Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
https443
metadat
I've always wondered why Jellyfin doesn't have better support for parsing Scene release names, which follow strict naming conventions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_(warez)
https://scenerules.org/t.html?id=2020_X265.nfo
99% coverage is achievable via a few straightforward regexes.
Don't get me wrong though, I really like and appreciate Jellyfin, especially on Apple TV with Swiftfin, it's my daily driver for big screen entertainment and it's amazing, 10e9 times better than Chromecasting from a laptop to GoogleTV, which is just a horrible UX (no pause button on the TV) and also would randomly freeze for 5-30 seconds every few minutes.
Plex was nice too, and works great if you are okay with being at the mercy of a closed system for your media center. Though I sure don't miss those pointless forced UI "downgrade in functionality" updates!
deadbunny
Jellyfin parses scene naming conventions fine. I have thousands of films and hundreds of TV shows (with thousands of episodes) all in scene name format and I can think of a handful of matching errors on Jellyfish but it's usually due to a commonish film name and a wrong year or something similar.
metadat
I agree it works most of the time, but sometimes falls flat on it's face. Especially for TV episodes and even entire seasons.
majkinetor
The same. I basically never edit metadata. I rarely add IMDB id when slip happens.
undefined
snapplebobapple
You can automate that with sonarr/radarr/lidarr. Works like a dream.
nicoco
Add prowlarr and bazarr for the full win.
snapplebobapple
the full win would also include 2 instances of readarr, once for ebooks and one for audio books, whisparr for your 18+ needs, stash for your 18+ needs frontend, and I think audiobookshelf and kavita to play the audiobooks and ebooks respectively. If you're into comics you might also want to throw mylar3 in there and if you have multiple users (aka a spouse and/or offspring) you may want to throw ombi in there too.
politelemon
Prowlarr is a deitysend. Instead of having to configure indexers in Sonarr, it does the heavy lifting for you. Goes in, configures an indexer, and that's your search setup done.
Remmy
Toss in RDClient for real-debrid support via the qbitorrent plugin in sonaar/radarr and it's fantastic.
Cyph0n
I use Prowlarr as it’s tightly integrated with the *arr stack, but Jackett is another great option if you don’t need that.
croutonwagon
What do prowlarr and bazarr do
BrandoElFollito
I use the full stack and all very grateful for the products.
The remaining annoyances are:
- lack of multi language support
- there is no connection between the systems when you want to remove a movie (you remove it in one place and everything knows about that and acts accordingly)
- I still did not make to fully grasp how and where to say "I do not want this particular release". I think I saw that in radarr but it never is obvious to me where it is.
j1elo
Yeah I was initially surprised when learning about the *arr stack for the first time, as my intuition was very insistently telling me: "I must be gettint it wrong, these ought to be all a single service!!"
They all definitely feel like small parts of a single package, don't look like they merit being their own thing. But it's not my thing, so what do I know.
l__l
Honestly I just think the concept of Son/Radarr doesn't translate well to music, I find Lidarr fiddly in general.
In particular I'd add to your list that the overnight scans to update cover art are an absolute mess. It's not so big a deal on my libraries in Sonarr and Radarr, but for Lidarr? Jesus Christ. I have reasonably sized music library (~400/500 gig), and every night Lidarr starts phoning out to check, for every single album and artist, whether the associated cover art or artist image has changed. This takes hours, and is completely unnecessary, and cannot be turned off. I've resorted to just blocking the addresses it does this on, but this breaks things when I try and use it to add new music.
lavezzi
> there is no connection between the systems when you want to remove a movie (you remove it in one place and everything knows about that and acts accordingly)
Not following this. Settings -> Connections in Sonarr for example.
zackify
I’ve been using it for a year. I don’t name anything in a special way, and it just works.
quaintdev
Yup running it on RPi with external hard drive. No need to name anything.
seanp2k2
As rPi 4Bs are hard to get still / overpriced, unless you’re absolutely married to the rPi, check out OrangePi 5B for a much faster CPU, more RAM, eMMC, and good wifi OR get the 5+ for the same minus wifi (it has an E-key m.2 to add it) but adds a 2280 m.2 so you could throw a 4TB m.2 SSD on there (which are about $200 now) and now you’ve got a pretty dang good little NAS that’s fast and fanless for about $350-400 all-in. Did I mention the 5+ has 2x 2.5G Ethernet?
itsrobforreal
My pi3b with 3 512GB flash drives streams perfectly in 720p and uses less power than the lamp next to the sofa, what a time to be alive
randomluck040
How would you rate the performance? Is it sufficient for 4K HDR streams over your network?
ufish235
Which model Synology? I am looking into one of the dual/quad core Celeron models because I heard the iGPU is critical for any kind of transcoding.
syntaxing
Not OP, but you pretty much have to run the Celeron ones. I don't think the docker image would work with the Realtek ones (the ones that end in j). I have a DS220+ (J4025 with dual core only). It works ok, you pretty much max out one of the cores running a 4K stream. I would recommend separating the storage and server if you can afford it. The price difference between the quad core (4 bay) and 2 core (has 2 bay) is enough to get a 2 bay + a N95 mini pc that can handle 4 streams of 4K.
seanp2k2
Another idea is to get a thin client with an i7 or i9 (you probably want at least 10th gen at this point) and either an external enclosure for a few SSDs or if you find one with a PCIE slot, a PCIE card to fit maybe 4x m.2 SSDs. Some good deals are out there on U.2 SSDs if you look as well, like 8TB for $400 from Intel or WD good.
