Jellyfin: Free Software Media System

by marcodiego • 5 years ago

317 199 5 years ago

I've been a Plex-to-Jellyfin convert for a long while now, and I've nothing bad to say. I switched because Plex kept pushing their streaming services, and the fuzzy feeling I get from running FOSS.

Jellyfin used to run on my desktop which has a beefy CPU/GPU, but runs fine on my puny Synology NAS.

MikusR4• 5 years ago

Seeing how Jellyfin runs on raspberry pi 4 your Synology must be very fast with lots of ram.

y4mi• 5 years ago

It might just have hardware support for relevant codecs. They often do, which gives them a massive advantage when playing media files.

jszymborski4• 5 years ago

It's got 4Gb RAM and 4 cores at 2.2Ghz. (RPi4 has 1.5Ghz if I'm reading Wiki right).

It's certainly not as quick as on my desktop, but it's rare if 2 people in my household stream video from it so no trouble so far.

I have only recently switched from desktop to NAS though, so perhaps I'll notice the performance later on.

machrider• 5 years ago

I'm running Jellyfin on a recent Intel-based Synology (they also have cheaper ARM CPU models), and it can transcode H.265->H.264 on the fly using about 50% CPU. It also runs in a Docker container so it's pretty easy to manage. I'm a big fan!

notesinthefield2• 5 years ago

How much of your use is audio streaming? I'm dying to make my collection remotely accessible after leaving the Plex ecosystem.

jszymborski4• 5 years ago

In the past I wasn't super thrilled by Jellyfin's audio streaming (nor Plex's tbh).

I'm auditioning Subsonic at the moment, but I might give Ampache a go soon (it's apparently having a bit of a revival at the moment).

napkin2• 5 years ago

Just try Navidrome!

mawise• 5 years ago

I'd love audio streaming suggestions too, I've been running Kodi on an old fire tablet to stream music from a Synology NAS but it's surprisingly flaky

smbv• 5 years ago

I use Finamp with Jellyfin for audio

https://github.com/UnicornsOnLSD/finamp

29083011397778• 5 years ago

Another comment not from GP, but I'd recommend Polaris. It's very light (unlike Airsonic), FOSS all the way, and has a functional web client (again unlike Subsonic). Can't recommend it enough

IceWreck• 5 years ago

I tried out Jellyfin for music, but it kept messing up my music tagging. I switched to Navidrome last year. It works with all subsonic clients and has a great web UI.

dangravell2• 5 years ago

An alternative is to use a cloud based player, and stream music from a cloud storage service.

Disclaimer: I run this service: https://asti.ga/

I've written up some alternatives at https://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/2021/0...

I'd love to know any feedback you have.

awill2• 5 years ago

I'm with you. I wish Plex they didn't offer a lifetime plex pass, because one-time payments (instead of a monthly subscription) are likely the cause of Plex needing to do all this extra stuff no one asked for to further monetize.

I check out Jellyfin periodically, but the last time I checked it isn't quite ready to replace Plex for me. All the apps (ios, Android, Android TV) aren't great, crash, and I don't think the codec support or audio passthrough support was that good. Hopefully in the future.

joshspankit3• 5 years ago

I consistently argue that the issue with Plex is not income, but desperately attempting to rebrand as a “legitimate” media centre.

Look at the marketing materials and features from the last few years: Specifically trying to avoid any thought of pirated content.

katbyte6• 5 years ago

Emby does lifetime purchases and hasn’t don’t the stuff plex has

candiddevmike• 5 years ago

How difficult is the transition from Plex to Jellyfin, do you lose any capabilities?

Also what's the fuzzy feeling you get running FOSS? Do you contribute to the project?

rglullis6• 5 years ago

Just being an user of a FOSS system is already a huge contribution. It provides a good feedback loop for developers and brings motivation for the teams to solve issues that are sidelined when no one seems to care.

Granted, FOSS developers don't live off user feedback alone, but if you depend on 1% of your user base becoming faithful financial backers, the more users you have, the better it is.

executive2• 5 years ago

- no Samsung Tizen app yet, have to use FireTV/Roku app/DLNA streaming. Have not tried development version (https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-tizen)

- no offline download in iOS app. Can use browser UI and download mkv to device.

