Jellyfin: We're Good, Seriously

https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-we-re-good-seriously

by bo0tzz • 2 years ago

556 306 2 years ago

forum.jellyfin.org

gigatexal• 2 years ago

Now this is what open source should be: well funded but also the community highlighting the projects building off of it — in this case the main project highlighting and advocating for the folks that build front ends to JellyFin.

bhaney2• 2 years ago

Very respectable. It's behaviors like this that keep me on Jellyfin instead of Plex, even in the face of social pressures to switch.

Larrikin• 2 years ago

I hope the project succeeds and think this is a good move. But I have a lifetime Plex pass and Jellyfin still seems not as good. I have both on my box, but whenever I try to use Jellyfin theres just something missing. I will keep checking back.

nolok3• 2 years ago

Do you have any specific exemples ?

yegle2• 2 years ago

I can give a couple examples:

1) Jellyfin supports reading NFO files to help determining matching the file with the correct metadata (https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/metadata/nfo/). This is arguably superior than Plex's way (you have to name your file with IMDb id or tmdb id https://support.plex.tv/articles/201018497-fix-match-match/#...), but I still constantly find media w/o metadata in Jellyfin.

2) The way you fix the matching in Jellyfin has a pretty terrible UX. You select the movie w/o metadata (there's no filter to "find all media that Jellyfin fail to match w/ metadata) and click "Identify" in the 3-dot menu, then fill in the information and search (why can't Jellyfin prefill useful metadata, at the very minimum the year that should be easily identified using regex?), then pick either IMDb or tmdb (why do I have to choose one of them? Can I bulk-switch my library to use IMDb instead of tmdb?), with a checkbox to confirm you want to "replace existing images" (why do I have any images to replace? Jellyfin did not match the media to any metadata right?) you now have some useful metadata.

3) When I need to force a rescan of a library, there's no way (that I can find) to do that when you are viewing the library. The only way to do this is to go to Settings -> Dashboard -> Scan All Libraries.

4) There's no offline media playback support (AFAIKT).

weberer3• 2 years ago

Never used Plex, but I have 2 gripes with the Jellyfin iOS client.

1. I can't download shows from the iOS client. I can on my Android device

2. The music player doesn't interface with the device's media player. So you have to keep your phone open when listening to music

phito• 2 years ago

So glad I stopped using Plex, it worked fine but was so bloated with useless garbage and I did not feel like I could trust it with my data.

I need a plex.com account to use my own self hosted instance? Uninstalled.

lofties• 2 years ago

The garbage is exactly why I stopped using Plex. Yeah, Jellyfin isn't perfect. But at least it isn't bombarding me with crap I don't need.

karolist2• 2 years ago

This goes against my experience. I too have a Plex lifetime pass and it has been rock solid, my library lives in network mounted NAS drive, formatted with filebot. I've unpinned the default views that it comes with when you install the client and pinned just my libraries. It just works on all devices, absolutely no issues, no memory leaks, the UI is beautiful and Netflix like, which is important for my family. The central account is what makes claiming the server and sharing the library with others and the overall remote login experience very easy, this is what enables plex.tv/link functionality.

Yes it is not perfect and they made mistakes along the way but comments as such just tend to ride on the sentiment that vilifies all non OSS products as if it's something inherently bad, the "us vs them" attitude is something I see time and time again here.

outime• 2 years ago

I have never used Plex even though I've heard it's superior but I just didn't bother when I saw exactly what you said. Creating an account somewhere to use my own instance? Even though I could just block all outbound traffic and hope it'll still work - no thanks. Jellyfin turned out very fine.

perryizgr84• 2 years ago

I need a plex.com account to use my own self hosted instance?

And anybody could log into their plex account on my instance! The way they handle accounts for self-hosted instances is either deliberately convoluted or ineptly designed.

apexalpha• 2 years ago

I need a plex.com account to use my own self hosted instance? Uninstalled.

Wasn't this the case from the beginning?

c-hendricks2• 2 years ago

I need a plex.com account to use my own self hosted instance?

https://support.plex.tv/articles/200430283-network/#:~:text=...

madaxe_again• 2 years ago

Ditto. I would love to use jellyfin in principle, but in reality I find myself often butting heads with it when I just want to watch a damned film - and Plex, despite its considerable bloat, just works.

MattPalmer1086• 2 years ago

Yep. Every time I've tried Jellyfin, I thought it was great... Until a video wouldn't play, or the sound wasn't synchronised, or something else. Whereas Plex just works, and always did.

Hoping Jellyfin keeps going, maybe I'll check it out again at some point.

primax• 2 years ago

The creeping enshittification of Plex is really putting me off.

I know you can unfuck it, however I don't want to reward that toxic behaviour with usage

yard20102• 2 years ago

I feel the same with Plex! I'm scared to try Jellyfin.

Vaslo• 2 years ago

Jellyfin helps fit a niche between a more complicated Kodi setup and Plex’s easy setup with everything just working.

Non-techie family though prefers Plex, hands down. Looks good and really easy to setup on any machine.

Sakos5• 2 years ago

I have more issues when using Plex than I do with Jellyfin. Jellyfin can still be annoying, but Plex can be infuriating trying to get it play nice with my library. I've stopped using Plex.

e40• 2 years ago

The client I use is Apple TV 4k and Plex does not have reliable playback for that device. It’s pathetic this has been broken for so long. I have to use Infuse for playback, which is $1/mo.

Does Jellyfin work well on this platform?

vundercind3• 2 years ago

Jellyfin works well except that if you’re not transcoding, you’ll need Infuse for (IIRC?) a couple not-ubiquitous-but-not-rare audio codecs that Apple TV doesn’t natively support.

I use Infuse with Jellyfin. My server’s way too weak for reliable transcoding, plus not using it avoids a large proportion of bugs in the Jellyfin issues tracker at any given time.

bronson2• 2 years ago

Using the Jellyfin webui on AppleTV without even installing an app works decent.

There’s a dedicated AppleTV app, which works great for a month, then reliably forgets its credentials. I use it, but the kids don’t want to learn how to type urls, usernames, and passwords so they don’t. That’s fair.

stojano• 2 years ago

"stop donating" respect!

RandomThoughts35• 2 years ago

I think it’s a massive mistake.

They currently have 3 years of runway but that’s ridding on the high of the announcement and this communication will dry up donations. Plus, they ask people to donate to clients instead of the core product but they could do so themselves with the money they receive.

flumpcakes• 2 years ago

Why? Not everything has to be a subscription or a hyper growth business, not every product needs to do everything. If they and their users are happy with the cadence, and have a war chest of 3 years operating costs assuming 100% of funding stopped then why not divert attention to other projects in the ecosystem that might need the funding more?