Don’t forget that Asrock Rack and Supermicro sell Atom and Xeon-D boards, as well as some Ryzen AM4/5 models if you want to DIY. There are great cases out there (eg Fractal Node 304/804) these days that support full-size modular PSUs with 80+ Titanium ratings to sip power. That’s been my biggest gripe with x86 over ARM: idle power usage for something I expect to have on 24x7 with PG&Es 50c/kWh. I just rebuilt my old desktop 5950x into a NAS using a Silverstone RM44 with air cooling, but it’s made to support liquid as well. That’s got plenty of room to fit 4X full-size GPUs and a power supply to match if you dabble with AI on the side. RTX 4060s are coming soon for $300 and that should be more than enough power for transcodes for the whole family.
https443
It worked on my older "DS 216+II". Could not stream more than 1 person at a time though. That was ok for my usage but not sure for yours.
I recently upgraded to "DS 423+" and it's a lot faster - can have multiple streams going if I want.
ufish235
Do you ever notice/regret the fact that it only has 1GBe instead of 2.5?
coldacid
It was the same thing with Emby.
Drybones
I switched to Jellyfin from Plex cause of it being open source and having AMD/VA-API transcoding support
I’ve enjoyed it a but more cause I feel like I can do more on the server end. I recently started to use Infuse on my Apple TV for it cause turns out that Swiftfin, still in development, doesn’t have a license for Dolby Audio formats.
But the development cycle for Jellyfin and the clients looks healthy, unlike Plex which seems to have stagnated. The next gen Jellyfin Web UI (Jellyfin Vue) is looking good too
Jellyfin is also pretty forgiving about my file names but I am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I have a complex script to process movie and tv show filenames and folders. You can also override the metadata with the Identify function on the media page context menu.
beeb
Unfortunately I had a pretty bad experience with jellyfin when trying to switch from plex. Plex works for me in almost all scenarios, mobile, desktop, chromecast, what have you. And I can play multiple feeds simultaneously from my cheap Nuc server. With Jellyfin I had trouble to get video even playing without stuttering/buffering on my phone when on the same network, let alone on mobile internet. I'll probably give it another go in a few months to see how they evolved.
FractalParadigm
That about lines up with my Jellyfin experience ~18 months ago, although I was coming from (and switched back to) Emby at the time, which Jellyfin was forked from (still evident by all the Emby/MediaBrowser references in folder and file names). Which, IMO, was really interesting, because the codebases were very close to identical for some time yet Emby was orders of magnitude more reliable. I have more and more family accessing my server each month to the point I've almost run out of 'devices' allowed by an Emby 'license,' making Jellyfin a more attractive offering going forward... assuming they've fixed the problems they had at the start.
growingentropy
Hmmm...I might suggest looking into the transcoding settings and changing some things next time you take a look. Because I run Plex alongside Jellyfin (the wife prefers Plex's UI once I tweak it), and it typically runs just as efficiently if not a bit more.
muti
I had some issues with Jellyfin that weren't due to transcoding, still not sure what the cause was.
I had a 2nd gen chromecast that would play half a second and fail, something to do with the data format I think as there was some shenanigans with changing the media container but no real transcoding happening. Solved by getting a newer chromecast which was a nice upgrade anyway.
I also had problems playing on my phone, the integrated player in the app would play video fine while the UI was interacted with, so tapping continuously worked. The picture would freeze up though. Playing through the web UI on the phone worked fine, but I prefer the app. Changing the media player from the integrated to externally through VLC solved that.
So I've found it a bit rough in some cases for me, but there are a ton of Jellyfin apps with nice UI. The core work (transcoding etc) is done by ffmpeg by all the big players (plex, emby, jellyfin) so don't expect much differentiation there.
d21d3q
As other comments suggest, this might be due to transcoding. There is tool Tdarr which transcodes media in advance. h264 could be the safest choice for mobile (hw support) and web.
manmal
Plex might have been stagnating, but it works kinda flawlessly for me. I run it in Docker at home and through a reverse proxy on a cheap VPS (don’t want to expose any ports at home) and even that works really well - the iOS app automagically switches between remote and local networks. Hardware transcoding (Intel) just works, even in Docker. Media scanning is very snappy. User management and parental controls look powerful enough, at least after having bought Plex Pass.
NoMoreNicksLeft
> Plex might have been stagnating,
It's not stagnating, so much as they have decided that their initial market doesn't interest them. They were writing software for end users that let end users set up their own person Netflix. But maybe the revenue was unexciting or just insufficient, and now they want to be their own streaming service.
Their streaming service sucks (they're probably at least two orders of magnitude too small to be able to afford to do it right, maybe even 3 or 4), and contaminates the searches on my server with their junk.
Also, it might be true that they're just afraid of the liability of doubling down on their original market. Contributory infringement and all that. This is almost certainly the reason they haven't expanded to include media like ebooks and audio books and karaoke. I mean they have the perfect paradigm for all of these things... the same software that keeps track of where I am in a season of shows, or halfway through a movie could definitely keep track of where I am in a book, if they wanted to.
