecting externally now, whereas I did all the time with Plex. Maybe I just needed to get Plex running over Tailscale but it seemed to fight that a bit.

Fair enough, but I honestly have not had a single issue with Jellyfin. It really has been on par with Plex for me.

My only beef with Jellyfind when I used it some time back was inability to resize subtitles, which were huge on a large TV. Could have been lack of knowledge on my part though.

The default recommended folder naming settings are different for jellyfin from plex if I recall correctly. Personally I just let the arr app download metadata and let jellyfin scan local nfo files only for metadata so have not had a problem for a long time.

I moved from plex to jellyfin and got 10% of the way through organising the films the jellyfin style and then just moved the rest of the video files into a folder called 'ok' and it worked fine. try the lazy way first and see how it goes

I don't recall the folder names being different, but by default Jellyfin uses different metadata providers than Plex. That means that things like numbering of specials (think BSG and the webisodes), or shows which have a different aired vs DVD order (i.e. Futurama) might differ between the two. For those, you have to either tweak your episode numbers or just tell Jellyfin to use the metadata provider Plex does (which is what I did for those edge cases).

> Plex also defaults to transcoding which fixes a lot of gaps with clients that don’t support certain codecs.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but as far as I can tell, Plex defaults to direct play enabled, and will direct play unless it's not supported by client. (Or other constraints, like limited bandwidth settings, etc.)

Don't have any of those library issues, something wrong in your setup? My tv also doesn't support DTS, but don't have to do any manual work, jellyfin should do it on the fly for you.

Are your files named to the Jellyfin spec? Haven't had any of those issues

> As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my *arr stack and it has helped tremendously. I used to have to babysit and manually intervene on maybe 10% of requests, now it’s near zero

Any more details here? I hit this a lot and it's not too much work, but still pretty annoying.

Step one is to just let Claude have ssh access to the machine you run plex from and let him do a full sweep. I had some conflicting profile rules and was not properly blocking malware and not properly marking failures so they were never retried. This fixed a big portion of the manual work needed, but the usenet account is really what got me to nearly 100% hands off. I think I am paying $3/month for the next fifteen months, and apparently if I pay attention during Black Friday there will be some pretty cheap deals. For more months of access at even less

EDIT: Claude was also able to look at my logs and noticed that nearly all of the exe or other malware was coming from 2 trackers so we just eliminated those.

Where could someone learn more about the usenet account method?

Claude will be able to help you with everything you need. If you don't have Claude code then the various self hosted subreddits are a good starting point. I had Claude do a sweep of the recent reddit posts to capture the current most recommended usenet accounts, he gave me two links, told me to sign up and paste in the API keys and he took it from there.

How long before they block this kind of work with ai.

I already had DeepSeek tell me "I cant help you with torrents or other copyright infringing uses".

You can get around the checks with careful prompting. You’re just interested and want to learn more about it.

All I did was create a wrapper script to pipe to the torrent client, then "pipe these torrent files to the script" - so easy to circumvent you wonder why they bother

weird, when I ran ds4flash it didn't complain about it at all.

They're already banning certain questions and workflows in the frontier models, but you can usually work around it with well structured queries. The ablated ("cracked") local LLMs will do whatever you want.

I second your Usenet recommendation. I also have the $3 deal which just rolls over each year.

I have had claude do the same, plus reorder nfs mounts, share templates, and do some init-container magic to start vpn/gluetun with port-forwarding, all in a k8s cluster. It's become so easy to manage and debug.

I just like the confirmation that AI is happy to be a Boatswain.

Claude is perfectly happy to do it and gives great suggestions. I can't imagine it will last, I did run into one situation where I wanted to archive all the media on a subscription site before my subscription expired, and it refused. But splitting it into one session to collect all URLs and a second session to plug them into yt-dlp with the right arguments worked just fine.

What are you using for audiobook requests? I also recently setup arr stack, but I saw readarr is depreciated and there doesn't seem to be a clear successor.

It’s been a while since I used it but lazylibrarian has worked for me in the past.

I tried shelfarr as well with some success a while back, but haven’t needed any new books lately since I’m busy catching up on the books I’ve downloaded (the Bible is long lol).

After reading a lot of reddit threads I settled on ReadMeABook[0] and it has been working great so far. One pretty cool feature is that it lets you connect an LLM API key and then you can have it make requests based on your library. I now have Fable 5.1 suggesting my next book.

[0]: https://github.com/kikootwo/readmeabook

Hello Mantis. Question: what do you do with the books? Is there kindle integration somehow?

I think most folks lean on Calibre for that. I've setup KOReader on my wife's Kobo and it looks at our local Calibre server for books.

I use it for audiobooks. They are served up by Plex and I use the Prologue iOS app which is a great audiobook listening experience.

If you don’t want to commit to one of the vibecoded no community arr clones for books then i recommend shelfmark. Lightweight grabber, easy to start with, easy to rip out later.

Chaptarr is great! Just had their public release after a long alpha testing phase

Could you share a link to source code/repo? I couldn't find it

https://github.com/Chaptarr/chaptarr maybe?

I like them both, but I can never give up plexamp. I’ve tried navidrome and various jellyfin clients but I keep going back.

For music, I use Navidrome + Symfonium. Not quite as smooth as Plexamp was (and there's nothing on par with Symfonium on desktop), but I disliked having my music and video commingled so it's been worthwhile for me.

Claude and jellyfin and HASS is great. Now my phone has a “door lock” which turns off the kids user’s access, but lets the current playing finish. And another “door lock” unlocks playing for ten minutes.

What do you mean by door lock, where does the code show up?

Hass can make things appear like light switches, etc, but if you did that (they can run arbitrary code) then the kids will learn that "Hey Siri, turn on Kids Play" will work.

But door locks refuse to unlock from Hey Siri, so you have to unlock and use your phone.

So I made them appear as door locks (my idea, heh, AI didn't come up with that).

Understood, so you have a virtual “home lock” on your phone that is actually a media unlock or whatever. Clever :) I also didn’t know HASS = home assistant

Yeah, home assistant is super powerful once you break out of the mold of "a light is a light, right" and realize that ANYTHING can be represented as state changes, and you can run arbitrary code based on it.

And with lights, locks, and brightness/color being able to be modeled in Hass's interface to HomeKit and Siri, you can basically do ANYTHING that can be turned into on/off, lock/unlock, or a slider.

You could probably build a remote paintball turret with it, camera for viewfinder, sliders for elevation, rotation, and azimuth, lock for arming, switch for fire.

unrelated to your otherwise helpful comment, I just wanted to note that it is "demur" (i.e. hesitate or object) you want in this case; "demure" is an adjective meaning shy or modest.

Thanks, fixed

For what it’s worth, I am very happy with Jellyfin and the *arr suite. It took a bit of agent prodding to get them all playing nicely together and bypassing Cloudflare CAPTCHAs. However, it's pretty sweet when you get it all working.

> bypassing Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

Can you say more about this? I've never encountered this problem in nearly a decade of running the same stack.

With the *arr stack, some of the trackers it uses to search for a torrent will present a captcha when Prowlerr queries it for a search. If you integrate FlareSolverr and set up Prowlerr to submit queries through it for the trackers that have CAPTCHAs, it won't get blocked by them.

Yep. It really isn’t nefarious or abusive. I keep mine slowed down to not scan often to be considerate. Even private trackers can require it now.

