
Jellyfin: A Free Software Media System - matthberg
https://jellyfin.org/
======
chime
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.

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.

~~~
aequitas
What keeps me locked into these solutions is that I'm totally sold on the
ChromeCast concept where your TV is just a dumb screen with barely any
interaction (on/off, volume and pause/resume (but only if the stars align and
HDMI CEC works)) and your phone/pc tells it which content it should play.
Haven't been able to get DLNA working on my current TV.

~~~
majora2007
This is why I use Plex. I tried using Roku and other things with a remote, but
using my phone to just cast things is amazing. I also love Plex/Jellyfin
because I like organization and metadata and playlists, etc.

I tried Jellyfin, but the UX wasn't there for me. But it's still very young,
so hopefully it gets better.

------
ironarm
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.

The only real downside is there are not a lot of native apps available yet.

I also recommend the linuxserver docker images that are a great shortcut to
getting it set up along with a suite of complementary software.

~~~
scrollaway
> _There 's some slight hiccups, but it's not Plex._

Please elaborate -- is "it's not plex" supposed to be positive or negative?

I'm a heavy Plex user and I'd love to switch to an open source alternative.
But Plex is _really_ good, and I love the native Trakt.tv webhook integration
(which means everything I watch automatically gets tracked on trakt.tv).

~~~
noicebrewery
It IS a fork of Emby, however, which is quite similar to Plex in how it
behaves. Crucially, Jellyfin does not make you log into someone elses website
for your own content. Don't you find that kinda weird about Plex?

But yes, the downside is the lack of smooth integrations. When I tried
Jellyfin about a year ago they did not quite have Chromecast support nailed
down, however as of now they've got a fully functional Android app and proper
Chromecast integration.

~~~
ses1984
I'm pretty sure you can use plex without logging in for many use cases.

~~~
duckMuppet
You can whitelist certain private local IP's, however for any remote access it
must be done through their app.plex.tv website or whatever unless you're going
to setup a VPN.

I think that change was made a couple of years ago. I have ran plex on my
freenas server for years and had an older version of it. When i upgraded my
freenas to use iocage instead of jails recently, i was forced to update plex,
and had no clue about this change. I was shocked to say the least and it is
absolutely annoying compared how it was. Emby went closed source around the
time as well.

I guess as they say, everyone's gotta eat, and filet and caviar are the menu
items.

------
jchw
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.

~~~
rb666
But Emby has a proper IOS client, Jellyfin does not. This is value I pay for.
Plus I don't mind paying for quality software regardless.

~~~
coppernoodles
There is a beta client for Jellyfin as well which you can install via
testflight, it may be this one:
[https://testflight.apple.com/join/TcFUEVEb](https://testflight.apple.com/join/TcFUEVEb)
but I just googled that and did not get it from an official page.

~~~
ValentineC
I used this before, and it works decently enough.

I do wish there was a feature to download videos locally for watching on-the-
go. (I'm not sure if the Plex or Emby apps have it.)

~~~
majora2007
Plex does have that feature. Jellyfin devs have it high on their list, but it
hasn't been built out yet.

------
opendomain
The website looks great, but does not offer a lot of detail.

Can someone explain: "Holds your entire movie collection" \- does this mean it
rips your DVDs onto a hard drive? Or just catalog them?

"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?

"Enjoy your own music collection. Make playlists, and listen on the go." \-
Can I transfer songs I bought song on Apple, GooglePlay, or CDs?

"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?

Thank you for your help!

~~~
krisroadruck
It, and apps like it (plex, emby) are a fancy front end for all your pirated
media or personal backups. It requires the media exist in digital form on a
network attached device, be it your PC, NAS or server. It will not interface
with any legit streaming services you have like spotify, netflix, et cetera.
Think of it as a personal netflix-like UI for your local media, and nothing
more.

~~~
surround
But how does it support live TV?

~~~
anthonylavado
There’s native support for HDHomeRun tuners, and M3U files.

There’s other plugins to enable TVHeadend access and more IPTV.

------
anthonylavado
I’m one of the Core Team members of Jellyfin, if anyone had any questions.
[https://github.com/anthonylavado](https://github.com/anthonylavado)

~~~
hysan
From what I'm reading in comments, clients are the biggest UX gap. I'm
planning on finally setting up a solution for my family and was initially
leaning towards Plex for simplicity client-side.

