Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-project-leadership-changes

by swat535 • 2 days ago

366 330 2 days ago

forum.jellyfin.org

al_borland9• 2 days ago

Happy to see that it looks like a peaceful transition. I’m not currently a Jellyfin user, I tried it, but it didn’t seem capable of handling my library on my hardware. I’m sticking with Plex for now, but as they move more and more toward trying to be a streaming service instead of a media server, I’m hoping Jellyfin matures to the point where it’s viable when I need it.

techaqua• 2 days ago

what is your hardware problem?

al_borland9• 2 days ago

I’m running Plex via Docker on a Synology NAS. This has been working fine. When I tried to fire up a Jellyfin container, it was painfully slow. Clients barely worked. It wasn’t a good experience. It was several months ago, so I don’t remember all the details.

2muchtime2• 2 days ago

What do you mean they’re moving toward trying to be a streaming service?

kortilla• 2 days ago

Plex is a piece of shit that rams dumb streaming stuff down your throat each time you sign in on a TV. This coincidentally happens every other month or so when the app seems to forget the account it’s signed into.

It’s becoming hostile for people who want to work from their media alone.

someguyiguess• 2 days ago

They’re a paid service now. It’s no longer open source.

al_borland9• 2 days ago

Take a look at their homepage, you wouldn’t even know they offer a media server looking at this. (The main URL forwards to the watch subdomain)

https://watch.plex.tv/

It’s now how a majority of users are using Plex as well.

In 2023, Scott Hancock, Plex’s then-VP of marketing, said that Plex had more people using its online streaming service than using its media server features since 2022.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/plexs-crackdown-on-f...

With media servers being something studios surely don’t like, and Plex deprioritizing that aspect of the business, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before they shut it down completely.

To even know they have a media server, I need to click on the profile image in the top right of their website (even though I’m logged out), then click “My Media” under Links. No one is finding that organically.

That goes here, which seems to be their only page about the media server, and at the bottom is a link to a site that tries to scare people away. Instead of talking about how to rip your existing DVD and CD collection for the modern streaming era and self-hosting, it pushes users toward the big streaming services. Maybe that link is there because of the lawyers, but it sure seems like they don’t want this to exist anymore.

https://www.plex.tv/your-media/

tclancy4• 2 days ago

Huge fan of Jellyfin and the whole related stack, glad to see this is all peaceful.

timcobb• 2 days ago

What's the related stack

deejaaymac• 2 days ago

Jellyfin, sonarr, radarr, lidarr, sometimes jackett....aka the ArrStack

tclancy4• 2 days ago

Yeah the arr stack plus seer. It all feels like cheating. Which it is.

jbird99• 2 days ago

Cool to see fellow Mohawk alum making the front page of HN. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors Joshua and team!

Supercompressor• 2 days ago

Had no idea, that is cool! Thanks for pointing this out.

freetime23• 2 days ago

Recently Plex increased the cost of a new Lifetime Plex Pass to $750 [1]. It seems like they really want to get most users paying recurring monthly or annual fees. But to me at least that kind of goes against the whole purpose of hosting my own media library.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative!

[1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/

judge20203• 2 days ago

Makes me feel lucky that I got it for $120 in 2021. But I appreciate that they still offer a lifetime pass at all.

ssl-32• 2 days ago

$120 isn't too bad. I paid $75 in July of 2019.

$750 is nuts.

walrus016• 2 days ago

I still am not quite sure what value something like Plex offers for my personal HTPC media needs. I have a large collection of disk space that's an SMB file share on my local LAN, on a server in my garage. My home theatre PC mounts it over the LAN.

I have an XFCE4 desktop environment on the HTPC with the font size cranked up a bit and can run nautilus, thunar, or any other file explorer metaphor browser to explore the folders. There's a folder for movies, a folder for TV shows, and then stuff is organized within there by its directory name and filename. I double click on something I want to watch and it opens in VLC. Dead simple and works.

locksleydev• 2 days ago

Clients on everything, watch history tracking, meta data collection, nicer player, quick transcode for mobiles and other portable media players you don't want 4k on, automatic subtitle collection, live TV DVR, and an interface so simple my grandmother can use it.

bombcar• 2 days ago

Jellyfin is nice for various reasons (main for me is play synching) but Apple TV + Infuse + SMB share made something pretty bulletproof and kid friendly even before.

igorstellar• 2 days ago

You’ve described NAS in general. It’s more than just file system. Plex gives you Media Library indexing, web app, mobile and TV apps to play content from your NAS, from anywhere in the world (it even includes Relay, in case you don’t have public IP or accessing NAT traversal).

sasaf5• 2 days ago

I have almost the same setup. Plus a 3rd party app called "Material Files" to access it on my phone.

judge20203• 2 days ago

In particular the main value-add is that they have clients across so many different platforms, including most major bespoke smart TV brands[0], and their solution to streaming on WAN (HTTPS brokering) is pretty darn good for most people. Accessing my media from hotel rooms is pretty darn seamless, other than the wifi connection sometimes requiring downscaling to 720p or or so.

0: not really an issue nowadays with everyone moving to Big Tech-provided smart TV OS, but when you use an old TV with like mid-2010s webOS it's nice to see some old Plex app that still works.

RajT882• 2 days ago

I assume Plex "just works". Jellyfin is some assembly required.

You also occasionally run into a "Love Exposure" type bug.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/10494

al_borland9• 2 days ago

It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies. Shows what’s recently be added, recently released. Keeps track of where you’re at in a TV series, to always play the next episode. It can transcode as needed, to something like a mobile device or TV that might be more picky than VLC.

