Recently Plex increased the cost of a new Lifetime Plex Pass to $750 [1]. It seems like they really want to get most users paying recurring monthly or annual fees. But to me at least that kind of goes against the whole purpose of hosting my own media library.
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative!
My biggest beef with Plex is that they've pivoted away from being a media server first and are trying to change into a streaming platform first, and because managers inside the company have to show KPI, they're stuffing the streaming buttons and sections and recommendations in everywhere.
Really frustrating because the media server experience is still by far the best.
It really needs to have a "classic" toggle where all the streaming crap is disabled.
I have frozen both my Plex server and app versions to avoid turning them into a streaming app with outdated contents. Ever since they got rid of Camera Upload function it's been going downhill function-wise.
Honestly, this is why I stopped using plex. I set up and ran my own server because I wanted to see the stuff I have, mostly digitized family VHS and then suddenly I'm finding movies and shows on my server that I didn't put there.
Wow, you can do this? At the risk of further complicating my arr stack, which I barely had the wherewithal to get running in the first place, how does that work?
I still am not quite sure what value something like Plex offers for my personal HTPC media needs. I have a large collection of disk space that's an SMB file share on my local LAN, on a server in my garage. My home theatre PC mounts it over the LAN.
I have an XFCE4 desktop environment on the HTPC with the font size cranked up a bit and can run nautilus, thunar, or any other file explorer metaphor browser to explore the folders. There's a folder for movies, a folder for TV shows, and then stuff is organized within there by its directory name and filename. I double click on something I want to watch and it opens in VLC. Dead simple and works.
It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies. Shows what’s recently be added, recently released. Keeps track of where you’re at in a TV series, to always play the next episode. It can transcode as needed, to something like a mobile device or TV that might be more picky than VLC.
Lots of quality of life improvements over list of files on a smb share.
BTW, there was a variant of this discussion with the iPod and mp3 players back then. Some people wanted to manage music "by hand" in the file system, and had various schemes for doing so (folders for genre, then artists, then album, etc.), and wanted that reflected 1-to-1 in the mp3 player.
iTunes (and the iPod) had a different idea: The app takes care of file management, and you have a frontend supported by a database containing all sorts of metadata to browse your music (both static metadata (artist, genre) and dynamic (play count, skip count, last heard)). iTunes has smart playlists which I love (all songs with 3 stars or more that I haven't heard in 6 weeks).
I'm firmly in the latter camp, and similarly prefer Jellyfin over a pure SMB share for movies.
The first version in the very early days of 128kbps mp3 seemed to be more popular before people were ripping and encoding music with proper id3 tags. Once it became a defacto standard for proper artist, albumname, tracknumber id3 trags to be embedded as metadata in the mp3, using some sort of automated tool very quickly took over.
I do recall using several different tools about 20 years ago that took a bunch of horribly mangled filename .mp3 files (but which did have proper id3 tags in them, or where the user had manually corrected the id3 tags for the bare minimum of albumname, artistname and track numbers) and then rewrote their filenames on disk to something logically consistent to make them easier to find and move, store, copy manually if needed.
The more I think about it the more there needs to be an ID3 equivalent to video media so the meta data is stored with-in the movie container versus a central database.
Kodi and their meta helpers can create a local meta file. Next step is to push it into the media container.
CppCon and other video recorded events would benefit from this. The shared video file would contain the details and remove the energy to search for the source and other meaningful information.
google "metadata in MKV video file" seems to show that MKV already supports something like that, and mkv is already a container format. One problem would be that some collections of video acquired from dozens of sources/people who did the encode won't by any means be 100% standards compliant MKV.
I remember going through and manually keying in the id3 tags on my mp3s using WinAmp, because without them the dash between the artist and song look slightly different. That was a lot of work over a dash.
This is not a rant or an attack on you. I get the point of easyness that Plex and/or Jellyfin offer. I merely would like to explain why i do not need it. I tried both Jellyfin and Plex, but i could not find a huge benefit in using them in our household. Again, not a rant.
I think it's an extra layer on top of things i do not need. I do not need cover art, descriptions or trailers. The smb shares have a folder hierarchy that's very logical and easy to our household so sorting and reindexing is not needed. Kodi (Windows,Linux, Android) keeps track of where i was, but i don't really care that much. Usually i remember what i was watching. File Explorer Pro (paid version) on IOS plays anything. I do not need transcoding, because all the players can play anything i throw at it. My wife and kids know how to use Kodi both on the pcs and the chromecasts.
Mp3's go to a Sonos at the moment. If more mp3 devices would be needed in the future, i'm kinda curious about the CrowdSupply Esparagus systems [1][2]
If you’re using Kodi, that’s effectively the same thing. Kodi is XBMC. Plex started as a fork of XBMC for OS X. At some point they broke it out into a client/server architecture, which Jellyfin emulated.
If you have one primary client, Kodi is fine. Moving to Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby is more about serving multiple clients while maintaining continuity.
> I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking
curious question then - do you remember the content of what you were watching? i totally get that you don't know on what episode you are and i used and love Jellyfin myself, but if you're watching 100+ series "at once" i'm starting to wonder if you even remember the last episode of a show if you rotate so heavily, know what i mean? i barely remember an episode after a week, even if i exclusively watch one show. so either my memory is even worse than i thought, or - you have the memory of a savant ;)
Mostly it's shows that are on hiatus, due to release cycles being completely random nowadays. Or Anime releasing a second season under a whole different show name.
Also shows I've watched 1-2 episodes of and decided it's worth watching, but not now - as there are a limited number of hours in a day.
Unfortunately i don't have the luxury to watch a lot of shows during the week. Usually the max is around 5 or so. Call me strange, but sometimes i actually like it that i forget what i was watching. Makes me kinda of realise it's still a little luxury leisure. Usually i get happy when i realise there's more show to watch (happened with Foundation). Or i keep ignoring it, because interest was lost over time (happened with Rick and Morty). The kids tend to watch a series back to front and then ignore it completely once they lose interest.
I can't watch anything without subtitles. Plex and Jellyfin support them, in many languages, because of the mumbled dialogues. Yes, I know you burn subs in.
Same here. XBMC/Kodi pointed at NFS has served me and my family well for 15+ years. Every once in a while I check out the alternatives with their custom server software and thick "stacks" and conclude that they don't offer me anything I want to do that I can't do with just shared files.
I wonder if we are starting to see a generational gap in how we consume media. When I was growing up, there was no "media experience," you just turned on the TV, selected your channel, and there was your show. Or your turned on the TV, pushed the VHS tape into the VCR, and your movie started playing.
Every once in a while I start looking into things like jellyfin and after a few hours poking around, eventually start to wonder if the heaviest users of these platforms enjoy the process of organizating their media and finding the perfect UI theme for that particular week _more_ than they enjoy actually sitting down and watching their shows.
I would equate browsing for a movie to watch in a Jellyfin library (or Netflix, etc) on the TV to someone browsing at Blockbuster to find a movie to rent, seeing what is available on their DVR, or maybe even the TV Guide.
I think the media servers started as a way to avoid tapes/DVDs and making it easier to get content on the TV. It’s a much better experience than a 100 DVD changer. Now, it evolved based on anxiety around streaming services and never knowing when the TV show you’re watching will get pulled, or your favorite movie will lose availability… and wanting to maintain access. This is especially true as companies, like Sony, remove digital copies of movies people “bought”. So any digital file with DRM from a company is only good as long as they decide to keep offering it, which isn’t forever.
> you just turned on the TV, selected your channel, and there was your show
You've just described the media experience. When I was a kid I spent so much time just flipping through channels. The same activity today is a vastly different and inferior experience. Modern televisions take forever to change channels.
Jellyfin took me 20 minutes to setup with docker-compose. I’ve never customized anything about it aside from pointing it at my media library. It’s way less effort than making an SMB share play nice with a smart TV.
And you can stream to your phone. And I set my elderly aunt up to be able to stream it from her Apple TV ~80 miles away from me. And there are phone apps that let you download stuff in advance to watch on a plane. And I've been able to cast Jellyfin from my phone to the TV in a hotel before
My personal media library has over 600 moves and 70+ shows and around 8,000 books. There is no way I can watch and read all of it in my lifetime. But I do find joy in being a little librarian and I also care deeply about art and like to keep my own little nest. All of it is sharable with anyone i like anywhere in the world. I do use jellyfin but i don't think I have ever switched its theme though.
Either way, yeah one of the joys of running a home lab to me is definitely the managing and maintainence to me and I don't think its any lesser pursuit than watching the media itself
i've used this plugin a lot, and it is nice, but a bit hit-or-miss. it analyzes all episodes of a show to start seeing a pattern in the beginning of shows, or checks chapters which my files rarely had. works well for most shows, but if a show has unique intros for every episode, it doesn't really work. also had trouble with 100% consistent intros, but i never really figured out why that happened.
kind of a 50% solution, works a lot of times but a lot of other times you still end up scrubbing. (also consider that if you install this plugin onto a large existing library, it's going to take a considerable amount of compute and real-world time to do complete it for every show).
That sounds like what I see with Plex, too. It definitely doesn't get it when the intros are unique. And if there's something later that's the same each show (an explanation of the game show, etc) it'll target it as the intro instead.
ah i see, then they must use a similar process. i wonder how big streaming sites do it. underpaid global south workers who manually tag the intro for every episode, or do the files come pre-tagged by the production. maybe a mix of both.
There is a plugin that is supposed to provide this, but I don't think it works with every client, and I'm moderately sure it doesn't work with Kodi. Oddly, skip credits/jump to next episode works fine.
>It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies.
Infuse [1] is a nice way to get these features on Apple TV and iOS devices while simply sharing files via SMB.
Yes. And with something like a GL.iNet travel router + Tailscale, you can watch Jellyfin from anywhere without ever exposing it to the Internet. You plug it in your hotel room, tell the hotel TV to connect to it, and voilà: Jellyfin on any random TV.
Connect a random TV to your home LAN over a VPN? No thank you! I would rather use HDMI in. You can also cache data locally. Or just watch on a smaller screen or tablet. There are a lot of jurisdictions where I would not want to take private keys or passwords with me.
I just bring a $25 Onn 4k Google TV “box” I use for travel that’s roughly half the size of a deck of cards and pre-configured with Jellyfin/ad-free home screen/etc in addition to the travel router linked to my VPN.
Less due to security and more because I’ve seen hotel TVs that literally had like 5 sec latency for any button press and are full of ads so I don’t want to deal with that.
I have a HD TV from 2007 and I still vividly remember having to convert videos to a certain format because it was so picky. IIRC it only played .mp4, most of the movies I had on my external drive back then were .mkv and maybe some .avi , so almost nothing played
The only thing I value from that list is the played/unplayed status, and resuming a title from where I left off. My two preferred clients handle that for me on my various devices.
In particular the main value-add is that they have clients across so many different platforms, including most major bespoke smart TV brands[0], and their solution to streaming on WAN (HTTPS brokering) is pretty darn good for most people. Accessing my media from hotel rooms is pretty darn seamless, other than the wifi connection sometimes requiring downscaling to 720p or or so.
0: not really an issue nowadays with everyone moving to Big Tech-provided smart TV OS, but when you use an old TV with like mid-2010s webOS it's nice to see some old Plex app that still works.
I guess this applies to a relatively small subset of population who are always on the riad and travelling for work.
One must have a nightmare of a vacation to even consider turning on a tv in an hotel room, I can't even remember the last time an hotel TV served any other purpose than hanging a wet towel.
Want to watch an episode of that series while you're sitting at work waiting for a long test pass? Plex.
You're hanging out with friends and they want to watch that movie you own? Plex.
You're at the gym and want to watch The Wire instead of whatever reality show is on the gym TV? Believe it or not, straight to Plex.
To your direct point, it doesn't have to be a terrible vacation. Any time I plan a vacation longer than a week it includes down day(s) with no itinerary, just recuperating. Sometimes that involves staring at a screen. Sometimes I've been out for 10 hours, it's only 7PM and I don't want to go to sleep, but I want to chill out in my room (maybe I'm overstimulated, maybe I'm just tired, doesn't matter).
I guess we are a different breed. I didn't even knew there were TV in gym clubs (I am exercising outside, never understood paying for exercising either). I don't really understand why someone would be so little engaged on his exercising/training/sport that they would need a screen to entertain themselves to be honest.
That is interesting to hear, a completely foreign concept to me that sounds a bit like addiction to be honest.
If exercise was pleasant you wouldn't have to remind people to do more of it. The only thing worse than running for an hour is running for an hour and actually paying attention to the complaints your body is sending while doing so.
Well I'll give a pass to those who live in Siberia, Ulaanbataar or anywhere else with permafrost then ;-)
My experience in cold places, especially those with a lot of snow and ice, is that there are usually enough chores to do that skipping deadlifts day is not really a problem though.
> Also what's "engaging" in running? You put one foot in front of the other, it's not exactly something that needs 100% of your brain power to execute.
I guess that is the difference between running or cycling outside and doing it on a machine.
This thread was a "why does remote access matter", not a comparison of Jellyfin and Plex.
I run both and Jellyfin is very clearly an open source project.
By that I mean that the interesting technical problem (streaming) is implemented rather well and there is a UI that technically has buttons to expose the things it does while simultaneously not being good at many of the things people use Plex for.
Jellyfin's remote access story is "set up a VPN or Tailscale". Plex's remote access story is "it works".
Jellyfin's story for accessing content from multiple servers doesn't exist. Neither does a global auth system for sharing access to your library, having friends, etc.
Jellyfin's sorting, filtering, and searching are just OK. Its web UI is nowhere near as nice for libraries of O(1000).
Real world example: I was at an AirBnB last week that had a Roku TV. To get to my Plex library I installed the Plex app. There was a Jellyfin app but I couldn't use it because there was no VPN client for the TV, and I don't feel the need to set up and run Tailscale when I already have Wireguard.
Well usually if I am on vacation that is not to stare at walls but to visit, enjoy the place I am visiting and and experience stuff so yes I usually only come back to the hotel room either to wash/change myself or to sleep and/or have sex.
Are you staying all day in your bedroom when you are home?
What I want to know is, what happened in your life that turned you into the kind of monster that destroys hotel electronics with wet towels when there are always perfectly good towel racks in the bathroom??
In my experience there are never enough towel racks or they aren't wide enough for the towel and the bathroom ventilation is usually set to stop automatically when you close the door.
Hotel electronics do not have feelings so I don't really think that the monster qualification applies, and they are probably ok anyway as they are so rarely used and have time to dry before being powered on thanks to the aircon helping maintaining a dry air. I don't think the actual electrical components do suffer from a lot of moisture from the towel.
You can do that with Jellyfin and Tailscale trivially on devices you own; for a hotel TV you can use a GL.iNet travel router (which will also let you access your LAN from any device connected to it) and it's all free (except for the router of course, that you just buy once).
Admittedly my use case is not the most common. For a number of what I think are well founded reasons I don't use the "smart TV" OSes built into any televisions I own, none of my TVs have the wifi password or access to the Internet. The HTPC screen is just a screen, something else that's smarter is driving it.
I also don't have any need for realtime transcoding as my home internet upstream speed is sufficient that I can watch 'full resolution' stuff remotely from my laptop or phone via VPN back to home office, and smbfs or sshfs access to the same file shares, without needing to use any CPU or GPU resources to process the video in realtime in between where it's stored any my client playback device.
If you don't care for any of the modcons of a media streaming system similar to Netflix, etc. then more power to you, stick with a SMB share. It's undeniably less that can go wrong and god knows these systems can become a janitorial hell sometimes.
However I hope you can see that there is a plethora of benefits that others may enjoy from it. Otherwise, this kinda feels like the classic HN Dropbox critique.
I am definitely in the former category. I’m not dedicating the time to replicate a Netflix client equivalent with all the metadata (although I do make the time for FLAC albums). There’s nothing as straightforward as directories and a SMB conf file. Plus, you name individual files however you want.
I have straightforward SMB shares, but two distinct groups for movies. The first is standard bitrate, where everything is 1080p SDR h265. The second is for 4K HDR, higher bitrate. That second group is only for a small number of movies that I like very much, will rewatch, and have cinematography and visuals that justify the storage. If I love a movie but it is mostly an indoor dialogue affair, there is no point in it being in the second group. There is duplication between the two groups so I am covered if I want to watch the high def version at home on my large TV connected to my Pi NAS via Ethernet, or the standard def version around the house (usually working out) on a mobile device (or possibly on the road via my Tailnet).