If you were to convince me to try Jellyfin, what would your recommended setup
for an LG WebOS TV? Ideally one that allows me to continue using the TV
remote.

~~~
anthonylavado
Most "boxes" that you get would let you use your TV remote through CEC. If you
really wanted to add something on, then I would probably recommend anything
from a Fire Stick 4K to an nVidia Shield.

That said, we have WebOS work in progress.

------
heavyset_go
Jellyfin is great, the project team is committed to keeping it open source and
they're great to work with.

If anyone is looking to contribute, the React client needs some work and its
success would open up support to more platforms.

------
regnerba
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+.

~~~
vxNsr
Does Jellyfin offer a way to watch from outside the local network alà
app.plex.com? Or do I need to set up a vpn as well?

~~~
thekyle
Just the usual ways of exposing a service to the public net. Port forwarding
or VPN would both work fine. Jellyfin does support UPnP.

~~~
prplhaz4
There's also fairly complete documentation on setting up a number of reverse
proxies if you're considering port forwarding:
[https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-
pro...](https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-proxy.html)

------
benboughton1
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.

~~~
bronco21016
People are doing exactly what you think they’re doing. They’re building
collections of content illegally from torrenting.

With everyone creating their own subscription streaming service these days
piracy is about to making a roaring come back and with the advances in
software out there today it’s becoming easier than ever. You can go to reddit
and find 100s of Plex servers that people open up to others for a small fee or
even free. These servers contain nearly everything that’s popular. Why would
you want to mess around with 2-3 HDMI dongles/boxes and 4-5 streaming services
when you can have it all in one place for significantly cheaper and with
little technical ability other than installing the Plex app and registering
for a shared server? I suspect as time goes on Jellyfin will become the go to
for these types of ‘services’.

~~~
ValentineC
> _Why would you want to mess around with 2-3 HDMI dongles /boxes and 4-5
> streaming services when you can have it all in one place for significantly
> cheaper and with little technical ability other than installing the Plex app
> and registering for a shared server? I suspect as time goes on Jellyfin will
> become the go to for these types of ‘services’._

This, except for most people maintaining their own private libraries, it
probably makes more sense to use Kodi to play back files in a file system,
than to rename everything to fit Jellyfin/Plex's fairly inflexible file naming
requirements.

~~~
bronco21016
As someone who ran Kodi for quite sometime I can tell you it just doesn’t
quite meet the wife approval factor. Not to mention it has basically no
utilities for on the fly transcoding and remote playback which was the killer
feature that pulled me to Plex to begin with.

~~~
ValentineC
> _As someone who ran Kodi for quite sometime I can tell you it just doesn’t
> quite meet the wife approval factor._

Have you tried manually adding the content to the "Movies" and "TV Shows"
libraries in Kodi? Kodi seems to have much more robust and flexible library
support, though the process is less "set it and go" as well.

(A huge gripe of mine is having to store TV show seasons in a prescribed
format in Jellyfin — I'm just testing it with movies for now.)

> _Not to mention it has basically no utilities for on the fly transcoding and
> remote playback which was the killer feature that pulled me to Plex to begin
> with._

But yes, it's lacking on the other points, and for discovery of "similar"
stuff.

------
fixmycode
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.

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.

~~~
krisroadruck
They've made it pretty clear in a number of threads on Reddit that native apps
for Samsung and LG are very low on the priority list. The standard advice
tossed around is either to drop some coin on a shield, or cast from another
device. I eventually ended up buying a shield, but once I did that, the main
things that were annoying me on plex that originally motivated me to
investigate Jellyfin turned out to be issues with the native TV apps, with the
android version on the shield having none of the problems, so I ended up just
switching back to plex. _shrug_

~~~
heavyset_go
> _They 've made it pretty clear in a number of threads on Reddit that native
> apps for Samsung and LG are very low on the priority list._

Low in priority insofar as there are not many developers with that hardware
contributing to the project. If you have the hardware and free time to
contribute, please do.

~~~
mikeryan
Both Samsung and LG have emulators that are fine for feature development. You
don’t need the hardware and there are too many variations to even make that
worthwhile.

~~~
kingosticks
I guess technically that might work but developing software for a platform you
don't use yourself is hard work when you're usually only rewarded with user
complaints i.e. when you are not getting paid.

------
branon
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.

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.

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.

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.

Keep up the great work everybody!

~~~
charwalker
How are you handling remote access to Jellyfin? I have it set up internally
but not yet accessible to friends/family.

~~~
branon
I've got nginx running and acting as a reverse proxy[0]. I've found it's an
easy way to manage TLS certificates, and using a memorable subdomain is a
bonus for my users as well.

The Jellyfin server is configured so no user tiles are shown on the login
screen. Everybody who logs in must type both a username and password.

