As the primary open-source alternative to Plex, Jellyfin is often pointed to as the way to go when users get annoyed with certain feature restrictions, lack of customization, or the general...
As the primary open-source alternative to Plex, Jellyfin is often pointed to as the way to go when users get annoyed with certain feature restrictions, lack of customization, or the general increased commercialization of Plex. People are then usually immediately dissuaded by additional comments criticizing Jellyfin's lack of client support and polish, which unfortunately stems from the team's general lack of resources.
I love the values Jellyfin stands for and I wanted to help spread their call for developers, so if this is your cup of tea please consider helping out! I would love to see them succeed in their goals so that we have a true feature-rich self-hosting alternative available for streaming media, especially as Plex seems to be walking a tight-rope to stay on the good side of movie studios in an uncertain legal environment.
Relevant excerpt on Jellyfins's philosophy:
For those who are not aware, Jellyfin is a bit unusual, even within the FLOSS world. We are explicitly anti-commercial. Our team is entirely composed of volunteers who contribute because they like what we're doing and can help out in whatever ways they can. This includes developers, translators, and community members who help moderate the community and assist others in troubleshooting and working through problems.
No one gets paid for Jellyfin work, by design. We're not backed by any company or "organization" with its own agenda. We have no "monetization plan" or anything of the sort, and actively avoid bug bounties. Jellyfin isn't a "product" in the commercial sense of the word. And while we do take donations, these only cover our infrastructure costs and the rare piece of developer client hardware as needed; we don't pay developers out of donations, and never will. Money is not an issue (for what we use it for), and that's not really what we need. This is a choice we've made from day 1 to avoid Jellyfin following in the footsteps of nearly every other player in this space, who start out as FLOSS, start adding user-hostile features in the name of money, and then go closed source. We want to be different. We want to be volunteer-only and work on this thing to help make media streaming available to everyone.
When I put together a media server, Plex was what I initially went with because it seemed easy at the time. And it was, more or less. Took me just a couple of hours or so of reading and thinking...
When I put together a media server, Plex was what I initially went with because it seemed easy at the time. And it was, more or less. Took me just a couple of hours or so of reading and thinking while I fiddled with settings and LAN addresses to get Plex working.
Then I ran into the lack of hardware acceleration. A number of things they'd been doing were bad enough, annoying enough, but then I came home with a two hundred dollar video card I'd bought specifically for the media server to help with transcoding and ... fuck you pay us reared its head.
Jellyfin was installed within hours. Fuck Plex; they were pulling usage data on me and my libraries and we all know they can monetize that. Demanding a subscription just to unlock my own hardware features is a fuck you to me that I wasn't standing for.
I was prepared (and angry/motivated enough) to have to do some puzzling and thinking, but Jellyfin installed smoothly. It just works.
Is Jellyfin perfect? No, not in all ways. There are little things it does that annoy me. Like how the page display doesn't seem to update smoothly or often (so a lot of times I'll click on a series I was watching, and it will revert back to the first episode rather than the one I left off at). And its media identification stuff isn't super great; about a fifth of the time I have to manually identify a movie or series before it'll find the match in the databases and pull the metadata.
But Jellyfin is overall way, way better than Plex. Fans helping fans, something that'll always find that soft spot in my heart to nest in. I particularly love how it pulls random background pictures for the libraries and backgrounds, and honestly wish they'd change up more often. It'd be great if every day, maybe even twice a day, those images (drawn from the movies and shows in my libraries) would change. Right now they seem to only change once or twice a month. It just gives me a really nice thrill every time I flick over to Jellyfin and see a screen or poster from a movie I haven't watched in a while.
Hopefully some fans with developer talent can spare a little time here and there to contribute. People like me enjoy having our media immediately and permanently available to us without a subscription. That's why I have my own media server. VLC let me watch what was on the hard drives just fine ... but it's really nice having the interface layer Jellyfin offers. Maintaining and updating that is always greatly appreciated.
I switched to Jellyfin because I was sick and tired of Plex trying to push off-brand streaming services I didn’t want. If I wanted a streaming service I’d just use a streaming service and not add...