Ah - I use Usenet, not Torrents, that'd explain it. Thanks!

Also a lifetime pass Plex user, I'll leave as soon as someone has a good solution for identifying raw Bluray rips automatically. Why do I have to manually name the episodes? We had CDDB last century, why isn't there an equivalent for raw video rips? The ripped data should be identical, a simple hash should uniquely identify it.

Are you describing a plex feature? I was under the impression they required the media to follow certain naming conventions. [1]

Maybe mkv-renamer is of use to you? [2]

1: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-...

2: https://github.com/ssanj/mkv-renamer

I'm describing a hypothetical feature that I want. Essentially an automatic version of mkv-renamer that can identify series, episodes, and special content based on the signature of the ripped files. For whatever reason, such a service doesn't even exist.

Does Filebot not do this for you? A quick glance suggests it does, but I'm not overly concerned with its decision-making; name matches are close enough.

That may actually be what I need, I'll give it try.

Thank you for starting this thread. Another lifetime plex pass user, interested in my choices. For now, I am happy on plex/plexamp. Good to know what jellyfin is at.

If there is one thing that needs to be re-written and consolidated it is the arrs ecosystem. Replacing/consolidating the arrs themselves is pretty straightforward. The trap that quickly becomes a token incinerator is incorporating the downloader into the library manager itself. A lot of learned lessons in that sabnzbd codebase.

As someone with coding projects in the is area would you care to elaborate on "a lot of learned lessons"?

sabnzbd is basically packaged decades of domain specific knowledge about deobfuscating media files

Things like when to cancel early, how to handle par2, obfuscation, rars within rars, decoding articles. Just a mountain of "huh, didn't think of that being a complex problem" that was resolved over time.

I was able to replace the arr suite + sabnzbd with my own rust+ts frankenstein but had I known how complex the usenet piece was going to be I would have separated it into two phases.

I agree. In particular, I think it needs declarative configuration, and it needs to stop storing configuration in a database.

It's insane that the current setup options are:

- Click through dozens of pages importing JSONs from TRaSH Guides, then do it all over again on the other app.

- Run an app that basically does the same thing but over the REST API.

Lifetime pass user long before the ridiculous price hikes for it and the direction for the service going down a path I didn't want to support. You can run Plex and Jellyfin on the same server concurrently pointing to the same media files. My Plex server was still running until I was able to transfer everything over and their mobile app ecosystem got up to parity.

Both for simplicity and portability, I am a very happy user of https://firecore.com/infuse.

I guess it's less full featured as Plex or Jellyfin (it still more than covers the bases for video: format support, different video/audio/subtitle tracks, tv series recognition, skip intros, Trakt.tv etc.); but then again all it requires is any online storage, and the Infuse app (either on iDevice or AppleTV).

Yeaah, second that! I use it on the AppleTV and across the rest of my devices! Works like a charm, and coupled with Tailscale I can access everything on my Nas everywhere :) I have it configured to use Jellyfin as the source, runing on said nas

You should try this: https://neptuneplayer.com/

Does it do bitstream DTS and DV on Apple TV? If so maybe I’ll have to try. Also am I going old or is the whole join our discord to see what it’s about/download is the new norm on the web? My click through rate on that is about 0.

Oh my, this immediately looks so much better UX-wise than Swiftfin!

Looks good...but having to join Discord to try it is one step too many, if I have to be honest.

It's still in beta unfortunately but this is Hacker News and it's okay to share software before it hits prod. People want to be ahead of the curve and it looks promising.

Absolutely, I never said it's not :) I'm just not a fan of the Discord distribution channel - but the reply above you said it's on AppleTV, and I might try that!

FYI: it is GA for Apple TV (so no Discord required) - it’s only iOS/iPad that’s still in public beta.

(Source: was in the Neptune tvOS beta, still am for iOS - it is a fun squad though)

Thanks for the heads up, I'll give it a try on the tv!

huh, yeah I should start an xbmc fork/reimagining. the limitations with the tools of the day are imagination. a LOT of the software I use these days are things I facilitated the creation of and a media player is definitely supposed to be on that list

I left Plex for Jellyfin + Infuse a couple of years ago, and I'm not looking back.

But the sore point right now is outside access, which Jellyfin really isn't made for. I set up Tailscale so I can connect Infuse to Jellyfin remotely. But that's not exactly as smooth as Plex. I can't give friends and family access, either, which was dead easy with Plex.

In terms of the UX, Infuse isn't very good, but it does the job okay. The built-in subtitle fetcher is amazing; that stuff never worked for me with Plex.

For people that don’t know, Infuse lets you use Jellyfin on Apple TV and it’s very helpful for day purpose

Crazy expensive though. It's basically a Plex subscription, just for the player.

Isn’t it something like $10/yr or something?

Yep. Worth every cent. The Apple TV experience of Infuse is night and day with Plex. I used to constantly struggle with Plex buffering and crashing on my local network with the Apple TV app. Infuse just points to a file share on my NAS and streams beautifully, even at larger 4K files.

I used Plex for years. I’d never go back from Infuse now, and I’m happy to pay that subscription to support its excellent development.

It's not as bad as I thought/misremembered. $23/year here in Denmark, and $140/lifetime.

I just bought a lifetime pro access , I think it was around 200$ but really worth it. I get all the updates for free.

Whenever I can, I buy my software now these days instead of renting it.

It seems like a strange juxtaposition to talk about buying vs. renting while getting updates for free.

Not as expensive as a Starbucks habit

There is also an open source tvOS client called Swiftfin. The experience isn't as good though.

You can also transcode your files to formats that the free version of Infuse supports if you are a miser.

Best to specify the formats you can play in the *arr tools than rely on client transcoding. I aim for media I can direct play and the filters in radarr and sonarr make that pretty easy. I also use tdarr to clean up / convert things I couldn't get a direct play file for.

... and is awesome even without Jellyfin - I have it installed on all devices including Apple TV, connected to family NAS through webdav.

I use port forwarding on my home router to open up jellyfin to outside access. it's not as pretty, but it works.

tailscale + cloudflare for lets encrypt support. can then give family tailscale access

Has cloudfare become any more strict with passing large amounts of video data through them? I heard they were kind of against it, but haven't enforced anything.

If you don't proxy or tunnel the connection, it isn't an issue. I assume they are using Tailscale for the actual connection.

One does not need cloudflare for letsencrypt. The tooling has become really simple to use.

You do need a DNS service with API access for automatically creating/renewing the certificates for things that are only served over tailscale though, since they aren't publicly accessible for the letsencrypt servers to talk to.

I've got a Caddy instance setup which proxies my traffic and has dead easy integration for domain DNS registration. Super handy

Same, it's fantastic. As long as you don't need to support as many requests per second on your hardware as something like NGINX could, Caddy is the way to go.

Caddy is great, but doesn't solve the problem I was talking about on its own.

Caddy will get SSL certs automatically if it is exposed to the internet and DNS for that domain points to it, but if you are routing over tailscale exclusively Caddy can't automatically validate the domain names over ACME. There is a Caddy extension for doing DNS based validation, but that puts you back to needing a DNS provider with an API.

> There is a Caddy extension for doing DNS based validation, but that puts you back to needing a DNS provider with an API.

Yea, for clarity this is what i was describing. I use Porkbun's API and the Caddy instance isn't reachable from the internet, only local and over tailscale

I think you overestimate the technical capabilities of my family or their eagerness to install software. When I ran Plex, and nobody ever installed the Plex app like I recommended to them, even though it's one click away in all the app stores.

