* Better iOS/tvOS/OSX video playback (just buy Infuse because it can play so many titles the Plex player cannot)
* Add full context menus everywhere. Playlists are virtually useless for anything other than playback in order or randomly. Why can't I multi-select items on a playlist and move them to another playlist?
* Subtitle settings turn off between episodes
* Let me sort by file size so I can watch the disk gobbling files first
Thank God for python-plexapi and a bunch of scripts I use to organize an unwieldy library.
Plex been swinging in the wrong direction for a number of years now.
Additionally, Plex tends to revise their UI and inner workings in a way that favors everything but the core media sharing platform. They add TV stations, they mix in their streaming ad-supported channels with your search results, and push them before the friends and family stuff, making it tough to help other navigate to shared libraries.
I think, overall, Plex is a good shepherd for their product, but everyone knows the enshitificaiton process is inevitable. It's just a question of how long the timeline between "Plex is usable" and "Plex is sold to private equity and is now utter shit." I've been pleasantly surprised with the length, so far. But having an escape hatch is always a good idea, and Jellyfin seems to be nearing a parity.
I pointed out that Plex should do ebooks. It is a natural fit. They keep track of how far in a series or a show you are, they could keep track of where you are in a book. Many of the Plex idioms transfer well. It has a clear visual style that helps you to pick out the shows you might try, or shows like those you've already watched.
BUT IT'S NOT EVEN MEDIA, YOU'RE STUPID
Books were the first media, you must be illiterate.
WHY WOULD I WANT TO READ BOOKS ON MY BIGSCREEN TV!
Plex runs on my iPhone. And on yours too.
[banhammered]
But if you need more than one feature, I'm sure that in 10 or 15 minutes I could come up with a 90 page list of features. Without even trying.
>I would think the only thing I can think of is fully self-hosted login instead of their cloud option
Well shit. Even you can come up with one thing. Plex was awesome, and then Plex wanted to be the shittiest version of whatever CBS is calling their streaming service.
Ideally keep it behind a VPN and give your family members access to it that way, and let local devices on your LAN connect to it without a VPN.
But I'm not all about getting something like Tailscale to work with my elderly mother's Roku device, nor teaching her how to use it.
VPN is one solution, and actually the only real solution for app-based jellyfin (TV, phone apps) I found so far.
Another is to host Jellyfin behind reverse proxy, and have a completely independent authgatein front of it (authentik, authelia). Jellyfin even supports LDAP (trough plugin), so you dont have to login twice per visit. The downside is only web interface can be hidden this way, as apps will break expecting jellyfin auth page and finding something else.
services:
jellyfin:
build:
dockerfile: jellyfin.Dockerfile
container_name: jellyfin
group_add:
- 44
- 993
environment:
- TZ=<redacted>
- JELLYFIN_PublishedServerUrl=<redacted>
- DOMAIN_NAME=<redacted>
ports:
- 8096:8096
- 8920:8920
- "7359:7359/udp"
volumes:
- ./config:/config
- ./cache:/cache
- ./config/index.html:/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/index.html
- type: bind
source: /mnt/storage/Video
target: /media
restart: always
devices:
- /dev/dri:/dev/dri
i also recommend seerr to pair with jellyfin: https://seerr.dev/
my wife logs into the seerr ui with her jellyfin account, makes requests, they get grabbed by sonarr/radarr, which in turn place them in the correct library, and they're identified & labeled correctly on import
It's not a true self-hosted software. It just depends on what matters most to you.
With open-source software, this just isn't a problem. Even if the company behind it decides to turn evil, the community can fork it and continue on. Just look at Emby for example: it did a rugpull and changed to a proprietary license, so the community forked it and made Jellyfin.
If anyone has been thinking of building something in the Jellyfin ecosystem, I very much recommend it.
[1]: https://github.com/DeclanChidlow/KOReader-Jellyfin-Plugin/
Movie (2016).whatever.zzz/whatever.mkv
I think some folks who have strong opinions about things like organizing their files under folders by director or something find it grating, but it did nothing but help my structure.
The pain just kept adding up. It was quite nice most of the time. But every single time I reached for my phone, I was wondering how badly it was going to go. Quitting Jellyfin seemed like an excellent choice.
Upnp/dlna is much cruder; very direct raw BubbleUPnP client. But it works so well for me. Their transcoding server also is quite good and I can run it on any machine I want, isn't coupled to anything, can switch between them easily.
Bubbleupnp is also great because it lets me turn tablets into cast screens. I love that so much. Good general protocols rock; having media server, media renderer, then separate control points was a great model, good job UPnP.
My GF has it set up on her iPad, phone, computer. App is on our TV and has no issues. We have Netflix at home. She’s non technical and hasn’t had any trouble once I gave her a login.
The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of her lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home ;) (for now)
Tailscale got me outside-the-home Jellyfin with a grand total of maybe 30 minutes of effort, including signing up, getting my server connected, and getting it on my MacBook, AppleTV, and phone. I'd never used it before.
You could probably have your Wii computer boot directly into Jellyfin using a startup shortcut with 'dolphin-emu -e WiiFin.dol', then switch out of the app to play Wii games using the better menu app.
Then you can your Wiimote for both media + gaming with out needing a keyboard / mouse.
You could probably do a sticky round robin reverse proxy with a few backends doing transcode.
The biggest issue is bandwidth, but you probably knew that.
Nvidia arbitrarily locks number of encodes between 2 to 5 streams, depending if you're willing to run hacked firmware and drivers.
Multi-encoding on nvidia is a "professional card option" only.
Intel's ARC line has no such arbitrary encode/decode limit. And they are significantly cheaper as well.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/h...
Would be music-only, which is sometimes ideal for older devices.
I'm wanting to set it up for around 20 households to share, and with transcoding that exceeds a single (cheap) node.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/h...
The jellyfin DB itself is unfortunately sqlite instead of being DB agnostic. Maybe you could hack together something such that only one node handles writes and everyone else handles reads... if getting multiple cheap nodes gets your more bandwidth. I have to imagine that jellyfin fairly quickly stops being in charge of the media stream directly.
But yeah I think the transcoding and the size of your data pipe is the only "hard" part. The DB read/writes themselves are going to not be an issue (I think)
[1] https://jellyfin.org/posts/jellyfin-release-10.11.0/#the-lib...
Do not upgrade Jellyfin if you have a sizeable library. Backup first if you do.
The other aspect is you could share the media storage over NFS and have multiple jellyfin instances running for different houeshold groups.
With 2 or 3 nodes like that I think you could make it work.
For your use case, deploying multiple instances would be the way to go.