I switched to Jellyfin because I was sick and tired of Plex trying to push off-brand streaming services I didn’t want. If I wanted a streaming service I’d just use a streaming service and not add the complexity of Plex to it.
But isn't Plex Live TV something that can be disabled in the settings? I've never quite understood the vitriol from the Plex community about a feature that is easily turned off.
But isn't Plex Live TV something that can be disabled in the settings? I've never quite understood the vitriol from the Plex community about a feature that is easily turned off.
In general I think it's just a frustration with Plex shifting it's focus away from the self-hosting community and more towards attempting to recreate their own streaming service of sorts and...
In general I think it's just a frustration with Plex shifting it's focus away from the self-hosting community and more towards attempting to recreate their own streaming service of sorts and profit off of advertisements and partnership deals. I think most of us get the feeling that if they do actually manage to be successful with those ventures, that business with dwarf the self-hosting community and we can say goodbye to significant updates on the Plex media server side. Most of us have lifetime Plex passes and as such simple don't offer any continuing financial incentive for Plex to cater towards us. Instead they've pivoted into turning us and our users into a product to be sold to other companies.
Personally I also incredibly dislike how it muddies the water for my users on which content I've curated in my library and which content is just being promoted by a 3rd party (with ads). They simply view Plex as something I am providing for them, not as an independent service. This adds some difficulty setting up a simple and intuitive client for my non tech savvy users.
It seems to keep turning itself back on whenever the software gets updated. If I uninstall Plex I know I’ll never get harassed by it ever again, not only that, but I know this works for all the...
It seems to keep turning itself back on whenever the software gets updated. If I uninstall Plex I know I’ll never get harassed by it ever again, not only that, but I know this works for all the software that harasses me every day.
Even if it did stay turned off I wouldn’t expect it stay turned off because my experience with all the unwanted software that tries to stuff itself up my nose every day is I am always telling it “I don’t want to see this ever again” and I keep seeing it again anyway. It’s true even for software that I really like, like Jetbrains IDEs…. Update to a new version and I get harassed with a dialog that wants to tell me about features under my IDE every time I start it up…. When I am feeling distractable and under the gun to get my next task done. (Why don’t they ever interrupt you after you’ve finished a task and are in a good mood?)
Just like conspiracy theorists have been activated by the COVID-19 situation and now react violently to the slightest whiff of a “15 minute city” or replacing gas stoves with induction cooktops, I’m at a fever pitch because Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Amazon (the only thing that takes more clicks than cancelling Prime is how many times you have to click to check out on Amazon without getting a “free” trial of Prime… the only way I would try it and then cancel it is if I knew it wrecked some executive’s numbers and would get them fired) have been pissing in the pool for so long.
So it’s not just about Plex, it’s about an industry that’s out of control. The whole reason I am running a server on my computer is I want control, I want to escape from that bullshit, and if they don’t give me that escape, it’s good bye. It shows a real lack of cultural sensitivity that Plex thought that the people want to use Plex want to get off-brand streaming services shoved up their nose. I have to fight with software being like this at all day at work and when I want to do creative things, when I just want to zone out and relax I expect some respite.
Exactly this - it makes every set up of a new Plex client a big headache too. What was previously a "login and everything works" experience, is now turned to making sure everything that would...
Exactly this - it makes every set up of a new Plex client a big headache too. What was previously a "login and everything works" experience, is now turned to making sure everything that would confuse a novice user-is-turned-off chore.
When there wasn’t an official client for XBOX ONE I had a lot of trouble w/ codecs trying to watch with Videotape. The official client seems to encapsulate the web app, it’s clunky, makes you...
When there wasn’t an official client for XBOX ONE I had a lot of trouble w/ codecs trying to watch with Videotape.
The official client seems to encapsulate the web app, it’s clunky, makes you emulate the mouse pointer, but every time it’s failed to play a video I found out that the video file is really corrupted now.
I guess back in the day when I wanted to “sync” I just dropped the files onto my PC laptop and watched them with “plays for sure” VLC. I think I have synced files to the Plex iOS and Android apps and had it work OK. That might be something I care about more because these days I travel with with my iPad and RDP into YOSHINON (the body of the YOShInOn system) using Tailscale when I want to code. My Jellyfin server (tamamo… yeah I’m a weeb) is on Tailscale too but I haven’t set the ACLs to let me log in remotely. Still my connection is slow and syncing a few anime episodes to my iPad would be good for entertainment on the go if I could make it work.