I mean, if they aren't even willing to download the one app that actually gets them the content they want to see, then *no* software will ever be something that this type of user will be interested in. Not everyone has to use an app, so why try and cater to an audience who clearly has zero interest? You're not gonna magically make it somehow even easier than "go to app store, download app" to the point that they'll use any piece of software.

No, the browser version of Plex is much simpler because you can just send a link. The receiver only needs to go through a simple "type your email and password" sign-up process, and that's it. Nothing to install, works everywhere.

Tailscale is exponentially worse, though. Not only would I have ask them to go to Jellyfin and sign up and log in, I would have to explain that they can't do that until they've installed the Tailscale app (which I have to explain because most non-techies do not know what a VPN is). Tailscale requires its own account, so they have to first sign up to that, and I have to add them as an external user first.

Jellyfin works just fine with remote access and multiple users.

I don't trust Jellyfin to be secure enough to be put on the public Internet.

Why is that? Did you have an issue with how it's set up? Or does it not do enough out of the box and leaves security for the administrator?

Is Plex/jellyfin even necessary for Infuse? I've been using Infuse for years now and it has direct access to my NAS to look for media content and just directly plays it. It's a such an amazing app and it plays everything I throw at it without any buffering or transcoding issues. The Pro version pretty much has all the necessary codecs, including all the dolby things for hdr/atmos. It just works so well.

Yeah I have Infuse only, and am happy with it. No need for jellyfin or whatever else. Honestly Infuse may be one of my best app purchases of these past 10 years…

>But the sore point right now is outside access, which Jellyfin really isn't made for. I set up Tailscale so I can connect Infuse to Jellyfin remotely. But that's not exactly as smooth as Plex. I can't give friends and family access, either, which was dead easy with Plex.

I'm confused about this bit. I installed jellyfin to provide outside access to me and my family/friends.

It wasn't difficult to make it available on the 'net, setting up new users is pretty simple and jellyfin has clients (both first and third party) for most platforms.

In fact, I went from never having used jellyfin to giving external access to friends/family within a few hours.

I'm sure I'm missing something, so if you wouldn't mind, I'd be very interested to hear your experience.

I don't believe in Jellyfin being secure enough to put on the public Internet. In my case, Jellyfin is on my home network, and the box has access to a lot of files and devices.

>I don't believe in Jellyfin being secure enough to put on the public Internet. In my case, Jellyfin is on my home network, and the box has access to a lot of files and devices.

Fair enough. IME, Jellyfin and (just as importantly -- at least for me) the distribution (Fedora) I use have been very good at patching/releasing updates to both the clients and servers when vulnerabilities are found.

Initially, I stuffed jellyfin (and a bunch of other stuff) behind HAProxy[0], which was fine. Now I don't even bother.

It's been at least three years since I put up my jellyfin server and haven't had any issues at all.

All that said, I understand your trepidation and am glad you found something that works for you!

[0] https://www.haproxy.org/

I have the exact same setup. I found Infuse a PITA to begin with. Now it works pretty dang well, even remotely. One big irritation though is the subtitles are always on by default, on Apple TV it's an issue as I can't find a way to disable the default haha! Sometimes there is also a delay between when Jellyfin can play a new video in the browser and when Infuse can play it even though it can see the file.

I do find Infuse significantly better than the Jellyfin apps though.

I also have a lifetime pass, but I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with Plex. Why do I have to regularly turn off their "recommended" stuff that is just ads for movies I can buy online? Why does it appear and re-appear?

Also, the Plex app for LG TV has been buggy and broken for years: some content will not play at all, some will not play if you ff/rewind, and some will not play until you physically turn your TV off and then on. Very annoying.

I'm glad to see competition.

> As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my arr stack and it has helped tremendously.

LLMs have been AMAZING for home server maintenance and improvements. I have completed SO many of my "some day" tasks. I never have to read another fucking log file ever again. It has taken all of the friction out of the hobby. It's all* fun now.

I’ve set up literally hundreds of different self-hosted applications over the years on my homelab. I’ve configured the reverse proxy by hand, setup the docker containers, etc.

Now I can just tell Claude “Setup XYZ app on my server” and it does it all and leaves a note in my Obsidian vault documenting the service (setup instructions, backups, hostname, etc).

Trying out new things has never been easier now that the effort is near-0 to kick the tires.

I would caution against this approach. It's fine to have Claude write a setup script, or whatever you need, but don't run coding agents as your main user on your production machine with full access to your files or whatever your "homelab" consists of.

Yep. You should never let an LLM have access to the system. It's irresponsible as all get out.

Your personal computer? Eh. This afternoon Claude code diagnosed an issue I’ve had with my 4K displays since Tahoe, it would have taken me a week just to learn enough to try to figure it out. Now I have a cli tool which fixes it. I get a weekly report of Chezmoi drift across all my machines, including what I changed. This took me 30 minutes to set up. There are so many things it can simplify.

A production server with user data on it? I wouldn’t dare. My backed up MacBook? Truly valuable.

Next step: set up a scheduled job to read the logs to find any issues before they bite.

Being realistic, most of our home lab setups wouldn’t come close to “production ready” even without AI generated bugs. Relatively stable because they’re largely un-stressed, yes. Good enough for personal use because you can log in and fix anything, sure. Full of bugs, footguns and brain dead decisions because this is our hobby and not our 40 hour a week paid job? Also yes. Our new AI overlords will simply increase the number of buggy things we can deploy.

Hmm, I feel like I have a pretty decent … well, not production-ready, but it’s all in Ansible and I did have to rebuild it from that once, which ironed out most of the bugs in that and everything gets built according to the templates I have for Docker and non Docker setups.

Plus I have “itguy” now, a CLI that can deploy everything, check on status and show me logs. And it’s available via Slack and as an Alfred workflow. So yeah, I think that’s pretty close to production ready.

I still use the free version of Plex and got it set up in a jail on my FreeBSD server. Serves my needs for now, and also use Infuse like a lot of people here on my Apple TV 4K. I have no need to transcoding or anything because all my media consumption is at home these days. If Plex does shit the bed, I will have to rethink my setup for Jellyfin..

I've also got a lifetime Plex pass, but have moved on. I was tired of fighting Plex for what the home screen looked like. It seemed like every update there was more Plex bullshit and less of my actual media without digging through menus. I'd configure it to be just my media, and the next update ads and content from other streaming services kept showing up.

When you move to jellyfin you will then start watching the progress of kyoo for similar reasons lol.

Interesting post about Jellyfin's finances (2024)

https://opencollective.com/jellyfin/updates/were-good-seriou...

> We have quite a budget collected over the last 5 years, and while we're really happy to see so many in the Jellyfin community contribute to us, we want to ask you to stop! No, really. We don't actually need your money. At least, not here and now. We have over $24,000 in the bank, and with average monthly expenses of only ~$600, that's over 40 months (3.3 years) of runway! So, we have plenty of money for the near future ...

Or, you know, invest the money and try to become more self-sufficient over time, safeguarding development in the future.

Classic HN user take. While $600 is obviously a pisspoor budget, they do incredible work compared to closed source solution companies like Plex. Not everything needs to be capitalistic, in fact the product pretty much sells and safeguards itself based on being freeware with pretty quality UX. Who will replace them?

