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Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

forum.jellyfin.org

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Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#211

Post by dododge »

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…

For me the metadata is a big part of it. I have a large physical media collection so I could just use the discs, but putting it all into plex has made it so much easier to browse and watch. For example I can pause and skim the cast/crew filmographies right in the plex UI, including being able to see what I already have and investigate the stuff I've never heard of for possible future purchases. When watching several movies in a row, after finishing one I can follow the automatically-populated trail of related/similar movies until I find something that fits my mood.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#212

Post by amiga386 »

The title here is burying the lede and should be updated to something like "Jellyfin founder, project leader and core contributer all leave the project".

It's not just Andrew [Rabert] leaving. This is an announcement by Joshua Boniface (the current project lead) and Anthony Lavado (a core contributor) announcing that they're leaving too.

Boniface's and Lavado's reasons are mostly akin to burnout, or the need for a family life, which I totally understand, especially as Boniface has been the face of the project for quite some time. I use Jellyfin daily, and I know exactly who Boniface is, I hadn't actually heard of Rabert, though I'm grateful for him founding the project. Boniface in particular has lead Jellyfin through huge levels of internal changes, bugfixes and improvements. It is throwing off the janky architecture of Emby, one part at a time.

Rabert's reasons are here: https://github.com/andrewrabert/jellium-desktop/issues/609

An obvious sore point is that Rabert has been AI-coding the Jellyfin desktop app, while the community (who bear the brunt of drive-by AI slop) have strongly opposed it. Even if he's a great coder and makes a wonderful desktop app with the aid of AI, that seems irreconcilable. Every wannabe contributor who shits up the project and wastes volunteers time with AI slop will say "you let that guy add his AI generated stuff, why not me?"

So he's leaving the Jellyfin project and he's going to rename his desktop app, to see if it stands on its own merits as a third-party Jellyfin client, rather than an official project. I wish the best of luck to him.

Even with that angle, it's true that the "Jellyfin community" (which includes all bug reporters, users on forums, etc.) can be very rude, directly to the contributors who may have inadvertantly added bugs. And Jellyfin is going through some growing pains, for example their 10.11.x series rewrote all the database handling to be a much better fit for the language (from raw SQL to .NET EF Core), which gives them a much more stable base to make changes upon, but it also had some performance regressions that rendered some third party Jellyfin apps unusable. (Those third parties' advice is not to upgrade). But at the same time, the project is getting there, supporting developers who are systematically fixing those regressions. The project has thousands of bug reports, but it also has thousands of fixes, and thousands of merged PRs. They are keeping up with the demand. I have every confidence Jellyfin 12.x will be great, and I'm looking forward to the new possibilities for plugins and enhancements it will open up.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#213

Post by jonathanlydall »

fg137 wrote: post #204
freetime2 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ext…

I have seen people talking about this "hosting a small streaming service for friends" thing, and I really have trouble understanding that. It just seems a bad idea to expose such a server to the Internet and maintain it, even with a VPN, and I don't know what kind of friends they have. That's a lot of effort for very questionable return, considering the requirements for your hard drive space, bandwidth, the time it t…

It's not an open server that anyone can just connect to, only specific Plex accounts that you invite.

They also don't need to know anything about how to connect to your server, it simply shows up as a server name in the list on their "app" or the Plex website, there is no need for dynamic DNS or VPN or anything like that as Plex's servers do a kind of "service discovery" automatically.

It does require you exposing the Plex TCP port to the internet, so you are relying on them making sure there are no vulnerabilities. You could probably do a VPN approach and give them a URL they can enter into a web-browser, but it's unlikely to work on TV and mobile apps.

I've given access to my Plex server to my siblings and parents and it's great. Since I got a decently fast fibre line, no more having to manually copy shows/movies they want to watch over a LAN or using a USB HDD or memory stick.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#214

Post by gertrunde »

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…

My jellyfin setup is not that different.

Jellyfin container instance running on a mini pc, reading media from an NFS share on a NAS, organised in a very similar fashion.

The advantage is there is a "native" app on the TV, so everything is very adapted to the TV UX, i.e. remote control driven UI etc.

(And the jellyfin side is relatively disposable, the container can be trashed and redone fairly quickly).

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#215

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

NichoPaolucci wrote: post #38

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…

How much music do you have in Jellyfin? I tried it a few weeks ago and it was extremely slow and terrible with my music library. It would take 30+ seconds to load artist pages.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#216

Post by optionalsquid »

ncallaway wrote: post #126
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"?

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 alm…

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

If Jellyfin was designed around music, then I would expect it to support gap-less playback out of the box. Albums where each track seamlessly transitions into the next are not that rare

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#217

Post by amiga386 »

saint_yossarian wrote: post #200
Hobadee wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kodi does have bultin server functionality (both DNLA and a web interface), it's just less commonly used that way, and I don't think transcoding is supported without plugins.

I tried it some time ago and found it was useless in that role.

Kodi is 99% a TV-like frontend to a local-disk media collection, its web interface is an afterthought, its performance for remotely served media is atrocious.

Jellyfin, Emby and Plex are media servers first and foremost.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#218

Post by theshrike79 »

Fnoord wrote: post #208
theshrike79 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

I still have artifacts in my dirs of TOSORT, TODO, and DONE.

I've resorted to manually tracking some non-Plex/Jellyfin shows on Obsidian manually :D

It's super fun to watch some 7 season show on a local streaming service, be on season 3 episode hellifiknow, come back in a week and poof it's gone.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#220

Post by stasomatic »

b3lvedere wrote: post #160
al_borland wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I can't watch anything without subtitles. Plex and Jellyfin support them, in many languages, because of the mumbled dialogues. Yes, I know you burn subs in.

Plus the whole *arr stack.

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