RandomThoughts35• 2 years ago

3 years is nothing especially if you intentionally kill your donations. They won’t come back magically when they will need them.

Plus as stated before, they can divert the money to other projects related to Jellyfin themselves. They don’t need the community to do that for them.

Honestly, if you are a project the size of Jellyfin and you ask donations to stop because you have a measly three years of operational runway without funding anything and without any idea of what to do with the money, I seriously question your ability to survive.

Retr0id3• 2 years ago

If I donated to project X and they redistributed my funds to related project Y, I'd be mildly peeved. Only mildly, mind, but the way they're doing it here is exactly the right way, imho.

Mashimo4• 2 years ago

but that’s ridding on the high of the announcement

What announcement?

RandomThoughts35• 2 years ago

It’s a young project. They still have wind in their sails from the time they forked Emby and can still ride on the hope such a fork brought. That’s not going to last forever. I’m already seeing a lot more comments saying people switched back to Plex than I used to including in this very discussion.

thomasfromcdnjs• 2 years ago

A strange comment to downvote. I also think it's a big mistake.

Three years is nothing, and money isn't always reliable coming in.

Nor does it factor in some unexpected expenses.

alt2275• 2 years ago

They havent said dont donate, they have said donate to client maintainers instead.

As they point out in the post, Jellyfins No1 problem is keeping their clients up to date with new features and design polish.

They have identified that the money being donated to them would be much better donated to the maintainers of the clients to encourage them to do more/better work, but they dont feel its right that they choose how that is distributed and they want the users to donate to the client they favour most. I think this is great, and hopefully some of the clients which have been dragging recently can get some donations and encourage some fresh development on them.

alt2275• 2 years ago

They have made it clear they dont want to decide which clients get what proportion of money, and are asking their users to do that for them by directly donating to the clients they most use or prefer.

I really good way of doing it if you ask me.

RandomThoughts35• 2 years ago

It's a really bad way of doing things.

They are losing moneytary support they will probably never recover and refusing to actually be stewards of their own ecosystem.

sixhobbits• 2 years ago

(June, 2023)

bhaney2• 2 years ago

No, this is from last month. You're looking at the date the poster's account was created.

arnath• 2 years ago

The $400/month doesn’t account for their labor, does it? I feel like that’s why people donate personally

lozenge• 2 years ago

This requires them to agree on how to pay out the money, which sounds like more trouble than it's worth.

wccrawford5• 2 years ago

IMO, there's nothing worse than paying people too little money. Well, other than unevenly paying everyone money.

"But it's $100 a month they wouldn't have had!" Sure, but now there's something to value your time and effort against, and it will not stack up favorably.

Semaphor2• 2 years ago

Yeah, but they specifically don’t want that:

No, this doesn't violate our policy of "no paid development", because donations are just that - donations. We will still not honour bug bounties or similar, and still not use our collective finance here for paid development.

giamma• 2 years ago

I have an android TV running Kodi. Kodi connects via SMB to my NAS (Odroid HC-4, OpenMediaVault) and can easily show all my content.

Would Jellyfin improve my experience? I could run it on odroid without transcoding, and then use the official android-tv client. Would it be worth the effort of switching?

Semaphor2• 2 years ago

Single-client is IMO where Kodi shines. This way you also have less complexity as Kodi doesn’t need a ton of things that are integrated in Jellyfin, I’d not switch if you don’t have any pain points with this set up.

defrost3• 2 years ago

Depends on how much you value your Kodi setup and how many "difficult to auto match" shows | movies you have.

I wanted to run Kodi | JellyFin in parallel (two Kodi client Android TV's in house) so that visitors with iPhones | Androids | Tables could browse content.

The local Kodi TV clients used the NAS box MariDB to hold meta data held in the local to content .NFO files (show ID's, descriptions, etc)

I've held off on that as the JellyFin docs are not clear and the small experiments I tried in isolation proved tricky to resolve issues.

The issues being getting JellyFin to load details from local.nfo files w/out making changes and|or getting JellyFin to not make additional .INFO files (more or less duplicates) and|or getting JellyFin to not trash existing artwork with new downloads.

I'm sure there are solutions here (eg: JellyFin can use seperate directories for it's meta-data (but then doesn't read the local .nfo files to get ambiguous shows 'right')), I've yet to put the hard hours in and these are the kinds of hiccups you may face.

It's moot if you have a small collection | don't care about existing artwork | etc.

IIRC you can disable transcoding on fly by server and trust the network | viewing client to handle full original content, etc.

I like JellyFin and used Emby in the past and use small JellyFin setups today - I just haven't resolved the issues in pointing it at a large curated collection and letting it rip making it's own parallel meta data w/out affecting pre-existing meta data.

bestouff• 2 years ago

I had the same setup until recently. I always had troubles with Kodi not indecing very well my movies; and also when wartching my moview far from home I had to copy them first, than think about marking them as "watched" in my library - and if I stopped watching mi-movie that was even more complicated.

Really, Jellyfin has been quite the upgrade. The indexing is better, I can watch things far from home, everything is there. As a bonus, I can create accounts for close friends/family so they can watch what I download without hassle.

Just try it.

beAbU• 2 years ago

I'm not a Jellyfin user, but I use Emby, which has the same ancestry and similar features.

I can connect to my media server from literally anywhere in the world, using basically any device. I have a Chromecast with Google TV that I pack with me when we go away, and I pop it in the TV, configure wifi and I have my entire media collection right there. My phone, laptop, tablet and the wife's devices all have the client installed & configured.

I have friends and family that I share my media collection with and they are on the other side of the planet. All I give them is a URL, username+password and they are off to the races.

If this is not your use case, then Kodi with SMB is probably more than good enough.

hi_hi• 2 years ago

As someone else mentioned, the benefit of Jellyfin is it updates with newly added media quite consistently. I previously was a heavy Kodi user, on a small Android TV set top box. I now use Jellyfin exclusively, without transcoding as you mentioned.

Another benefit I've found is it's much easier to add new subtitle to a show/movie, without needing to setup specific subtitle databases as I did with Kodi.

The only issue of note is the occasional crash, but given the level of polish with Jellyfin, and zero cost, it feels absurd to mention it. Oh, and if you have multiple household members, checkout Jellyseerr [0]. It lets others easily request shows/movies (which you can get notified about and approve) without bugging you.

[0] https://github.com/Fallenbagel/jellyseerr

bambax• 2 years ago

I had this setup with a Netgear NAS (old and slow). I switched to a better NAS and Jellyfin and could not be happier. Well, I could be happier because Jellyfin has some quirks, but I'm pretty happy.

