As a long time plex user with a lifetime pass, I always enjoy seeing the good progress with Jellyfin as it will increasingly give me a soft landing for when Plex finally does something to make me move. At the very least it will hopefully keep some of plex’s most user hostile behavior in check.
As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my *arr stack and it has helped tremendously. I used to have to babysit and manually intervene on maybe 10% of requests, now it’s near zero, plus I got audiobook requests and subtitles working great. Granted a big part of the increased success was signing up for a Usenet service but of course Claude was able to configure it all and make it work. I was a little worried Claude would demur in the face of the task, but it was more than happy to help me acquire media in this way
Yes it really does, and I intend to switch eventually but from what I heard the last time I looked into it, the end user clients are a big area where plex still beats Jellyfin. Since that’s where my non technical friends and family mostly interact with the system, it’s the area I need to be the most polished and hands off.
Yes, this is the big one for me. Seemingly unlike a lot of folks, Plex is my main music server. Years ago I ripped all my CDs (1800+, IIRC) and Plex + Plexamp is really, really, really good for listening. I haven't yet found anything else that works as well.
I use Plexamp on desktop/laptop computers and then the Android and iOS apps for on-the-go music. I tried Symfonium [1] because it seemed promising and would give me a Jellyfin path, but it was weird and kinda buggy and ate my phone's battery.
I'm hopeful there'll be a good replacement available eventually, but for now, I just have to stick with Plex.
yeah I'm in a boat of similar shape. plex and plexamp is very simple and plug and play - it handles the IP stuff for remote play, which is the tough part for me.
I don't mind lacking features in the server or the client honestly, if I can find and play an album or playlist I'm good. But the connectivity piece can be hard if you're not familiar with self host stuff. I tried to do Jellyfin and Tailscale and some client and it... kind of worked? But it was definitely not as seamless.
I do hope every year that it's my last year paying for Plex. Maybe this year!
Yeah PlexAmp is amazing. Feels like it's the only music client around these days that has a functional "shuffle by album" option, instead of treating my library as only a collection of individual songs.
> Feels like it's the only music client around these days that has a functional "shuffle by album" option
foobar2000 has this!
After trying dozens of music clients (including PlexAmp) I eventually settled on simply using foobar2000 pointed to an smb share - nothing else seems capable of properly handling playback by folder structure. (e.g. I've got all my Led Zeppelin albums in the "Led Zeppelin" folder, and I want to just select it and play their discography in album release order.)
I use (and contribute to) Finamp the Jellyfin PlexAmp alternative and it's just done a 1.0.0 release which brings it up to parity with PlexAmp for me. I've previously been a long time PlexAmp user but FinAmp now does everything I want it to.
I don’t think it’ll work because Plex gates everything with a sign in to their online accounts, so auth would have to go through them and there might be server-to-Plex verification going on too.
That said, I’m very interested in this space - I’ve been building a music server that provides compatible APIs for Synology and QNAP mobile apps, with a few more on my todo list. I’d love to include Plexamp so if it is possible please let me know!
I would be interested to hear from anyone who set it and can still access Plex over their LAN in a network outage. I have set this multiple times according to docs, and it worked only once ever, thereafter apparently resetting to online login. Of course, they do not make this an easy setting to change!
Performance was also a big issue for me the last time I tried running Jellyfin on the same hardware as my Plex server. I’m happy to see that has been their focus.
Maybe I'm naive, but I feel like if Plex was going to do anything to existing lifetime subscriptions, they would have done it by now. I think we're fine for now.
I (also a lifetime Plex Pass user) decided to try it out ~6 months ago, and I've switched over. I haven't had any gaps in functionality yet, though YMMV of course. While it isn't better than Plex (which is still fine for now), it isn't worse either, and I trust the Jellyfin devs a lot more than the Plex devs at this point.
I must be old school. I never got on board with Plex, because my "lifetime" licenses for PlayOn, TVersity and Twonky all ended up completely useless. Yes, those licenses still work, but you can't get the latest versions which provide support for the latest codecs, features, etc. There's a cutoff on the versions that "lifetime" license allows you to upgrade to, and some of those licenses were not that cheap at the time.
So of course, Plex is going to engage in the fuckery that they are. JellyFin on the other hand, for the amount it costs is surprisingly low on janky behavior.
Yes, eventually, all of them will end up this way. But the attitude lacks nuance. I paid $120 for Plex 8 years ago, and if it becomes utter crap tomorrow, it's been totally worth it.
Don't think of any such thing as "lifetime". Just ask: "For the amount they are charging me, how long does it need to last for it to have been worth my money?" With the price I paid, one year would have been enough.
I switched to jellyfin about 6 months ago and I can say it is definitely worse. I’m constantly fighting to fix thumbnails, fix episodes to be in the same show, force rescans to get it to even recognize a show that already exists. I never had any of these problems with plex.
Plex also defaults to transcoding which fixes a lot of gaps with clients that don’t support certain codecs. I’m often running into issues where infuse can’t play DTS so I need to reencode before I can play the movies.
Also in the process of ditching plex I switched to audiobookshelf for my audiobooks and I have to say it’s also crap. It’s constantly refusing to start playing, or pausing for a really long time before playing.
All that being said I’m not switching back. It’s been a pain but it was worth it.
That's fair. It got most of my stuff without issues, but there were a fair few I needed to fix.
However, compared to Plex, I've found the remote experience (through Tailscale) to be a lot easier and better performing than the Plex equivalent for me personally. I never have any issues connecting externally now, whereas I did all the time with Plex. Maybe I just needed to get Plex running over Tailscale but it seemed to fight that a bit.
My only beef with Jellyfind when I used it some time back was inability to resize subtitles, which were huge on a large TV. Could have been lack of knowledge on my part though.
The default recommended folder naming settings are different for jellyfin from plex if I recall correctly. Personally I just let the arr app download metadata and let jellyfin scan local nfo files only for metadata so have not had a problem for a long time.
I moved from plex to jellyfin and got 10% of the way through organising the films the jellyfin style and then just moved the rest of the video files into a folder called 'ok' and it worked fine. try the lazy way first and see how it goes
I don't recall the folder names being different, but by default Jellyfin uses different metadata providers than Plex. That means that things like numbering of specials (think BSG and the webisodes), or shows which have a different aired vs DVD order (i.e. Futurama) might differ between the two. For those, you have to either tweak your episode numbers or just tell Jellyfin to use the metadata provider Plex does (which is what I did for those edge cases).
> Plex also defaults to transcoding which fixes a lot of gaps with clients that don’t support certain codecs.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but as far as I can tell, Plex defaults to direct play enabled, and will direct play unless it's not supported by client. (Or other constraints, like limited bandwidth settings, etc.)
Don't have any of those library issues, something wrong in your setup? My tv also doesn't support DTS, but don't have to do any manual work, jellyfin should do it on the fly for you.
> As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my *arr stack and it has helped tremendously. I used to have to babysit and manually intervene on maybe 10% of requests, now it’s near zero
Any more details here? I hit this a lot and it's not too much work, but still pretty annoying.
