I don’t much care about browsing through a pretty interface and would rather be able to rewind/forward as needed without buffering hell. I wish VLC app had some better features like saving settings or autoconnecting to my default server. But it is great for playing hidef videos. If you want to watch stuff more than organizing and polishing your library, give it a shot.

1. What has and has not been watched 2. How far through a film/episode has been watched 3. One click to start watching the film/series from where I left off

If the VLC app can do that then I'm sold.

I tried Jellyfin, but the UX wasn't there for me. But it's still very young, so hopefully it gets better.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instantbit...

-tune fastdecode and -movflags +faststart are the magic keywords

There's no transcoding or buffering in Infuse (even with subtitles) but you'll sometimes need transcoding for subtitle rendering in the Android app.

For music I liked Kodi since it was able to get lyrics, but really haven't found a good use for Plex.

How do you do that directly from vlc?

The only real downside is there are not a lot of native apps available yet.

I also recommend the linuxserver docker images that are a great shortcut to getting it set up along with a suite of complementary software.

Please elaborate -- is "it's not plex" supposed to be positive or negative?

I'm a heavy Plex user and I'd love to switch to an open source alternative. But Plex is really good, and I love the native Trakt.tv webhook integration (which means everything I watch automatically gets tracked on trakt.tv).

But yes, the downside is the lack of smooth integrations. When I tried Jellyfin about a year ago they did not quite have Chromecast support nailed down, however as of now they've got a fully functional Android app and proper Chromecast integration.

I think that change was made a couple of years ago. I have ran plex on my freenas server for years and had an older version of it. When i upgraded my freenas to use iocage instead of jails recently, i was forced to update plex, and had no clue about this change. I was shocked to say the least and it is absolutely annoying compared how it was. Emby went closed source around the time as well.

I guess as they say, everyone's gotta eat, and filet and caviar are the menu items.

It also doesn't have the latest "free" stuff Plex has started adding in. Personally, I just want my movies or TV and that's it. If I want steaming or news, I'll go find it elsewhere.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250377-transcoding-media...

Of all things to be concerned about I wouldn’t consider a media transcoder to be one of them.

Plex will default to a dGPU like the Quadro over Intel Quick Sync on the iGPU and on Windows can't be redirected.

Jellyfin has free transcoding out of the box and you can point it to a GPU of choice like Intel Quick Sync over Nvidia. I'm not 100% if that actually uses the Intel iGPU over the Nvidia card as I removed the dGPU before testing. So far both applications are happy with a few transcodes running on the iGPU with maybe 8-10% CPU usage for each.

If you look at the transcoder in htop, you can see the ffmpeg commands it uses.

I don't use trakt.tv myself so never looked to see if it has any integration with that.

I do wish there was a feature to download videos locally for watching on-the-go. (I'm not sure if the Plex or Emby apps have it.)

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/70869-emby-jus...

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/71240-emby-ser...

Can someone explain: "Holds your entire movie collection" - does this mean it rips your DVDs onto a hard drive? Or just catalog them?

"Collect your TV Shows, and have them automatically organized by season." - is this over the air TV? Over the Top (Cable). Does it include Netflix, PrimeTV, Hulu? IS this just a catalog of what you like or does it Copy these to the hard drive as well?

"Enjoy your own music collection. Make playlists, and listen on the go." - Can I transfer songs I bought song on Apple, GooglePlay, or CDs?

"Watch Live TV and set automatic recordings to expand your media library" - is this over the air and/or cable? Can I record from streaming services? Once I record, can I watch it on my mobile?

Thank you for your help!

There’s other plugins to enable TVHeadend access and more IPTV.

I just installed it a few weeks back, and like it a lot. Much less clutter and overhead compared to Plex. The Roku app is what's missing for me, though. When that is finished (it's in development), this will be a great full replacement for Plex, for me.

If you were to convince me to try Jellyfin, what would your recommended setup for an LG WebOS TV? Ideally one that allows me to continue using the TV remote.

That said, we have WebOS work in progress.

If anyone is looking to contribute, the React client needs some work and its success would open up support to more platforms.

With everyone creating their own subscription streaming service these days piracy is about to making a roaring come back and with the advances in software out there today it’s becoming easier than ever. You can go to reddit and find 100s of Plex servers that people open up to others for a small fee or even free. These servers contain nearly everything that’s popular. Why would you want to mess around with 2-3 HDMI dongles/boxes and 4-5 streaming services when you can have it all in one place for significantly cheaper and with little technical ability other than installing the Plex app and registering for a shared server? I suspect as time goes on Jellyfin will become the go to for these types of ‘services’.

This, except for most people maintaining their own private libraries, it probably makes more sense to use Kodi to play back files in a file system, than to rename everything to fit Jellyfin/Plex's fairly inflexible file naming requirements.

TITLE (YEAR) is easy to edit, then clear metadata for the original file name so that isn't picked up. I use Rename My TV Series for shows.