My upstream bandwidth is not great, so WAN streams are choked to 4 Mbps each,
for all users except myself of course ;)

[0] [https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-
pro...](https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/reverse-
proxy.html#nginx)

------
PenguinCoder
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)

~~~
bisby
[https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-
roku](https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-roku)

Requires setting your Roku to dev mode and side loading. Didn't want to toss
some half finished slop onto the app store. It's been in a semi idle state
because it covers most of my use cases and I don't really know enough about
other people's use cases to know what needs to be fixed or updated before
people find it "acceptable". (I'm not a BrightScript dev, which gives a bit of
extra imposter syndrome and makes me nervous to consider a thing shippable
too).

BrightScript is awful, but if you can help develop it would be great (the
server is in .NET but the Roku app is in Roku's BrightScript). If not, testing
and feedback and prioritization of feature requests also helps a ton.

~~~
mmcclure
We have to write some BrightScript at work in order to maintain an SDK for our
QoS data analytics product. It's one of those things where you forget about it
until you have to work on it again, then you get to go through all the stages
of "why would someone do this" all over.

I think Roku is actually one of the better OTT platforms out there, but that's
absolutely in spite of BrightScript.

------
bsharitt
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).

------
coppernoodles
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.

------
nabeelms
I've never used a media server before. What advantages does a media server
offer over just storing stuff on a set of folders?

~~~
NortySpock
Flashy movie posters you can idly browse through while you are curling up
against your significant other.

There's a real emotional difference in clicking on a movie poster rather than
squinting at text in a list of folder contents.

Additionally the media server will generally pull lists of actors, directors,
and other related works, as well as holding your place in the episode or
series if you are working your way through a TV series on the weekend. "What
episode where we on?" becomes a rhetorical question rather than a debate.

~~~
FreeKill
Also, other quality of life features such as searching your library, ordering
your list by different criteria such as directors, critic reviews, release
date, combining movies/tv shows into organized collections etc.

~~~
petepete
Plus your library marking what you've seen and bringing what's next to the
fore. Kodi does this very well

~~~
majora2007
Plus gives you the optional ability to watch your media from anywhere, even
outside your network.

------
yboris
Shameless plug: I built _Video Hub App_ 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).

Website: [https://videohubapp.com/](https://videohubapp.com/)

MIT Open Source: [https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-
App](https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App)

~~~
majora2007
This actually looks pretty nice. I'll try this out tonight. Thanks.

------
throwaway-9320
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.

------
cfjgvjh
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.

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.

~~~
mistermann
> jellyfin addon for kodi

Is this how one would watch media from Jellyfish on TV, install Kodi+JellyFish
AddOn for iOS/Android and then Chromecast to TV?

~~~
xbmcuser
Depends on the tv as it does have native apps for some tvs

------
hbcondo714
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.

~~~
hbcondo714
I used to use a Gyration[1] universal remote control that had a trackpad
built-in that allowed my thumb to easily move & click the mouse cursor on my
HTPC. Alas I used it so much over the years that it eventually lost
responsiveness to my thumb. The manufacturer doesn't make this remote anymore
and I never found another computer that made remotes with this kind of mouse
technology :(

[1] [https://www.newegg.com/gyration-gyr3101us-
universal/p/N82E16...](https://www.newegg.com/gyration-gyr3101us-
universal/p/N82E16880105001)

------
alias_neo
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.

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

~~~
zmix
A few comments up I read, that Jellyfin acts as a DLNA server. Can't you just
connect your LG as a DLNA client/renderer?

~~~
alias_neo
Yes, but the experience is substantially worse; you get some ugly folder
icons, no art-work, and names are based on folder/file names rather than Meta.

Family (particularly little ones) love the beautiful artwork/cover art layout
you get from the likes of Emby/Jellyfin/Plex.

~~~
zmix
Ah, ok, I see.

------
mrmlz
My biggest gripe with Jellyfin, Emby, Plex etc. is the lack of .rar-support.

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.

Other than that i've found the meta-data to be "better" in emby/jellfin
compared to Kodi.

~~~
racingmars
RAR is a proprietary format... there is no free-software code to decompress
RAR archives (the license agreement for the code that is available prohibits
using the code to 'reverse engineer' the RAR format itself, and I'm guessing
most projects don't want to have to change their license agreement to a non-
free-software license to be able to include RAR support).