Step one is to just let Claude have ssh access to the machine you run plex from and let him do a full sweep. I had some conflicting profile rules and was not properly blocking malware and not properly marking failures so they were never retried. This fixed a big portion of the manual work needed, but the usenet account is really what got me to nearly 100% hands off. I think I am paying $3/month for the next fifteen months, and apparently if I pay attention during Black Friday there will be some pretty cheap deals. For more months of access at even less
EDIT: Claude was also able to look at my logs and noticed that nearly all of the exe or other malware was coming from 2 trackers so we just eliminated those.
Claude will be able to help you with everything you need. If you don't have Claude code then the various self hosted subreddits are a good starting point. I had Claude do a sweep of the recent reddit posts to capture the current most recommended usenet accounts, he gave me two links, told me to sign up and paste in the API keys and he took it from there.
All I did was create a wrapper script to pipe to the torrent client, then "pipe these torrent files to the script" - so easy to circumvent you wonder why they bother
I have had claude do the same, plus reorder nfs mounts, share templates, and do some init-container magic to start vpn/gluetun with port-forwarding, all in a k8s cluster. It's become so easy to manage and debug.
Claude is perfectly happy to do it and gives great suggestions. I can't imagine it will last, I did run into one situation where I wanted to archive all the media on a subscription site before my subscription expired, and it refused. But splitting it into one session to collect all URLs and a second session to plug them into yt-dlp with the right arguments worked just fine.
What are you using for audiobook requests? I also recently setup arr stack, but I saw readarr is depreciated and there doesn't seem to be a clear successor.
It’s been a while since I used it but lazylibrarian has worked for me in the past.
I tried shelfarr as well with some success a while back, but haven’t needed any new books lately since I’m busy catching up on the books I’ve downloaded (the Bible is long lol).
After reading a lot of reddit threads I settled on ReadMeABook[0] and it has been working great so far. One pretty cool feature is that it lets you connect an LLM API key and then you can have it make requests based on your library. I now have Fable 5.1 suggesting my next book.
If you don’t want to commit to one of the vibecoded no community arr clones for books then i recommend shelfmark. Lightweight grabber, easy to start with, easy to rip out later.
For music, I use Navidrome + Symfonium. Not quite as smooth as Plexamp was (and there's nothing on par with Symfonium on desktop), but I disliked having my music and video commingled so it's been worthwhile for me.
Claude and jellyfin and HASS is great. Now my phone has a “door lock” which turns off the kids user’s access, but lets the current playing finish. And another “door lock” unlocks playing for ten minutes.
unrelated to your otherwise helpful comment, I just wanted to note that it is "demur" (i.e. hesitate or object) you want in this case; "demure" is an adjective meaning shy or modest.
For what it’s worth, I am very happy with Jellyfin and the *arr suite. It took a bit of agent prodding to get them all playing nicely together and bypassing Cloudflare CAPTCHAs. However, it's pretty sweet when you get it all working.
With the *arr stack, some of the trackers it uses to search for a torrent will present a captcha when Prowlerr queries it for a search. If you integrate FlareSolverr and set up Prowlerr to submit queries through it for the trackers that have CAPTCHAs, it won't get blocked by them.
Also a lifetime pass Plex user, I'll leave as soon as someone has a good solution for identifying raw Bluray rips automatically. Why do I have to manually name the episodes? We had CDDB last century, why isn't there an equivalent for raw video rips? The ripped data should be identical, a simple hash should uniquely identify it.
I'm describing a hypothetical feature that I want. Essentially an automatic version of mkv-renamer that can identify series, episodes, and special content based on the signature of the ripped files. For whatever reason, such a service doesn't even exist.
Thank you for starting this thread. Another lifetime plex pass user, interested in my choices. For now, I am happy on plex/plexamp. Good to know what jellyfin is at.
If there is one thing that needs to be re-written and consolidated it is the arrs ecosystem. Replacing/consolidating the arrs themselves is pretty straightforward. The trap that quickly becomes a token incinerator is incorporating the downloader into the library manager itself. A lot of learned lessons in that sabnzbd codebase.
Lifetime pass user long before the ridiculous price hikes for it and the direction for the service going down a path I didn't want to support. You can run Plex and Jellyfin on the same server concurrently pointing to the same media files. My Plex server was still running until I was able to transfer everything over and their mobile app ecosystem got up to parity.
I guess it's less full featured as Plex or Jellyfin (it still more than covers the bases for video: format support, different video/audio/subtitle tracks, tv series recognition, skip intros, Trakt.tv etc.); but then again all it requires is any online storage, and the Infuse app (either on iDevice or AppleTV).
Yeaah, second that! I use it on the AppleTV and across the rest of my devices! Works like a charm, and coupled with Tailscale I can access everything on my Nas everywhere :) I have it configured to use Jellyfin as the source, runing on said nas
huh, yeah I should start an xbmc fork/reimagining. the limitations with the tools of the day are imagination. a LOT of the software I use these days are things I facilitated the creation of and a media player is definitely supposed to be on that list
I left Plex for Jellyfin + Infuse a couple of years ago, and I'm not looking back.
But the sore point right now is outside access, which Jellyfin really isn't made for. I set up Tailscale so I can connect Infuse to Jellyfin remotely. But that's not exactly as smooth as Plex. I can't give friends and family access, either, which was dead easy with Plex.
In terms of the UX, Infuse isn't very good, but it does the job okay. The built-in subtitle fetcher is amazing; that stuff never worked for me with Plex.
I also have a lifetime pass, but I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with Plex. Why do I have to regularly turn off their "recommended" stuff that is just ads for movies I can buy online? Why does it appear and re-appear?
Also, the Plex app for LG TV has been buggy and broken for years: some content will not play at all, some will not play if you ff/rewind, and some will not play until you physically turn your TV off and then on. Very annoying.
I have a ~40TB library and was still on 10.10.7 because of all the performance issues with 10.11. Upgraded straight to 12.0 and was impressed with how quick and painless it was! As the upgrade instructions warn about, some of my titles disappeared until a rescan added them back, but that was the only weirdness. The whole initial migration only took a few minutes.
Same here, though my migration took about 10 minutes, and the rescan took about 30 minutes. It also had a few minutes of generating trickplay images, though it must have just been filling in gaps, because generating trickplay images for a large library takes days.
I wrongly assumed I was below version 10.10.7 and tried to "upgrade" to it first as the migration guide said, but this completely blew up and the db migrations failed. I then tried to skip straight to 12 and that also crashed on startup during db migrations, so I just nuked the whole Jellyfin config and started from scratch.
Bit unfortunate how this can even happen, but it's on me for not checking or taking a backup first. The config/db really contain anything important anyways, other than "watched" markers that are already out of sync for me across Emby/Jellyfin/Plex.
Went from 10.11 to 12.0 and had zero issues. Scaleway/Ubuntu/Docker env with 8GB RAM.
Well one small niggle, I had a custom script setup on Caddy that overrides how certain buckets are sorted because my users are too lazy to follow my instructions. They changed the BucketID string in some way but this more to do with me having a custom script dependant on something they don't guarantee.
