WiiFin – Jellyfin Client for Nintendo Wii

by throwawayk7h • 3 months ago

260 128 3 months ago

I can't believe the wifi got a client before ps5

gkhartman• 3 months ago

Honestly surprised it took this long. I guess it's less than ideal, since the wii doesn't support modern tv resolutions.

dmonitor• 3 months ago

The Wii supports 240p, though, which is very hard to replicate these days.

Forgeties792• 3 months ago

Man what can’t you do with a Wii? Didn’t someone post an article the other detailing how they booted Mac OS X on it?

dddddaviddddd• 3 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47691730

Forgeties792• 3 months ago

Love it

shrinks99• 3 months ago

Noticed that Jellyfin had inched out Plex when sorting by popularity on the TrueNAS app catalogue the other day (45,178 installs vs Plex's 42,225). The existance of this project seems to confirm that the dev ecosystem around it is getting stronger!

monocasa2• 3 months ago

And that plex really pissed off the community by changing its pricing model.

altmanaltman• 3 months ago

I started out my home server journey with Plex but it just kept getting worse, forcing me to switch to Jellyfin, which imo works just as well and seems to not fall into the whole pay us to stream your media business practice yet. Paywalling such a core feature was pretty harsh

shiroiuma2• 3 months ago

It may seem "harsh", but this is simply the reality of using proprietary software. You don't have any control over it, and unless you stick with a particular version, it can change at any time (sometimes called a "rugpull"). And with anything internet-connected, it's not usually a good idea to stick with an old version because of security issues.

With open-source software, this just isn't a problem. Even if the company behind it decides to turn evil, the community can fork it and continue on. Just look at Emby for example: it did a rugpull and changed to a proprietary license, so the community forked it and made Jellyfin.

tech234a2• 3 months ago

Can anyone comment on the security of Jellyfin? When I had last looked into it, it seemed like Jellyfin had a somewhat weak security model that made me question switching family members to it from Plex.

heavyset_go4• 3 months ago

Don't expose it to the internet unless you know what you're doing, or put it on a VPS you don't care about.

Ideally keep it behind a VPN and give your family members access to it that way, and let local devices on your LAN connect to it without a VPN.

random_human_4• 3 months ago

For whatever reason people here and on Reddit will tell you that you need to have Jellyfin pass through five VPNs, otherwise nasty things will happen. Meanwhile the actual devs suggests simply setting up a reverse proxy, which you can do in two lines with Caddy: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/networking/re...

MaxikCZ4• 3 months ago

Yea its pretty bad, there are pages of non-fixed confirmed exploits, you really shouldnt let it face the net.

VPN is one solution, and actually the only real solution for app-based jellyfin (TV, phone apps) I found so far.

Another is to host Jellyfin behind reverse proxy, and have a completely independent authgatein front of it (authentik, authelia). Jellyfin even supports LDAP (trough plugin), so you dont have to login twice per visit. The downside is only web interface can be hidden this way, as apps will break expecting jellyfin auth page and finding something else.

vachina• 3 months ago

To alleviate your concerns, I have a public facing Jellyfin instance hosted on a subdomain for almost a year now. So far zero pwns or bot activity.

dawnerd2• 3 months ago

It’s still a mess and any suggestions to fix it are met with hostility which is a shame because I’d love to use it. Last I checked there were still endpoints not behind auth that exposed stuff you’d probably not want exposed.

ndesaulniers• 3 months ago

I run it in a docker container behind traefik in another container. Getting that wired up and working in podman was quite the challenge. Docker container mounts my media as read only.

tengbretson• 3 months ago

Plex could reverse this trend in a week if they decided to prioritize work on any feature that their core market actually wanted.

zythyx• 3 months ago

What more does Plex need? I would consider myself a power user of Plex and it does everything I need it to do. I would think the only thing I can think of is fully self-hosted login instead of their cloud option, but I'm glad we have that option because I don't want to handle the authentication of my friends and family

outime• 3 months ago

When I had to decide between Plex and Jellyfin, I noticed that with Plex it was mandatory to have an account even when self-hosting (!) so I'm not sure whether it's better or worse than Jellyfin, I just didn't bother trying it out because of that.

chneu4• 3 months ago

I was camping without service last year. I wanted to watch some House MD I had downloaded in the plex app before I left. I fire up plex ...it can't connect. Why does it need to connect? Bye Plex. Hello Jellyfin.

majora20072• 3 months ago

Plex is aimed for a simple ease-of-use experience, so if you aren't technical enough to setup a reverse proxy, Plex offers all the authentication and proxying for you.