Lots of quality of life improvements over list of files on a smb share.

wildzzz2• 2 days ago

Thats what I used to have 15 years ago when I was streaming over SMB to my Xbox running XBMC. It works but having something like Plex or Jellyfin is just so much nicer. It gives you the "Netflix" experience of browsing your media library. My Jellyfin is setup to offer an automatic "skip intro/credits" button. I used to use Plex and was a yearly subscriber mostly for the ability to download media to my phone for offline playback. Obviously I could do that with an SMB share but Plex (and the others) have built-in transcoding which is nice if you don't have the time or space for a bunch of full size 1080p files.

Now, I use Jellyfin alongside Seerr (so me and others can quickly pick-out media to automatically download in a preset quality). I've also installed a plugin for Jellyfin called Moonfin that offers a ton of quality of life improvements and also integrates Seerr within one app. I just click on a movie or TV season I want, Seerr tells radarr or sonarr to query my private trackers for the selection, and then radarr/sonarr send the torrent to rtorrent. After a few minutes, Jellyfin picks up the files and adds them to the database.

NegativeLatency3• 2 days ago

I can share plex with my friends and family easily. Your solution sounds good but it’s just too hard for most people.

There are plex client apps for most tvs and boxes, even the really cheap bad ones, and it all just kinda works.

SmellTheGlove• 2 days ago

Its missing the wife/husband/child acceptance factor.

drnick1• 2 days ago

One thing that Jellyfin does really well is integrate devices like the HDHomeRun. You can then watch OTA TV from any device on the LAN or elsewhere through the Jellyfin Web portal or dedicated clients for Linux/Android/iOS.

If your HTPC is powerful enough, you should also check out Plasma Bigscreen as a substitute for XFCE4.

lexicality• 2 days ago

I started using it because me and my flatmate had different media libraries and we wanted to share them. Plex very conveniently merged both into a single deduplicated library that we could pick from when watching something on the TV.

dododge• 1 day ago

For me the metadata is a big part of it. I have a large physical media collection so I could just use the discs, but putting it all into plex has made it so much easier to browse and watch. For example I can pause and skim the cast/crew filmographies right in the plex UI, including being able to see what I already have and investigate the stuff I've never heard of for possible future purchases. When watching several movies in a row, after finishing one I can follow the automatically-populated trail of related/similar movies until I find something that fits my mood.

gertrunde• 1 day ago

My jellyfin setup is not that different.

Jellyfin container instance running on a mini pc, reading media from an NFS share on a NAS, organised in a very similar fashion.

The advantage is there is a "native" app on the TV, so everything is very adapted to the TV UX, i.e. remote control driven UI etc.

(And the jellyfin side is relatively disposable, the container can be trashed and redone fairly quickly).

HumblyTossed3• 1 day ago

That’s very detailed. Sounds like you have everything the way you want it. So plex would probably add nothing.

RiverCrochet• 1 day ago

Plex/Jellyfin is for those without a home theater. I typically listen/watch media on my phone or old iPad, or sometimes a laptop. Since Jellyfin works through the browser it covers all these scenarios. On the occasion I have some people over and we want to watch it on a TV I can connect the laptop to the TV.

wink• 9 hours ago

A friend who doesn't live close had one season of a series I wanted to watch and I could stream it from his Plex. I'm not saying this could not have been solved in another easy way, but it worked without friction because he had Plex anyway.

I'm kinda over downloading gigabytes of files and then deleting them after watching. And I'm not doing this regularly so I've not investigated. All I'm saying is that it solved a problem nicely.

unixhero4• 8 hours ago

Yes but do you have no friends and family and are you never outside of your house? I think the answer is hopefully yes to all of these.

hack13122• 2 days ago

$750?!! Holy shit.

benoau• 2 days ago

It's $980 if you buy it through Apple... and the crazy thing is Plex is actually losing $75 if you buy it that way!

spl757• 2 days ago

I remember when Plex wasn't a money grab. Many moons ago.

zerof1l• 2 days ago

Have to admit, quite impressive that someone is still paying this much for Plex given the free alternative like Jellyfin that can do pretty much everything the same.

What’s the psychology here that people are willing to pay this much for this software, yet not even $20 for another?

VPenkov• 2 days ago

It's pretty slick looking which is worth something to me. Not $750, but something. But even though some of the UX choices of Jellyfin didn't make sense to me, it's an amazing piece of software, so I'm sticking with that, and using Wholphin [1] as a frontend.

[1] https://github.com/damontecres/Wholphin

dewey4• 2 days ago

I have a lifetime pass I bought many years ago for not much money, Plex had apps in all Platforms. Jellyfin does not at this point, even though there’s work being done everywhere.

Plex just works and is supporter everywhere. Not that surprising that people use it.

jerf3• 1 day ago

What information do you have that people are actually paying this price?

There are plenty of situations where a business must charge over X for one reason and must charge under Y for another, where Y < X. What happens is generally they go for the "over X" branch for fairly obvious reasons, then go out of business sooner or later because they can't actually charge that. Just the fact that they are trying to charge that much doesn't mean people are paying it.

nvarsj• 1 day ago

Not hard to understand. People will pay for a better UX. Which Plex has, once you disable all the streaming junk.

Also there’s simply more clients for it. The only way to play Bluray Dolby Vision layers correctly is with an AM6B+ which has an amazing Plex frontend.

m4xp• 2 days ago

How is that even a viable business model? I don't know a single self host person that would pay a subscription for something they are hosting

freetime23• 2 days ago

According to this Forbes article [1], Plex earns the majority of their revenue from selling ads in their streaming platform:

Valory said that Plex, which currently does not disclose financial information, generates roughly 20 percent of its revenues from member subscriptions, which unlock premium capabilities of its media platform, compared to 80 percent from the ad business.

