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Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

jellyfin.org

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Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#5

Post by init2null »

Cyph0n wrote: post #3
sergiotapia wrote: post #2

What benefits are there compared to Emby? Been using it for quite some time and very curious! How is av1 support on jellyfin?

For your second question: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/#vid...

They don't list Infuse on there, but it's pretty great in its support of pretty much everything. The Apple TV has certainly surprised me by being an excellent platform for in-home streaming.

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#7

Post by lukevp »

Jellyfin is pretty good, and I've been using it in place of Plex for the last few years. However, I feel like there are some underlying limitations that I just can't get past:

1. the UI jank. The thumbnail tiles are slow to load, even on a local network. Searches and filters flicker as you type and take a while to return. Scrolling fast in the web UI gets choppy/laggy.

2. The native app (at least in the case of Apple TV) is either nonexistent or terrible. I've been using Swiftfin since it was one of the first alpha versions, and it constantly lost pairing with my Jellyfin instance. When it did work, which was very cryptic and usually required re-enrolling the client every time, it would randomly fail to load things, and the UI was very choppy as well. I haven't used the native apps on other platforms, but I imagine they are equally or more janky, because the Apple TV is comparatively very beefy hardware-wise vs. most other platforms.

3. The polling for new media is slow. I upped it to 10 minutes (the quickest possible setting) but I shudder to think what a full scan of a media library every 10 minutes is doing to my disks. Why doesn't it use file watchers and webhooks for new content notification?

4. The homepage has very little actionable info and doesn't work for browsing. It's not like Netflix or any of the other services where you can boot it up and see a bunch of different categories, as well as your "list". It has playlists, but you have to drill down to see them. You can go to "Movies -> Suggestions" and it has a little bit, but nothing like Netflix does. No real recommendation engine.

5. You have to maintain your own trailers or use an app like Infuse that can download its own trailers.

6. You have to separately configure tiles to be rendered if you want a nice seeking experience where it shows a live preview as you scrub through the timeline.

7. Movies and TV Shows are separated even though pretty much every other platform doesn't separate them, which requires you to click into one of 2 options before you can do almost anything.

That said, it's still far better and less janky than Plex was before I switched, and Infuse actually plays back HDR / Dolby Vision content correctly.

Does anyone else have qualms with Jellyfin? And how does Plex compare to any of these gripes?

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#8

Post by muppetman »

RickHull wrote: post #6

My media center is a laptop with a broken screen, running Arch Linux and Kodi. Kodi has a web interface that you can stream to. Why might I want to add Jellyfin?

Because you can give your friends a login, they can log in from anywhere, and watch your content. Same for you. You can log in from anywhere and do that. Kodi is more of a local thing, I find the two compliment each other very well. There are native apps for jellyfin as well. Loaded up and hit play. I guess you can probably do this with Kodi but it hasn't been designed from the ground up for this use case.

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#10

Post by muppetman »

lukevp wrote: post #7

Jellyfin is pretty good, and I've been using it in place of Plex for the last few years. However, I feel like there are some underlying limitations that I just can't get past: 1. the UI jank. The thumbnail tiles are slow to load, even on a local network. Searches and filters flicker as you type and take a while to return. Scrolling fast in the web UI gets choppy/laggy. 2. The native app (at least in the case of Apple…

Plex has a lot more polish. However, Plex also tries to shove stuff down your throat. If you want to share your meeting with friends, you need to have a Kodi pass or some bollocks. Jellyfin is 100% free. Certainly it is not as polished though, but I managed to use it with my friend who are not very technically literate, and it works very well for them. Every release improve the polish a little!

Edit: New media shows up for me pretty much straight away without having to do anything. Not sure what's happening there for you.

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