Jellyfin is great & amazing. Been using the Debian repo for a while now & overall just a huge upgrade to my life. Especially with (non-iphone) devices being able to control & cast.
I still kind of want to burn it all down though. It's such a thick & heavy system. I just want a better world where there's media vaults exposed, that various clients can consume & push to devices. (I want the browser to be able to be both intermediary here and target ideally.)
The huge monolith feels so cumbersome. So much is close but full of gnits. The browsing interface frequently makes it very difficult to get to the next episode; it wants to be smart & just doesn't always cut it & leaves no fall backs. The remote control interface desyncs. The remote control interface tries to adjust colors, I think, but sometimes creates a low contrast or zero contrast interface that's impossible to use.
It's just so big. This fork of an old old huge Emby app... It feels like smaller pieces would work better. It's wild that DLNA for so close, but didn't really cut it; that it's small pieces loosely coupled haven't quite become good enough, somehow. I think a bunch of that is that the controllers on each device never connected, where-as Jellyfin is a centralized system that keeps track of what you're watching.
Jellyfin is probably the most dualistic of softwares that I run. Most loved, most hated. Incredibly thick to try to wrangle; hope of evolvability is low; the monolith has landed and isn't likely to be heavily moving from here. Beware monoliths.
I feel like the sole reason jellyfin exists is because some people don't want to fork over the cash for lifetime plex. Plex just works. Jellyfin is constantly in a state of failure or bad state.
I ran plex for a long time and had a lifetime plex membership. They pushed their services so hard, but I let it pass until they stated emailing out to all my friends what I've been watching.
They violated their promises. They stated that they didn't track or know what people watched. This is absolutely a lie. They have to track it to email it out to friends.
I deleted my account, destroying my lifetime plex pass and moved to Jellyfin. Yes, it's not as polished, but it preserves my privacy and I don't get ads filled free crap tv shoved in my face all the time. Plus Jellyfin generally does just work. I don't miss Plex at all.
Both of your complaints come down to two settings options you failed to click. Settings that set your privacy are created when you set up the machine. If you don't set them at that point, they are in the settings any time... As for their content, again, just turn them off. I never added their content to my side bar, and they never showed up on their own?
I'm certain I would turn them off every time they popped back on, and the settings would reset occasionally.
Regardless, the polish isn't enough to justify a company that has modified the deal (we don't track what you do). Once that first promise is broken, the trust is broken forever.
I've been using Plex since 2014 (i.e. before there was a need for privacy settings) and can personally attest to all of these sharing features being opt-out rather than opt-in. I was not pleased to see viewing history randomly showing up in my inbox (thankfully I don't have anything embarrassing) and then needing to search how to opt out of sharing and analytic stuff.
I think the opposite, the developers see people willing to pay 100s for Plex lifetime and probably willing to pay 100s more when they have to jump ship as Plex layers shit ontop of just works, while not meaningfully making things work better. Jellyfin is definitely not there yet, but I'm open to moving away from Plex, after spending $$ on lifetime pass.
So many negative comments in this thread when it's pretty fuckin great. Yeah, Jellyfin is rough around the edges and needs some handholding but that's what containers are for. Updates don't work? roll it back. No biggie.
Without Jellyfin I'd probably still be using a SMB share with a VPN, not having access to resumable playback/tracking, easily sharing with other people, convenience of using web/apps, etc.
One thing I want Jellyfin to have is the ability to link a specific file with a specific timestamp, similar to how on youtube you can do domain.tld/videoID?&t=timestamp
It is undoubtedly one of the best media apps out there. What I really like about this project is the attitude of the maintainers towards open software and donations [0].
Kodi is also an alternative that IMO would work better than SMB and VLC, but I personally don't like the Kodi user interface.
What they're missing from the announcement: HOW YOU GET THE NEW TRICKPLAY FEATURE (preview images as you scrub along the seek bar)
1. Upgrade Jellyfin
2. If you configured hardware decoding, go to Dashboard -> Playback -> Trickplay and enable hardware decoding. Note that the hardware decoding needed is MJPEG, it's quite possible the hardware decoding your system supports does _not_ support that even though it supports other formats, so check before you enable this.
3. Go to Dashboard -> Libraries and for each library, chose ... -> Manage Library, scroll down to the new Trickplay section, and tick "Enable Trickplay" and "Extract trickplay images during the scan" (as it makes clear, this does not slow the scan down, it just kicks off the asynchronous task immediately during scan rather than as a scheduled daily task later)
4. Go to Dashboard -> Advanced -> Scheduled Tasks and run Generate Trickplay Images
This is about the only time I'd be OK with those (otherwise obnoxious) popups you get in apps once they've updated version. If Jellyfin showed a "major changes" popup when an admin logs in the dashboard after an update, they could perhaps include a special call-to-action button just for enabling the new feature.
Of course, they could also have a help documentation page for telling upgraders how to enable the feature, and link it in the announcement. After all, the announcement is how I found out there was even an upgrade to apply.
