Once on the client side, it felt like those also needed to cache things. The only client that worked semi-well wasn’t a Jellyfin client, but could read from a Jellyfin server. I think it was called InFuse. With that as well, I spent hours simply navigating the app, going to every page, and waiting for it to cache everything so I could then navigate around. Then if I added something new, I needed to go to a page to show it and get it cached.
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.
I also remember opening the app one day, not long ago, and seeing a full screen ad instead of my media. Considering I have PlexPass, I found this extremely off putting. I think that was a one-time thing, but still a bad omen.
Then they became a client/server model.
They are supposed to provide the source code for Plex Transcoder, since that's a modified ffmpeg build. In practice, the version they share is not up to date with the version they ship.
They are generally speaking, closed source.
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.
I was concerned.
Anything we can do to avoid the hodgepodge of 8 different streaming services and rotating availability…
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative!
[1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/
$750 is nuts.
$750 is insane considering how little they care about user feedback.
At some point you hit market saturation and the forever users are just costing you money and new user acquisition isn’t enough to offset it.
Nobody likes the subscription model but it’s the easiest way to sustain constant development bigger than side hustle projects.
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.
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.
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.
However I hope you can see that there is a plethora of benefits that others may enjoy from it. Otherwise, this kinda feels like the classic HN Dropbox critique.
I have straightforward SMB shares, but two distinct groups for movies. The first is standard bitrate, where everything is 1080p SDR h265. The second is for 4K HDR, higher bitrate. That second group is only for a small number of movies that I like very much, will rewatch, and have cinematography and visuals that justify the storage. If I love a movie but it is mostly an indoor dialogue affair, there is no point in it being in the second group. There is duplication between the two groups so I am covered if I want to watch the high def version at home on my large TV connected to my Pi NAS via Ethernet, or the standard def version around the house (usually working out) on a mobile device (or possibly on the road via my Tailnet).
Plex/Emby/Jellyfin will handle that compatibility by converting on the fly.
Plus, when using a Fire Stick, or Google TV Streamer, or old Chromecast it just isn't easy/possible to browse a SMB share.
Right now if I'm not at home, and I'm watching something remotely that's served from a home fileserver, the only two client devices that I have in use are either my MacOS laptop (VLC), or a fairly recent Android phone with a file explorer app that supports sshfs mounts to open files (again VLC as the video player).
And if your remote internet connection is insufficient? Especially if you have all content in high bit rate HDR stuff… that can be problematic in some parts of the world.
In contrast to your HTPC setup, I've actually never even considered owning my own TV, it was just a streamlined way for me to access my collection on other non-TV devices, including the mac I didn't want to keep files on.
The annoying thing is that Jellyfin is particular about how your TV shows are organized. If you just dump whole seasons into one directory, that's fine but if you have individual episodes, they need to be organized by Title/Season #/Episode.mkv. The good thing about Sonarr is that it will make a second library directory for you comprised of hardlinks organized in the right structure. Plex is less picky, it seems to recognize files no matter how messy your downloads folder is but Plex has infected their client with ads and freemium garbage of late. Obviously if you use usenet, this isn't a huge problem, you can do whatever you want with your files once downloaded.
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.
Want to watch an episode of that series while you're sitting at work waiting for a long test pass? Plex.
You're hanging out with friends and they want to watch that movie you own? Plex.
You're at the gym and want to watch The Wire instead of whatever reality show is on the gym TV? Believe it or not, straight to Plex.
To your direct point, it doesn't have to be a terrible vacation. Any time I plan a vacation longer than a week it includes down day(s) with no itinerary, just recuperating. Sometimes that involves staring at a screen. Sometimes I've been out for 10 hours, it's only 7PM and I don't want to go to sleep, but I want to chill out in my room (maybe I'm overstimulated, maybe I'm just tired, doesn't matter).
That is interesting to hear, a completely foreign concept to me that sounds a bit like addiction to be honest.
Doing deadlifts outside when it's -30C is pretty hardcore.
Also what's "engaging" in running? You put one foot in front of the other, it's not exactly something that needs 100% of your brain power to execute.