So possibly they are just trying to extract as much money as possible from their "legacy" userbase while they can, with the expectation that people hosting their own media libraries are a dwindling market.

Looking at their different features offered in different pricing plans [2], it seems like their strategy is to make money on sharing media libraries with friends and family. $70/year isn't a huge amount to simplify streaming to other (non-technical) people on a variety of different devices. And I suspect some plex users are charging for their access to their media libraries - even if it's something informal like accepting donations or asking for a payment on venmo - in which case the fees would just be a small operating cost.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2024/04/17/venerab...

[2] https://www.plex.tv/plans/

Gareth321• 2 days ago

While I'm a lucky lifetime Plex pass holder, the service I get with my own self hosted setup is leagues ahead of anything I could pay for. I would probably pay for a Plex subscription if I started today. I hope Jellyfin improves its remote streaming UX, subtitle management, and app polish, because it's a pretty good contender otherwise.

iamacyborg2• 1 day ago

There are lots of folks self-hosting the music app Roon and paying for it.

jorvi• 2 days ago

My biggest beef with Plex is that they've pivoted away from being a media server first and are trying to change into a streaming platform first, and because managers inside the company have to show KPI, they're stuffing the streaming buttons and sections and recommendations in everywhere.

Really frustrating because the media server experience is still by far the best.

It really needs to have a "classic" toggle where all the streaming crap is disabled.

baggachipz• 1 day ago

It really needs to have a "classic" toggle where all the [enshittified] crap is disabled.

This can apply to almost any modern application.

soggybread• 1 day ago

Honestly, this is why I stopped using plex. I set up and ran my own server because I wanted to see the stuff I have, mostly digitized family VHS and then suddenly I'm finding movies and shows on my server that I didn't put there.

_superposition_2• 1 day ago

The only good thing about this in my setup is I can add shows/movies to my watchlist from their advertisements and it gets picked up by my arr stack.

pigpag• 1 day ago

I have frozen both my Plex server and app versions to avoid turning them into a streaming app with outdated contents. Ever since they got rid of Camera Upload function it's been going downhill function-wise.

hankbond• 2 days ago

Jellyfin is great for my needs, and I appreciate the effort that goes into it. Recently was having rendering issues doing HDR -> SDR tone mapping since I watch my content on a 2008 era Pioneer plasma display. I found that oddly enough while the server is pretty solid, the client experience is a bit hit or miss. I'm using the mpg-shim adapter, and I'm looking forward to them building a native app with better native render compositing.

postalcoder• 2 days ago

I’m grateful for this team. Jellyfin is a great product. I’ve been using llm + Tailscale + Jellyfin to manage my media box and I couldn’t be more happy. I’ve got perfect metadata, perfect organization, and multimodal search on top of it. What a dream.

RAM-bunctious2• 2 days ago

Great that it's peaceful.

Jellyfin is an amazing project, and works almost exactly how I want it to. By listing and playing my media without autoplaying trailers and other such stuff.

I imagine many here who've never tried it will be of the same mindset

pudgywalsh• 2 days ago

It's not amazing, it's as good as it is. Which is to say not great.

There is a crazy amount of bugs which I have no confidence will ever get fixed.

If you're the type that enjoys tinkering with obscure Linux settings for hours on end, which are certain to break if you dare to update anything, it may be for you.

whynotmaybe• 2 days ago

Maybe it's a Linux thing?

I've been using it on Windows for years with multiple devices and it's been working flawlessly.

Computer02• 2 days ago

I just put media in a folder and then watch it I rarely have to manage my Jellyfin server

doctorpangloss• 2 days ago

I just had an LLM set it up and never had to touch it again.

tick_tock_tick2• 2 days ago

There is a crazy amount of bugs which I have no confidence will ever get fixed.

Like what honestly I've been running one for years and have had nearly zero issues.

zeagle2• 2 days ago

I have no conflict of interest and feel bad for you if you've wasted time on it, but for anyone else who is considering trying it I have literally have had no issues with mine including setting up nvidia hw transcoding on a debian nas. Only thing I can think of is briefly the android tv client lagged on a major version RC so was incompatible till it updated on my box. I have to check the change log sometimes because of how seamless updating has been (kind of like paperless-ngx and immich as another plug!).

type0• 2 days ago

It's probably your config or hardware issues

amiga3863• 2 days ago

While I'd agree that the 10.11.x releases have terrible performance on some APIs to the extent that I rolled back to 10.10.x and marked it as held, until they release 12.x...

Jellyfin is a daily driver for me and works amazingly. I have thousands of films, TV shows, books, music, and it lets me navigate and use them perfectly well.

I have a wonderful little Linux media server.

What sort of bugs affect you?

ErroneousBosh• 1 day ago

If you're the type that enjoys tinkering with obscure Linux settings for hours on end, which are certain to break if you dare to update anything, it may be for you.

Can you suggest an alternative?

Bluescreenbuddy2• 1 day ago

I'm on Windows and it's been close to perfect. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

FatherOfCurses• 1 day ago

I'm sorry that you have had a bad experience.

I have been running Jellyfin in a container on a Linux server for three years now. I am streaming video to Infuse on three Apple TV boxes and music to a Kodi installation on a Raspberry Pi with no issues.

RAM-bunctious2• 1 day ago

Obviously not everyone will necessarily have the same experience as me, but I can't say I've encountered any problems.