The main difference is that it works everywhere, from any device on the LAN (browser, iPad, Android phone, you name it), and even remotely (using Tailscale, to avoid exposing Jellyfin to the world). It's like you have your own little Netflix that you can access from absolutely anywhere.

NoboruWataya• 2 years ago

There is a Jellyfin add-on for Kodi which you could use if you want to keep using Kodi for other stuff like streaming. That's what I do (Kodi runs on a Raspberry Pi connected to the TV) and it works fine, though honestly I'm not a particularly heavy or advanced user so my needs are low. Another advantage of that setup is that I can use the Jellyfin clients on my laptop while using Kodi for the TV.

poisonborz• 2 years ago

Not happy about this post. Instead of asking to stop, they should do just what they suggest, without further ado - distribute the income to the ecosystem devs the way they see fit. Make it transparent, make application to these funds posssible, make feature bounties, write it besides the donation button.

Once someone stops donating, it is unlikely they will put up the effort of continually researching on which client/dev to support. This would be much better handled by Jellyfin maintainers.

cr3ative• 2 years ago

That sounds like a lot of work which could lead to people complaining that their money didn’t go where they wanted it to go. This is simpler.

jenscow• 2 years ago

And if they decide to split the donations equally, a few crappy clients would get made, just to get a slice of the pie.

blowski2• 2 years ago

I agree, it would be nice to make it easy to donate, and then the donations are spread to others within the ecosystem. But perhaps they're worried about a ruckus when they choose to make a donation someone doesn't agree with, so they'd need to have a layer of bureaucracy that they don't want to manage.

greatgib• 2 years ago

I don't think that it is the job of Jellyfish but it would be nice to have a foundation dedicated to do that for all projects.

Especially in Europe where you can get a nice tax deduction but only if you do the donation to a well (and complexly) registered non profit

sincerely• 2 years ago

If I donated to a specific project or organization, I would feel seriously deceived if they turned around and donated that money elsewhere. This is the correct move

eitland• 2 years ago

Mozilla is a prime example of this.

I think many have donated to Mozilla thinking they were donating to Firefox only to later realize donations never reach Firefox.

3836293648• 2 years ago

It's one thing if you donate to wikipedia and it ends up at some random wikimedia project you've never heard of and a completely different thing if you donate to Jellyfin and it ends up at Jellyfin Android.

But as others have said, the hax office might not like it

pjerem• 2 years ago

And even then, redistributing money will inherently make the organization have political issues. Choosing who "deserves" it is just hard work, takes time, needs an internal political alignment and strategy where the people working on this project are just doing it for fun on their free time.

In fact their decision is pretty mature and nice : they have enough to support the project costs but they don’t want the project to become their job and that’s exactly what money flowing over a hobby does : changing it to a job.

scosman• 2 years ago

They could donate to their dependencies that need it?

Still directly supporting the code running in the project. Balances out that people seem happier to donate to the UI/product layer than something like ffmpeg. Might be a bad example, but I’m sure some of their dependencies are underfunded.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 2 years ago

Even if you donated to Jellyfin, and the money went to the developers of Jellyfin clients, which are listed everywhere as part of the project?

TZubiri3• 2 years ago

If I bought a cheeseburger, I would feel seriously deceived if they turned around and bought cheese from a diary provider and buns from a bakery and...

hoten• 2 years ago

They should probably do both.

Make an announcement like this, but add that beyond x years of runway the remaining donations will be funneled to the community projects.

rtpg• 2 years ago

I mean they say in the post that you should donate to clients right?

deely3• 2 years ago

No one read more then the first sentences.

newsclues3• 2 years ago

Love jellyfin but don’t understand some of their choices like abandoning Reddit for a forum with no traffic

Chris20482• 2 years ago

I understand abandoning reddit in any situation

specproc• 2 years ago

A dedicated forum, open to read without login, and controlled by the project. They have easy access to all their data, decision-making power on features to support, and it's their call whether or not to allow advertising (they don't) or AI training of their data.

Seems like a perfectly good place for it to me.

iamacyborg• 2 years ago

Reddit isn’t conducive to many types of conversations due to the voting mechanism for posts and comments.

yard20102• 2 years ago

Why would they want to use Reddit?

venson3• 2 years ago

The forum has 10000 users and averages around 30-40 posts a day ... i would not say thats "no traffic"

sbergot• 2 years ago

When you accept donations you have to be transparent about how it is going to be used. They cannot change their mind like that.

swores3• 2 years ago

They can't do it retroactively for already received donations (not ethically at least, I don't think it would be illegal in this situation), but it wouldn't at all be a problem for them to announce "donations from today on will be used in this new way" instead of making the announcement they just made.

(I personally think they made the right choice, am just responding to your comment disagreeing that it would be a transparency issue if they changed how things worked moving forwards.)

amelius• 2 years ago

distribute the income to the ecosystem devs the way they see fit

Except the IRS may step in and spoil the idea ...

sokoloff2• 2 years ago

If Jellyfin operated as a 501c3 charity, the IRS would have standing to ensure that funds were used in accordance with those requirements.

I couldn’t find evidence that they do. If you donate money to me (not a 501c3) because you like something I do and want me to keep doing it, I can do anything (legal) with that money without IRS comment. (However, your donation to me is not deductible to you.)

venson3• 2 years ago

Why do you think Jellyfin would operates out of the US? I would say the majority of core devs isn't even located on the American continent.

GTP• 2 years ago

I instead like what they did: they were transparent about their finances and told their supporters that there are others that would benefit more from their support at this time. They were under no obligation of doing this, but it likely felt them like the right thing to do.

rob74• 2 years ago

Yeah, they could have done what e.g. the Wikimedia foundation does (find ways to spend the money and keep asking for more), but they didn't. Saying "we're good, we have all the money we need for the time being" is very refreshing...

Chris20482• 2 years ago

distribute the income to the ecosystem devs the way they see fit

It sounds like they have a general policy of "no paid dev". Further, it's possible that part of the motivation is the belief that if they did have it, it might lead to negative consequences (fewer contributions from non paid devs, squabbles over compensation, generally having to manage payouts etc)

barnabee• 2 years ago

Spending it on other projects is a bad idea:

- it'd be distracting, they're open source devs/maintainers not fund managers

- it could be divisive and they'd risk taking flak if they get it "wrong"

- it creates a class of "approved" clients and related projects

I think the Jellyfin team's approach is pretty reasonable.