The transcoding isn't just about bandwidth, it's about compatibility. I store most media in H.265 because that's the most space efficient, and most things can play it, but a decent number of devices still need H.264. I also have older content with DTS soundtracks, which isn't supported by a bunch of new devices.
Plex/Emby/Jellyfin will handle that compatibility by converting on the fly.
Plus, when using a Fire Stick, or Google TV Streamer, or old Chromecast it just isn't easy/possible to browse a SMB share.
Yeah I would definitely need to look into some kind of real time transcoding setup (jellyfin, etc) if I had a use case for remote watching of things on any other less-capable platforms, particularly that can't handle x265 or AV1 encoded things.
Right now if I'm not at home, and I'm watching something remotely that's served from a home fileserver, the only two client devices that I have in use are either my MacOS laptop (VLC), or a fairly recent Android phone with a file explorer app that supports sshfs mounts to open files (again VLC as the video player).
> I also don't have any need for realtime transcoding as my home internet upstream speed is sufficient that I can watch 'full resolution' stuff remotely from my laptop or phone via VPN back to home office, and smbfs or sshfs access to the same file shares, without needing to use any CPU or GPU resources to process the video in realtime in between where it's stored any my client playback device.
And if your remote internet connection is insufficient? Especially if you have all content in high bit rate HDR stuff… that can be problematic in some parts of the world.
That's definitely a consideration, and I'm not watching 72GB 3-hour length 4K movies remotely if the far end's internet connection is insufficient. But the times that I find myself in such a place are fairly uncommon these days. If I were spending a lot of time in places where Internet service was considerably worse than where I travel now, I would probably just download the 1080p, HEVC/x265, 2.2GB total file size version of a movie and call that "ehh, good enough".
After being too used to the streaming app experience, I wanted the same thing for my own library. You don't need to use the transcoding feature but the Netflix experience is a nice upgrade. The Jellyfin server doesn't need much for resources either (if you aren't transcoding), people run it on raspberry pis with external harddrives attached. Once nice thing is that I often forget about the stuff I've downloaded, Jellyfin has a "recently added" section and will also remember where I've left off with a "continue watching" section and also a "next up" section showing the next episode in series I'm watching. Since I have sonarr subscribed to currently airing TV shows, the latest episode will appear there after its been downloaded.
The annoying thing is that Jellyfin is particular about how your TV shows are organized. If you just dump whole seasons into one directory, that's fine but if you have individual episodes, they need to be organized by Title/Season #/Episode.mkv. The good thing about Sonarr is that it will make a second library directory for you comprised of hardlinks organized in the right structure. Plex is less picky, it seems to recognize files no matter how messy your downloads folder is but Plex has infected their client with ads and freemium garbage of late. Obviously if you use usenet, this isn't a huge problem, you can do whatever you want with your files once downloaded.
If I had your setup, I would still prefer the client experience of either Infuse, Jellyfin, or Plex, but I don't think I'd value it enough to pay. The first time I used plex, I was impressed by the fact that I didn't really need to do any of what you've described with your collection (for the most part). I just had a huge dump of torrents and other randomly sourced video files, in wildly varying formats, that were named just barely well-enough for Plex to turn that into a very nicely browsable home media experience with no extra work, that I could then stream to any device with a client. Not that I'd be dismissive of manually organizing a collection, it's just not a compelling hobby to me, so a drop in media viewing experience with an amazing frontend that handled all of the meta stuff was spectacular.
In contrast to your HTPC setup, I've actually never even considered owning my own TV, it was just a streamlined way for me to access my collection on other non-TV devices, including the mac I didn't want to keep files on.
VPN is also common in those discussions, it's more setup on the client side but can win on security. Of course there'd be a lot of people in trouble if you couldn't trust tailscale to be better than a beginner selfhoster on security so it's still a good goto option.
Clients on everything, watch history tracking, meta data collection, nicer player, quick transcode for mobiles and other portable media players you don't want 4k on, automatic subtitle collection, live TV DVR, and an interface so simple my grandmother can use it.
You’ve described NAS in general. It’s more than just file system. Plex gives you Media Library indexing, web app, mobile and TV apps to play content from your NAS, from anywhere in the world (it even includes Relay, in case you don’t have public IP or accessing NAT traversal).
A friend who doesn't live close had one season of a series I wanted to watch and I could stream it from his Plex. I'm not saying this could not have been solved in another easy way, but it worked without friction because he had Plex anyway.
I'm kinda over downloading gigabytes of files and then deleting them after watching. And I'm not doing this regularly so I've not investigated. All I'm saying is that it solved a problem nicely.
Thats what I used to have 15 years ago when I was streaming over SMB to my Xbox running XBMC. It works but having something like Plex or Jellyfin is just so much nicer. It gives you the "Netflix" experience of browsing your media library. My Jellyfin is setup to offer an automatic "skip intro/credits" button. I used to use Plex and was a yearly subscriber mostly for the ability to download media to my phone for offline playback. Obviously I could do that with an SMB share but Plex (and the others) have built-in transcoding which is nice if you don't have the time or space for a bunch of full size 1080p files.
Now, I use Jellyfin alongside Seerr (so me and others can quickly pick-out media to automatically download in a preset quality). I've also installed a plugin for Jellyfin called Moonfin that offers a ton of quality of life improvements and also integrates Seerr within one app. I just click on a movie or TV season I want, Seerr tells radarr or sonarr to query my private trackers for the selection, and then radarr/sonarr send the torrent to rtorrent. After a few minutes, Jellyfin picks up the files and adds them to the database.
One thing that Jellyfin does really well is integrate devices like the HDHomeRun. You can then watch OTA TV from any device on the LAN or elsewhere through the Jellyfin Web portal or dedicated clients for Linux/Android/iOS.
If your HTPC is powerful enough, you should also check out Plasma Bigscreen as a substitute for XFCE4.
For me the metadata is a big part of it. I have a large physical media collection so I could just use the discs, but putting it all into plex has made it so much easier to browse and watch. For example I can pause and skim the cast/crew filmographies right in the plex UI, including being able to see what I already have and investigate the stuff I've never heard of for possible future purchases. When watching several movies in a row, after finishing one I can follow the automatically-populated trail of related/similar movies until I find something that fits my mood.
I started using it because me and my flatmate had different media libraries and we wanted to share them. Plex very conveniently merged both into a single deduplicated library that we could pick from when watching something on the TV.
Jellyfin is nice for various reasons (main for me is play synching) but Apple TV + Infuse + SMB share made something pretty bulletproof and kid friendly even before.
Plex/Jellyfin is for those without a home theater. I typically listen/watch media on my phone or old iPad, or sometimes a laptop. Since Jellyfin works through the browser it covers all these scenarios. On the occasion I have some people over and we want to watch it on a TV I can connect the laptop to the TV.
It isn't sustainable in the context of their desire to pivot to being a streaming service, along with their desire to blow resources on repeatedly redesigning the apps to make the UI slower and buggier.
The change to $750 just took effect July 1st. I suspect we're going to see some big discounts down to $400 or less around Black Friday and periodically at other times of the year.
pCloud, a cloud storage provider who offers lifetime plans, uses a similar strategy.
Basically I think they are putting the $750 price out there a) for anyone who is dumb enough to pay it, and b) as a way to make limited-time discounts and the annual plan seem like better deals by comparison.
According to this Forbes article [1], Plex earns the majority of their revenue from selling ads in their streaming platform:
> Valory said that Plex, which currently does not disclose financial information, generates roughly 20 percent of its revenues from member subscriptions, which unlock premium capabilities of its media platform, compared to 80 percent from the ad business.
So possibly they are just trying to extract as much money as possible from their "legacy" userbase while they can, with the expectation that people hosting their own media libraries are a dwindling market.
Looking at their different features offered in different pricing plans [2], it seems like their strategy is to make money on sharing media libraries with friends and family. $70/year isn't a huge amount to simplify streaming to other (non-technical) people on a variety of different devices. And I suspect some plex users are charging for their access to their media libraries - even if it's something informal like accepting donations or asking for a payment on venmo - in which case the fees would just be a small operating cost.
I have seen people talking about this "hosting a small streaming service for friends" thing, and I really have trouble understanding that. It just seems a bad idea to expose such a server to the Internet and maintain it, even with a VPN, and I don't know what kind of friends they have. That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it takes to curate your library including "acquisition" and pruning etc.
It's not an open server that anyone can just connect to, only specific Plex accounts that you invite.
They also don't need to know anything about how to connect to your server, it simply shows up as a server name in the list on their "app" or the Plex website, there is no need for dynamic DNS or VPN or anything like that as Plex's servers do a kind of "service discovery" automatically.
It does require you exposing the Plex TCP port to the internet, so you are relying on them making sure there are no vulnerabilities. You could probably do a VPN approach and give them a URL they can enter into a web-browser, but it's unlikely to work on TV and mobile apps.
I've given access to my Plex server to my siblings and parents and it's great. Since I got a decently fast fibre line, no more having to manually copy shows/movies they want to watch over a LAN or using a USB HDD or memory stick.
> It just seems a bad idea to expose such a server to the Internet and maintain it
Why? Nerds have been hosting services for their friends and family for decades now. It was one of the primary benefits of knowing an IT nerd. They probably had a few servers co-located at work or with their friend who worked for the local ISP. These days with cloud I suppose it's changed, but I didn't think this skillset had eroded that much.
Hosting services on the public internet isn't very scary. If your Plex server gets zero day'ed, you just reinstall it and start over. Chances are that will never happen.
I host the media server, you come help me fix my plumbing when I need it sort of thing.
> That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it takes to curate your library including "acquisition" and pruning etc.
This part, sure. But it's like anything else you do for family and friends. When I ran an e-mail server for everyone it was a giant pain that eventually became not worth it once the free providers got better and more accessible.
Plus the whole "curating" thing is the fun part, usually! Most of that stuff is usually about 98% automated either way so the "job" is largely fixing automation when it chokes.
While I'm a lucky lifetime Plex pass holder, the service I get with my own self hosted setup is leagues ahead of anything I could pay for. I would probably pay for a Plex subscription if I started today. I hope Jellyfin improves its remote streaming UX, subtitle management, and app polish, because it's a pretty good contender otherwise.
Have to admit, quite impressive that someone is still paying this much for Plex given the free alternative like Jellyfin that can do pretty much everything the same.
What’s the psychology here that people are willing to pay this much for this software, yet not even $20 for another?
It's pretty slick looking which is worth something to me. Not $750, but something. But even though some of the UX choices of Jellyfin didn't make sense to me, it's an amazing piece of software, so I'm sticking with that, and using Wholphin [1] as a frontend.
Not hard to understand. People will pay for a better UX. Which Plex has, once you disable all the streaming junk.
Also there’s simply more clients for it. The only way to play Bluray Dolby Vision layers correctly is with an AM6B+ which has an amazing Plex frontend.
I have a lifetime pass I bought many years ago for not much money, Plex had apps in all
Platforms. Jellyfin does not at this point, even though there’s work being done everywhere.
Plex just works and is supporter everywhere. Not that surprising that people use it.
What information do you have that people are actually paying this price?
There are plenty of situations where a business must charge over X for one reason and must charge under Y for another, where Y < X. What happens is generally they go for the "over X" branch for fairly obvious reasons, then go out of business sooner or later because they can't actually charge that. Just the fact that they are trying to charge that much doesn't mean people are paying it.
I’m surprised people reach for plex, not sure what I’m missing - but a Jellyfin container set up has been fantastic for strictly at home usage (running on an old gaming PC).
It’s fantastic software - the cross platform applications are pretty useable. Don’t think we’ve even had any major issues over the last 4 years using it.
Many thanks to the builders and maintainers, hopefully Andrew can take some rest and know they help a lot of people!
I run JF not plex, but the #1 missing feature I'd like is per-user granular sharing of content within specific libraries.
So far as I can tell, the only way around this is to symlink the subset of media into separate folders, make each of them libraries, then present those libraries to each user.
I'm not sure if this is what you want but you can set two lists of tags for each user that works as items blacklists and whitelists. Then you tag whatever media you want with those and they will appear or disappear for that user.
You can find this feature in the admin control panel -> Users -> select an user -> Parental control (tab)
There is also an Access tab, together both can be used to lock things down fairly well.
That's exactly the problem that I tried to solve with the OS I'm working on.
You can have a shared jellyfin instance if you want everyone to access the same library.
But you can also create OS users, with their own jellyfin instance, and within that you can set access or only to certain folders. That only have the contents that you want them to access.
It's not as efficient as granting access within jellyfin, but it's pretty close to what you're trying to do.
I have a problem that it constantly tries to re-encode video that could be played perfectly fine in their player or the mpv shim. I wound up just mounting my remote drives and playing in my local mpv. I don't really use it because of that. Unfortunate because otherwise I love a lot of things about it.
I too have run into this problem on a number of devices. The client's supported codec/media format detection logic appears to be extremely pessimistic. To the point that the mere existence of certain audio track formats and subtitles can trigger transcoding, even when said tracks/subtitles aren't actively used. The same files played via MPV on a file share, i.e. no transcoding possible, play without issue.
I've tried tweaking both the clients and server to be less pessimistic, i.e. see if the active media elements are supported, but even then it really fights it. I think the best approach would be rewrite the clients to adopt a (try || transcode) strategy rather than (guess || transcode), but that looked to be a major piece of work.
You can check why it’s re-encoding, there’s some guides out there. In my case it was the subtitles! Turns out Safari can’t handle all types of subtitles. Might be worth looking into it.
Of course I have been down the rabbit hole. The software is wrong. Give me an option to bypass re-encoding, and instead of failing based on diagnostics like it does, just play the darn file the best you can. I only have so much patience and I prefer living with a samba share to play it in the exact same mpv player without problems rather than fighting software over something that is so simple and fundamental to a video player.
Yeah, I can 100% understand your frustration. It’s also a bit opaque as to why it’s re-encoding.
That said, we are a family so I can’t get everyone else to stream to mpv, so Jellyfin works better for everyone. mpv is also a great piece of software, plays everything!
The Apple TV solutions for Jellyfin are inadequate last I checked. Basically you are stuck with Plex and Infuse. I already have lifetime Plex Pass so no reason to care... for now.
Infuse is another $100 license to sync watch history, when I already paid $100 for Plex a while ago (with the primary driver being 'sync watch history', which is the basic feature Plex provides).
Paying more money to use a different product, and then expecting all of my users to do the same, is a big hill to climb.
For how much Infuse gets praised I was disappointed in the UI/UX. Playback is great, but the browsing UI is terrible and offline downloads are really buggy (Just like with Plex for a very long time)
It's worth noting that Swiftfin finally had a new release for tvOS this summer which is worth checking out if you're interested in Jellyfin on Apple TV
Not sure of your issues or when you last tried. I recently installed Plex on my TruNAS. I use the AppleTV app and it works well.
One caveat is that older AppleTVs can’t do native decoding of some mkvs. But that’s largely an AppleTV limitation. Though I could imagine the client being smart enough to list its abilities and the server only serving content supported by the client.
Because Plex worked amazingly ~5-6 years ago, while Jellyfin was still very early stage. It'd sort of work. So there's a lot of "Well I'm already using Plex" inertia. Plus Plex has very lovely, polished clients, you can easily invite people, share your library with others etc etc. Once they got all that of course, then the changes/fees/ads/bloat started.
Jellyfin is great, it's all I've ever used. But it's still very rough - AppleTV support is limited+buggy (ask my wife...), you can't cast to a Chromecast from iOS etc. Plugins are required for some things to work. Transcoding is harder to get working. Good luck downloading stuff for offline use on the mobile client apps, all you get is the raw movie/tv show file - you have to use VLC to play it.
Again, I love Jellyfin and I use it daily. But we're both kidding ourselves if we think the polished experience you get with Plex is the same as it is with Jellyfin.
I bought a cheapo lifetime pass in the early days of plex. Their business leadership decided to make Plex more like a TV than a personal media server, and the UI / UX changes reflected this.
I got a great deal as an early user, but new users have Good Reasons not to use plex anymore.
I use Plex because the whole experience looks and feels more polished than Jellyfin (that’s personal but even the name Jellyfin irks me, I hate jellyfish), which is something I value more than openness. Also I bought the Plex lifetime a few years ago during Covid and at that time Jellyfin was nowhere near Plex in terms of user friendliness, Plex already had a TV app, a mobile app with ability to download locally, a feature to share access to anyone with a Plex account, automatic metadata update, etc. I don’t know if Jellyfin has all that even today.
If I were to make a choice today I think my first choice would still be Plex.