It's not a true self-hosted software. It just depends on what matters most to you.

lamasery8• 3 months ago

Forced server transcoding for everything. Ouch. Thought maybe at least mpeg2 or something would play directly.

mystraline2• 3 months ago

Intel ARC 380's are ideal at 4k realtime transcoded streams. And theyre cheap as well.

You could probably do a sticky round robin reverse proxy with a few backends doing transcode.

The biggest issue is bandwidth, but you probably knew that.

haunter• 3 months ago

Even better is a passive cooled GPU like the Palit 3050 KalmX https://www.palit.com/palit/vgapro.php?id=5147 Too bad they are not producing them anymore

ruined• 3 months ago

it's 480p. every box i've used in the last two decades could do that on the fly without breaking a sweat.

zamadatix• 3 months ago

The Wii is just barely within the last 2 decades but it does very much struggle with 480p decoding of most anything (and even sweats a decent amount on 240p) as it was pretty low end for even 20 years ago.

ghastmaster• 3 months ago

You can disable transcoding in the server settings or at the user level. Your client device would have to support the file being directly played of course.

nout2• 3 months ago

Jellyfin is great in that it just works. I managed to install it on Samsung TV with Tizen OS and it has been just solid experience for many years now.

nerptastic• 3 months ago

Agreed. I honestly chose Jellyfin over plex because I preferred the branding, not sure what I’m missing. I really enjoy Jellyfin, and thy seemingly have support for most devices in some way.

My GF has it set up on her iPad, phone, computer. App is on our TV and has no issues. We have Netflix at home. She’s non technical and hasn’t had any trouble once I gave her a login.

The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of her lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home ;) (for now)

lamasery8• 3 months ago

The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of her lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home ;) (for now)

Tailscale got me outside-the-home Jellyfin with a grand total of maybe 30 minutes of effort, including signing up, getting my server connected, and getting it on my MacBook, AppleTV, and phone. I'd never used it before.

lamasery8• 3 months ago

The one trick is to make sure your file naming & organization is good. They have good documentation on it. Everything's pretty much automatic then, almost zero further work. The naming conventions aren't too bad, and the resulting file tree would be a reasonable way to organize your files regardless.

nout2• 3 months ago

I actually like the conventions. Movie name and a year in parentheses and then it can be whatever. E.g.

Movie (2016).whatever.zzz/whatever.mkv

jauntywundrkind• 3 months ago

I gave Jellyfin up and went back to upnp/dlna after the Android and iOS clients would keep losing sync, or wouldn't show me some season of a show, or would pick a white background on white text for a show.

The pain just kept adding up. It was quite nice most of the time. But every single time I reached for my phone, I was wondering how badly it was going to go. Quitting Jellyfin seemed like an excellent choice.

Upnp/dlna is much cruder; very direct raw BubbleUPnP client. But it works so well for me. Their transcoding server also is quite good and I can run it on any machine I want, isn't coupled to anything, can switch between them easily.

Bubbleupnp is also great because it lets me turn tablets into cast screens. I love that so much. Good general protocols rock; having media server, media renderer, then separate control points was a great model, good job UPnP.

tym0• 3 months ago

Yeah the poor Jellyfin clients (on xbox) are what's keeping me on Plex despite all the accumulating paper cuts...

throwaway894345• 3 months ago

Heh, I just spent 15 minutes debugging a Jellyfin bug where my WebOS client thought that the startup wizard had not been completed yet (I tried restarting it several times, but the thing that did the trick was enabling debug logging and _then_ it started working properly--probably a coincidence). Jellyfin is the best in class, but the bar is in hell. It can't be run in any kind of a high availability configuration, so if your only instance goes down or has any kind of issue, you have to jump on and fix it immediately or you can't use it. When something goes wrong, some of the logs show up in stderr, but most are just written as plain files to a directory. It's free software, so you get what you pay for, but it's pretty buggy.

zhivota• 3 months ago

I love it mostly as well so far, the only sticking point on both my TVs is constantly having to re-enter my server IP address. It sticks around for a couple days, then it's gone again.

monocasa2• 3 months ago

Has anyone tried to horizontally scale jellyfin to running on a multi node cluster?