I can't actually even think of any bugs. Nor do I have the same patience for tinkering with settings these days. For me, it just works, with the obvious exceptions of allowing it through the firewall, but that's unavoidable.

terminalgravity• 19 hours ago

Not my experience. Only bugs ive had are with it not correctly recognizing a media file. That was fairly easy to correct on a few files. Would be a pain if it missed for many.

xrox• 2 days ago

The three founders are all great people, but there is a gatekeeping issue within the project (I'm heavily involved, so this is a throwaway account).

The constant mocking accusations and hostility toward third-party clients, plugins, themes, and other tools have made Jellyfin's official spaces unbearable. The atmosphere often revolves around the opinions of a small group of people, and anything that falls outside their preferences will result in a ban.

There are two individuals are the primary drivers of this culture.

declan_roberts• 2 days ago

Is it going to get better with these departures?

WD-42• 2 days ago

I believe the person leaving was vibe coding too much for other’s taste, so I assume they aren’t the one with strong opinions.

cvanelteren2• 2 days ago

Can attest to this with my recent interactions on the jellyfin-ios repo.

r0ckarong• 2 days ago

third-party clients

Funny how this is the only thing that keeps me from switching from Emby to Jellyfin is the atrocious state of their "own" apps. My last attempt failed when I had to use their Android client. Since I've discovered Wolphin and Findroid it looks a lot more plausible but I just don't have enough pain and lifetime Emby Premiere was still reasonable when I bought it.

unixhero4• 8 hours ago

The official Jellyfin app for Android is fine and usable now. So is Findroid.

NichoPaolucci2• 2 days ago

I’m surprised people reach for plex, not sure what I’m missing - but a Jellyfin container set up has been fantastic for strictly at home usage (running on an old gaming PC).

It’s fantastic software - the cross platform applications are pretty useable. Don’t think we’ve even had any major issues over the last 4 years using it.

Many thanks to the builders and maintainers, hopefully Andrew can take some rest and know they help a lot of people!

sgc2• 2 days ago

I have a problem that it constantly tries to re-encode video that could be played perfectly fine in their player or the mpv shim. I wound up just mounting my remote drives and playing in my local mpv. I don't really use it because of that. Unfortunate because otherwise I love a lot of things about it.

andwur• 1 day ago

I too have run into this problem on a number of devices. The client's supported codec/media format detection logic appears to be extremely pessimistic. To the point that the mere existence of certain audio track formats and subtitles can trigger transcoding, even when said tracks/subtitles aren't actively used. The same files played via MPV on a file share, i.e. no transcoding possible, play without issue.

I've tried tweaking both the clients and server to be less pessimistic, i.e. see if the active media elements are supported, but even then it really fights it. I think the best approach would be rewrite the clients to adopt a (try || transcode) strategy rather than (guess || transcode), but that looked to be a major piece of work.

port113• 1 day ago

You can check why it’s re-encoding, there’s some guides out there. In my case it was the subtitles! Turns out Safari can’t handle all types of subtitles. Might be worth looking into it.

NamTaf2• 2 days ago

I run JF not plex, but the #1 missing feature I'd like is per-user granular sharing of content within specific libraries.

So far as I can tell, the only way around this is to symlink the subset of media into separate folders, make each of them libraries, then present those libraries to each user.

amlib• 2 days ago

I'm not sure if this is what you want but you can set two lists of tags for each user that works as items blacklists and whitelists. Then you tag whatever media you want with those and they will appear or disappear for that user.

You can find this feature in the admin control panel -> Users -> select an user -> Parental control (tab)

There is also an Access tab, together both can be used to lock things down fairly well.

onel• 2 days ago

That's exactly the problem that I tried to solve with the OS I'm working on. You can have a shared jellyfin instance if you want everyone to access the same library. But you can also create OS users, with their own jellyfin instance, and within that you can set access or only to certain folders. That only have the contents that you want them to access.

It's not as efficient as granting access within jellyfin, but it's pretty close to what you're trying to do.

internet101010• 2 days ago

The Apple TV solutions for Jellyfin are inadequate last I checked. Basically you are stuck with Plex and Infuse. I already have lifetime Plex Pass so no reason to care... for now.

tkcranny• 2 days ago

Infuse is terrific software, and supports jellyfin and smb. I use it for jellyfin and absolutely love my setup.

I ditched plex because of missing Dolby audio support and all the use hostile channels and “features” years ago, and will never look back.

exogenousdata• 2 days ago

Not sure of your issues or when you last tried. I recently installed Plex on my TruNAS. I use the AppleTV app and it works well.

One caveat is that older AppleTVs can’t do native decoding of some mkvs. But that’s largely an AppleTV limitation. Though I could imagine the client being smart enough to list its abilities and the server only serving content supported by the client.

watermelon0• 2 days ago

Plex app is better, but still inadequate compared to Infuse.

maggit• 2 days ago

It's worth noting that Swiftfin finally had a new release for tvOS this summer which is worth checking out if you're interested in Jellyfin on Apple TV

Hikikomori3• 1 day ago

What about moonfin? I use it on shield and it works great.

muppetman• 2 days ago

Because Plex worked amazingly ~5-6 years ago, while Jellyfin was still very early stage. It'd sort of work. So there's a lot of "Well I'm already using Plex" inertia. Plus Plex has very lovely, polished clients, you can easily invite people, share your library with others etc etc. Once they got all that of course, then the changes/fees/ads/bloat started.

Jellyfin is great, it's all I've ever used. But it's still very rough - AppleTV support is limited+buggy (ask my wife...), you can't cast to a Chromecast from iOS etc. Plugins are required for some things to work. Transcoding is harder to get working. Good luck downloading stuff for offline use on the mobile client apps, all you get is the raw movie/tv show file - you have to use VLC to play it.