Uke• 5 years ago

- no auto sync of content like plex/netflix is the biggest one for me - if the server isn't accessible, the entire app just doesn't work on android. It would be cool to have your shows on the go - metadata/initial content library setup took ages (read 10+ hours) for me (12+TB content) - no live-tv over tvheadend.. but that should be similar to plex

overall, not quite ready, but on it's way

josteink2• 5 years ago

How difficult is the transition from Plex to Jellyfin

You obviously need to setup a some new software, optionally on a new server/container, and need to reconfigure all your libraries.

Not a big deal IMO.

do you lose any capabilities?

I had issues with HDR-output to my TV (on my AppleTV 4K), and that for me was a show-stopper. Also the application is generally not as smooth or polished.

It might improve though, so I'm sure I'll check it out again some time later.

Also what's the fuzzy feeling you get running FOSS?

You know that the people making it want to solve the same problems you do. That they are not desperately seeking a way to make money, because that can often severely affect the direction the software is taking.

endisneigh• 5 years ago

I'm curious - why does it matter if Plex is pushing their streaming services? Isn't it really easy to ignore?

executive2• 5 years ago

Jellyfin UI is cleaner, no upsell buttons and does not tie everything to cloud account.

oliwarner2• 5 years ago

You can actually toggle them all off in the settings. You'll never see them in a client after that.

I have no problem with Plex doing this. They're trying to show value for a service rather than just gatekeeping premium convenience features.

My problem with Plex is the utter distain they show for users by not having any sort proper bug triage. Users throw themselves at a forum that staff members rarely interact with. It's desperate.

colordrops• 5 years ago

No, it's difficult if not impossible to figure out how to get past the login screen without logging in, and they change it all the time. Also who knows what data they are sending back about you and your watching habits?

wussboy2• 5 years ago

I switched to Jellyfin because Plex refuses to just show me the files in my directory. Why can’t you just let me have a directory view? Makes my blood boil just topping it out.

Godel_unicode4• 5 years ago

I don't understand this desire, why would you ever want that? The point of using something like Plex is to organize by metadata.

M_bara• 5 years ago

I agree. This is a peeve for me. I ripped toons for my kids and I can’t get the movie or to show view to display them appropriately. A directory view would have been perfect

disfadbish• 5 years ago

You can view directories, you just have to switch to folder view. It isn't a great directory browser though and that view isn't always sticky so YMMV.

klahaha9• 5 years ago

hello using jellyfin for months no idea how to folder view. can you explain?

2OEH8eoCRo03• 5 years ago

What? You can.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/200392126-using-the-library...

The Folders option is available for all media types, and lets you browse the media folder structure directly based on the folder hierarchy on disk. Browse By Folder is a sticky setting, letting you use Grid, List, or Summary view to browse your drive’s directory structure.

ValentineC• 5 years ago

I don't get this. I'm a Jellyfin user too, and I've never seen an option for a directory view in the web UI.

At least my movies are reasonably well-catalogued. My TV shows are still a mess because of how inflexible their naming policy is.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 5 years ago

I disabled all those streaming service views so I only see my own stuff.

clutch89• 5 years ago

I love Jellyfin, but its inability to Chromecast from iOS is a dealbreaker. I think they’re working on a whole new iOS app though that has a working chromecast button - https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin

jacobmischka• 5 years ago

Sadly, Chromecast is essentially broken on Android too and has been for about a year. Stable version of the Chromecast plugin in the app is ancient and the nightly version doesn't work with stable server.

cookiecaper3• 5 years ago

Jellyfin doesn't run on FreeBSD because .NET doesn't run on FreeBSD. This is sad.

ggm3• 5 years ago

I thought it ran under linuxulation

bluGill3• 5 years ago

Sort of. When you dig in you discover it that support isn't that great. There are efforts by the community, but Microsoft is doing nothing to help - in particular they regularly break things with each release, and once they do a stable release the previous release is no longer supported.