Hmmm As an Android developer maybe I should give the Android repo a pull and poke around! I've been wanting to do some open source dev recently so it might be fun!
Hmmm As an Android developer maybe I should give the Android repo a pull and poke around! I've been wanting to do some open source dev recently so it might be fun!
I've been meaning to set up my own media server, whether it be Plex or Jellyfin, maybe I'll try both to see what works for not and then see how it goes. I hardly have the energy to be doing...
I've been meaning to set up my own media server, whether it be Plex or Jellyfin, maybe I'll try both to see what works for not and then see how it goes. I hardly have the energy to be doing projects like this though so maybe it'll be a later rather than sooner kinda thing lol.
Never used findroid, but I much prefer finamp as i mostly listen to music from my media server on my phone. I used to use gelli, but development was slow and it was very buggy, missing essential...
Never used findroid, but I much prefer finamp as i mostly listen to music from my media server on my phone. I used to use gelli, but development was slow and it was very buggy, missing essential features (offline downloads)
I sincerely hope this call does attract some fresh developers. From experience I can tell that, unfortunately, it is an issue many open source projects face. There is a finite amount of developers...
I sincerely hope this call does attract some fresh developers. From experience I can tell that, unfortunately, it is an issue many open source projects face. There is a finite amount of developers available and dedicating time and energy to a project outside regular work for a pro longed amount of time does take some dedication.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the demographics of many (not all) open source projects reflect this. I found it much easier to spend time contributing (and eventually accidentally creating) open source projects when I was younger and in college. It simply is a period where you have more time available and more freedom in choosing where to spend it on.
Refinement is the worst stage for this. It’s hard to motivate yourself to do a lot of annoying work to improve the product by 1%. It’s something where it really helps to have a manager and bunch...
Refinement is the worst stage for this. It’s hard to motivate yourself to do a lot of annoying work to improve the product by 1%. It’s something where it really helps to have a manager and bunch of junior devs to push the work onto and a salary to incentive you to do the work.
A lot of open source has a ton of activity in the beginning, where it’s the most fun, but then never get to the polish stage because polish isn’t fun.
I tried bih Plex and Jellyfin. Each of them had their advantages and disadvantages - for me, that is. Plex' advantages: has good Kodi client, easy to witch users, thus easy parental control has...
I tried bih Plex and Jellyfin. Each of them had their advantages and disadvantages - for me, that is.
Plex' advantages:
has good Kodi client, easy to witch users, thus easy parental control
has better scrubber (isit the right word?), even is it doesn't find the right movie, it gives a few options to pick from
was better capable of serving content to different clients without re-encoding
Plex' disadvantages:
need to be online to set up, which ultimately means you are in the hands of somebody and doesn't actually have full control
on my system (Gentoo Linux) the init script didn't start the server on the first go, I had to start it second time after reboot (this ultimately led to uninstall and keeping Jellyfin
Jellyfin's advantages:
open source (I like using FOSS, not because I don't have to pay, but because of the philosophy behind such software)
you are the boss
has the same UI on PC and in mobile app (which to my knowledge actually is the same web UI wrapped in an app)
I like Kodi's plugin, as it simply adds remote files to local Kodi library, which means you stay within Kodi's interface when you are selecting a movie
Jellyfin's disadvantages:
for some reason it likes to re-encode for some clients (PC, web) and I can't force it to try and serve raw file
no easy user switching on Kodi
bad support for multi part movies in Kodi (for exampke Live Aid concert DVDs, there are four of them and in Kodi I can see and play only the first one), I don't know how Plex handles that, I didn't get that far when testing it; it works fine in web interface and on mobile
Jellyfin is great piece of software, especially when you consider the price - free. I mean free for end user, there is actually tons of work out into it and many developers paid the price of their own time to get where it is today.