This isn't entirely speculation on my part... at some point someone had asked them about preroll trailers for new seasons (Archer might be the most fun for these), but they said that they wouldn't add the feature because there was no legitimate source for those videos (even though just ripping them with youtube-dl is dead simple).
thrashh
I paid Plex for a lifetime pass a long time ago and unless something changes, I will likely never pay them again and somehow I expect more features.
So it’s not surprising they’re looking at other sources of revenue if they expect to continue paying for developers, hosting and the entire company.
I also don’t see how ripping with youtube-dl is relevant. They need a legal source from somebody, maybe with a SLA, that they can sign a contract with, not set up some hack.
manmal
Insightful points, thank you. I only don’t know about the infringement part - Hollywood seems to be the most litigative group, and Plex has them fully covered.
Arn_Thor
There are excellent plugins to manage audiobooks and several spectacularly good apps for playback though. Don’t know about ebooks
epcoa
> I run it in Docker at home and through a reverse proxy on a cheap VPS (don’t want to expose any ports at home)
What is the benefit of running the reverse proxy vs just opening the port? It would seem whatever attacks viable on the directly opened port could just as well be carried out on the proxy port.
manmal
If the attack is an application layer (Plex) exploit, then yes, I'll still have a problem. But, having a reverse proxy which handles TLS handshakes does provide extra security against a lot of attacks. I trust nginx to be better hardened than the Plex server.
Also, all traffic is tunneled through wireguard and my home IP has no ports open. Since I'm behind CGNAT, my home is really hard to DDoS now. If I'm ever attacked, I'll just turn off the VPS.
Ultimately, I had the choice between paying €2/month for a fixed IPv4 at my ISP, or spend a little more (€5) on a Hetzner VPS that would also give me space for hosting some websites with a great uplink. So I went with the latter.
I will likely add CrowdSec soon which will give additional protection. To my knowledge, it's not available for Plex without a reverse proxy.
I've also contemplated using Cloudflare Zero Trust (Cloudflare Access) instead, and might yet switch to it - I just refrained from it for now because I read on Reddit that running Plex through that might be a ToS violation (streaming). I've to check the ToS and see if that's true. Also, I run a Minecraft server for my kids and their friends, which isn't compatible with Cloudflare ZT, so - I need the reverse proxy anyway.
crispyambulance
> ...am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I have a complex script to...
It seems crazy to me that Plex and other media libraries effectively require you to follow persnickety file-naming conventions. I am very much in the minority of folks who think that you should just be able to point these media servers to a file, tell it what that file is, and then have it maintain associations so you can query your media in arbitrary ways to make a playlist or whatever-- no filenames changes needed.
ubercow13
I think you can do that, there is an informal standard for xml files which can live alongside the media with metadata info. I'm not sure if Jellyfin can create them directly but it can read them. See for example tinymediamanager
crispyambulance
Tinymediamanager looks really cool. Much nicer than filebot!
Musky
> I am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library to the point where I have a complex script to process movie and tv show filenames and folders.
I'm curious to know why you chose to write a custom (and complex) script yourself instead of using something like Sonarr/Radarr for this task? Does your script do something that the *arr apps are not capable off or is there another reason?
growingentropy
I hand-change every file name.
Please tell me I'm an idiot and show me a better way. Lol it won't save me the hundreds of movies I've put in "Title (year).type" format, but it will save some future work.
Musky
The *arr suite of apps is made to automate the whole process of building up your media library. You have Prowlarr for managing your download sites and clients, Sonarr/Radarr for TV shows/movies, Lidarr for music, Readarr for books, etc.
These apps can be self hosted and are fully open source. The basic workflow is that you add a movie/show, it automatically searches all of your download sites for the title, chooses the best download based on your filter criteria (resolution, size, etc.), sends it to your download client and then places the movie/show into your library based on the folder/file naming pattern you specified previously.
You can choose to automate as much of the process as you want or do most of it manually. E.g. grabbing new episodes as soon as they air vs supplying your own files (if you rip your media yourself for example) and only letting the program do the part of renaming and moving your files.
katbyte
The *arr applications can automate it but I personally don’t like doing it that way, unless you are good with your quality profiles bad files can overwrite good and it’s not the best with removing unnecessary files
I use a program called filebot which uses the same metadata sources as Emby/jellyfin and will automatically rename and move files.
So sonarr/radarr queue things up in rutorrent that saves to a temporary location and then I drag to filebot to rename, skim the results for things going weird, and tell it to move em
rodgerd
I let the Ember Media Manager work out the hard stuff around this for me. It is (generally) extremely good about parsing things, scraping the right details, and producing INFO/NFO files that Kodi, Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, etc will recognise.
The only irritation is that it's Windows-only, but it has saved so much pain and aggravation. It can also auto-rename/restructure your filesystem, but I've never been brave enough to try that feature.
majkinetor
For me it recognizes basically all the movies without any intervention, downloaded from random places. For those few it can't find, I just put IMDB id in its metadata and its done. For music, I tagged all albums with Picard previously, so each has musicbrainz data and was instantly recognized fully. On boarding for 10TB media center lasted maybe an hour for video and 0 for audio.
joexner
Same here! But for me it was "Title (year in Sumerian Ur dynasty calendar).type"
The only format that stands the test of time, IMO
ThatMedicIsASpy
something like tinymediamanager?
aorth
> am meticulous at making sure the structure and filenames are correct before dumping anything new to the library
Me too! General rules of thumb: as long as your content matches the name on https://www.themoviedb.org/ Jellyfin will recognize it and have excellent metadata, posters, etc. Even if you change the filenames later you can re-scan the library and it will be updated to reflect the new names.
