Why the fuck are you not using Jellyfin?
Seriously, the setup is really easy and it just fucking works.
It failed the spouse test when I last tried last year
Genuine question - what aspect of it didn’t work for them?
I wonder how? Plex is actually worse to navigate and filled with ads and shit.
The issue I had: Jellyfin experience is a better on Firestick and Chromecast than it is on Roku, but the difference has been shrinking fast due to contributions from someone named 1hitsong on GitHub. That person has absolutely hammered patches out over the past few months.
Lol wut? I’ve never seen an ad on Plex. And it’s very easy to navigate, wtf you talking about.
Because it fucks up subtitles on their Nvidia Shield and firestick apps, and has issues with transcoding too. If you’re purely using the desktop app, or browser then it’s better. But Plex just works in every aspect. Subtitles, transcoding, sharing libraries. Have had no issues or weird bugs. Anytime I try JF I have to dive deep into resolving bugs, some of which are unsolvable by me.
Welcome to Jellyfin friend
Jellyfin simply doesn’t work as well as Plex unfortunately.
How so? I have way less issues with jellyfin than I did with Plex. I think with jellyfin you just need to RTFM and find some plugins to expand the functionality if you need it
Literally just the basics of choosing audio/subtitles/quality settings
Oh 🤷♂️ I guess I never have issues with that.
In what way?
The apps don’t work well at all. If you’re just desktop based, its fine. But Nvidia Shield app, firestick app, mobile app, all have issues with hardware transcoding, and also somehow doesn’t handle subtitles properly. I have had both Plex and Jfin set up side by side multiple times, trying to test if I can make the swap. But JF just has too many bugs on their apps, which is what I use primarily, as do my users.
I have not seen that. It is always plex that does something stupid. Jellyfin is extremely reliable. Plex is particularly pissing me off lately.
Both hardware transcoding, same file, same server and there is Plex making me wait, wait, wait. While jellyfin is nearly click and go.
Sounds more like you had transcoding issues.
Using the Jellyfin Android app and the Android TV app on my Chromecast.Besides .ssa subtitles I usually never need to transcode. And usually the transcoding reason is me using an incomptaible audio/video source (TrueHD audio and HDR)
Oh so it’s my fault somehow? Sorry but if I use the same library on Plex vs. JF and one works fine, the other doesn’t. That’s not my fault lol. It was set up to hardware transcode, and still didn’t work for many files. Plex did. Same with subtitles. I watched the same file with Plex and JF side by side. Same directory. Subtitles worked with Plex, all fucked up with JF. JF also crashed all the time on my Nvidia Shield.
Listen…
Some weeks ago I had trouble transcoding some anime files. Didnt really work amd had a low processing framerate using VAAPI. Switched to Intel hardware transcodig and suddenly it worked.I don’t know your setup or when exactly you tried out JF, but theres absolutely no need to be offended.
I had intel hardware transcoding turned on for both JF and Plex. Many files did not work on JF. I am offended and annoyed because people keep telling me it’s my problem - when it’s not. It’s JF issues that are not solveable by me. I even went to the discord and talked to the devs, and they literally said “oh yea we don’t have tons of focus on the mobile apps unfortunately”, and acknowledged that my issue was a bug. Yet people continue to tell me “IT WORKS FOR ME SO YOU’RE DUMB.”
Sharing and remote streaming, plain and simple. I have no problem setting up accounts for friends, but choosing your server is a pain for some. But the bigger problem is that the first thing anyone will say is: Don’t expose Jellyfin to the Internet. That’s a bit of a problem.
And they’ll then say, “Oh it’s not so bad just set up wireguard and…” This is the ramblings of a lunatic. I’ve been working with tech a long time. Tech is my job. It is my hobby. I do all of it from repairing my own hardware to administering servers to running my own home lab to doing open source development. Wireguard is not friendly. It is not something I’m going to set up at every friend and family member’s house so I can share my library.
I’ve got a more secure but imperfect setup in sticking Jellyfin on the Internet behind a proxy that requires login. But this is not something most people are going to want to deal with. They want to stand up their server and then share it with people.
Realistically what could the jellyfin devs do to make this easier?
One thing is prioritizing security. There’s a number of known flaws, of varying severity, which is why most people would recommend not exposing Jellyfin to the Internet.
Perhaps they could set up a second project, a Jellyfin meta-library, whose whole goal is to be exposed to the Internet. You stand that up, give it access to other Jellyfin servers, and it handles the work similar to STUN of connecting you to media on those servers. This would make it so people could share easier.
I would have done this, but set up ‘meshnet’ to make the remote computers look like they’re all on the same network, but nordvpn just pulled the plug on meshnet and are decommissioning it in December. Goodbye
Tailscale has this same functionality, and is free for something like 100 hosts. Uses wireguard as the backend tech. It also has apple tv and android clients, so you can setup the Tailscale app on an end client for a user, then setup the jellyfin client and they should be good to go. That client device will just “see” your jellyfin server as a local client on the same network, albeit a tailscale wirrguard overlay network.
I haven’t actually deployed it as I don’t share my media server currently, but I was investigating it a bit ago.