There are some great efforts, the other comment linked one, but in the end forums are full of users asking for help with something not working and no getting any response. Not a situation that makes me willing to try at this time.

crobibero3• 5 years ago

Here is a community member building Jellyfin for FreeBSD https://github.com/Thefrank/jellyfin-server-freebsd

comice• 5 years ago

I only use Plex because they have a native LG webos app.

jellyfin has one too and are currently in the process of getting into the official LG app store, awesome!

it was rejected a couple of times for some bugs the LG reviewers found, all of which are fixable and being worked on. looks pretty much a done deal.

zain• 5 years ago

Where do you keep track of the LG app status? I’d love to track the progress too

dtparr• 5 years ago

The project is here: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-webos

Unfortunately, it's been pretty quiet the last few months after seemingly getting close to a retry in the LG store.

whoisburbansky2• 5 years ago

Tangential note about Plex; if you're like me and are disappointed by the default buffering behavior in Plex basically making it near-impossible to seek between already-buffered positions easily, I've been using https://github.com/iwalton3/plex-mpv-shim to cast Plex from my phone to mpv on my linux media box with great success.

ggm3• 5 years ago

I'm also using this. Odd quirks, such as the device appearing twice as a fling/cast target, and apparent random net events which make the web client on OSX pop over the "do you want to continue here" pane. (I posted to the plex forums about this btw)

the shim works fine. And, there appears to be a jellyfin shim in the same model.

stavros2• 5 years ago

This is too excellent, thank you. Is there any way to do this without involving the phone? I watch Plex on my computer but I'd love to use MPV as a frontend for it, as Plex can't seek to save its life.

wingworks4• 5 years ago

How are you using Plex? Try access the UI via a different browser, or via the dedicated Plex app. Try a few different ones. Personally I use Safari and find I can scroll through my library much faster then the App, or in Chrome. I can also seek pretty quick, even 4k remux files. This is on an all gigabit network. (though client WiFi AC works great too).

But transcoding and trying to seek... isn't the best. At least for my macmini plex server.

whoisburbansky2• 5 years ago

I believe the shim is basically set up like a Chromecast receiver, so you can use anything that will cast to it. It should be possible to do that from the browser as well (hit the Cast icon in the upper right and the shim receiver should pop up).

reddog• 5 years ago

I have moved from Plex to Emby and finally to Jellyfin to run the Raspberry Pi media server in my camping van. The problem with Plex and Emby (other than their business model of wanting to collect a monthly fee for allowing you to watch your own media) was that they required the server to phone home before they would work. This isn't possible if you are camping and don't have a cell/wifi signal.

And Jellyfin has worked well. The server and clients aren't as slick as Plex but they work just fine and give me a lot more flexiblity in moving media from my home server to the van since the way they store the media metainfo is the same on the Mac OS and the RPi OS.

napkin2• 5 years ago

If you're looking for a slick cross-platform Jellyfin client in the Apple ecosphere, try Infuse. It's quite polished, and even available for tvOS- my personal motivation for using it.

Cyph0n• 5 years ago

+1, Infuse is a great Jellyfin client (among other things).

sneak• 5 years ago

Note also that Infuse is spyware, per its privacy label on the App Store.

You pay for the privilege of having it upload your usage data to a remote server against your consent.

calvano915• 5 years ago

Plex charges a one time lifetime fee. Not monthly.

onedr0p2• 5 years ago

There's both actually.

sergiotapia• 5 years ago

I've used Plex, currently on Emby - why should I switch to Jellyfin, they seem identical? Almost a fork really. Appreciate the info, this is a real question and I can make the switch easily enough :)

cmeacham98• 5 years ago

Jellyfin is an OSS fork of Emby, which went proprietary and stopped distributing source code.

bluGill3• 5 years ago

Jellyfin is an Emby fork as the other said. However they are diverging over time, each some some features that the other doesn't, or things that work better in one than the other. Both are moving targets.

Mashimo3• 5 years ago

Jellyfin forked from Emby about 2 years ago and are still rewriting the spaghetti code from emby.