Also see the Jellyfin documentation about media naming for TV series https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ and movies https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/.
29083011397778
> Plex which seems to have stagnated
Besides a pointless re-arranging of the UI, which we all hate, what should they be doing? I'll grant you "Bugs to be quashed", but fewer features to fill, fewer devs on the payroll, and less selling out to make payroll sounds perfect to me.
dang
Related:
From Plex to Jellyfin Media Server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33579209 - Nov 2022 (344 comments)
Better than Netflix: Jellyfin on my NAS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33433880 - Nov 2022 (1 comment)
Why I use Jellyfin for my home media library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33362416 - Oct 2022 (228 comments)
Jellyfin Release – v10.8.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31720125 - June 2022 (14 comments)
Jellyfin: Free Software Media System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28664802 - Sept 2021 (199 comments)
Moving my home media library from iTunes to Jellyfin and Infuse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27462767 - June 2021 (171 comments)
Jellyfin: A Free Software Media System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21986282 - Jan 2020 (173 comments)
Jellyfin is an open source alternative for Plex - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20797851 - Aug 2019 (1 comment)
PUSH_AX
For years I just wanted a good user experience playing video files from my MBP to a TV, I spent a lot of money (on NAS, chromecasts etc), used a lot of software with objectively terrible user experiences (Plex I'm looking firmly at you).
Finally, I discovered the combination of Jellyfin and Infuse App. It works really well.
urbandw311er
I’d be interested to know what you find terrible about the PLEX UX. I’ve been a happy user for years and have found the user interface to be reasonably intuitive. Perhaps dense in places, but certainly not terrible in my opinion.
Timon3
I don't know how to navigate Plex anymore. I used to use it roughly 8 years ago, and it was simple - it showed me my media, I could navigate through it, watch it, and nothing more.
I tried using it again 2 years ago - and I simply couldn't find my media anymore. I logged in with my account, and the settings showed me that it was connected to my server, but it showed me a bunch of random media that I did not add to my server. I couldn't find a way to navigate to my media after a couple of minutes, so I uninstalled it, replaced it with Jellyfin, and never looked back.
Maybe I was too blind to find it, but showing me random media instead of my own is a no-go for a local media server.
atourgates
This is exactly the issue. I’m sure most people who installed Plex did it to stream their own self-hosted media, but now Plex by default shoves in a bunch of streaming BS that they want you to watch, while hiding your own media behind a few clicks.
Plex has always had some minor frustrations, but this is probably enough to make me switch.
benglish11
Yeah some time ago Plex started adding their own content or pushing you to streaming services, probably in an attempt to be more legitimate. I use Plex currently and I remember this being frustrating. With some configuration you can basically remove those options though. I mainly consume Plex through the Apple TV app and the UX (once configured) is above average.
eddythompson80
When you’re setting up a new server, it shows you a bunch of default Libraries for their own media. Unselecting them then should remove them from your list. You can also edit your Libraries list later. Managing Libraries is a pretty import part of Plex UI (and Jellyfin for that matter)
If you don’t know which library on the list to click on or drag around, maybe you’ll have a hard time in general.
JadoJodo
They show their hosted media first thing now, and hide your media behind some clicks.
undefined
atombender
I've used Plex for more than a decade, and I've seen it drop in quality over the years as Plex the company has pivoted towards being a streaming service.
Personally, my main beef is that as a client app, the streaming service stuff has bled into the personal library UI in obnoxious ways. For example, the default "tab" is called "Recommended". This shows some kind of algorithm-based feed of stuff they think you want to watch. This tab is the default even for your own private library. Why would it suggest stuff from a library that I curate? It's very strange. In the browser, it remembers your last active tab to some extent, but the native apps (like on AppleTV) does not. When I open the app and go to a folder, I just see recommended stuff. Similarly, if you go to the screen for a TV show in your library, it will show a "Related shows" section. It's my library, I know what is there, I don't want these spammy algorithmic things.
Occasionally I run into other parts of the app, which invariably try to steer me towards using their streaming service. It's just a constant reminder of how it's no longer designed for my purposes.
urbandw311er
> Why would it suggest stuff > from a library that I curate?
Mostly to try and help save time, eg to suggest you could resume a couple of recently watched episodes that you haven’t finished yet.
Or that you might want to watch something that was just added to the library in the last few minutes.
In most cases this has proved useful to me and I’ve found it to be a timesaver.
PaulHoule
I switch to Jellyfin because Plex was always spamming me to try some off-brand streaming service. I know this behavior is so normalized that even Ubuntu Linux does it now but actions have consequences and it does drive users away.
urbandw311er
I mean to be fair it does need to find a way to pay for itself. I paid for a subscription, removed those streaming channels and I don’t think I have been pestered about them in a long time.
xienze
For me it's two things:
1. You have to use their login service to log into a server that's... self-hosted.
2. The Plex app has very limited codec support, at least on iOS. In particular, I rip directly from disc and Plex would require transcoding for UHDs, or Blu-rays with TrueHD/DTS/etc. audio. Infuse has support for all of that out of the box so my Jellyfin server doesn't do any transcoding at all, and AppleTV/iPad/etc. are more than capable of decoding even full bitrate UHD content.
trhr
Plex is cluttered, messy, not free, not available on all devices, and harder to run on Kubernetes.