Hopefully they allow admins to change a users preferences in the future but currently it has to be done at the user level. I'm sure that will be in a future update.
Subtitles are the Achilles heel of Jellyfin (at least the Android client sending the stream to Chromecast stick connected to the TV). I can see the subtitle present but it doesn't show on the movie. Ok, I will just add manually - can't, progress indicator loops forever. Ok, I will remove the existing subtitles and add - removal succeeds - addition fails. This is the same fiddling everytime. If it works, it is a miracle. I used to forget about the subtitles and start the movie - you could just fix it on the fly right?! Nope, now I do full prep before calling everyone that the movie is good to go.
This is not coming from a bad place - I am very appreciative of having a open source alternative to Plex. Just putting this out there in case it catches someone's interest to improve it.
FWIW, Moonfin and Infuse both work flawlessly on an AppleTV.
I also remember Google TV working fine, but it seemed like ads got added to another part of the UI every month so I got sick of it.
Roku only supports text subtitles, so if you have picture subtitles (like a DVD or bluray), then you'll need to burn them in if you want to play on Roku.
The default jellyfin client works great also on my NVIDIA shield.
Young children and non technical adults can use it as easily as any streaming app. I guess you can tweak and theme it endlessly to look like your favourite streaming app but I haven’t felt the need to so far.
Self-hosting always involves a bit of jankiness, if you can’t handle that then back to overpriced subscriptions and spyware you go.
I had this problem, but I fixed it by setting it up so it extracts all embedded subtitles into SRT files, and enabled a setting prevents Jellyfin from serving embedded subtitles.
From what I remember, some clients don't support streaming subtitles, so they must download them completely in advance, when the movie starts, before they start appearing. If you pick embedded subtitles with these clients, Jellyfin must extract the subtitles files immediately, and this takes a while depending on container format, file sizes and server load. External subtitles are faster.
> If you pick embedded subtitles with these clients, Jellyfin must extract the subtitles files immediately, and this takes a while depending on container format, file sizes and server load.
Really? How?
My expectation would be that extracting a subtitle file takes a few seconds at most. If you had to do it on the fly every time you watched anything in your library, it wouldn't matter.
I don't undestand how movie containers work, but I ran this on a 70 GB movie file to test:
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -map 0:s:0 /tmp/subtitles.srt
The movie is 2 hours long, and the expected time to complete is 21 minutes. It seems like it's reading the entire file. This is on an average SATA SSD that is also being read/written to by the torrent client in the background.
IIRC, in many containers embedded subtitles will be interleaved with the video and audio atoms/boxes/packets/etc., and so pulling out the subtitles requires scanning the full file. Not quite as expensive as decoding or re-encoding, but still as slow as "stream the full file into memory and demux the streams"
There's an official plug-in in Jellyfin called "Subtitle Extract" that does it automatically for you.
I personally use Bazarr instead, because I also want to download subtitles for different languages. In Bazarr, Embedded Subtitles is just another subtitle provider that can fetch subtitles depending on your rules.
I think you don't want to do the "extract embedded subtitles" method, it's slow as hell and downloading external subtitles is much faster than the built-in extract, at least for HDR+4K mkv video which is what we end up with the most. Can take up to a minute for a 40 minute episode to extract the subtitles, which means you'll need to pause for a minute before you can watch with subtitles, with a 5950X CPU.
Coming from Plex, I gave Jellyfin a try, but returned back to Plex after several months. My biggest gripes were poor subtitle support and inability to differintiate TV shows from movies stored in the same folder. Does this version improve these issues?
I love jellyfin, been using it for years now, alongside the *ARR stack.
My young daughter recently started getting into audio books, so I installed Listenarr alongside a vibe coded mcp server [0] which I have running with all the other arr service mcp connections.
This allows the family to easily download and manage their media (err…Linux distributions) via Onyx AI, which I also have running with everything else on local box running microK8s, all on a relatively puny Geekom minipc with 16Gb
This whole setup is pretty straightforward to manage with Claude which has no issues working with K8s.
I had to go back from 10.11.x to 10.10.7 because the performance was bad, but I'm very confident they've fixed all the performance problems with this 12.0 release.
I'm also confident they've found most of the bugs and have produced something you can just upgrade to, given they've had 7 release candidates over the past few months:
12.0 RC1 - Jun 22
12.0 RC2 - Jun 28
12.0 RC3 - Jul 22
12.0 RC4 - Aug 02
12.0 RC5 - Aug 11
12.0 RC6 - Aug 26
12.0 RC7 - Sep 01
12.0 - Sep 08
Overall it looks like a lot of solid testing has gone into this, I shouldn't have to go back to 10.10 again.
UPDATE: Upgraded to 12.0, performance is great, better than 10.10 and 10.11, including in third party apps! No problems with the migration.
I have a trifling complaint about this, which is that it smacks of LLM aid throughout, especially in headings. I wish people would aggressively filter for these things--I have a technical writing SKILL.md that tries to remove all the AI tropes it finds and use simplified technical English (it's a thing, look it up) to do docs, and that makes one heck of a difference...
Jellyfin works great for me. My only gripe is logging around library scanning being pretty difficult to interpret. I'd love to add a dedicated scanner log that focuses only on logs relating to scanning, which for me tends to be the trouble spot in these systems.
That said I very rarely would even need it, the last time I thought I did was when I had my under configured to not see R rated movies because of my kids, the logs were not clear that the movie was ever scanned so it was hard to realize.
Something I've long wanted is something far more minimal than jellyfin that just browses my library by folder but has a web player that can transcode/remux as needed for the browser. As it stands when I want to watch a film with someone elses computer I give VLC/whatever a link to a webdav URL and it streams from that. It'd just be nice to have it be in the browser.
I have a plex pass but moved to jellyfin, because I can't get plex to reliably stream from my server at all. While jellyfin works so smoothly. Look forward to this update!
Jellyfin has worked great so far for us, I never used Plex or Emby so cant compare. They recently made an official Tizen app too, so dont have to build and sideload anymore, just works.
One of the remaining issues is that the Samsung client remuxes if you select a secondary audio track[0] - apparently fixable by using the AVPlay player instead of the HTML player.
Not sure if they support multiple OPDS catalogs now.
I am on v10 (using JF for music only) and with book plugin (forgot which one) it didn't offer to split books into multiple catalogs, which was a bit annoying. Maybe I missed it in v11. Solution for me was to vibecode a simplest OPDS server with 0 css and basic auth.
How would jellyfin be able to tell whether the video files in a directory are movies or tv? What does going nuts actually look like, and what causes it?
Not OP, but I've run into similar instances of Jellyfin "going nuts."
Mixed media type libraries are depreciated and "broken" according to the documentation[1], which is fair enough, but sometimes this results in weirdness if a TV-show is also part of a franchise and has associated TV-movies (e.g. the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Futurama, or Breaking Bad). If you want to keep those movies on your file system in a folder with the other stuff from the franchise, Jellyfin often can't handle it. And it's not obvious to new users whether these TV-movies belong in a TV-shows library or a movies library.