You can use hardware decoding for free on jellyfin. It's open source. Emby is now closed source.

hbcondo714• 5 years ago

One feature I would like to see catch on is having media center software installable on a router. Plex does this[1] which means you can use the USB drive on a router to store and stream your media files without a NAS / media server. Simple setup, I would like to see routers as clients[2] for Jellyfin.

[1] https://support.plex.tv/articles/230934267-netgear-nighthawk...

[2] https://jellyfin.org/clients/

onedr0p2• 5 years ago

VyOS can run containers with podman, maybe Jellyfin or Plex would work on that. Honestly I think the job of a router should not include running a those kinds of apps.

denton-scratch• 5 years ago

Too right! I want my router rock-solid. I won't run software on it that isn't mission-critical router software.

jeroenhd5• 5 years ago

I don't see why it wouldn't work if you can get ssh access to your router, assuming you grab an ARM build with the right dependencies. Most consumer routers are absolutely terrible though, so I'd expect such a device to run out of resources very quickly, particularly while transcoding.

jchw• 5 years ago

I switched off of Emby to Jellyfin a fairly long time ago. It’s pretty good. I’ve had some annoying issues upgrading my instance over time, but otherwise it generally works. The ecosystem is also a bit young, but I have no huge complaint about the apps. Finamp is pretty nice for example; it’s a Jellyfin client optimized for music playback.

querez• 5 years ago

In contrast to most people in this thread, I don't find Jellyfin to be an all-around great experience. Maybe because I run the JF client on a Google Chromecast, and the "Jellyfin for Android TV" app is very unstable. I get roughly one crash a day, mostly when restarting a movie-watching. The UI is okay, but there are a lot of small annoyances (why is there no "restart from beginning" button? Why can't I use the "wheel/cursor thing" on my remote to go forward/back?, why does it so often fail to automatically recognize/parse filenames, or download cover art? Why can't a folder contain both movies and tv series?).... All in all, it's mediocre at best, but I'm still glad it exists: despite everything, I still use it over other alternatives, because it's open source and works well enough. I can live with having to restart the client every now and then.

parineum2• 5 years ago

I would recommend installing Kodi on your chromecast and using the jellyfin addon[1] into Kodi instead. The app is garbage and Kodi is awesome.

(Don't use the Jellyfin Connect addon, it's different and I wouldn't recommend it)

[1]https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-kodi

yownie• 5 years ago

I'll check this out, thanks!

3np4• 5 years ago

What makes you not recommend Jellyfin Connect? I've been on Connect ~1y now and I found it a smoother and hassle-free experience compared to Jellyfin Kodi (which I was on for ~1y prior to switching).

JC has less bells and whistles with library integration and metadata but I'm not missing anything, really.

cookiecaper3• 5 years ago

Kodi is awesome, but every time I try to use it on a set-top box-type thing, it promptly consumes the entire available storage. I'm going to have to concoct some type of just-in-time mini-library so that these things don't get overeager with posterization, indexing, artwork, etc., but still allow me to use them to watch things essentially on-demand. Sounds efforty so I just won't.

jfneedswork• 5 years ago

100%.

I’m glad JF exists, but it needs so much work. From the server to the client, it’s an awful experience.

I want to leave Plex so badly, they introduce bugs more frequently than their useless “features”, but the experience is still streets ahead of JF.

3np4• 5 years ago

When did you last try? 10.6 -> 10.7 was a pretty big transition that took forever to complete and there were several issues around there.

For some there time every other release had something break bad while the team were all personally running test versions from the master branch...

After that settled down I've found it pretty much rock solid (since around June) and the team seem to have learned from the friction there and have a better release process now.

katbyte6• 5 years ago

Have you tried Emby? Year ago I attempted to use plex and it was a disaster- Emby seemed like. Good middle ground between plex and jellyfin

syshum• 5 years ago

I have tried it a few times, I still feel it lacking over emby which is what it was forked from when emby moved to a more closed license model.

I still use emby as my primary server, but I keep Jellyfin around to keep tabs on the project

paranoidrobot• 5 years ago

Why can't a folder contain both movies and tv series?

While your other points I'd mostly agree with, this one you're swimming against the stream here.

It's a pretty standard convention to separate episodic and feature content. There's usually different data sources for each, as well as episodic content being different in structure.

