Having tried everything from Plex, Emby, and JellyFin to casting on various platforms and RaspPi with HDMI, I found the best experience for me was to get the VLC app on my AppleTV. It plays straight from my NAS over SMB, doesn’t need any transcoding, and let’s me download subtitles on screen directly.<p>I don’t much care about browsing through a pretty interface and would rather be able to rewind/forward as needed without buffering hell. I wish VLC app had some better features like saving settings or autoconnecting to my default server. But it is great for playing hidef videos. If you want to watch stuff more than organizing and polishing your library, give it a shot.
I highly recommend Jellyfin. I've been running it as a front end for my media server for about 2 months. There's some slight hiccups, but it's not Plex.<p>The only real downside is there are not a lot of native apps available yet.<p>I also recommend the linuxserver docker images that are a great shortcut to getting it set up along with a suite of complementary software.
I moved over to Jellyfin after Emby started sufficiently pissing me off. I don’t really want to pay a subscription fee to self host stuff, but I especially don’t want to be pushed to pay for something that was already free and open source. (I certainly do so voluntarily. Krita comes to mind.) Jellyfin lacks many of the native apps, but at least I don’t feel like I’m being pushed into someone’s annoying monetization scheme.
The website looks great, but does not offer a lot of detail.<p>Can someone explain:
"Holds your entire movie collection" - does this mean it rips your DVDs onto a hard drive? Or just catalog them?<p>"Collect your TV Shows, and have them automatically organized by season." - is this over the air TV? Over the Top (Cable). Does it include Netflix, PrimeTV, Hulu? IS this just a catalog of what you like or does it Copy these to the hard drive as well?<p>"Enjoy your own music collection. Make playlists, and listen on the go." - Can I transfer songs I bought song on Apple, GooglePlay, or CDs?<p>"Watch Live TV and set automatic recordings to expand your media library" - is this over the air and/or cable? Can I record from streaming services? Once I record, can I watch it on my mobile?<p>Thank you for your help!
I’m one of the Core Team members of Jellyfin, if anyone had any questions. <a href="https://github.com/anthonylavado" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/anthonylavado</a>
Jellyfin is great, the project team is committed to keeping it open source and they're great to work with.<p>If anyone is looking to contribute, the React client needs some work and its success would open up support to more platforms.
Switched to Jellyfin a few weeks ago from PLEX and it has been rock solid so far. I especially love how much better managing users is. Having more control over who can download, stream, and transcode when doing either of those things is A+.
If you use a media player/manager like this, where do you get your movies? Is there a online movie store that you can download in appropriate format? There was a place for this before good streaming services existed but how do you legally obtain movies and store them on a NAS to feed into JellyFin? Are people ripping their blurays? I ot out of watching all the latest and greatest movies 10 years ago where we would just torrent everything into a folder called /movies. Now it's just the odd Netflix series so I am interested to know how people manage their movie collections and how they acquire them.
The only thing that keeps me from using Jellyfish over Plex is because of the TV apps. My Samsung Smart TV has a really outdated but functional Plex client, meanwhile, my Netflix and YouTube apps are updated regularly, although they're not as feature-rich as the Roku versions.<p>The Samsung Smart TV OS apparently is being cycled out for more modern alternatives. Surely the Jellyfish team knows this but with the ever-changing landscape of TV OS's, it seems like it's really difficult to support a large quantity of devices.
I've been using Jellyfin for about six months and have been overjoyed with it. Amazing alternative to the nasty proprietary apps like Plex and Emby.<p>Previously, I was pointing Kodi at an SFTP server which worked fine, similar to the guy who had a good experience with VLC. Those are both great standalone solutions.<p>However, adding "media server" software like Jellyfin into the mix gives my users a much wider variety of clients to choose from (including the Jellyfin addon for Kodi) without compromising freedom.<p>Various other perks include tracking watched status across devices, Chromecast support, and re-encoding video files so they play on old clients or slower connections. The playback reporting plugin is fun as well.<p>Keep up the great work everybody!
I really want to use Jellyfin. There is one major thing holding me back right now which is no Roku app without hacking an emby app. I'd love to even help develop or test a Roku Jellyfin app, but I know nothing of their code base (or .NET)
I'm in the process of trying to move to Jellyfin from Plex, especially as Plex tries to shove in more "features". Right now the only thing that's holding me back is the state of the Roku and iOS apps, which are still pretty rough around the edges(and neither officially available yet).
Since the audience here is developer-centric, I would like to share that I contributed a small amount of code to jellyfin and the interaction with the developers was very positive.
Shameless plug: I built <i>Video Hub App</i> that does something similar: gives you a nice YouTube-like layout (and many more previewing and searching capabilities) for videos on your computer (no streaming though).<p>Website: <a href="https://videohubapp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://videohubapp.com/</a><p>MIT Open Source: <a href="https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App</a>
Has anyone have any overview of how robust the security situation is? I attempted to setup Jellyfin behind an nginx proxy with basic auth enabled because I didn't know how trustworthy their security is, but ran into various issues with the setup that couldn't be resolved at the time. It sometimes worked, but mostly ran into issues. This was around the time when the fork happened and Jellyfin was very much a new thing, I have not tried it after that.
Jellyfin is really good, I've switched from plex and haven't looked back; it doesn't really have a native client I liked but the jellyfin addon for kodi works pretty okay.<p>It's also much faster to scan my library with jellyfin than plex, (few minutes vs an hour and a half) though I'm not sure why as I only have ~30 shows.
Any recommendations for a remote control when using it as a HTPC? Didn't see anything on the site but it's not specific to Jellyfin and IMO that's just as important as the media software itself.
I've given this a go, I'd love to use it over emby, but until it has an LG WebOS app, so my family can use it easily, I can't make the switch.<p>They'd benefit hugely, I feel, from focusing effort on the native apps. Some of this is more challenging; WebOS for example never had an OSS app, so there's nothing for Jellyfin to fork
My biggest gripe with Jellyfin, Emby, Plex etc. is the lack of .rar-support.<p>It annoys me to no end. Kodi has had support for ages (back in the XBMC-days) but the feature-request and bountys seems to fall on deaf ears.<p>Other than that i've found the meta-data to be "better" in emby/jellfin compared to Kodi.
As many of us long time Plex users see new, unwanted features vs having issues fixed (like syncing or a method to run it as a service), Jellyfin has become my next step. I haven't set it up for external access yet but so far I'm enjoying the simplicity. I'm not limited by lack of certain apps/players as I do everything on PC but I'm excited to see where this crew can go.
I personally don't see much use for all those fancy features over a simple but adequate minidlna server, except I don't get why after all those years no one implemented proper automatic library rescan for it. There are workarounds but it should work OOTB!
Jellyfin is one of my fallbacks in case Plex ends up walking off the cliff of pointless bloat and unwanted partnerships. The current Tidal integration, that you can’t fully disable, was the first time I started considering alternatives.
Can you view stuff indexed on NAS, running Jellyfin, from a separate HTPC running Kodi? NAS is the best place for indexing media but not really for viewing them, HTPC is great for viewing media, but not for storing them.