I have been using Plex since 2014, paid for the lifetime pass back then. It is by-far the most used piece of software I've ever relied on (excluding any general purpose software like OS/Browser).
I have my family setup on Plex, my automations, my apps, my preferences, etc. I'm so comfortable in Plex that until they do something catastrophic to my experience, I can't find the motivation to train my mother to use another app.
I never heard of Jellyfin until now (I might have been living under a rock). Plex has been... fine, though this looks really interesting so I might switch over.
One thing that may help your transition is that you can point both systems at the same media files so it's not an immediate commitment. I did that, then one day Plex borked itself as it periodically did for me and I just didn't bother fixing it.
plex runs on most of the commercial NAS you can buy as a simple click-install-works packet, even on the cheap CPUs. It is a very slick tool, but I am happy I moved everything over to jellyfin.
I run Jellyfin on Raspberry pi and access it with Android app. The main issues I have with the app are:
1. Subtitle management is a total pain. Sometimes it doesn't show any subtitle toggle, sometimes it does. There isn't an option to switch between different subtitles. Adding an external subtitle file on the fly via the app never works for me. One approach that almost always works is to download the subtitle file, rename it to match movie filename, trigger a metadata refresh for the file/library (this requires switching from library view to dashboard view and back so certainly has friction). Also, if you start a movie directly on Chromecast, subtitles don't show even if they have been chosen. However, if you start the movie with subtitles "ON" on the app and THEN stream it via Chromecast, subtitles show up on the TV.
2. Sometimes it has issues with Google Chromecast (puck connecting to my LG OLED TV via HDMI port). I have had better luck with the in-built Chromecast feature of the TV.
The Pi isn't mega snappy when it comes to the lag between button press to actual playback start/end of seeking but it generally works fine once the stream starts playing.
I didn't pay a dime for it so this is not throwing any shade on the Jellyfin team - I am grateful for their work.
How much music do you have in Jellyfin? I tried it a few weeks ago and it was extremely slow and terrible with my music library. It would take 30+ seconds to load artist pages.
The media player app for android set top boxes like nvidia shield handles different subtitle formats and advanced settings much better than the jellyfin one, especially for anime subs.
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
It's not amazing, it's as good as it is. Which is to say not great.
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 have no conflict of interest and feel bad for you if you've wasted time on it, but for anyone else who is considering trying it I have literally have had no issues with mine including setting up nvidia hw transcoding on a debian nas. Only thing I can think of is briefly the android tv client lagged on a major version RC so was incompatible till it updated on my box. I have to check the change log sometimes because of how seamless updating has been (kind of like paperless-ngx and immich as another plug!).
Setting HW-encoding is a tad complicated indeed, it’s hard to debug WHY it’s not working. But once you have it, you’re good. Jellyfin has been rock solid for us in 2 years since we ditched Netflix and Prime Video.
I haven't touched a media server setup since like XBMC and earlier tuner board + dvr era stuff, but recently did a Jellyfin setup for all my purchased physical media.
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 use Infuse on the Apple TV and it’s great. I’m not sure how the free version of it compares, but they have a lifetime license for it that I believe is about $100. Definitely worth it if you have a large variety of media and frequently watch on the Apple TV specifically.
I did a build from their repo and pushed it to the Apple TV, just to try out the rewrite changes. It's considerably improved, and plenty nice for my purposes. I didn't feel like I had to, though. I'll delete it and use the app store version when they cut a release.
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.
Infuse is a nice app but note that it does not use the media server's transcoding service, so it can work poorly trying to stream remotely, while Jellyfin's transcoding-aware web client works better. The Jellyfin app for Apple TV was pretty unusable last time I tried it, though.
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.
I really like Infuse, I use it with Jellyfin to stream to my Apple TV. But there is one thing that I have repeatedly been irritated by, and it is that it cannot search by tags, nor can it search for words in the description of movies.
I've used Jellyfin for years and my experience is currently incredibly smooth and works like a dream for the whole family.
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.
My jellyfin installation chokes on audiobooks. 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.
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?
I've never tried it for audiobooks frankly didn't even know it supported them.
> 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.
I really dislike this paradigm that the user needs to become a human DBMS, and rename/link files or write template rules for the media server to understand. It was understandable back in XBMC days but it just feels silly now. Surely it can extract some Musicbrainz-like fingerprint from the media instead of only relying on filename.
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.
For a related issue, Kim Possible was aired out of order, leading to various problems if you watch the episodes in the order they were aired. I am given to understand this is fairly common for older TV shows.
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.
Jellyfin will let you set up alternate metadata providers and select between different episode ordering if available (https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-resolved-dvd-order-instead-of-a...). For tv shows especially TVDB will tend to have alternate orderings most often, and TMDB will occasionally have alternate orderings available.
That isn't a Jellyfin thing, Plex has the same issue. And both Jellyfin and Plex give you mechanisms to resolve that issue (using the alternate episode ordering that the metadata provider has, rather than the default one, or using another metadata provider if need be).
> I've never tried it for audiobooks frankly didn't even know it supported them.
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"?
I think I have an idea of how it might not support audio books. What if audio books had the following issue:
> 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.
> 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)
"Supporting audiobooks" involves more than just playing audio files, unless you want to ignore the basic set of features associated with audiobooks as their own medium.
> 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.
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.
While I'd agree that the 10.11.x releases have terrible performance on some APIs to the extent that I rolled back to 10.10.x and marked it as held, until they release 12.x...
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.
Obviously not everyone will necessarily have the same experience as me, but I can't say I've encountered any problems.
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.
Not my experience. Only bugs ive had are with it not correctly recognizing a media file. That was fairly easy to correct on a few files. Would be a pain if it missed for many.
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'm been running Jellyfin in a container as well for 4 years. I stream to a couple Roku devices. The only problem I've encountered is Roku doesn't support DVDSUB and Jellyfin recently added automatic overlaying of DVDSUB server-side which drastically slows down seeking on Roku.
Could be, but it also had problems on my mac. I had to abandon Jellyfin for Emby over it.
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).
> 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 simply could no longer provide the effort (mental or time-wise) that the role demanded, and thus I was not performing my duties to an acceptable degree, facing severe burnout, and risks to my mental health.
[...]
We've proven that FLOSS works, and is in demand.
If "FLOSS works" maintainers shouldn't be "facing severe burnout", I've come across two more in the past week alone:
Happy to see that it looks like a peaceful transition. I’m not currently a Jellyfin user, I tried it, but it didn’t seem capable of handling my library on my hardware. I’m sticking with Plex for now, but as they move more and more toward trying to be a streaming service instead of a media server, I’m hoping Jellyfin matures to the point where it’s viable when I need it.
It’s now how a majority of users are using Plex as well.
> In 2023, Scott Hancock, Plex’s then-VP of marketing, said that Plex had more people using its online streaming service than using its media server features since 2022.
With media servers being something studios surely don’t like, and Plex deprioritizing that aspect of the business, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before they shut it down completely.
To even know they have a media server, I need to click on the profile image in the top right of their website (even though I’m logged out), then click “My Media” under Links. No one is finding that organically.
That goes here, which seems to be their only page about the media server, and at the bottom is a link to a site that tries to scare people away. Instead of talking about how to rip your existing DVD and CD collection for the modern streaming era and self-hosting, it pushes users toward the big streaming services. Maybe that link is there because of the lawyers, but it sure seems like they don’t want this to exist anymore.
Indeed. They forked Xbox Media Center back in the day, to produce a Mac version when none existed.
Then they became a client/server model.
They are supposed to provide the source code for Plex Transcoder, since that's a modified ffmpeg build. In practice, the version they share is not up to date with the version they ship.
Plex is a piece of shit that rams dumb streaming stuff down your throat each time you sign in on a TV. This coincidentally happens every other month or so when the app seems to forget the account it’s signed into.
It’s becoming hostile for people who want to work from their media alone.
I am not so sure. Have used it for years for free( I have need to stream on the go) and it’s always been no issue. On first setup you are give the option to display streaming options or only your library. I cannot remember the last time I was logged. Super stable and zero time spent setting it up.
On the flip side Jellyfin has never worked that well out of the box for me. Always some fiddling around and even when I get it right the server will crash unexpectedly and when I want to go watch something I have to manually reboot it.
I was a user back when it was Mac only, before they even broke it out into a client/server architecture. When they added the streaming services, I don’t remember getting a choice. I do remember finally getting annoyed enough some time last year and looking for a way to hide it all.
I also remember opening the app one day, not long ago, and seeing a full screen ad instead of my media. Considering I have PlexPass, I found this extremely off putting. I think that was a one-time thing, but still a bad omen.
Been a user since forever too but for the past few years I just don’t recall seeing any ads on a day to day basis. Regardless it runs much better for me than the only alternative.
Have used it for years as well, Plex is a piece of shit. I'm waiting for the day I'll have the time to migrate off this enshitified hostile dark "platform".
I’m running Plex via Docker on a Synology NAS. This has been working fine. When I tried to fire up a Jellyfin container, it was painfully slow. Clients barely worked. It wasn’t a good experience. It was several months ago, so I don’t remember all the details.
I don’t know if it’s a synology related problem or just Jellyfin but I have never gotten it running well. Even when it’s running I always get hiccups like server crashed a week later but appears green and running. Or trouble logging into the server using a third party client. Plex has always been perfect for me.
I’ve been running Plex on various devices for many years and have been impressed by the stability and usefulness. Grandfathered on the old lifetime subscription but I get that $750 seems excessive.
I just set up Jellyfin on an 1819 this weekend and so far it seems great, dunno if it’s improved or my device has bit more oomph - the ui on some devices is not as nice as plex but it’s been great
Jellyfin has a lot of alternative unofficial apps partly because of it ui as some people that did not like the look built something else. That is the case for almost every client OS
I waited for all that to finish. I tried to help it along by going through everything so it would cache it all. It wasn’t as straightforward as Plex’s visual, flipping covers over as the metadata loads in for each movie, providing a clear queue and sense of progress.
Once on the client side, it felt like those also needed to cache things. The only client that worked semi-well wasn’t a Jellyfin client, but could read from a Jellyfin server. I think it was called InFuse. With that as well, I spent hours simply navigating the app, going to every page, and waiting for it to cache everything so I could then navigate around. Then if I added something new, I needed to go to a page to show it and get it cached.
There's never been a better time to consider writing your own media server solution from scratch.
I really don't like the idea of transcoding on demand. It has always created a janky experience on the client. I've been using a custom solution that runs everything through ffmpeg normalization as part of the media upload phase. Whenever a client wants to stream something we give them raw byte ranges directly from the block storage provider. In practice, this feels like flipping the channels on an analog tv. Every video starts and seeks nearly instantly.
I've long since given up on the dream of maintaining lossless master copies of everything just in case. Every practical use of that 50 gb copy of Home Alone would have you transcoding it. Most clients would choke on that bit rate. When would you actually be able to use all of the available information? Why not just discard what you'll never use? I realize it feels offensive to kill information like this but you can do a much better job with the end experience if you do.
You can get a modern chatbot to produce this experience in a single prompt. The code can run on anything slightly more powerful than a potato because you aren't transcoding at playback time anymore. A raspberry pi would be more than enough to serve a few clients on a LAN. If you remain humble in your list of demands (a simple directory browser that plays videos linked within), you can more easily achieve total autonomy.
> You can get a modern chatbot to produce this experience in a single prompt.
If you value your time that little and you get more joy out of building apps for multiple platforms instead of watching movies then this is the best choice. For everyone else it's probably better to just go with any of the hundres of solutions that went through years of bug fixing and pain already to get it working on all these platforms.
I am the exclusive user and I only watch from browsers on laptops and desktops attached to whatever display and audio outputs. I suspect this describes a non-trivial portion of the audience here as well. I don't care about someone being able to watch my media collection on Xbox because I don't have one.
> I am the exclusive user and I only watch from browsers on laptops
People doing that don't need a media server like Plex or Jellyfin, you just need a directory on your computer. People who use Jellyfin or Plex have a very different case of running it on servers, then streaming it to TVs, streaming boxes and mobile devices.
Check out https://siloserver.org . Silo has its own API but also spins up a Jellyfin-protocol compatibility layer. This allows you to use any Jellyfin client and just point it at your Silo server.
It's already significantly better than Jellyfin, Plex, and Emby. Give it a try. The development team is active on their Discord. A lot of users are testing it.
It's currently running a PB+ media library (which neither Jellyfin nor Emby can run) with native clients across multiple platforms. It will unseat Jellyfin.
> Every practical use of that 50 gb copy of Home Alone would have you transcoding it. Most clients would choke on that bit rate.
What clients are you using? I use the highest bitrate HDR videos possible. I very rarely have to transcode. 4k TVs are cheap as are 4k streaming devices.
The main case for transcoding is playing a video in a browser that doesn't support the original codec. Everything can handle high bitrate streams now. The one other rare exception is video that's over 100Mbit/s. I've encountered a few that are that high and some streaming boxes can only handle 100Mb.
We should be clear about software vs hardware transcoding being different things. Hardware transcoding is "free" for even commodity hardware. Yes, lower end systems might have trouble keeping up with a blu-ray remux as its source to a high-bitrate target. But you can very easily buy an off the shelf mini-pc to act as a transcode-capable server and eliminate nearly all the downsides that come with trying to avoid transcoding.
Just to supplement your point with an anecdote: my first "proper" Jellyfin host was a retired Optiplex 3020. I added a 128GB SSD through one of those silly CD drive bay adapters and threw in a Quadro P400 that I bought off of eBay. On top of that, the actual server ran Proxmox with Jellyfin nested in an LXC container. By all accounts, the machine was a janky pile of e-waste given a new, horrible life through sheer stinginess.
There were quirks (mostly self-imposed ones) to getting the whole thing set up, but it ran like a champ for the better part of a year. Hardware transcoding really does make a world of difference, even in the worst of cases.
"There's never been a better time to consider writing your own media server solution from scratch."
If you want to go the hacker route, and do not give a flying fig about UI, you can get a long way just by setting up any old webserver that has range support (which is most of them) and serving out directories with video files and some sort of automated index. You don't even need to do any work. Browsers already are smart enough to hit a video file, extract the playback metadata with range requests and provide native seeking, speed management, and some of the other basics. Plus you get native "right click (or equivalent) -> download" support without anything giving you hassles.
On the one hand, it's missing a lot of features. On the other hand, it can't be beat for simplicity and the bang-for-the-buck is pretty good. And anything capable of A: running an HTTP server at all and B: has enough storage to store the files can saturate whatever network it is on with video data if you want it to.
If the novel parts are don't transcode, and clean up before adding to library, then you can just do that, right? Without having to create a frontend, which is the fiddly part (especially since losing the AppleTV client I can use with Jellyfin server would be a sacrifice). It's pretty easy to, for example, make a python script that grabs metadata from tmdb when given a URL (so the script has no need for disambiguation logic -- that's what humans are for), generate an ffmpeg command that adds that metadata, and does whatever re-encoding/re-muxing you want. Can embed subtitle files this way too.
Do whatever encoding you want in advance too of course. Note, the above is generated from a script (not created manually) that is run like `./cleanvideo.py ./bluray.mkv ./eng.sdr.srt https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/985-eraserhead`
After doing this for over a decade, I find that Jellyfin, or even just a caddy directory listing, make a great media library browser. Jellyfin will almost never identify things incorrectly. Can always fall back to just listing things and playing your content with `mpv https://machine.tailnet-name.ts.net/movies/...` even remotely given the use of tailscale. Or VLC from my phone, etc.
Transcoding on demand is just trading compute for storage. If you have infinite storage you can store all definitions in advance for any possible client (I think that's what Netflix does); but if you don't, transcoding on demand is fine and isn't that much slower (a bit janky, yes, but only a bit).
I think most people would find that two or three definition is all they really need. 1080p h264 at high bit rate for compatibility on the local network and low bit rate 1080p for streaming remotely or to save space in local downloads for a trip.
There's a reason they turned to transcoding: it means every device can get the highest quality version it is capable of displaying. Your solution limits the video to the lowest common supported quality.
I’m grateful for this team. Jellyfin is a great product. I’ve been using llm + Tailscale + Jellyfin to manage my media box and I couldn’t be more happy. I’ve got perfect metadata, perfect organization, and multimodal search on top of it. What a dream.
Small plug to ask for help with the Apple TV App? Swiftfin is really rough but the best option. It’s quite terrible, never refreshes, overlapping text constantly. It could use some love.
