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 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 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!
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.
Sign in via key is easy, not stuttering. I can recommend it.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you say more about this? I've never encountered this problem in nearly a decade of running the same stack.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ffmpeg -i input.mkv -map 0:s:0 /tmp/subtitles.srt
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.
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
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'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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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..