Have you tried manually adding the content to the "Movies" and "TV Shows" libraries in Kodi? Kodi seems to have much more robust and flexible library support, though the process is less "set it and go" as well.

(A huge gripe of mine is having to store TV show seasons in a prescribed format in Jellyfin — I'm just testing it with movies for now.)

> Not to mention it has basically no utilities for on the fly transcoding and remote playback which was the killer feature that pulled me to Plex to begin with.

But yes, it's lacking on the other points, and for discovery of "similar" stuff.

I did not know about these shared servers. Makes Plex/JellyFin etc interesting. All the popular media one spot ready to stream.

I’m speculating that the rise of Jellyfin is/will be because of the coming crackdown on Plex and Emby. Github and other repository services will eventually begin shunning Jellyfin much the way Popcorntime was pushed to shadier corners of the web.

In the end this is all driven by the media companies refusing to deliver an easy and reasonably priced way to have access to most video content.

I also have Plex Lifetime but wonder if I'd have more of a voice if I was month to month vs no longer paying in.

I have Jellyfin running side by side with Plex, though the library is much less curated. I find it works for about 90% of what I want to do once I set up remote access and link in friends and family already connected to Plex. I don't have any player issues (all PC based) so the lack of apps for some products doesn't bother me.

a) Grab a copy of your favorite show or movie as a blu-ray and rip that (which is illegal in most jurisdictions, as you have to break the copy protection).

b) Watch it on Netflix and grab it from somewhere else (which is also illegal, because you don't own it if you have Netflix)

c) Don't care at all and just download the stuff "from sources".

d) Just watch open or initially free stuff. That's even harder.

It's pretty hard to stay on the safe side for this kind of thing.

Maybe we will see the same we had with the music industry some time ago: It's possible for me to get a FLAC album without DRM nowadays from perfectly legal sources. Not every album and every niche, but I can buy it and own it. Maybe the movie industry will have the same moment in the next decade.

They’ve been trying (desperately) to present Plex as a business supporting only legitimate and legal usage.

First it was “curated” podcasts and “web shows”, then News(??), TIDAL integration, ad-supported media, and so on.

Originally it was very clear that they wanted to help you organize and play all your content without judgement and with the most beautiful experience possible.

Clearly Not Any More.

I was fairly certain this was allowed in Europe as long as you own the discs (or otherwise has a permanent right to watch the content?)

Anyone knows the details?

You’re not breaking encryption thus are safe from that can of worms, and assuming you’re not uploading (distributing is definitely a crime, even a single chunk of a torrent) and it’s for personal use I believe that the law is on your side.

The Samsung Smart TV OS apparently is being cycled out for more modern alternatives. Surely the Jellyfish team knows this but with the ever-changing landscape of TV OS's, it seems like it's really difficult to support a large quantity of devices.

Low in priority insofar as there are not many developers with that hardware contributing to the project. If you have the hardware and free time to contribute, please do.

I think it's a mistake for them not to put huge effort into TV apps; on the TV is, after all the main use case for this.

Suggesting people buy other devices isn't going to fly either.

I have a hundred devices in my home that can run an Android app or web site, but convincing my family that any of them are effortless to use is another matter, I suspect a lot of the technical people here have families similarly disinterested in the complexity of a 3rd, 4th or Nth remote control to deal with.

I don't really understand the complaints about TV apps for jellyfin: it's pretty much a given for these walled gardens. You're usually better off just hooking up a raspberrypi or firetv stick to your TV, smart or dumb. And CEC is an awesome tool to control everything together.

* PS4 development requires purchase of an expensive development kit (2500$, although they sometimes lend them to developers for a year as well), which is probably just not financially viable for most contributors as there is no way to make back this money for them

* The PS4 SDK and everything related to it is under NDA and open sourcing code linking against it seems to be forbidden (e.g. the Unreal Engine excludes these parts from their public source code releases as well)

Previously, I was pointing Kodi at an SFTP server which worked fine, similar to the guy who had a good experience with VLC. Those are both great standalone solutions.

However, adding "media server" software like Jellyfin into the mix gives my users a much wider variety of clients to choose from (including the Jellyfin addon for Kodi) without compromising freedom.

Various other perks include tracking watched status across devices, Chromecast support, and re-encoding video files so they play on old clients or slower connections. The playback reporting plugin is fun as well.

Keep up the great work everybody!

The Jellyfin server is configured so no user tiles are shown on the login screen. Everybody who logs in must type both a username and password.

My upstream bandwidth is not great, so WAN streams are choked to 4 Mbps each, for all users except myself of course ;)

[0] https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-pro...

I used Plex briefly some years ago, but became dissatisfied with nag screens, paywalls, and the inability to conduct user authentication on my own terms. Usage of a Plex account (or Google/Facebook integration) is mandatory, which is uncool.

Emby used to be alright but as of version 3.6, the project was taken closed-source[0].

Thankfully the Jellyfin developers stepped in, and are working to continue the legacy.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20181212100152/https://github.co...