There’s some alternatives. I like JellyTV, pretty smooth UI. Streamyfin has a beta for the TV as well, and continues to improve. But yeah definitely some of the tougher part of the ecosystem
The way they do their list rendering is infuriating for large collections. Instead of showing titles + shimmer, its just big blobs of loading placeholders. So to find where you are in your list of movies you have to stop scrolling and let the content finish loading to get your bearings.
Its minor overall, but as a former app dev, poor list performance drives me crazy.
Also, for files in a directory with the same prepended string with long filenames(like full_show_name - S01E01), it displays just a fraction of the full filename in a list.
I need to sit there and wait for the filename to scroll horizontally to see what the actual episode number or name is. Instead of just showing the full filename on multiple lines, or showing the filename below the thumbnail.
- Doesn't show landscape artwork (embedded .png), only portrait, and if the embedded artwork is not portrait it grabs a random frame from the file instead of cropping the embedded artwork (https://community.firecore.com/t/use-landscape-artwork/26878...)
I tried to get involved (in very minor ways) a while back but got basically no engagement from the project so I just let it be. I moved to infuse instead as my ios client and its been good overall. I really hate its list performance on large collections though.
I had some issues with it too, though not as bad as you seem to have experienced. Good new is they're reworking it, heavily, and seem to be near a new release.
For my own purposes I cloned it and pushed the build to my AppleTV... and it's considerably better than the last app store release (quite a while ago).
I'm not suggesting anyone do the same, but just saying your problems might be about to solve themselves.
Jellyfin is great for my needs, and I appreciate the effort that goes into it. Recently was having rendering issues doing HDR -> SDR tone mapping since I watch my content on a 2008 era Pioneer plasma display. I found that oddly enough while the server is pretty solid, the client experience is a bit hit or miss. I'm using the mpg-shim adapter, and I'm looking forward to them building a native app with better native render compositing.
Jellyfin is great project and good software when is working, unfortunately for me it doesn’t works very well. Constantly have issues with playback, files indexing and watch statuses that not marked, but that are small issues compred to the hell with subtitles. Very often out of sync (if they load)
So I switched to nova player and sharing my tv shows and music collection over SMB. It isn’t issueless, but at least more smooth amd leas complex.
Note that the headline doesn't reflect the post. Here's the beginning:
> Hello everyone. Effective yesterday, Anthony and I [Joshua Boniface] decided to depart from the project, myself as Project Leader, and he as a core team member. This is in addition to the resignation of Andrew on Friday.
"Several core team members including the founder leave" looks a bit different from "founder leaves".
Also an important note is that they are leaving on good terms. Headline made me terrified that some bad drama was going down, but they are just ready to move on and committed to clean handoffs to whoever owns it going forward.
Plus the title only mentions 1 person while 98% of the linked article is about 2 other people, neither of which are only person mentioned in the title. And the linked article doesn’t even have any link to find out about the founder leaving, the only person named in the title.
the fact that Jellyfin works as well as it does with a rotating cast of maintainers might be the strongest argument for open source I've seen this year
Sure its a catalog of your local media served via an API, with metadata enrichment, built in transcoding (hardware support too) and multiple user support (watch history, recommendations etc).
Its not just a web app, I would say most dont use the web app directly, instead they provide clients (Android/iOS/Roku/AndroidTV/WebOS/Tizen) that are in official app stores. This is the big thing for me, being able to just install the client on your TV and not worry about it is great.
Often the clients are just wrappers of the web client with native integrations, but they work well.
Plus there are loads of 3rd party plugins to extend it, and alternate clients, Im a fan of https://github.com/jeffvli/feishin for music duties personally.
They do a bit more than this. They do streaming and transcoding for a start, that's fairly essential for a functioning video platform. They also have native apps for a range of platforms. Support subtitles, multiple audio tracks, all sorts of codecs. And then there's all the metadata stuff as well, getting blurbs, posters, ratings, categorisations, episode naming (which has so many awkward edge cases) etc all from various metadata services. Oh and they do this all with multiple users and ACLs.
Plex also then adds social features and curation. The value of that to its users is debatable, but it's additional complexity regardless.
These are pretty big projects. A founder moving on is a fairly big deal.
I can browse to jellyfin on my phone, ipad, laptop, TV etc watch any format (since it will transcode on the fly) and watch whatever I was watching from wherever I left it. It will also obviously know where I'm up to in any series so if I start watching something else I can go back to it at a later date.
A friend or relative can stream the content over the internet via Plex or Jellyfin (through a Roku, or other streaming device) via a UI that is very, very easy to use. Plex is a way for my non-technical aunt to easily interact with my media server from her home three states away.
I'd prefer to be exclusively on Jellyfin. It simply has more features that I use - specifically, collections are great non-hierarchical groupings.
But periodically my system will refuse to see the Tailscale server, and I'll have to do some black magic tech operation like reinstalling to get it back.
Additionally, guiding a friend remotely through installing both Jellyfin and Tailscale is far more effort than saying, "Find Plex in your media sources."
Reminder that you don't need a powerful transcoding server and engine - I have been running for years with simple WebDAV on my NAS, and Infuse as a comfortable client on all apple devices.
The title here is burying the lede and should be updated to something like "Jellyfin founder, project leader and core contributer all leave the project".
It's not just Andrew [Rabert] leaving. This is an announcement by Joshua Boniface (the current project lead) and Anthony Lavado (a core contributor) announcing that they're leaving too.
Boniface's and Lavado's reasons are mostly akin to burnout, or the need for a family life, which I totally understand, especially as Boniface has been the face of the project for quite some time. I use Jellyfin daily, and I know exactly who Boniface is, I hadn't actually heard of Rabert, though I'm grateful for him founding the project. Boniface in particular has lead Jellyfin through huge levels of internal changes, bugfixes and improvements. It is throwing off the janky architecture of Emby, one part at a time.
An obvious sore point is that Rabert has been AI-coding the Jellyfin desktop app, while the community (who bear the brunt of drive-by AI slop) have strongly opposed it. Even if he's a great coder and makes a wonderful desktop app with the aid of AI, that seems irreconcilable. Every wannabe contributor who shits up the project and wastes volunteers time with AI slop will say "you let that guy add his AI generated stuff, why not me?"
So he's leaving the Jellyfin project and he's going to rename his desktop app, to see if it stands on its own merits as a third-party Jellyfin client, rather than an official project. I wish the best of luck to him.
Even with that angle, it's true that the "Jellyfin community" (which includes all bug reporters, users on forums, etc.) can be very rude, directly to the contributors who may have inadvertantly added bugs. And Jellyfin is going through some growing pains, for example their 10.11.x series rewrote all the database handling to be a much better fit for the language (from raw SQL to .NET EF Core), which gives them a much more stable base to make changes upon, but it also had some performance regressions that rendered some third party Jellyfin apps unusable. (Those third parties' advice is not to upgrade). But at the same time, the project is getting there, supporting developers who are systematically fixing those regressions. The project has thousands of bug reports, but it also has thousands of fixes, and thousands of merged PRs. They are keeping up with the demand. I have every confidence Jellyfin 12.x will be great, and I'm looking forward to the new possibilities for plugins and enhancements it will open up.
Kodi isn't a media server. Plex isn't FLOSS. Emby is what Jellyfin was forked from, and barely classifies as FLOSS anymore, and isn't as popular as Jellyfin from what I can tell. There isn't really anything else that I am aware of. Jellyfin being the #1 FLOSS media server makes sense to me, although I don't think there are really any viable #2s.
Kodi does have bultin server functionality (both DNLA and a web interface), it's just less commonly used that way, and I don't think transcoding is supported without plugins.
I tried it some time ago and found it was useless in that role.
Kodi is 99% a TV-like frontend to a local-disk media collection, its web interface is an afterthought, its performance for remotely served media is atrocious.
Jellyfin, Emby and Plex are media servers first and foremost.
I actually use Kodi 90% as a front-end to Jellyfin. If I only watched or listened to my media at my TV, just Kodi and a SMB or NFS share would be fine. But with Jellyfin I have the same media everywhere. This is somewhat more important for music than for movies and shows.
The three founders are all great people, but there is a gatekeeping issue within the project (I'm heavily involved, so this is a throwaway account).
The constant mocking accusations and hostility toward third-party clients, plugins, themes, and other tools have made Jellyfin's official spaces unbearable. The atmosphere often revolves around the opinions of a small group of people, and anything that falls outside their preferences will result in a ban.
There are two individuals are the primary drivers of this culture.
Funny how this is the only thing that keeps me from switching from Emby to Jellyfin is the atrocious state of their "own" apps. My last attempt failed when I had to use their Android client. Since I've discovered Wolphin and Findroid it looks a lot more plausible but I just don't have enough pain and lifetime Emby Premiere was still reasonable when I bought it.
Recently Plex increased the cost of a new Lifetime Plex Pass to $750 [1]. It seems like they really want to get most users paying recurring monthly or annual fees. But to me at least that kind of goes against the whole purpose of hosting my own media library.
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative!
[1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/
My biggest beef with Plex is that they've pivoted away from being a media server first and are trying to change into a streaming platform first, and because managers inside the company have to show KPI, they're stuffing the streaming buttons and sections and recommendations in everywhere.
Really frustrating because the media server experience is still by far the best.
It really needs to have a "classic" toggle where all the streaming crap is disabled.
I have frozen both my Plex server and app versions to avoid turning them into a streaming app with outdated contents. Ever since they got rid of Camera Upload function it's been going downhill function-wise.
Honestly, this is why I stopped using plex. I set up and ran my own server because I wanted to see the stuff I have, mostly digitized family VHS and then suddenly I'm finding movies and shows on my server that I didn't put there.
To be fair you had to disable those feeds and then the content would not appear. User hostile move nonetheless.
The only good thing about this in my setup is I can add shows/movies to my watchlist from their advertisements and it gets picked up by my arr stack.
Wow, you can do this? At the risk of further complicating my arr stack, which I barely had the wherewithal to get running in the first place, how does that work?
The arr programs have 'plex watchlist' under the connect settings
I would recommend listarr as well. Woke up to "disclosure day" this morning without even asking.
> It really needs to have a "classic" toggle where all the [enshittified] crap is disabled.
This can apply to almost any modern application.
I still am not quite sure what value something like Plex offers for my personal HTPC media needs. I have a large collection of disk space that's an SMB file share on my local LAN, on a server in my garage. My home theatre PC mounts it over the LAN.
I have an XFCE4 desktop environment on the HTPC with the font size cranked up a bit and can run nautilus, thunar, or any other file explorer metaphor browser to explore the folders. There's a folder for movies, a folder for TV shows, and then stuff is organized within there by its directory name and filename. I double click on something I want to watch and it opens in VLC. Dead simple and works.
It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies. Shows what’s recently be added, recently released. Keeps track of where you’re at in a TV series, to always play the next episode. It can transcode as needed, to something like a mobile device or TV that might be more picky than VLC.
Lots of quality of life improvements over list of files on a smb share.
BTW, there was a variant of this discussion with the iPod and mp3 players back then. Some people wanted to manage music "by hand" in the file system, and had various schemes for doing so (folders for genre, then artists, then album, etc.), and wanted that reflected 1-to-1 in the mp3 player.
iTunes (and the iPod) had a different idea: The app takes care of file management, and you have a frontend supported by a database containing all sorts of metadata to browse your music (both static metadata (artist, genre) and dynamic (play count, skip count, last heard)). iTunes has smart playlists which I love (all songs with 3 stars or more that I haven't heard in 6 weeks).
I'm firmly in the latter camp, and similarly prefer Jellyfin over a pure SMB share for movies.
The first version in the very early days of 128kbps mp3 seemed to be more popular before people were ripping and encoding music with proper id3 tags. Once it became a defacto standard for proper artist, albumname, tracknumber id3 trags to be embedded as metadata in the mp3, using some sort of automated tool very quickly took over.
I do recall using several different tools about 20 years ago that took a bunch of horribly mangled filename .mp3 files (but which did have proper id3 tags in them, or where the user had manually corrected the id3 tags for the bare minimum of albumname, artistname and track numbers) and then rewrote their filenames on disk to something logically consistent to make them easier to find and move, store, copy manually if needed.
The more I think about it the more there needs to be an ID3 equivalent to video media so the meta data is stored with-in the movie container versus a central database.
Kodi and their meta helpers can create a local meta file. Next step is to push it into the media container.
CppCon and other video recorded events would benefit from this. The shared video file would contain the details and remove the energy to search for the source and other meaningful information.
google "metadata in MKV video file" seems to show that MKV already supports something like that, and mkv is already a container format. One problem would be that some collections of video acquired from dozens of sources/people who did the encode won't by any means be 100% standards compliant MKV.
I remember going through and manually keying in the id3 tags on my mp3s using WinAmp, because without them the dash between the artist and song look slightly different. That was a lot of work over a dash.
Worthwhile work, to me. I’m gonna listen to this music until I perish, might as well fix what’s bothering me.
This is not a rant or an attack on you. I get the point of easyness that Plex and/or Jellyfin offer. I merely would like to explain why i do not need it. I tried both Jellyfin and Plex, but i could not find a huge benefit in using them in our household. Again, not a rant.
I think it's an extra layer on top of things i do not need. I do not need cover art, descriptions or trailers. The smb shares have a folder hierarchy that's very logical and easy to our household so sorting and reindexing is not needed. Kodi (Windows,Linux, Android) keeps track of where i was, but i don't really care that much. Usually i remember what i was watching. File Explorer Pro (paid version) on IOS plays anything. I do not need transcoding, because all the players can play anything i throw at it. My wife and kids know how to use Kodi both on the pcs and the chromecasts.
Mp3's go to a Sonos at the moment. If more mp3 devices would be needed in the future, i'm kinda curious about the CrowdSupply Esparagus systems [1][2]
1: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-media-center 2: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-audio-brick
If you’re using Kodi, that’s effectively the same thing. Kodi is XBMC. Plex started as a fork of XBMC for OS X. At some point they broke it out into a client/server architecture, which Jellyfin emulated.
If you have one primary client, Kodi is fine. Moving to Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby is more about serving multiple clients while maintaining continuity.
> "Usually i remember what i was watching"
You must not watch that many TV shows or Anime then. Or you have the memory of a savant.
Without an automated system I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking.
> I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking
curious question then - do you remember the content of what you were watching? i totally get that you don't know on what episode you are and i used and love Jellyfin myself, but if you're watching 100+ series "at once" i'm starting to wonder if you even remember the last episode of a show if you rotate so heavily, know what i mean? i barely remember an episode after a week, even if i exclusively watch one show. so either my memory is even worse than i thought, or - you have the memory of a savant ;)
It's not like the plots are complex :D
Mostly it's shows that are on hiatus, due to release cycles being completely random nowadays. Or Anime releasing a second season under a whole different show name.
Also shows I've watched 1-2 episodes of and decided it's worth watching, but not now - as there are a limited number of hours in a day.
Unfortunately i don't have the luxury to watch a lot of shows during the week. Usually the max is around 5 or so. Call me strange, but sometimes i actually like it that i forget what i was watching. Makes me kinda of realise it's still a little luxury leisure. Usually i get happy when i realise there's more show to watch (happened with Foundation). Or i keep ignoring it, because interest was lost over time (happened with Rick and Morty). The kids tend to watch a series back to front and then ignore it completely once they lose interest.
I still have artifacts in my dirs of TOSORT, TODO, and DONE.
I've resorted to manually tracking some non-Plex/Jellyfin shows on Obsidian manually :D
It's super fun to watch some 7 season show on a local streaming service, be on season 3 episode hellifiknow, come back in a week and poof it's gone.
I can't watch anything without subtitles. Plex and Jellyfin support them, in many languages, because of the mumbled dialogues. Yes, I know you burn subs in.
Plus the whole *arr stack.
Usually subtitles are not that hard to find.
Yes but there is something nice about automatic subtitles. Less friction in my life.
Plex makes it much easier for non-technical relatives to interact with my media server. That's my own use-case.
Same here. XBMC/Kodi pointed at NFS has served me and my family well for 15+ years. Every once in a while I check out the alternatives with their custom server software and thick "stacks" and conclude that they don't offer me anything I want to do that I can't do with just shared files.
Yup, it’s a great UX and it makes the media experience feel finished, not hacky.
I wonder if we are starting to see a generational gap in how we consume media. When I was growing up, there was no "media experience," you just turned on the TV, selected your channel, and there was your show. Or your turned on the TV, pushed the VHS tape into the VCR, and your movie started playing.