My experience in cold places, especially those with a lot of snow and ice, is that there are usually enough chores to do that skipping deadlifts day is not really a problem though.
> Also what's "engaging" in running? You put one foot in front of the other, it's not exactly something that needs 100% of your brain power to execute.
I guess that is the difference between running or cycling outside and doing it on a machine.
Seems like you don't need hotels, a hostel would work just fine :D
Some of us need to unwind even on "vacation". Just get your feet up and watch your shows and relax before hitting the sack.
Are you staying all day in your bedroom when you are home?
(So I instead travel with an Apple TV that does all of the above, and more)
You also occasionally run into a "Love Exposure" type bug.
(or you make your peace with sending your login details in cleartext)
Lots of quality of life improvements over list of files on a smb share.
Not sure if Jellyfin has an equivalent
kind of a 50% solution, works a lot of times but a lot of other times you still end up scrubbing. (also consider that if you install this plugin onto a large existing library, it's going to take a considerable amount of compute and real-world time to do complete it for every show).
It's good most of the time, but not 100%.
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 do recall using several different tools about 20 years ago that took a bunch of horribly mangled filename .mp3 files (but which did have proper id3 tags in them, or where the user had manually corrected the id3 tags for the bare minimum of albumname, artistname and track numbers) and then rewrote their filenames on disk to something logically consistent to make them easier to find and move, store, copy manually if needed.
Less due to security and more because I’ve seen hotel TVs that literally had like 5 sec latency for any button press and are full of ads so I don’t want to deal with that.
Every once in a while I start looking into things like jellyfin and after a few hours poking around, eventually start to wonder if the heaviest users of these platforms enjoy the process of organizating their media and finding the perfect UI theme for that particular week _more_ than they enjoy actually sitting down and watching their shows.
I think the media servers started as a way to avoid tapes/DVDs and making it easier to get content on the TV. It’s a much better experience than a 100 DVD changer. Now, it evolved based on anxiety around streaming services and never knowing when the TV show you’re watching will get pulled, or your favorite movie will lose availability… and wanting to maintain access. This is especially true as companies, like Sony, remove digital copies of movies people “bought”. So any digital file with DRM from a company is only good as long as they decide to keep offering it, which isn’t forever.
You've just described the media experience. When I was a kid I spent so much time just flipping through channels. The same activity today is a vastly different and inferior experience. Modern televisions take forever to change channels.
"Smart" seems to mean "powerful but complicated and frustrating."
I get the functionality benefits. I just don't want to pay the friction price.
Either way, yeah one of the joys of running a home lab to me is definitely the managing and maintainence to me and I don't think its any lesser pursuit than watching the media itself
Infuse [1] is a nice way to get these features on Apple TV and iOS devices while simply sharing files via SMB.
And it connects to both Plex and Jellyfin too.
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
You must not watch that many TV shows or Anime then. Or you have the memory of a savant.
Without an automated system I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking.
curious question then - do you remember the content of what you were watching? i totally get that you don't know on what episode you are and i used and love Jellyfin myself, but if you're watching 100+ series "at once" i'm starting to wonder if you even remember the last episode of a show if you rotate so heavily, know what i mean? i barely remember an episode after a week, even if i exclusively watch one show. so either my memory is even worse than i thought, or - you have the memory of a savant ;)
Mostly it's shows that are on hiatus, due to release cycles being completely random nowadays. Or Anime releasing a second season under a whole different show name.
Also shows I've watched 1-2 episodes of and decided it's worth watching, but not now - as there are a limited number of hours in a day.
It's super fun to watch some 7 season show on a local streaming service, be on season 3 episode hellifiknow, come back in a week and poof it's gone.
Plus the whole *arr stack.
If you have one primary client, Kodi is fine. Moving to Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby is more about serving multiple clients while maintaining continuity.
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.
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.
If your HTPC is powerful enough, you should also check out Plasma Bigscreen as a substitute for XFCE4.
Jellyfin container instance running on a mini pc, reading media from an NFS share on a NAS, organised in a very similar fashion.
The advantage is there is a "native" app on the TV, so everything is very adapted to the TV UX, i.e. remote control driven UI etc.
