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#jellyfin#plex#media#server#don#https#more#app#something#client
Discussion (195 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative!
[1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/
I have an XFCE4 desktop environment on the HTPC with the font size cranked up a bit and can run nautilus, thunar, or any other file explorer metaphor browser to explore the folders. There's a folder for movies, a folder for TV shows, and then stuff is organized within there by its directory name and filename. I double click on something I want to watch and it opens in VLC. Dead simple and works.
Lots of quality of life improvements over list of files on a smb share.
iTunes (and the iPod) had a different idea: The app takes care of file management, and you have a frontend supported by a database containing all sorts of metadata to browse your music (both static metadata (artist, genre) and dynamic (play count, skip count, last heard)). iTunes has smart playlists which I love (all songs with 3 stars or more that I haven't heard in 6 weeks).
I'm firmly in the latter camp, and similarly prefer Jellyfin over a pure SMB share for movies.
I think it's an extra layer on top of things i do not need. I do not need cover art, descriptions or trailers. The smb shares have a folder hierarchy that's very logical and easy to our household so sorting and reindexing is not needed. Kodi (Windows,Linux, Android) keeps track of where i was, but i don't really care that much. Usually i remember what i was watching. File Explorer Pro (paid version) on IOS plays anything. I do not need transcoding, because all the players can play anything i throw at it. My wife and kids know how to use Kodi both on the pcs and the chromecasts.
Mp3's go to a Sonos at the moment. If more mp3 devices would be needed in the future, i'm kinda curious about the CrowdSupply Esparagus systems [1][2]
1: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-media-center 2: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-audio-brick
Infuse [1] is a nice way to get these features on Apple TV and iOS devices while simply sharing files via SMB.
1. https://firecore.com/infuse
Not sure if Jellyfin has an equivalent
0: not really an issue nowadays with everyone moving to Big Tech-provided smart TV OS, but when you use an old TV with like mid-2010s webOS it's nice to see some old Plex app that still works.
One must have a nightmare of a vacation to even consider turning on a tv in an hotel room, I can't even remember the last time an hotel TV served any other purpose than hanging a wet towel.
I also don't have any need for realtime transcoding as my home internet upstream speed is sufficient that I can watch 'full resolution' stuff remotely from my laptop or phone via VPN back to home office, and smbfs or sshfs access to the same file shares, without needing to use any CPU or GPU resources to process the video in realtime in between where it's stored any my client playback device.
You also occasionally run into a "Love Exposure" type bug.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/10494
Now, I use Jellyfin alongside Seerr (so me and others can quickly pick-out media to automatically download in a preset quality). I've also installed a plugin for Jellyfin called Moonfin that offers a ton of quality of life improvements and also integrates Seerr within one app. I just click on a movie or TV season I want, Seerr tells radarr or sonarr to query my private trackers for the selection, and then radarr/sonarr send the torrent to rtorrent. After a few minutes, Jellyfin picks up the files and adds them to the database.
If your HTPC is powerful enough, you should also check out Plasma Bigscreen as a substitute for XFCE4.
There are plex client apps for most tvs and boxes, even the really cheap bad ones, and it all just kinda works.
That’s the killer feature. I haven’t met a person who couldn’t use PLEX.
$750 is nuts.
$750 is insane considering how little they care about user feedback.
> Valory said that Plex, which currently does not disclose financial information, generates roughly 20 percent of its revenues from member subscriptions, which unlock premium capabilities of its media platform, compared to 80 percent from the ad business.
So possibly they are just trying to extract as much money as possible from their "legacy" userbase while they can, with the expectation that people hosting their own media libraries are a dwindling market.
Looking at their different features offered in different pricing plans [2], it seems like their strategy is to make money on sharing media libraries with friends and family. $70/year isn't a huge amount to simplify streaming to other (non-technical) people on a variety of different devices. And I suspect some plex users are charging for their access to their media libraries - even if it's something informal like accepting donations or asking for a payment on venmo - in which case the fees would just be a small operating cost.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2024/04/17/venerab...
[2] https://www.plex.tv/plans/
What’s the psychology here that people are willing to pay this much for this software, yet not even $20 for another?
[1] https://github.com/damontecres/Wholphin
Plex just works and is supporter everywhere. Not that surprising that people use it.
