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
> As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my arr stack and it has helped tremendously.
LLMs have been AMAZING for home server maintenance and improvements. I have completed SO many of my "some day" tasks. I never have to read another fucking log file ever again. It has taken all of the friction out of the hobby. It's all* fun now.
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 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
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.
they'll eventually come out with a completely new overhauled version of plex that's sub only but your lifetime pass will still be good for "plex classic" which they'll stop supporting
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
> As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my arr stack and it has helped tremendously.
LLMs have been AMAZING for home server maintenance and improvements. I have completed SO many of my "some day" tasks. I never have to read another fucking log file ever again. It has taken all of the friction out of the hobby. It's all* fun now.
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
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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
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.
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...
they'll eventually come out with a completely new overhauled version of plex that's sub only but your lifetime pass will still be good for "plex classic" which they'll stop supporting
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.
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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.
really is just the normies access to it via samsung and LG TV's that hold me back.
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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"?
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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.
> 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.
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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.
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
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?
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.
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
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Chaptarr is great! Just had their public release after a long alpha testing phase
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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).
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.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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
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.
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?
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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.
Updated the rootless podman container and restarted, worked fine.
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.
Just pulled latest container and it just worked as far as I can tell.
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.
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.
Could you elaborate on how you set it up to extract the embedded subtitles?
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> 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.
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Do you use bazarr? That’s been the final fix for me with subtitles
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.
SenPlayer is also very good on ATV.
Is that an old problem, or a problem that is still in this new v12?
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
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 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!
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!
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.
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?
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 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.
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
> 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.
i believe the maintainers stance is that jellyfin should not be exposed and it should always be behind a vpn
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.
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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.
Their stance is actually that exposing it is fine
Frankly at this point, everything that is not explicitly fully public should be...
Unfortunately, yeah.
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.
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This seems like spam in order to get people to sign up to a service with your referral link. It’s literally just a guide on how to create an account.
That's not mine. I can remove the link if it makes it look less spammy.. It's not always easy for people to do the setup.
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.
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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.
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.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
A lot of Jellyfin's API doesn't require any authentication at all, as an example.
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I think they are confusing Jellyfin with the crazy exploits in Plex recently.