Requires setting your Roku to dev mode and side loading. Didn't want to toss some half finished slop onto the app store. It's been in a semi idle state because it covers most of my use cases and I don't really know enough about other people's use cases to know what needs to be fixed or updated before people find it "acceptable". (I'm not a BrightScript dev, which gives a bit of extra imposter syndrome and makes me nervous to consider a thing shippable too).

BrightScript is awful, but if you can help develop it would be great (the server is in .NET but the Roku app is in Roku's BrightScript). If not, testing and feedback and prioritization of feature requests also helps a ton.

I think Roku is actually one of the better OTT platforms out there, but that's absolutely in spite of BrightScript.

I just happened to stumble upon this while browsing around and suddenly a Jellyfin logo popped up and all my movies were there.

Would love to try Jellyfin, but I'm definitely not setting up another box + remote for it, and it sounds like the web client is a little patchy in the PS4's browser.

(looks like the web client does have a bunch of PS4-specific detection in it, so it's getting at least some testing/use— perhaps I'll check it out: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/search?q=PS4&type=C...)

There's a real emotional difference in clicking on a movie poster rather than squinting at text in a list of folder contents.

Additionally the media server will generally pull lists of actors, directors, and other related works, as well as holding your place in the episode or series if you are working your way through a TV series on the weekend. "What episode where we on?" becomes a rhetorical question rather than a debate.

What is the benefit of this being a server side function?

Sounds like the opposite of a feature. Never judge a book...

(1) Pulls media metadata automatically

(2) Can serve content to a variety of clients, including smart phones

(3) Provides user access controls for when you want to share your content with others

(4) Can transcode media on the fly for clients that don’t natively support a media format

(5) Allows you to logically split up your content into libraries

(6) Provides powerful search capabilities using metadata (e.g., by actor, by genre, by director)

(7) Provides support for audio as well as video content

Handles organization and searching for various media

Additionally, clients available for smartphones and Android TV devices.

And most importantly for some people is being an endpoint for accessing their media remotely

Website: https://videohubapp.com/

MIT Open Source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

It's also much faster to scan my library with jellyfin than plex, (few minutes vs an hour and a half) though I'm not sure why as I only have ~30 shows.

Is this how one would watch media from Jellyfish on TV, install Kodi+JellyFish AddOn for iOS/Android and then Chromecast to TV?

[1] https://www.newegg.com/gyration-gyr3101us-universal/p/N82E16...

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

They'd benefit hugely, I feel, from focusing effort on the native apps. Some of this is more challenging; WebOS for example never had an OSS app, so there's nothing for Jellyfin to fork

Family (particularly little ones) love the beautiful artwork/cover art layout you get from the likes of Emby/Jellyfin/Plex.

It annoys me to no end. Kodi has had support for ages (back in the XBMC-days) but the feature-request and bountys seems to fall on deaf ears.

Other than that i've found the meta-data to be "better" in emby/jellfin compared to Kodi.

Not sure why anyone actually uses RAR these days...I really don't get it.

I don't think the license is the issue, Kodi has solved it with a external dep if i'm not mistaken. The reason is more related to your last sentence. They don't get it, and thus doesn't want to spend time on solving it. Which is their prerogative of course, but it still annoys _me_ :)

I don't understand why you'd want to keep media files in .rar, unless you are part of scene distribution.

It's not like ROM emulation, where there's tangible savings to be had storing the individual ROMs in a compressed format.

But i guess times are changing, kids these days etc. :)

The assumptions you need to do to make a folder into a file requires a lot of extra work.

An example of a folder that is actually a file could be a folder named "A Good Movie" with a bunch of .rar files in it.

I've built a streaming plugin for deluge that tries to work around these assumptions but only for a playback scenario and not an indexing scenario. That allows streaming of multi-rar file torrents.

There's also the problem that many rar parsing libraries reads the beginning and end of each part of a split .rar file. That can cause a lot of latency with e.g. 100 files.

Edit: all this applies only to rar files with no compression. With compression you can't do much with regards to seeking and whatnot.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/85

I think that summarizes the current status afaik!

// mrmlz

It finds metadata pretty well (Artwork, artist info, and summaries) but playback leaves a fair bit to be desired and playlists aren't very well fleshed out.

As far as gonic goes I've been testing it out for a while and haven't run into any issues and I'm a bit of a fanboy for stuff made in go. It's still pretty bare-bones, but has been pretty stable and fast otherwise.

Looking into it would seem that gonic might not actually do transcoding yet (airsonic could transcode into opus after some configuration which is nice) although, caching from dsub might have saved me there if that's the case.

The main issue with jellyfin as far as mobile stuff goes is that it doesn't cache any tracks so if I was going between wifi signals audio would frequently cut out which was never a problem with airsonic/gonic as dsub will request a couple of tracks ahead of time to compensate for deadzones.

There is an Jellyfin Dev in this thread. Ask him about the Emby Database design where DB and XML files where all mixed :)))

DL;DR: Not too much difference for the enduser right now. Might load a bit faster, because of website refactoring.

A lot more development still needed, feel free to contribute.