I can watch my Jellyfin shows from a Flatpak local client on my desktop, pause and move to my phone, pause and move to my TV. That's three different operating systems, and at no point do they transcode, because it's not going through a browser.
kaetemi
The webOS client runs at an amazing 1fps.
For random episodes Plex decides it must transcode (even though they play just fine over DLNA). (I have transcoding disabled so it just refuses to play those.)
Randomly just a blank screen after the last episode in a deck is done playing.
Resuming from screensaver ends up in a broken user select screen half of the time. One time it was even showing the user select while the remote was still blindly controlling the UI hidden behind the logon, as the last user.
lostlogin
> I’d be interested to know what you find terrible about the PLEX UX
1) Adding new users is harder than it should be (the sharing tab takes me to ‘camera roll’ and ‘synced content’ on my phone. ‘Manage library access’ is the correct section to go to.
2) Getting new users to watch default res (not transcode) is not easy.
3) Deleting the pinned crap that gets added every so often is frustrating.
4) Finding a particular setting when you want it is way too hard - settings are too spread out.
5) Splitting out content is irritating (eg mine versus a library shared with me).
6) The server can end up chewing up an absolute mass of storage with its logs, and app data. This is hard (impossible?) to manage from the UI.
7) Probably not a UI bug, but Plex loses the sound/video sync sometimes. Making the show transcode is the only reliable fix I’ve found. I wish I could chose to advance or regard the audio in settings while watching. Or even better, just not break.
peblos
What does Jellyfin + Infuse give you over simply using Infuse?
I looked at Jellyfin about a year ago and settled on just playing media from my NAS using Infuse but maybe I need to take another look
LTL_FTC
Maybe this doesn’t happen to you but: my infuse app on my Apple TV constantly clears the cache because it gets full. This requires it to rescan my library before I have access to my media. Kind of a pain. Server side processing like with jelly fin would prevent this from happening. This is the reason I bounce back and forth between infuse and Plex on my Apple TV.
leokennis
I also have this all the time. I think it stores the metadata in iCloud (if you configure it) so it does not rescan your media, but it does need to redownload the iCloud data. No other app suffers from this, so I think it’s a bug.
peblos
I have heard/read of people having the same issue but I’ve never experienced this myself thankfully
Recently checked the metadata cache which was about 1.9GB which felt a bit bigger than I’d have expected but I’m not sure what a typical value is
jeanofthedead
My favorite feature of Infuse is how it clears the Metadata cache every single time I launch the app. Takes about 30-45 seconds for it to show all of my media again. Even with plenty of storage space on my ATV4K.
katbyte
This is why I stopped using it and switched back to the Emby app. It takes 5-10 min for it to reload for me.
gytisgreitai
Can you explain more? I am using Infuse with nfs mounted shares and have been pretty happy. Anthing to gain from jellyfin?
syntaxing
Not OP, but jellyfin gives you a web interface and multiple user access kinda like Netflix profiles.
geerlingguy
Very helpful especially in a family where you might want to separate out libraries a bit.
hamandcheese
The main advantage of Jellyfin is that it can transcode on-the-fly, which is important if you want to share with friends and family that have slower or metered internet.
But the unfortunate flipside is it seems like the best clients (so far) do not support transcoding very well, they want to direct stream.
cuban-frisbee
Jellyfin can help with metadata and keeping track of progress for tv shows etc.
xienze
Yeah I run Jellyfin+Infuse at home. The biggest selling point for me is that Infuse has "all the codecs" and I can just throw anything, including full bitrate UHD content at the devices and the server doesn't need to do any transcoding.
leokennis
I have put all my media on a WebDAV reachable machine and pointed Infuse towards it. For me it’s the most convenient option as I have to manage nothing, don’t need to run a server etc. and Incan stream directly on my Apple TV.
treyg
Did you try an Apple TV?
venusenvy47
[dead]
kitsunesoba
Not too long ago I found myself tired of how Plex on my server would periodically break itself and unhappy with how the company was continuing to pivot away from the core product, so I started looking into alternatives.
Jellyfin was the most promising option but unfortunately ended up being unviable for me, because my home server/NAS runs FreeBSD, and by virtue of C#/Mono being a pain to get running on FreeBSD so is Jellyfin. I could work around this with a Linux jail or moving the server over to Linux but I'd really rather not have to do either.
As an side it's a bit odd to me how all of the most complete media server packages heavily rely on either Python or C#, and also a bit frustrating because when they break it not infrequently has something to do with some quirk in either. Would really like to see a media server comparable to Plex written in something less prone to breakage.
afavour
> As an side it's a bit odd to me how all of the most complete media server packages heavily rely on either Python or C#
Why? Not trying to be an ass but there isn’t much in a media server that would warrant it all being written in a lower level language.
Personally I run Plex in a Docker container and basically don’t worry about it at all.
kitsunesoba
The language doesn't necessarily have to be lower level, just less finicky about the environment it's running in.
Docker might technically qualify as a fix, but I'd rather that the software be engineered well enough to not need it.
soulofmischief
I'm not sure that ensuring BSD support is a requirement of well-engineered software. You're welcome to start your own project vs. complaining about Jellyfin, a free and open project. I just wouldn't confuse their product focus with badly engineered software on account of it using a modern language.