(And the jellyfin side is relatively disposable, the container can be trashed and redone fairly quickly).
What’s the psychology here that people are willing to pay this much for this software, yet not even $20 for another?
Plex just works and is supporter everywhere. Not that surprising that people use it.
There are plenty of situations where a business must charge over X for one reason and must charge under Y for another, where Y < X. What happens is generally they go for the "over X" branch for fairly obvious reasons, then go out of business sooner or later because they can't actually charge that. Just the fact that they are trying to charge that much doesn't mean people are paying it.
> 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...
They also don't need to know anything about how to connect to your server, it simply shows up as a server name in the list on their "app" or the Plex website, there is no need for dynamic DNS or VPN or anything like that as Plex's servers do a kind of "service discovery" automatically.
It does require you exposing the Plex TCP port to the internet, so you are relying on them making sure there are no vulnerabilities. You could probably do a VPN approach and give them a URL they can enter into a web-browser, but it's unlikely to work on TV and mobile apps.
I've given access to my Plex server to my siblings and parents and it's great. Since I got a decently fast fibre line, no more having to manually copy shows/movies they want to watch over a LAN or using a USB HDD or memory stick.
Why? Nerds have been hosting services for their friends and family for decades now. It was one of the primary benefits of knowing an IT nerd. They probably had a few servers co-located at work or with their friend who worked for the local ISP. These days with cloud I suppose it's changed, but I didn't think this skillset had eroded that much.
Hosting services on the public internet isn't very scary. If your Plex server gets zero day'ed, you just reinstall it and start over. Chances are that will never happen.
I host the media server, you come help me fix my plumbing when I need it sort of thing.
> That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it takes to curate your library including "acquisition" and pruning etc.
This part, sure. But it's like anything else you do for family and friends. When I ran an e-mail server for everyone it was a giant pain that eventually became not worth it once the free providers got better and more accessible.
Plus the whole "curating" thing is the fun part, usually! Most of that stuff is usually about 98% automated either way so the "job" is largely fixing automation when it chokes.
Really frustrating because the media server experience is still by far the best.
It really needs to have a "classic" toggle where all the streaming crap is disabled.
This can apply to almost any modern application.
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.
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).
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?
> Let me provide a per-folder template for extracting season / episode information.
That's frankly not what I would call a bug and a bunch of work for near zero benefit. Not to be mean but why do you care? and if it really bothers you just use hardlinks let jellyfin see what it needs and you can have your pretty version for youself.
It's a music player. How could it not support audiobooks? You think it will rate your tracks and refuse to play them if they're insufficiently "musical"?
> There is a very noticeable pause between each track that it plays, despite the entire thing being queued.
> 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.
It would almost be like it wasn't really built with audio books in mind, but was rather designed around music.
If Jellyfin was designed around music, then I would expect it to support gap-less playback out of the box. Albums where each track seamlessly transitions into the next are not that rare
Sounds like you answered your own fucking question.
But the truly disgusting part is how XBMC/Kodi/Plex/Jellyfin just reassigns the files to another show and there is absolutely no way to audit what's going on other than realizing that some show has two files per episodes or some show you don't have is in the library. Why can't this be easier to inspect?
After two decades I just gave up and use the Home Video mode (just show me my directories mode) on Jellyfin to avoid having to deal with metadata.
Jellyfin has major problems dealing with this common situation. To Jellyfin, the source of truth is imdb. Imdb numbers Kim Possible episodes in the order they were aired. If you want the metadata that jellyfin scrapes from imdb, and you also want to watch the episodes in an appropriate order, you have to do this:
1. Number all of the episodes in airing order.
2. Ask Jellyfin to fetch the metadata.
3. Renumber the episodes into the correct order.
4. Remember never to ask Jellyfin to scan any directory that contains those episodes again.
If you mess up, Jellyfin will attach descriptions and preview images to every file that aren't, technically, related to the episode in that file.
I mean, I've got many like that and yes it does work. `s01/01 - Pilot.mkv` is recognized as season 1, episode 1, etc.