Nonetheless, I'm just glad that the upgrade didn't break anything! I think it's also the right choice to keep existing metadata as-is, and leave it to the admin to turn on options, plugins, etc. and refresh it at their leisure to pick up these new code paths.
Yet another major version without fixing the lack of sane defaults for filtering and sorti g and the lack of user configurable and permanent settings for filters... how are you guys so awesome and terrible at the same time?
I gave up on reporting this yeaes ago when they repeatedly closed issues without fixing it. Go in the web client or linux client and notice the default is show all sorted by something. Change it to u watched o ly by something else. Now navigate away and back and notice your filters are gone. Now go look in settings for any spot to change the default settings and notice its not there.
> You may upgrade your Jellyfin instances at any time now, however please read on for a complete detailing of what's new and changed, including some very important release notes..
> Ubuntu users: We have dropped support for non-LTS Ubuntu releases with 10.9.0. That is, we have not built 10.9.0 packages for any releases except 20.04 LTS, 22.04 LTS, and 24.04 LTS, and we will not publish builds for any new non-LTS releases going forward.
You know that stupidly nice Ubuntu 18.04 LTS box you painstakingly setup just four years ago right before the pandemic that you can't trust to auto-upgrade? Go fuck yourself.
I'm done with Shibuntu, now Debian only with no regrets or downsides so far.
Downvotes welcome, but p.s. I love you <3.
Wasn't docker supposed to make OS release irrelevant?
I'm super confused: doesn't Debian also have a 5 year support cycle? How is Debian better than Ubuntu on this particular issue?
I've been upgrading the same Ubuntu server across LTS releases since 14.04 - now on 22.04 - without any major issues. Spending 30 minutes every two years to upgrade major versions isn't that big of a lift.
This is false, 2018.06 was 4 years and 11 months ago. Just saying, not true. And it's been totally abandoned for some time now, at least two years by my estimate.
How often do you rebuild your bare metal garage snowflakes?
18.06 was 5 years 11 months 11 days. A: it makes no sense to count from when you personally installed it vs when it was released. B: it was in any case so close to 6 we may as well say it was 6 years C: if you don't mind running 6 year old software just run old jellyfin too.
I moved from Debian to Arch for my main home server because I was fed up with reinstalling between versions. Now I think you can upgrade in place.
I will be back to Debian at some point because Arch requires me to remember to update. It works great but since I have everything on docker it depends not make much sense to be bleeding edge
When did Debian require a reinstall between versions? I've been upgrading in place since around 1996. In those early years, sometimes upgrades had rough spots but that hasn't been the case for at least a couple decades.
But 4 years is a pretty short time. Compare 4 years with the 20+ evil Microsoft Windows gives to pirates for free.. when $ms doesn't really have to.. dozens of years of compatibility. Linux sucks in this dimension, and I am a huge advocate professionally and personally of Linux.
Have you ever tried to install the latest Node.js and discovered your glibc.so is too old? It's a major impediment and just plain sucks, especially for open source.
18.04 is from 2018. That's what the "18" means. That's 6 years.
Apt-get dist upgrade is really not hard. Learn it, do it.
Society & world has a necessity to not anchor itself to a distant past. In general I believe free software is moving at a bit more incremental pace, with some noticeable new innovation sprinkled in. But a 4.15 kernel from 2018 really is from a before time, before things started settling down. I have no respect for preserving those systems. Anchoring ourselves to the past is antithetical to open source's strengths.
18.04 went out of service for non-pro, non-legacy users over a year ago. You've had a year to upgrade the machine, now is the time to move up to the best LTS you can run. This is 100% on you.
Why not upgrade Ubuntu instead? Surely you can get the benefits of new security latches and other software updated as well? Indirectly then uou get this version of Jellyfin?
I use Arch on my desktop and it's definitely more up-to-date than stable. The Plasma 6 upgrade rendered one install a black screen and I've had to rescue installs because I wasn't on top of Arch News.
I do enjoy my Arch desktop but it's a labor of love.
I still kind of want to burn it all down though. It's such a thick & heavy system. I just want a better world where there's media vaults exposed, that various clients can consume & push to devices. (I want the browser to be able to be both intermediary here and target ideally.)
The huge monolith feels so cumbersome. So much is close but full of gnits. The browsing interface frequently makes it very difficult to get to the next episode; it wants to be smart & just doesn't always cut it & leaves no fall backs. The remote control interface desyncs. The remote control interface tries to adjust colors, I think, but sometimes creates a low contrast or zero contrast interface that's impossible to use.
It's just so big. This fork of an old old huge Emby app... It feels like smaller pieces would work better. It's wild that DLNA for so close, but didn't really cut it; that it's small pieces loosely coupled haven't quite become good enough, somehow. I think a bunch of that is that the controllers on each device never connected, where-as Jellyfin is a centralized system that keeps track of what you're watching.
Jellyfin is probably the most dualistic of softwares that I run. Most loved, most hated. Incredibly thick to try to wrangle; hope of evolvability is low; the monolith has landed and isn't likely to be heavily moving from here. Beware monoliths.
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