Jellyfin 12.0(jellyfin.org) |
Jellyfin 12.0(jellyfin.org) |
I don't use streaming (though, mpv can likely handle it). Prefer to have all media I use locally. Don't watch video on my phone, either.
Very happy to see it’s been folded into the server!
Edit: Anyone is running Jellyfin on Qnap?
Plezy supports both Plex and Jellyfin as a backend - I'm not sure if there is 100% feature parity.
but they have an iOS app for ipad/iphone https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jellyfin-mobile/id1480192618
Neptune is an up-and-coming client that looks promising.
Edit: And making it more secure? Just because it is commonly for LAN doesn't mean it can be insecure
I don't know if that changed, but I gave jellyfin only read only access to my movies.
Just like all the updates before that.
Or release native clients that can use OIDC.
Doing neither sucks =[.
There have been exploits: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/security
The project is a fork of another project (Emby) and there has always been potential for user-supplied data ending up in command-line arguments, or exploitation of the (admin) user getting to upload various files. Nonetheless, all reported security bugs have been fixed promptly, and they're proactively sweeping through the full set of APIs they inherited, looking for possible exploit paths.
Most exploits required an authenticated user.
If you're concerned about this, you should run Jellyfin's docker image, with read-only mounts of your media library, and only give accounts to people you trust, which is how you should treat your personal media library anyway.
A lot of Jellyfin's API doesn't require any authentication at all, as an example.
mpv can still do terminal ANSI-art output if you really want but it can also display pixels directly via DRM without a display server if you launch it from a random VT.
> Is this a massive red-flag security risk that actively exposes your data to the Internet? No.
>
> At this point, this over-4-year-old issue has gotten posted to HackerNews more than enough times and gotten quite enough unhelpful peanut-gallery comments like those above..
Hashing (and/or salting) a password client-side before sending it would offer next to no protection, as if the server is expecting this value and the attacker intercepts it, they could just replay the hashed value themselves. Why would they need to know the original password?
The salt for the password should also have been randomly generated when it was first created, and stored alongside the password in the database. The only way for the client to know this value would be to retrieve it based on username alone, when the request is first made. This would reduce the security of the system and allow a dedicated attacker much more leverage to try and crack that single password, if they knew only the username of the user.
The comment you're replying to is correct, encryption is the job of HTTPS.
The client could do a challenge-response PAKE with the server, proving the client held the password while not transmitting it. The session cookie could be sent from the server as part of that exchange, encrypted so only the holder of the user's password could decrypt it.
That's not how the web works, but it's strictly superior to the accepted standard of the client sending the raw password to the server, and it would be secure even over an active MITM unencrypted link.
If you want to make it super easy for non technical people also use reverse proxies to your tailnet so jellyfin/plex is reachable at like “https://watch.example.com”. Pretty much the only friction for non technical people would be creating a tailscale account and being invited to tailnet I guess. But you could also just do that for them I suppose with auth keys
If you think most non tech people can just casually find an old pc, install and setup pfsense, then you are out of touch with reality. And they also would have to let it run all the time and have space for it. That's just not something realistic. It's not an option for my friends. Might also break chromecast.
As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my *arr stack and it has helped tremendously. I used to have to babysit and manually intervene on maybe 10% of requests, now it’s near zero, plus I got audiobook requests and subtitles working great. Granted a big part of the increased success was signing up for a Usenet service but of course Claude was able to configure it all and make it work. I was a little worried Claude would demur in the face of the task, but it was more than happy to help me acquire media in this way
But the sore point right now is outside access, which Jellyfin really isn't made for. I set up Tailscale so I can connect Infuse to Jellyfin remotely. But that's not exactly as smooth as Plex. I can't give friends and family access, either, which was dead easy with Plex.
In terms of the UX, Infuse isn't very good, but it does the job okay. The built-in subtitle fetcher is amazing; that stuff never worked for me with Plex.
I'm confused about this bit. I installed jellyfin to provide outside access to me and my family/friends.
It wasn't difficult to make it available on the 'net, setting up new users is pretty simple and jellyfin has clients (both first and third party) for most platforms.
In fact, I went from never having used jellyfin to giving external access to friends/family within a few hours.
I'm sure I'm missing something, so if you wouldn't mind, I'd be very interested to hear your experience.
I guess it's less full featured as Plex or Jellyfin (it still more than covers the bases for video: format support, different video/audio/subtitle tracks, tv series recognition, skip intros, Trakt.tv etc.); but then again all it requires is any online storage, and the Infuse app (either on iDevice or AppleTV).
I've got the lifetime pass, but it really does feel like a Sword of Damocles situation...