Again, I love Jellyfin and I use it daily. But we're both kidding ourselves if we think the polished experience you get with Plex is the same as it is with Jellyfin.

schainks• 2 days ago

I bought a cheapo lifetime pass in the early days of plex. Their business leadership decided to make Plex more like a TV than a personal media server, and the UI / UX changes reflected this.

I got a great deal as an early user, but new users have Good Reasons not to use plex anymore.

simonklitj• 2 days ago

Biggest reason for me - for a long time - was no Apple TV app. Using Infuse has fixed that for me, however.

TiredOfLife2• 2 days ago

5 years ago when i bought an LG OLED tv and finally decided to move from SAMBA/Apache/plain files I tried first Jellyfin, but

1. Jellyfin up to to a year or two ago didn't have WebOS client.

2. Jellyfin android client is (was?) just the webclient - so no video or audio codec support.

3. Server ran very poorly on my raspberry pi

so I went with Plex and am still using Plex

noisy_boy• 1 day ago

I run Jellyfin on Raspberry pi and access it with Android app. The main issues I have with the app are:

1. Subtitle management is a total pain. Sometimes it doesn't show any subtitle toggle, sometimes it does. There isn't an option to switch between different subtitles. Adding an external subtitle file on the fly via the app never works for me. One approach that almost always works is to download the subtitle file, rename it to match movie filename, trigger a metadata refresh for the file/library (this requires switching from library view to dashboard view and back so certainly has friction). Also, if you start a movie directly on Chromecast, subtitles don't show even if they have been chosen. However, if you start the movie with subtitles "ON" on the app and THEN stream it via Chromecast, subtitles show up on the TV.

2. Sometimes it has issues with Google Chromecast (puck connecting to my LG OLED TV via HDMI port). I have had better luck with the in-built Chromecast feature of the TV.

The Pi isn't mega snappy when it comes to the lag between button press to actual playback start/end of seeking but it generally works fine once the stream starts playing.

I didn't pay a dime for it so this is not throwing any shade on the Jellyfin team - I am grateful for their work.

mmcnl• 2 days ago

Plex has a great Tizen app. It just works on my TV same as Netflix.

thiht3• 2 days ago

I use Plex because the whole experience looks and feels more polished than Jellyfin (that’s personal but even the name Jellyfin irks me, I hate jellyfish), which is something I value more than openness. Also I bought the Plex lifetime a few years ago during Covid and at that time Jellyfin was nowhere near Plex in terms of user friendliness, Plex already had a TV app, a mobile app with ability to download locally, a feature to share access to anyone with a Plex account, automatic metadata update, etc. I don’t know if Jellyfin has all that even today.

If I were to make a choice today I think my first choice would still be Plex.

Hikikomori3• 2 days ago

Would you pay the $700 today as well?

Jellyfin has all those features now. Sharing servers is harder as you don't have centralized account mgmt, but you can use wizarr to make it simpler.

zeratax2• 1 day ago

every jellyfin app nowadays not only has downloads, but unlike plex it even works relialby

jagermo• 2 days ago

plex runs on most of the commercial NAS you can buy as a simple click-install-works packet, even on the cheap CPUs. It is a very slick tool, but I am happy I moved everything over to jellyfin.

baxuz• 2 days ago

The media player app for android set top boxes like nvidia shield handles different subtitle formats and advanced settings much better than the jellyfin one, especially for anime subs.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 1 day ago

How much music do you have in Jellyfin? I tried it a few weeks ago and it was extremely slow and terrible with my music library. It would take 30+ seconds to load artist pages.

jasonlotito• 1 day ago

I'm surprised people reach for plex

I have a lifetime subscription from 2016. All my friends have Plex, too. It works. We share. Ezpz.

k3liutZu• 1 day ago

I never heard of Jellyfin until now (I might have been living under a rock). Plex has been... fine, though this looks really interesting so I might switch over.

jerf3• 1 day ago

One thing that may help your transition is that you can point both systems at the same media files so it's not an immediate commitment. I did that, then one day Plex borked itself as it periodically did for me and I just didn't bother fixing it.

jkman• 1 day ago

Plexamp is still head and shoulders above anything comparable on the jellyfin side.

dabbz• 1 day ago

I have been using Plex since 2014, paid for the lifetime pass back then. It is by-far the most used piece of software I've ever relied on (excluding any general purpose software like OS/Browser).

I have my family setup on Plex, my automations, my apps, my preferences, etc. I'm so comfortable in Plex that until they do something catastrophic to my experience, I can't find the motivation to train my mother to use another app.

Varelion• 2 days ago

This UI is YUMMYYY

AdmiralAsshat• 2 days ago

Now here we are 7-and-a-half years later, and it's the #1 FLOSS media server

Source? How does its install base compare to Kodi's?

Hobadee2• 2 days ago

Kodi isn't a media server. Plex isn't FLOSS. Emby is what Jellyfin was forked from, and barely classifies as FLOSS anymore, and isn't as popular as Jellyfin from what I can tell. There isn't really anything else that I am aware of. Jellyfin being the #1 FLOSS media server makes sense to me, although I don't think there are really any viable #2s.

saint_yossarian• 2 days ago

Kodi does have bultin server functionality (both DNLA and a web interface), it's just less commonly used that way, and I don't think transcoding is supported without plugins.

cr125rider• 2 days ago

Small plug to ask for help with the Apple TV App? Swiftfin is really rough but the best option. It’s quite terrible, never refreshes, overlapping text constantly. It could use some love.