That said, if I was them I'd probably do what the Helix devs do [0] and rather than telling people to stop donating, remind them that donations are a "tip" to the project and shouldn't be assumed to be buying you anything or paying to ramp up development (or marketing or anything else). I really appreciate that stance and their attitude that it's great to have the money and they'll spend it if and when they need it, while also encouraging people to consider donating elsewhere if they want to have a bigger impact.

[0] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/2220

illegalmemory• 2 years ago

it'd be distracting, they're open source devs/maintainers not fund managers

Exactly this! It is extra responsibility which distracts from the core project.

holowoodman2• 2 years ago

And spending on other projects might create tax problems for them, their donors and maybe the other projects...

djbon21125• 2 years ago

Exactly. This is something we've discussed internally a LOT and this is basically my take as to why not to distribute the money elsewhere, with the added #4 of "people who donated to us, donated to us - is it really right to take their money and give it to other projects, even if we think it is?".

lucideer• 2 years ago

Spending it on other projects is a bad idea:

Disagree

- it'd be distracting, they're open source devs/maintainers not fund managers

True. Dedicating time & effort to this would take away time & effort from development. But the harsh reality here is:

1. Client devs simply will not receive anywhere near as much funding as the drop Jellyfin are proposing/asking for.

2. It's clear from the article that Jellyfin's main devs would prefer a world where those client devs do receive such funds.

It's ultimately a trade-off: Jellyfin central dev would take a hit from taking on such a fiscal role, but the Client dev community would benefit, which sounds like it would benefit Jellyfin ultimately. Entirely up to Jellyfin's devs on whether they feel the hit would be worthwhile but I don't think it should be dismissed out of hand & it's worth suggesting.

benhurmarcel• 2 years ago

So like Mozilla? Then you got people complaining that they can't donate just to the project they support instead of the others.

rat9988• 2 years ago

What you suggest is closer to fraud to me than the right thing to do. If I donate to a project, it's not for the maintainer to choose to to use the money for something else.

KnobbleMcKnees• 2 years ago

Not happy about this post. Instead of asking to stop, they should do just what they suggest, without further ado - distribute the income to the ecosystem devs the way they see fit. Make it transparent, make application to these funds possible, make feature bounties, write it besides the donation button.

Additional admin that will lead to more costs in a self-fulfilling cycle. This is a bad idea. People who are donating are already doing so with intent. Trying to gues where their money would be best placed is playing unnecessary financial games. They're a software developer, not a pension fund manager.

Once someone stops donating, it is unlikely they will put up the effort of continually researching on which client/dev to support. This would be much better handled by Jellyfin maintainers.

They're already using the client just as they're using Jellyfin, how is this any more effort than what they've put into donating to Jellyfin directly?

roenxi• 2 years ago

IMO they should probably put their thinking hat on and try to find a way of spending more money. If the community says they want $20,000 spent on some project; then spend it. Buy some ads or something. In theory a project funded by donations is best run at around break even. This is a signal from their supporters that they should be spending more.

_heimdall• 2 years ago

That is assuming people are donating money to change the project rather than support the project as it already is.

The money doesn't have to be spent just because it's there. Personally I'd be a little annoyed if I donted to a project and the only change they made was to burn the cash on advertising that they otherwise didn't do.

bluGill4• 2 years ago

$20000 isn't a useful amount of money. If they are getting $20k/month they can think about hiring a developer to work full time on the project, but at their current donation levels they could hire a developer for maybe 3 weeks before they run dangerously low on money.

Remember, Jellyfin is a fork of Emby which was a fork of Plex - both those projects were open source and then went paid. After being burnt twice like that I think it is understandable why many Jellyfin developers have had enough of that and will reject anything that even slightly could be seen as going paid. So while hiring someone might be possible and in the best interest of Jellyfin in a different world, they cannot do that in this world without losing support.

TZubiri3• 2 years ago

money and foss greybeards don't mix.

its-summertime• 2 years ago

Footing the legal costs of making sure that doing such complies with the open collective policies, the policies of the group OC is delegating management to, their prior statements, etc, would easily take up such a small amount, leaving nothing for no one.

ygjb• 2 years ago

Instead of asking to stop, they should do just what they suggest, without further ado - distribute the income to the ecosystem devs the way they see fit

Probably not. The amount of money they are taking in is very small, and if they start to ramp up revenue, then they actually need to start paying people for non-core work, like lawyers and accountants. Assuming that the money is received in Canada, by an Ontario registered non-profit, then it is really easy to do the accounting work for small dollar amounts (I ran several Manitoba and BC based non-profits previously for conferences and community work). If you start paying people who can't invoice you, then you need to sort out cross-jurisdictional payroll, and if you are making alot of purchases through other services.

Comments like this are unhelpful because it assumes that the developer of the project has a desire to run a business (and non-profits are businesses) rather than building and shipping an open source tool that scratches an itch. It's cool to speculate on what could be, but if you think that is the right approach, fork it, run the business transparently, and allocate a portion of revenue to be held in reserve the moment the core team for the project you forked asks for it.

calibas• 2 years ago

How do you know he's not already donating the extra?

If I was running a popular open-source project, I wouldn't make it public that I've got extra money that I'm giving away. That comes with all sort of complications...

eYrKEC2• 2 years ago

His contrarian post got to front page of Hacker news. I think he won. His message to redirect funds to sub-maintainers is being heard.

satyrnein• 2 years ago

Great example of how taking people's money leads to new expectations!

worble2• 2 years ago

I recently started using Jellyfin for friday movie nights with me and a few friends who no longer live near each other. The sync feature on the web UI works surprisingly well, we hang out on VC and it's as close to watching something physically together it can be. Overall I've found it to be really solid, although I've not really dabbled much with other media center software to compare it to.

My only real complaint is that for whatever reason it really does not like my folder structure - most of my files work but it'll randomly decide that a bunch of episodes in a folder are a single "file" with multiple "versions". Reading their docs it seems like they really want you to conform to a specific folder structure, but not only would this take me forever (I've been growing this collection for 15+ years now!), I just don't want to change it; I'm happy with my folder layout and it makes sense to me, it's really surprising that Jellyfin can't just show me the raw files.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

What is VC?

shubb• 2 years ago

Internet slang for voice chat

TeMPOraL• 2 years ago

I suppose you could change the structure rather fast with a few well-placed batch operations in a shell, though I also understand why you wouldn't want it.

Regarding the randomly merged episodes, perhaps the culprit isn't the folder structure or file name patterns, but metadata on the files themselves? I never had this particular situation, but I wasted my fair share of life dealing with assumptions music players make about ID3 tags, and how they're routinely broken by files sourced from random places on the Internet.

theshrike792• 2 years ago

I wasted my fair share of life dealing with assumptions music players make about ID3 tags, and how they're routinely broken by files sourced from random places on the Internet.

