I'm genuinely rooting for Jellyfin to overtake Plex in functionality and popularity; someone needs to. Plex isn't even fully FLOSS.

That said, I don't actually like Jellyfin, and I wish it weren't implemented in such a Windows-centric language framework.

Once I found out that Jellyfin existed, I excitedly spun up an instance and put all my media on it. It can't handle any AVI videos and lags a lot more than my Plex VM with exactly the same specs. Worst of all, it can't detect my external Chromecast, only the one built into my smart TV.

After assessing how well Jellyfin worked, I had to hang my head in defeat and return to using Plex. I can see that Jellyfin has a very active user / developer community on Matrix, and I bet things will get better.

EDIT: I accidentally said Windows-centric above, but what I meant was Microsoft-centric. I meant the company and not their OS. Leaving it the "wrong" way above for posterity.

I'm in the same boat, I actually like Plex, but want a truly open source solution so we can keep up to date with FFMPEG and a more clear roadmap. But in the 2 years I've been following, I haven't seen much improvement. They are very active, but from a UX and ease of use, it doesn't come anywhere close to Plex.

Also just a note, C#/.NET is cross platform and totally open source. I run an open source app that is in .NET, like Jellyfin, but just for reading and it runs of everything, including Pis.

> That said, I don't actually like Jellyfin, and I wish it weren't implemented in such a Windows-centric language framework.

That's an unfortunate holdover from it's origin as an Emby fork.

> Once I found out that Jellyfin existed, I excitedly spun up an instance and put all my media on it. It can't handle any AVI videos and lags a lot more than my Plex VM with exactly the same specs.

AVI is just a container format and Jellyfin leverages ffmpeg to do most of the actual decoding work, so that sounds like an issue with the VM's ffmpeg. Jellyfin also doesn't enable hardware decoding by default; could be related? I'm not sure what Plex does (for codecs/etc).

> That's an unfortunate holdover from it's origin as an Emby fork.

Unfortunate? My initial guess on first contact with the project was that it'd be some Node thing. I was so relieved to see it wasn't. My unkind but honest and built-on-experience assessment is that it's a big part of why it's so not-shitty. C#'s a great choice for a backend language.

I realized AVI and AV1 is confusing.

> I'm genuinely rooting for Jellyfin to overtake Plex in functionality and popularity; someone needs to. Plex isn't even fully FLOSS.

XBMC (now called Kodi) still exist and is open source. I’ve been using it for going on 15 years now and it’s never disappointed.

Different niches. Jellyfin's a server first, with a built-in (but I think, technically, removable) web UI, and optional clients for a variety of platforms, including set-top boxes like Roku and Android TV and (I think) Apple TV—and Kodi, actually.

Kodi's for running on your set-top box, mostly. Like, yes, you can link Kodi instances together and stuff like that, but it's mainly for running attached to a TV.

I've tried with Kodi off and on, never really being happy with it, since it was still XBMC. I much prefer the Jellyfin model of operation. I spend a lot more time using it and a lot less time having to mess around with it, while using more features than I ever even tried to with Kodi.

I even use both, Jellyfin as a backend and easy web interface, Kodi as a frontend on my htpc thats kept in sync (Jellyfin for Kodi plugin). Best of both worlds. Mainly because streaming JF from Firefox doesn't seem to support surround sound, maybe it's a browser limitation?

C# and .net 6 are not windows-centric.

Here is the very first sentence of the Wikipedia entry [0] for .NET Framework:

"The .NET Framework (pronounced as 'dot net') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows".

The official documentation for both C# [1] and .NET Framework [2] live on Microsoft.com.

I would say the above constitutes a pretty Windows-centric existence relative to some other vendor-agnostic languages, but maybe we're saying different things. What did you mean?

Refs

----

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework

1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/

2: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet-framework

The .NET Framework is not quite the same thing as .NET, and they have separate Wikipedia pages which reflect that distinction.

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

That sentence has perhaps not been edited in a while. .NET has been multi-platform for years. (edit: my bad, I didn't see that you'd linked to the .NET Framework, which is the Windows-only legacy runtime.)

There are several GUI libraries that are still Windows-only (e.g. Winform, WPF, etc.), but the latest one MAUI targets MacOS as well as Windows desktops, in addition to iOS and Android.

Just glancing at the code on GitHub, Jellyfin is primarily an ASP.NET web server targeting .NET 6. The download <https://jellyfin.org/downloads/> page shows a wealth of platforms, of which Windows is only one.

The original statement suggested the Jellyfin was somehow weaker on other platforms than Windows when there's nothing to suggest that there isn't parity on all supported platforms.

The .NET team has put a lot of effort into shedding its Windows-only past. I'm honestly not sure how FOSS the platform is, but at least some of it is open-source.

I made the mistake of saying "Windows" instead of "Microsoft". I didn't mean to indicate that it somehow works better on Windows. I'm running it on Linux and don't have Windows, so I couldn't even be the judge of that. Thank you for this clarifying statement, it helped me to understand.