It's probably possible to get all of them to live in the one directory, but if you want a better experience from just about any of the media centre software - you're going to have to get used to separating them.

Ideally something like:

/data/movies/<movie name>/

/data/tv/<series name>/season <season number>/

rascul2• 5 years ago

It might get a little bit weird when a TV show also has movies that are correlated to the show plot. Stargate SG-1 had a couple like that, if I recall correctly. It might be nice to display those movies with the show so they can be watched together in the appropriate order.

klahaha9• 5 years ago

Why can't a folder contain both movies and tv series?

i don't understand this too... i just want to respect folder not have simple metadata control all

also subtitle SRT upload is broken (maybe fixed in source now)

and jellyfin want to own media plays ok with nextcloud but when i have permissions broken, after i fix chown jellyfin was 100% broken delete/add library didn't work (scan never started) had to entirely delete jellyfin db to work it again

jellyfin is good software, better to alternative, but needs work for improve

blue-gum• 5 years ago

I run both Jellyfin and Plex at the same time with the same library. I personally don't like Jellyfin either. I often have problems with stream freezing (especially if fast forward/backward). I play both directly from the browser.

I feel like Jellyfin GUI reminders me of XBMC/Kodi GUI a bit and might make it a better fit for home media setups/tvs

ajnin• 5 years ago

I've setup jellyfin on my media server but I barely use it because the web player bugs make it unusable for me. I think most issues are due to the fact my hardware is underpowered for the task, and the player gets confused when the server replies come slow and not in the same order as they were requested. In practice subtitles go out of sync regularly, I get "codec not supported by browser" messages with the actual video playing fine behind it when seeking and frequently enough to make watching videos too annoying to bother.

There are also other annoyances like the player forgetting my subtitle selection when jumping to the next video of the same season of a show.

There's also no quality setting that is just "stream the source file directly". It seems to always want to transcode when embedding subtitles, which I guess is done by ffmpeg on the server but is really the player's job.

I know they're working on a new player, though it's not included in jellyfin yet.

klahaha9• 5 years ago

subtitles go out of sync regularly

can be problem with subtitle source?

"codec not supported by browser"

probable problem with browser not jellyfin?

There are also other annoyances like the player forgetting my subtitle selection when jumping to the next video of the same season of a show.

There's also no quality setting that is just "stream the source file directly". It seems to always want to transcode when embedding subtitles, which I guess is done by ffmpeg on the server but is really the player's job.

Direct source file is download button it can play in vlc, or can use FTP. why embed subtitles? here i think jellyfin use external track for subtitle (default parametres)

3np4• 5 years ago

"codec not supported by browser"

Unless you're very specific and consistent with your source media codecs, I highly recommend using jellyfin-mpv-shim when streaming from the browser.

You just start the headless client wherever you want to play and it comes up as a "cast target" from the icon in the top right.

Much better performance and codec support. MPV also has great subtitle control and caching.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-mpv-shim

Also, if you haven't, it may be worth updating to the latest point release. There have been a couple of bugs that have come and gone but I think it's in a good place right now.

jeroenhd5• 5 years ago

In my experience, the "codec not supported by browser" error generally means that transcoding either failed or stalled. I get the error message when ffmpeg dies in the middle of a transcode myself. The transcoder still has the file cached on disk as far as it has transcoded it, but Jellyfin notices that the process has died and throws errors.

I don't think a new player will fix that issue, it's usually a resource problem on the server side.

There is a "stream the source directly" option, it's the default even, but only when it's possible to do so (i.e. the media is in a streaming container and not AVI or DivX). You can copy the download URL and paste it into your favorite native player if you want to force it, but that will probably lead to a full file download if the web player doesn't stream the file already. The only way I can think of to avoid this issue is to pre-transcode the media on your NAS to a streamable format.

