I'm not sure that ensuring BSD support is a requirement of well-engineered software. You're welcome to start your own project vs. complaining about Jellyfin, a free and open project. I just wouldn't confuse their product focus with badly engineered software on account of it using a modern language.

Anyway, there is Docker; You could spend the rest of your life shaking your fist, or you could just run it via Docker and be happy that someone else also developed free software to solve these problems for you.

It's not just on BSDs that these breakages occur. The forums are full of reports, many of which occur on Linux.

And yes, I've actually considered starting a project of my own. The main thing that gives me pause is not writing the CRUD and server bits but learning ins and outs of the absolute beast that is FFMPEG.

It’s enough of a beast that jellyfin actually created a custom spin of it.

With gstreamer and it's webrtcbin stuff, it's incredibly easy to hack something together that would get an MVP going.

I'd love to see a modular, but integrated approach, and one that lets me treat the media server itself as fungible. I want a sqlite database that is easily syncable/backup/restorable, I want a small Rust component that does media scanning and writes metadata to the database, and another small server component that has "storage" plugins for accessing the actual media and then uses gstreamer to "simul-cast" it to any WebRTC capable client.

Imagine being able to WHIP your media into an OBS session, or have it cast side-by-side with a webcam feed to an RPi hooked up to a TV. Etc.

If I could clone myself, this is the project Clone #1 would work on.

I'd reckon you could get very far relying on GPT-4 to create the appropriate ffmpeg calls based on your precise needs, it has the documentation in its training corpus and is great for this kind of thing.

no one is saying bsd support is a requirement, no one is complaining about jellyfin existing for free, no one said it is badly engineered. they're just saying that there's not a good fit for their use case, which sounds like it's the same as mine: running in a truenas jail.

so stop getting defensive. you could have just said "there is docker" and saved everyone the passive aggression.

If you google there is a jellyfin on truenas install that works well.

I assure you there's no passive aggression. They said "I'd rather that the software be engineered well enough to not need it" and I replied to this portion of their comment. If you have something constructive to add, please do. :)