I was also not aware that .NET 6 is not the same as .NET Framework, so that was my mistake. I'm partly going to blame my ignorance on Microsoft for that one; for us folks that don't develop in M$ land, these distinctions can be subtle.

What I _meant_ to say was that I wish it weren't such a Microsoft-centric language framework.

Jellyfin is written in .NET 6, not .NET Framework. .NET Framework is the legacy Windows only version, but .NET 6 is FOSS and cross-platform.

And the documentation is on Microsoft's site because it was originally developed at Microsoft.

Here is the very first sentence from https://dotnet.microsoft.com:

"Free. Cross-platform. Open source. A developer platform for building all your apps."

The download page for .NET which includes downloads for Windows, MacOS and Linux is https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download

What the GP meant is exactly what they said, "C# and .net 6 are not windows-centric.", sadly it shares a name with .Net Framework which was windows centric.

Then MSSQL or PowerShell are technically not Windows-centric since they have native Linux ports? While cross-platform, the .Net ecosystem is decidedly Windows first. Zero of the .Net developers I know develop on a non-Windows machine.

I think those are very different. .Net 6 (formerly core) is specifically branched to get away from being tied to windows only. In fact the initial versions lacked many of the windows API supports! It is open source and cross platform by design.

The literal only thing that keeps me from moving to Jellyfin is that I cannot seem to get it to work with a Chromecast.

If that worked (and I'm not sure if its a cert problem or something else) I'd be happily away from Emby/Plex and every other option I've used in the past.

Interesting. I recently installed jellyfin and have no issues streaming it to my chromecast. It works beautifully.

I believe this might be caused by Google. Chromecasts will only cast from URLs that have a valid HTTPS certificate (self signed will not work). If you're accessing your Jellyfin over the local IP it will be impossible to get a valid certificate for it.

> If you're accessing your Jellyfin over the local IP it will be impossible to get a valid certificate for it.

I just made a domain name for all of my local network services. Each service gets a subdomain that resolves to a local IP address, so like jellyfin.mydomain.com -> 10.x.x.x. Then just do DNS validation with letsencrypt. Boom, valid cert.

FWIW if you want to run your Jellyfin on the public internet, you can use NAT hairpinning in your local network and have that subdomain resolve to your public IP, and still access it from within your network :).

Correct, that's what I do as well. I meant if you actually use 10.x.x.x:8096 to access your Jellyfin instance

For the record, Plex gets around this by having a wildcard cert for a domain which just resolves to the local IP, ie 10.0.1.2.local-plex.tv (or whatever it is) resolving to 10.0.1.2.

I could only get it to work when I was out of the house, but inside, it never connected. You can ask on their Github for support, but I wasn't able to solve even with their help.

This could be a whole lot of causes. For example, our home access points by default isolated each wireless client, so they couldn't even see each other, much less a central server.

Jellyfin has been really nice in my experience for audio streaming. I'll also plug Finamp, my mobile audio jellyfin client of choice, and Sonixd, my macOS jellyfin client, two amazing little pieces of software. Haven't tried it much for video though. I love the fact that I can manage my own logins and self-host -- if the media has to live locally, after all, why not handle the whole thing?

These are both great! Especially Sonixd. Finamp appears to be missing a "recently added" section but I'm going to test drive it for a week or so anyway.

Finamp is missing a few features, but it's a work in progress so I can forgive it. Planning on making a couple of PRs myself, for things like fixing the reverse sort order of album view and implementing other views offline.

Oh, and for some reason local storage deletion doesn't work for me on iOS -- need to investigate that. But if you want to listen to music that's stored on Jellyfin and store some for offline use, it's great so far. Just needs some small stuff built out!

Jellyfin is awesome. The DLNA support enables streaming to my local TVs without having to install apps on the TVs themselves, though I haven't heavily tested it with video yet (works great with music). Also the visibility of libraries can be managed per account, so not everyone you give a login to has to see all your content.

Plex also has DLNA support [1].

[1]: https://support.plex.tv/articles/200350536-dlna/

I have a decent size library and accessing Jellyfin via DLNA from a PS4 was unworkable for me. There is no search, and I couldn't find any way to select specific movies other than scrolling through the entire library by title name, or finnicky categories like genre or release year. Plex's DLNA implementation provides a "By First Letter" listing so you can find it via "By First Letter > M > (scroll down past a dozen entries to 'The Matrix')" instead of "By Title > (scroll down past a few hundred entries to 'The Matrix')". I don't think I'd be able to stomach that amount of scrolling to watch "Zardoz" on Jellyfin.

The way I do it is search for the media on my phone using the Jellyfin app, and the app has an option to cast it to whatever detected device via DLNA. You can do this from the phone app or web browser on your LAN.

You do have to have your media metadata correct though, e.g. ID3 tags, etc.

If it's possible to use the Jellyfin iOS app to cast to PS4 (or Apple TV gen 3) then I'd try it out again.