"Capitalistic" is, I'm sure, meant derogatorily. I disagree with the sentiment, and I think the Jellyfin maintainers deserve at least a living wage for their time and efforts.

The Jellyfin devs have chosen for it to be a community/hobby project in order to avoid perverse incentives. That's a completely valid choice. There's a reason JF is the only mainstream media server solution that's continuously improved without any signs of enshittification, and personally I'm inclined to agree with the devs that keeping it completely non-profit has been a boon to its ongoing health and popularity.

Agreed! To clarify: I think they deserve a wage for their work and have previously donated, and that 'capitalizing' on their work is more than justifiable. I also think it's fine that they don't care!

> deserve at least a living wage for their time and efforts

I agree with the sentiment

However,

> $24000 in the bank

I assume there are multiple developers. If the developers are based on North America or Europe that money does not guarantee a living wage for more than.. some months?

It's not a failing of society for someone to have a hobby they enjoy which does not pay them a living wage nor is it derogatory to say not everything in society need be done for capitalistic reasons.

I consider myself a general fan of capitalism as driver behind our primary incomes but I do wish there would be some more room left for the other parts of our lives to be driven by passion, community, or pure enjoyment without it being considered a tragedy to leave them that way.

I'm happy to pay for passion, for community commons, and I'm happy to compensate people for the work they do for pure enjoyment if I want it.

Trade and exchange are natural and human and friendly and cooperative and loving parts of the human experience. To think they're some artificial bolt-on is the derogatory implication.

I don’t disagree with you and I’ve just learned they specifically avoid monetisation to keep their incentives aligned with the community’s. Thanks everyone for pointing that out.

(…but you couldn’t call me capitalistic, that really doesn’t suit me.)

I just hope they can continue to develop the product, because I’m using it daily and don’t want it to go away.

I'm struggling to think of a use for the money that doesn't result in becoming dependent on the money and thus less self-sufficient long term. What did you have in mind with this comment?

The genesis of jellyfin is as a fork of Emby by part of the developper who saw the need for finance of Emby to start driving choices being made in the project rather than user and technical needs and merits.

Part of the team needed it, part of it saw that as something that shouldn't go that way, so they did what you're supposed to do in open source and forked.

So it's not really a surprise they don't go that way.

Are they not paying themselves?

No.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-meta/blob/master/polici...

> Jellyfin funds itself exclusively from donations by individual users. It does not and will not accept any sponsorship or other monetary compensation in exchange for features, priority access, support, or any other work by the community.

They spend the donations on paying for hosting servers, etc. They don't pay anyone a salary.

Their post highlights that your favourite third party client can be different. If your third party client is made by someone who'll accept donations, you should donate to them to keep your client going.

Note that the lead dev of the official android clients does accept personal donations (via Github Sponsors and Buy Me A Coffee), but does not take requests on how to prioritize the work because he wants to keep it strictly as a hobby.

This is really the most healthy way to do things for small or medium-sized open source projects. Paying some people just creates and unnecessary hierarchy that is divorced from the how much they actually contribute to the project and can be an endless source for drama.

Part of the team needed it, part of it saw that as something that shouldn't go that way, so they did what you're supposed to do in open source and forked. Ergo they are very much against doing that for that specific project.

Subtitles are the Achilles heel of Jellyfin (at least the Android client sending the stream to Chromecast stick connected to the TV). I can see the subtitle present but it doesn't show on the movie. Ok, I will just add manually - can't, progress indicator loops forever. Ok, I will remove the existing subtitles and add - removal succeeds - addition fails. This is the same fiddling everytime. If it works, it is a miracle. I used to forget about the subtitles and start the movie - you could just fix it on the fly right?! Nope, now I do full prep before calling everyone that the movie is good to go.

This is not coming from a bad place - I am very appreciative of having a open source alternative to Plex. Just putting this out there in case it catches someone's interest to improve it.

Is that an old problem, or a problem that is still in this new v12?

Given v12 just came out and has a bunch of warnings regarding migration, I'm not going to jump on it yet. This is pre-v12 issue.

FWIW, Moonfin and Infuse both work flawlessly on an AppleTV.

I also remember Google TV working fine, but it seemed like ads got added to another part of the UI every month so I got sick of it.

Roku only supports text subtitles, so if you have picture subtitles (like a DVD or bluray), then you'll need to burn them in if you want to play on Roku.

SenPlayer is also very good on ATV.

Good to know; I missed that when looking for players. Probably because if you search the App Store for "jellyfin" on TvOS, it doesn't find SenPlayer

The default jellyfin client works great also on my NVIDIA shield.

Young children and non technical adults can use it as easily as any streaming app. I guess you can tweak and theme it endlessly to look like your favourite streaming app but I haven’t felt the need to so far.

Self-hosting always involves a bit of jankiness, if you can’t handle that then back to overpriced subscriptions and spyware you go.

Skip forward / back is so janky and annoying. Eg, left or right on the remote wheel moves the timeline, but doesn't change the play position until you press the center button. I wish there was an option to skip immediately.

I had this problem, but I fixed it by setting it up so it extracts all embedded subtitles into SRT files, and enabled a setting prevents Jellyfin from serving embedded subtitles.

From what I remember, some clients don't support streaming subtitles, so they must download them completely in advance, when the movie starts, before they start appearing. If you pick embedded subtitles with these clients, Jellyfin must extract the subtitles files immediately, and this takes a while depending on container format, file sizes and server load. External subtitles are faster.

> If you pick embedded subtitles with these clients, Jellyfin must extract the subtitles files immediately, and this takes a while depending on container format, file sizes and server load.

Really? How?

My expectation would be that extracting a subtitle file takes a few seconds at most. If you had to do it on the fly every time you watched anything in your library, it wouldn't matter.

I don't undestand how movie containers work, but I ran this on a 70 GB movie file to test:

    ffmpeg -i input.mkv -map 0:s:0 /tmp/subtitles.srt

The movie is 2 hours long, and the expected time to complete is 21 minutes. It seems like it's reading the entire file. This is on an average SATA SSD that is also being read/written to by the torrent client in the background.

Any chance you're doing a reencode to SRT? I don't see `-c copy`.

If I extract SRT subtitles from a 47 minute video, it takes about one second, so your two-hour duration isn't what's causing you to wait. You might be decoding two hours of extremely high-resolution pixels, but there's no actual need to do that either.

No, the subtitles are already in SRT. No video decoding is happening. ffmpeg was using 2% CPU and 0% GPU. The bottleneck is IO. ffmpeg must read the entire file, parse the container format and collect the subtitles.

If the SSD was completely idle and could reach it's max rated read speed of 550 MB/s, assuming absolutely no overhead, ffmpeg would finish in just over 2 minutes (70000 MB / 550 MB/s / 60 s/min = 2.12 min). So, in the best case scenario, I'll be stuck waiting for 2 minutes for the subtitles to appear, if the client doesn't time out. Real-world speeds are 10x slower, as we've seen, but they're more than 10x faster than 4K Blu-ray bitrates, so they're sufficient.

How large is your 47 minute video? If it's ~8 GB, which is typically on the high end for episodes from streaming services, and if you have an PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD, which reads at ~6 GB/s, you'll extract subtitles in about 1 second.