I only use it for movies and TV shows though, the live TV experience (with a HDHomeRun) was incredibly buggy and slow, and once you've tried it and failed, it seems like it's impossible to remove the remnants of it from your interface.
The music and audiobook support never felt like it was as polished as TV/movies either, so I gave up on that.
Now I use:
* Jellyfin for films/TV shows
* Channels for live TV
* Navidrome for music
* Audioookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts
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.
I think a lot of people are doing stuff that's well beyond what I use it for. I just have my blurays and dvds on there, so it's possible I don't know I'm missing some important stuff that other people need.
This sort of underscores the ancestor's complaint: It's not exactly dead simple to set up and understand, the community recommends third-party apps that have only partial support, etc.
Jellyfin is a daily driver for me and works amazingly. I have thousands of films, TV shows, books, music, and it lets me navigate and use them perfectly well.
I have a wonderful little Linux media server.
What sort of bugs affect you?
Can you suggest an alternative?
I have been running Jellyfin in a container on a Linux server for three years now. I am streaming video to Infuse on three Apple TV boxes and music to a Kodi installation on a Raspberry Pi with no issues.
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.
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!
I've tried tweaking both the clients and server to be less pessimistic, i.e. see if the active media elements are supported, but even then it really fights it. I think the best approach would be rewrite the clients to adopt a (try || transcode) strategy rather than (guess || transcode), but that looked to be a major piece of work.
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.
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.
It's not as efficient as granting access within jellyfin, but it's pretty close to what you're trying to do.
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.
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 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
1. Subtitle management is a total pain. Sometimes it doesn't show any subtitle toggle, sometimes it does. There isn't an option to switch between different subtitles. Adding an external subtitle file on the fly via the app never works for me. One approach that almost always works is to download the subtitle file, rename it to match movie filename, trigger a metadata refresh for the file/library (this requires switching from library view to dashboard view and back so certainly has friction). Also, if you start a movie directly on Chromecast, subtitles don't show even if they have been chosen. However, if you start the movie with subtitles "ON" on the app and THEN stream it via Chromecast, subtitles show up on the TV.
2. Sometimes it has issues with Google Chromecast (puck connecting to my LG OLED TV via HDMI port). I have had better luck with the in-built Chromecast feature of the TV.
The Pi isn't mega snappy when it comes to the lag between button press to actual playback start/end of seeking but it generally works fine once the stream starts playing.
I didn't pay a dime for it so this is not throwing any shade on the Jellyfin team - I am grateful for their work.
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.
I have a lifetime subscription from 2016. All my friends have Plex, too. It works. We share. Ezpz.
Source? How does its install base compare to Kodi's?
Kodi is 99% a TV-like frontend to a local-disk media collection, its web interface is an afterthought, its performance for remotely served media is atrocious.
Jellyfin, Emby and Plex are media servers first and foremost.
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.
I understand it will be kept in sync from now on
Requires tvOS 26
Its minor overall, but as a former app dev, poor list performance drives me crazy.
I need to sit there and wait for the filename to scroll horizontally to see what the actual episode number or name is. Instead of just showing the full filename on multiple lines, or showing the filename below the thumbnail.
Also:
- Flattens folders with a single file in it (so foldername/file.mkv shows up as just file.mkv in the parent folder), no way to disable this (https://community.firecore.com/t/avoid-flattening-tv-show-fo...)
- Doesn't show landscape artwork (embedded .png), only portrait, and if the embedded artwork is not portrait it grabs a random frame from the file instead of cropping the embedded artwork (https://community.firecore.com/t/use-landscape-artwork/26878...)
- If you exit a video before it's ended, but it's close to the ending, it marks it as played (so if you go back in you lose the playback position) (https://community.firecore.com/t/infuse-skips-end/23504)
Yes, I have these links handy because I've been tracking these issues for years and they're still not fixed.
> 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".
[...]
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.
And storage is getting expensive AF.
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.
It's currently running a PB+ media library (which neither Jellyfin nor Emby can run) with native clients across multiple platforms. It will unseat Jellyfin.
