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Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

jellyfin.org

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Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#211

Post by foobiekr »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #98
foobiekr wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love jellyfin but their web model is just bizarre. Why on earth, when you go to 192.168.whatever:8096 does it ask you what server you want to connect to? Like.. THE ONE SERVING THE PAGE. Just now I decided to connect to Jellyfin over tailscale and it's asking me to add a server; on 100.xxx, which is the jellyfin server which served the UI. And it doesn't seem to want to accept any answer as to what the server URL i…

> Why on earth, when you go to 192.168.whatever:8096 does it ask you what server you want to connect to? This lets you connect to and play another friend's Jellyfin rather nicely. I think it's also so the HTML and JS that forms the web interface can basically be the app as well. > And it doesn't seem to want to accept any answer as to what the server URL is. Should be " http://192.168.100.xxx:8096 " - make sure your…

If you can connect to a friend's jellyfin, you can also get the UI package delivered from the friend's server.

They've sort of conflated three different ideas - one, the non-browser clients are separate and need a way to select multiple servers from a common wrapper app; two, for development purposes separate the server of the UI package from the backend being accessed; three, have a server based application.

None of these items are uncommon, they are just commonly solved by making the separate front-end server an exception rather than a weird and senseless default. Most people solve this by making the dev mode case an exception.

Moreover, why not just add a button to the UI to automatically connect to the _UI serving server_ instead of having the user type it?

I love jellyfin, but this stuff is just terrible design for out of box experience or connecting from a new client instance, and it breaks when you're traversing a network boundary with something like Tailscale.

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#212

Post by skerit »

bhaney wrote: post #27
lukevp wrote: post #7

Jellyfin is pretty good, and I've been using it in place of Plex for the last few years. However, I feel like there are some underlying limitations that I just can't get past: 1. the UI jank. The thumbnail tiles are slow to load, even on a local network. Searches and filters flicker as you type and take a while to return. Scrolling fast in the web UI gets choppy/laggy. 2. The native app (at least in the case of Apple…

I have a very different experience from most of your issues, to the point where I think something is wrong with your install. I can scroll through a page of >1000 movie cards and there's no choppiness or lag at all in the webUI. The cards have blurhash placeholders until the actual thumbnail loads, which is always very quick. Swiftfin for the Apple TV is admittedly very barebones and can be choppy when scrolling thro…

Swiftfin constantly forgets my login on AppleTV too, but then again so do a few other apps, so I blame Apple

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#213

Post by integricho »

xbmcuser wrote: post #125
fastily wrote: post #37

Bemused by the number of people complaining about a free and open source project. A quick review of the git history tells me that it’s maintained by a very small group of people who generously work on this in their free time. Luckily jellyfin does accept PRs, so if you think the project needs improvements, then perhaps folks, you can do something about it

Yes Jellyfin does accept PR's but they don't accept hacks ie workarounds for single issue for a particular device won't be accepted easily. The maintainers feel using hacks and workarounds is not the best way to go for the long term maintenance of the project. One of the reasons skip intro took so long to get into jellyfin and jellyfin clients as they wanted a universal media segment system that can be used for other…

sounds like you don't approve of the devs healthy approach to the development of this project, but would rather sacrifice long term sustainability for quick wins.

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#214

Post by integricho »

issafram wrote: post #181

I hate that so many people don't know about Universal Media Server

I used Universal Media Server for 3 years, not knowing about jellyfin actually. UMS was a most of the time non-functional piece of crap. Refreshing the library was a pain and always felt that it required restarting services and devices on both sides and a blessing from the local priest. Then comes the frequent disappearance of the server itself which again requires service restarts. Then the mid-movie playback stops or stutters. Not recognizing the subtitles and again requiring service restarts. I spent more time fiddling with the app, holding it together with duct-tape and sticks rather the watching media through it. It is a very unstable and unreliable piece of software.

Then came jellyfin, and as a breath of fresh air, all my problems were gone. In maybe 2 years since I switched to it, I can count on my fingers how many times did I have to fiddle with it for some reason. It just works, in the most common sense of ways, no crashes, no discoverability problems, nothing, just pure stable performance, I cannot emphasize enough how much of a chasm exists in quality and usability between jellyfin and UMS. While UMS feels like a piece of early alpha software that was abandoned, jellyfin is the rock solid , actively maintained alternative that got your back.

Universal Media Server is just bad software.