I've also noticed it cannot handle additional layers of folders (i.e. for Genres) in TV show libraries, but it can handle that layer in movie libraries. Failure mode (the "going nuts") looks like those genre folders recognized as bizarre or obscure television shows, and nothing scanned the next layer down.
I haven't looked into how their scanning algorithms work, but it's definitely frustrating that there's not a button or feature to say: "No, Jellyfin, this is a folder, not a show or movie. Try scanning again on the subtree starting here."
Honestly, any software that either silently/automatically reorganizes a user's files and folders (not Jellyfin, but there are others that do this... even FOSS projects) or demands a specific meta-hierarchy on the file system is frustrating to anyone who deliberately keeps their files and folders well-organized.
The success of jellyfin in recent years has affected me in one unexpected way: I have a project whose .com domain name starts with jelly* and at some point I started getting so many signups from confused Jellyfin users who thought it was related.
(fortunately it’s a niche thing, so I just closed signups and just give my prospective users a one time invite code)
Does this introduce basic UX changes, like saying that a media will be permanently lost instead of "will be removed from Jellyfin" which is inaccurate?
Edit: And making it more secure? Just because it is commonly for LAN doesn't mean it can be insecure
I think you have some confusion between expectations upon the client and the server. This very site (and almost every other) sends your password in plaintext over form data when you sign in.
Hashing (and/or salting) a password client-side before sending it would offer next to no protection, as if the server is expecting this value and the attacker intercepts it, they could just replay the hashed value themselves. Why would they need to know the original password?
The salt for the password should also have been randomly generated when it was first created, and stored alongside the password in the database. The only way for the client to know this value would be to retrieve it based on username alone, when the request is first made. This would reduce the security of the system and allow a dedicated attacker much more leverage to try and crack that single password, if they knew only the username of the user.
The comment you're replying to is correct, encryption is the job of HTTPS.
not necessarily always a VPN, but you can also use a reverse proxy like caddy or nginx where encryption and security are primary concerns instead of something non-essential like in jellyfin.
I doubt that, how would that work? You would need to give all your friends a VPN login into your local network for all of their devices, including TVs.
If you think most non tech people can just casually find an old pc, install and setup pfsense, then you are out of touch with reality. And they also would have to let it run all the time and have space for it. That's just not something realistic. It's not an option for my friends. Might also break chromecast.
I hate people who are demanding of open source projects but... doing performance improvements and adding comic book support before making the product secure enough to expose to the internet is wild prioritization and I don't know what else to say.
I stay purely home network, as I suspect most do. So although I can see your use case, I can also understand why it's not a bigger priority than those other features.
The project is a fork of another project (Emby) and there has always been potential for user-supplied data ending up in command-line arguments, or exploitation of the (admin) user getting to upload various files. Nonetheless, all reported security bugs have been fixed promptly, and they're proactively sweeping through the full set of APIs they inherited, looking for possible exploit paths.
Most exploits required an authenticated user.
If you're concerned about this, you should run Jellyfin's docker image, with read-only mounts of your media library, and only give accounts to people you trust, which is how you should treat your personal media library anyway.
> Is this a massive red-flag security risk that actively exposes your data to the Internet? No.
>
> At this point, this over-4-year-old issue has gotten posted to HackerNews more than enough times and gotten quite enough unhelpful peanut-gallery comments like those above..
Sorry, but you are being one of those people there. Open source development lives on intrinsic motivation and community. If those things which you want, aren't things that motivate other to donate their free time to, you can implement them yourself, you can try throwing money at people to do it for you, you can take other unwanted chores from them to free their time, but you really ought not push negativity lime this.
As a long time plex user with a lifetime pass, I always enjoy seeing the good progress with Jellyfin as it will increasingly give me a soft landing for when Plex finally does something to make me move. At the very least it will hopefully keep some of plex’s most user hostile behavior in check.
As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my *arr stack and it has helped tremendously. I used to have to babysit and manually intervene on maybe 10% of requests, now it’s near zero, plus I got audiobook requests and subtitles working great. Granted a big part of the increased success was signing up for a Usenet service but of course Claude was able to configure it all and make it work. I was a little worried Claude would demur in the face of the task, but it was more than happy to help me acquire media in this way
Feels like only a matter of time with Plex doesn't it!
I've got the lifetime pass, but it really does feel like a Sword of Damocles situation...
Yes it really does, and I intend to switch eventually but from what I heard the last time I looked into it, the end user clients are a big area where plex still beats Jellyfin. Since that’s where my non technical friends and family mostly interact with the system, it’s the area I need to be the most polished and hands off.
Jellyfin's Android clients seem to be fine. Android TV and smartphone at least. Have been fine for at least five years.
Can't speak to other platforms though.
Yes, this is the big one for me. Seemingly unlike a lot of folks, Plex is my main music server. Years ago I ripped all my CDs (1800+, IIRC) and Plex + Plexamp is really, really, really good for listening. I haven't yet found anything else that works as well.
I use Plexamp on desktop/laptop computers and then the Android and iOS apps for on-the-go music. I tried Symfonium [1] because it seemed promising and would give me a Jellyfin path, but it was weird and kinda buggy and ate my phone's battery.
I'm hopeful there'll be a good replacement available eventually, but for now, I just have to stick with Plex.
[1] https://www.symfonium.app/
yeah I'm in a boat of similar shape. plex and plexamp is very simple and plug and play - it handles the IP stuff for remote play, which is the tough part for me.
I don't mind lacking features in the server or the client honestly, if I can find and play an album or playlist I'm good. But the connectivity piece can be hard if you're not familiar with self host stuff. I tried to do Jellyfin and Tailscale and some client and it... kind of worked? But it was definitely not as seamless.
I do hope every year that it's my last year paying for Plex. Maybe this year!
Yeah PlexAmp is amazing. Feels like it's the only music client around these days that has a functional "shuffle by album" option, instead of treating my library as only a collection of individual songs.
woahhh this exists? I have an Apple Music playlist called Sunday Albums and have always wanted exactly this.
Lyrion (fka Logitech Media Server ) does album shuffle
Another up-vote from me for Plexamp.
I find the mainstream subscription players to be excruciating to use to play what I want at the time.
> Feels like it's the only music client around these days that has a functional "shuffle by album" option
foobar2000 has this!
After trying dozens of music clients (including PlexAmp) I eventually settled on simply using foobar2000 pointed to an smb share - nothing else seems capable of properly handling playback by folder structure. (e.g. I've got all my Led Zeppelin albums in the "Led Zeppelin" folder, and I want to just select it and play their discography in album release order.)
I use (and contribute to) Finamp the Jellyfin PlexAmp alternative and it's just done a 1.0.0 release which brings it up to parity with PlexAmp for me. I've previously been a long time PlexAmp user but FinAmp now does everything I want it to.
That 1.0.0, and 1.0.1 is in Beta. Is that ready to be moved into stable? Or am I looking at the wrong project? https://github.com/finamp-app/finamp/releases#release-1.0.1-...