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 were quirks (mostly self-imposed ones) to getting the whole thing set up, but it ran like a champ for the better part of a year. Hardware transcoding really does make a world of difference, even in the worst of cases.
What clients are you using? I use the highest bitrate HDR videos possible. I very rarely have to transcode. 4k TVs are cheap as are 4k streaming devices.
The main case for transcoding is playing a video in a browser that doesn't support the original codec. Everything can handle high bitrate streams now. The one other rare exception is video that's over 100Mbit/s. I've encountered a few that are that high and some streaming boxes can only handle 100Mb.
If you want to go the hacker route, and do not give a flying fig about UI, you can get a long way just by setting up any old webserver that has range support (which is most of them) and serving out directories with video files and some sort of automated index. You don't even need to do any work. Browsers already are smart enough to hit a video file, extract the playback metadata with range requests and provide native seeking, speed management, and some of the other basics. Plus you get native "right click (or equivalent) -> download" support without anything giving you hassles.
On the one hand, it's missing a lot of features. On the other hand, it can't be beat for simplicity and the bang-for-the-buck is pretty good. And anything capable of A: running an HTTP server at all and B: has enough storage to store the files can saturate whatever network it is on with video data if you want it to.
Has made managing kid’s TV viewing at home easier over streaming services.
It's not just Andrew [Rabert] leaving. This is an announcement by Joshua Boniface (the current project lead) and Anthony Lavado (a core contributor) announcing that they're leaving too.
Boniface's and Lavado's reasons are mostly akin to burnout, or the need for a family life, which I totally understand, especially as Boniface has been the face of the project for quite some time. I use Jellyfin daily, and I know exactly who Boniface is, I hadn't actually heard of Rabert, though I'm grateful for him founding the project. Boniface in particular has lead Jellyfin through huge levels of internal changes, bugfixes and improvements. It is throwing off the janky architecture of Emby, one part at a time.
Rabert's reasons are here: https://github.com/andrewrabert/jellium-desktop/issues/609
An obvious sore point is that Rabert has been AI-coding the Jellyfin desktop app, while the community (who bear the brunt of drive-by AI slop) have strongly opposed it. Even if he's a great coder and makes a wonderful desktop app with the aid of AI, that seems irreconcilable. Every wannabe contributor who shits up the project and wastes volunteers time with AI slop will say "you let that guy add his AI generated stuff, why not me?"
So he's leaving the Jellyfin project and he's going to rename his desktop app, to see if it stands on its own merits as a third-party Jellyfin client, rather than an official project. I wish the best of luck to him.
Even with that angle, it's true that the "Jellyfin community" (which includes all bug reporters, users on forums, etc.) can be very rude, directly to the contributors who may have inadvertantly added bugs. And Jellyfin is going through some growing pains, for example their 10.11.x series rewrote all the database handling to be a much better fit for the language (from raw SQL to .NET EF Core), which gives them a much more stable base to make changes upon, but it also had some performance regressions that rendered some third party Jellyfin apps unusable. (Those third parties' advice is not to upgrade). But at the same time, the project is getting there, supporting developers who are systematically fixing those regressions. The project has thousands of bug reports, but it also has thousands of fixes, and thousands of merged PRs. They are keeping up with the demand. I have every confidence Jellyfin 12.x will be great, and I'm looking forward to the new possibilities for plugins and enhancements it will open up.
Aren't JellyFin & Plex essentially just a catalog for your local data (most likely torrented movies, etc.) in a web app? If so, what's the big deal?
edit: ah, i missed the BIG transcoding part.
Plex also then adds social features and curation. The value of that to its users is debatable, but it's additional complexity regardless.
These are pretty big projects. A founder moving on is a fairly big deal.
Its not just a web app, I would say most dont use the web app directly, instead they provide clients (Android/iOS/Roku/AndroidTV/WebOS/Tizen) that are in official app stores. This is the big thing for me, being able to just install the client on your TV and not worry about it is great.
Often the clients are just wrappers of the web client with native integrations, but they work well.
Plus there are loads of 3rd party plugins to extend it, and alternate clients, Im a fan of https://github.com/jeffvli/feishin for music duties personally.