Not sure why anyone actually uses RAR these days...I really don't get it.

~~~
mrmlz
I still have tonnes of .rar. Exclusively for legacy reasons (you can google
why .rar exists), sure i could spend the time extracting everything, or
continue using Kodi which is my current solution.

I don't think the license is the issue, Kodi has solved it with a external dep
if i'm not mistaken. The reason is more related to your last sentence. They
don't get it, and thus doesn't want to spend time on solving it. Which is
their prerogative of course, but it still annoys _me_ :)

~~~
ValentineC
> _I still have tonnes of .rar. Exclusively for legacy reasons (you can google
> why .rar exists), sure i could spend the time extracting everything, or
> continue using Kodi which is my current solution._

I don't understand why you'd want to keep media files in .rar, unless you are
part of scene distribution.

It's not like ROM emulation, where there's tangible savings to be had storing
the individual ROMs in a compressed format.

~~~
mrmlz
Well, for the longest time, like a decade+, there was no point to spend the
time unpacking the files. I could watch them with unrar| mplayer without any
problems. Then XBMC came along and everything continued to work without a
hitch, it isn't until now the need to unpack them has actually presented
itself so i of course see this as a step back and degradation in my personal
user experience.

But i guess times are changing, kids these days etc. :)

------
charwalker
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.

------
krick
How does it compare to Subsonic/Libresonic/Airsonic in terms of being a self-
hosted Spotify?

~~~
iotku
Music support exists but needs a lot of love. Currently for my usecase
(streaming my music to my Android phone) transcoding doesn't currently work
(streaming flac over a mobile data connection is bad news) so I've fallen back
to using dsub/gonic (subsonic compatible server) until transcoding is
resolved.

It finds metadata pretty well (Artwork, artist info, and summaries) but
playback leaves a fair bit to be desired and playlists aren't very well
fleshed out.

~~~
krick
Thanks! First time I hear of gonic too. Why use it instead of Airsonic?

~~~
iotku
Personally I'm just not a huge fan of java and the web interface was a bit on
the annoying side, although it has a few more features like grabbing podcasts
(which never really seemed to be implemented into other clients).

As far as gonic goes I've been testing it out for a while and haven't run into
any issues and I'm a bit of a fanboy for stuff made in go. It's still pretty
bare-bones, but has been pretty stable and fast otherwise.

Looking into it would seem that gonic might not actually do transcoding yet
(airsonic could transcode into opus after some configuration which is nice)
although, caching from dsub might have saved me there if that's the case.

The main issue with jellyfin as far as mobile stuff goes is that it doesn't
cache any tracks so if I was going between wifi signals audio would frequently
cut out which was never a problem with airsonic/gonic as dsub will request a
couple of tracks ahead of time to compensate for deadzones.

------
ZoomZoomZoom
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!

------
jmuguy
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.

~~~
flatiron
I have it disabled on my server. It’s just a drop down and I set it to
“disabled” and that was that.

~~~
jmuguy
Yeah except now it’s suggesting songs on tidal that played during tv episodes.
Haven’t found a way to get rid of that :/

~~~
Arn_Thor
Go to "manage libraries", then edit each library. Once the edit menu opens, go
to the "advanced" section and untick "include related TIDAL content". That
ought to sort it out

------
bitL
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.

------
tomc1985
How is this compared to Kodi?

~~~
tryum
Kodi is a media player, not a media server. There's a plugin to use kodi as a
front-end to jellyfin media server.

~~~
Blaiz0r
But Kodi can just play files off an attached/networked storage and collects
all the metadata if need be, so what's the difference?

~~~
kingosticks
As answered at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21988656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21988656),
it has benefits if you have multiple clients.

------
mopsi
How does it compare to Emby? What's better, what's worse?

~~~
Mashimo
Jellyfin is open source, based on Emby 2.4.X or something like that. It can do
hardware encoding out of the box. With emby you have to pay for that. They now
start with refactoring all the code, because apparently Emby code was really
spagetti like.

There is an Jellyfin Dev in this thread. Ask him about the Emby Database
design where DB and XML files where all mixed :)))

DL;DR: Not too much difference for the enduser right now. Might load a bit
faster, because of website refactoring.

------
nwithan8
Slowly but surely transitioning to Jellyfin from Plex.

A lot more development still needed, feel free to contribute.

------
Havoc
What kind of device would be best for attaching to a TV? Rasp4 or something
like that?

------
xfalcox
Does this have an option to completely disable transcoding?

~~~
smurfpandey
You can disable transcoding per-user, there's no option to disable it system
wide.

------
skanga
Is it possible to customize the movies screen to eliminate pagination and use
a continuous scroll instead?