Anyway, there is Docker; You could spend the rest of your life shaking your fist, or you could just run it via Docker and be happy that someone else also developed free software to solve these problems for you.
wernercd
> Plex in a Docker container
This... what's it matter if its hard to get running in linux? you only have to get it running once and bam - you run your server in a container of that.
Could take a rocket scientist working on it... but once it's done? it's done. the container maintainer occasionally releases updated versions doing the same thing that worked previously.
I have Plex running on docker on a QNAP with a dedicated graphics card and rarely have issues (other than my own stupidity).
0ld
Well, it was recently added to ports, JFYI
kitsunesoba
Good to hear, it was a few months ago when I was looking and it was still a mess back then. Will have to take another look.
mikehotel
It looks like the port was compiled with a binary SkiaSharp [0] since that requires Google tooling to build. Interesting to see the committer allowing this. Apparently it is not the first time.
LeFantome
Pretty sure recent Jellyfin uses dotnet ( actual Microsoft ) and not Mono.
Python, and increasingly dotnet are already packaged for every distribution I have tried recently.
Dotnet is even being ported to Haiku right now.
What is the challenge in getting these setup?
kitsunesoba
It’s been several months so I forget the exact issue, but at that point whatever the C# runtime was didn’t install cleanly without manually building a specific branch or somesuch, with no official package being available for FreeBSD.
GlumWoodpecker
Is Docker not an option? As far as I can tell, Docker is available on FreeBSD, and Jellyfin has a Docker image available, I've been using it for a few years at this point (on Linux, though).
secstate
I happily run Jellyfin in a jail using: https://github.com/Thefrank/jellyfin-server-freebsd
It's not an official build, but its been very reliable for me.
undefined
lostmsu
I tried it, but ended up just using file shares. The biggest issue for me is that it does not automatically recognize many movies by their short names instead linking to some obscure thing with a similar name. For instance, since files can not have colon in the name, and many movies do, it gets confused about the title. Another similar issue is about shows and how it recognizes their folder and file structures.
In the end it seems easier for me to just navigate the folder structure and look up any metadata by googling, because I add shows and movies more often than have urges to look up random character's actor.
Oh, and web client doesn't play 5.1
ryandrake
Another "just share files" user checking in. There are dozens of us!
Old school NFS/SMB has "just worked" for me for decades. It's free, uses almost zero server resources, is easy to add content to (just copy a file), and it isn't going to change out from under you when its developer decides to monetize you.
If you really must have a pretty front-end for your TV or whatever, there's Kodi, which is also old-school, free, runs on everything, and so on. My only gripe with Kodi is the same gripe I have with every other media player system out there: They all seem to insist on grafting their own "library" concept onto your already-existing and perfectly-functioning filesystem. I just added that file to my filesystem. Why do I need to add it again to the in-app "library?"
venusenvy47
[dead]
asylteltine
[dead]
branon
Your filenames can't have colons in them? Sounds like a side-effect of keeping compatibility with 30 year-old Microsoft filesharing protocols. Samba is cool and everything but SMB has no advantages over NFS, SSHFS, or even bind mounts on the same host.
jeroenhd
The Windows colon file limitation is annoying, but I've never had trouble with it. Autodetection always seems to work for me, even if the name gets a little mangled (unless tvdb doesn't know about a particular movie/show/season). Sometimes there's a weird extra (year) behind the title because of the way the folder got named, but the metadata itself still shows up right.
Then again, I do get most of my content through *arr so perhaps that automation already resolves the filename inconsistencies.
As for 5.1 audio, that's almost entirely unsupported by browsers. I think Edge and Safari support Dolby but I'm not sure if you need to feed those a special kind of format or not. Maybe the native applications get around this somehow?
https443
If you follow their naming conventions it works great: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ -- https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/ ... but I admit that most people don't want to do that.
lostmsu
Yeah, I don't have time to rename every single one of 100+ episodes.
llanowarelves
Also you can argue that the (original) filename itself is part of the metadata. It's useful to have what it was originally called when referencing elsewhere. So where to put this data? in a sidecar file during the rename process or something? We could just use content hash, but then online dashboards to redownload things from vendors, for example, won't necessarily have that there displayed on the page, or when you start downloading it in the browser.
29083011397778
In case it's helpful for anyone else having the issue: mmv [0] means you only have to run the command once to rename every file. It's pretty fantastic.
NamTaf
This is why I hammered out a bash script to do my music :)
Thankfully 99% of my visual media was already in the format, but there’s numerous utilities that can bulk rename media in the necessary format
Sakos
Jellyfin is marginally better than Plex, but I also encountered a lot of quirks with Jellyfin which ended in me giving up on it for streaming my media to my other devices.
I just want something that automatically transcodes whatever I watch to account for poor bandwidth when I'm not home. All the library stuff feels so unnecessary and breaks in weird ways that are difficult (impossible?) to solve.
s0rce
I also just share files on the server side and then use Kodi on an Nvidia Shield as the client for watching tv. Works well. I looked at Jellyfin/Plex but didn't really understand what it would offer, maybe if I had multiple tv's and wanted a more shared/transferable experience.
basq
Frankly, you really should be fixing and cleaning the tags with a program like tiny media manager or the like. It improves the user experience vastly, from having cover art, background/preview art, plot overviews, actor / studio lists, and clean, consistent file/folder names.
