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Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

forum.jellyfin.org

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Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#301

Post by qlte »

Fnoord wrote: post #210
bambax wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Connect a random TV to your home LAN over a VPN? No thank you! I would rather use HDMI in. You can also cache data locally. Or just watch on a smaller screen or tablet. There are a lot of jurisdictions where I would not want to take private keys or passwords with me.

I just bring a $25 Onn 4k Google TV “box” I use for travel that’s roughly half the size of a deck of cards and pre-configured with Jellyfin/ad-free home screen/etc in addition to the travel router linked to my VPN.

Less due to security and more because I’ve seen hotel TVs that literally had like 5 sec latency for any button press and are full of ads so I don’t want to deal with that.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#302

Post by dabbz »

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…

I have been using Plex since 2014, paid for the lifetime pass back then. It is by-far the most used piece of software I've ever relied on (excluding any general purpose software like OS/Browser).

I have my family setup on Plex, my automations, my apps, my preferences, etc. I'm so comfortable in Plex that until they do something catastrophic to my experience, I can't find the motivation to train my mother to use another app.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#303

Post by ncallaway »

optionalsquid wrote: post #216
ncallaway wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> If Jellyfin was designed around music

I think what you said is a fair response to me, but I wanted to respond to this specific phrasing.

I don't think Jellyfin was designed around music. I think music was an afterthought added after the fact, and shoehorned into the rest of the experience. And then I think audiobooks in jellyfin are basically an afterthought of an afterthought.

(Again, I'm just responding to clarify if I accidentally conveyed a misconception about Jellyfin's music support)

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#304

Post by dundarious »

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…

If the novel parts are don't transcode, and clean up before adding to library, then you can just do that, right? Without having to create a frontend, which is the fiddly part (especially since losing the AppleTV client I can use with Jellyfin server would be a sacrifice). It's pretty easy to, for example, make a python script that grabs metadata from tmdb when given a URL (so the script has no need for disambiguation logic -- that's what humans are for), generate an ffmpeg command that adds that metadata, and does whatever re-encoding/re-muxing you want. Can embed subtitle files this way too.

e.g., of generated command: ffmpeg -y -hide_banner -i /mnt/storage/rips/bluray.mkv -i ./eng.sdr.srt -map 0:v -map 0:a -map 1 -c:v copy -c:a copy -c:s mov_text -metadata:s:a:0 language=eng -metadata:s:a:0 title=eng -metadata:s:s:0 language=eng -metadata:s:s:0 title="English (SDR)" -disposition:s:0 hearing_impaired -metadata title="Film Title" -metadata genre="Pretentious Comedy" -metadata artist="Alan Smithee" -metadata date=2026 -f mp4 -movflags +faststart "/mnt/storage/movies/Film Title (2026).mp4"

Do whatever encoding you want in advance too of course. Note, the above is generated from a script (not created manually) that is run like `./cleanvideo.py ./bluray.mkv ./eng.sdr.srt https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/985-eraserhead`

After doing this for over a decade, I find that Jellyfin, or even just a caddy directory listing, make a great media library browser. Jellyfin will almost never identify things incorrectly. Can always fall back to just listing things and playing your content with `mpv https://machine.tailnet-name.ts.net/movies/...` even remotely given the use of tailscale. Or VLC from my phone, etc.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#305

Post by mvanbaak »

hydrogen7800 wrote: post #279
_superposition_ wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only good thing about this in my setup is I can add shows/movies to my watchlist from their advertisements and it gets picked up by my arr stack.

Wow, you can do this? At the risk of further complicating my arr stack, which I barely had the wherewithal to get running in the first place, how does that work?

The arr programs have 'plex watchlist' under the connect settings

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#306

Post by prmoustache »

bityard wrote: post #207
prmoustache wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this applies to a relatively small subset of population who are always on the riad and travelling for work. One must have a nightmare of a vacation to even consider turning on a tv in an hotel room, I can't even remember the last time an hotel TV served any other purpose than hanging a wet towel.

What I want to know is, what happened in your life that turned you into the kind of monster that destroys hotel electronics with wet towels when there are always perfectly good towel racks in the bathroom??

In my experience there are never enough towel racks or they aren't wide enough for the towel and the bathroom ventilation is usually set to stop automatically when you close the door.

Hotel electronics do not have feelings so I don't really think that the monster qualification applies, and they are probably ok anyway as they are so rarely used and have time to dry before being powered on thanks to the aircon helping maintaining a dry air. I don't think the actual electrical components do suffer from a lot of moisture from the towel.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#307

Post by Arainach »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #282
Arainach wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means access from anywhere. Want to watch an episode of that series while you're sitting at work waiting for a long test pass? Plex. You're hanging out with friends and they want to watch that movie you own? Plex. You're at the gym and want to watch The Wire instead of whatever reality show is on the gym TV? Believe it or not, straight to Plex. To your direct point, it doesn't have to be a terrible vacation. Any t…

I can do all of this stuff with my Jellyfin server for the yearly cost of a domain name

This thread was a "why does remote access matter", not a comparison of Jellyfin and Plex.

I run both and Jellyfin is very clearly an open source project.

By that I mean that the interesting technical problem (streaming) is implemented rather well and there is a UI that technically has buttons to expose the things it does while simultaneously not being good at many of the things people use Plex for.

Jellyfin's remote access story is "set up a VPN or Tailscale". Plex's remote access story is "it works".

Jellyfin's story for accessing content from multiple servers doesn't exist. Neither does a global auth system for sharing access to your library, having friends, etc.

Jellyfin's sorting, filtering, and searching are just OK. Its web UI is nowhere near as nice for libraries of O(1000).

Real world example: I was at an AirBnB last week that had a Roku TV. To get to my Plex library I installed the Plex app. There was a Jellyfin app but I couldn't use it because there was no VPN client for the TV, and I don't feel the need to set up and run Tailscale when I already have Wireguard.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#308

Post by mvanbaak »

Hikikomori wrote: post #196
thiht wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Plex because the whole experience looks and feels more polished than Jellyfin (that’s personal but even the name Jellyfin irks me, I hate jellyfish), which is something I value more than openness. Also I bought the Plex lifetime a few years ago during Covid and at that time Jellyfin was nowhere near Plex in terms of user friendliness, Plex already had a TV app, a mobile app with ability to download locally, a f…

Would you pay the $700 today as well? Jellyfin has all those features now. Sharing servers is harder as you don't have centralized account mgmt, but you can use wizarr to make it simpler.

I probably would. Or just go for the cheaper route of paying them monthly/yearly

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#309

Post by mvanbaak »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #227
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…

FLOSS works because when maintainers need to leave the project doesn’t die.

This is more common in FLOSS then in corporate/closed source projects.

Re: Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team

#310

Post by zeagle »

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.

I held off buying an apple TV mainly cause I don't want to purchase Infuse for DV/HDR/Atmos content. Is there a decent client otherwise?
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