IIRC, in many containers embedded subtitles will be interleaved with the video and audio atoms/boxes/packets/etc., and so pulling out the subtitles requires scanning the full file. Not quite as expensive as decoding or re-encoding, but still as slow as "stream the full file into memory and demux the streams"

Could you elaborate on how you set it up to extract the embedded subtitles?

There's an official plug-in in Jellyfin called "Subtitle Extract" that does it automatically for you.

I personally use Bazarr instead, because I also want to download subtitles for different languages. In Bazarr, Embedded Subtitles is just another subtitle provider that can fetch subtitles depending on your rules.

I think you don't want to do the "extract embedded subtitles" method, it's slow as hell and downloading external subtitles is much faster than the built-in extract, at least for HDR+4K mkv video which is what we end up with the most. Can take up to a minute for a 40 minute episode to extract the subtitles, which means you'll need to pause for a minute before you can watch with subtitles, with a 5950X CPU.

> which means you'll need to pause for a minute before you can watch with subtitles

The entire point is that it will extract the embedded subtitles ahead of time (when the media is added to the library) so Jellyfin doesn’t have to do it when you want to watch it.

Oh, I thought we were talking about Jellyfin's "extract subtitles on the fly when playing", which I think is how it works by default, which is what I described before.

If it's a async process that runs on import/update of the library, that sounds great. I'm guessing we're/you're talking about Bazarr then? Although I don't see it explicitly mentioned in this thread earlier. Or some other application?

There's an official plug-in called "Subtitle Extract" that does it in advance, no need for Bazarr :)

You can use this and then block embedded subtitles on a per-library basis, which is what I vaguely described a couple of posts up.

Uuuh, where has that been all this time?! And also, why isn't this the default behavior in core or at least optionally so, rather than a somewhat hidden plugin?! Fake outrage aside, thank you for the pointer. I did read it above, thought it was talking about something else, re-read it now and actually understood it, thanks for sticking with it! :)

No problem, glad I could help :)

I agree this should be easier to find and set up.

Do you use bazarr? That’s been the final fix for me with subtitles

I wasn't aware of this - thanks, I will give it a try.

Upgrade experiences, anyone?

I have a ~40TB library and was still on 10.10.7 because of all the performance issues with 10.11. Upgraded straight to 12.0 and was impressed with how quick and painless it was! As the upgrade instructions warn about, some of my titles disappeared until a rescan added them back, but that was the only weirdness. The whole initial migration only took a few minutes.

Same here, though my migration took about 10 minutes, and the rescan took about 30 minutes. It also had a few minutes of generating trickplay images, though it must have just been filling in gaps, because generating trickplay images for a large library takes days.

I wrongly assumed I was below version 10.10.7 and tried to "upgrade" to it first as the migration guide said, but this completely blew up and the db migrations failed. I then tried to skip straight to 12 and that also crashed on startup during db migrations, so I just nuked the whole Jellyfin config and started from scratch.

Bit unfortunate how this can even happen, but it's on me for not checking or taking a backup first. The config/db really contain anything important anyways, other than "watched" markers that are already out of sync for me across Emby/Jellyfin/Plex.

So on what version where you?

Just pulled latest container and it just worked as far as I can tell.

Went from 10.11 to 12.0 and had zero issues. Scaleway/Ubuntu/Docker env with 8GB RAM.

Well one small niggle, I had a custom script setup on Caddy that overrides how certain buckets are sorted because my users are too lazy to follow my instructions. They changed the BucketID string in some way but this more to do with me having a custom script dependant on something they don't guarantee.

Hopefully they allow admins to change a users preferences in the future but currently it has to be done at the user level. I'm sure that will be in a future update.

if you're running on scaleway, can I ask what you're doing for media storage? scaleway block storage?

Scaleway Object Storage + rclone. Airbus is switching from AWS to Scaleway and has begun their migration. So they are enterprise grade but seem to have the ease of use of Digital Ocean which I migrated from last year. I get a bit overwhelmed by AWS sometimes in work so it's nice to use a simpler product for my personal setup.

Updated the rootless podman container and restarted, worked fine.

Probably 20TB here, 10.11.11, upgrade was smooth and quick. Maybe a few minutes of migration time?

I was actually just getting frustrated with Jellyfin performance and had just told my wife last night that I was switching back to Plex. I didn't realize it was a .11 thing. I just realized that it had gotten worse lately.

12 is working good in the browser so far, but I haven't really put it through the paces fully on Android.

ducks before people start throwing paper balls at me

Windows 11, upgrading jellyfin has literally never been an issue.

Windows 11? booooo

J/k whatever floats your boat my dude

yeah when I started my homelab journey I wanted my windows desktop to also be a server. Over time i moved to pis and other smaller footprint stuff but my media server still is my desktop pc and works via a remote wake up and sleep method over day/night cycle to manage less power consumption. only I use my jellyfin mostly so how can i watch stuff if i am asleep

yep, "just worked". Seems to be much better at properly categorizing some of the more stubborn corners of my library as well. Congrats to Jellyfin maintainers!

I had to go back from 10.11.x to 10.10.7 because the performance was bad, but I'm very confident they've fixed all the performance problems with this 12.0 release.

I'm also confident they've found most of the bugs and have produced something you can just upgrade to, given they've had 7 release candidates over the past few months:

   12.0 RC1 - Jun 22
   12.0 RC2 - Jun 28
   12.0 RC3 - Jul 22
   12.0 RC4 - Aug 02
   12.0 RC5 - Aug 11
   12.0 RC6 - Aug 26
   12.0 RC7 - Sep 01
   12.0     - Sep 08

Overall it looks like a lot of solid testing has gone into this, I shouldn't have to go back to 10.10 again.

UPDATE: Upgraded to 12.0, performance is great, better than 10.10 and 10.11, including in third party apps! No problems with the migration.

Their AI policy (https://jellyfin.org/posts/state-of-the-fin-2026-05-24/#llma...)

> AI use isn't completely forbidden in pull requests/code submissions, however you must understand HOW it does what it does, and any posts to a pull request/issue should be written by the user. You cannot function as a go-between between your AI and our questions/comments, just copy-pasting whatever the AI tells you

One of the more sensible ones.

I love jellyfin, been using it for years now, alongside the *ARR stack.

My young daughter recently started getting into audio books, so I installed Listenarr alongside a vibe coded mcp server [0] which I have running with all the other arr service mcp connections.

This allows the family to easily download and manage their media (err…Linux distributions) via Onyx AI, which I also have running with everything else on local box running microK8s, all on a relatively puny Geekom minipc with 16Gb

This whole setup is pretty straightforward to manage with Claude which has no issues working with K8s.

For those interested in the listenarr audiobook mcp: [0] https://github.com/leachuk/listenarr-mcp/blob/main/CLAUDE.md

Looking forward to this upgrade. I didn't know or think about using Jellyfin for books though. Are there any apps (on mobile or iPad) anyone would reccommend that could read the book list similar to iBooks?

Anyone have the live tv (via iptv not connecting a tuner with an antennae) working well with Apple TV?

Jellyfin works great for me. My only gripe is logging around library scanning being pretty difficult to interpret. I'd love to add a dedicated scanner log that focuses only on logs relating to scanning, which for me tends to be the trouble spot in these systems.

That said I very rarely would even need it, the last time I thought I did was when I had my under configured to not see R rated movies because of my kids, the logs were not clear that the movie was ever scanned so it was hard to realize.

As other have said the apps for devices is still the issue with Jellyfin.