And finally to the point - I'm not developer, I can't help Jellyfin in other ways then sending reports from my usage. As of today after diacovering this thread here, I very highly consider donation. I have to look up if that is an option and if it is, I will donate. I bought MakeMKV to rip all my original DVDs and Blu rays and I use "abcde" software to rip my original audio CDs (I keep saying original as I really own originals that I bought and still keep buying), so Jellyfin should in this regard be at least of the same value. Not long ago I donated to Wikipedia, I will probably donate to Web archive and I feel like I should really reward the Jwllyfin team for their work.
I view this as a disadvantage; native apps are always better, and those native apps should take advantage of their host platforms features and UI toolkit, rather than trying to look and behave...
has the same UI on PC and in mobile app (which to my knowledge actually is the same web UI wrapped in an app)
I view this as a disadvantage; native apps are always better, and those native apps should take advantage of their host platforms features and UI toolkit, rather than trying to look and behave exactly the same.
It's why I added "for me" :-) My 9yo daughter just got her first PC and phone and having the same UI is easier for her at the moment. I also like navigating the same menus when I have to change...
It's why I added "for me" :-) My 9yo daughter just got her first PC and phone and having the same UI is easier for her at the moment. I also like navigating the same menus when I have to change some setting or whatever. I tried Findroid (the unofficial client) which was better in some ways but lacked too many other features that the web UI wrapped inside an app has.
But you are right in that apps should be taking advantage of host platform.
You shouldn't discount the ability of kids to learn new paradigms like drinking water. Seeing 1 year olds navigating YouTube is both terrifying and inspiring. If anything, the incoherent mess that...
You shouldn't discount the ability of kids to learn new paradigms like drinking water. Seeing 1 year olds navigating YouTube is both terrifying and inspiring. If anything, the incoherent mess that comes from shoehorning a universal UI into an opinionated platform might do more harm than good when it comes to learning how apps work.
Honestly, after a couple minutes of reading that post, I still had no idea what Jellyfin actually is. A bit of a writing fail, there. Would it have been so hard for them to copy-paste from elsewhere:
Honestly, after a couple minutes of reading that post, I still had no idea what Jellyfin actually is. A bit of a writing fail, there. Would it have been so hard for them to copy-paste from elsewhere:
What is Jellyfin?
Jellyfin enables you to collect, manage, and stream your media. Run the Jellyfin server on your system and gain access to the leading free-software entertainment system, bells and whistles included.
As the primary open-source alternative to Plex, Jellyfin is often pointed to as the way to go when users get annoyed with certain feature restrictions, lack of customization, or the general increased commercialization of Plex. People are then usually immediately dissuaded by additional comments criticizing Jellyfin's lack of client support and polish, which unfortunately stems from the team's general lack of resources.
I love the values Jellyfin stands for and I wanted to help spread their call for developers, so if this is your cup of tea please consider helping out! I would love to see them succeed in their goals so that we have a true feature-rich self-hosting alternative available for streaming media, especially as Plex seems to be walking a tight-rope to stay on the good side of movie studios in an uncertain legal environment.
Relevant excerpt on Jellyfins's philosophy:
This is awesome, I used to use jellyfin but switched to Plex because jellyfin didn't have an app for my TV
I'll definitely take a look and try to help
Which TV is that? Cause if it's Samsung (Tizen OS) I've compiled jellyfin for it following instructions online and it was relatively painless
Yeah it's Samsung, I didn't dig too deep at the time when I switched - will have to take a look!
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-tizen
When I put together a media server, Plex was what I initially went with because it seemed easy at the time. And it was, more or less. Took me just a couple of hours or so of reading and thinking while I fiddled with settings and LAN addresses to get Plex working.
Then I ran into the lack of hardware acceleration. A number of things they'd been doing were bad enough, annoying enough, but then I came home with a two hundred dollar video card I'd bought specifically for the media server to help with transcoding and ... fuck you pay us reared its head.
Jellyfin was installed within hours. Fuck Plex; they were pulling usage data on me and my libraries and we all know they can monetize that. Demanding a subscription just to unlock my own hardware features is a fuck you to me that I wasn't standing for.
I was prepared (and angry/motivated enough) to have to do some puzzling and thinking, but Jellyfin installed smoothly. It just works.