Musicbrainz Picard is a life-saver. I don't add any audio to my collection without putting it through Picard first.

Retr0id3• 2 years ago

I haven't tried implementing it, but my idea is to write a script that automatically creates a "correctly" organized directory tree, populated with symlinks to the arbitrarily-located real files.

Sakos5• 2 years ago

Jellyfin doesn't even work quite right if you try to follow their documentation to the letter in how to structure and name your directories. I hope they improve that aspect, because it can be time consuming and irritating to fix when it doesn't work right. It largely works though.

Hamuko3• 2 years ago

Does Jellyfin allow using external metadata agents and scanners like Plex? I basically couldn't use Plex at all if I didn't have HAMA and ASS installed for scanning anime files.

NicoJuicy• 2 years ago

Do you have a separate library for movies and tv shows?

worble2• 2 years ago

Yes, I've tried separating them out, I've tried putting them all together, I even tried putting it as a photo library because apparently that was supposed to be closer to a raw folder layout, but the issue still persisted.

I think there's a kind of disconnect between the kind of users that use these media libraries - a lot of people seem to really value the metadata aspect of it, how it collects all the info the IMDB or whatever and tries to sort and match stuff.

And then there's people like me who just want a server that can handle any file I throw at it and play it over the internet, I'm not too fussed about the other aspects. Part of me thinks that maybe I'm using the wrong tool for the job, but Jellyfin does otherwise work really well for what I want, folder gripes aside.

crtasm2• 2 years ago

Try dashboard > libraries > display > Display a folder view to show plain media folders

reddalo• 2 years ago

This is interesting, I feel like Plex doesn't have such a feature

xbmcuser• 2 years ago

I used to have similar problem till I started using hardlinks because of arr apps now I have pretty looking file and folder structure for jellyfin.

ThatMedicIsASpy3• 2 years ago

Manage your stuff with tinymediamanager. It will auto rename files folders, download nfos thumbnails, covers.

TV shows just need s01e01

Then import the folders and dont allow jellyfin to fetch online data.

theshrike792• 2 years ago

The *arr stack can be used to rename files in a sane way

A good tip is to include the imdb or tmdb ID in the file name for movies and in the directory for TV/Anime, it'll make things unambiguous

LelouBil• 2 years ago

The sync feature on the web UI works surprisingly well.

Hmm ? I've been having issues with SyncPlay since forever. Media stuck for some people, stuck at loading. Playing until some point, then freezing.

Basically whenever I'm doing something with SyncPlay it's "press play and if it does actually start never press pause"

But that's literally my only issue with Jellyfin, I've been using it for the past year and it's awesome.

pmlnr• 2 years ago

I've tried it all: Jellyfin, plex, Emby. They all want to transcode all the time. I ended up going back to minidlna, with a layout of images/etc it likes, combined with an android app called BubbleUpnp, and it's better, than all the other setups.

kombine• 2 years ago

I'm running Jellyfin on Raspberry Pi 4 and switched transcoding off. Never really had any problem with it.

desro3• 2 years ago

What codec is your media in, and what are your players? I've virtually never had JF try to transcode something for me on the fly

crtasm2• 2 years ago

On Jellyfin note that you need to turn off transcoding for each user account.

Keeping 'allow ... conversion without re-encoding' turned on should be fine, and likely needed for some of your files.

InsomniacL5• 2 years ago

    Some very-well-requested features/clients have gotten no traction at all, with no one coming in willing to start/help developing them. We've had to abandon some (like Chromecast for a while, though it's getting new life in the last few weeks) because of this.

    We're aware that probably the biggest complaints about Jellyfin are about the lack of client support, and the rough edges/lack of polish. We do hear you. We do want this to improve this just as much as you do.

    But we need people to help us do so. We need more volunteers who can help make the code better, write new code, document, and generally improve things. We need your help to push past what I call the Development Bystander Problem, get some new blood into the project, and especially, help to make it better!

    https://jellyfin.org/posts/a-call-for-developers/

It's noble to want to be a 100% volunteer force but it's frustrating that they know they have issues and a big pot of money but won't solve them.

Even without paying for development, money could be spent to improve the developer experience and attract new devs.

They have acknowledged client development is an issue in the OP and the link above. Could they not support client devs with hardware, licences, costs, etc...

IshKebab• 2 years ago

I don't understand why they even care about not paying for development. Is paying for development somehow immoral? Of course not!

wccrawford5• 2 years ago

Not immoral, but it's a huge HR headache. Once people get paid, you have to deal with what people are worth. And everyone thinks everyone (including themselves) is worth different amounts. Coming to a consensus about that is a huge hassle, and will still end up with hurt feelings.

Bad moral is bad for code.

If you have enough money, you can swallow that pill and push through. If you don't, it will make things worse.

They have enough money for what they do, but they haven't got nearly enough income (donations) to pay everyone market wages.

lolinder• 2 years ago

They're the FOSS entrant in the category dominated by Plex, which has a history of monetization strategies that upset the community. Jellyfin probably wants to stay completely clear of even the appearance of being a paid project because the main reason someone would choose them over Plex is to get away from the influence of monetary incentives.

michaelt3• 2 years ago

They make a 'free software media solution that puts you in control and respects your privacy' and if they're not naive, they probably suspect a decent portion of their users are playing pirated movies.

So from a certain perspective, saying "no-one gets paid" is more consistent than saying "us developers get paid, those anime studios don't".

For another thing, if you pay for the upfront development of software, it still needs ongoing support. And that support commitment comes with a funding commitment; you don't just pay $x0,000 for an eastern european developer to spend a year adding smart TV support - to keep the developer around and the feature working, you've now got to raise that money every year, forever.

cqqxo4zV46cp2• 2 years ago

Yeah. I didn’t know this before, and I’m now beginning to see why Jellyfin never comes close to satisfying me whenever I use it, when compared to Plex.

What they’re trying to do is really hard. As much great work as they’re putting into it, they’re really treading water with what they’re currently able to muster with people that are willing to volunteer their time. There’s obviously a lot of people that want to put money toward the effort.

3np• 2 years ago

Why should distributing surplus funds fall on them, though? That's work, and it's not fun.

Setting up a wider Jellyfin-ecosystem-donation-fund (or your favorite FLOSS project) is something anyone can do. Maybe someone reading this comment will get the motivation to step up? (And no, we don't need another platform, just plain honest human volunteering)

climb_stealth• 2 years ago

Switched from Plex to Jellyfin a few years ago and have been happy with it. Plex had issues with movies with subtitle files. It tried to constantly reencode stuff. Couldn't work it out. Jellyfin works fine.