I think one silver lining is that whenever it does reach a tipping point there's going to be a ton of support for projects like Jellyfin, so hopefully we see more feature parity - in particular for shared access for friends and family.
It's insane that the current setup options are:
- Click through dozens of pages importing JSONs from TRaSH Guides, then do it all over again on the other app.
- Run an app that basically does the same thing but over the REST API.
LLMs have been AMAZING for home server maintenance and improvements. I have completed SO many of my "some day" tasks. I never have to read another fucking log file ever again. It has taken all of the friction out of the hobby. It's all* fun now.
Now I can just tell Claude “Setup XYZ app on my server” and it does it all and leaves a note in my Obsidian vault documenting the service (setup instructions, backups, hostname, etc).
Trying out new things has never been easier now that the effort is near-0 to kick the tires.
Any more details here? I hit this a lot and it's not too much work, but still pretty annoying.
EDIT: Claude was also able to look at my logs and noticed that nearly all of the exe or other malware was coming from 2 trackers so we just eliminated those.
I tried shelfarr as well with some success a while back, but haven’t needed any new books lately since I’m busy catching up on the books I’ve downloaded (the Bible is long lol).
Also, the Plex app for LG TV has been buggy and broken for years: some content will not play at all, some will not play if you ff/rewind, and some will not play until you physically turn your TV off and then on. Very annoying.
I'm glad to see competition.
Maybe mkv-renamer is of use to you? [2]
1: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-...
Also in the process of ditching plex I switched to audiobookshelf for my audiobooks and I have to say it’s also crap. It’s constantly refusing to start playing, or pausing for a really long time before playing.
All that being said I’m not switching back. It’s been a pain but it was worth it.
So of course, Plex is going to engage in the fuckery that they are. JellyFin on the other hand, for the amount it costs is surprisingly low on janky behavior.
Can you say more about this? I've never encountered this problem in nearly a decade of running the same stack.
https://opencollective.com/jellyfin/updates/were-good-seriou...
> We have quite a budget collected over the last 5 years, and while we're really happy to see so many in the Jellyfin community contribute to us, we want to ask you to stop! No, really. We don't actually need your money. At least, not here and now. We have over $24,000 in the bank, and with average monthly expenses of only ~$600, that's over 40 months (3.3 years) of runway! So, we have plenty of money for the near future ...
This is not coming from a bad place - I am very appreciative of having a open source alternative to Plex. Just putting this out there in case it catches someone's interest to improve it.
I have a ~40TB library and was still on 10.10.7 because of all the performance issues with 10.11. Upgraded straight to 12.0 and was impressed with how quick and painless it was! As the upgrade instructions warn about, some of my titles disappeared until a rescan added them back, but that was the only weirdness. The whole initial migration only took a few minutes.
I'm also confident they've found most of the bugs and have produced something you can just upgrade to, given they've had 7 release candidates over the past few months:
12.0 RC1 - Jun 22
12.0 RC2 - Jun 28
12.0 RC3 - Jul 22
12.0 RC4 - Aug 02
12.0 RC5 - Aug 11
12.0 RC6 - Aug 26
12.0 RC7 - Sep 01
12.0 - Sep 08
UPDATE: Upgraded to 12.0, performance is great, better than 10.10 and 10.11, including in third party apps! No problems with the migration.
> AI use isn't completely forbidden in pull requests/code submissions, however you must understand HOW it does what it does, and any posts to a pull request/issue should be written by the user. You cannot function as a go-between between your AI and our questions/comments, just copy-pasting whatever the AI tells you
One of the more sensible ones.
My young daughter recently started getting into audio books, so I installed Listenarr alongside a vibe coded mcp server [0] which I have running with all the other arr service mcp connections.
This allows the family to easily download and manage their media (err…Linux distributions) via Onyx AI, which I also have running with everything else on local box running microK8s, all on a relatively puny Geekom minipc with 16Gb
This whole setup is pretty straightforward to manage with Claude which has no issues working with K8s.
For those interested in the listenarr audiobook mcp: [0] https://github.com/leachuk/listenarr-mcp/blob/main/CLAUDE.md
Anyone have the live tv (via iptv not connecting a tuner with an antennae) working well with Apple TV?
That said I very rarely would even need it, the last time I thought I did was when I had my under configured to not see R rated movies because of my kids, the logs were not clear that the movie was ever scanned so it was hard to realize.
https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/315/mysql-server-back-en...
For TV you pretty much have to use Kodi and all the decent theme require a surprising amount of other plug-ins to work...
Anyone know of a decent theme for Kodi that won't fall over next time it updates? I just need "Resume Watching", "Newly Added" and alphabetical lists.