JamesSwift4• 2 days ago

I tried to get involved (in very minor ways) a while back but got basically no engagement from the project so I just let it be. I moved to infuse instead as my ios client and its been good overall. I really hate its list performance on large collections though.

magarnicle• 2 days ago

Yeah Infuse is actually usable.

dantetheinferno• 2 days ago

Same. I wrote a really big upgrade to the Jellyfin iOS App to support Chromecast (https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-ios/issues/16), got crickets :(

Best of luck to the folks leaving. Supporting OSS isn't easy.

clayhacks• 2 days ago

There’s some alternatives. I like JellyTV, pretty smooth UI. Streamyfin has a beta for the TV as well, and continues to improve. But yeah definitely some of the tougher part of the ecosystem

dd8601fn3• 2 days ago

I had some issues with it too, though not as bad as you seem to have experienced. Good new is they're reworking it, heavily, and seem to be near a new release.

For my own purposes I cloned it and pushed the build to my AppleTV... and it's considerably better than the last app store release (quite a while ago).

I'm not suggesting anyone do the same, but just saying your problems might be about to solve themselves.

eisa01• 2 days ago

They just released the first update in years, v1.5

I understand it will be kept in sync from now on

Requires tvOS 26

stasomatic3• 1 day ago

Infuse is polished, I lack nothing in it on ATV.

JamesSwift4• 1 day ago

The way they do their list rendering is infuriating for large collections. Instead of showing titles + shimmer, its just big blobs of loading placeholders. So to find where you are in your list of movies you have to stop scrolling and let the content finish loading to get your bearings.

Its minor overall, but as a former app dev, poor list performance drives me crazy.

Hikikomori3• 1 day ago

I use moonfin on my shield, seems to exist for apple tv?

tbeseda• 1 day ago

Keep an eye on Neptune. I used Swiftfin, switched to Infuse, and am now using Neptune daily. It's coming along really nicely.

https://neptuneplayer.com

buffer_overlord2• 2 days ago

Checkout media streamer project on GitHub

NegativeLatency3• 2 days ago

Why? It’s got crypto stuff in it?

buffer_overlord2• 1 day ago

https://github.com/profullstack/media-streamer

thaumasiotes4• 2 days ago

Note that the headline doesn't reflect the post. Here's the beginning:

Hello everyone. Effective yesterday, Anthony and I [Joshua Boniface] decided to depart from the project, myself as Project Leader, and he as a core team member. This is in addition to the resignation of Andrew on Friday.

"Several core team members including the founder leave" looks a bit different from "founder leaves".

Hobadee2• 2 days ago

Also an important note is that they are leaving on good terms. Headline made me terrified that some bad drama was going down, but they are just ready to move on and committed to clean handoffs to whoever owns it going forward.

no-name-here• 2 days ago

Plus the title only mentions 1 person while 98% of the linked article is about 2 other people, neither of which are only person mentioned in the title. And the linked article doesn’t even have any link to find out about the founder leaving, the only person named in the title.

mvanbaak4• 1 day ago

So, is there anyone left? /s

cube00• 2 days ago

I simply could no longer provide the effort (mental or time-wise) that the role demanded, and thus I was not performing my duties to an acceptable degree, facing severe burnout, and risks to my mental health.

[...]

We've proven that FLOSS works, and is in demand.

If "FLOSS works" maintainers shouldn't be "facing severe burnout", I've come across two more in the past week alone:

* Filebrowser (Mar 2026): https://hacdias.com/2026/03/11/filebrowser/

* axum-login / tower-sessions (last week): https://github.com/maxcountryman/axum-login/discussions/330

squigz• 2 days ago

Do people doing non-FLOSS work not also sometimes face severe burnout?

ThrowawayTestr2• 2 days ago

Yes but those people aren't doing it as a hobby.

hnarn2• 2 days ago

If "FLOSS works" maintainers shouldn't be "facing severe burnout"

So your success criteria for ”FLOSS works” is that zero people involved in it experience stress related issues?

HumblyTossed3• 1 day ago

FLOSS works because when maintainers need to leave the project doesn’t die.

mvanbaak4• 1 day ago

This is more common in FLOSS then in corporate/closed source projects.

dingi• 2 days ago

Appreciate your hard work over the years. Jellyfin is a great product that I have been self hosting for years. Wish you guys the best. Thank you.

luciana1u• 2 days ago

the fact that Jellyfin works as well as it does with a rotating cast of maintainers might be the strongest argument for open source I've seen this year

bob10293• 2 days ago

There's never been a better time to consider writing your own media server solution from scratch.

I really don't like the idea of transcoding on demand. It has always created a janky experience on the client. I've been using a custom solution that runs everything through ffmpeg normalization as part of the media upload phase. Whenever a client wants to stream something we give them raw byte ranges directly from the block storage provider. In practice, this feels like flipping the channels on an analog tv. Every video starts and seeks nearly instantly.

I've long since given up on the dream of maintaining lossless master copies of everything just in case. Every practical use of that 50 gb copy of Home Alone would have you transcoding it. Most clients would choke on that bit rate. When would you actually be able to use all of the available information? Why not just discard what you'll never use? I realize it feels offensive to kill information like this but you can do a much better job with the end experience if you do.

You can get a modern chatbot to produce this experience in a single prompt. The code can run on anything slightly more powerful than a potato because you aren't transcoding at playback time anymore. A raspberry pi would be more than enough to serve a few clients on a LAN. If you remain humble in your list of demands (a simple directory browser that plays videos linked within), you can more easily achieve total autonomy.

