What do you mean? Trick play is just the name of the functionality. There are several methods/formats to actually implement it, such as HLS, DASH, and BIF.
In this case, the functionality was added to the server API using the HLS format.
Argh, I wanted to say it’s not a very good name for that. I did not really understand what that’s supposed to mean (English is not my first language) but now I think it might be those books you can flip through very fast and it’ll be a very simple animation? That would make sense.
A server & client software pair that allows you to have all your personal media available on demand. Movies, TV Shows, Music, Photos, Books, etc. All served from your server to a client device - Android, Roku, iOS, etc.
Idk about the rest of these jabronies, but I didn’t even know jellyfin had its own comm until this appeared in my feed. But I’m gonna subscribe now that I know of it!
A server & client software pair that allows you to have all your personal media available on demand. Movies, TV Shows, Music, Photos, Books, etc. All served from your server to a client device - Android, Roku, iOS, etc.
They strictly use the donations to cover their infrastructure cost (website, docs, metadata API fees). They don’t use donations to fund development, to avoid becoming for-profit at all cost.
And since they are currently sitting at ~$20k that they have yet to spend, they aren’t pushing the donation options at all.
What they much rather need is actual contributors, that can help with development.
So I haven’t taken the time to wrap my head around Jellyfin and the Arr family.
I currently use Kodi with Seren and Premiumize. Is there a guide for converting to something to replace Premiumize with what I assume is Sonarr and Radarr? I have a few months until my next renewal though I have to say I’ve not been unhappy with Premiumize, it’s just another bill.
Completely different kind of service, the debrid services let you stream media. The arrs are so you can download and store media. I think it’s overall more convenient to just have a premiumize or Real-Debrid subscription so you don’t have to buy hard drives and keep a server running
Yah, I realize that. But I’m not against just having the whole season or series on file or not have to worry about whether there’s a problem 2 seasons in getting it at a low bitrate for my cabin internet connection. I kinda dislike having to scroll through to find the feed I want and half the time I accidentally pick a dubbed feed or a shitcam. I’ll often go on to piratebay and just pull the entire season at my preferred resultion rather than fart around with the debrid.
And I run a pile of servers already for other purposes and backup, I’m fine adding services.
But on this subject I’m far enough behind the curve that I wouldn’t mind some direction towards best practices before I go too far in the wrong direction.
Debrid services can be used to download as well. If you’re doing lite torrenting it works perfectly fine to grab files of any kind without exposing your IP, similar-ish to a VPN.
I’m guessing you’re talking about Stremio though, which covers a large amount of media. But will falter for older stuff, or non-popular titles. I don’t recall what it was, but I recently ran into a 2019 series that wasn’t possible to find with Torrentio.
I’ve been dabbling with jellyfin lately. It doesn’t seem to like my mp3 organization, which Plex had no issues with. I generally use artist/album/songs, though there are exceptions that seem to be tripping up jellyfin. For example, I split compilation cds into the appropriate artist’s directory (so, artist/song), and it doesn’t seem to know how to deal with that. There are also a few weird things floating around, but those might be due to bad id3 tags in the mp3s.
I know there are some issues with mp3 tags in some songs. For example, my wife’s *NSync or N-Sync (or whatever the hell they are, I don’t actually care) mp3s seem to have the artist name in different formats, so that’s not helping matters at all.
Also, in fairness, jellyfin kind of got a bum start on my system - I installed it and started it, but I didn’t have enough space on /var for everything, so the system started having problems. To get it running, I stopped jellyfin and just deleted the metadata directory (getting the server running in general was much more important than getting jellyfin working). I’ve since allocated more space to /var, and I had jellyfin reread all of the libraries, which seems to have been mostly successful. (It looks like I had the same issue with Plex, because I had moved its metadata /var directory to the media drive, but I forgot for jellyfin.)
I do hope the new version includes some features that are just personal preference, like for example I’d prefer the “artist” view to be first in the Music section, not albums. And I’d like to sort albums within the artist by year, not name (I suppose I could go in and give it the year as the sort key, but I don’t want to have to do that for every artist). These are personal preferences, of course, not breaking bugs.
