Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

forum.jellyfin.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 348 posts

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#141

Post by hn_throw2025 »

NamTaf wrote: post #64
walrus01 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly my use case is not the most common. For a number of what I think are well founded reasons I don't use the "smart TV" OSes built into any televisions I own, none of my TVs have the wifi password or access to the Internet. The HTPC screen is just a screen, something else that's smarter is driving it. I also don't have any need for realtime transcoding as my home internet upstream speed is sufficient that I c…

If you don't care for any of the modcons of a media streaming system similar to Netflix, etc. then more power to you, stick with a SMB share. It's undeniably less that can go wrong and god knows these systems can become a janitorial hell sometimes. However I hope you can see that there is a plethora of benefits that others may enjoy from it. Otherwise, this kinda feels like the classic HN Dropbox critique.

I am definitely in the former category. I’m not dedicating the time to replicate a Netflix client equivalent with all the metadata (although I do make the time for FLAC albums). There’s nothing as straightforward as directories and a SMB conf file. Plus, you name individual files however you want.

I have straightforward SMB shares, but two distinct groups for movies. The first is standard bitrate, where everything is 1080p SDR h265. The second is for 4K HDR, higher bitrate. That second group is only for a small number of movies that I like very much, will rewatch, and have cinematography and visuals that justify the storage. If I love a movie but it is mostly an indoor dialogue affair, there is no point in it being in the second group. There is duplication between the two groups so I am covered if I want to watch the high def version at home on my large TV connected to my Pi NAS via Ethernet, or the standard def version around the house (usually working out) on a mobile device (or possibly on the road via my Tailnet).

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#142

Post by thaumasiotes »

viccis wrote: post #134
thaumasiotes wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"?

[flagged]

Do you not know how audio files work?

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#143

Post by dewey »

zerof1l wrote: post #130
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?

I have a lifetime pass I bought many years ago for not much money, Plex had apps in all Platforms. Jellyfin does not at this point, even though there’s work being done everywhere.

Plex just works and is supporter everywhere. Not that surprising that people use it.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#144

Post by asimovDev »

al_borland wrote: post #45
walrus01 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies. Shows what’s recently be added, recently released. Keeps track of where you’re at in a TV series, to always play the next episode. It can transcode as needed, to something like a mobile device or TV that might be more picky than VLC. Lots of quality of life improvement…

I have a HD TV from 2007 and I still vividly remember having to convert videos to a certain format because it was so picky. IIRC it only played .mp4, most of the movies I had on my external drive back then were .mkv and maybe some .avi , so almost nothing played

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#145

Post by hn_throw2025 »

al_borland wrote: post #45
walrus01 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies. Shows what’s recently be added, recently released. Keeps track of where you’re at in a TV series, to always play the next episode. It can transcode as needed, to something like a mobile device or TV that might be more picky than VLC. Lots of quality of life improvement…

The only thing I value from that list is the played/unplayed status, and resuming a title from where I left off. My two preferred clients handle that for me on my various devices.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#146

Post by bambax »

al_borland wrote: post #45
walrus01 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It lets the user browser with cover art, descriptions, trailers, sorting by release date, rating, etc. It keeps track of watched and unwatched movies. Shows what’s recently be added, recently released. Keeps track of where you’re at in a TV series, to always play the next episode. It can transcode as needed, to something like a mobile device or TV that might be more picky than VLC. Lots of quality of life improvement…

Yes. And with something like a GL.iNet travel router + Tailscale, you can watch Jellyfin from anywhere without ever exposing it to the Internet. You plug it in your hotel room, tell the hotel TV to connect to it, and voilà: Jellyfin on any random TV.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#147

Post by bambax »

judge2020 wrote: post #34
walrus01 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In particular the main value-add is that they have clients across so many different platforms, including most major bespoke smart TV brands[0], and their solution to streaming on WAN (HTTPS brokering) is pretty darn good for most people. Accessing my media from hotel rooms is pretty darn seamless, other than the wifi connection sometimes requiring downscaling to 720p or or so. 0: not really an issue nowadays with eve…

You can do that with Jellyfin and Tailscale trivially on devices you own; for a hotel TV you can use a GL.iNet travel router (which will also let you access your LAN from any device connected to it) and it's all free (except for the router of course, that you just buy once).

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#148

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

squigz wrote: post #124
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?

Yes but those people aren't doing it as a hobby.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#149

Post by bambax »

bob1029 wrote: post #132

There's never been a better time to consider writing your own media server solution from scratch. I really don't like the idea of transcoding on demand. It has always created a janky experience on the client. I've been using a custom solution that runs everything through ffmpeg normalization as part of the media upload phase. Whenever a client wants to stream something we give them raw byte ranges directly from the b…

Transcoding on demand is just trading compute for storage. If you have infinite storage you can store all definitions in advance for any possible client (I think that's what Netflix does); but if you don't, transcoding on demand is fine and isn't that much slower (a bit janky, yes, but only a bit).
Post reply on HN