For TV you pretty much have to use Kodi and all the decent theme require a surprising amount of other plug-ins to work...

Anyone know of a decent theme for Kodi that won't fall over next time it updates? I just need "Resume Watching", "Newly Added" and alphabetical lists.

Moonfin?

That looks nice but no Xbox support.

Swiftfin and InFuse are great for Apple TV. Yet another reason to use a streaming box.

I'd love a Kodi theme with the design and responsiveness of the Jellyfin Roku app but sadly nothing I've tried has come close. I always end up going back to the default Kodi theme - it's ugly but it works.

(I'd jump to Roku or Apple TV on my main setup in a heartbeat if they supported DV 7 FEL and all audio passthrough formats.)

Wholphin is a great Android TV app, way better than the "original".

I'm using Wholphin as a client which should just work with v12 but I've not had time to update yet.

I've only really been using jellyfin for a month or two but it's much more user friendly than the xbmc/kodi setup I was using, and the pause/resume between devices is fantastic. I'm totally converted.

Interesting! I have been using the Jellyfin addon for Kodi as my main client, but it would be interesting to try Android TV again on the same device, since I 90% only use it for things on Jellyfin. How is the music player on it?

I only used it for a short while - from memory there was no seek, but it could have just been because my chrome tv remote didn't have seek buttons, long press next/previous didn't work.

I can also recommend Wholphin if it is available (and you are the type of person who actually allows your TV to connect to a network). It's much faster than the official(?) jellyfin android client.

>allows your TV to connect to a network

You don't need to connect your TV, you can just use an Android TV stick such as a Thompson Stick

I have a plex pass but moved to jellyfin, because I can't get plex to reliably stream from my server at all. While jellyfin works so smoothly. Look forward to this update!

Pity they still haven't finished adding support for proper database backends. SQLite is the source of all my problems with Jellyfin as it buckles under the weight of my library, behaves badly on CoW filesystems, and prevents scaling my instance to multiple nodes.

I don't even have a huge library but it performs terribly on my system due to SQLite. Would love a Postgres backend.

Huh, I always thought one of the main advantages of SQLite was supposed to be the performance. (e.g. it's one of the things they brag about on the website.)

It's something to do with NFS. I haven't fully figured it out, but it keeps locking up for some reason. They basically say NFS is not supported.

It's performant under specific workloads. Performance degrades a lot with safe multi-client usage.

Part of this upgrade was improving the database, with the end goal of supporting other database engines like Postgres and MySQL. Unclear exact timeline of proper support but it’s on the way

https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/315/mysql-server-back-en...

I can’t imagine what size library causes trouble, but plugins might also be the problem with slowness or scaling. Could you manually add some indexes on misbehaving queries?

I agree that SQLite might not be the better choice given many Jellyfin users are probably on ZFS or BTRFS.

So what I'm getting from the thread, this is Plex, minus the cancer, but also minus the features?

I think the biggest downsites for most people are the clients. Plex has still better client support on most TVs and mobile devices.

And then maybe watch offline support.

Open Source Plex that anyone can write a client for. I’m not missing any features after switching.

What features is it missing, exactly?

I have always had issues with playing high bitrate BluRay remuxes, with HDR and DTS 5.1+ audio. Granted the last time I tried JellyFin was January 2025 so it is possible this has changed.

Have there been improvements on this front?

Are you sure the client and the server are powerful enough? Do they support all required codecs? I have issues with 4k movies because my Jellyfin is served by a mac mini, and my client is an old Android tablet that doesn't support hardware decoding, but that is hardly Jellyfin's fault. Though they just updated ffmpeg to the latest version, so it might help.

I've been using Jellyfin for roughly 5 years, most of my library are Blu-ray remuxes (50-100 GB) and I haven't had a single one fail to play. My setup is Apple TV with Infuse connected to a LG C9 with a modern Yamaha receiver.

Transcoding is a whole can of worms I chose to avoid by playing everything directly.

I currently use the plex direct play feature on android tv with a Nvidia Shield Pro. Is there an equivalent jellyfin android tv app?

Yes there's an android TV app. It's not the greatest feature-wise but never had any issues

Infuse is the magic ingredient that avoids the codec/transcoding issues other people sometimes experience. It supports direct play of pretty much every possible video thx to its built-in codecs. I’ve been using it for 2 years and I don’t think I had a single case of transcoding. It is paid, but worth it IMO.

This is almost certainly a you problem. Tons of people play remuxes with Jellyfin.

I would check that your client supports the requisite codecs, and has a sufficient network connection. Or alternatively check that your server has enough horsepower (GPU or CPU) to transcode.

oh, i don't know, an easy means of sharing your library with friends, one of the best features of plex?

What's wrong with making a friend an account on your server so they can log in? I've done it, it works fine.

Jellyfin client on android is/was just a wrapper for webplayer so no native format support.

Jellyfin server (when i last tried it 5 years ago) couldn't run on same raspberry pi that hapily ran Plex

I have a trifling complaint about this, which is that it smacks of LLM aid throughout, especially in headings. I wish people would aggressively filter for these things--I have a technical writing SKILL.md that tries to remove all the AI tropes it finds and use simplified technical English (it's a thing, look it up) to do docs, and that makes one heck of a difference...

link: https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw/blob/main/skel/.pi/skills/t...

Yep, that’s mine

this skill may help: https://github.com/blader/humanizer

Mine already covers all of that, based on what Codex says…

Interesting nobody mentioned Silo yet.

https://siloserver.org/

Nice, looks like this is using the Jellyfin protocol. Does anyone know what the motivation to create this was and what is the differentiator here?

It's vibe-slop that popped up just a couple months ago. Aside from inappropriate advertising, why would anyone mention it under a Jellyfin release announcement?

Dow folks migrating frem Plex ; Codex/Sol had no issue transferring played/watched status to my new Jellyfin library.

Coming from Plex, I gave Jellyfin a try, but returned back to Plex after several months. My biggest gripes were poor subtitle support and inability to differintiate TV shows from movies stored in the same folder. Does this version improve these issues?

Can I ask why you have TV shows in the same folder? I have a /video folder and under that /tv /movies /kidsmovies /kidstv. Just kinda curious.

They probably had it set up that way for Plex, and didn't read the documentation about how Jellyfin needs its libraries organized.

Plenty of shows continue in a movie, like Firefly (2002) -> Serenity (2005), so I can see why you'd want to mix.

I get it’s a personal thing but yeah I’d still separate them. Tv != Movie.

I separate everything by decade > type > year (of start date). Don't even keep multiple seasons in the same folder if they are from different years. Still ends up mixing all types within a decade.

But I prefer splitting things by decades as a first level. The distinction of cinema, direct-to-video, TV show, TV movie, web and others isn't really that important to me.

I would even recommend separating all and any anime + animated movies from the rest. Different metadata sources, easier to browse.

Jellyfin has worked great so far for us, I never used Plex or Emby so cant compare. They recently made an official Tizen app too, so dont have to build and sideload anymore, just works.

One of the remaining issues is that the Samsung client remuxes if you select a secondary audio track[0] - apparently fixable by using the AVPlay player instead of the HTML player.

[0]: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-tizen/issues/337

Literally last night I was trying to set up books in Jellyfin and dismayed to see the bookshelf plugin archived with no mention of ongoing support.

Very happy to see it’s been folded into the server!

They don't mention it so I don't think it was changed, but I am really looking forward to multiple libraries actually separating the contents.