As for the subtitles, I'm a little annoyed as well that the setting doesn't always stick (it works sometimes, which is even worse). I've never had desync issues though, that's probably more of an issue with the transcode lagging and confusing the player or just mismatched subtitle files.

newbie789• 5 years ago

Does anyone have any experience with their Firestick app? I’m seeing some complaints about Chromecast devices but they’re pretty different.

steviedotboston2• 5 years ago

Does anyone know if Jellyfin lets you share an OTA TV connection with friends/family?

m0ngr313• 5 years ago

It does

steviedotboston2• 5 years ago

So in theory someone could use it to build their own mini Locast?

NortySpock• 5 years ago

I believe it does allow OTA, though when I tried to, Jellyfin seemed to try to transcode the video regardless of what "please don't transcode" settings I had on video transcoding. (And the RPi4 couldn't keep up with transcoding video via software)

Still working on getting that sorted out but in the meantime I've got VLC that I can point at my HDHomerun.

jeroenhd5• 5 years ago

Jellyfin will transcode the moment it determines the source isn't directly streamable. Broken headers, weird containers or general MP4 weirdness can fail the test and make it transcode, but usually direct streaming is the default. If that happens to me, I just copy the download URL from the Jellyfin client and paste it into VLC. That method causes major network traffic (so it doesn't work great on mobile networks on the move) but it'll work fine from home.

Transcodes without hardware acceleration are pretty slow and the transcodes themselves aren't cached which can be a major pain, but with some effort I've managed to get hardware encoding and decoding working through Intel Quicksync (on an entirely separate device, even, through rffmpeg.py!) and things seem to be working great. The isolation Docker provides will make enabling hardware support a pain if you're using that, but if you're running the native package then I'd definitely recommend trying to get hardware acceleration support working.

firefwing24• 5 years ago

Jellyfin is awesome, but there's a few caveats for me. - Android TV app is quite unstable. Even if you make it do direct streaming, it's not a flawless playback - Sometimes hangs when clicking next episode. I also kind of wish the login experience was a bit better. - Android App is decent, but for music it's unusable. I'm still using plex + plexamp because that experience is just so much better for me.

But, I don't regret moving my videos to JF. Plex Android app had terrible QA/QC where it would have regressions consistently every month. A bug where rewinding 30 seconds would push you forward instead of backwards would return at least 1 update every 2 months and that was frustrating.

tw04• 5 years ago

Appreciate the info. I tried it with a shield a while back and the experience was awful. Haven't tried again recently and it sounds like it's not worth the effort. I have endless issues from a business and go-to-market perspective with Plex, but it's tough to switch when the server and video playback have remained mostly bulletproof the last 18 months.

wingworks4• 5 years ago

Yeah, when I started out on Plex, I tried the other services (Jellyfin and Kodi and this other dedi music one), and while they all did what was advertised more or less, Plex was by far the more polished solution with the least bugs for my setup. I also really like the Plex UI, feels well thought out and easy to navigate.

Having said that, I keep an open mind, and every few years check out Jellyfin/Kodi etc.

katbyte6• 5 years ago

Have you given Emby a try? I find it’s basically the same as plex without some of the headaches

tomnipotent• 5 years ago

It will also completely delete any local assets if you're using NFS and a mount disappears during a scan. This has happened to me a few times, very frustrating.

RealStickman_4• 5 years ago

For audio playback on android I mostly use Finamp nowadays. An older, potentially more stable alternative would be Gelli.

xbmcuser• 5 years ago

Are you on the latest Android TV beta https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv/releases

btw for Android TV i would recommend installing kodi and the jellyfin plugin

f0e4c2f7• 5 years ago

Big fan of Jellyfin. I see a lot of comments mentioning problems with the client.

I use it on an Amazon FireTV (you can download jellyfin directly from Amazon's app store, no side loading needed).

It seems to work well on that platform (at least for me).

bbertelsen• 5 years ago

Jellyfin + tailscale. Easy mode.

wingworks4• 5 years ago

tailscale! I love it! So flexible.

marcodiego2• 5 years ago

I simply wanted a personal netflix for the local network. Best fit I could find.

m0ngr313• 5 years ago

I love Jellyfin. The clients aren't super mature, but the addon for Kodi works great for me so that's what I use.

The only thing I missed about Plex was having Plexamp, but now there is Finamp and Gelli for Android and I wrote one called Jellyamp for desktop and now all my media needs are covered

shimonabi• 5 years ago

It's not mature enough.