This gave me an idea, what if I let an agent make a proxy for Jellyfin to act like Plex? Best of both worlds!
Maybe worth a try.
I’m interested in helping with this. Let me know if you start a repo. I was considering the same approach, though I’m not sure how feasible it is.
I don’t think it’ll work because Plex gates everything with a sign in to their online accounts, so auth would have to go through them and there might be server-to-Plex verification going on too.
That said, I’m very interested in this space - I’ve been building a music server that provides compatible APIs for Synology and QNAP mobile apps, with a few more on my todo list. I’d love to include Plexamp so if it is possible please let me know!
> I don’t think it’ll work because Plex gates everything with a sign in to their online accounts...
That isn't true. You can configure the server with which subnets are trusted, and do not require auth.
I would be interested to hear from anyone who set it and can still access Plex over their LAN in a network outage. I have set this multiple times according to docs, and it worked only once ever, thereafter apparently resetting to online login. Of course, they do not make this an easy setting to change!
Performance was also a big issue for me the last time I tried running Jellyfin on the same hardware as my Plex server. I’m happy to see that has been their focus.
really is just the normies access to it via samsung and LG TV's that hold me back.
There is a nice Jellyfin app for LG now
I am currently on vacation and used jellyfin via the browser on all the smart TV. And it just works great. I didn't expect it to work this good.
Sign in via key is easy, not stuttering. I can recommend it.
I have a lifetime pass as well, but switched to Jellyfin years ago.
Maybe I'm naive, but I feel like if Plex was going to do anything to existing lifetime subscriptions, they would have done it by now. I think we're fine for now.
I (also a lifetime Plex Pass user) decided to try it out ~6 months ago, and I've switched over. I haven't had any gaps in functionality yet, though YMMV of course. While it isn't better than Plex (which is still fine for now), it isn't worse either, and I trust the Jellyfin devs a lot more than the Plex devs at this point.
I must be old school. I never got on board with Plex, because my "lifetime" licenses for PlayOn, TVersity and Twonky all ended up completely useless. Yes, those licenses still work, but you can't get the latest versions which provide support for the latest codecs, features, etc. There's a cutoff on the versions that "lifetime" license allows you to upgrade to, and some of those licenses were not that cheap at the time.
So of course, Plex is going to engage in the fuckery that they are. JellyFin on the other hand, for the amount it costs is surprisingly low on janky behavior.
Yes, eventually, all of them will end up this way. But the attitude lacks nuance. I paid $120 for Plex 8 years ago, and if it becomes utter crap tomorrow, it's been totally worth it.
Don't think of any such thing as "lifetime". Just ask: "For the amount they are charging me, how long does it need to last for it to have been worth my money?" With the price I paid, one year would have been enough.
I switched to jellyfin about 6 months ago and I can say it is definitely worse. I’m constantly fighting to fix thumbnails, fix episodes to be in the same show, force rescans to get it to even recognize a show that already exists. I never had any of these problems with plex. Plex also defaults to transcoding which fixes a lot of gaps with clients that don’t support certain codecs. I’m often running into issues where infuse can’t play DTS so I need to reencode before I can play the movies.
Also in the process of ditching plex I switched to audiobookshelf for my audiobooks and I have to say it’s also crap. It’s constantly refusing to start playing, or pausing for a really long time before playing.
All that being said I’m not switching back. It’s been a pain but it was worth it.
That's fair. It got most of my stuff without issues, but there were a fair few I needed to fix.
However, compared to Plex, I've found the remote experience (through Tailscale) to be a lot easier and better performing than the Plex equivalent for me personally. I never have any issues connecting externally now, whereas I did all the time with Plex. Maybe I just needed to get Plex running over Tailscale but it seemed to fight that a bit.
Fair enough, but I honestly have not had a single issue with Jellyfin. It really has been on par with Plex for me.
My only beef with Jellyfind when I used it some time back was inability to resize subtitles, which were huge on a large TV. Could have been lack of knowledge on my part though.
The default recommended folder naming settings are different for jellyfin from plex if I recall correctly. Personally I just let the arr app download metadata and let jellyfin scan local nfo files only for metadata so have not had a problem for a long time.
I moved from plex to jellyfin and got 10% of the way through organising the films the jellyfin style and then just moved the rest of the video files into a folder called 'ok' and it worked fine. try the lazy way first and see how it goes
I don't recall the folder names being different, but by default Jellyfin uses different metadata providers than Plex. That means that things like numbering of specials (think BSG and the webisodes), or shows which have a different aired vs DVD order (i.e. Futurama) might differ between the two. For those, you have to either tweak your episode numbers or just tell Jellyfin to use the metadata provider Plex does (which is what I did for those edge cases).
> Plex also defaults to transcoding which fixes a lot of gaps with clients that don’t support certain codecs.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but as far as I can tell, Plex defaults to direct play enabled, and will direct play unless it's not supported by client. (Or other constraints, like limited bandwidth settings, etc.)
Don't have any of those library issues, something wrong in your setup? My tv also doesn't support DTS, but don't have to do any manual work, jellyfin should do it on the fly for you.
> As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my *arr stack and it has helped tremendously. I used to have to babysit and manually intervene on maybe 10% of requests, now it’s near zero
Any more details here? I hit this a lot and it's not too much work, but still pretty annoying.
Step one is to just let Claude have ssh access to the machine you run plex from and let him do a full sweep. I had some conflicting profile rules and was not properly blocking malware and not properly marking failures so they were never retried. This fixed a big portion of the manual work needed, but the usenet account is really what got me to nearly 100% hands off. I think I am paying $3/month for the next fifteen months, and apparently if I pay attention during Black Friday there will be some pretty cheap deals. For more months of access at even less
EDIT: Claude was also able to look at my logs and noticed that nearly all of the exe or other malware was coming from 2 trackers so we just eliminated those.
Where could someone learn more about the usenet account method?
Claude will be able to help you with everything you need. If you don't have Claude code then the various self hosted subreddits are a good starting point. I had Claude do a sweep of the recent reddit posts to capture the current most recommended usenet accounts, he gave me two links, told me to sign up and paste in the API keys and he took it from there.
How long before they block this kind of work with ai.
I already had DeepSeek tell me "I cant help you with torrents or other copyright infringing uses".
You can get around the checks with careful prompting. You’re just interested and want to learn more about it.
All I did was create a wrapper script to pipe to the torrent client, then "pipe these torrent files to the script" - so easy to circumvent you wonder why they bother
weird, when I ran ds4flash it didn't complain about it at all.
I have had claude do the same, plus reorder nfs mounts, share templates, and do some init-container magic to start vpn/gluetun with port-forwarding, all in a k8s cluster. It's become so easy to manage and debug.
I just like the confirmation that AI is happy to be a Boatswain.
Claude is perfectly happy to do it and gives great suggestions. I can't imagine it will last, I did run into one situation where I wanted to archive all the media on a subscription site before my subscription expired, and it refused. But splitting it into one session to collect all URLs and a second session to plug them into yt-dlp with the right arguments worked just fine.