Overall it seems like a decent replacement for Plex. I watched an episode of the Simpsons using it last night on our FireTV, and it worked fine.
Since you mentioned the /var directory, I’m gonna guess you’re running a *nix server of some kind. I use easytag for audiobooks and Picard for all my music that lidarr couldn’t figure out. You can match your lidarr and Picard renaming formats so that everything is organized consistently. I tend to leave compilations / soundtracks/ various artists albums in their own directory and leave any artist level grouping as a task best handled by a database tag filter in the player.
You probably know about it but there’s a great program for Windows (I’m not sure about other platforms) called MP3TAG which handles (re)tagging like nothing else
I didn’t, but I use Linux anyway. Musicbrainz.org offers a program designed to do that, too. I’m a little hesitant to run it on my collection of mp3s without some smaller tests first though.
Picard (the MusicBrainz program in question) absolutely needs hand holding. When I decided to do the initial run through of my library, I went artist by artist and album by album. There’s a temptation to just throw everything at it. But there are enough releases and re-releases, and instances of a single song/recording being on multiple albums that it was much less headache to never try to more than one album at a time. That hand holding is a good thing in my opinion despite the tedium. There’s just too much content for any automated system to reliably handle all the match collisions. Lidarr works because it more or less goes album by album too. Lidarr can do a pretty good job of screwing everything up though, so that’s the one to keep separate or be very careful and test settings thoroughly. I’m still finding weird ways that lidarr has mangled stuff I’d already tagged and renamed with Picard because of a badly formed renaming format string in lidarr’s settings.
The was playing with Picard this afternoon. It did a good job finding what I had, though it seemed like it was updating the mp3 data before I was hitting save. I need to play with it more to understand it better.
Once it finds a match, it will show you a comparison of the tags for each file before and after. Maybe that’s what you saw. As far as I know, it only writes the tags and renames the files once you hit save. If there is an option to write the tags before you choose to save, I’ve never seen or used it. You can of course choose to not rename the files and just fix the tags.
Yeah I think the interface confused me at first, I figured it out last night. Basically you are matching files in the top left to the top right (either automatically or manually). Once it matches it shows the before and after at the bottom, then click save to update the file. Useful!
I was having issues getting Jellyfin to update some data, in particular release date/year, even after using Identify on them and pointing to the correct album. I had to manually update that info for several of albums. Maybe the incorrect info in the mp3 tags overrides what it gets from the internet. That would explain it.
Any place to sign up for a newsletter to be let known? I’d like to trial moving to jellyfin but I might as well wait since it’s not like Plex is that terrible that I have to switch now
Please let there be Media Delete capability for Roku clients, soon. It’s the only thing missing for the wife and I. It’s incredible without this feature, but would be even BETTER than sliced bread with it!
Sorry, but as far as I’m aware, this isn’t in anyone’s plans to work on. I know it’s not on mine. I think the consensus is to keep admin functions on the web client and let the Roku client simply be a user client.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked up some feature or low-priority bug only to find the answer is “there’s a PR for this that will be added in 10.9”, commented like a year ago, glad to see the future plan is more frequent but smaller feature releases!
I’m glad for people who were waiting on this release. It took so long that I wrote my own media server in the mean time to resolve all the problems I was having with Jellyfin. I hope they can get more frequent releases out for folks still using it. Having looked at the code base, I understand that the cruft from Emby slows down development.
Eh, Chromecast has AV1 and so do some smart TVs already. If that is your primary watching platform, encode away in AV1 and get an Arc A380 for the rest. It will also massively decrease encoding times.
Also of you can stand the quality check out DVDs in charity shops or second hand online (Ebay etc). (And give away / resell after you made a “backup”.)
To keep a copy of the media in Jellyfin you need to have a physical copy with the server. You also probably shouldn’t share it with friends unless you are living together.
You may need to keep the physical copy for it to be legal or moral according to your own ethics but from a purely technical standpoint there is absolutely no need.
Yeah, fair, but depending on where you are you’re already in illegal territory if you’re circumventing DRM on the discs (e. g. Germany, I think).
(And how likely is it that I 1. get busted for pirating when not torrenting/downloading and 2. will make the copyright trolls believe me that I actually legally bought this movie at a charity shop five years ago? Has that ever hapenend?)