Every once in a while I start looking into things like jellyfin and after a few hours poking around, eventually start to wonder if the heaviest users of these platforms enjoy the process of organizating their media and finding the perfect UI theme for that particular week _more_ than they enjoy actually sitting down and watching their shows.
I would equate browsing for a movie to watch in a Jellyfin library (or Netflix, etc) on the TV to someone browsing at Blockbuster to find a movie to rent, seeing what is available on their DVR, or maybe even the TV Guide.
I think the media servers started as a way to avoid tapes/DVDs and making it easier to get content on the TV. It’s a much better experience than a 100 DVD changer. Now, it evolved based on anxiety around streaming services and never knowing when the TV show you’re watching will get pulled, or your favorite movie will lose availability… and wanting to maintain access. This is especially true as companies, like Sony, remove digital copies of movies people “bought”. So any digital file with DRM from a company is only good as long as they decide to keep offering it, which isn’t forever.
> you just turned on the TV, selected your channel, and there was your show
You've just described the media experience. When I was a kid I spent so much time just flipping through channels. The same activity today is a vastly different and inferior experience. Modern televisions take forever to change channels.
It seems like all home technology adds friction and inscrutable failure modes in order to gain functionality/flexibility.
"Smart" seems to mean "powerful but complicated and frustrating."
I get the functionality benefits. I just don't want to pay the friction price.
Jellyfin took me 20 minutes to setup with docker-compose. I’ve never customized anything about it aside from pointing it at my media library. It’s way less effort than making an SMB share play nice with a smart TV.
And you can stream to your phone. And I set my elderly aunt up to be able to stream it from her Apple TV ~80 miles away from me. And there are phone apps that let you download stuff in advance to watch on a plane. And I've been able to cast Jellyfin from my phone to the TV in a hotel before
My personal media library has over 600 moves and 70+ shows and around 8,000 books. There is no way I can watch and read all of it in my lifetime. But I do find joy in being a little librarian and I also care deeply about art and like to keep my own little nest. All of it is sharable with anyone i like anywhere in the world. I do use jellyfin but i don't think I have ever switched its theme though.
Either way, yeah one of the joys of running a home lab to me is definitely the managing and maintainence to me and I don't think its any lesser pursuit than watching the media itself
Plex subscription also includes a “Skip Intro” for TV shows. That’s the only value I’ve gotten out of it other than being able to stream to my phone.
Not sure if Jellyfin has an equivalent
Jellyfin can support intro/outro skipping as well with a plugin. https://github.com/intro-skipper/intro-skipper
i've used this plugin a lot, and it is nice, but a bit hit-or-miss. it analyzes all episodes of a show to start seeing a pattern in the beginning of shows, or checks chapters which my files rarely had. works well for most shows, but if a show has unique intros for every episode, it doesn't really work. also had trouble with 100% consistent intros, but i never really figured out why that happened.
kind of a 50% solution, works a lot of times but a lot of other times you still end up scrubbing. (also consider that if you install this plugin onto a large existing library, it's going to take a considerable amount of compute and real-world time to do complete it for every show).
That sounds like what I see with Plex, too. It definitely doesn't get it when the intros are unique. And if there's something later that's the same each show (an explanation of the game show, etc) it'll target it as the intro instead.
It's good most of the time, but not 100%.
ah i see, then they must use a similar process. i wonder how big streaming sites do it. underpaid global south workers who manually tag the intro for every episode, or do the files come pre-tagged by the production. maybe a mix of both.
There is a plugin that is supposed to provide this, but I don't think it works with every client, and I'm moderately sure it doesn't work with Kodi. Oddly, skip credits/jump to next episode works fine.
It does work with Kodi, you just need to add a client-side plugin for Kodi to support it: https://github.com/SgtJalau/service.jellyskip
It does. Has for a while.
>It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies.
Infuse [1] is a nice way to get these features on Apple TV and iOS devices while simply sharing files via SMB.
1. https://firecore.com/infuse
Infuse also supports some codecs on Apple TV that the official Plex client doesn't.
And it connects to both Plex and Jellyfin too.
Yes. And with something like a GL.iNet travel router + Tailscale, you can watch Jellyfin from anywhere without ever exposing it to the Internet. You plug it in your hotel room, tell the hotel TV to connect to it, and voilà: Jellyfin on any random TV.
Connect a random TV to your home LAN over a VPN? No thank you! I would rather use HDMI in. You can also cache data locally. Or just watch on a smaller screen or tablet. There are a lot of jurisdictions where I would not want to take private keys or passwords with me.
I just bring a $25 Onn 4k Google TV “box” I use for travel that’s roughly half the size of a deck of cards and pre-configured with Jellyfin/ad-free home screen/etc in addition to the travel router linked to my VPN.
Less due to security and more because I’ve seen hotel TVs that literally had like 5 sec latency for any button press and are full of ads so I don’t want to deal with that.
Jellyfin does all these things too, and it’s free.
I have a HD TV from 2007 and I still vividly remember having to convert videos to a certain format because it was so picky. IIRC it only played .mp4, most of the movies I had on my external drive back then were .mkv and maybe some .avi , so almost nothing played
Plex used to have that problem, but in the last few years it's gotten MUCH better at transcoding on-the-fly.
The only thing I value from that list is the played/unplayed status, and resuming a title from where I left off. My two preferred clients handle that for me on my various devices.
In particular the main value-add is that they have clients across so many different platforms, including most major bespoke smart TV brands[0], and their solution to streaming on WAN (HTTPS brokering) is pretty darn good for most people. Accessing my media from hotel rooms is pretty darn seamless, other than the wifi connection sometimes requiring downscaling to 720p or or so.
0: not really an issue nowadays with everyone moving to Big Tech-provided smart TV OS, but when you use an old TV with like mid-2010s webOS it's nice to see some old Plex app that still works.
I guess this applies to a relatively small subset of population who are always on the riad and travelling for work.
One must have a nightmare of a vacation to even consider turning on a tv in an hotel room, I can't even remember the last time an hotel TV served any other purpose than hanging a wet towel.
It means access from anywhere.
Want to watch an episode of that series while you're sitting at work waiting for a long test pass? Plex.
You're hanging out with friends and they want to watch that movie you own? Plex.
You're at the gym and want to watch The Wire instead of whatever reality show is on the gym TV? Believe it or not, straight to Plex.
To your direct point, it doesn't have to be a terrible vacation. Any time I plan a vacation longer than a week it includes down day(s) with no itinerary, just recuperating. Sometimes that involves staring at a screen. Sometimes I've been out for 10 hours, it's only 7PM and I don't want to go to sleep, but I want to chill out in my room (maybe I'm overstimulated, maybe I'm just tired, doesn't matter).
I guess we are a different breed. I didn't even knew there were TV in gym clubs (I am exercising outside, never understood paying for exercising either). I don't really understand why someone would be so little engaged on his exercising/training/sport that they would need a screen to entertain themselves to be honest.
That is interesting to hear, a completely foreign concept to me that sounds a bit like addiction to be honest.
If exercise was pleasant you wouldn't have to remind people to do more of it. The only thing worse than running for an hour is running for an hour and actually paying attention to the complaints your body is sending while doing so.
> I am exercising outside
Doing deadlifts outside when it's -30C is pretty hardcore.
Also what's "engaging" in running? You put one foot in front of the other, it's not exactly something that needs 100% of your brain power to execute.
Well I'll give a pass to those who live in Siberia, Ulaanbataar or anywhere else with permafrost then ;-)
My experience in cold places, especially those with a lot of snow and ice, is that there are usually enough chores to do that skipping deadlifts day is not really a problem though.
> Also what's "engaging" in running? You put one foot in front of the other, it's not exactly something that needs 100% of your brain power to execute.
I guess that is the difference between running or cycling outside and doing it on a machine.
I can do all of this stuff with my Jellyfin server for the yearly cost of a domain name
This thread was a "why does remote access matter", not a comparison of Jellyfin and Plex.
I run both and Jellyfin is very clearly an open source project.
By that I mean that the interesting technical problem (streaming) is implemented rather well and there is a UI that technically has buttons to expose the things it does while simultaneously not being good at many of the things people use Plex for.
Jellyfin's remote access story is "set up a VPN or Tailscale". Plex's remote access story is "it works".
Jellyfin's story for accessing content from multiple servers doesn't exist. Neither does a global auth system for sharing access to your library, having friends, etc.
Jellyfin's sorting, filtering, and searching are just OK. Its web UI is nowhere near as nice for libraries of O(1000).
Real world example: I was at an AirBnB last week that had a Roku TV. To get to my Plex library I installed the Plex app. There was a Jellyfin app but I couldn't use it because there was no VPN client for the TV, and I don't feel the need to set up and run Tailscale when I already have Wireguard.
So on vacation you just come to the hotel room and fall on the bed. First thing you do when you wake up is leave the room?
Seems like you don't need hotels, a hostel would work just fine :D
Some of us need to unwind even on "vacation". Just get your feet up and watch your shows and relax before hitting the sack.
Well usually if I am on vacation that is not to stare at walls but to visit, enjoy the place I am visiting and and experience stuff so yes I usually only come back to the hotel room either to wash/change myself or to sleep and/or have sex.
Are you staying all day in your bedroom when you are home?
Vacation is also transit, a Mariot here a Hilton there. I watch content curated by me or YouTube.
Maybe different people vacation differently.
Maybe that's OK.
What I want to know is, what happened in your life that turned you into the kind of monster that destroys hotel electronics with wet towels when there are always perfectly good towel racks in the bathroom??
In my experience there are never enough towel racks or they aren't wide enough for the towel and the bathroom ventilation is usually set to stop automatically when you close the door.
Hotel electronics do not have feelings so I don't really think that the monster qualification applies, and they are probably ok anyway as they are so rarely used and have time to dry before being powered on thanks to the aircon helping maintaining a dry air. I don't think the actual electrical components do suffer from a lot of moisture from the towel.
You can't know for certain that modern AI-imbedded electronics aren't sentient and humidity-averse... YOU MONSTER!
You can do that with Jellyfin and Tailscale trivially on devices you own; for a hotel TV you can use a GL.iNet travel router (which will also let you access your LAN from any device connected to it) and it's all free (except for the router of course, that you just buy once).
How are you going about installing Jellyfin on random hotel TVs? None of the hotels I've stayed at have that level of freedom on their TVs.
(So I instead travel with an Apple TV that does all of the above, and more)
If there is a browser then that's all that's needed. Just point it to the LAN IP of your Jellyfin install.
Admittedly my use case is not the most common. For a number of what I think are well founded reasons I don't use the "smart TV" OSes built into any televisions I own, none of my TVs have the wifi password or access to the Internet. The HTPC screen is just a screen, something else that's smarter is driving it.
I also don't have any need for realtime transcoding as my home internet upstream speed is sufficient that I can watch 'full resolution' stuff remotely from my laptop or phone via VPN back to home office, and smbfs or sshfs access to the same file shares, without needing to use any CPU or GPU resources to process the video in realtime in between where it's stored any my client playback device.
If you don't care for any of the modcons of a media streaming system similar to Netflix, etc. then more power to you, stick with a SMB share. It's undeniably less that can go wrong and god knows these systems can become a janitorial hell sometimes.
However I hope you can see that there is a plethora of benefits that others may enjoy from it. Otherwise, this kinda feels like the classic HN Dropbox critique.
I am definitely in the former category. I’m not dedicating the time to replicate a Netflix client equivalent with all the metadata (although I do make the time for FLAC albums). There’s nothing as straightforward as directories and a SMB conf file. Plus, you name individual files however you want.
I have straightforward SMB shares, but two distinct groups for movies. The first is standard bitrate, where everything is 1080p SDR h265. The second is for 4K HDR, higher bitrate. That second group is only for a small number of movies that I like very much, will rewatch, and have cinematography and visuals that justify the storage. If I love a movie but it is mostly an indoor dialogue affair, there is no point in it being in the second group. There is duplication between the two groups so I am covered if I want to watch the high def version at home on my large TV connected to my Pi NAS via Ethernet, or the standard def version around the house (usually working out) on a mobile device (or possibly on the road via my Tailnet).
The transcoding isn't just about bandwidth, it's about compatibility. I store most media in H.265 because that's the most space efficient, and most things can play it, but a decent number of devices still need H.264. I also have older content with DTS soundtracks, which isn't supported by a bunch of new devices.
Plex/Emby/Jellyfin will handle that compatibility by converting on the fly.
Plus, when using a Fire Stick, or Google TV Streamer, or old Chromecast it just isn't easy/possible to browse a SMB share.
Yeah I would definitely need to look into some kind of real time transcoding setup (jellyfin, etc) if I had a use case for remote watching of things on any other less-capable platforms, particularly that can't handle x265 or AV1 encoded things.
Right now if I'm not at home, and I'm watching something remotely that's served from a home fileserver, the only two client devices that I have in use are either my MacOS laptop (VLC), or a fairly recent Android phone with a file explorer app that supports sshfs mounts to open files (again VLC as the video player).
> I also don't have any need for realtime transcoding as my home internet upstream speed is sufficient that I can watch 'full resolution' stuff remotely from my laptop or phone via VPN back to home office, and smbfs or sshfs access to the same file shares, without needing to use any CPU or GPU resources to process the video in realtime in between where it's stored any my client playback device.
And if your remote internet connection is insufficient? Especially if you have all content in high bit rate HDR stuff… that can be problematic in some parts of the world.
That's definitely a consideration, and I'm not watching 72GB 3-hour length 4K movies remotely if the far end's internet connection is insufficient. But the times that I find myself in such a place are fairly uncommon these days. If I were spending a lot of time in places where Internet service was considerably worse than where I travel now, I would probably just download the 1080p, HEVC/x265, 2.2GB total file size version of a movie and call that "ehh, good enough".
After being too used to the streaming app experience, I wanted the same thing for my own library. You don't need to use the transcoding feature but the Netflix experience is a nice upgrade. The Jellyfin server doesn't need much for resources either (if you aren't transcoding), people run it on raspberry pis with external harddrives attached. Once nice thing is that I often forget about the stuff I've downloaded, Jellyfin has a "recently added" section and will also remember where I've left off with a "continue watching" section and also a "next up" section showing the next episode in series I'm watching. Since I have sonarr subscribed to currently airing TV shows, the latest episode will appear there after its been downloaded.
The annoying thing is that Jellyfin is particular about how your TV shows are organized. If you just dump whole seasons into one directory, that's fine but if you have individual episodes, they need to be organized by Title/Season #/Episode.mkv. The good thing about Sonarr is that it will make a second library directory for you comprised of hardlinks organized in the right structure. Plex is less picky, it seems to recognize files no matter how messy your downloads folder is but Plex has infected their client with ads and freemium garbage of late. Obviously if you use usenet, this isn't a huge problem, you can do whatever you want with your files once downloaded.
If I had your setup, I would still prefer the client experience of either Infuse, Jellyfin, or Plex, but I don't think I'd value it enough to pay. The first time I used plex, I was impressed by the fact that I didn't really need to do any of what you've described with your collection (for the most part). I just had a huge dump of torrents and other randomly sourced video files, in wildly varying formats, that were named just barely well-enough for Plex to turn that into a very nicely browsable home media experience with no extra work, that I could then stream to any device with a client. Not that I'd be dismissive of manually organizing a collection, it's just not a compelling hobby to me, so a drop in media viewing experience with an amazing frontend that handled all of the meta stuff was spectacular.
In contrast to your HTPC setup, I've actually never even considered owning my own TV, it was just a streamlined way for me to access my collection on other non-TV devices, including the mac I didn't want to keep files on.
I assume Plex "just works". Jellyfin is some assembly required.
You also occasionally run into a "Love Exposure" type bug.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/10494
jellyfin was pretty plug and play for me
If you want it accessible outside your house, the two most common options are NGINX + LetsEncrypt or Tailscale.
(or you make your peace with sending your login details in cleartext)
VPN is also common in those discussions, it's more setup on the client side but can win on security. Of course there'd be a lot of people in trouble if you couldn't trust tailscale to be better than a beginner selfhoster on security so it's still a good goto option.
Clients on everything, watch history tracking, meta data collection, nicer player, quick transcode for mobiles and other portable media players you don't want 4k on, automatic subtitle collection, live TV DVR, and an interface so simple my grandmother can use it.
You’ve described NAS in general. It’s more than just file system. Plex gives you Media Library indexing, web app, mobile and TV apps to play content from your NAS, from anywhere in the world (it even includes Relay, in case you don’t have public IP or accessing NAT traversal).
