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Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

jellyfin.org

161–170 of 292 posts

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#161

I switched from Plex to Jellyfin/Infuse for three reasons: 1) better tone mapping, allowing me to watch HDR movies on SDR without it looking bad. 2) Plex, on my variety of clients, had regular issues with audio out of sync. I’m very sensitive to this and it drove me nuts. I have no issues with Jellyfin. I fiddled with all kinds of platform and Plex settings but couldn’t find a solution that solved it for good. 3) It’…

On audio sync issues, I unfortunately see them with jellyfin rather frequently on apple tv when using homepods as audio output. I end up having to enable the "native player" in the experimental settings to get the audio in-sync.

I've previously reported this to the developers of the app, and they've closed the issue saying it was a bug in one of their dependencies, without fixing the issue. It remains unfixed.

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t take this as criticism of your setup, but why are you trying to stream Blu-ray Disc folders at all? Why not transcode the files?

Firsly, I have multiple tens of terabytes of movies (painful to duplicate), and I watch them with their original menus in Kodi. Secondly, a BDMV can't be turned into a single correct linear representation - for example, the Star Trek TOS discs have the ability to toggle back and forth between original and CG-remastered graphics seamlessly. As another example, I have stereoscopic 3D blu-rays; should the transcode be t…

This is an interesting take, thanks for describing it. I think most people, myself included, would find your setup a little odd, but I completely understand why you're doing it. It would make many (most?) home media servers a little hobbled, especially if you wanted to stream content to mobile devices outside of the home, but it sounds as if this is more of a replacement for the old pile of set-top boxes for you, rather than a general service to all your devices, is that a fair interpretation?

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#164

I've been impressed at the performance of the live re-encoding, but at the same time annoyed that it happens rather than streaming the original media (I think it always transcodes?). The upside is that it will play anything on anything. My main gripe is with how hard it is to actually get it to find the files - you can't just feed it a folder full of media and expect it to play it, it needs to be some carefully craft…

Pretty sure there is direct play? Believe the client has it enabled by default

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#165

I ridiculously love Jellyfin. I have found that if my Jellyfin box is IPv6 and I map a domain to that address, such as free DNS from Cloudflare, then I can access my personal media from anywhere on the internet. What I haven’t found is a way to restrict access to known devices, such as MAC address, so that big companies don’t sue me to death. Yes, I know Jellyfin has a login prompt, but I would prefer better security…

I setup a VPN with OpenVPN, I can access Jellyfin from anywhere provided I have a login and key.

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#166
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>holding the keys to your library but it's still on my hard drive. if i can't log in to plex for some reason, i'll install jellyfin. or mount it as a network drive and play the files with VLC. it's not like they're locking away my content behind their authentication, all they're locking away behind that auth is my ability to access my media through plex .

Are they not also injecting ad-supported streaming content into your library by default? Yes, there is an option to disable this, but it is the default and needs to be disabled at the user level (afaik).

This is introducing a distraction to the point and is entirely unrelated to the point being made. Voice this complaint as a top level discussion if you actually want it to be discussed.

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#167

Jellyfin's strategy for streaming blu-ray disc folders is to use ffmpeg to concatenate (and usually transcode) them to disc, then stream the result. It doesn't work very well - frequently, the concatenation process is sitting there running long after the client has disconnected. And the devs seem to break it entirely every second release or so, just failing to recognize the BDMV as a playable movie at all.

I'm glad they're at least trying to support disc folders, though. Plex just doesn't.

I believe the big selling-point for Plex is that it can stream content to every single device you own no matter where you are, which requires on-the-fly transcoding. It's my understanding that the performance requirements for realtime transcoding necessitates something like an MKV or MP4 file, although I'm happy to be proven wrong by someone with more direct knowledge of the process.

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#168

I've been impressed at the performance of the live re-encoding, but at the same time annoyed that it happens rather than streaming the original media (I think it always transcodes?). The upside is that it will play anything on anything. My main gripe is with how hard it is to actually get it to find the files - you can't just feed it a folder full of media and expect it to play it, it needs to be some carefully craft…

It does not always transcode. It transcodes if your client reports it doesn't support the format or if the bitrate cap on your client is lower than the source media. It says why transcoding is happening in the Administration Dashboard for any currently playing media.

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#169

How many music files can it handle? I’ve got a very large collection of mp3s and flac and many of the similar programs I have tried have choked trying to handle the size of the collection.

I've got a ~80k library and it seems to handle it ok. Scanning isn't very fast, but it does pull up a lot of cover art and artist profile pictures, so that may be why. It doesn't seem to respond at all to changing tags for files it has already scanned, so far the only solution was removing the library entirely and re-adding it which is tedious.

It supports drilling down by Album Artists which is a minimum requirement for nay big and diverse music library. Genres seem to work fine, you can select one and it will at least list all albums under that, but no option to change the grouping to artists or something else exists.

The web interface does ok at first when loading a big playlist. For example, trying to play my OC-Remix collection which is essentially an album composed of ~4k songs works for the first few songs and moving around the playlists is somewhat smooth, but picking a song at 1000 place or so just awaits forever. I don't know whats up with that.

The playing queue is very terse and doesn't like listing the track number, artist nor even the album (it does show a thumb sized album art for each entry but good luck with that). This is a very dumbed down mobile centric design, could do much better here...

All in all I would advise just trying out more than one media server. Jellyfin is ok-ish for music and great for videos but if you are gonna go trough all the work of setting that up it doesn't cost much more to also setup something like Navidrome which will give you a decent subsonic instance which is compatible with many clients and will likely give you a better experience when handling big and diverse music libraries. That said, Navidrome's built-in web client is pretty bare-bones, so you are gonna have to rely on the "native" clients more.

For example, you can use Strawberry's subsonic feature to access your Navidrome's library on a pretty damn good interface for music nerds who feel comfortable on "spreadsheet" like interfaces. No tag editing, but you don't usually want to expose your library with write permission on these services anyway. But it does pick up on tag changes if you tell it to a complete re-scan which takes ~15 minutes.

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried this but using two servers means you lose or fragment all your watch history. If I have to remember where I am in a series myself, I might as well just use VLC.

There is JellyPlexWatch, which will sync the databases between jellyfin and Plex. I've been using both next to each other for a while with that setup to sync watch history. Honestly I haven't been able to move over to Jellyfin after the drama around the integration of skip intro, but I hope things get better. https://github.com/luigi311/JellyPlex-Watched

> the drama around the integration of skip intro

what are you referring to?

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