When looking for media online, you pretty much just need a good adblocker and the sense not to run any random executables.
The media files themselves are very unlikely to have malware attached. They would need to exploit a bug in the specific video player you are using and then exploit another bug in your OS to get admin privileges before doing any real damage. It’s pretty much just theoretical. Keep your stuff up to date and don’t worry about it.
That doesn’t really resolve the problem of is the media safe.
From a cybersecurity standpoint you should be validating the mime type of the media at a minimum (The actual magic number, not the extension). And running it through ClamAV as well, ideally, before it’s released to your media library.
Man I am so grateful for this project, I was afraid it would feel polished enough after having been with Plex for the last few years. But hot damn Jellyfin is so much better and keeps on giving!
I plan on switching regardless but let’s say I was on the fence… Aside from it not being owned by a for-profit company, why is Jellyfin better than Plex?
There’s a few reasons, but number one for me is how incredibly clean the UI is.
Plex is a mess. Half of it is just premium shit they’re trying to convince you to use. The actual “stream my own media” functionality is buried at the bottom of the menus.
Trying to get nontechnical family to use Plex was always a challenge, just because of how busy it is. I’ve never had this problem since moving to Jellyfin.
There’s an option in sonarr to only create folders for shows when needed. That would at least help with the unaired shows. Also, I’m pretty sure when you choose to delete them from sonarr it deletes the folder too. And there’s also the option in jellyfin to allow users to delete shows, you have to activate it per user.
Besides all the other stuff people mentioned, a concrete one is that you can stream TV via it for free vs Plex. Just add a TV tuner to it and away you go.
That’s always been pretty much a niche though (and I know as a former HDHomerun and Kodi user) and over time more people just stream their media anyway.
Plex has a known and very old issue of improperly transcoding 5.1 audio to stereo and dropping the center channel. It makes movies seem super quiet. That’s why I switched.
People mentioned a lot of things. I’ll add that plex doesn’t offer hardware transcoding without premium. Now, setting up hardware transcoding on an NVidia graphics card on linux is a bit complicated, setting it up on windows is really simple. While it’s not just clicking “enable hardware acceleration”, it’s not much more complicated than that.
Plex is focused on making money, whether that is from the sale of your data or selling you products. Jellyfin is a community-driven project, so its focus is just on being better because it exists.
With Jellyfin, it’s truly self-hosting as opposed to leveraging a third party to do some of the legwork. Plex “offers” more, but it all comes at the cost of your data, or your data+an actual fee.
Jellyfin is available directly on most newer TV stores, iOS/Apple TV, Android, Chromecast, Fire stick, and Roku. It already takes some work to set up your media library in the relevant structures, so if you’re going to do the work anyway for a self-hosting option, why pay Plex extra for what Jellyfin can do for free since it is an open-source project?
There’s STILL not a great option for AppleTV. I bit the bullet years ago and have a lifetime infuse option. But that’s not really any different than how I paid (also years ago) for a lifetime Plex Pass too.
There is no official support for LG TVs running WebOS 5 or older (which is pretty much any one made before like 2021 or 2022, mine is from 2018), you can add in one if you root the TV, but even in that case it’s just a wrapper for the web UI. When Plex forced me to drop them (I had just moved everything to Hetzner), I lost a few users as well since they didn’t have clients available for their older TVs. Of course this can easily be remedied by using a streaming stick/STB but the problem still exists.
I believe from last time I checked that it was more an issue of LG not approving the app to be listed rather than it not being available. It being a wrapper makes sense too on the older webOS apps as it’s basically a PWA with some JS libs to interact with the TV.
I got a chrome cast because nordvpn didn’t have an LG app and the jellyfin client works great on that. Still annoying it’s not baked in though.
Honestly the clients for Plex are trash though. We had SO many issues with Plex and have almost none with Jellyfin. The only thing is Plex is a few more features than Jellyfin (one that comes to mind is an easy way to search for open subtitles to for a show without them hard-coded)
why pay Plex extra for what Jellyfin can do for free since it is an open-source project?