Even with public IP, it brokers an HTTPS certificate for you, which many smart TV platforms and OSes require for operation nowadays.
A friend who doesn't live close had one season of a series I wanted to watch and I could stream it from his Plex. I'm not saying this could not have been solved in another easy way, but it worked without friction because he had Plex anyway.
I'm kinda over downloading gigabytes of files and then deleting them after watching. And I'm not doing this regularly so I've not investigated. All I'm saying is that it solved a problem nicely.
Thats what I used to have 15 years ago when I was streaming over SMB to my Xbox running XBMC. It works but having something like Plex or Jellyfin is just so much nicer. It gives you the "Netflix" experience of browsing your media library. My Jellyfin is setup to offer an automatic "skip intro/credits" button. I used to use Plex and was a yearly subscriber mostly for the ability to download media to my phone for offline playback. Obviously I could do that with an SMB share but Plex (and the others) have built-in transcoding which is nice if you don't have the time or space for a bunch of full size 1080p files.
Now, I use Jellyfin alongside Seerr (so me and others can quickly pick-out media to automatically download in a preset quality). I've also installed a plugin for Jellyfin called Moonfin that offers a ton of quality of life improvements and also integrates Seerr within one app. I just click on a movie or TV season I want, Seerr tells radarr or sonarr to query my private trackers for the selection, and then radarr/sonarr send the torrent to rtorrent. After a few minutes, Jellyfin picks up the files and adds them to the database.
What are these private trackers? Asking for a friend…
Its missing the wife/husband/child acceptance factor.
Yes but do you have no friends and family and are you never outside of your house? I think the answer is hopefully yes to all of these.
One thing that Jellyfin does really well is integrate devices like the HDHomeRun. You can then watch OTA TV from any device on the LAN or elsewhere through the Jellyfin Web portal or dedicated clients for Linux/Android/iOS.
If your HTPC is powerful enough, you should also check out Plasma Bigscreen as a substitute for XFCE4.
For me the metadata is a big part of it. I have a large physical media collection so I could just use the discs, but putting it all into plex has made it so much easier to browse and watch. For example I can pause and skim the cast/crew filmographies right in the plex UI, including being able to see what I already have and investigate the stuff I've never heard of for possible future purchases. When watching several movies in a row, after finishing one I can follow the automatically-populated trail of related/similar movies until I find something that fits my mood.
I started using it because me and my flatmate had different media libraries and we wanted to share them. Plex very conveniently merged both into a single deduplicated library that we could pick from when watching something on the TV.
I can share plex with my friends and family easily. Your solution sounds good but it’s just too hard for most people.
There are plex client apps for most tvs and boxes, even the really cheap bad ones, and it all just kinda works.
Weird I scrolled this far for “friends”.
That’s the killer feature. I haven’t met a person who couldn’t use PLEX.
My jellyfin setup is not that different.
Jellyfin container instance running on a mini pc, reading media from an NFS share on a NAS, organised in a very similar fashion.
The advantage is there is a "native" app on the TV, so everything is very adapted to the TV UX, i.e. remote control driven UI etc.
(And the jellyfin side is relatively disposable, the container can be trashed and redone fairly quickly).
That’s very detailed. Sounds like you have everything the way you want it. So plex would probably add nothing.
Jellyfin is nice for various reasons (main for me is play synching) but Apple TV + Infuse + SMB share made something pretty bulletproof and kid friendly even before.
Plex/Jellyfin is for those without a home theater. I typically listen/watch media on my phone or old iPad, or sometimes a laptop. Since Jellyfin works through the browser it covers all these scenarios. On the occasion I have some people over and we want to watch it on a TV I can connect the laptop to the TV.
I have almost the same setup. Plus a 3rd party app called "Material Files" to access it on my phone.
Makes me feel lucky that I got it for $120 in 2021. But I appreciate that they still offer a lifetime pass at all.
$120 isn't too bad. I paid $75 in July of 2019.
$750 is nuts.
I paid $75 December 2013 and then a similar amount as you in 2021 when I set up a system for my parents.
$750 is insane considering how little they care about user feedback.
The lifetime model isn't sustainable, that's why they're pricing it out.
It had been sustained for something like 14 years, though?
Yep, but there’s a limit to everything.
At some point you hit market saturation and the forever users are just costing you money and new user acquisition isn’t enough to offset it.
Nobody likes the subscription model but it’s the easiest way to sustain constant development bigger than side hustle projects.
It isn't sustainable in the context of their desire to pivot to being a streaming service, along with their desire to blow resources on repeatedly redesigning the apps to make the UI slower and buggier.
The change to $750 just took effect July 1st. I suspect we're going to see some big discounts down to $400 or less around Black Friday and periodically at other times of the year.
pCloud, a cloud storage provider who offers lifetime plans, uses a similar strategy.
Basically I think they are putting the $750 price out there a) for anyone who is dumb enough to pay it, and b) as a way to make limited-time discounts and the annual plan seem like better deals by comparison.
It was $120 even a year ago (bought one in April of last year), the jump $750 is really weird.
How is that even a viable business model? I don't know a single self host person that would pay a subscription for something they are hosting
According to this Forbes article [1], Plex earns the majority of their revenue from selling ads in their streaming platform:
> Valory said that Plex, which currently does not disclose financial information, generates roughly 20 percent of its revenues from member subscriptions, which unlock premium capabilities of its media platform, compared to 80 percent from the ad business.
So possibly they are just trying to extract as much money as possible from their "legacy" userbase while they can, with the expectation that people hosting their own media libraries are a dwindling market.
Looking at their different features offered in different pricing plans [2], it seems like their strategy is to make money on sharing media libraries with friends and family. $70/year isn't a huge amount to simplify streaming to other (non-technical) people on a variety of different devices. And I suspect some plex users are charging for their access to their media libraries - even if it's something informal like accepting donations or asking for a payment on venmo - in which case the fees would just be a small operating cost.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2024/04/17/venerab...
[2] https://www.plex.tv/plans/
I have seen people talking about this "hosting a small streaming service for friends" thing, and I really have trouble understanding that. It just seems a bad idea to expose such a server to the Internet and maintain it, even with a VPN, and I don't know what kind of friends they have. That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it takes to curate your library including "acquisition" and pruning etc.
It's not an open server that anyone can just connect to, only specific Plex accounts that you invite.
They also don't need to know anything about how to connect to your server, it simply shows up as a server name in the list on their "app" or the Plex website, there is no need for dynamic DNS or VPN or anything like that as Plex's servers do a kind of "service discovery" automatically.
It does require you exposing the Plex TCP port to the internet, so you are relying on them making sure there are no vulnerabilities. You could probably do a VPN approach and give them a URL they can enter into a web-browser, but it's unlikely to work on TV and mobile apps.
I've given access to my Plex server to my siblings and parents and it's great. Since I got a decently fast fibre line, no more having to manually copy shows/movies they want to watch over a LAN or using a USB HDD or memory stick.
> It just seems a bad idea to expose such a server to the Internet and maintain it
Why? Nerds have been hosting services for their friends and family for decades now. It was one of the primary benefits of knowing an IT nerd. They probably had a few servers co-located at work or with their friend who worked for the local ISP. These days with cloud I suppose it's changed, but I didn't think this skillset had eroded that much.
Hosting services on the public internet isn't very scary. If your Plex server gets zero day'ed, you just reinstall it and start over. Chances are that will never happen.
I host the media server, you come help me fix my plumbing when I need it sort of thing.
> That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it takes to curate your library including "acquisition" and pruning etc.
This part, sure. But it's like anything else you do for family and friends. When I ran an e-mail server for everyone it was a giant pain that eventually became not worth it once the free providers got better and more accessible.
Plus the whole "curating" thing is the fun part, usually! Most of that stuff is usually about 98% automated either way so the "job" is largely fixing automation when it chokes.
They’re not “friends”, they’re people paying a small fee to conveniently access pirated media.
While I'm a lucky lifetime Plex pass holder, the service I get with my own self hosted setup is leagues ahead of anything I could pay for. I would probably pay for a Plex subscription if I started today. I hope Jellyfin improves its remote streaming UX, subtitle management, and app polish, because it's a pretty good contender otherwise.
There are lots of folks self-hosting the music app Roon and paying for it.
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Have to admit, quite impressive that someone is still paying this much for Plex given the free alternative like Jellyfin that can do pretty much everything the same.
What’s the psychology here that people are willing to pay this much for this software, yet not even $20 for another?
It's pretty slick looking which is worth something to me. Not $750, but something. But even though some of the UX choices of Jellyfin didn't make sense to me, it's an amazing piece of software, so I'm sticking with that, and using Wholphin [1] as a frontend.
[1] https://github.com/damontecres/Wholphin
Not hard to understand. People will pay for a better UX. Which Plex has, once you disable all the streaming junk.
Also there’s simply more clients for it. The only way to play Bluray Dolby Vision layers correctly is with an AM6B+ which has an amazing Plex frontend.
I have a lifetime pass I bought many years ago for not much money, Plex had apps in all Platforms. Jellyfin does not at this point, even though there’s work being done everywhere.
Plex just works and is supporter everywhere. Not that surprising that people use it.
What information do you have that people are actually paying this price?
There are plenty of situations where a business must charge over X for one reason and must charge under Y for another, where Y < X. What happens is generally they go for the "over X" branch for fairly obvious reasons, then go out of business sooner or later because they can't actually charge that. Just the fact that they are trying to charge that much doesn't mean people are paying it.
I remember when Plex wasn't a money grab. Many moons ago.
$750?!! Holy shit.
It's $980 if you buy it through Apple... and the crazy thing is Plex is actually losing $75 if you buy it that way!
Losing $75 while gaining $675.
If your paycheck was shorted $75, you might care.
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I’m surprised people reach for plex, not sure what I’m missing - but a Jellyfin container set up has been fantastic for strictly at home usage (running on an old gaming PC).
It’s fantastic software - the cross platform applications are pretty useable. Don’t think we’ve even had any major issues over the last 4 years using it.
Many thanks to the builders and maintainers, hopefully Andrew can take some rest and know they help a lot of people!
I run JF not plex, but the #1 missing feature I'd like is per-user granular sharing of content within specific libraries.
So far as I can tell, the only way around this is to symlink the subset of media into separate folders, make each of them libraries, then present those libraries to each user.
I'm not sure if this is what you want but you can set two lists of tags for each user that works as items blacklists and whitelists. Then you tag whatever media you want with those and they will appear or disappear for that user.
You can find this feature in the admin control panel -> Users -> select an user -> Parental control (tab)
There is also an Access tab, together both can be used to lock things down fairly well.
I didn't know about tags nor their uses in Parental Control, thanks!
And after checking it out, if you use Sonarr/Radarr for managing your media, the tags you put there are synced to Jellyfin, so that's even better.
That's exactly the problem that I tried to solve with the OS I'm working on. You can have a shared jellyfin instance if you want everyone to access the same library. But you can also create OS users, with their own jellyfin instance, and within that you can set access or only to certain folders. That only have the contents that you want them to access.
It's not as efficient as granting access within jellyfin, but it's pretty close to what you're trying to do.
I have a problem that it constantly tries to re-encode video that could be played perfectly fine in their player or the mpv shim. I wound up just mounting my remote drives and playing in my local mpv. I don't really use it because of that. Unfortunate because otherwise I love a lot of things about it.
I too have run into this problem on a number of devices. The client's supported codec/media format detection logic appears to be extremely pessimistic. To the point that the mere existence of certain audio track formats and subtitles can trigger transcoding, even when said tracks/subtitles aren't actively used. The same files played via MPV on a file share, i.e. no transcoding possible, play without issue.
I've tried tweaking both the clients and server to be less pessimistic, i.e. see if the active media elements are supported, but even then it really fights it. I think the best approach would be rewrite the clients to adopt a (try || transcode) strategy rather than (guess || transcode), but that looked to be a major piece of work.
You can check why it’s re-encoding, there’s some guides out there. In my case it was the subtitles! Turns out Safari can’t handle all types of subtitles. Might be worth looking into it.
Of course I have been down the rabbit hole. The software is wrong. Give me an option to bypass re-encoding, and instead of failing based on diagnostics like it does, just play the darn file the best you can. I only have so much patience and I prefer living with a samba share to play it in the exact same mpv player without problems rather than fighting software over something that is so simple and fundamental to a video player.
Yeah, I can 100% understand your frustration. It’s also a bit opaque as to why it’s re-encoding.
That said, we are a family so I can’t get everyone else to stream to mpv, so Jellyfin works better for everyone. mpv is also a great piece of software, plays everything!
The Apple TV solutions for Jellyfin are inadequate last I checked. Basically you are stuck with Plex and Infuse. I already have lifetime Plex Pass so no reason to care... for now.
Infuse is terrific software, and supports jellyfin and smb. I use it for jellyfin and absolutely love my setup.
I ditched plex because of missing Dolby audio support and all the use hostile channels and “features” years ago, and will never look back.
Infuse is another $100 license to sync watch history, when I already paid $100 for Plex a while ago (with the primary driver being 'sync watch history', which is the basic feature Plex provides).
Paying more money to use a different product, and then expecting all of my users to do the same, is a big hill to climb.
So the Plex inertia remains.
For how much Infuse gets praised I was disappointed in the UI/UX. Playback is great, but the browsing UI is terrible and offline downloads are really buggy (Just like with Plex for a very long time)
Yep, total agreement here. But they really nail the "it just works" of playback, so all things considered I stick with it.
It's worth noting that Swiftfin finally had a new release for tvOS this summer which is worth checking out if you're interested in Jellyfin on Apple TV
Not sure of your issues or when you last tried. I recently installed Plex on my TruNAS. I use the AppleTV app and it works well.
One caveat is that older AppleTVs can’t do native decoding of some mkvs. But that’s largely an AppleTV limitation. Though I could imagine the client being smart enough to list its abilities and the server only serving content supported by the client.
Plex app is better, but still inadequate compared to Infuse.
What about moonfin? I use it on shield and it works great.
Because Plex worked amazingly ~5-6 years ago, while Jellyfin was still very early stage. It'd sort of work. So there's a lot of "Well I'm already using Plex" inertia. Plus Plex has very lovely, polished clients, you can easily invite people, share your library with others etc etc. Once they got all that of course, then the changes/fees/ads/bloat started.
Jellyfin is great, it's all I've ever used. But it's still very rough - AppleTV support is limited+buggy (ask my wife...), you can't cast to a Chromecast from iOS etc. Plugins are required for some things to work. Transcoding is harder to get working. Good luck downloading stuff for offline use on the mobile client apps, all you get is the raw movie/tv show file - you have to use VLC to play it.
Again, I love Jellyfin and I use it daily. But we're both kidding ourselves if we think the polished experience you get with Plex is the same as it is with Jellyfin.
I bought a cheapo lifetime pass in the early days of plex. Their business leadership decided to make Plex more like a TV than a personal media server, and the UI / UX changes reflected this.
I got a great deal as an early user, but new users have Good Reasons not to use plex anymore.
I use Plex because the whole experience looks and feels more polished than Jellyfin (that’s personal but even the name Jellyfin irks me, I hate jellyfish), which is something I value more than openness. Also I bought the Plex lifetime a few years ago during Covid and at that time Jellyfin was nowhere near Plex in terms of user friendliness, Plex already had a TV app, a mobile app with ability to download locally, a feature to share access to anyone with a Plex account, automatic metadata update, etc. I don’t know if Jellyfin has all that even today.
If I were to make a choice today I think my first choice would still be Plex.
every jellyfin app nowadays not only has downloads, but unlike plex it even works relialby
It works reliably with Plex too, I use it every time I travel or take the train, not sure useless taunts are necessary here.
it's just one of the most common complaints i see all the time from plex users and was a big reason i switched too
Would you pay the $700 today as well?
Jellyfin has all those features now. Sharing servers is harder as you don't have centralized account mgmt, but you can use wizarr to make it simpler.
I probably would. Or just go for the cheaper route of paying them monthly/yearly
I would not pay $700 indeed.
I have been using Plex since 2014, paid for the lifetime pass back then. It is by-far the most used piece of software I've ever relied on (excluding any general purpose software like OS/Browser).
I have my family setup on Plex, my automations, my apps, my preferences, etc. I'm so comfortable in Plex that until they do something catastrophic to my experience, I can't find the motivation to train my mother to use another app.
I never heard of Jellyfin until now (I might have been living under a rock). Plex has been... fine, though this looks really interesting so I might switch over.
