Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team • Hacker News Board

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#121

Post by rgovostes » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 5:28 AM UTC

clepto wrote: post #115

dd8601fn wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't touched a media server setup since like XBMC and earlier tuner board + dvr era stuff, but recently did a Jellyfin setup for all my purchased physical media. It was crazy smooth for me. TMDB stuff just worked. Movies, TV, extras organization just worked. Apple TV, Roku, and iOS devices as clients just worked. The Apple TV client isn't great , but they're rewriting a big chunk of it now. It doesn't do the sha…

I use Infuse on the Apple TV and it’s great. I’m not sure how the free version of it compares, but they have a lifetime license for it that I believe is about $100. Definitely worth it if you have a large variety of media and frequently watch on the Apple TV specifically.

Infuse is a nice app but note that it does not use the media server's transcoding service, so it can work poorly trying to stream remotely, while Jellyfin's transcoding-aware web client works better. The Jellyfin app for Apple TV was pretty unusable last time I tried it, though.

This sort of underscores the ancestor's complaint: It's not exactly dead simple to set up and understand, the community recommends third-party apps that have only partial support, etc.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#122

Post by Hobadee » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 5:30 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #81

Note that the headline doesn't reflect the post. Here's the beginning: > Hello everyone. Effective yesterday, Anthony and I [Joshua Boniface] decided to depart from the project, myself as Project Leader, and he as a core team member. This is in addition to the resignation of Andrew on Friday. "Several core team members including the founder leave" looks a bit different from "founder leaves".

Also an important note is that they are leaving on good terms. Headline made me terrified that some bad drama was going down, but they are just ready to move on and committed to clean handoffs to whoever owns it going forward.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#123

Post by drnick1 » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 5:31 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…

One thing that Jellyfin does really well is integrate devices like the HDHomeRun. You can then watch OTA TV from any device on the LAN or elsewhere through the Jellyfin Web portal or dedicated clients for Linux/Android/iOS.

If your HTPC is powerful enough, you should also check out Plasma Bigscreen as a substitute for XFCE4.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#124

Post by squigz » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 5:31 AM UTC

cube00 wrote: post #82

I simply could no longer provide the effort (mental or time-wise) that the role demanded, and thus I was not performing my duties to an acceptable degree, facing severe burnout, and risks to my mental health. [...] We've proven that FLOSS works, and is in demand. If "FLOSS works" maintainers shouldn't be "facing severe burnout", I've come across two more in the past week alone: * Filebrowser (Mar 2026): https://hacdi…

Do people doing non-FLOSS work not also sometimes face severe burnout?

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#125

Post by Hobadee » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 5:33 AM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #44

> Now here we are 7-and-a-half years later, and it's the #1 FLOSS media server Source? How does its install base compare to Kodi's?

Kodi isn't a media server. Plex isn't FLOSS. Emby is what Jellyfin was forked from, and barely classifies as FLOSS anymore, and isn't as popular as Jellyfin from what I can tell. There isn't really anything else that I am aware of. Jellyfin being the #1 FLOSS media server makes sense to me, although I don't think there are really any viable #2s.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#126

Post by ncallaway » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 5:39 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #106

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never tried it for audiobooks frankly didn't even know it supported them. > Let me provide a per-folder template for extracting season / episode information. That's frankly not what I would call a bug and a bunch of work for near zero benefit. Not to be mean but why do you care? and if it really bothers you just use hardlinks let jellyfin see what it needs and you can have your pretty version for youself.

> I've never tried it for audiobooks frankly didn't even know it supported them. It's a music player. How could it not support audiobooks? You think it will rate your tracks and refuse to play them if they're insufficiently "musical"?

I think I have an idea of how it might not support audio books. What if audio books had the following issue:

> There is a very noticeable pause between each track that it plays, despite the entire thing being queued.

> That pause is presumably also present when playing music, but no one notices because each song is its own track. Audiobook tracks split in places where a pause would never occur naturally.

It would almost be like it wasn't really built with audio books in mind, but was rather designed around music.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#127

Post by no-name-here » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 5:47 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #81

Note that the headline doesn't reflect the post. Here's the beginning: > Hello everyone. Effective yesterday, Anthony and I [Joshua Boniface] decided to depart from the project, myself as Project Leader, and he as a core team member. This is in addition to the resignation of Andrew on Friday. "Several core team members including the founder leave" looks a bit different from "founder leaves".

Plus the title only mentions 1 person while 98% of the linked article is about 2 other people, neither of which are only person mentioned in the title. And the linked article doesn’t even have any link to find out about the founder leaving, the only person named in the title.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#128

Post by luciana1u » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 5:49 AM UTC

the fact that Jellyfin works as well as it does with a rotating cast of maintainers might be the strongest argument for open source I've seen this year

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#129

Post by r0ckarong » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 5:53 AM UTC

xrox wrote: post #35

The three founders are all great people, but there is a gatekeeping issue within the project (I'm heavily involved, so this is a throwaway account). The constant mocking accusations and hostility toward third-party clients, plugins, themes, and other tools have made Jellyfin's official spaces unbearable. The atmosphere often revolves around the opinions of a small group of people, and anything that falls outside thei…

> third-party clients

Funny how this is the only thing that keeps me from switching from Emby to Jellyfin is the atrocious state of their "own" apps. My last attempt failed when I had to use their Android client. Since I've discovered Wolphin and Findroid it looks a lot more plausible but I just don't have enough pain and lifetime Emby Premiere was still reasonable when I bought it.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#130

Post by zerof1l » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:02 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/

Have to admit, quite impressive that someone is still paying this much for Plex given the free alternative like Jellyfin that can do pretty much everything the same.

What’s the psychology here that people are willing to pay this much for this software, yet not even $20 for another?