It's a very fast and easy process, I was able to complete the task for 2tb of files in an hour or two, and that's because I was being thorough. It makes the experience close to netflix in terms of quality (in several ways better even). Jellyfin's default behavior of interpreting file names is fine as it is, but clean file names is truly the more bespoke solution.
Teslazar
Here's my personal experience switching from Plex to Jellyfin. Everyone's needs are different, but, for me, Jellyfin has been a much better experience.
I used Plex for years and always hated it. It didn't let me customize the home screen in the way I wanted, so there was always a bunch of junk on there that I didn't want and couldn't remove. It also ran very slow on my Samsung TV (1), starting up slowly and responding to the press of a button after about a full second (it had done this for a long time through multiple versions of the app and factory resetting the TV without any improvement; also, the TV is only a few years old).
I got frustrated enough to finally switch to Jellyfin about 4 months ago. It was a pain to get the app installed on my TV (the app isn't in the TV's app library, so it needs to be installed as if you're a dev), but once I got it working it works well. The app starts up faster than the Plex app and is very responsive to button presses.
Back when I was using Plex, I really wanted to customize the home screen to remove certain components and re-order what appears and spent a lot of time reading over settings/customization stuff which never actually let me do what I wanted. With Jellyfin, I simply went to settings > home and the intuitive options there let me do exactly what I wanted to do in seconds.
I can't think of any major issues I've had with Jellyfin, but here are a couple of thoughts. With Jellyfin I needed to create separate folders for what what Plex called collections and add them as libraries instead of collections. At first, I thought this was a negative but ended up deciding it didn't really matter as it works fine. I had a series of videos that wouldn't play properly on Jellyfin until I used ffmpeg to strip out the extra subtitle tracks (they had 42!), but never tested them on Plex so not sure if Plex would have handled them.
(1) I will never buy another Samsung TV, but that's a rant for another post. I considered buying an Nvidia Shield just to fix some issues with the TV, but probably won't bother now that Jellyfin is working well.
zeekaran
I got a Shield because neither the Chromecast 4k nor my LG TV could handle HDR content. Shield also replaced my Steam Link so that was nice. I changed the Netflix button on the remote to Plex with a button mapper app and then bought a properly sized Plex sticker to cover the Netflix button.
What issues were you having with the Plex home screen?
manmal
> Shield also replaced my Steam Link so that was nice
GameStream has been sunsetted though, right? I’m using Sunshine & Moonlight to great success, but not with a Shield.
zeagle
Cool software. I used it within/in parallel to Kodi to sync a couple devices but ended up removing this layer.
I didn't like that you can't outright disable transcoding for content served via their app or in the browser. I serve mostly local client and my headless NAS has poor integrated graphics and runs Linux so this was very brittle. Kodi's jellyfin addon can play without transcoding by default so this seemed reasonable.
However in case others want to go this route for a similar use case I hope I can save you some frustration: both this and the native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or passthrough atmos content properly. I also had odd tearing and av sync issues with some large 4k content that don't happen with maven kodi builds.
After a lot of time trying to figure out it, I stripped it out and my shield has no further issues just using kodi despite being the ill famed 2019 tube model. Hdr10, Dolby vision, atmos pass through you name it just works.
WastingMyTime89
> I didn't like that you can't outright disable transcoding for content served via their app or in the browser.
You can outright disable transcoding. That’s a checkbox in the server option.
> both this and the native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or passthrough atmos content properly
They do out of the box. Never had an issue with either transcoding disabled. If you have properly configured the source content, Jellyfin is just a passthrough for Kodi and content is directly accessed using the network share.
nijave
I ran into this with HDR. I have a fork/branch that strips that logic block out and it works great (tldr; video gets transcoded breaking HDR for any transcode reason i.e. audio/subtitle)
zeagle
Thanks I'll need to take a look next time I start tweaking my tv setup!
zeagle
I'm not sure what to say. Unless this is a recent change in my experience it does not work as intended. I spent a lot of time playing with the various transcoding settings and per user settings and direct path access or the regular way of accessing files.
I'm happy it worked for you. I have specific content jellyfin doesn't work with where Kodi is fine and I am just sharing my experience with this software package.
WastingMyTime89
For the transcoding setting, they are indeed in the user profile and work since day-1 as inherited from the Emby fork. It does 100% disable all transcoding for this user.
> I have specific content jellyfin doesn't work with where Kodi is fine
Very surprising as Jellyfin is just a passthrough to Kodi. Did you open a bug report?
> I am just sharing my experience with this software package.
Every post here about an open source project be it Firefox or Jellyfin always see plenty of people sharing their experience with it from a decade ago and panning things that actually work. I usually just read them and move on but sometimes I like to give a counterpoint when it’s about a piece of software I consider quite good.
DarkCrusader2
> However in case others want to go this route for a similar use case I hope I can save you some frustration: both this and the native Android app do not handle Dolby vision or passthrough atmos content properly. I also had odd tearing and av sync issues with some large 4k content that don't happen with maven kodi builds.
I also get audio sync issue with some media types. I am frustrated to the point that I now just copy things on a thumb drive to play on my TV.
