Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team • Hacker News Board

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#21

Post by infecto » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:20 AM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #14

techaqua wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is your hardware problem?

I’m running Plex via Docker on a Synology NAS. This has been working fine. When I tried to fire up a Jellyfin container, it was painfully slow. Clients barely worked. It wasn’t a good experience. It was several months ago, so I don’t remember all the details.

I don’t know if it’s a synology related problem or just Jellyfin but I have never gotten it running well. Even when it’s running I always get hiccups like server crashed a week later but appears green and running. Or trouble logging into the server using a third party client. Plex has always been perfect for me.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#22

Post by klik99 » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:21 AM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #14

techaqua wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is your hardware problem?

I’m running Plex via Docker on a Synology NAS. This has been working fine. When I tried to fire up a Jellyfin container, it was painfully slow. Clients barely worked. It wasn’t a good experience. It was several months ago, so I don’t remember all the details.

I just set up Jellyfin on an 1819 this weekend and so far it seems great, dunno if it’s improved or my device has bit more oomph - the ui on some devices is not as nice as plex but it’s been great

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#23

Post by al_borland » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:25 AM UTC

2muchtime wrote: post #6

al_borland wrote: post #2

Happy to see that it looks like a peaceful transition. I’m not currently a Jellyfin user, I tried it, but it didn’t seem capable of handling my library on my hardware. I’m sticking with Plex for now, but as they move more and more toward trying to be a streaming service instead of a media server, I’m hoping Jellyfin matures to the point where it’s viable when I need it.

What do you mean they’re moving toward trying to be a streaming service?

Take a look at their homepage, you wouldn’t even know they offer a media server looking at this. (The main URL forwards to the watch subdomain)

https://watch.plex.tv/

It’s now how a majority of users are using Plex as well.

> In 2023, Scott Hancock, Plex’s then-VP of marketing, said that Plex had more people using its online streaming service than using its media server features since 2022.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/plexs-crackdown-on-f...

With media servers being something studios surely don’t like, and Plex deprioritizing that aspect of the business, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before they shut it down completely.

To even know they have a media server, I need to click on the profile image in the top right of their website (even though I’m logged out), then click “My Media” under Links. No one is finding that organically.

That goes here, which seems to be their only page about the media server, and at the bottom is a link to a site that tries to scare people away. Instead of talking about how to rip your existing DVD and CD collection for the modern streaming era and self-hosting, it pushes users toward the big streaming services. Maybe that link is there because of the lawyers, but it sure seems like they don’t want this to exist anymore.

https://www.plex.tv/your-media/

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#24

Post by postalcoder » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:25 AM UTC

I’m grateful for this team. Jellyfin is a great product. I’ve been using llm + Tailscale + Jellyfin to manage my media box and I couldn’t be more happy. I’ve got perfect metadata, perfect organization, and multimodal search on top of it. What a dream.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#25

Post by judge2020 » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:27 AM UTC

freetime2 wrote: post #9

Recently Plex increased the cost of a new Lifetime Plex Pass to $750 [1]. It seems like they really want to get most users paying recurring monthly or annual fees. But to me at least that kind of goes against the whole purpose of hosting my own media library. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative! [1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/

Makes me feel lucky that I got it for $120 in 2021. But I appreciate that they still offer a lifetime pass at all.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#26

Post by walrus01 » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:31 AM UTC

freetime2 wrote: post #9

Recently Plex increased the cost of a new Lifetime Plex Pass to $750 [1]. It seems like they really want to get most users paying recurring monthly or annual fees. But to me at least that kind of goes against the whole purpose of hosting my own media library. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative! [1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/

I still am not quite sure what value something like Plex offers for my personal HTPC media needs. I have a large collection of disk space that's an SMB file share on my local LAN, on a server in my garage. My home theatre PC mounts it over the LAN.

I have an XFCE4 desktop environment on the HTPC with the font size cranked up a bit and can run nautilus, thunar, or any other file explorer metaphor browser to explore the folders. There's a folder for movies, a folder for TV shows, and then stuff is organized within there by its directory name and filename. I double click on something I want to watch and it opens in VLC. Dead simple and works.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#27

Post by al_borland » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:33 AM UTC

igor47 wrote: post #16

al_borland wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m running Plex via Docker on a Synology NAS. This has been working fine. When I tried to fire up a Jellyfin container, it was painfully slow. Clients barely worked. It wasn’t a good experience. It was several months ago, so I don’t remember all the details.

I wonder if it was just a start up issue? Some kind of initial scan of your database?

I waited for all that to finish. I tried to help it along by going through everything so it would cache it all. It wasn’t as straightforward as Plex’s visual, flipping covers over as the metadata loads in for each movie, providing a clear queue and sense of progress.

Once on the client side, it felt like those also needed to cache things. The only client that worked semi-well wasn’t a Jellyfin client, but could read from a Jellyfin server. I think it was called InFuse. With that as well, I spent hours simply navigating the app, going to every page, and waiting for it to cache everything so I could then navigate around. Then if I added something new, I needed to go to a page to show it and get it cached.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#28

Post by NichoPaolucci » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC

tclancy wrote: post #19

timcobb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the related stack

Yeah the arr stack plus seer. It all feels like cheating. Which it is.

Definitely cheating. I’ve taught my mostly-non-technical gf how to to load up sonarr and add something to the library.

Anything we can do to avoid the hodgepodge of 8 different streaming services and rotating availability…

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#29

Post by locksleydev » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:35 AM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #26

freetime2 wrote: post #9

Recently Plex increased the cost of a new Lifetime Plex Pass to $750 [1]. It seems like they really want to get most users paying recurring monthly or annual fees. But to me at least that kind of goes against the whole purpose of hosting my own media library. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative! [1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/

I still am not quite sure what value something like Plex offers for my personal HTPC media needs. I have a large collection of disk space that's an SMB file share on my local LAN, on a server in my garage. My home theatre PC mounts it over the LAN. I have an XFCE4 desktop environment on the HTPC with the font size cranked up a bit and can run nautilus, thunar, or any other file explorer metaphor browser to explore th…

Clients on everything, watch history tracking, meta data collection, nicer player, quick transcode for mobiles and other portable media players you don't want 4k on, automatic subtitle collection, live TV DVR, and an interface so simple my grandmother can use it.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#30

Post by bombcar » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 2:35 AM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #26

freetime2 wrote: post #9

Recently Plex increased the cost of a new Lifetime Plex Pass to $750 [1]. It seems like they really want to get most users paying recurring monthly or annual fees. But to me at least that kind of goes against the whole purpose of hosting my own media library. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Jellyfin for offering an alternative! [1] https://www.plex.tv/blog/new-lifetime-plex-pass-pricing/

I still am not quite sure what value something like Plex offers for my personal HTPC media needs. I have a large collection of disk space that's an SMB file share on my local LAN, on a server in my garage. My home theatre PC mounts it over the LAN. I have an XFCE4 desktop environment on the HTPC with the font size cranked up a bit and can run nautilus, thunar, or any other file explorer metaphor browser to explore th…

Jellyfin is nice for various reasons (main for me is play synching) but Apple TV + Infuse + SMB share made something pretty bulletproof and kid friendly even before.