The Roku app is tolerable (so, about as good as anything not from one of the companies that's big enough to gain access to the lower-level SDK)

The Android app works really well on a Shield, and is much more pleasant to use. Can't vouch for other devices, and Android experience, especially Android TV, can vary a lot with the device. The Shield also handles more video codecs and can pass through more audio formats than my Roku can, which means less transcoding, which means my poor, weak old server doesn't get abused while still only barely managing to generate a slideshow. In fact, I'm not sure I have any files that the Shield can't handle natively.

I love, love, love having a Web interface to use when I want to change things. Mixing the library & settings management interface with the "6-foot" remote-friendly interface, as on Kodi/XBMC, is a UI disaster. It's also very nice as a fallback streaming option, and works way better than I'd have expected.

I haven't been able to get subtitles working with DLNA though

Having used both - I also strongly prefer Jellyfin.

You get the whole service, open source, easy to run as a docker container or on K8s, love the web UI.

Indeed:

    #/bin/bash

    docker run -d \
    --volume /opt/jellyfin/config:/config \
    --volume /opt/jellyfin/cache:/cache \
    --net=host \
    --restart=unless-stopped \
    jellyfin/jellyfin:10.7.7-amd64

That's "docker, run this and detach the console..."

"Also, mount these two directories in the image, to where Jellyfin expects to store its config, so that stuff persists across container restarts and upgrades..."

"... uh, I don't remember what --net=host does, I think maybe it directly exposes the container's ports on the host interface, because I was being lazy when I wrote this? Anyway, it works..."

".. restart this unless I explicitly stop it..."

"... and run this official Jellyfin image, at this particular version"

Then after the second "--volume" insert more lines for every folder you want to map in, like so:

    --volume /mnt/storage/movies:/media/Movies \
    --volume /mnt/storage/tv:/media/TV \
    --volume /mnt/storage/kid-movies:/media/Kids \
    --volume /mnt/storage/music:/media/Music \

Add as many as you like.

You'll see the directories on the right of the ":" show up in the Jellyfin UI, where you can add them as media sources and tell it what's in them, who has access (say, granting some users access only to that "Kids" library), et c.

Save as "jellyfin.sh" or whatever, and chmod +x. Run it. Done. To upgrade the version, change the last line to the new version, kill the container with a docker command, and run the script again. Do the same if you want to add more directories.

(might want to check the version, that may not be latest, it's just what mine is running right now)

You could also do it with docker-compose, I just tend not to do that unless I'm dealing with a container that depends on other containers.

Works ~anywhere that can run Docker containers. Doesn't matter which distro you're using. I'm pretty sure it even comes back up on system restart, and I didn't do any extra work to make that happen. Self-contained, simple, and clean.

[EDIT] To be clear, you also need to create those "/opt/jellyfin/config" and "cache" directories. The left side is what's on the host filesystem. But, you can put those anywhere, they don't have to go in "/opt".

Helpfully, the "--volume" list is also a complete list of everything (aside from the shell file itself) that you might want to back up. Which is one of the things I love about configuring services with Docker.

Just to pop in and note that this comment turned out an excellent starting point - it might've taken me four hours to figure out why systemd wouldn't mount my shares on boot, but after that getting Jellyfin itself going took about five minutes, and your comment is a big part of why. So thanks for that! Hit me up if you're ever in Baltimore, I'll buy you that beer I owe you :)

This is disappointing:

    "Note that this project is supported on all major operating systems except FreeBSD, which is still incompatible."

Considering both Plex and Emby support FreeBSD, I'm sad to to learn that Jellyfin does not.

Is FreeBSD support really something worth worrying about? Perhaps it's also disappointing that Jellyfin doesn't run on AmigaOS?

In my case, I'm running FreeNAS/TrueNAS for storage and a Plex jail. I'd imagine there are a number of people in the same boat considering the popularity of TrueNAS.

TrueNAS Scale is Debian-based. It's easy to migrate from Core to Scale [0]. You do lose your jails but there's both an official Plex chart for the underlying k3s, and a community-supported one in TrueCharts [1].

There's a Jellyfin chart on TrueCharts as well.

[0] https://www.truenas.com/docs/scale/gettingstarted/migratingf...

[1] https://truecharts.org/

TrueNAS is a pretty small niche, no? Not only that, but the usual way of using NAS involves doing compute tasks on a separate server.

Besides, the FreeBSD based TrueNAS Core will almost certainly be deprecated and replaced with Linux based TrueNAS Scale within the nest couple of years. Further strengthening the idea that this is a pointless platform to support.

How's it compare with Subsonic and allies? I like the interface and the clients for Subsonic, but I've never had good luck with its indexing and transcoding from network sources like my NAS.

It depends whether you care more about music or movies. Jellyfin is a movie-centric solution that happens to have options for music. Subsonic was a music-centric solution that has apparently grown the ability to play video in recent years.

Turns out I don't much care for Jellyfin's approach to music, but for videos it's pretty solid, and I found it very easy to set up. Thanks for the recommendation!

(As for music, I ended up just running Airsonic in another container on the same box, so all set there till something better comes along. Navidrome, maybe...)

It's great that you left this here but can you also leave a few words about why is it better than Plex (or Emby)?