This <https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/17215> is an example bug; there were others but I can't find them at the moment.

Something I've long wanted is something far more minimal than jellyfin that just browses my library by folder but has a web player that can transcode/remux as needed for the browser. As it stands when I want to watch a film with someone elses computer I give VLC/whatever a link to a webdav URL and it streams from that. It'd just be nice to have it be in the browser.

The success of jellyfin in recent years has affected me in one unexpected way: I have a project whose .com domain name starts with jelly* and at some point I started getting so many signups from confused Jellyfin users who thought it was related.

(fortunately it’s a niche thing, so I just closed signups and just give my prospective users a one time invite code)

Not sure if they support multiple OPDS catalogs now.

I am on v10 (using JF for music only) and with book plugin (forgot which one) it didn't offer to split books into multiple catalogs, which was a bit annoying. Maybe I missed it in v11. Solution for me was to vibecode a simplest OPDS server with 0 css and basic auth.

Did they fix that thing where like you can’t have mixed movies and tv in the same folder without it going nuts

How would jellyfin be able to tell whether the video files in a directory are movies or tv? What does going nuts actually look like, and what causes it?

Not OP, but I've run into similar instances of Jellyfin "going nuts."

Mixed media type libraries are depreciated and "broken" according to the documentation[1], which is fair enough, but sometimes this results in weirdness if a TV-show is also part of a franchise and has associated TV-movies (e.g. the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Futurama, or Breaking Bad). If you want to keep those movies on your file system in a folder with the other stuff from the franchise, Jellyfin often can't handle it. And it's not obvious to new users whether these TV-movies belong in a TV-shows library or a movies library.

I've also noticed it cannot handle additional layers of folders (i.e. for Genres) in TV show libraries, but it can handle that layer in movie libraries. Failure mode (the "going nuts") looks like those genre folders recognized as bizarre or obscure television shows, and nothing scanned the next layer down.

I haven't looked into how their scanning algorithms work, but it's definitely frustrating that there's not a button or feature to say: "No, Jellyfin, this is a folder, not a show or movie. Try scanning again on the subtree starting here."

Honestly, any software that either silently/automatically reorganizes a user's files and folders (not Jellyfin, but there are others that do this... even FOSS projects) or demands a specific meta-hierarchy on the file system is frustrating to anyone who deliberately keeps their files and folders well-organized.

[1]: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/mixed-movies-...

Are you sure? At least with Kodi for specials like Futurama you make a Season 0 with them that the scrapers understand. Seems like Jellyfin understands that too: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows

I guess for Theatrical TV show movies like The Simpsons Movie it might be more complicated, but worse case you always create or edit your own NFO files with something like MediaElch and have Jellyfin use those.

I think it's better to have genres in the NFO files and not in the folder structure. A show or movie can easily fall into two or genres which is not going to get captured by a single folder.

I bit the bullet years ago and just have separate folders for the two, using recommended naming conventions.

I realised it doesn't improve my life, to care about folder structure and naming, so much that I insist on retaining it and hobbling the media browsing frontend. The media browser brings in massively more metadata than I would have personally collected and encoded into the filepath/filename, and makes it nicely hyperlinked and searchable. Screenshots, posters, backdrops, cast, director, ...

You may think differently. In which case, enjoy your UI being a series of nested folders.

I do have a minimal level of categorisation, e.g. I can have filesystem paths like /tv/comedy /tv/drama, and then I have one "TV Shows" library made of multiple paths, including both /tv/comedy and /tv/drama. So I see the categories but Jellyfin doesn't have to.

What I have for mixed media are Jellyfin's Collections, where I can mix together films, TV series, music, books on any given topic. That's not accounting for TV show "specials" which live with the TV show, if TheTVDB.com honours it thusly.

> I realised it doesn't improve my life, to care about folder structure and naming, so much that I insist on retaining it and hobbling the media browsing frontend.

There's no good reason for any folder structure to hobble a media browsing frontend. There are multiple frontends I've tried for my personal library of ebooks (mostly Humble Bundles of software/hardware books), and a number of those frontends have an option that's basically one book per folder (i.e. all identically named files in that folder treated as different versions of the same book... epub, pdf, etc) and folders above that can be whatever you want. BookOrbit[1] supports arbitrary folder hierarchies and Readest[2] supports at least one level of intermediate hierarchy.

In the context of existing software counterexamples, Jellyfin's delicate sensitivity to folder meta-structure is a regression from the baseline expectation. But I'd agree that ultimately folder naming requirements for the media items themselves makes good sense.

> In which case, enjoy your UI being a series of nested folders.

When the Jellyfin UI reflects those nested folders, I can tell it to only rescan a specific subfolder when I add a movie, rather than checking the whole library for new content. Folders and hierarchical structure are objectively useful, though our search-addled brains make that less obvious than it used to be.

[1]: https://bookorbit.app/library-file-structure/#grouping-folde...

[2]: https://readest.com/docs/library#import

> There's no good reason for any folder structure to hobble a media browsing frontend.

Sure, but what I'm saying is that it was a price I was willing to pay. I tried a lot of other media browsing software and they just didn't meet my needs like Jellyfin did. Could Jellyfin be more flexible? Sure. Does it need to be for me? Not at the moment. I'm getting the benefit right away, and might stand to get more benefit in future if it becomes more flexible on path/filename parsing.

> a number of those frontends have an option that's basically one book per folder

Jellyfin already supports that, but currently only for movies. Seems entirely possible it could do that for books or TV episodes too, if someone volunteers the time to land the server and UI changes for it.

> When the Jellyfin UI reflects those nested folders, I can tell it to only rescan a specific subfolder when I add a movie, rather than checking the whole library for new content.

Jellyfin supports realtime monitoring with inotify so it can see new/updated files as you add them, but this depends on the filesystem supporting it, and also I think it still has a bug where doesn't work on library directory paths that are symlinks.

Jellyfin supports nested folders (Books, Music Videos and Other library types support a folder view), but their limitations are apparent: no homogenous filtering/sorting display, and for Music Videos and Other, no metadata collection.

Thanks. My collection has grown to the point where I'm considering adding some kind of front end to index/search/filter but this means that Jellyfin will not be an option. Probably I'll just end up hacking together some minimal custom solution.

I assume via metadata, classified externally, which is a large part of the selling point of Jellyfin

[self promo warning]

jellyfin 12 available as hosted option on malmo. one click install

https://malmo.network/store/jellyfin

I do run a Jellyfin server for family, but I don't use it that much. I just do everything through a terminal, like I do most other stuff. It's faster and less finicky, I feel.

How does the terminal replace a networked media player?

By using a bunch of CLI tools and self-written scripts.

I don't use streaming (though, mpv can likely handle it). Prefer to have all media I use locally. Don't watch video on my phone, either.

OK, I understand now; you mean Jellyfin is only used by your family, because you prefer to use the CLI instead. I didn't parse it that way initially.

mplayer -vo caca /mnt/nas/example.mp4

Man get with the times and switch to mplayer2 already /s

mpv can still do terminal ANSI-art output if you really want but it can also display pixels directly via DRM without a display server if you launch it from a random VT.

Upgrade from 10.11.11 was also successful here - only took 2-3 minutes. Can definitely notice the performance improvement

How does it compare to current Plex? Are there proper, usable apps for Apple TV and iOS already?

Edit: Anyone is running Jellyfin on Qnap?