One thing that may help your transition is that you can point both systems at the same media files so it's not an immediate commitment. I did that, then one day Plex borked itself as it periodically did for me and I just didn't bother fixing it.
Plexamp is still head and shoulders above anything comparable on the jellyfin side.
plex runs on most of the commercial NAS you can buy as a simple click-install-works packet, even on the cheap CPUs. It is a very slick tool, but I am happy I moved everything over to jellyfin.
Biggest reason for me - for a long time - was no Apple TV app. Using Infuse has fixed that for me, however.
Plex has a great Tizen app. It just works on my TV same as Netflix.
5 years ago when i bought an LG OLED tv and finally decided to move from SAMBA/Apache/plain files I tried first Jellyfin, but
1. Jellyfin up to to a year or two ago didn't have WebOS client.
2. Jellyfin android client is (was?) just the webclient - so no video or audio codec support.
3. Server ran very poorly on my raspberry pi
so I went with Plex and am still using Plex
I run Jellyfin on Raspberry pi and access it with Android app. The main issues I have with the app are:
1. Subtitle management is a total pain. Sometimes it doesn't show any subtitle toggle, sometimes it does. There isn't an option to switch between different subtitles. Adding an external subtitle file on the fly via the app never works for me. One approach that almost always works is to download the subtitle file, rename it to match movie filename, trigger a metadata refresh for the file/library (this requires switching from library view to dashboard view and back so certainly has friction). Also, if you start a movie directly on Chromecast, subtitles don't show even if they have been chosen. However, if you start the movie with subtitles "ON" on the app and THEN stream it via Chromecast, subtitles show up on the TV.
2. Sometimes it has issues with Google Chromecast (puck connecting to my LG OLED TV via HDMI port). I have had better luck with the in-built Chromecast feature of the TV.
The Pi isn't mega snappy when it comes to the lag between button press to actual playback start/end of seeking but it generally works fine once the stream starts playing.
I didn't pay a dime for it so this is not throwing any shade on the Jellyfin team - I am grateful for their work.
I also didn't pay a dime for Plex
> I'm surprised people reach for plex
I have a lifetime subscription from 2016. All my friends have Plex, too. It works. We share. Ezpz.
How much music do you have in Jellyfin? I tried it a few weeks ago and it was extremely slow and terrible with my music library. It would take 30+ seconds to load artist pages.
The media player app for android set top boxes like nvidia shield handles different subtitle formats and advanced settings much better than the jellyfin one, especially for anime subs.
Great that it's peaceful.
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
It's not amazing, it's as good as it is. Which is to say not great.
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 have no conflict of interest and feel bad for you if you've wasted time on it, but for anyone else who is considering trying it I have literally have had no issues with mine including setting up nvidia hw transcoding on a debian nas. Only thing I can think of is briefly the android tv client lagged on a major version RC so was incompatible till it updated on my box. I have to check the change log sometimes because of how seamless updating has been (kind of like paperless-ngx and immich as another plug!).
Setting HW-encoding is a tad complicated indeed, it’s hard to debug WHY it’s not working. But once you have it, you’re good. Jellyfin has been rock solid for us in 2 years since we ditched Netflix and Prime Video.
I haven't touched a media server setup since like XBMC and earlier tuner board + dvr era stuff, but recently did a Jellyfin setup for all my purchased physical media.
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 use Infuse on the Apple TV and it’s great. I’m not sure how the free version of it compares, but they have a lifetime license for it that I believe is about $100. Definitely worth it if you have a large variety of media and frequently watch on the Apple TV specifically.
I did a build from their repo and pushed it to the Apple TV, just to try out the rewrite changes. It's considerably improved, and plenty nice for my purposes. I didn't feel like I had to, though. I'll delete it and use the app store version when they cut a release.
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.
Infuse is a nice app but note that it does not use the media server's transcoding service, so it can work poorly trying to stream remotely, while Jellyfin's transcoding-aware web client works better. The Jellyfin app for Apple TV was pretty unusable last time I tried it, though.
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.
I really like Infuse, I use it with Jellyfin to stream to my Apple TV. But there is one thing that I have repeatedly been irritated by, and it is that it cannot search by tags, nor can it search for words in the description of movies.
I held off buying an apple TV mainly cause I don't want to purchase Infuse for DV/HDR/Atmos content. Is there a decent client otherwise?
> There is a crazy amount of bugs which I have no confidence will ever get fixed.
Like what honestly I've been running one for years and have had nearly zero issues.
I've used Jellyfin for years and my experience is currently incredibly smooth and works like a dream for the whole family.
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
My jellyfin installation chokes on audiobooks. 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.
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?
I've never tried it for audiobooks frankly didn't even know it supported them.
> 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.
I really dislike this paradigm that the user needs to become a human DBMS, and rename/link files or write template rules for the media server to understand. It was understandable back in XBMC days but it just feels silly now. Surely it can extract some Musicbrainz-like fingerprint from the media instead of only relying on filename.
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.
For a related issue, Kim Possible was aired out of order, leading to various problems if you watch the episodes in the order they were aired. I am given to understand this is fairly common for older TV shows.
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.
Jellyfin will let you set up alternate metadata providers and select between different episode ordering if available (https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-resolved-dvd-order-instead-of-a...). For tv shows especially TVDB will tend to have alternate orderings most often, and TMDB will occasionally have alternate orderings available.
That isn't a Jellyfin thing, Plex has the same issue. And both Jellyfin and Plex give you mechanisms to resolve that issue (using the alternate episode ordering that the metadata provider has, rather than the default one, or using another metadata provider if need be).
> I've never tried it for audiobooks frankly didn't even know it supported them.
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"?
I think I have an idea of how it might not support audio books. What if audio books had the following issue:
> 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.
> 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
> If Jellyfin was designed around music
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)
[flagged]
Do you not know how audio files work?
"Supporting audiobooks" involves more than just playing audio files, unless you want to ignore the basic set of features associated with audiobooks as their own medium.
> 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.
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.
Could try submitting a patch?
While I'd agree that the 10.11.x releases have terrible performance on some APIs to the extent that I rolled back to 10.10.x and marked it as held, until they release 12.x...
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?
Obviously not everyone will necessarily have the same experience as me, but I can't say I've encountered any problems.
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.
Not my experience. Only bugs ive had are with it not correctly recognizing a media file. That was fairly easy to correct on a few files. Would be a pain if it missed for many.
I'm sorry that you have had a bad experience.
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'm been running Jellyfin in a container as well for 4 years. I stream to a couple Roku devices. The only problem I've encountered is Roku doesn't support DVDSUB and Jellyfin recently added automatic overlaying of DVDSUB server-side which drastically slows down seeking on Roku.
Maybe it's a Linux thing?
I've been using it on Windows for years with multiple devices and it's been working flawlessly.
It has worked flawlessly for me on Linux.
Could be, but it also had problems on my mac. I had to abandon Jellyfin for Emby over it.
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).
Tell me more about Emby. Solid replacement?
I just put media in a folder and then watch it I rarely have to manage my Jellyfin server
It's probably your config or hardware issues
> 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.
Can you suggest an alternative?
I just had an LLM set it up and never had to touch it again.
I'm on Windows and it's been close to perfect. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I simply could no longer provide the effort (mental or time-wise) that the role demanded, and thus I was not performing my duties to an acceptable degree, facing severe burnout, and risks to my mental health.
[...]
We've proven that FLOSS works, and is in demand.
If "FLOSS works" maintainers shouldn't be "facing severe burnout", I've come across two more in the past week alone:
* Filebrowser (Mar 2026): https://hacdias.com/2026/03/11/filebrowser/
* axum-login / tower-sessions (last week): https://github.com/maxcountryman/axum-login/discussions/330
FLOSS works because when maintainers need to leave the project doesn’t die.
This is more common in FLOSS then in corporate/closed source projects.
> If "FLOSS works" maintainers shouldn't be "facing severe burnout"
So your success criteria for ”FLOSS works” is that zero people involved in it experience stress related issues?
Do people doing non-FLOSS work not also sometimes face severe burnout?
Yes but those people aren't doing it as a hobby.
What’s your point, or are you just engaging in a conversation while completely ignoring the context?
Generally you wouldn't expect someone working on a hobby for free to experience burnout.
Happy to see that it looks like a peaceful transition. I’m not currently a Jellyfin user, I tried it, but it didn’t seem capable of handling my library on my hardware. I’m sticking with Plex for now, but as they move more and more toward trying to be a streaming service instead of a media server, I’m hoping Jellyfin matures to the point where it’s viable when I need it.
What do you mean they’re moving toward trying to be a streaming service?
Take a look at their homepage, you wouldn’t even know they offer a media server looking at this. (The main URL forwards to the watch subdomain)
https://watch.plex.tv/
It’s now how a majority of users are using Plex as well.
> In 2023, Scott Hancock, Plex’s then-VP of marketing, said that Plex had more people using its online streaming service than using its media server features since 2022.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/plexs-crackdown-on-f...
With media servers being something studios surely don’t like, and Plex deprioritizing that aspect of the business, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before they shut it down completely.
To even know they have a media server, I need to click on the profile image in the top right of their website (even though I’m logged out), then click “My Media” under Links. No one is finding that organically.
That goes here, which seems to be their only page about the media server, and at the bottom is a link to a site that tries to scare people away. Instead of talking about how to rip your existing DVD and CD collection for the modern streaming era and self-hosting, it pushes users toward the big streaming services. Maybe that link is there because of the lawyers, but it sure seems like they don’t want this to exist anymore.
https://www.plex.tv/your-media/
I feel very foolish, I thought you were saying Jellyfin was trying to become a streaming service.
I was concerned.
They’re a paid service now. It’s no longer open source.
To the best of my knowledge Plex has never been open source. It's just easy to mix up because it's been using Kodi as a base the whole time.
Indeed. They forked Xbox Media Center back in the day, to produce a Mac version when none existed.
Then they became a client/server model.
They are supposed to provide the source code for Plex Transcoder, since that's a modified ffmpeg build. In practice, the version they share is not up to date with the version they ship.
They are generally speaking, closed source.
Plex is a piece of shit that rams dumb streaming stuff down your throat each time you sign in on a TV. This coincidentally happens every other month or so when the app seems to forget the account it’s signed into.
It’s becoming hostile for people who want to work from their media alone.
I am not so sure. Have used it for years for free( I have need to stream on the go) and it’s always been no issue. On first setup you are give the option to display streaming options or only your library. I cannot remember the last time I was logged. Super stable and zero time spent setting it up.
On the flip side Jellyfin has never worked that well out of the box for me. Always some fiddling around and even when I get it right the server will crash unexpectedly and when I want to go watch something I have to manually reboot it.
You must not use the TV apps. Both the Samsung and the LG ones suffer from this.
I was not suggesting Jellyfin was better because the apps don’t exist in any meaningful sense for TVs.
I was a user back when it was Mac only, before they even broke it out into a client/server architecture. When they added the streaming services, I don’t remember getting a choice. I do remember finally getting annoyed enough some time last year and looking for a way to hide it all.
I also remember opening the app one day, not long ago, and seeing a full screen ad instead of my media. Considering I have PlexPass, I found this extremely off putting. I think that was a one-time thing, but still a bad omen.
Been a user since forever too but for the past few years I just don’t recall seeing any ads on a day to day basis. Regardless it runs much better for me than the only alternative.
Have used it for years as well, Plex is a piece of shit. I'm waiting for the day I'll have the time to migrate off this enshitified hostile dark "platform".
Works amazing for me.
This has never been my experience. When it can’t find my own content, it says “nothing to watch”…
Haven't been logged out of the app on my Apple TV in 4 years now.
Apple TV is not a TV. It’s the terrible quality of all of their TV apps that leads to this behavior.
what is your hardware problem?
I’m running Plex via Docker on a Synology NAS. This has been working fine. When I tried to fire up a Jellyfin container, it was painfully slow. Clients barely worked. It wasn’t a good experience. It was several months ago, so I don’t remember all the details.
I don’t know if it’s a synology related problem or just Jellyfin but I have never gotten it running well. Even when it’s running I always get hiccups like server crashed a week later but appears green and running. Or trouble logging into the server using a third party client. Plex has always been perfect for me.
I run Jellyfin in Docker on an N100 mini PC without problems.
My nas has an N100 because I wanted to avoid Synology's shite CPU offerings. I similarly have had no issues.
I’ve been running Plex on various devices for many years and have been impressed by the stability and usefulness. Grandfathered on the old lifetime subscription but I get that $750 seems excessive.
I just set up Jellyfin on an 1819 this weekend and so far it seems great, dunno if it’s improved or my device has bit more oomph - the ui on some devices is not as nice as plex but it’s been great
Jellyfin has a lot of alternative unofficial apps partly because of it ui as some people that did not like the look built something else. That is the case for almost every client OS
Hmmm, seems like that is not true for Roku which is specifically the one that is bad - maybe I'll just grab an Onn or something
I wonder if it was just a start up issue? Some kind of initial scan of your database?
I waited for all that to finish. I tried to help it along by going through everything so it would cache it all. It wasn’t as straightforward as Plex’s visual, flipping covers over as the metadata loads in for each movie, providing a clear queue and sense of progress.
Once on the client side, it felt like those also needed to cache things. The only client that worked semi-well wasn’t a Jellyfin client, but could read from a Jellyfin server. I think it was called InFuse. With that as well, I spent hours simply navigating the app, going to every page, and waiting for it to cache everything so I could then navigate around. Then if I added something new, I needed to go to a page to show it and get it cached.
Could be the hardware acceleration was not mounted to the container.
There's never been a better time to consider writing your own media server solution from scratch.
I really don't like the idea of transcoding on demand. It has always created a janky experience on the client. I've been using a custom solution that runs everything through ffmpeg normalization as part of the media upload phase. Whenever a client wants to stream something we give them raw byte ranges directly from the block storage provider. In practice, this feels like flipping the channels on an analog tv. Every video starts and seeks nearly instantly.
I've long since given up on the dream of maintaining lossless master copies of everything just in case. Every practical use of that 50 gb copy of Home Alone would have you transcoding it. Most clients would choke on that bit rate. When would you actually be able to use all of the available information? Why not just discard what you'll never use? I realize it feels offensive to kill information like this but you can do a much better job with the end experience if you do.
You can get a modern chatbot to produce this experience in a single prompt. The code can run on anything slightly more powerful than a potato because you aren't transcoding at playback time anymore. A raspberry pi would be more than enough to serve a few clients on a LAN. If you remain humble in your list of demands (a simple directory browser that plays videos linked within), you can more easily achieve total autonomy.
> You can get a modern chatbot to produce this experience in a single prompt.
If you value your time that little and you get more joy out of building apps for multiple platforms instead of watching movies then this is the best choice. For everyone else it's probably better to just go with any of the hundres of solutions that went through years of bug fixing and pain already to get it working on all these platforms.
Quite the straw man we've constructed here.
I am the exclusive user and I only watch from browsers on laptops and desktops attached to whatever display and audio outputs. I suspect this describes a non-trivial portion of the audience here as well. I don't care about someone being able to watch my media collection on Xbox because I don't have one.
> I am the exclusive user and I only watch from browsers on laptops
People doing that don't need a media server like Plex or Jellyfin, you just need a directory on your computer. People who use Jellyfin or Plex have a very different case of running it on servers, then streaming it to TVs, streaming boxes and mobile devices.
Check out https://siloserver.org . Silo has its own API but also spins up a Jellyfin-protocol compatibility layer. This allows you to use any Jellyfin client and just point it at your Silo server.
It's another vibe coded slop
It's already significantly better than Jellyfin, Plex, and Emby. Give it a try. The development team is active on their Discord. A lot of users are testing it.
It's currently running a PB+ media library (which neither Jellyfin nor Emby can run) with native clients across multiple platforms. It will unseat Jellyfin.
> Every practical use of that 50 gb copy of Home Alone would have you transcoding it. Most clients would choke on that bit rate.
What clients are you using? I use the highest bitrate HDR videos possible. I very rarely have to transcode. 4k TVs are cheap as are 4k streaming devices.
The main case for transcoding is playing a video in a browser that doesn't support the original codec. Everything can handle high bitrate streams now. The one other rare exception is video that's over 100Mbit/s. I've encountered a few that are that high and some streaming boxes can only handle 100Mb.
We should be clear about software vs hardware transcoding being different things. Hardware transcoding is "free" for even commodity hardware. Yes, lower end systems might have trouble keeping up with a blu-ray remux as its source to a high-bitrate target. But you can very easily buy an off the shelf mini-pc to act as a transcode-capable server and eliminate nearly all the downsides that come with trying to avoid transcoding.
