I quit streaming services around 4 months ago, determined the exact maximum streaming quality every device I own can handle, used a $60 used office PC from craigslist, admittedly I haven't fully figured out how to get subtitles to work without transcoding, but I just need to sit down and figure it out at some point. I direct stream all of my content from a 10+ yr old PC and it uses less than 5% cpu while watching a 4k movie. I could stream to easily 5-10 PC's and still likely be able to do software maintenance on the PC at the same time. That and with how jellyfin looks like a streaming service, with no transcoding it's better than any streaming service. Nearly every streaming service you use is transcoding on the fly instead of storing 20versions of each video for direct streaming, direct streaming a previously encoded asset will always deliver a higher quality viewing experience.
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In my experience, transcoding with subtitles becomes an issue when the subtitles are burned in to the video. I often get external subtitles from https://www.opensubtitles.org/ and then stick the downloaded SRT file in the same folder as the movie. Make sure it has the exact same file name as the movie so jellyfin will associate the two together. Once I do that, it does not transcode at least for subtitle reasons.
I used Plex for a long time and was very tempted by their lifetime plan. I tried Jellyfin but at the time it just wasn't a patch on Plex. I continued with Plex but always had that itch to get away from closed source. I eventually tried Jellyfin again and whilst it's definitely not as feature rich as Plex, it does what I need from it which is a central store of media that any TV in my house can use. I've even given a few friends a login so they can watch content.
I do love that it's completely self hosted. I run it behind Caddy so it has a Let's Encrypt certificate. All run in a Docker container with the media from an NFS share from a Pi4 with an external HDD.
That said, I still have Plex running as I have one Samsung TV and there's no official Jellyfin client for it. Yes there's some long winded developer way to get one on but I just can't be bothered.
I've been considering switching to Jellyfin for a while due to concerns about Plex either becoming worse or them peering into my library. Any idea how the apps work on Fire TV Stick? I have one for home and one I take away with me and it all works seamlessly with Plex
Jellyfin has an app for fire stick, it works flawlessly
I've been using plex for several years and setup jellyfin a few months ago to tinker with it. Playing videos works fine for me locally but I have some family out of state who have access and jellyfin doesn't have a solution for that outside of me publicly sharing the URL and managing the passwords. Also a pain point for me is having multiple files of different quality for the same movie/episode, it always shows as two episodes that it will play back to back and seems to require a lot of manual work per show/movie to get it tracked as 1 piece of media with 2 files to choose from. Would love to ditch Plex eventually but for me and my family it just works without issue and they can manage their own remote login.
I use jellyfin for every device except for my android TV. I really like it and prefer it over Plex, but it was working fine until it suddenly stopped working a few months ago. I tried updating the app, the jellyfin container, reinstalling the app and clearing data and redoing my jellyfin instance entirely. Nothing worked, everytime I try to connect to the server via the android TV i just got an error unable to connect... and the rest is cut off. Regular android app works, idk what the problem is but it has to be client side, so I just gave up and now have plex running alongside just for the TV.
If anyone has had this Problem before I would love suggestions!
I don't know about using the jellyfin client but as a backend for Kodi, it's amazing
I actually prefer the Jellyfin client to the Kodi client by a lot. Using Kodi on top just adds more unneeded complexity and reloading libraries in my experience.
I tried Jellyfin a few weeks ago and didn’t have much luck with it. I only added a couple of shows and movies just to test it but half of them just didn’t show in the library (even though it detected them as they showed in other places). Will it only show stuff in the library if it can pick up the metadata for it?
How long did you give it? It indexes the library. I had to rebuild my library once, and while I don't have a huge collection - mainly just rips of my DVD collection, about 450 films, and it takes over an hour to index everything. Until it's done, not everything shows up.
I didn’t give it very long but it was literally just 3 films and 1 TV show
it will still shows stuff in the library even if it failed to pick up the metadata.
for jellyfin, folder structure is kinda important for auto detection to work.
For shows, you can organises your files like this:
series-name-a/
season-01/
episode-01
episode-02
You can check out the doc, it is more detailed
One thing jellyfin doesnt do well its anime content. But fortunately there's Shoko Server, a metadata engine you can selfhost. Its awesome!
Yeah, I'm really glad I found out about Jellyfin. I switched to Jellyfin because Plex doesn't let you disable Passout Protection (automatically stopping playback after something like 3hrs) without Plex Pass. I was just about to fork over $95 for a lifetime license when I looked into Jellyfin and discovered continuous playback was the default. I switched that very day and never looked back.
Maybe when the merge transcoded downloads on the official clients. rn depending on streamyfin
Does jellyfin do any kind of library sharing? Because that's the killer feature that Plex has for me.
I have three friends who have Plex servers and between the four of us, I think we have all the content anyone could want.
I could never get Plex to work the way I wanted it to, so I'm actually someone who moved to Kodi and then to Emby. Once I got into Emby, I've yet to leave it. My biggest problem now is that I want to leave it for Jellyfin, but the lack of many things I love about Emby have never been moved to Jellyfin.
For example, I have a very specific organization of my music libraries I use to navigate what I want to listen to much quicker, since I'm into all kinds of genres of music. Emby allows me to navigate by folder structure, so if I'm in the mood for heavy metal one day, go to that folder. If classical another day, go there. Jellyfin on the other hand didn't have folder structure view and even though it's one of the top requested features for the past few years when I last checked, it's never been added...
I think the day Jellyfin does fill in these gaps, assuming new ones aren't introduced due to Emby also improving, I'll finally jump over.
I guess to the original topic, I do think Jellyfin exceeds Plex though lol.
Is there a reason that you don't organize your music by artist\album and leverage tags? It's been some time since I tried Jellyfin, but Plex does an excellent job of tagging (not directly written to original files) and categorizing. It's a good experience.
Any recommendations about how to install all this jazz?
I'd like to build a music box controllable by the family, eventually centralising videos so anyone (or at least me) can just pick up their phone and watch an episode of star trek without the hassle of copying. Automatic subtitles would be magic.
Cheers!
Many ways to install it officially nowadays (see their website) but most do it via docker. A very easy albeit unoffical way is via flatpak.
Yeah! It's been great for me. No detection issues or weird bugs. The mobile and TV apps are also great!
Has been for a long while. Also there are tons of unofficial apps as well.
Not got around to trying it out properly yet. Waiting on new AMD GPUs, hoping for a low-end encoder or I may get access to a RX 480.
What does Jellyfin use .NET for?
Jellyfin is a fork of Emby which was written in .NET. The server backend and web page are all (or mostly) .NET is my understanding. It makes use of external programs like ffmpeg on the server or VLC on the apps.