Not sure if there is for Apple TV

but they have an iOS app for ipad/iphone https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jellyfin-mobile/id1480192618

Swiftfin, Moonfin are two Jellyfin clients for Apple TV.

I recently switched from Plex's pretty terrible native players to Plezy (on iOS, iPadOS and tvOS).

Plezy supports both Plex and Jellyfin as a backend - I'm not sure if there is 100% feature parity.

Thanks, definitely will try that one.

Infuse is the best I've tried so far on Apple TV. They also make a version for iOS and iPadOS.

Neptune is an up-and-coming client that looks promising.

RC2 was unusable for my large music library. Does anyone else have large music libraries that are unusable?

My raspberry pi 4 struggles every time I scan the library. I hope that this release helps.

Exciting times, they really messed up with 10.11.x shipped half baked DB refactoring

Unfortunately doesn't support Vulkan decoding/encoding (ffmpeg 8 does).

What's the situation on intro end ending detection and skipping?

Intro skipping should work; requires a plugin, may only work with the web client? I have the plugin installed, but it doesn't work with the Jellyfin addon for Kodi. Ending detection works fine; don't remember if it requires a plugin.

I get the "skip intro" / "skip credits" prompts while watching on Infuse, so yes it's possible, but it's specific to only certain shows (probably those with properly-titled chapters). I'm also not sure if the prompts appear in other clients; Infuse might have implemented it from scratch using the chapter titles.

Ah so it's library not finger print based? Only power user Plex feature I need.

Does this introduce basic UX changes, like saying that a media will be permanently lost instead of "will be removed from Jellyfin" which is inaccurate?

Edit: And making it more secure? Just because it is commonly for LAN doesn't mean it can be insecure

Including, but not limited to, sending passwords in cleartext on login.

As opposed to what? The password needs to reach the server. Encryption is the job of HTTPS.

... as opposed to using salted hashing like in every tutorial since 1990s.

I think you have some confusion between expectations upon the client and the server. This very site (and almost every other) sends your password in plaintext over form data when you sign in.

Hashing (and/or salting) a password client-side before sending it would offer next to no protection, as if the server is expecting this value and the attacker intercepts it, they could just replay the hashed value themselves. Why would they need to know the original password?

The salt for the password should also have been randomly generated when it was first created, and stored alongside the password in the database. The only way for the client to know this value would be to retrieve it based on username alone, when the request is first made. This would reduce the security of the system and allow a dedicated attacker much more leverage to try and crack that single password, if they knew only the username of the user.

The comment you're replying to is correct, encryption is the job of HTTPS.

I don't think this is what the GP meant, but he's accidentally correct in that there is indeed no good reason for a password to reach the server.

The client could do a challenge-response PAKE with the server, proving the client held the password while not transmitting it. The session cookie could be sent from the server as part of that exchange, encrypted so only the holder of the user's password could decrypt it.

That's not how the web works, but it's strictly superior to the accepted standard of the client sending the raw password to the server, and it would be secure even over an active MITM unencrypted link.

i believe the maintainers stance is that jellyfin should not be exposed and it should always be behind a vpn

Unfortunately, yeah.

Frankly at this point, everything that is not explicitly fully public should be...

not necessarily always a VPN, but you can also use a reverse proxy like caddy or nginx where encryption and security are primary concerns instead of something non-essential like in jellyfin.

I doubt that, how would that work? You would need to give all your friends a VPN login into your local network for all of their devices, including TVs.

or your friend can setup VPN on his Router box.

But then all of his traffic goes through my internet. Unless he has a special high end router that can only route specific domains.

You dont need high end box, a old mini pc running pfsense/opnsense is enough.

High end, as in feature rich.

If you think most non tech people can just casually find an old pc, install and setup pfsense, then you are out of touch with reality. And they also would have to let it run all the time and have space for it. That's just not something realistic. It's not an option for my friends. Might also break chromecast.

Most non tech people just subcribe to netflix/hbo/disney and call it a day.

Correct, most do. Still leaves a significant portion that does not want to sub to multiple streaming services. Be that as it may, I have multiple friends who I share my jellyfin with. Giving them all access to my network is just not an option. It's not.

Tailscale. Your friend just needs to be invited to your tailnet. Super easy to use with clients on all the major devices.

Even on TV? Without their other traffic is going through network? Also for non technical people?

Yes, I have Tailscale on my AppleTV. Only traffic attempting to reach your tailnet is routed to you, the rest is on his own network.

If you want to make it super easy for non technical people also use reverse proxies to your tailnet so jellyfin/plex is reachable at like “https://watch.example.com”. Pretty much the only friction for non technical people would be creating a tailscale account and being invited to tailnet I guess. But you could also just do that for them I suppose with auth keys

Their stance is actually that exposing it is fine

Reverse proxy works fine. There’s even a setting in Jellyfin to provide the proxy IP.

> like saying that a media will be permanently lost instead of "will be removed from Jellyfin" which is inaccurate?

I don't know if that changed, but I gave jellyfin only read only access to my movies.

I hate people who are demanding of open source projects but... doing performance improvements and adding comic book support before making the product secure enough to expose to the internet is wild prioritization and I don't know what else to say.

Or release native clients that can use OIDC.

Doing neither sucks =[.

Just use Tailscale. It’s always 1 day away from an 0-day anyway.

You can either require mesh vpn or make it easy for friends to access your library. You can't have both.

I stay purely home network, as I suspect most do. So although I can see your use case, I can also understand why it's not a bigger priority than those other features.

Then whitelist their ASN.

What about it is insecure with regards to exposing it to the internet?

There's nothing wrong with exposing it to the internet.

There have been exploits: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/security

The project is a fork of another project (Emby) and there has always been potential for user-supplied data ending up in command-line arguments, or exploitation of the (admin) user getting to upload various files. Nonetheless, all reported security bugs have been fixed promptly, and they're proactively sweeping through the full set of APIs they inherited, looking for possible exploit paths.

Most exploits required an authenticated user.

If you're concerned about this, you should run Jellyfin's docker image, with read-only mounts of your media library, and only give accounts to people you trust, which is how you should treat your personal media library anyway.

I think they are confusing Jellyfin with the crazy exploits in Plex recently.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415

A lot of Jellyfin's API doesn't require any authentication at all, as an example.

> ...

> Is this a massive red-flag security risk that actively exposes your data to the Internet? No.

> At this point, this over-4-year-old issue has gotten posted to HackerNews more than enough times and gotten quite enough unhelpful peanut-gallery comments like those above..

I've had my instance on the internet for years without issue. (Tailscale is great for me, but not feasible for family)

Sorry, but you are being one of those people there. Open source development lives on intrinsic motivation and community. If those things which you want, aren't things that motivate other to donate their free time to, you can implement them yourself, you can try throwing money at people to do it for you, you can take other unwanted chores from them to free their time, but you really ought not push negativity lime this.

Yeaaahhhhhh, you’re totally right

What have you contributed to the project?

You hate it so much that you're doing it yourself?

It sounds like a real pain in the ass upgrade, I'm thankful I've put off trying Jellyfin this long.

Stop jellyfin, update containers, start container, start library scan?

Just like all the updates before that.

Quite the opposite, the upgrade was completely painless for me. The only things that can trip it up are mentioned in the release notes: avoid multiple usernames that only differ in case and make sure you're upgrading from 10.10.7 or any 10.11.x.

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