Just to understand you setup better, are you using kodi on TV or your server or both?
zeagle
I run Kodi on a 2019 Nvidia shield "tube" model. My media and previously jellyfin is on a NAS that serves the content over nfs to the shield. Shield--Receiver--TV. Look into the maven Kodi build if you have something similar. My sync issues went away using when I stopped using jellyfin and also maybe from removing path substitution when I redid it from scratch. I believe I have fixed output with passthrough in Kodi and upmixed turned off on the shield.
rcarmo
I have tried it a couple of years ago (maybe less), but went back to Plex because of higher polish and family sharing features (which are a little clunky on Plex, but usable). Also, I have PlexAmp set up everywhere (including some Android desktop displays) for music.
How does Jellyfin tackle closed user groups, family photos/videos, remote access, etc?
princevegeta89
Look into jfa-go. I run it on the side and it hard-integrates into Jellyfin and adds a lot of account management stuff and the group/policy specific config you're mentioning
asylteltine
Agree with this. Same experience
pwpw
I've been happily using jellyfin for awhile now. Overall it works great. It has a few issues that I would like to see implemented/fixed:
- No offline downloading on iPad
- The official Apple TV app logs me out of my server every day
- Using the native player on the Apple TV app is still experimental and can have issues
- No intro skip
js2
I use Plex Server + Lifetime pass + Infuse. It is an excellent combination and has none of those issues. I point Infuse at Plex for TV shows to get the intro skip. For movies, I point Infuse at an NFS share since Infuse can handle more media types than Plex.
Plex also lets me easily share my movie rips with family members across the country.
pwpw
For the life of me, I cannot get infuse to connect to my jellyfin server, which is why I use the official jellyfin app. It might be how I set it up on my NAS.
I’ve tried Plex in the past and wasn’t a fan of the bloat and constant changes. I’ll stick with jellyfin since it’s free and doesn’t have the negative incentives associated with pursuing profit. I find that annoying when o just want a clean way to watch my library.
DavideNL
> which is why I use the official jellyfin app
Not sure about AppleTV, but fyi note that there's currently 2 official apps: "Jellyfin" and "SwiftFin".
SwiftFin is better but very new and doesn't have all features yet, etc.
toomuchtodo
What’s the lifetime pass cost?
throwanem
$120, which seems a lot considering Infuse works with Jellyfin too.
xbmcuser
There is a introskip plugin for jellyfin it's in beta and does not work with all clients yet but it very good at intro detecting for most of my shows. Most of the client app developers have added support for the plugin apart for some that say the plugin is not official they will not add the intro skip button until it is officially accepted in jellyfin.
aquova
I've been using this for a few months now. It works pretty well, although it only works through the web client, not some other ones like Roku. I do hope it gets officially merged at some point.
Gareth321
Also I think there's still no tone mapping, meaning watching HDR content can look washed out on incompatible devices, or those transcoding.
stryan
There's hardware accelerated tone-mapping [0], does that work for you?
[0] https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-ac...
Gareth321
Cool! Very much so!
David_SQOX
That was a show-stopper for me. I have so many 4k UHD files that play beautifully on plex but not so hot on jellyfin. I support jellyfin though, there needs to be competition in this space so plex doesn't run away with the 'ball'.
russelg
I've had no issues transcoding with tone mapping in Jellyfin, on both an Intel iGPU and a GTX 1660.
lost_tourist
I mean isn't intro skip impossible? Is there something buried in the stream that indicates beginning/ending of an intro? I suspect the streaming services do that "manually" and not by AI or other automated means.
pebble
I believe Plex does it by finding similar segments across a season.
Edit: they use audio https://support.plex.tv/articles/skip-content/
jmondi
Interesting, recently the Android TV app started to do the same thing for me. It logs me out of my server every day.
longitudinal93
There's a completely acceptable intro skip available as a plugin.
beingforthebene
You mean the beta software with many bugs? Not remotely acceptable in my opinion. https://github.com/ConfusedPolarBear/intro-skipper/issues
DarthNebo
Absolutely love this on my Android TV, I just spin up a container on my laptop with mounted folders & I am able to play large files without plugging & copying anything to a USB drive. Android TVs for some reason cannot fathom that video files >4GB do exist along with other basic filesystems like ExFAT & NTFS......smh
yrro
I expect the manufacturers don't want to license Microsoft's patents.
iamtedd
Linux has support for exFAT via FUSE since 2009. In 2013, Samsung Electronics published a Linux driver for exFAT under GPL. On 28 August 2019, Microsoft published the exFAT specification and released the patent to the Open Invention Network members. The Linux kernel introduced native exFAT support with the 5.4 release in November 2019.
jeroenhd
From what I can raad, the 4GB file limit for SMB seems to come from Samba using SMB 2 compatibility. You should disable SMB 2 for security anyway, but it's possible the SMB client still messes up.
In that case, if you're entering a hostname manually somewhere, try replacing smb:// with cifs://. That should force it to use a modern standard that's capable of 4GB+ files.
entropie
My mother is able to send a telegram bot youtube URLs. She sends links to audiobooks, yt-dlp extracts audio and saves it in an incoming folder and shes able to listen/download it via jellyfin. Works really well.
noveltyaccount
Is there source code for this?
entropie
The bot part is done in node red (and is a relatively simple flow) it just calls a script that ensures no parallel downloads via a little daemon/fifo.
https://gist.github.com/entropie/d265e94136b9777cc6b3190189b...
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
Have been using Jellyfin on my synology server for the past 2 years. It's a dream, but you do need to name your files/directories per their naming convention: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/shows/ -- https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies/