Live data from Hacker News

Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

forum.jellyfin.org

171–180 of 348 posts

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a rant or an attack on you. I get the point of easyness that Plex and/or Jellyfin offer. I merely would like to explain why i do not need it. I tried both Jellyfin and Plex, but i could not find a huge benefit in using them in our household. Again, not a rant. I think it's an extra layer on top of things i do not need. I do not need cover art, descriptions or trailers. The smb shares have a folder hierarc…

> "Usually i remember what i was watching" You must not watch that many TV shows or Anime then. Or you have the memory of a savant. Without an automated system I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking.

Unfortunately i don't have the luxury to watch a lot of shows during the week. Usually the max is around 5 or so. Call me strange, but sometimes i actually like it that i forget what i was watching. Makes me kinda of realise it's still a little luxury leisure. Usually i get happy when i realise there's more show to watch (happened with Foundation). Or i keep ignoring it, because interest was lost over time (happened with Rick and Morty). The kids tend to watch a series back to front and then ignore it completely once they lose interest.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#172
post #108
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run JF not plex, but the #1 missing feature I'd like is per-user granular sharing of content within specific libraries. So far as I can tell, the only way around this is to symlink the subset of media into separate folders, make each of them libraries, then present those libraries to each user.

I'm not sure if this is what you want but you can set two lists of tags for each user that works as items blacklists and whitelists. Then you tag whatever media you want with those and they will appear or disappear for that user. You can find this feature in the admin control panel -> Users -> select an user -> Parental control (tab) There is also an Access tab, together both can be used to lock things down fairly we…

I didn't know about tags nor their uses in Parental Control, thanks!

And after checking it out, if you use Sonarr/Radarr for managing your media, the tags you put there are synced to Jellyfin, so that's even better.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple TV solutions for Jellyfin are inadequate last I checked. Basically you are stuck with Plex and Infuse. I already have lifetime Plex Pass so no reason to care... for now.

Infuse is terrific software, and supports jellyfin and smb. I use it for jellyfin and absolutely love my setup. I ditched plex because of missing Dolby audio support and all the use hostile channels and “features” years ago, and will never look back.

Infuse is another $100 license to sync watch history, when I already paid $100 for Plex a while ago (with the primary driver being 'sync watch history', which is the basic feature Plex provides).

Paying more money to use a different product, and then expecting all of my users to do the same, is a big hill to climb.

So the Plex inertia remains.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#174

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/

How is that even a viable business model? I don't know a single self host person that would pay a subscription for something they are hosting

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#175
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plex subscription also includes a “Skip Intro” for TV shows. That’s the only value I’ve gotten out of it other than being able to stream to my phone. Not sure if Jellyfin has an equivalent

Jellyfin can support intro/outro skipping as well with a plugin. https://github.com/intro-skipper/intro-skipper

i've used this plugin a lot, and it is nice, but a bit hit-or-miss. it analyzes all episodes of a show to start seeing a pattern in the beginning of shows, or checks chapters which my files rarely had. works well for most shows, but if a show has unique intros for every episode, it doesn't really work. also had trouble with 100% consistent intros, but i never really figured out why that happened.

kind of a 50% solution, works a lot of times but a lot of other times you still end up scrubbing. (also consider that if you install this plugin onto a large existing library, it's going to take a considerable amount of compute and real-world time to do complete it for every show).

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re a paid service now. It’s no longer open source.

To the best of my knowledge Plex has never been open source. It's just easy to mix up because it's been using Kodi as a base the whole time.

Indeed. They forked Xbox Media Center back in the day, to produce a Mac version when none existed.

Then they became a client/server model.

They are supposed to provide the source code for Plex Transcoder, since that's a modified ffmpeg build. In practice, the version they share is not up to date with the version they ship.

They are generally speaking, closed source.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#177

I’m surprised people reach for plex, not sure what I’m missing - but a Jellyfin container set up has been fantastic for strictly at home usage (running on an old gaming PC). It’s fantastic software - the cross platform applications are pretty useable. Don’t think we’ve even had any major issues over the last 4 years using it. Many thanks to the builders and maintainers, hopefully Andrew can take some rest and know th…

Biggest reason for me - for a long time - was no Apple TV app. Using Infuse has fixed that for me, however.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#178

Great that it's peaceful. Jellyfin is an amazing project, and works almost exactly how I want it to. By listing and playing my media without autoplaying trailers and other such stuff. I imagine many here who've never tried it will be of the same mindset

It's not amazing, it's as good as it is. Which is to say not great. There is a crazy amount of bugs which I have no confidence will ever get fixed. If you're the type that enjoys tinkering with obscure Linux settings for hours on end, which are certain to break if you dare to update anything, it may be for you.

It's probably your config or hardware issues

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#179

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…

> You can get a modern chatbot to produce this experience in a single prompt.

If you value your time that little and you get more joy out of building apps for multiple platforms instead of watching movies then this is the best choice. For everyone else it's probably better to just go with any of the hundres of solutions that went through years of bug fixing and pain already to get it working on all these platforms.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#180
post #174

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/

How is that even a viable business model? I don't know a single self host person that would pay a subscription for something they are hosting

According to this Forbes article [1], Plex earns the majority of their revenue from selling ads in their streaming platform:

> Valory said that Plex, which currently does not disclose financial information, generates roughly 20 percent of its revenues from member subscriptions, which unlock premium capabilities of its media platform, compared to 80 percent from the ad business.

So possibly they are just trying to extract as much money as possible from their "legacy" userbase while they can, with the expectation that people hosting their own media libraries are a dwindling market.

Looking at their different features offered in different pricing plans [2], it seems like their strategy is to make money on sharing media libraries with friends and family. $70/year isn't a huge amount to simplify streaming to other (non-technical) people on a variety of different devices. And I suspect some plex users are charging for their access to their media libraries - even if it's something informal like accepting donations or asking for a payment on venmo - in which case the fees would just be a small operating cost.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2024/04/17/venerab...

[2] https://www.plex.tv/plans/

Post reply on HN