One big reason for me is that I got Plex lifetime on sale for like 70 bucks and it comes with a discount on Tidal, something I already paid for. With the discount after about 1 year and 2 months I’ve gotten my Plex Pass value out of Tidal alone. Oh and the paid features for PlexAmp are also really nice to use for the point where I barely use the Tidal app anymore.
Jellyfin is 90% plex, and it’s impressive how it comes forward in leaps and bounds, but it’s not better than plex. People just appreciate it more.
If you only need that 90% that it does (and don’t need things like intro detection, conversions, mobile sync, ass/sas subtitles), then you’ll come away super happy with not having to pay plex and not being locked into plex.
It doesn’t really do much over that 90%, it’s just neat that the 90% isn’t plex
Now that’s the realistic answer I was looking for, thanks! Open source is really the only reason I want to switch. I bought the lifetime Plex pass like a decade ago so the cost doesn’t bother me. The lack of mobile sync is a bummer though
You can run both, since you have Plex paid for anyway. Then you get the best of both worlds, and can maybe get new users on the jellyfin. If they catch that last 10% difference or Plex goes to shit, and jellyfin is a platform you like since you’ll have low-stakes experience with it, maybe you’ll eventually want to move everyone over.
Plus if one service goes down the other may still be up which is nice.
I have remote access for Jellyfin using a domain I purchased just for self-hosting. Using Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) and a dynamic IP service. NPM handles directing the incoming traffic to the correct server. I point a subdomain back to my Jellyfin server. When traveling, I install the Jellyfin app on a smart TV where I am staying, or connect my laptop to the TV and just use the web interface and my subdomain. I also use the Jellyfin android app to connect remotely using a phone or tablet.
At home all my TVs use a Roku and the Jellyfin Roku app to connect locally.
I want to use Jellyfin because of its awesome open source and how much effort the devs obviously put into it, but when I use Plex (lifetime pass for $80 back in 2020) I don’t have to do any of this crazy looking text you’ve typed here. I sign into my account, and it’s off to the races.
So, with that being said, for the people in the back like me who this may look like the most complicated stuff in the world just to get some streaming started, are there ANY easy methods to achieve this such as with Plex?
Short answer no.
Plex works by having a centralised server run by Plex themselves, that facilitates your client connecting to your server.
The external facing part of Jellyfin server is basically a web server, and it’s a bad idea to expose that to the internet without putting a reverse proxy in front of it (hence the mention of NGINX above).
Another option is to have a VPN connection to where you are running Jellyfin and then only access Jellyfin pseudo locally (so potential security problems aren’t a big concern). This introduces other complications if you want to access it remotely via things like Roku or Chromecast, especially if you have multiple external (and probably not tech savvy) users.
I want to stress that none of this is prohibitively expensive or hard, but doing it involves learning and effort.
All the information and programs you need are available online for free.
If you only wanted to use Jellyfin at home (server in the cupboard, client on the tv), none of this other stuff matters. If you want to access Jellyfin remotely, and the idea of running a reverse proxy or a vpn server with the corresponding exposed ports and domain configuration sounds scary, Jellyfin is probably not for you.
That is unfortunate. Thank you for the in depth explanation for those of us on Lemmy who don’t know all there is to know about Linux/CLI/Networking!
I’m the only one who uses my Plex, so the real issue is that I don’t want to fiddle around with settings, proxies, or VPNs just to stream an audiobook through my phone while driving to work. Maybe in the future there will be a more simple self host setup for people like me. I’ll keep an eye on it to see how it progresses. Thanks again! 😁
Do you know if there’s a good guide for setting that all up? I know all those words but I get nervous about trying to implement them all individually on my own.
I’ve been a Plex user for over a decade, I have a lifetime PlexPass, and I’ve also used Jellyfin for a few years. Like you said, Plex is better in the sense that it offers more, but they’re also profit driven, which has become more annoying in the past few years.
Plex has way better logging than Jellyfin does, the latter suffers a lot from log spam, and the stack traces it produces when anything errors out are like 10-15 lines. They’re not of use to end users, and there’s no way to disable them/decrease the verbosity.
Plexamp is probably the best music app I’ve used and makes it really hard to switch to Jellyfin. Symfonium probably the closest thing to it but not quite.
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