(I'd jump to Roku or Apple TV on my main setup in a heartbeat if they supported DV 7 FEL and all audio passthrough formats.)
And then maybe watch offline support.
Have there been improvements on this front?
Jellyfin server (when i last tried it 5 years ago) couldn't run on same raspberry pi that hapily ran Plex
I've only really been using jellyfin for a month or two but it's much more user friendly than the xbmc/kodi setup I was using, and the pause/resume between devices is fantastic. I'm totally converted.
You don't need to connect your TV, you can just use an Android TV stick such as a Thompson Stick
One of the remaining issues is that the Samsung client remuxes if you select a secondary audio track[0] - apparently fixable by using the AVPlay player instead of the HTML player.
This <https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/17215> is an example bug; there were others but I can't find them at the moment.
jellyfin 12 available as hosted option on malmo. one click install
I am on v10 (using JF for music only) and with book plugin (forgot which one) it didn't offer to split books into multiple catalogs, which was a bit annoying. Maybe I missed it in v11. Solution for me was to vibecode a simplest OPDS server with 0 css and basic auth.
(fortunately it’s a niche thing, so I just closed signups and just give my prospective users a one time invite code)
Mixed media type libraries are depreciated and "broken" according to the documentation[1], which is fair enough, but sometimes this results in weirdness if a TV-show is also part of a franchise and has associated TV-movies (e.g. the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Futurama, or Breaking Bad). If you want to keep those movies on your file system in a folder with the other stuff from the franchise, Jellyfin often can't handle it. And it's not obvious to new users whether these TV-movies belong in a TV-shows library or a movies library.
I've also noticed it cannot handle additional layers of folders (i.e. for Genres) in TV show libraries, but it can handle that layer in movie libraries. Failure mode (the "going nuts") looks like those genre folders recognized as bizarre or obscure television shows, and nothing scanned the next layer down.
I haven't looked into how their scanning algorithms work, but it's definitely frustrating that there's not a button or feature to say: "No, Jellyfin, this is a folder, not a show or movie. Try scanning again on the subtree starting here."
Honestly, any software that either silently/automatically reorganizes a user's files and folders (not Jellyfin, but there are others that do this... even FOSS projects) or demands a specific meta-hierarchy on the file system is frustrating to anyone who deliberately keeps their files and folders well-organized.
[1]: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/mixed-movies-...
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-meta/blob/master/polici...
> Jellyfin funds itself exclusively from donations by individual users. It does not and will not accept any sponsorship or other monetary compensation in exchange for features, priority access, support, or any other work by the community.
They spend the donations on paying for hosting servers, etc. They don't pay anyone a salary.
Their post highlights that your favourite third party client can be different. If your third party client is made by someone who'll accept donations, you should donate to them to keep your client going.
Part of the team needed it, part of it saw that as something that shouldn't go that way, so they did what you're supposed to do in open source and forked. Ergo they are very much against doing that for that specific project.
Part of the team needed it, part of it saw that as something that shouldn't go that way, so they did what you're supposed to do in open source and forked.
So it's not really a surprise they don't go that way.
From what I remember, some clients don't support streaming subtitles, so they must download them completely in advance, when the movie starts, before they start appearing. If you pick embedded subtitles with these clients, Jellyfin must extract the subtitles files immediately, and this takes a while depending on container format, file sizes and server load. External subtitles are faster.
Really? How?
My expectation would be that extracting a subtitle file takes a few seconds at most. If you had to do it on the fly every time you watched anything in your library, it wouldn't matter.
I also remember Google TV working fine, but it seemed like ads got added to another part of the UI every month so I got sick of it.
Roku only supports text subtitles, so if you have picture subtitles (like a DVD or bluray), then you'll need to burn them in if you want to play on Roku.
Young children and non technical adults can use it as easily as any streaming app. I guess you can tweak and theme it endlessly to look like your favourite streaming app but I haven’t felt the need to so far.
Self-hosting always involves a bit of jankiness, if you can’t handle that then back to overpriced subscriptions and spyware you go.
Well one small niggle, I had a custom script setup on Caddy that overrides how certain buckets are sorted because my users are too lazy to follow my instructions. They changed the BucketID string in some way but this more to do with me having a custom script dependant on something they don't guarantee.
Hopefully they allow admins to change a users preferences in the future but currently it has to be done at the user level. I'm sure that will be in a future update.
Bit unfortunate how this can even happen, but it's on me for not checking or taking a backup first. The config/db really contain anything important anyways, other than "watched" markers that are already out of sync for me across Emby/Jellyfin/Plex.
