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Jellyfin: Free Software Media System

jellyfin.org

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Re: Jellyfin: Free Software Media System

#141

Post by jeroenhd »

katbyte wrote: post #121
SCLeo wrote: post #119

Although I cannot complain too much since it is open source, I have to say, my experience with Jellyfin is very painful. After fiddling with it for more than 10 hours, I still cannot get .ass subtitles to work on my Android Jellyfin client. :( (My NAS isn't strong enough to burn subtitles in real time. Even it does, I just cannot get the fonts to work. All CJK characters are displayed as squares.)

I still use Emby, I’d like to use a free solution like jelly but it’s just not there

That's interesting. Jellyfin forked from Emby when the developers went closed source, so I'd be interested to learn what the Emby side has fixed that Jellyfin still lacks.

I switched from Emby to Jellyfin and I found them to be generally equally stable.

Re: Jellyfin: Free Software Media System

#142

Post by RealStickman_ »

smbv wrote: post #47
notesinthefield wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of your use is audio streaming? I'm dying to make my collection remotely accessible after leaving the Plex ecosystem.

I use Finamp with Jellyfin for audio https://github.com/UnicornsOnLSD/finamp

I also use Finamp for audio streaming (or local, downloaded playback). It's a good app, but still lacking a lot of features other audio players have, like rearranging the play queue. I'd suggest also trying [Gelli](https://github.com/dkanada/gelli), which seems to be a more mature app for music playback.

Re: Jellyfin: Free Software Media System

#143

Post by jeroenhd »

ajnin wrote: post #40

I've setup jellyfin on my media server but I barely use it because the web player bugs make it unusable for me. I think most issues are due to the fact my hardware is underpowered for the task, and the player gets confused when the server replies come slow and not in the same order as they were requested. In practice subtitles go out of sync regularly, I get "codec not supported by browser" messages with the actual v…

In my experience, the "codec not supported by browser" error generally means that transcoding either failed or stalled. I get the error message when ffmpeg dies in the middle of a transcode myself. The transcoder still has the file cached on disk as far as it has transcoded it, but Jellyfin notices that the process has died and throws errors.

I don't think a new player will fix that issue, it's usually a resource problem on the server side.

There is a "stream the source directly" option, it's the default even, but only when it's possible to do so (i.e. the media is in a streaming container and not AVI or DivX). You can copy the download URL and paste it into your favorite native player if you want to force it, but that will probably lead to a full file download if the web player doesn't stream the file already. The only way I can think of to avoid this issue is to pre-transcode the media on your NAS to a streamable format.

As for the subtitles, I'm a little annoyed as well that the setting doesn't always stick (it works sometimes, which is even worse). I've never had desync issues though, that's probably more of an issue with the transcode lagging and confusing the player or just mismatched subtitle files.

Re: Jellyfin: Free Software Media System

#144

Post by notesinthefield »

dangravell wrote: post #132
notesinthefield wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of your use is audio streaming? I'm dying to make my collection remotely accessible after leaving the Plex ecosystem.

An alternative is to use a cloud based player, and stream music from a cloud storage service. Disclaimer: I run this service: https://asti.ga/ I've written up some alternatives at https://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/2021/0... I'd love to know any feedback you have.

I have close to 3 tb of music, storing it all offsite is prohibitively expensive at the hundreds of dollars per month level, so that service is not good for me.

Re: Jellyfin: Free Software Media System

#145

Post by jeroenhd »

hbcondo714 wrote: post #33

One feature I would like to see catch on is having media center software installable on a router. Plex does this[1] which means you can use the USB drive on a router to store and stream your media files without a NAS / media server. Simple setup, I would like to see routers as clients[2] for Jellyfin. [1] https://support.plex.tv/articles/230934267-netgear-nighthawk... [2] https://jellyfin.org/clients/

I don't see why it wouldn't work if you can get ssh access to your router, assuming you grab an ARM build with the right dependencies. Most consumer routers are absolutely terrible though, so I'd expect such a device to run out of resources very quickly, particularly while transcoding.

Re: Jellyfin: Free Software Media System

#147

Post by jeroenhd »

NortySpock wrote: post #82
steviedotboston wrote: post #56

Does anyone know if Jellyfin lets you share an OTA TV connection with friends/family?

I believe it does allow OTA, though when I tried to, Jellyfin seemed to try to transcode the video regardless of what "please don't transcode" settings I had on video transcoding. (And the RPi4 couldn't keep up with transcoding video via software) Still working on getting that sorted out but in the meantime I've got VLC that I can point at my HDHomerun.

Jellyfin will transcode the moment it determines the source isn't directly streamable. Broken headers, weird containers or general MP4 weirdness can fail the test and make it transcode, but usually direct streaming is the default. If that happens to me, I just copy the download URL from the Jellyfin client and paste it into VLC. That method causes major network traffic (so it doesn't work great on mobile networks on the move) but it'll work fine from home.

Transcodes without hardware acceleration are pretty slow and the transcodes themselves aren't cached which can be a major pain, but with some effort I've managed to get hardware encoding and decoding working through Intel Quicksync (on an entirely separate device, even, through rffmpeg.py!) and things seem to be working great. The isolation Docker provides will make enabling hardware support a pain if you're using that, but if you're running the native package then I'd definitely recommend trying to get hardware acceleration support working.

Re: Jellyfin: Free Software Media System

#148

Post by RealStickman_ »

firefwing24 wrote: post #61

Jellyfin is awesome, but there's a few caveats for me. - Android TV app is quite unstable. Even if you make it do direct streaming, it's not a flawless playback - Sometimes hangs when clicking next episode. I also kind of wish the login experience was a bit better. - Android App is decent, but for music it's unusable. I'm still using plex + plexamp because that experience is just so much better for me. But, I don't r…

For audio playback on android I mostly use Finamp nowadays. An older, potentially more stable alternative would be Gelli.

Re: Jellyfin: Free Software Media System

#150

Post by input_sh »

bobuk wrote: post #129

I've read the whole thread and am absolutely surprised. Why is nobody telling about plex's ditching of their plugin system? Have invested a lot of time in developing plex's plugin for youtube, twitch, and my favorite streaming services, paid a lifetime fee to plex. And now the whole plugins system is disabled. That's the only reason why I've switched to Jellyfin. It's not better than plex. It's definitely worse, but…

> but it's open, and that's how I am sure it will work forever.

Why are you so sure about it? IIRC Emby was also open sourced before it wasn't, at which point it was forked into Jellyfin. Based on that alone, I wouldn't be too surprised if Jellyfin pulls the same thing down the road, forcing you to move to yet another fork down the line.

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