The media server has a misconfigured path to the web server on Ubuntu, so it won't start after installation. I created a symbolic link to the web server folder. The Android client on my Xiaomi Mibox crashes after it comes to the end of every video.

pixxel• 5 years ago

Heavy user here for 2 years (web/iOS/Roku). Works really well, never crashes. <3

lbqjfw• 5 years ago

I set up a Mac mini as my HTPC about a year ago, and settled on Jellyfin to manage my media. Overall it's been great, and I'm really happy that Jellyfin exists. I use Kodi for the TV interface, with the Jellyfin for Kodi add-on to link the two [1]. I looked into Plex, but was turned off by how commercial it was and how hard they tried to push their paid services. The big advantage to Jellyfin is that I can start watching a show on my TV, and pick up exactly where I left off on any of my devices (I use the Jellyfin iPhone and iPad apps, as well as the web interface). I can also access my music library through Jellyfin, and at the recommendation of a comment on this post I just downloaded finamp, which seems like a great music player [2].

The initial setup took a bit of work, and there are definitely some quirks, but all-in-all it's worked for me really well. I would wholeheartedly recommend both Jellyfin and Kodi for anyone interested in a HTPC/home streaming setup.

[1] https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-kodi [2] https://github.com/UnicornsOnLSD/finamp

m0zg• 5 years ago

Trivially deployed using Docker compose as well. I've been using this for quite some time. iPad app works great too.

japanuspus• 5 years ago

For serving local music, the free and open source "Logitech Media Server"[0] is a great solution -- main weakness is the lack of a central organization promoting it. In addition to working smoothly with dedicated ("squeeze") clients which can be Logitech-brand or DIY[1, 2], it has a massive plugin catalog that allows e.g.

- airPlay integration: stream to your squeeze-clients via airPlay, stream to your airPlay clients from squeezebox.

- chromeCast integration: stream to chromeCast devices from squeezeBox.

- upNp integration: stream to upNp clients.

The system was originally developed by "SqueezeBox" who also made (awesome) physical devices. SqueezeBox was acquired by Logitech many years ago. Logitech put out one or two devices before giving up, but they are actually playing really nice by continuing to support development on the server (see [0]).

[0] https://github.com/Logitech/slimserver [1]: https://github.com/ralph-irving/squeezelite [2]: https://www.picoreplayer.org/

klahaha9• 5 years ago

anyone know good solution for share media library with people in different language? we have 3 principal languages here in house (russian english french) not all people is good with audio/subtitle in different lang

i know jellyfin has subtitles but i dont see filter by audio/sub language in list, and metadata is one lang only no translate for synopsis/poster

Mashimo3• 5 years ago

You could put the movie files in different folders. And thus create different libraries inside jellyfin.

klahaha9• 5 years ago

you mean symlink? or i need 3 times big HDD for 3 language?

kls0e• 5 years ago

jellyfin on rpi4 with official docker image runs great. just hw encoding acceleration i was not able to set up smoothly.

SCLeo• 5 years ago

Although I cannot complain too much since it is open source, I have to say, my experience with Jellyfin is very painful. After fiddling with it for more than 10 hours, I still cannot get .ass subtitles to work on my Android Jellyfin client. :(

(My NAS isn't strong enough to burn subtitles in real time. Even it does, I just cannot get the fonts to work. All CJK characters are displayed as squares.)

katbyte6• 5 years ago

I still use Emby, I’d like to use a free solution like jelly but it’s just not there

jeroenhd5• 5 years ago

That's interesting. Jellyfin forked from Emby when the developers went closed source, so I'd be interested to learn what the Emby side has fixed that Jellyfin still lacks.

I switched from Emby to Jellyfin and I found them to be generally equally stable.

bobuk• 5 years ago

I've read the whole thread and am absolutely surprised. Why is nobody telling about plex's ditching of their plugin system? Have invested a lot of time in developing plex's plugin for youtube, twitch, and my favorite streaming services, paid a lifetime fee to plex. And now the whole plugins system is disabled.