FrinkleFrankle• 2 days ago

Sounds cool. Care to share it?

bob10293• 2 days ago

I just did. Put the above into your favorite chat bot and append your preferred language, runtime environment and block storage provider.

butvacuum• 2 days ago

sounds like a bastardized HTTP Live Streaming implementation- which is now fully supported by ffmpeg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

gib444• 2 days ago

Things are fast and simple when you ignore tradeoffs, such as extra disk space requirements

bambax4• 2 days ago

Transcoding on demand is just trading compute for storage. If you have infinite storage you can store all definitions in advance for any possible client (I think that's what Netflix does); but if you don't, transcoding on demand is fine and isn't that much slower (a bit janky, yes, but only a bit).

eviks• 2 days ago

But since you don't have an infinite number of clients, just a few, there is no need for infinite storage

jdboyd• 1 day ago

I think most people would find that two or three definition is all they really need. 1080p h264 at high bit rate for compatibility on the local network and low bit rate 1080p for streaming remotely or to save space in local downloads for a trip.

HumblyTossed3• 1 day ago

Transcoding on demand is just trading compute for storage.

And storage is getting expensive AF.

gamblor956• 2 days ago

You just described Plex 0.1.

There's a reason they turned to transcoding: it means every device can get the highest quality version it is capable of displaying. Your solution limits the video to the lowest common supported quality.

jeremycarter• 2 days ago

Check out https://siloserver.org . Silo has its own API but also spins up a Jellyfin-protocol compatibility layer. This allows you to use any Jellyfin client and just point it at your Silo server.

szmarczak• 2 days ago

It's another vibe coded slop

dewey4• 2 days ago

You can get a modern chatbot to produce this experience in a single prompt.

If you value your time that little and you get more joy out of building apps for multiple platforms instead of watching movies then this is the best choice. For everyone else it's probably better to just go with any of the hundres of solutions that went through years of bug fixing and pain already to get it working on all these platforms.

bob10293• 1 day ago

Quite the straw man we've constructed here.

I am the exclusive user and I only watch from browsers on laptops and desktops attached to whatever display and audio outputs. I suspect this describes a non-trivial portion of the audience here as well. I don't care about someone being able to watch my media collection on Xbox because I don't have one.

JamesSwift4• 1 day ago

We should be clear about software vs hardware transcoding being different things. Hardware transcoding is "free" for even commodity hardware. Yes, lower end systems might have trouble keeping up with a blu-ray remux as its source to a high-bitrate target. But you can very easily buy an off the shelf mini-pc to act as a transcode-capable server and eliminate nearly all the downsides that come with trying to avoid transcoding.

Mixtape• 1 day ago

Just to supplement your point with an anecdote: my first "proper" Jellyfin host was a retired Optiplex 3020. I added a 128GB SSD through one of those silly CD drive bay adapters and threw in a Quadro P400 that I bought off of eBay. On top of that, the actual server ran Proxmox with Jellyfin nested in an LXC container. By all accounts, the machine was a janky pile of e-waste given a new, horrible life through sheer stinginess.

There were quirks (mostly self-imposed ones) to getting the whole thing set up, but it ran like a champ for the better part of a year. Hardware transcoding really does make a world of difference, even in the worst of cases.

driverdan• 1 day ago

Every practical use of that 50 gb copy of Home Alone would have you transcoding it. Most clients would choke on that bit rate.

What clients are you using? I use the highest bitrate HDR videos possible. I very rarely have to transcode. 4k TVs are cheap as are 4k streaming devices.

The main case for transcoding is playing a video in a browser that doesn't support the original codec. Everything can handle high bitrate streams now. The one other rare exception is video that's over 100Mbit/s. I've encountered a few that are that high and some streaming boxes can only handle 100Mb.

jerf3• 1 day ago

"There's never been a better time to consider writing your own media server solution from scratch."

If you want to go the hacker route, and do not give a flying fig about UI, you can get a long way just by setting up any old webserver that has range support (which is most of them) and serving out directories with video files and some sort of automated index. You don't even need to do any work. Browsers already are smart enough to hit a video file, extract the playback metadata with range requests and provide native seeking, speed management, and some of the other basics. Plus you get native "right click (or equivalent) -> download" support without anything giving you hassles.

On the one hand, it's missing a lot of features. On the other hand, it can't be beat for simplicity and the bang-for-the-buck is pretty good. And anything capable of A: running an HTTP server at all and B: has enough storage to store the files can saturate whatever network it is on with video data if you want it to.

dundarious• 1 day ago

If the novel parts are don't transcode, and clean up before adding to library, then you can just do that, right? Without having to create a frontend, which is the fiddly part (especially since losing the AppleTV client I can use with Jellyfin server would be a sacrifice). It's pretty easy to, for example, make a python script that grabs metadata from tmdb when given a URL (so the script has no need for disambiguation logic -- that's what humans are for), generate an ffmpeg command that adds that metadata, and does whatever re-encoding/re-muxing you want. Can embed subtitle files this way too.

e.g., of generated command: ffmpeg -y -hide_banner -i /mnt/storage/rips/bluray.mkv -i ./eng.sdr.srt -map 0:v -map 0:a -map 1 -c:v copy -c:a copy -c:s mov_text -metadata:s:a:0 language=eng -metadata:s:a:0 title=eng -metadata:s:s:0 language=eng -metadata:s:s:0 title="English (SDR)" -disposition:s:0 hearing_impaired -metadata title="Film Title" -metadata genre="Pretentious Comedy" -metadata artist="Alan Smithee" -metadata date=2026 -f mp4 -movflags +faststart "/mnt/storage/movies/Film Title (2026).mp4"

Do whatever encoding you want in advance too of course. Note, the above is generated from a script (not created manually) that is run like `./cleanvideo.py ./bluray.mkv ./eng.sdr.srt https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/985-eraserhead`

After doing this for over a decade, I find that Jellyfin, or even just a caddy directory listing, make a great media library browser. Jellyfin will almost never identify things incorrectly. Can always fall back to just listing things and playing your content with `mpv https://machine.tailnet-name.ts.net/movies/...` even remotely given the use of tailscale. Or VLC from my phone, etc.

karhuton• 2 days ago

Big thank you for your work!