What are you using for audiobook requests? I also recently setup arr stack, but I saw readarr is depreciated and there doesn't seem to be a clear successor.
It’s been a while since I used it but lazylibrarian has worked for me in the past.
I tried shelfarr as well with some success a while back, but haven’t needed any new books lately since I’m busy catching up on the books I’ve downloaded (the Bible is long lol).
After reading a lot of reddit threads I settled on ReadMeABook[0] and it has been working great so far. One pretty cool feature is that it lets you connect an LLM API key and then you can have it make requests based on your library. I now have Fable 5.1 suggesting my next book.
[0]: https://github.com/kikootwo/readmeabook
Hello Mantis. Question: what do you do with the books? Is there kindle integration somehow?
If you don’t want to commit to one of the vibecoded no community arr clones for books then i recommend shelfmark. Lightweight grabber, easy to start with, easy to rip out later.
Chaptarr is great! Just had their public release after a long alpha testing phase
Could you share a link to source code/repo? I couldn't find it
https://github.com/Chaptarr/chaptarr maybe?
I like them both, but I can never give up plexamp. I’ve tried navidrome and various jellyfin clients but I keep going back.
For music, I use Navidrome + Symfonium. Not quite as smooth as Plexamp was (and there's nothing on par with Symfonium on desktop), but I disliked having my music and video commingled so it's been worthwhile for me.
Claude and jellyfin and HASS is great. Now my phone has a “door lock” which turns off the kids user’s access, but lets the current playing finish. And another “door lock” unlocks playing for ten minutes.
What do you mean by door lock, where does the code show up?
unrelated to your otherwise helpful comment, I just wanted to note that it is "demur" (i.e. hesitate or object) you want in this case; "demure" is an adjective meaning shy or modest.
Thanks, fixed
For what it’s worth, I am very happy with Jellyfin and the *arr suite. It took a bit of agent prodding to get them all playing nicely together and bypassing Cloudflare CAPTCHAs. However, it's pretty sweet when you get it all working.
> bypassing Cloudflare CAPTCHAs
Can you say more about this? I've never encountered this problem in nearly a decade of running the same stack.
With the *arr stack, some of the trackers it uses to search for a torrent will present a captcha when Prowlerr queries it for a search. If you integrate FlareSolverr and set up Prowlerr to submit queries through it for the trackers that have CAPTCHAs, it won't get blocked by them.
Yep. It really isn’t nefarious or abusive. I keep mine slowed down to not scan often to be considerate. Even private trackers can require it now.
Also a lifetime pass Plex user, I'll leave as soon as someone has a good solution for identifying raw Bluray rips automatically. Why do I have to manually name the episodes? We had CDDB last century, why isn't there an equivalent for raw video rips? The ripped data should be identical, a simple hash should uniquely identify it.
Are you describing a plex feature? I was under the impression they required the media to follow certain naming conventions. [1]
Maybe mkv-renamer is of use to you? [2]
1: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-...
2: https://github.com/ssanj/mkv-renamer
I'm describing a hypothetical feature that I want. Essentially an automatic version of mkv-renamer that can identify series, episodes, and special content based on the signature of the ripped files. For whatever reason, such a service doesn't even exist.
Thank you for starting this thread. Another lifetime plex pass user, interested in my choices. For now, I am happy on plex/plexamp. Good to know what jellyfin is at.
If there is one thing that needs to be re-written and consolidated it is the arrs ecosystem. Replacing/consolidating the arrs themselves is pretty straightforward. The trap that quickly becomes a token incinerator is incorporating the downloader into the library manager itself. A lot of learned lessons in that sabnzbd codebase.
As someone with coding projects in the is area would you care to elaborate on "a lot of learned lessons"?
sabnzbd is basically packaged decades of domain specific knowledge about deobfuscating media files
Lifetime pass user long before the ridiculous price hikes for it and the direction for the service going down a path I didn't want to support. You can run Plex and Jellyfin on the same server concurrently pointing to the same media files. My Plex server was still running until I was able to transfer everything over and their mobile app ecosystem got up to parity.
Both for simplicity and portability, I am a very happy user of https://firecore.com/infuse.
I guess it's less full featured as Plex or Jellyfin (it still more than covers the bases for video: format support, different video/audio/subtitle tracks, tv series recognition, skip intros, Trakt.tv etc.); but then again all it requires is any online storage, and the Infuse app (either on iDevice or AppleTV).
Yeaah, second that! I use it on the AppleTV and across the rest of my devices! Works like a charm, and coupled with Tailscale I can access everything on my Nas everywhere :) I have it configured to use Jellyfin as the source, runing on said nas
huh, yeah I should start an xbmc fork/reimagining. the limitations with the tools of the day are imagination. a LOT of the software I use these days are things I facilitated the creation of and a media player is definitely supposed to be on that list
I left Plex for Jellyfin + Infuse a couple of years ago, and I'm not looking back.
But the sore point right now is outside access, which Jellyfin really isn't made for. I set up Tailscale so I can connect Infuse to Jellyfin remotely. But that's not exactly as smooth as Plex. I can't give friends and family access, either, which was dead easy with Plex.
In terms of the UX, Infuse isn't very good, but it does the job okay. The built-in subtitle fetcher is amazing; that stuff never worked for me with Plex.
For people that don’t know, Infuse lets you use Jellyfin on Apple TV and it’s very helpful for day purpose
I also have a lifetime pass, but I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with Plex. Why do I have to regularly turn off their "recommended" stuff that is just ads for movies I can buy online? Why does it appear and re-appear?
Also, the Plex app for LG TV has been buggy and broken for years: some content will not play at all, some will not play if you ff/rewind, and some will not play until you physically turn your TV off and then on. Very annoying.
I'm glad to see competition.
Upgrade experiences, anyone?
I have a ~40TB library and was still on 10.10.7 because of all the performance issues with 10.11. Upgraded straight to 12.0 and was impressed with how quick and painless it was! As the upgrade instructions warn about, some of my titles disappeared until a rescan added them back, but that was the only weirdness. The whole initial migration only took a few minutes.
Same here, though my migration took about 10 minutes, and the rescan took about 30 minutes. It also had a few minutes of generating trickplay images, though it must have just been filling in gaps, because generating trickplay images for a large library takes days.
I wrongly assumed I was below version 10.10.7 and tried to "upgrade" to it first as the migration guide said, but this completely blew up and the db migrations failed. I then tried to skip straight to 12 and that also crashed on startup during db migrations, so I just nuked the whole Jellyfin config and started from scratch.
Bit unfortunate how this can even happen, but it's on me for not checking or taking a backup first. The config/db really contain anything important anyways, other than "watched" markers that are already out of sync for me across Emby/Jellyfin/Plex.
Just pulled latest container and it just worked as far as I can tell.
Went from 10.11 to 12.0 and had zero issues. Scaleway/Ubuntu/Docker env with 8GB RAM.
Well one small niggle, I had a custom script setup on Caddy that overrides how certain buckets are sorted because my users are too lazy to follow my instructions. They changed the BucketID string in some way but this more to do with me having a custom script dependant on something they don't guarantee.