It’s fantastic software - the cross platform applications are pretty useable. Don’t think we’ve even had any major issues over the last 4 years using it.
Many thanks to the builders and maintainers, hopefully Andrew can take some rest and know they help a lot of people!
If I were to make a choice today I think my first choice would still be Plex.
Jellyfin has all those features now. Sharing servers is harder as you don't have centralized account mgmt, but you can use wizarr to make it simpler.
So far as I can tell, the only way around this is to symlink the subset of media into separate folders, make each of them libraries, then present those libraries to each user.
It's not as efficient as granting access within jellyfin, but it's pretty close to what you're trying to do.
You can find this feature in the admin control panel -> Users -> select an user -> Parental control (tab)
There is also an Access tab, together both can be used to lock things down fairly well.
And after checking it out, if you use Sonarr/Radarr for managing your media, the tags you put there are synced to Jellyfin, so that's even better.
Jellyfin is great, it's all I've ever used. But it's still very rough - AppleTV support is limited+buggy (ask my wife...), you can't cast to a Chromecast from iOS etc. Plugins are required for some things to work. Transcoding is harder to get working. Good luck downloading stuff for offline use on the mobile client apps, all you get is the raw movie/tv show file - you have to use VLC to play it.
Again, I love Jellyfin and I use it daily. But we're both kidding ourselves if we think the polished experience you get with Plex is the same as it is with Jellyfin.
I ditched plex because of missing Dolby audio support and all the use hostile channels and “features” years ago, and will never look back.
Paying more money to use a different product, and then expecting all of my users to do the same, is a big hill to climb.
So the Plex inertia remains.
One caveat is that older AppleTVs can’t do native decoding of some mkvs. But that’s largely an AppleTV limitation. Though I could imagine the client being smart enough to list its abilities and the server only serving content supported by the client.
I got a great deal as an early user, but new users have Good Reasons not to use plex anymore.
1. Jellyfin up to to a year or two ago didn't have WebOS client.
2. Jellyfin android client is (was?) just the webclient - so no video or audio codec support.
3. Server ran very poorly on my raspberry pi
so I went with Plex and am still using Plex
Jellyfin is an amazing project, and works almost exactly how I want it to. By listing and playing my media without autoplaying trailers and other such stuff.
I imagine many here who've never tried it will be of the same mindset
There is a crazy amount of bugs which I have no confidence will ever get fixed.
If you're the type that enjoys tinkering with obscure Linux settings for hours on end, which are certain to break if you dare to update anything, it may be for you.
It was crazy smooth for me. TMDB stuff just worked. Movies, TV, extras organization just worked. Apple TV, Roku, and iOS devices as clients just worked. The Apple TV client isn't great, but they're rewriting a big chunk of it now.
It doesn't do the sharing scenario that people are solving with Plex, but for my purposes it has been perfect.
Like what honestly I've been running one for years and have had nearly zero issues.
That pause is presumably also present when playing music, but no one notices because each song is its own track. Audiobook tracks split in places where a pause would never occur naturally.
The second-most-annoying trait of Jellyfin in my experience is technically not a bug, but should definitely be fixed. It hardcodes expectations of how to determine what season and episode number to assign to files. And if you overwrite them, it will re-mangle them on scan unless you take precautions to stop it.
As far as Jellyfin is concerned, your files must include a tag of the form S__E__ somewhere in the filename. Being located in a folder called "Season 2" with names like "11 - name of episode" won't work. Substrings like 第2集 won't work. Setting actual metadata tags on the file ( https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/FFmpeg_Metadata ) doesn't work; jellyfin ignores them.
Let me provide a per-folder template for extracting season / episode information. Jellyfin already lets you prefer embedded artwork to whatever it finds on the internet. Why enforce hallucinated episode numbers when explicit ones are clearly present?
I've been using it on Windows for years with multiple devices and it's been working flawlessly.
Every so often, Jellyfin would choke ingesting a video. Worse, it would hang the whole ingestion process, so videos later in the list wouldn't get processed. Restarting didn't fix it, either, I had to delete the problematic video (which notably, played ok in things like VLC and IINA).
[...]
We've proven that FLOSS works, and is in demand.
