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 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.
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.
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.
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]
> 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'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 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.
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
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 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.
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.
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??
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?
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).
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 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".
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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!).
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 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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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:
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative!
[1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/
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 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.
Lots of quality of life improvements over list of files on a smb share.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Not sure if Jellyfin has an equivalent
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).
It's good most of the time, but not 100%.
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
And it connects to both Plex and Jellyfin too.
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.
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.
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).
That is interesting to hear, a completely foreign concept to me that sounds a bit like addiction to be honest.
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.
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.
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.
Are you staying all day in your bedroom when you are home?
(So I instead travel with an Apple TV that does all of the above, and more)
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.
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 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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
You also occasionally run into a "Love Exposure" type bug.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/10494
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.
If your HTPC is powerful enough, you should also check out Plasma Bigscreen as a substitute for XFCE4.
There are plex client apps for most tvs and boxes, even the really cheap bad ones, and it all just kinda works.
That’s the killer feature. I haven’t met a person who couldn’t use PLEX.
$750 is nuts.
$750 is insane considering how little they care about user feedback.
> 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/
What’s the psychology here that people are willing to pay this much for this software, yet not even $20 for another?
[1] https://github.com/damontecres/Wholphin
Plex just works and is supporter everywhere. Not that surprising that people use it.
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!
If I were to make a choice today I think my first choice would still be Plex.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not as efficient as granting access within jellyfin, but it's pretty close to what you're trying to do.
I ditched plex because of missing Dolby audio support and all the use hostile channels and “features” years ago, and will never look back.
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.
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.
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 got a great deal as an early user, but new users have Good Reasons not to use plex anymore.
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
Jellyfin is an amazing project, and works almost exactly how I want it to. By listing and playing my media without autoplaying trailers and other such stuff.
I imagine many here who've never tried it will be of the same mindset
There is a crazy amount of bugs which I have no confidence will ever get fixed.
If you're the type that enjoys tinkering with obscure Linux settings for hours on end, which are certain to break if you dare to update anything, it may be for you.
It was crazy smooth for me. TMDB stuff just worked. Movies, TV, extras organization just worked. Apple TV, Roku, and iOS devices as clients just worked. The Apple TV client isn't great, but they're rewriting a big chunk of it now.
It doesn't do the sharing scenario that people are solving with Plex, but for my purposes it has been perfect.
I think a lot of people are doing stuff that's well beyond what I use it for. I just have my blurays and dvds on there, so it's possible I don't know I'm missing some important stuff that other people need.
This sort of underscores the ancestor's complaint: It's not exactly dead simple to set up and understand, the community recommends third-party apps that have only partial support, etc.
Jellyfin is a daily driver for me and works amazingly. I have thousands of films, TV shows, books, music, and it lets me navigate and use them perfectly well.
I have a wonderful little Linux media server.
What sort of bugs affect you?
Like what honestly I've been running one for years and have had nearly zero issues.
That pause is presumably also present when playing music, but no one notices because each song is its own track. Audiobook tracks split in places where a pause would never occur naturally.
The second-most-annoying trait of Jellyfin in my experience is technically not a bug, but should definitely be fixed. It hardcodes expectations of how to determine what season and episode number to assign to files. And if you overwrite them, it will re-mangle them on scan unless you take precautions to stop it.
As far as Jellyfin is concerned, your files must include a tag of the form S__E__ somewhere in the filename. Being located in a folder called "Season 2" with names like "11 - name of episode" won't work. Substrings like 第2集 won't work. Setting actual metadata tags on the file ( https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/FFmpeg_Metadata ) doesn't work; jellyfin ignores them.
Let me provide a per-folder template for extracting season / episode information. Jellyfin already lets you prefer embedded artwork to whatever it finds on the internet. Why enforce hallucinated episode numbers when explicit ones are clearly present?
> Let me provide a per-folder template for extracting season / episode information.
That's frankly not what I would call a bug and a bunch of work for near zero benefit. Not to be mean but why do you care? and if it really bothers you just use hardlinks let jellyfin see what it needs and you can have your pretty version for youself.
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.
It's a music player. How could it not support audiobooks? You think it will rate your tracks and refuse to play them if they're insufficiently "musical"?
> There is a very noticeable pause between each track that it plays, despite the entire thing being queued.
> That pause is presumably also present when playing music, but no one notices because each song is its own track. Audiobook tracks split in places where a pause would never occur naturally.
It would almost be like it wasn't really built with audio books in mind, but was rather designed around music.
Sounds like you answered your own fucking question.
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.
Can you suggest an alternative?
I've been using it on Windows for years with multiple devices and it's been working flawlessly.
Every so often, Jellyfin would choke ingesting a video. Worse, it would hang the whole ingestion process, so videos later in the list wouldn't get processed. Restarting didn't fix it, either, I had to delete the problematic video (which notably, played ok in things like VLC and IINA).
[...]
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
So your success criteria for ”FLOSS works” is that zero people involved in it experience stress related issues?
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming
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 was concerned.
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.
It’s becoming hostile for people who want to work from their media alone.
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 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.
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.
Anything we can do to avoid the hodgepodge of 8 different streaming services and rotating availability…
I understand it will be kept in sync from now on
Requires tvOS 26
Best of luck to the folks leaving. Supporting OSS isn't easy.
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.
> 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".
Has made managing kid’s TV viewing at home easier over streaming services.
Source? How does its install base compare to Kodi's?
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.