Currently using Jellyfin installed on an old Mac mini. It’s mostly good, except I could not figure out the parental controls.
Exploring other options now, in particular emby.
A Call for Developers – Jellyfin
71–80 of 127 posts
Re: A Call for Developers – Jellyfin
#72I do not understand why anyone uses Jellyfin, I've tried it twice, and it seems soo finicky and opinionated. I've always just had a Linux computer hooked up to the T.V. Add a little bit of ktorrent, VLC, and SMB. Never really had any problems with this and its much much simpler.
Tell me you live alone or only with a partner in a single TV home. Multiple users, multiple locations, one setup. That's the value.
Or you could purchase inFuse, point it to a Samba server and literally walk away and be done. They even support connecting to a Jellyfin backend. Paying for commercial software that works out of the box, I know, the horror, I'm literally shaking.
Re: A Call for Developers – Jellyfin
#73Oh, I had no idea jellyfin was based on C#. I started my career as a C# dev, but now I only write C++. I miss C# dearly and have been badly wanting a project to flex those muscles on. I guess I'll dive into jellyfin now. I've got a list of annoyances and now that I know it's C#, I'm ready to get fixing
You're likely in for a treat if you haven't written C# in a while. The language has evolved quite a bit, especially around all kinds of nice ergonomics. Interesting things like pattern matching, using statements, and performance oriented primitives. I got back to writing C# full time earlier this year and it's a joy.
I must admit to disliking C#'s functional libraries. I have wasted so much time trying to get the buggers into a pipeline. It becomes agonising in a way that doing the same thing in Scala was so very much a dream. I keep discovering the hard way, just don't do it (or just get a whole lot more experienced at it, although I don't know how without going through the pain barrier, and deeper each time, like Inception).
Could you give me a hint about these 'performance oriented primitives' please? (The only ones I can think of are structs versus classes) Edit: but isn't there a new thing where you can subtype a class without allocations, like Scala's record classes, or is that new in Java, can't remember.
Re: A Call for Developers – Jellyfin
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. Media specific OSes are just okay but I have no problem about plugging my laptop into an HDMI cable to watch something. I have no anxiety about how a laptop sitting on a tv stand will look.
I don’t think anyone is using Jellyfin because they have anxiety about what their laptop looks like on a TV stand. My whole family uses Plex, they can operate it incredibly simply with a remote and don’t have to unplug and replug a thing. The simplicity is key, if you’re only catering for yourself/an exclusively techie audience then it’s not necessary.
I use Infuse on my Apple TV and Jellyfin is a nice backend for it (not necessary though). It’s just a nicer interaction than fiddling with an HTPC.
Re: A Call for Developers – Jellyfin
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, Kodi requires constant maintenance and tweaking. Jellyfin seems better overall(?) But I'm really frustrated with this transcoding issue. Or the fact it's incapable of DTS 5.1 passthrough on GCCWGTV (even their site https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/ says Jellyfin has been tested with DTS mono only, not DTS 5.1 ).
I do kinda cheat by ensuring I never need to transcode. Clients are AppleTV or iOS devices, mostly, and support every video or audio codec I’ve got. My server’s too weak to transcode more than about DVD resolution videos at live-video speeds, is why I have to do it that way.
Do you have media with DTS (not Dolby) 5.1 audio tracks, and can Jellyfin pass it through from the AppleTV to your TV or A/V receiver?
Re: A Call for Developers – Jellyfin
#76Currently using Jellyfin installed on an old Mac mini. It’s mostly good, except I could not figure out the parental controls. Exploring other options now, in particular emby.
Best option right now is to have separate libraries. Adult accounts (password protected) see all libraries, kid accounts only see kid libraries.
It’s not great, having to SSH into the server and move files around as the kids get older. Works, but isn’t ideal. Really ugly results in some interfaces, but others (infuse IIRC?) at least provide combined “movie” and “tv” categories so you don’t have to try to remember which library some on-the-line film is in.
There are other approaches but they’re worse (more time-consuming and prone to letting things slip through)
Re: A Call for Developers – Jellyfin
#77I do not understand why anyone uses Jellyfin, I've tried it twice, and it seems soo finicky and opinionated. I've always just had a Linux computer hooked up to the T.V. Add a little bit of ktorrent, VLC, and SMB. Never really had any problems with this and its much much simpler.
Tell me you live alone or only with a partner in a single TV home. Multiple users, multiple locations, one setup. That's the value.
Ouch. But sadly not true.
Both my non-tech wife and my four year old have figured out how to watch things. Which, is, my point. VLC, a directory browser, and ktorrent suite our needs so perfectly. Admittedly, the four year old hasn't figured out how to download torrents yet; but for my wife it was super simple to explain: "goto this website, search for desired show, only download from purple or green pirates."
My setup is slightly more complicated than I let on in the first post. We have multiple TVs, each hooked to a linux laptop (lenovo T430s, because I had one and the rest were cheap on ebay.). Then there's a NAS with SMB. All media is downloaded to the NAS, any T.V. can watch any downloaded media.
Re: A Call for Developers – Jellyfin
#78I do not understand why anyone uses Jellyfin, I've tried it twice, and it seems soo finicky and opinionated. I've always just had a Linux computer hooked up to the T.V. Add a little bit of ktorrent, VLC, and SMB. Never really had any problems with this and its much much simpler.
It's extremely convenient to have software keep track of which episode on a 7 season show I'm on
This is a good use case. This is a manual process for me or setting reminders in my phone.
Re: A Call for Developers – Jellyfin
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do kinda cheat by ensuring I never need to transcode. Clients are AppleTV or iOS devices, mostly, and support every video or audio codec I’ve got. My server’s too weak to transcode more than about DVD resolution videos at live-video speeds, is why I have to do it that way.
Do you have media with DTS (not Dolby) 5.1 audio tracks, and can Jellyfin pass it through from the AppleTV to your TV or A/V receiver?
Probably? I’ve got and have watched a lot of stuff, and have a reeeaaallly big screen so favor files large enough that including raw audio streams from the source is fairly common.
Lemme check my watched-videos…
Got one I must have watched at DTS-HD 5.1. But maybe the “HD” makes a difference.
Oh, here, DTS 5.1, no HD. This one definitely worked, I watched it like a month ago. Only audio track available on this video, so no chance I used a different one.
I’ve run into exactly one problem with my set-up, and I think it was some bad interaction between a particular frame-rate/resolution combo and my projector. Temporarily tweaking a tvOS setting (telling it not to switch video output to match sources) fixed it. Only seen it happen one time.
I do have a 7.1 audio receiver. Dunno if that matters for reproducing the issue.
Re: A Call for Developers – Jellyfin
#80I looked at adding a much-requested and not-that-hard-to-add feature a while back (allowlist-by-tag), got as far as figuring out where to add it in the server code… but bailed when I realized I’d need to shepherd PRs through at least two repos to get the feature delivered, while juggling both repos to do integration testing. Monorepos for tightly-coupled code are so nice… Maybe I’ll give it another look. [edit] incid…
Fwiw, Plex parental controls are absurdly flexible.
I have it set up so the kids account can only watch things that have been given a particular tag. Due to how granular Plex tags are, this means you can give them a whole movie or TV show, some of a TV show, or a single episode
As it is right now, they have access to a reasonably large corpus of content, but nothing new; every time I acquire a new episode of bluey or something, my wife wants to watch it first. We basically always approve it, since we aren't that likely to object to most things you'd find in a kids show, but it's nice to have the peace of mind