If "FLOSS works" maintainers shouldn't be "facing severe burnout", I've come across two more in the past week alone:
* Filebrowser (Mar 2026): https://hacdias.com/2026/03/11/filebrowser/
* axum-login / tower-sessions (last week): https://github.com/maxcountryman/axum-login/discussions/330
So your success criteria for ”FLOSS works” is that zero people involved in it experience stress related issues?
I really don't like the idea of transcoding on demand. It has always created a janky experience on the client. I've been using a custom solution that runs everything through ffmpeg normalization as part of the media upload phase. Whenever a client wants to stream something we give them raw byte ranges directly from the block storage provider. In practice, this feels like flipping the channels on an analog tv. Every video starts and seeks nearly instantly.
I've long since given up on the dream of maintaining lossless master copies of everything just in case. Every practical use of that 50 gb copy of Home Alone would have you transcoding it. Most clients would choke on that bit rate. When would you actually be able to use all of the available information? Why not just discard what you'll never use? I realize it feels offensive to kill information like this but you can do a much better job with the end experience if you do.
You can get a modern chatbot to produce this experience in a single prompt. The code can run on anything slightly more powerful than a potato because you aren't transcoding at playback time anymore. A raspberry pi would be more than enough to serve a few clients on a LAN. If you remain humble in your list of demands (a simple directory browser that plays videos linked within), you can more easily achieve total autonomy.
If you value your time that little and you get more joy out of building apps for multiple platforms instead of watching movies then this is the best choice. For everyone else it's probably better to just go with any of the hundres of solutions that went through years of bug fixing and pain already to get it working on all these platforms.
There's a reason they turned to transcoding: it means every device can get the highest quality version it is capable of displaying. Your solution limits the video to the lowest common supported quality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming
https://watch.plex.tv/
It’s now how a majority of users are using Plex as well.
> In 2023, Scott Hancock, Plex’s then-VP of marketing, said that Plex had more people using its online streaming service than using its media server features since 2022.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/plexs-crackdown-on-f...
With media servers being something studios surely don’t like, and Plex deprioritizing that aspect of the business, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before they shut it down completely.
To even know they have a media server, I need to click on the profile image in the top right of their website (even though I’m logged out), then click “My Media” under Links. No one is finding that organically.
That goes here, which seems to be their only page about the media server, and at the bottom is a link to a site that tries to scare people away. Instead of talking about how to rip your existing DVD and CD collection for the modern streaming era and self-hosting, it pushes users toward the big streaming services. Maybe that link is there because of the lawyers, but it sure seems like they don’t want this to exist anymore.
https://www.plex.tv/your-media/
I was concerned.
It’s becoming hostile for people who want to work from their media alone.
On the flip side Jellyfin has never worked that well out of the box for me. Always some fiddling around and even when I get it right the server will crash unexpectedly and when I want to go watch something I have to manually reboot it.
Anything we can do to avoid the hodgepodge of 8 different streaming services and rotating availability…
I understand it will be kept in sync from now on
Requires tvOS 26
Best of luck to the folks leaving. Supporting OSS isn't easy.
For my own purposes I cloned it and pushed the build to my AppleTV... and it's considerably better than the last app store release (quite a while ago).
I'm not suggesting anyone do the same, but just saying your problems might be about to solve themselves.
Has made managing kid’s TV viewing at home easier over streaming services.
> Hello everyone. Effective yesterday, Anthony and I [Joshua Boniface] decided to depart from the project, myself as Project Leader, and he as a core team member. This is in addition to the resignation of Andrew on Friday.
"Several core team members including the founder leave" looks a bit different from "founder leaves".
Source? How does its install base compare to Kodi's?
The constant mocking accusations and hostility toward third-party clients, plugins, themes, and other tools have made Jellyfin's official spaces unbearable. The atmosphere often revolves around the opinions of a small group of people, and anything that falls outside their preferences will result in a ban.
There are two individuals are the primary drivers of this culture.
Funny how this is the only thing that keeps me from switching from Emby to Jellyfin is the atrocious state of their "own" apps. My last attempt failed when I had to use their Android client. Since I've discovered Wolphin and Findroid it looks a lot more plausible but I just don't have enough pain and lifetime Emby Premiere was still reasonable when I bought it.