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#215

Post by eisa01 »

lukevp wrote: post #7

Jellyfin is pretty good, and I've been using it in place of Plex for the last few years. However, I feel like there are some underlying limitations that I just can't get past: 1. the UI jank. The thumbnail tiles are slow to load, even on a local network. Searches and filters flicker as you type and take a while to return. Scrolling fast in the web UI gets choppy/laggy. 2. The native app (at least in the case of Apple…

The Apple TV / tvOS app is seeing development towards a new release, this discussion is actively updated with the progress https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin/discussions/1294

Worst case you may have to pay for Infuse another year, although it would have felt better to donate to the development of the Apple TV app instead

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#216

Post by watermelon0 »

nativeit wrote: post #152
spoaceman7777 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a jellyfin fan myself, I'd like to address a couple of your points. For 1, 2, 3(?), 4, you appear to be referring to the Apple TV client, which is written in an entirely different language and frameworks, and entirely different authors. (This is due to the excessive limitations on languages put in place by apple in their ecosystem). Jellyfin has dozens of other platforms. In regard to #3, Jellyfin does use file wa…

It's not really fair to blame Apple for those dev's poor product, nor for Jellyfin's choice not to support an iOS client of their own. Plex has a fantastic iOS app, the Plex Music app is one of the prettiest music players ever produced. VLC has a fully-functional iOS app. Home Assistant's iOS client is indistinguishable from its Android client. The list of self-hosted apps that have great iOS companion apps is long a…

Apple TV doesn't support embedding a web browser (WKWebView/UIWebView), which means that the client app needs to be completely re-implemented. For a small team of volunteers this can be quite a challenging undertaking, and will take development time away from other apps.

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#217

Post by petepete »

craniumslows wrote: post #157
BeetleB wrote: post #151

Have they made watching OTA broadcasts, with EPG and DVR work as well as Plex? It's what keeps me on Plex.

I use Silicon Dusts HD home run and it works great. Live TV from home while I'm travelling is one of my primary use cases. I subscribe to a TV listing service. The DVR function is good too. My biggest issue was that I had to get a graphics card that could transcode on the fly then TV worked perfectly.

I have the same setup and TV works well but changing channel takes a few seconds. Not been able to work out why.

I have an Nvidia card which is more than capable of transcoding. How long does yours take to switch?

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#218

Post by lodovic »

ghostly_s wrote: post #14
lukevp wrote: post #7

Jellyfin is pretty good, and I've been using it in place of Plex for the last few years. However, I feel like there are some underlying limitations that I just can't get past: 1. the UI jank. The thumbnail tiles are slow to load, even on a local network. Searches and filters flicker as you type and take a while to return. Scrolling fast in the web UI gets choppy/laggy. 2. The native app (at least in the case of Apple…

Hm, that sounds vastly jankier than Plex per your description. I have never had to wait for any UI element to load in plex, local or remote, including thumbnails. Everything is almost always instantaneous. I've tried the demo instance of Jellyfin a few times to see if it has improved and my impression was that it's a complete joke, not a serious plex alternative.

I have the opposite experience. I tried to setup Plex a few times but always ran into issues with getting ads, having to make a Plex account, and dealing with free/paid features. I just couldn't get it to work without ads and all the hassle. Instead I installed Jellyfin on a NUC running Docker, downloaded the app from the play store onto my TV, and it just works, no delays, no lag.

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#219

Post by xbmcuser »

integricho wrote: post #213
xbmcuser wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Jellyfin does accept PR's but they don't accept hacks ie workarounds for single issue for a particular device won't be accepted easily. The maintainers feel using hacks and workarounds is not the best way to go for the long term maintenance of the project. One of the reasons skip intro took so long to get into jellyfin and jellyfin clients as they wanted a universal media segment system that can be used for other…

sounds like you don't approve of the devs healthy approach to the development of this project, but would rather sacrifice long term sustainability for quick wins.

No I am with the devs on this. I am against people submitting code without discussing with the maintainers and then crapping on them later if the patches don't get accepted something like the arguments rust thing for Linux kernel. As it just will cause unnecessary friction and if the devs/maintainers stop enjoying on the project everyone suffers. I have seen hobby open source projects die with devs getting tired of arguments and then abandoning the project.

Re: Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

#220

Post by LiamPowell »

dullcrisp wrote: post #209
LiamPowell wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> better tone mapping, allowing me to watch HDR movies on SDR without it looking bad. I've never really understood why it's a desirable feature to have automatic HDR-to-SDR in the first place. No one is making HDR-only content and the official SDR master for every movie and TV show done by a human is always going to beat a fancy LUT. When performing colour grading you're always deciding what parts of the image need w…

I imagine people have multiple screens but don’t want to keep multiple copies of a video?

In this case I would think people would prefer to just have the SDR version which will look good on all displays rather than the HDR version that will look better on a HDR display but will look horrible on a SDR display. It's down to personal preference of course, but I can't imagine someone caring about having HDR videos while simultaneously putting up with the bad results of automatic HDR-to-SDR.

Just as an example since I didn't include one before: Which of the two below images using different algorithms is correctly tone-mapped? Do we care more about showing the details of the car and the driver or do we care more about the rest of the scene? It's simply not possible to decide which of these is better without context, which an algorithm will never have. A human watching the scene can make that decision, or pick something completely different.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/41094733/105145848...

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/41094733/105145851...

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