Hopefully they allow admins to change a users preferences in the future but currently it has to be done at the user level. I'm sure that will be in a future update.
if you're running on scaleway, can I ask what you're doing for media storage? scaleway block storage?
Updated the rootless podman container and restarted, worked fine.
Subtitles are the Achilles heel of Jellyfin (at least the Android client sending the stream to Chromecast stick connected to the TV). I can see the subtitle present but it doesn't show on the movie. Ok, I will just add manually - can't, progress indicator loops forever. Ok, I will remove the existing subtitles and add - removal succeeds - addition fails. This is the same fiddling everytime. If it works, it is a miracle. I used to forget about the subtitles and start the movie - you could just fix it on the fly right?! Nope, now I do full prep before calling everyone that the movie is good to go.
This is not coming from a bad place - I am very appreciative of having a open source alternative to Plex. Just putting this out there in case it catches someone's interest to improve it.
Is that an old problem, or a problem that is still in this new v12?
FWIW, Moonfin and Infuse both work flawlessly on an AppleTV.
I also remember Google TV working fine, but it seemed like ads got added to another part of the UI every month so I got sick of it.
Roku only supports text subtitles, so if you have picture subtitles (like a DVD or bluray), then you'll need to burn them in if you want to play on Roku.
SenPlayer is also very good on ATV.
The default jellyfin client works great also on my NVIDIA shield.
Young children and non technical adults can use it as easily as any streaming app. I guess you can tweak and theme it endlessly to look like your favourite streaming app but I haven’t felt the need to so far.
Self-hosting always involves a bit of jankiness, if you can’t handle that then back to overpriced subscriptions and spyware you go.
I had this problem, but I fixed it by setting it up so it extracts all embedded subtitles into SRT files, and enabled a setting prevents Jellyfin from serving embedded subtitles.
From what I remember, some clients don't support streaming subtitles, so they must download them completely in advance, when the movie starts, before they start appearing. If you pick embedded subtitles with these clients, Jellyfin must extract the subtitles files immediately, and this takes a while depending on container format, file sizes and server load. External subtitles are faster.
> If you pick embedded subtitles with these clients, Jellyfin must extract the subtitles files immediately, and this takes a while depending on container format, file sizes and server load.
Really? How?
My expectation would be that extracting a subtitle file takes a few seconds at most. If you had to do it on the fly every time you watched anything in your library, it wouldn't matter.
I don't undestand how movie containers work, but I ran this on a 70 GB movie file to test:
The movie is 2 hours long, and the expected time to complete is 21 minutes. It seems like it's reading the entire file. This is on an average SATA SSD that is also being read/written to by the torrent client in the background.
IIRC, in many containers embedded subtitles will be interleaved with the video and audio atoms/boxes/packets/etc., and so pulling out the subtitles requires scanning the full file. Not quite as expensive as decoding or re-encoding, but still as slow as "stream the full file into memory and demux the streams"
Could you elaborate on how you set it up to extract the embedded subtitles?
There's an official plug-in in Jellyfin called "Subtitle Extract" that does it automatically for you.
I personally use Bazarr instead, because I also want to download subtitles for different languages. In Bazarr, Embedded Subtitles is just another subtitle provider that can fetch subtitles depending on your rules.
I think you don't want to do the "extract embedded subtitles" method, it's slow as hell and downloading external subtitles is much faster than the built-in extract, at least for HDR+4K mkv video which is what we end up with the most. Can take up to a minute for a 40 minute episode to extract the subtitles, which means you'll need to pause for a minute before you can watch with subtitles, with a 5950X CPU.
Do you use bazarr? That’s been the final fix for me with subtitles
Coming from Plex, I gave Jellyfin a try, but returned back to Plex after several months. My biggest gripes were poor subtitle support and inability to differintiate TV shows from movies stored in the same folder. Does this version improve these issues?
I love jellyfin, been using it for years now, alongside the *ARR stack.
My young daughter recently started getting into audio books, so I installed Listenarr alongside a vibe coded mcp server [0] which I have running with all the other arr service mcp connections.
This allows the family to easily download and manage their media (err…Linux distributions) via Onyx AI, which I also have running with everything else on local box running microK8s, all on a relatively puny Geekom minipc with 16Gb
This whole setup is pretty straightforward to manage with Claude which has no issues working with K8s.
For those interested in the listenarr audiobook mcp: [0] https://github.com/leachuk/listenarr-mcp/blob/main/CLAUDE.md
I had to go back from 10.11.x to 10.10.7 because the performance was bad, but I'm very confident they've fixed all the performance problems with this 12.0 release.
I'm also confident they've found most of the bugs and have produced something you can just upgrade to, given they've had 7 release candidates over the past few months:
Overall it looks like a lot of solid testing has gone into this, I shouldn't have to go back to 10.10 again.
UPDATE: Upgraded to 12.0, performance is great, better than 10.10 and 10.11, including in third party apps! No problems with the migration.
I have a trifling complaint about this, which is that it smacks of LLM aid throughout, especially in headings. I wish people would aggressively filter for these things--I have a technical writing SKILL.md that tries to remove all the AI tropes it finds and use simplified technical English (it's a thing, look it up) to do docs, and that makes one heck of a difference...
link: https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw/blob/main/skel/.pi/skills/t...
this skill may help: https://github.com/blader/humanizer
As other have said the apps for devices is still the issue with Jellyfin.
For TV you pretty much have to use Kodi and all the decent theme require a surprising amount of other plug-ins to work...
Anyone know of a decent theme for Kodi that won't fall over next time it updates? I just need "Resume Watching", "Newly Added" and alphabetical lists.
Moonfin?
Jellyfin works great for me. My only gripe is logging around library scanning being pretty difficult to interpret. I'd love to add a dedicated scanner log that focuses only on logs relating to scanning, which for me tends to be the trouble spot in these systems.
That said I very rarely would even need it, the last time I thought I did was when I had my under configured to not see R rated movies because of my kids, the logs were not clear that the movie was ever scanned so it was hard to realize.
Literally last night I was trying to set up books in Jellyfin and dismayed to see the bookshelf plugin archived with no mention of ongoing support.
Very happy to see it’s been folded into the server!
Something I've long wanted is something far more minimal than jellyfin that just browses my library by folder but has a web player that can transcode/remux as needed for the browser. As it stands when I want to watch a film with someone elses computer I give VLC/whatever a link to a webdav URL and it streams from that. It'd just be nice to have it be in the browser.
I have a plex pass but moved to jellyfin, because I can't get plex to reliably stream from my server at all. While jellyfin works so smoothly. Look forward to this update!
Upgrade from 10.11.11 was also successful here - only took 2-3 minutes. Can definitely notice the performance improvement
Jellyfin has worked great so far for us, I never used Plex or Emby so cant compare. They recently made an official Tizen app too, so dont have to build and sideload anymore, just works.
One of the remaining issues is that the Samsung client remuxes if you select a secondary audio track[0] - apparently fixable by using the AVPlay player instead of the HTML player.