I was actually just getting frustrated with Jellyfin performance and had just told my wife last night that I was switching back to Plex. I didn't realize it was a .11 thing. I just realized that it had gotten worse lately.
12 is working good in the browser so far, but I haven't really put it through the paces fully on Android.
Windows 11, upgrading jellyfin has literally never been an issue.
J/k whatever floats your boat my dude
Sign in via key is easy, not stuttering. I can recommend it.
I was able to replace the arr suite + sabnzbd with my own rust+ts frankenstein but had I known how complex the usenet piece was going to be I would have separated it into two phases.
Don't think of any such thing as "lifetime". Just ask: "For the amount they are charging me, how long does it need to last for it to have been worth my money?" With the price I paid, one year would have been enough.
The entire point is that it will extract the embedded subtitles ahead of time (when the media is added to the library) so Jellyfin doesn’t have to do it when you want to watch it.
If it's a async process that runs on import/update of the library, that sounds great. I'm guessing we're/you're talking about Bazarr then? Although I don't see it explicitly mentioned in this thread earlier. Or some other application?
I personally use Bazarr instead, because I also want to download subtitles for different languages. In Bazarr, Embedded Subtitles is just another subtitle provider that can fetch subtitles depending on your rules.
I consider myself a general fan of capitalism as driver behind our primary incomes but I do wish there would be some more room left for the other parts of our lives to be driven by passion, community, or pure enjoyment without it being considered a tragedy to leave them that way.
I agree with the sentiment
However,
> $24000 in the bank
I assume there are multiple developers. If the developers are based on North America or Europe that money does not guarantee a living wage for more than.. some months?
(…but you couldn’t call me capitalistic, that really doesn’t suit me.)
I just hope they can continue to develop the product, because I’m using it daily and don’t want it to go away.
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -map 0:s:0 /tmp/subtitles.srt
If I extract SRT subtitles from a 47 minute video, it takes about one second, so your two-hour duration isn't what's causing you to wait. You might be decoding two hours of extremely high-resolution pixels, but there's no actual need to do that either.
But door locks refuse to unlock from Hey Siri, so you have to unlock and use your phone.
So I made them appear as door locks (my idea, heh, AI didn't come up with that).
I couldn't help but think with all the ads they were serving me directly, that they must be selling my data as well. That's not the point of self-host. No thank you.
Jellyfin still missing download w/ transcode, but with space getting so cheap I don't miss it. I do need to improve the music side though
But I prefer splitting things by decades as a first level. The distinction of cinema, direct-to-video, TV show, TV movie, web and others isn't really that important to me.
A production server with user data on it? I wouldn’t dare. My backed up MacBook? Truly valuable.
I've been hearing that for as long as Jellyfin has existed :-)
Until they handle OTA (along with its EPG), and DVR properly, it's the inferior option for me.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but as far as I can tell, Plex defaults to direct play enabled, and will direct play unless it's not supported by client. (Or other constraints, like limited bandwidth settings, etc.)
However, compared to Plex, I've found the remote experience (through Tailscale) to be a lot easier and better performing than the Plex equivalent for me personally. I never have any issues connecting externally now, whereas I did all the time with Plex. Maybe I just needed to get Plex running over Tailscale but it seemed to fight that a bit.
(Source: was in the Neptune tvOS beta, still am for iOS - it is a fun squad though)
I realised it doesn't improve my life, to care about folder structure and naming, so much that I insist on retaining it and hobbling the media browsing frontend. The media browser brings in massively more metadata than I would have personally collected and encoded into the filepath/filename, and makes it nicely hyperlinked and searchable. Screenshots, posters, backdrops, cast, director, ...
You may think differently. In which case, enjoy your UI being a series of nested folders.
I do have a minimal level of categorisation, e.g. I can have filesystem paths like /tv/comedy /tv/drama, and then I have one "TV Shows" library made of multiple paths, including both /tv/comedy and /tv/drama. So I see the categories but Jellyfin doesn't have to.
What I have for mixed media are Jellyfin's Collections, where I can mix together films, TV series, music, books on any given topic. That's not accounting for TV show "specials" which live with the TV show, if TheTVDB.com honours it thusly.
There's no good reason for any folder structure to hobble a media browsing frontend. There are multiple frontends I've tried for my personal library of ebooks (mostly Humble Bundles of software/hardware books), and a number of those frontends have an option that's basically one book per folder (i.e. all identically named files in that folder treated as different versions of the same book... epub, pdf, etc) and folders above that can be whatever you want. BookOrbit[1] supports arbitrary folder hierarchies and Readest[2] supports at least one level of intermediate hierarchy.