Also, I'm not getting nagged for features that I don't want anymore. I happily paid for my account, Plex, but just let me watch my local movies in peace. Leave me alone with television streaming, free movies or whatever else was the latest thing that was being pushed.

domh3• 2 years ago

This is my first time hearing about Jellyfin, and wow what a breath of fresh air compared to the typical hyper growth model employed by a lot of OSS projects.

Any Jellyfin users here that can vouch for it? I currently have a SMB share on a Raspberry Pi 4 and I connect to that on my Amazon Fire Stick using the VLC SMB features. It works ok but the VLC UI leaves much to be desired. Would Jellyfin be better for this? Is there a client that works on the Fire TV stick? (This one I think? https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv)

GaryNumanVevo7• 2 years ago

Absolutely, it's been running on my NAS (via Docker) for over a year now with no issues. It supports hardware transcoding which is nice for downscaling streams while watching outside of the house.

Jellyfin integrates really well with other services like Radarr, Sonarr, and Jellyseer so you can request media, have it downloaded, indexed, and available automatically.

Client-wise it's a mixed bag, Infuse is probably the best one out there, but it's only available for Apple TV / iOS.

desro3• 2 years ago

and macOS!

pmx• 2 years ago

I switched from Plex to JF after being a plex user from the very beginning. It's not as polished as plex but it has none of the bloat and works flawlessly for me. It's super easy to manage my libraries and the meta scanners work 95% of the time, very rarely needing me to manually tweak data or images for media.

Jellyfin android works fine on firetv. The only thing you might struggle with if you run the server on a pi is transcoding, especially if you have 4k media files.

desro3• 2 years ago

jellyfin handles my 12 TB media library with transparent ease. i use infuse as a client on my apple tvs, including devices at my family and partners' places via tailscale on aTV

dscottboggs2• 2 years ago

Any Jellyfin users here that can vouch for it?

I've been using it since the fork from Emby and it works well for what I use it for.

That said, they're right IMO to redirect funds to the clients. The Android TV app is in a really rough state. The regular Android and Web interfaces work great, Roku as far as I recall works well...but the Android TV one is really not good.

dspearson• 2 years ago

I haven't noticed any difference or problems with the Android TV application vs the Android or web client. What exactly is broken or not great for you?

perryizgr84• 2 years ago

I use Jellyfin, and it works good enough most of the times. Sometimes it just won't find subtitles, or metadata and it's highly annoying to fix it. The TV app is a bit rough sometimes. The android app feels very barebones. The HDR tone mapping is either horrible or non-existent (can't remember which, but I could never play proper HDR).

So yeah, there are a lot of rough edges, but I think this is the best on offer if you want a true self-hosted media library that mostly works out of the box across various platforms.

swed420• 2 years ago

I've been using Jellyfin since the beginning and it's been a total joy to use. Even though I trust the project now, in the beginning when I was migrating off of Plex I had both running simultaneously in separate VMs referencing the same read-only library. This dual config worked great, though I didn't use Plex much at all after Jellyfin quickly proved itself even in the early days of its development.

The diverse client support is awesome. In addition to streaming video content to various house devices, my favorite is my "jukebox" music listening setup consisting of a RPi 3B+ with ALLO Piano 2.1 DAC hat feeding separate speaker and subwoofer amps with desired crossover frequency. Running on the Pi is Mopidy with the Mopidy-Jellyfin extension to access Jellyfin's libraries along with the Mopidy-mowecl extension which provides a slick web front end for the DAC (you can also queue music from the Jellyfin GUI and "play to" the DAC). Highly configurable and fun to tinker with. For example, I have a USB numberpad keyboard plugged into the Pi with assigned hotkeys by way of the triggerhappy service. I love being able to keep the music playing if my desktop workstation is off or rebooting.

https://github.com/jellyfin/mopidy-jellyfin https://github.com/sapristi/mopidy-mowecl

The best thing is it's all FLOSS, so I don't have to worry about the rug being pulled out from under me!

eythian• 2 years ago

I've been using Jellyfin for several months now, for me it works nicely. I did a bit of tuning over time (e.g. "OK, now I'll spend a bit of time improving how subtitles work"), and after learning how to set that aspect up, it just trucks along working. I have a handful of friends using my setup too and haven't had complaints.

Beware though that if any transcoding is needed, the RPi probably won't be up to it. Instead I shelled out a little bit for a small Intel NUC thing that can do hardware conversion.

vundercind3• 2 years ago

I use it with a weak x86 server (used workstation off EBay) and stronger clients (Apple TV, iOS devices, browser on strong laptops) so I don’t need transcoding, since my server can’t manage real-time transcoding. Works great with that set-up, crazily better than XMBM/Kodi ever was in a dozen or so attempts, and people who aren’t me can pick it up and confidently use it, without immediately getting stuck in some weird UI mode and giving up forever, which is what Kodi always led to.

[edit] I use the download links in the browser UI and then VLC playback on an iPad for kids’ movies on long road trips. It even (with an assist from VLC) fills that use case.

internet101010• 2 years ago

Yes it handles my library (~60tb) just fine but the Apple TV client isn't great. I run it and Plex side-by-side and switch between the two depending on which device I am using.

ryandrake• 2 years ago

I've been using XBMC (now Kodi) clients + a single NFS file server for 16 years, now installed on three media PCs throughout my house. Looking at Jellyfin's feature set, it's not clear what it offers over my current setup. It just seems like an apples-to-apples alternative, which is fine.

BizarroLand3• 2 years ago

I run it from a docker container on my Truenas system. It works pretty well as all of my media is stored there.

I use folders to separate out TV shows / Movies on the Nas and then set a collection for each one.

Identifying the media was 80% automatic, the last 20% I had to do via identify and imdb searches, but that was a small hassle.

I've had a few videos not play due to formatting issues. When that happens I fire up handbrake and re-encode for mp4 web playback and ~20 minutes later I'm in business.

ramon156• 2 years ago

Love jellyfin, I'm even considering port forwarding so my friends can make use of it!

GardenLetter272• 2 years ago

You can use ProtonVPN for port forwarding if your ISP doesn't support it (or you want to protect your home IP).