Is Jellyfin perfect? No, not in all ways. There are little things it does that annoy me. Like how the page display doesn't seem to update smoothly or often (so a lot of times I'll click on a series I was watching, and it will revert back to the first episode rather than the one I left off at). And its media identification stuff isn't super great; about a fifth of the time I have to manually identify a movie or series before it'll find the match in the databases and pull the metadata.
But Jellyfin is overall way, way better than Plex. Fans helping fans, something that'll always find that soft spot in my heart to nest in. I particularly love how it pulls random background pictures for the libraries and backgrounds, and honestly wish they'd change up more often. It'd be great if every day, maybe even twice a day, those images (drawn from the movies and shows in my libraries) would change. Right now they seem to only change once or twice a month. It just gives me a really nice thrill every time I flick over to Jellyfin and see a screen or poster from a movie I haven't watched in a while.
Hopefully some fans with developer talent can spare a little time here and there to contribute. People like me enjoy having our media immediately and permanently available to us without a subscription. That's why I have my own media server. VLC let me watch what was on the hard drives just fine ... but it's really nice having the interface layer Jellyfin offers. Maintaining and updating that is always greatly appreciated.
I switched to Jellyfin because I was sick and tired of Plex trying to push off-brand streaming services I didn’t want. If I wanted a streaming service I’d just use a streaming service and not add the complexity of Plex to it.
But isn't Plex Live TV something that can be disabled in the settings? I've never quite understood the vitriol from the Plex community about a feature that is easily turned off.
In general I think it's just a frustration with Plex shifting it's focus away from the self-hosting community and more towards attempting to recreate their own streaming service of sorts and profit off of advertisements and partnership deals. I think most of us get the feeling that if they do actually manage to be successful with those ventures, that business with dwarf the self-hosting community and we can say goodbye to significant updates on the Plex media server side. Most of us have lifetime Plex passes and as such simple don't offer any continuing financial incentive for Plex to cater towards us. Instead they've pivoted into turning us and our users into a product to be sold to other companies.
Personally I also incredibly dislike how it muddies the water for my users on which content I've curated in my library and which content is just being promoted by a 3rd party (with ads). They simply view Plex as something I am providing for them, not as an independent service. This adds some difficulty setting up a simple and intuitive client for my non tech savvy users.
It seems to keep turning itself back on whenever the software gets updated. If I uninstall Plex I know I’ll never get harassed by it ever again, not only that, but I know this works for all the software that harasses me every day.
Even if it did stay turned off I wouldn’t expect it stay turned off because my experience with all the unwanted software that tries to stuff itself up my nose every day is I am always telling it “I don’t want to see this ever again” and I keep seeing it again anyway. It’s true even for software that I really like, like Jetbrains IDEs…. Update to a new version and I get harassed with a dialog that wants to tell me about features under my IDE every time I start it up…. When I am feeling distractable and under the gun to get my next task done. (Why don’t they ever interrupt you after you’ve finished a task and are in a good mood?)
Just like conspiracy theorists have been activated by the COVID-19 situation and now react violently to the slightest whiff of a “15 minute city” or replacing gas stoves with induction cooktops, I’m at a fever pitch because Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Amazon (the only thing that takes more clicks than cancelling Prime is how many times you have to click to check out on Amazon without getting a “free” trial of Prime… the only way I would try it and then cancel it is if I knew it wrecked some executive’s numbers and would get them fired) have been pissing in the pool for so long.
So it’s not just about Plex, it’s about an industry that’s out of control. The whole reason I am running a server on my computer is I want control, I want to escape from that bullshit, and if they don’t give me that escape, it’s good bye. It shows a real lack of cultural sensitivity that Plex thought that the people want to use Plex want to get off-brand streaming services shoved up their nose. I have to fight with software being like this at all day at work and when I want to do creative things, when I just want to zone out and relax I expect some respite.
I keep un-pinning these things from my Plex sidebar, and they keep coming back after a couple months.
Exactly this - it makes every set up of a new Plex client a big headache too. What was previously a "login and everything works" experience, is now turned to making sure everything that would confuse a novice user-is-turned-off chore.
I have issues with some sync in jellyfin sometimes. It will work fine in Plex. Other than that I try to use it.