In the context of existing software counterexamples, Jellyfin's delicate sensitivity to folder meta-structure is a regression from the baseline expectation. But I'd agree that ultimately folder naming requirements for the media items themselves makes good sense.
> In which case, enjoy your UI being a series of nested folders.
When the Jellyfin UI reflects those nested folders, I can tell it to only rescan a specific subfolder when I add a movie, rather than checking the whole library for new content. Folders and hierarchical structure are objectively useful, though our search-addled brains make that less obvious than it used to be.
[1]: https://bookorbit.app/library-file-structure/#grouping-folde...
Sure, but what I'm saying is that it was a price I was willing to pay. I tried a lot of other media browsing software and they just didn't meet my needs like Jellyfin did. Could Jellyfin be more flexible? Sure. Does it need to be for me? Not at the moment. I'm getting the benefit right away, and might stand to get more benefit in future if it becomes more flexible on path/filename parsing.
> a number of those frontends have an option that's basically one book per folder
Jellyfin already supports that, but currently only for movies. Seems entirely possible it could do that for books or TV episodes too, if someone volunteers the time to land the server and UI changes for it.
> When the Jellyfin UI reflects those nested folders, I can tell it to only rescan a specific subfolder when I add a movie, rather than checking the whole library for new content.
Jellyfin supports realtime monitoring with inotify so it can see new/updated files as you add them, but this depends on the filesystem supporting it, and also I think it still has a bug where doesn't work on library directory paths that are symlinks.
Jellyfin supports nested folders (Books, Music Videos and Other library types support a folder view), but their limitations are apparent: no homogenous filtering/sorting display, and for Music Videos and Other, no metadata collection.
I guess for Theatrical TV show movies like The Simpsons Movie it might be more complicated, but worse case you always create or edit your own NFO files with something like MediaElch and have Jellyfin use those.
I think it's better to have genres in the NFO files and not in the folder structure. A show or movie can easily fall into two or genres which is not going to get captured by a single folder.
Transcoding is a whole can of worms I chose to avoid by playing everything directly.
I would check that your client supports the requisite codecs, and has a sufficient network connection. Or alternatively check that your server has enough horsepower (GPU or CPU) to transcode.
You can use this and then block embedded subtitles on a per-library basis, which is what I vaguely described a couple of posts up.
I agree this should be easier to find and set up.
You can also transcode your files to formats that the free version of Infuse supports if you are a miser.
Whenever I can, I buy my software now these days instead of renting it.
I used Plex for years. I’d never go back from Infuse now, and I’m happy to pay that subscription to support its excellent development.
Caddy will get SSL certs automatically if it is exposed to the internet and DNS for that domain points to it, but if you are routing over tailscale exclusively Caddy can't automatically validate the domain names over ACME. There is a Caddy extension for doing DNS based validation, but that puts you back to needing a DNS provider with an API.
Yea, for clarity this is what i was describing. I use Porkbun's API and the Caddy instance isn't reachable from the internet, only local and over tailscale
I use Plexamp on desktop/laptop computers and then the Android and iOS apps for on-the-go music. I tried Symfonium [1] because it seemed promising and would give me a Jellyfin path, but it was weird and kinda buggy and ate my phone's battery.
I'm hopeful there'll be a good replacement available eventually, but for now, I just have to stick with Plex.
foobar2000 has this!
After trying dozens of music clients (including PlexAmp) I eventually settled on simply using foobar2000 pointed to an smb share - nothing else seems capable of properly handling playback by folder structure. (e.g. I've got all my Led Zeppelin albums in the "Led Zeppelin" folder, and I want to just select it and play their discography in album release order.)
I find the mainstream subscription players to be excruciating to use to play what I want at the time.
I don't mind lacking features in the server or the client honestly, if I can find and play an album or playlist I'm good. But the connectivity piece can be hard if you're not familiar with self host stuff. I tried to do Jellyfin and Tailscale and some client and it... kind of worked? But it was definitely not as seamless.
I do hope every year that it's my last year paying for Plex. Maybe this year!
Because yes, the remote stuff -- and PlexAmp just working the same wherever I am -- is the huge part of it. Music sits on my NAS and things... just work.
I also really like how easy the caching and offline mode is, because I frequently find myself driving in areas without mobile data service. I keep a couple favorite albums downloaded to my phone, then knowing the app will cache the next ~2 albums of queued tracks generally makes it Just Work.
Can't speak to other platforms though.
Maybe worth a try.
That said, I’m very interested in this space - I’ve been building a music server that provides compatible APIs for Synology and QNAP mobile apps, with a few more on my todo list. I’d love to include Plexamp so if it is possible please let me know!
That isn't true. You can configure the server with which subnets are trusted, and do not require auth.