I'm wanting to set it up for around 20 households to share, and with transcoding that exceeds a single (cheap) node.

rtpg• 3 months ago

For hardware acceleration you might be interested in the remote hardware acceleration strategy...

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/h...

The jellyfin DB itself is unfortunately sqlite instead of being DB agnostic. Maybe you could hack together something such that only one node handles writes and everyone else handles reads... if getting multiple cheap nodes gets your more bandwidth. I have to imagine that jellyfin fairly quickly stops being in charge of the media stream directly.

But yeah I think the transcoding and the size of your data pipe is the only "hard" part. The DB read/writes themselves are going to not be an issue (I think)

circularfoyers• 3 months ago

The database changes late last year is laying the grounds for other database engines[1].

[1] https://jellyfin.org/posts/jellyfin-release-10.11.0/#the-lib...

heavyset_go4• 3 months ago

Yes, it was annoying, SQLite sucks as single source of truth for clusters, and it cost less than $100 to just buy hardware that can handle multiple high res transcoding sessions at once, but not 20 households' worth.

galbar• 3 months ago

FWIW, I have managed 10 simultaneous live transcoded streams on a ARC B580 and it could have managed a few more. With couple of them you cold be fine.

The other aspect is you could share the media storage over NFS and have multiple jellyfin instances running for different houeshold groups.

With 2 or 3 nodes like that I think you could make it work.

stijnveken• 3 months ago

I only have an cpu with hardware acceleration that is used for transcoding and even that can handle a couple of streams transcoding simultaneously. The biggest thing is getting people to use clients that support direct play.

rauland• 3 months ago

Jellyfin isn't designed to be clustered.

For your use case, deploying multiple instances would be the way to go.

zdw• 3 months ago

It would be great to get one of these that supports the OpenSubsonic API, which has become a defacto standard for opensource music servers.

Would be music-only, which is sometimes ideal for older devices.

sbinnee• 3 months ago

I love this kind of project. I am pretty sure the developer had a Wii console sitting around somewhere and thought about how to make it useful again. Wait, I have a PS2 sitting around somewhere…

poglet• 3 months ago

If you're using Dolphin, it may be worth testing Better-Wii-Menu-DE (https://github.com/Gavin-S-Dev/Better-Wii-Menu-DE).

You could probably have your Wii computer boot directly into Jellyfin using a startup shortcut with 'dolphin-emu -e WiiFin.dol', then switch out of the app to play Wii games using the better menu app.

Then you can your Wiimote for both media + gaming with out needing a keyboard / mouse.

aidenn0• 3 months ago

Now we just need a tvOS client that can play music...

OuterVale• 3 months ago

I built a little Jellyfin plugin for KOReader [1] so I can access my books from my Kindle. Jellyfin proved really nice to work with (though there was some poorly documented auth stuff they were in the process of deprecating).

If anyone has been thinking of building something in the Jellyfin ecosystem, I very much recommend it.

[1] https://github.com/DeclanChidlow/KOReader-Jellyfin-Plugin/

agarmash• 3 months ago

It absolutely should be ported to GameCube and be called DolFin (the GameCube's codename is Dolphin)

_joel• 3 months ago

Never realised Wii had a .WAD format. I guess it can run doom though :)

aayushdutt• 3 months ago

Really looking forward to a Jellyfin client on PS5

aquova• 3 months ago

Speak of the devil, I was just looking for something just like this earlier this week. I may have even have ran into this exact project, but it didn't have functioning playback until now. I have a spare CRT in my office that I use for some old consoles, and thought it would be neat to stream some 4:3 media onto it, but didn't want to bother with getting some client box and HDMI to composite converter. If this works well, it would solve that problem nicely.

hnarn• 3 months ago

We really got a client for the Nintendo Wii before a usable one for tvOS.

clayhacks• 3 months ago

Yeah, I’ve been beta testing the Streamyfin tvOS app. it’s now about on par with the official tvOS client, but feels like it’s making more progress regularly

xdertz• 3 months ago

there is swiftfin wich is OSS but is a bit buggy or Infuse which is a subscription but seems to play everything.

hungryhobbit• 3 months ago

But can it still play Wii games?

WiiFin – Jellyfin Client for Nintendo Wii

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