GaryNumanVevo7• 2 years ago

Don't port forward it's a pain in the ass to expose your home network to the internet. Just use something like Tailscale VPN (p2p wireguard) and buy a domain to point to the internal Tailscale IP.

fragmede• 2 years ago

Tailscale funnel?

kortilla2• 2 years ago

“Don’t click a few buttons in your router UI to forward a port and setup a dynamic DNS client in the same way that has worked for 25 years. Instead use a bunch of other 3rd party shit that builds a VPN and tough shit if people are using a TV.”

What you’ve described is a pain in the ass from a setup perspective. I think what you were trying to say is “be careful about jellyfin vulnerabilities”, but that’s definitely not what came out.

tjoff• 2 years ago

Going through all that trouble to use a proprietary solution? Rather recommend https://github.com/slackhq/nebula or something.

honeybadger13• 2 years ago

I must be a networking genius because I run about 30 websites in dockers behind a reverse proxy(one static IP) with gazillions of port forwards and static routes over a consumer router and I have no issues.

domh3• 2 years ago

Have you managed to get TLS working with a setup like this? I have a custom domain that isn't used but I'd like to point it to a machine that's on Tailscale. Do you just put your Tailscale DNS on public DNS servers or do you use an internal one? Do you use a reverse proxy to route port 80/443 to the port your app is running on?

GardenLetter272• 2 years ago

I wish they could get added as an official app to the Samsung TV app store, etc.

perryizgr84• 2 years ago

They are available on the official LG TV app store and Play store (Sony, etc.). I guess someone forgot about Samsung.

renegade-otter• 2 years ago

I need to take the time to finally switch from Emby (what Jellyfin was forked from).

Mistletoe• 2 years ago

Imagine if Wikipedia did this. Bravo to Jellyfin for being practical.

herunan• 2 years ago

40-month runway is not that long and doesn’t account for any exceptional issues that may arise…

beezlebroxxxxxx• 2 years ago

I was expecting a much bigger number than 40 months, but then again for an entirely donation supported project it's quite good. I don't think I can remember a project telling people to stop donating directly to them before, though. It's a little odd really. I get it, but seems like investing in the S&P500 and then withdrawing your money the moment you get the slightest gainz.

djbon21125• 2 years ago

To be honest, it's right around a line that I feel is fine to make this request.

The thing that triggered this, that isn't really mentioned by me in the post, is that we've had a few sudden swells of donations around both the 10.9.0 release and the latest 2 Plex kerfuffles, and I get the very distinct impression that people donating are not reading all the "fine print" about what we use it for.

We also have a lot of recurring donations which should pay for a huge chunk. The goal here is to basically just make another public "hey, we never really asked for donations, and we appreciate it, but hey for now we'd rather you donate to individuals than the org since the org can coast on this money for a few more years". Which we absolutely can. I can't envision any real situation that would require us to use a huge sum of this money in one go, so it's really just the monthly recurring costs to cover which are relatively stable and consistent.

s_dev2• 2 years ago

Is there a Jelly Cloud solution? i.e a company that deploys Jellyfin to a EC2 instance and hooks up an S3 and gives you custom domain e.g: username.companyname.com and charges you a monthly fee for the S3/EC2 costs + other costs?

I was thinking of creating it but wanted to see what demand there is? Most Devs can easily do this themselves but I want to extend and sell it to other people as a service who wouldn't be capable and just happy to pay.

Plex and Emby would be competitors but not open source afaik.

danielbln• 2 years ago

I can't speak for a generic cloud solution. but various seedboxes (managed bittorrent providers) offer Plex and also Jellyfin as part of their offering. That's how I run Plex as well as Jellyfin, personally.

nusl• 2 years ago

Bytesized Hosting is close to this.

2gremlin181• 2 years ago

There are many providers who sell seedboxes, which is exactly what you're looking for. They generally include support for Jellyfin as well as other *arr apps. I personally use ultra.cc and have been mostly satisfied with the service.

weberer3• 2 years ago

Every seedbox offers this. I've had a good experience with whatbox.ca

stiltzkin2• 2 years ago

This was my go-to too, I highly recommend them as well.

honeybadger13• 2 years ago

I have been a Plex fanatic for quite a few years but the tides of been changing in a way that worries me. I am also an ad blocking fanatic and I have noticed trends between Plex, content I watch, and ads. I know they do something but I haven't quite figured it out yet even when putting my Plex behind a really aggressive ad blocking DNS configuration. They also mess with suggestions, doing things like hiding my own content in favor of their own, some other little annoyances...

I stood up a Jellyfin docker a few months back and instantly noticed for local playback is was swift, the UI is super fast, and also it just felt more polished in terms of overall experience in certain areas. I haven't switched yet but the project is so far more along in such a short time period that I will be watching very closely going forward. I love the humor and I love passion to build good software that respects a human.(privacy)

agilob• 2 years ago

They have money and lots of bugs and don't know what to do with one and another? Maybe do some bug fixing bounties?

wibwobble12333• 2 years ago

Read the page.

sam0x172• 2 years ago

$24k is not a lot to have in the bank for an org who is (whether they like it or not) mortal enemies with plex

rpgbr• 2 years ago

AFAIK, Jellyfin isn't an org, it's a non-profit project run by people who don't look for compensation.

djbon21125• 2 years ago

Correct, we're not even an "org" in any official sense. Just a loose collection of people working on the project.

sam0x172• 2 years ago

So an org

squarefoot3• 2 years ago

Why streaming? I can understand when one needs some media to play on different devices at the same time, also remotely, but for individual use I found a kodi box near my TV and configured to navigate NFS/SMB directories and filenames on my NAS, to be so immediate that I can't imagine doing things differently. Also, by streaming from box A (NAS) to box B (PC) it would probably need a lot more computing power from the usually smaller and less powerful hardware, and it would also move a lot more data on the home network because the video is transcoded by the weaker hardware and before being transmitted. ...Unless streaming in this context means a completely different thing and therefore I'm wrong.

hencoappel• 2 years ago

I mainly use Plex, but the key benefits are that it remembers what you've watched, allows for multiple accounts, allows for easily continuation of a film or series without having to remember what time/episode you were on. Also allows for easy remote viewing.

squarefoot3• 2 years ago

Kodi does all of this, except remote viewing that possibly could be done through external addons, but I'm not sure about that. Some features like remembering what you were watching requires it not to be turned off. Sleep is fine however, and on my mini PC it goes to sleep when it detects I turned off the TV via HDMI/CEC connection. When you wake it up you'll be in the same place and it remembers also the time watched, while if you turned it off you have to navigate back to the place you were watching, but it still keeps the time of that file and any other one, prompting you to continue from when you left or start over. Watched files and time are saved as part of the backup that can be scheduled to run automatically in the background, so one can upgrade it, then restore the backup to get back every change to the interface, addons, configuration, etc. It also runs on phones, and I installed it also on my Pixel with GrapheneOS along with some addons, but the interface is really hard to operate there.

scheeseman4863• 2 years ago

Software like Jellyfin and Plex allow for streaming to more than just Kodi boxes (your phone, tablet, set top box smart TV apps, web browser) and transcoding allows the flexibility to adapt the bitrate to reliably push video over the internet and to work around compatibility issues with clients that might not support certain codecs (keeping in mind transcoding only happens when it needs to).