Just to supplement your point with an anecdote: my first "proper" Jellyfin host was a retired Optiplex 3020. I added a 128GB SSD through one of those silly CD drive bay adapters and threw in a Quadro P400 that I bought off of eBay. On top of that, the actual server ran Proxmox with Jellyfin nested in an LXC container. By all accounts, the machine was a janky pile of e-waste given a new, horrible life through sheer stinginess.
There were quirks (mostly self-imposed ones) to getting the whole thing set up, but it ran like a champ for the better part of a year. Hardware transcoding really does make a world of difference, even in the worst of cases.
"There's never been a better time to consider writing your own media server solution from scratch."
If you want to go the hacker route, and do not give a flying fig about UI, you can get a long way just by setting up any old webserver that has range support (which is most of them) and serving out directories with video files and some sort of automated index. You don't even need to do any work. Browsers already are smart enough to hit a video file, extract the playback metadata with range requests and provide native seeking, speed management, and some of the other basics. Plus you get native "right click (or equivalent) -> download" support without anything giving you hassles.
On the one hand, it's missing a lot of features. On the other hand, it can't be beat for simplicity and the bang-for-the-buck is pretty good. And anything capable of A: running an HTTP server at all and B: has enough storage to store the files can saturate whatever network it is on with video data if you want it to.
If the novel parts are don't transcode, and clean up before adding to library, then you can just do that, right? Without having to create a frontend, which is the fiddly part (especially since losing the AppleTV client I can use with Jellyfin server would be a sacrifice). It's pretty easy to, for example, make a python script that grabs metadata from tmdb when given a URL (so the script has no need for disambiguation logic -- that's what humans are for), generate an ffmpeg command that adds that metadata, and does whatever re-encoding/re-muxing you want. Can embed subtitle files this way too.
e.g., of generated command: ffmpeg -y -hide_banner -i /mnt/storage/rips/bluray.mkv -i ./eng.sdr.srt -map 0:v -map 0:a -map 1 -c:v copy -c:a copy -c:s mov_text -metadata:s:a:0 language=eng -metadata:s:a:0 title=eng -metadata:s:s:0 language=eng -metadata:s:s:0 title="English (SDR)" -disposition:s:0 hearing_impaired -metadata title="Film Title" -metadata genre="Pretentious Comedy" -metadata artist="Alan Smithee" -metadata date=2026 -f mp4 -movflags +faststart "/mnt/storage/movies/Film Title (2026).mp4"
Do whatever encoding you want in advance too of course. Note, the above is generated from a script (not created manually) that is run like `./cleanvideo.py ./bluray.mkv ./eng.sdr.srt https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/985-eraserhead`
After doing this for over a decade, I find that Jellyfin, or even just a caddy directory listing, make a great media library browser. Jellyfin will almost never identify things incorrectly. Can always fall back to just listing things and playing your content with `mpv https://machine.tailnet-name.ts.net/movies/...` even remotely given the use of tailscale. Or VLC from my phone, etc.
Transcoding on demand is just trading compute for storage. If you have infinite storage you can store all definitions in advance for any possible client (I think that's what Netflix does); but if you don't, transcoding on demand is fine and isn't that much slower (a bit janky, yes, but only a bit).
I think most people would find that two or three definition is all they really need. 1080p h264 at high bit rate for compatibility on the local network and low bit rate 1080p for streaming remotely or to save space in local downloads for a trip.
But since you don't have an infinite number of clients, just a few, there is no need for infinite storage
> Transcoding on demand is just trading compute for storage.
And storage is getting expensive AF.
You just described Plex 0.1.
There's a reason they turned to transcoding: it means every device can get the highest quality version it is capable of displaying. Your solution limits the video to the lowest common supported quality.
Sounds cool. Care to share it?
sounds like a bastardized HTTP Live Streaming implementation- which is now fully supported by ffmpeg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming
I just did. Put the above into your favorite chat bot and append your preferred language, runtime environment and block storage provider.
Out of tokens.
Things are fast and simple when you ignore tradeoffs, such as extra disk space requirements
I’m grateful for this team. Jellyfin is a great product. I’ve been using llm + Tailscale + Jellyfin to manage my media box and I couldn’t be more happy. I’ve got perfect metadata, perfect organization, and multimodal search on top of it. What a dream.
Huge fan of Jellyfin and the whole related stack, glad to see this is all peaceful.
What's the related stack
Jellyfin, sonarr, radarr, lidarr, sometimes jackett....aka the ArrStack
Surely it should be the StackArr?
Arr, matey!
Suggest Prowlarr instead of jackett.
Yeah the arr stack plus seer. It all feels like cheating. Which it is.
Definitely cheating. I’ve taught my mostly-non-technical gf how to to load up sonarr and add something to the library.
Anything we can do to avoid the hodgepodge of 8 different streaming services and rotating availability…
Add seer and you don’t have to teach anyone. I even get a ntfy notification when requests are made and fulfilled.
Smart man, I still act as the middleman any time my gf wants a show!
See above about seerr. https://docs.seerr.dev/
Small plug to ask for help with the Apple TV App? Swiftfin is really rough but the best option. It’s quite terrible, never refreshes, overlapping text constantly. It could use some love.
Keep an eye on Neptune. I used Swiftfin, switched to Infuse, and am now using Neptune daily. It's coming along really nicely.
https://neptuneplayer.com
There’s some alternatives. I like JellyTV, pretty smooth UI. Streamyfin has a beta for the TV as well, and continues to improve. But yeah definitely some of the tougher part of the ecosystem
They just released the first update in years, v1.5
I understand it will be kept in sync from now on
Requires tvOS 26
Infuse is polished, I lack nothing in it on ATV.
The way they do their list rendering is infuriating for large collections. Instead of showing titles + shimmer, its just big blobs of loading placeholders. So to find where you are in your list of movies you have to stop scrolling and let the content finish loading to get your bearings.
Its minor overall, but as a former app dev, poor list performance drives me crazy.
Also, for files in a directory with the same prepended string with long filenames(like full_show_name - S01E01), it displays just a fraction of the full filename in a list.
I need to sit there and wait for the filename to scroll horizontally to see what the actual episode number or name is. Instead of just showing the full filename on multiple lines, or showing the filename below the thumbnail.
Also:
- Flattens folders with a single file in it (so foldername/file.mkv shows up as just file.mkv in the parent folder), no way to disable this (https://community.firecore.com/t/avoid-flattening-tv-show-fo...)
- Doesn't show landscape artwork (embedded .png), only portrait, and if the embedded artwork is not portrait it grabs a random frame from the file instead of cropping the embedded artwork (https://community.firecore.com/t/use-landscape-artwork/26878...)
- If you exit a video before it's ended, but it's close to the ending, it marks it as played (so if you go back in you lose the playback position) (https://community.firecore.com/t/infuse-skips-end/23504)
Yes, I have these links handy because I've been tracking these issues for years and they're still not fixed.
Eh, my media is ephemeral, I don’t rewatch things. I’m sure as a former dev you could whip up your own in a couple of weekends and a Show HN :)
I tried to get involved (in very minor ways) a while back but got basically no engagement from the project so I just let it be. I moved to infuse instead as my ios client and its been good overall. I really hate its list performance on large collections though.
Yeah Infuse is actually usable.
Same. I wrote a really big upgrade to the Jellyfin iOS App to support Chromecast (https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-ios/issues/16), got crickets :(
Best of luck to the folks leaving. Supporting OSS isn't easy.
I had some issues with it too, though not as bad as you seem to have experienced. Good new is they're reworking it, heavily, and seem to be near a new release.
For my own purposes I cloned it and pushed the build to my AppleTV... and it's considerably better than the last app store release (quite a while ago).
I'm not suggesting anyone do the same, but just saying your problems might be about to solve themselves.
I use moonfin on my shield, seems to exist for apple tv?
Jellyfin is great for my needs, and I appreciate the effort that goes into it. Recently was having rendering issues doing HDR -> SDR tone mapping since I watch my content on a 2008 era Pioneer plasma display. I found that oddly enough while the server is pretty solid, the client experience is a bit hit or miss. I'm using the mpg-shim adapter, and I'm looking forward to them building a native app with better native render compositing.
Well, good luck Andrew and Anthony!
Jellyfin is great project and good software when is working, unfortunately for me it doesn’t works very well. Constantly have issues with playback, files indexing and watch statuses that not marked, but that are small issues compred to the hell with subtitles. Very often out of sync (if they load)
So I switched to nova player and sharing my tv shows and music collection over SMB. It isn’t issueless, but at least more smooth amd leas complex.
Cool to see fellow Mohawk alum making the front page of HN. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors Joshua and team!
Had no idea, that is cool! Thanks for pointing this out.
Note that the headline doesn't reflect the post. Here's the beginning:
> Hello everyone. Effective yesterday, Anthony and I [Joshua Boniface] decided to depart from the project, myself as Project Leader, and he as a core team member. This is in addition to the resignation of Andrew on Friday.
"Several core team members including the founder leave" looks a bit different from "founder leaves".
Also an important note is that they are leaving on good terms. Headline made me terrified that some bad drama was going down, but they are just ready to move on and committed to clean handoffs to whoever owns it going forward.
Plus the title only mentions 1 person while 98% of the linked article is about 2 other people, neither of which are only person mentioned in the title. And the linked article doesn’t even have any link to find out about the founder leaving, the only person named in the title.
So, is there anyone left? /s
the fact that Jellyfin works as well as it does with a rotating cast of maintainers might be the strongest argument for open source I've seen this year
Please execute my ignorance. And this isn't an attack on anyone, just my own stupid limited understanding.
Aren't JellyFin & Plex essentially just a catalog for your local data (most likely torrented movies, etc.) in a web app? If so, what's the big deal?
edit: ah, i missed the BIG transcoding part.
Sure its a catalog of your local media served via an API, with metadata enrichment, built in transcoding (hardware support too) and multiple user support (watch history, recommendations etc).
Its not just a web app, I would say most dont use the web app directly, instead they provide clients (Android/iOS/Roku/AndroidTV/WebOS/Tizen) that are in official app stores. This is the big thing for me, being able to just install the client on your TV and not worry about it is great.
Often the clients are just wrappers of the web client with native integrations, but they work well.
Plus there are loads of 3rd party plugins to extend it, and alternate clients, Im a fan of https://github.com/jeffvli/feishin for music duties personally.
They do a bit more than this. They do streaming and transcoding for a start, that's fairly essential for a functioning video platform. They also have native apps for a range of platforms. Support subtitles, multiple audio tracks, all sorts of codecs. And then there's all the metadata stuff as well, getting blurbs, posters, ratings, categorisations, episode naming (which has so many awkward edge cases) etc all from various metadata services. Oh and they do this all with multiple users and ACLs.
Plex also then adds social features and curation. The value of that to its users is debatable, but it's additional complexity regardless.
These are pretty big projects. A founder moving on is a fairly big deal.
I can browse to jellyfin on my phone, ipad, laptop, TV etc watch any format (since it will transcode on the fly) and watch whatever I was watching from wherever I left it. It will also obviously know where I'm up to in any series so if I start watching something else I can go back to it at a later date.
A friend or relative can stream the content over the internet via Plex or Jellyfin (through a Roku, or other streaming device) via a UI that is very, very easy to use. Plex is a way for my non-technical aunt to easily interact with my media server from her home three states away.
Big thank you for your work!
Has made managing kid’s TV viewing at home easier over streaming services.
I run a local iptv server that serves up all my content, easy peasy
Appreciate your hard work over the years. Jellyfin is a great product that I have been self hosting for years. Wish you guys the best. Thank you.
I'd prefer to be exclusively on Jellyfin. It simply has more features that I use - specifically, collections are great non-hierarchical groupings.
But periodically my system will refuse to see the Tailscale server, and I'll have to do some black magic tech operation like reinstalling to get it back.
Additionally, guiding a friend remotely through installing both Jellyfin and Tailscale is far more effort than saying, "Find Plex in your media sources."
Reminder that you don't need a powerful transcoding server and engine - I have been running for years with simple WebDAV on my NAS, and Infuse as a comfortable client on all apple devices.
The title here is burying the lede and should be updated to something like "Jellyfin founder, project leader and core contributer all leave the project".
It's not just Andrew [Rabert] leaving. This is an announcement by Joshua Boniface (the current project lead) and Anthony Lavado (a core contributor) announcing that they're leaving too.
Boniface's and Lavado's reasons are mostly akin to burnout, or the need for a family life, which I totally understand, especially as Boniface has been the face of the project for quite some time. I use Jellyfin daily, and I know exactly who Boniface is, I hadn't actually heard of Rabert, though I'm grateful for him founding the project. Boniface in particular has lead Jellyfin through huge levels of internal changes, bugfixes and improvements. It is throwing off the janky architecture of Emby, one part at a time.
Rabert's reasons are here: https://github.com/andrewrabert/jellium-desktop/issues/609
An obvious sore point is that Rabert has been AI-coding the Jellyfin desktop app, while the community (who bear the brunt of drive-by AI slop) have strongly opposed it. Even if he's a great coder and makes a wonderful desktop app with the aid of AI, that seems irreconcilable. Every wannabe contributor who shits up the project and wastes volunteers time with AI slop will say "you let that guy add his AI generated stuff, why not me?"
So he's leaving the Jellyfin project and he's going to rename his desktop app, to see if it stands on its own merits as a third-party Jellyfin client, rather than an official project. I wish the best of luck to him.
Even with that angle, it's true that the "Jellyfin community" (which includes all bug reporters, users on forums, etc.) can be very rude, directly to the contributors who may have inadvertantly added bugs. And Jellyfin is going through some growing pains, for example their 10.11.x series rewrote all the database handling to be a much better fit for the language (from raw SQL to .NET EF Core), which gives them a much more stable base to make changes upon, but it also had some performance regressions that rendered some third party Jellyfin apps unusable. (Those third parties' advice is not to upgrade). But at the same time, the project is getting there, supporting developers who are systematically fixing those regressions. The project has thousands of bug reports, but it also has thousands of fixes, and thousands of merged PRs. They are keeping up with the demand. I have every confidence Jellyfin 12.x will be great, and I'm looking forward to the new possibilities for plugins and enhancements it will open up.
> Now here we are 7-and-a-half years later, and it's the #1 FLOSS media server
Source? How does its install base compare to Kodi's?
Kodi isn't a media server. Plex isn't FLOSS. Emby is what Jellyfin was forked from, and barely classifies as FLOSS anymore, and isn't as popular as Jellyfin from what I can tell. There isn't really anything else that I am aware of. Jellyfin being the #1 FLOSS media server makes sense to me, although I don't think there are really any viable #2s.
Kodi does have bultin server functionality (both DNLA and a web interface), it's just less commonly used that way, and I don't think transcoding is supported without plugins.
I tried it some time ago and found it was useless in that role.
Kodi is 99% a TV-like frontend to a local-disk media collection, its web interface is an afterthought, its performance for remotely served media is atrocious.
Jellyfin, Emby and Plex are media servers first and foremost.
I actually use Kodi 90% as a front-end to Jellyfin. If I only watched or listened to my media at my TV, just Kodi and a SMB or NFS share would be fine. But with Jellyfin I have the same media everywhere. This is somewhat more important for music than for movies and shows.
The three founders are all great people, but there is a gatekeeping issue within the project (I'm heavily involved, so this is a throwaway account).
The constant mocking accusations and hostility toward third-party clients, plugins, themes, and other tools have made Jellyfin's official spaces unbearable. The atmosphere often revolves around the opinions of a small group of people, and anything that falls outside their preferences will result in a ban.
There are two individuals are the primary drivers of this culture.
Can attest to this with my recent interactions on the jellyfin-ios repo.
> third-party clients
Funny how this is the only thing that keeps me from switching from Emby to Jellyfin is the atrocious state of their "own" apps. My last attempt failed when I had to use their Android client. Since I've discovered Wolphin and Findroid it looks a lot more plausible but I just don't have enough pain and lifetime Emby Premiere was still reasonable when I bought it.
The official Jellyfin app for Android is fine and usable now. So is Findroid.
Is it going to get better with these departures?
I believe the person leaving was vibe coding too much for other’s taste, so I assume they aren’t the one with strong opinions.
Not sure I would phrase it like this. For context see: https://github.com/andrewrabert/jellium-desktop/issues/109
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This UI is YUMMYYY
Checkout media streamer project on GitHub
Why? It’s got crypto stuff in it?
https://github.com/profullstack/media-streamer