That's the only reason why I've switched to Jellyfin. It's not better than plex. It's definitely worse, but it's open, and that's how I am sure it will work forever.

input_sh2• 5 years ago

but it's open, and that's how I am sure it will work forever.

Why are you so sure about it? IIRC Emby was also open sourced before it wasn't, at which point it was forked into Jellyfin. Based on that alone, I wouldn't be too surprised if Jellyfin pulls the same thing down the road, forcing you to move to yet another fork down the line.

anaganisk• 5 years ago

Well you just described most of the hipster open source projects these days. I’ve been burned by multiple projects. At the beginning they’re all we love open source, take all the bug fixes and feature enhancements. And sell their product to some corporate, or start a subscription as a service and close source it.

WastingMyTime89• 5 years ago

It's a community project started after Emby became closed source. They have multiple contributors who don't assign copyright. They legally can't become closed source even if someone wanted to. No one owns the whole code.

stavros2• 5 years ago

forcing you to move to yet another fork down the line.

That's exactly OP's point, whereas I can't just switch to a fork of Plex.

marcodiego2• 5 years ago

The fact that emby was once open is the reason we have jellyfin today.

If jellyfin ever becomes closed, people can continue the project from the last open release.

rglullis6• 5 years ago

forcing you to move to yet another fork down the line.

And we will keep moving to other oss forks until they realize that closing the source down will mean that they will never get our business.

There are better ways to make money than bait-and-switching with the licensing. It's not my responsibility to keep them working if what they are offering goes against what I value as a consumer.

lambada• 5 years ago

Do you have more details on this? I’ve found that it seems to have been made ‘unsupported’ in 2018, but theres still plugins that apparently work as of this month, and can’t find anything about the plugin function actually being disabled wholesale?

antihero• 5 years ago

Are there any ways to get something like XBMC running directly on an LG Smart TV?

Currently I am finding that having MP4 files on a pen drive is actually far less hassle.

However, the TV's lack of support for MKV files is frustrating - trying to simply rewrap them as MP4 using FFMpeg doesn't seem to work for some reason.

lardo• 5 years ago

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-webos looks promising

azinman2• 5 years ago

Do these systems largely expect you to have a big NAS with pirated media? The evolution of the media landscape seems to be away from things like this except for people digitizing their blue ray / dvd collections, but it’s otherwise difficult to comprehend why one wouldn’t want a Netflix subscription instead.

RealStickman_4• 5 years ago

By putting my media on my own server I can be certain it won't just disappear for no reason or be restricted to certain geographical areas only.

Sure, having everything on local media also works, but a streaming server is definitely more convenient.

yetanother-1• 5 years ago

This is very nice, but still misses photos organiser.

I wish I could have a photo viewer where I could specify a location, and it would show me all photos in folder view, and timeline of all photos in all folders and subfolders...

mceachen• 5 years ago

I'll be adding reverse geocoding in a version soon [1], but you can already browse by filesystem and timeline (and by camera, lens, file type, keyword, and Google Takeout metadata): https://photostructure.com/faq/why-photostructure/

(I'm the founder and solo author)

[1] https://forum.photostructure.com/t/support-reverse-geocoding...

jonathantf22• 5 years ago

I'm a big Emby user with a large library - trying Jellyfin and it just doesn't compare, feels like a cheap knock off. It crashes quite often requiring a reboot of the service, the client apps hang a lot and the plugin support isn't the same.

hansihe• 5 years ago

Jellyfin user with a relatively large library here. I am not having any crashing or hanging issues, did you use the Docker image when you tried it? Can't really speak about the plugin support since I haven't used Emby.

jonathantf22• 5 years ago

Haven't tried Docker, ran it on both Windows and Linux, on the same machines that Emby ran on. I tried it for a while but it was too unstable and I kinda gave up - switched back to Emby.

matips• 5 years ago

I tried Jellyfin as Plex alternative, but Android App is bugged or under development: not all codecs are supported, HDR is not implemented.

Xen0byte• 5 years ago

I've just given this a try, and it's a fantastic bit of software. I'll definitely be switching over to it.

Jellyfin: Free Software Media System

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