When there wasn’t an official client for XBOX ONE I had a lot of trouble w/ codecs trying to watch with Videotape.
The official client seems to encapsulate the web app, it’s clunky, makes you emulate the mouse pointer, but every time it’s failed to play a video I found out that the video file is really corrupted now.
I guess back in the day when I wanted to “sync” I just dropped the files onto my PC laptop and watched them with “plays for sure” VLC. I think I have synced files to the Plex iOS and Android apps and had it work OK. That might be something I care about more because these days I travel with with my iPad and RDP into YOSHINON (the body of the YOShInOn system) using Tailscale when I want to code. My Jellyfin server (tamamo… yeah I’m a weeb) is on Tailscale too but I haven’t set the ACLs to let me log in remotely. Still my connection is slow and syncing a few anime episodes to my iPad would be good for entertainment on the go if I could make it work.
Hmmm As an Android developer maybe I should give the Android repo a pull and poke around! I've been wanting to do some open source dev recently so it might be fun!
FWIW, I find the official Android client quite bad. There's a good alternative called Findroid.
I've been meaning to set up my own media server, whether it be Plex or Jellyfin, maybe I'll try both to see what works for not and then see how it goes. I hardly have the energy to be doing projects like this though so maybe it'll be a later rather than sooner kinda thing lol.
Never used findroid, but I much prefer finamp as i mostly listen to music from my media server on my phone. I used to use gelli, but development was slow and it was very buggy, missing essential features (offline downloads)
I sincerely hope this call does attract some fresh developers. From experience I can tell that, unfortunately, it is an issue many open source projects face. There is a finite amount of developers available and dedicating time and energy to a project outside regular work for a pro longed amount of time does take some dedication.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the demographics of many (not all) open source projects reflect this. I found it much easier to spend time contributing (and eventually accidentally creating) open source projects when I was younger and in college. It simply is a period where you have more time available and more freedom in choosing where to spend it on.
Refinement is the worst stage for this. It’s hard to motivate yourself to do a lot of annoying work to improve the product by 1%. It’s something where it really helps to have a manager and bunch of junior devs to push the work onto and a salary to incentive you to do the work.
A lot of open source has a ton of activity in the beginning, where it’s the most fun, but then never get to the polish stage because polish isn’t fun.
I tried bih Plex and Jellyfin. Each of them had their advantages and disadvantages - for me, that is.
Plex' advantages:
Plex' disadvantages:
Jellyfin's advantages:
Jellyfin's disadvantages:
Jellyfin is great piece of software, especially when you consider the price - free. I mean free for end user, there is actually tons of work out into it and many developers paid the price of their own time to get where it is today.
And finally to the point - I'm not developer, I can't help Jellyfin in other ways then sending reports from my usage. As of today after diacovering this thread here, I very highly consider donation. I have to look up if that is an option and if it is, I will donate. I bought MakeMKV to rip all my original DVDs and Blu rays and I use "abcde" software to rip my original audio CDs (I keep saying original as I really own originals that I bought and still keep buying), so Jellyfin should in this regard be at least of the same value. Not long ago I donated to Wikipedia, I will probably donate to Web archive and I feel like I should really reward the Jwllyfin team for their work.
I view this as a disadvantage; native apps are always better, and those native apps should take advantage of their host platforms features and UI toolkit, rather than trying to look and behave exactly the same.
It's why I added "for me" :-) My 9yo daughter just got her first PC and phone and having the same UI is easier for her at the moment. I also like navigating the same menus when I have to change some setting or whatever. I tried Findroid (the unofficial client) which was better in some ways but lacked too many other features that the web UI wrapped inside an app has.
But you are right in that apps should be taking advantage of host platform.
You shouldn't discount the ability of kids to learn new paradigms like drinking water. Seeing 1 year olds navigating YouTube is both terrifying and inspiring. If anything, the incoherent mess that comes from shoehorning a universal UI into an opinionated platform might do more harm than good when it comes to learning how apps work.
Honestly, after a couple minutes of reading that post, I still had no idea what Jellyfin actually is. A bit of a writing fail, there. Would it have been so hard for them to copy-paste from elsewhere: