I wanted to ask you guys about your thoughts on Jellyfin; an open-source media management platform.
Jellyfin is commonly referred to as an open-source alternative to media management platform Plex. Recently, Plex announced that they would be locking some of its core features behind a paywall going forward. As such, I wanted to hear from people who have used or are interested in trying out Jellyfin.
Do you think Jellyfin is an adequate alternative to Plex? What do you like and dislike about it? How do you think it could be improved? Any feedback you can provide is greatly appreciated.
I use Jellyfin. But, I’m not a heavy entertainment media consumer and not a Plex user. I’m not heavily dependent on transcoding. My main use case is playing my video downloads and rips over my LAN (ie, not away from home) on an Android tablet. I use LibreElec (a KODI derivative) to play the same media library on the TV.
My comments would be;
There is room for improvement in the player interface to me. Even on a tablet the navigation buttons are kind of small and at the bottom of the screen. I’d prefer a more user friendly tap anywhere to play/pause, press and hold anywhere to fast forward, etc. (eg MX Player Pro and the Youtube apps).
This might be a setting I’m missing, but I have two top level libraries, one contains MP4s, MKVs, etc that aren’t movies that would be in any lookup database, and the other contains more popular movies. Both libraries on disk are organized in a 3- or 4- deep folder structure. In Jellyfin, the stand-alone MP4/MKVs retain the folder structure that I can navigate in the tablet UI. The collection of more popular features from DVD etc are in one long flat list, and so things like television shows with multiple series and disks lose context of what show they are, since that would be one or two levels up.
I tried Jellyfin a few years back when I first setup my (then brand new) HL15. I found the software to have all the right features but too few of them implemented well enough for the experience I was looking for. I have a pretty big Apple presence in my home including AppleTV’s which I and my family all use. The Jellyfin TVOS was lacking and buggy overall. I also share David’s sentiment on the overall player interface and organization.
It’s possible I just caught Jellyfin at a bad time, but I ended up going with Emby. Both Jellyfin and Emby have a shared history with Jellyfin being forked a back in 2018. The overall Emby app and experience was much more refined and stable. The biggest downside to Emby is you’ll once again need to pay to unlock some features such as transcoding.
Hello cjl95, I installed jellyfin from the proxmox community scripts (Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts).
Got it up and running no problem. I make my media libraries read only. The script creates/installs into an LXC container on proxmox. I pass in the directories via entries in the conf file in /etc/pve/lxc. If it is a lxc container you don’t need to run nfs/samba etc. Also the video card (NVidia) is regular driver in container - no need for vgpu etc.
Now to Jellyfin. It installed fine and scanned my libraries including my books. I had myself and a friend test it out. The clients is good - not as extensive as plex but worked. My only glitch was after a few days the server would go down and I had to delete some files etc. After the 3rd time it was down I was not able to get it back up. The service via systemctl failed. So I deleted it and waited for plex to actually put their current free items behind a paywall and give time for jellyfin to grow.
That was my expereince. I am planning on looking into emby as well (https://emby.media/).