[0]: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-tizen/issues/337
How does it compare to current Plex? Are there proper, usable apps for Apple TV and iOS already?
Edit: Anyone is running Jellyfin on Qnap?
Not sure if there is for Apple TV
but they have an iOS app for ipad/iphone https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jellyfin-mobile/id1480192618
Swiftfin, Moonfin are two Jellyfin clients for Apple TV.
I recently switched from Plex's pretty terrible native players to Plezy (on iOS, iPadOS and tvOS).
Plezy supports both Plex and Jellyfin as a backend - I'm not sure if there is 100% feature parity.
Thanks, definitely will try that one.
Not sure if they support multiple OPDS catalogs now.
I am on v10 (using JF for music only) and with book plugin (forgot which one) it didn't offer to split books into multiple catalogs, which was a bit annoying. Maybe I missed it in v11. Solution for me was to vibecode a simplest OPDS server with 0 css and basic auth.
Did they fix that thing where like you can’t have mixed movies and tv in the same folder without it going nuts
How would jellyfin be able to tell whether the video files in a directory are movies or tv? What does going nuts actually look like, and what causes it?
Not OP, but I've run into similar instances of Jellyfin "going nuts."
Mixed media type libraries are depreciated and "broken" according to the documentation[1], which is fair enough, but sometimes this results in weirdness if a TV-show is also part of a franchise and has associated TV-movies (e.g. the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Futurama, or Breaking Bad). If you want to keep those movies on your file system in a folder with the other stuff from the franchise, Jellyfin often can't handle it. And it's not obvious to new users whether these TV-movies belong in a TV-shows library or a movies library.
I've also noticed it cannot handle additional layers of folders (i.e. for Genres) in TV show libraries, but it can handle that layer in movie libraries. Failure mode (the "going nuts") looks like those genre folders recognized as bizarre or obscure television shows, and nothing scanned the next layer down.
I haven't looked into how their scanning algorithms work, but it's definitely frustrating that there's not a button or feature to say: "No, Jellyfin, this is a folder, not a show or movie. Try scanning again on the subtree starting here."
Honestly, any software that either silently/automatically reorganizes a user's files and folders (not Jellyfin, but there are others that do this... even FOSS projects) or demands a specific meta-hierarchy on the file system is frustrating to anyone who deliberately keeps their files and folders well-organized.
[1]: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/mixed-movies-...
Dow folks migrating frem Plex ; Codex/Sol had no issue transferring played/watched status to my new Jellyfin library.
The success of jellyfin in recent years has affected me in one unexpected way: I have a project whose .com domain name starts with jelly* and at some point I started getting so many signups from confused Jellyfin users who thought it was related.
(fortunately it’s a niche thing, so I just closed signups and just give my prospective users a one time invite code)
What's the situation on intro end ending detection and skipping?
Exciting times, they really messed up with 10.11.x shipped half baked DB refactoring
Does this introduce basic UX changes, like saying that a media will be permanently lost instead of "will be removed from Jellyfin" which is inaccurate?
Edit: And making it more secure? Just because it is commonly for LAN doesn't mean it can be insecure
Including, but not limited to, sending passwords in cleartext on login.
As opposed to what? The password needs to reach the server. Encryption is the job of HTTPS.
... as opposed to using salted hashing like in every tutorial since 1990s.
I think you have some confusion between expectations upon the client and the server. This very site (and almost every other) sends your password in plaintext over form data when you sign in.
Hashing (and/or salting) a password client-side before sending it would offer next to no protection, as if the server is expecting this value and the attacker intercepts it, they could just replay the hashed value themselves. Why would they need to know the original password?
The salt for the password should also have been randomly generated when it was first created, and stored alongside the password in the database. The only way for the client to know this value would be to retrieve it based on username alone, when the request is first made. This would reduce the security of the system and allow a dedicated attacker much more leverage to try and crack that single password, if they knew only the username of the user.
The comment you're replying to is correct, encryption is the job of HTTPS.
i believe the maintainers stance is that jellyfin should not be exposed and it should always be behind a vpn
Unfortunately, yeah.
Frankly at this point, everything that is not explicitly fully public should be...
not necessarily always a VPN, but you can also use a reverse proxy like caddy or nginx where encryption and security are primary concerns instead of something non-essential like in jellyfin.
I doubt that, how would that work? You would need to give all your friends a VPN login into your local network for all of their devices, including TVs.
or your friend can setup VPN on his Router box.
But then all of his traffic goes through my internet. Unless he has a special high end router that can only route specific domains.
You dont need high end box, a old mini pc running pfsense/opnsense is enough.
High end, as in feature rich.
If you think most non tech people can just casually find an old pc, install and setup pfsense, then you are out of touch with reality. And they also would have to let it run all the time and have space for it. That's just not something realistic. It's not an option for my friends. Might also break chromecast.
Their stance is actually that exposing it is fine
> like saying that a media will be permanently lost instead of "will be removed from Jellyfin" which is inaccurate?
I don't know if that changed, but I gave jellyfin only read only access to my movies.
It sounds like a real pain in the ass upgrade, I'm thankful I've put off trying Jellyfin this long.
Stop jellyfin, update containers, start container, start library scan?
Just like all the updates before that.
I hate people who are demanding of open source projects but... doing performance improvements and adding comic book support before making the product secure enough to expose to the internet is wild prioritization and I don't know what else to say.
Or release native clients that can use OIDC.
Doing neither sucks =[.
Just use Tailscale. It’s always 1 day away from an 0-day anyway.
You can either require mesh vpn or make it easy for friends to access your library. You can't have both.
I stay purely home network, as I suspect most do. So although I can see your use case, I can also understand why it's not a bigger priority than those other features.
What about it is insecure with regards to exposing it to the internet?
There's nothing wrong with exposing it to the internet.
There have been exploits: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/security
The project is a fork of another project (Emby) and there has always been potential for user-supplied data ending up in command-line arguments, or exploitation of the (admin) user getting to upload various files. Nonetheless, all reported security bugs have been fixed promptly, and they're proactively sweeping through the full set of APIs they inherited, looking for possible exploit paths.
Most exploits required an authenticated user.
If you're concerned about this, you should run Jellyfin's docker image, with read-only mounts of your media library, and only give accounts to people you trust, which is how you should treat your personal media library anyway.
I think they are confusing Jellyfin with the crazy exploits in Plex recently.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
A lot of Jellyfin's API doesn't require any authentication at all, as an example.
> ...
> Is this a massive red-flag security risk that actively exposes your data to the Internet? No.
>
> At this point, this over-4-year-old issue has gotten posted to HackerNews more than enough times and gotten quite enough unhelpful peanut-gallery comments like those above..
I've had my instance on the internet for years without issue. (Tailscale is great for me, but not feasible for family)
Sorry, but you are being one of those people there. Open source development lives on intrinsic motivation and community. If those things which you want, aren't things that motivate other to donate their free time to, you can implement them yourself, you can try throwing money at people to do it for you, you can take other unwanted chores from them to free their time, but you really ought not push negativity lime this.