Mashimo4• 2 years ago

probably need a lot more computing power from the usually smaller and less powerful hardware

Streaming does not mean it forces a transcode. I mean it can, but if you watch from a decent client it often just sends the raw media file.

And you can change from PC to phone, to tv and it remembers what you watched.

I actually use kodi as a client for jellyfin.

cchance• 2 years ago

I mean, if people are so heavily donating... why not implement a full time dev ?

nullfrigid3• 2 years ago

Is Jellyfin an all in one solution for media management and streaming?

I normally just use transmission and serviio (vastly superior to Plex IMO), and only recently found out about sonarr, radarr, etc.

Really though, is there not any 'all in one' solution, instead of all these various programs chained together? I get keeping the serviio bit separate, and maybe the torrent client, but the rest could easily be integrated into one app.

TheCoelacanth• 2 years ago

No, it's only for the streaming aspect. It combines extremely well with sonarr/radarr, though.

zeroq• 2 years ago

I had a very weird experience with Jellyfins team.

Recently I decided to give the app a try, and it worked fine, but I have serious issues with their media scanner (nested structures, a lot of misc content like interviews, etc.).

Years ago I wrote my own script that scans my drives, downloads imdb database, and 100% accurately matches media to imdb-id and fetches all auxilary data like cast, synopsis, posters, and so on.

I asked on their forum if I could use that to somehow bypass the scanner, prepopulate the database or write my own scanner based on theirs.

I was repedatley said it would be impossible and to not touch the code. "Seriously, do not do this" said one of the team members. I mean I do understand they were trying to save me a lot of headache, but at the same time they're running a campaign for developers. I just found it very odd.

andrew_eu• 2 years ago

I can't speak for their developer/support team, but that kind of feedback indeed feels strange. Even more so because this kind of intervention is possible without touching any of Jellyfin's code.

In particular you can create an NFO file (same stem, next to the media, with a .info extension) that contains this data. With stuff like the IMDB ID given, Jellyfin is pretty good at extracting metadata from there; without it, false matches aren't uncommon. It's even documented. [1]

[1] https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/metadata/nfo/

djbon21125• 2 years ago

The reason is that, it's basically impossible. The issue comes down to the Library handling code. It's legacy Emby code that we've been slowly but surely trying to replace but it's a huge task. This is huge chunk of Jellyfin. Writing your own parser is a great idea, but directly hooking it into Jellyfin will just be giving yourself a lot of headaches and will NOT be easy to do.

You're best to write out NFOs and then let Jellyfin just import those with all external metadata providers removed.

Mashimo4• 2 years ago

I asked on their forum if I could use that to somehow bypass the scanner,

Oh that is easy. I think jellyfin can read from a sidecard file that you can place next to the media file.

andrewmcwatters2• 2 years ago

No you're not. You need at a minimum approximately $180,000 for a project with your expenses to be self-sustaining. With this burn rate, you'll end up asking for donations again in three years.

Further still, you'd need those reserves to grow at more than 2% per year, and more realistically somewhere much higher than that, just to ensure your donation reserves keep the project self-sustaining in the face of inflation.

How do we get so many smart people in tech who don't know how to manage finances?

stiltzkin2• 2 years ago

I always had Jellyfin as second option with my Plex Lifetime membership. Glad they improved a lot since the first days on their reddit community.

Now I prefer using Stremio+Read Debrid, Kodi as my main player for local movies.

eadmund2• 2 years ago

I’m a happy user of Jellyfin, and I’d like to amplify what others have said about $24,000 or 40 months’ expenses being not nearly enough. At a conservative safe withdrawal rate, $24,000 of capital is only $60/month — in other words, a tenth of what the project needs to cover its monthly expenses.

If the project wants to be self-sufficient, they thus need ten times as much money. Then they can invest it, and cover expenses with the income from their investments.

If the project doesn’t want to be self-sufficient, that’s something else. Maybe they would prefer to think it will better align incentives for their users to keep them hungry? Personally, though, I think that self-sufficiency should be everyone’s goal.

fiznool• 2 years ago

$24k over 40 months is $600/month. Am I missing something?

eadmund2• 2 years ago

Yes. ‘Safe withdrawal rate’ is the annual fraction of an investment which one can sell while maintaining the principal’s value, adjusted for inflation. That might sound very complex, so here’s an attempt to explain it simply.

If one has $24,000 and spend $600/month, then after 40 months there will be nothing at all left. On the other hand, if one invested that $24,000 in Treasury bonds one would have something like $26,229. So (ignoring inflation) one could spend ($24,000 - $26,229)/40 = $55.72 each month, and still have $24,000. Why would one want to do that? Because one could keep going, investing the money, collecting the interest and paying one’s expenses: that $24,000 can last forever, paying $55.72 a month.

Now, in real life one can’t ignore inflation, and that $24,000 will be worth less than $22,000 in 40 months. In real life inflation tends to outpace the risk-free rate of return one can get lending money to the U.S. Treasury. So one needs to get more return by taking one more risk, for example by investing in the stock market as a whole. But that exposes one to economic downturns.

To make a long story short (too late!) folks have run the numbers and figured that one can conservatively invest one’s money in some broad indices, withdraw about 3–4% a year and maintain the post-inflation value of one’s capital. More than that, and one runs out of capital; less than that, and the capital continues to increase, but you have less money to spend today.

If Jellyfin wants to be able to pay their $600 (in 2024 dollars) hosting bill forever, they need to invest $240,000 today. And then they’ll never need to ask for money again (assuming all sorts of things, like no decade-long recession, no world war, an asteroid doesn’t crash into the Earth and so forth). For the same reason, an American making the average wage of $63,795 needs a $2.2 million nest egg to never work again.

andrewmcwatters2• 2 years ago

I posted the same math here and it was downvoted all the way to the bottom of the thread.

highmastdon• 2 years ago

Why wouldn't they redistribute to other maintainers of the plugins/clients. They have much more knowlegde of where money is needed or where resources are lacking.

Or pay devs, not in their circle to build the features the community wants but they can't (lack of expertise, or otherwise) implement?

Jellyfin: We're Good, Seriously

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