Has made managing kid’s TV viewing at home easier over streaming services.

tomaskafka• 2 days ago

Reminder that you don't need a powerful transcoding server and engine - I have been running for years with simple WebDAV on my NAS, and Infuse as a comfortable client on all apple devices.

amiga3863• 1 day ago

The title here is burying the lede and should be updated to something like "Jellyfin founder, project leader and core contributer all leave the project".

It's not just Andrew [Rabert] leaving. This is an announcement by Joshua Boniface (the current project lead) and Anthony Lavado (a core contributor) announcing that they're leaving too.

Boniface's and Lavado's reasons are mostly akin to burnout, or the need for a family life, which I totally understand, especially as Boniface has been the face of the project for quite some time. I use Jellyfin daily, and I know exactly who Boniface is, I hadn't actually heard of Rabert, though I'm grateful for him founding the project. Boniface in particular has lead Jellyfin through huge levels of internal changes, bugfixes and improvements. It is throwing off the janky architecture of Emby, one part at a time.

Rabert's reasons are here: https://github.com/andrewrabert/jellium-desktop/issues/609

An obvious sore point is that Rabert has been AI-coding the Jellyfin desktop app, while the community (who bear the brunt of drive-by AI slop) have strongly opposed it. Even if he's a great coder and makes a wonderful desktop app with the aid of AI, that seems irreconcilable. Every wannabe contributor who shits up the project and wastes volunteers time with AI slop will say "you let that guy add his AI generated stuff, why not me?"

So he's leaving the Jellyfin project and he's going to rename his desktop app, to see if it stands on its own merits as a third-party Jellyfin client, rather than an official project. I wish the best of luck to him.

Even with that angle, it's true that the "Jellyfin community" (which includes all bug reporters, users on forums, etc.) can be very rude, directly to the contributors who may have inadvertantly added bugs. And Jellyfin is going through some growing pains, for example their 10.11.x series rewrote all the database handling to be a much better fit for the language (from raw SQL to .NET EF Core), which gives them a much more stable base to make changes upon, but it also had some performance regressions that rendered some third party Jellyfin apps unusable. (Those third parties' advice is not to upgrade). But at the same time, the project is getting there, supporting developers who are systematically fixing those regressions. The project has thousands of bug reports, but it also has thousands of fixes, and thousands of merged PRs. They are keeping up with the demand. I have every confidence Jellyfin 12.x will be great, and I'm looking forward to the new possibilities for plugins and enhancements it will open up.

aynyc• 1 day ago

Please execute my ignorance. And this isn't an attack on anyone, just my own stupid limited understanding.

Aren't JellyFin & Plex essentially just a catalog for your local data (most likely torrented movies, etc.) in a web app? If so, what's the big deal?

edit: ah, i missed the BIG transcoding part.

roygbiv2• 1 day ago

I can browse to jellyfin on my phone, ipad, laptop, TV etc watch any format (since it will transcode on the fly) and watch whatever I was watching from wherever I left it. It will also obviously know where I'm up to in any series so if I start watching something else I can go back to it at a later date.

danpalmer• 1 day ago

They do a bit more than this. They do streaming and transcoding for a start, that's fairly essential for a functioning video platform. They also have native apps for a range of platforms. Support subtitles, multiple audio tracks, all sorts of codecs. And then there's all the metadata stuff as well, getting blurbs, posters, ratings, categorisations, episode naming (which has so many awkward edge cases) etc all from various metadata services. Oh and they do this all with multiple users and ACLs.

Plex also then adds social features and curation. The value of that to its users is debatable, but it's additional complexity regardless.

These are pretty big projects. A founder moving on is a fairly big deal.

GolfPopper2• 1 day ago

A friend or relative can stream the content over the internet via Plex or Jellyfin (through a Roku, or other streaming device) via a UI that is very, very easy to use. Plex is a way for my non-technical aunt to easily interact with my media server from her home three states away.

Thev00d00• 1 day ago

Sure its a catalog of your local media served via an API, with metadata enrichment, built in transcoding (hardware support too) and multiple user support (watch history, recommendations etc).

Its not just a web app, I would say most dont use the web app directly, instead they provide clients (Android/iOS/Roku/AndroidTV/WebOS/Tizen) that are in official app stores. This is the big thing for me, being able to just install the client on your TV and not worry about it is great.

Often the clients are just wrappers of the web client with native integrations, but they work well.

Plus there are loads of 3rd party plugins to extend it, and alternate clients, Im a fan of https://github.com/jeffvli/feishin for music duties personally.

lorreyfum• 1 day ago

I run a local iptv server that serves up all my content, easy peasy

IAmBroom5• 1 day ago

I'd prefer to be exclusively on Jellyfin. It simply has more features that I use - specifically, collections are great non-hierarchical groupings.

But periodically my system will refuse to see the Tailscale server, and I'll have to do some black magic tech operation like reinstalling to get it back.

Additionally, guiding a friend remotely through installing both Jellyfin and Tailscale is far more effort than saying, "Find Plex in your media sources."

lthi747• 1 day ago

Well, good luck Andrew and Anthony!

Jellyfin is great project and good software when is working, unfortunately for me it doesn’t works very well. Constantly have issues with playback, files indexing and watch statuses that not marked, but that are small issues compred to the hell with subtitles. Very often out of sync (if they load)

So I switched to nova player and sharing my tv shows and music collection over SMB. It isn’t issueless, but at least more smooth amd leas complex.

Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

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