Why I use Jellyfin for my home media library

[bayesianbot]

Just a heads-up if you need subtitles, for me and apparently many others with Jellyfin the subs get easily out of sync. The issue in Github[0] has been open for 2.5 years and seems dead.. Only option seems to be re-transcoding and burning the subtitles into the video (which is an option, but consumes some system resources).

[0] https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/2547

[3np]

Not saying this is not an issue but we've easily watched several hundreds of different releases, all with subtitles, never had the out-of-sync problem appear in Jellyfin and not in other players (that is, sometimes subs are just inherently off-sync to the video file if it's from a different release etc).

The other subs-related annoyances (takes time to appear; transcoding/DS behave differently) appear in web client only and not when playing trough a "proper" player (mpv-shim/kodi/whathaveyou), which also support convenient timing adjustments. Maybe switching clients is a work-around that works for you. jellyfin-mpv-shim would be the smoothest if you just want to continue issuing local playback ("cast") from the web interface.

[atchoo]

I don't have any issues watching subtitled material straight through but I think I've seen it after skipping around and the workaround was to close the video and reopen it so it resumes from the right spot - not ideal but not a show-stopper at least.

[dhosek]

I’ve experienced this with some streaming—HBO Max in particular seems to have problems with out of sync CC on some but not all of their programming. Last Week Tonight is usually about a second or so behind with the captions vs the audio, and I think some other original programming has similar issues.

[Avamander]

You can use an another player such as Infuse to avoid that issue.

[layer8]

What’s currently the best alternative for video with subtitles? Ideally with the ability to control the position (subtitle shift) and timing delay.

[hcurtiss]

With apologies for the diversion, may I ask why you like subtitles? I have a neighbor who watches every movie with subtitles. I've never understood it. When I ask him, it's usually something about seeing the words, but he's not hard of hearing, and they listen to their movies outrageously loud anyway. In any event, to me, it detracts from the cinematography, and absent some handicap, I can't understand why you'd want subtitles. But I'm fully aware there's a sizable contingent that prefers watching movies with subtitles. Why is that?

[faitswulff]

Using yt-dlp + Jellyfin has been a revelation for serving my kids safe, vetted video content. You can even download an entire YouTube channel at once. The kids aren’t at an age where they need that much novelty, so watching old favorites again and again is fine by them.

I should probably also mention that we’re teaching them Chinese, so having an all-Chinese kids media library is invaluable. No English ads to break the immersion - no ads, period.

[philsnow]

I do exactly this (with emby instead of jellyfin though), with a cron job that runs this:

  #!/bin/bash -x
  
  export IFS="\n"
  find . -type f -name youtube-dl.batchfile | \
    xargs -I {} -n 1 bash -x -c \
      'cd "$(dirname "{}")" && pwd && yt-dlp --config-location youtube-dl.config'

each youtube-dl.batchfile is in a directory that corresponds to an emby library, and is a plain text file where each line is a link to something that yt-dlp understands (usually a youtube channel or playlist). The youtube-dl.config contains (among other things)

  --batch-file youtube-dl.batchfile

to point to the batchfile, and

  --download-archive youtube-dl-archive.txt

so that I don't re-download videos I've already retrieved, and also because it gives me a super quick way to exclude certain videos: either I can just go in and delete the file for a video I don't like (and instead of downloading it again, yt-dlp sees the ID in the archive and doesn't even bother trying to download it), or if I know of some I don't want it ever to download I can just pre-emptively put their IDs in the dl-archive file.

So now when I find a channel I want to download for the kids, I just drop a line in a batchfile and either kick off the cron job by hand or wait.

[throwthere]

We're trying to do the same with our kids-- finding kids friendly stations AND appropriate Chinese media. Could you share some of your favorite channels?

[marcrosoft]

I just dropped Plex for Jellyfin since they’ve been pushing their live crap in the menus and not focusing on user content. Jellyfin is awesome.

[MobileVet]

I guess I don’t understand , You can unpin their channels right? I don’t see any of the Plex stuff, just my family’s media.

[thinkmcfly]

Plex interface used to be so good. I guess they can't un-shit in that bed now though

[faitswulff]

I use Jellyfin somewhat reluctantly because of playlist management. If anyone knows an easy way to convert between directories and playlists (as in one directory represents one playlist) I’d be very grateful.

[PaulHoule]

I got so annoyed when Plex started bombarding me with spam for third-rate streaming services I'd never heard of. If I wanted to use a streaming service I wouldn't be using a home server to do it.

Jellyfin is better in numerous ways but I can only get it to work sporadically with my Denon HEOS speakers, though it turned out I could just copy some music to a USB stick and stick it in my receiver to make a music server that works with HEOS.

[bshep]

FWIW you can now disable the other streaming services, they annoy me as well and just today found a way to do it ( Settings -> Online Media Sources -> set all to 'Disabled' ).

[Daunk]

But I love my Plex! I can search for basically any movie, click "add to watchlist" and some magic happens behind the scenes and an hour or two later; that movie is in my library, ready to watch with subtitles and all. All my work buddies have the same system setup as well, so we're all sharing libraries to create an insane network of media, fit for any taste.

[acoard]

Have a docker-compose to share? I have Plex and love it too, but that "add to watchlist" type setup seems very interesting. Any links to point me in the right direction?

I used to use sonarr and radarr in the past but used those directly, not via Plex, and to be honest I sometimes ran into issues with them but generally they worked fine.

[curiousgal]

You can do the same with Jellyfin, to some extent. The free mobile app is the cherry on top.

[budafish]

Is that by using that radarr watchlist integration?

[djhworld]

How does this work?

[c0brac0bra]

This is like worlds colliding. I only know Jeff Geerling because he apparently wrote every Ansible role in existence.

[aleksiy123]

This only partially related.

I recently killed all my subscriptions and swapped over to a plex + seedbox + sonar/radarr set up.

The experience is good but not quite up to par with real streaming service. There are still rough edges. I always have issues with plex subtitles.

https://overseerr.dev/ is a nice addition for content exploration to the set up but for me the missing piece is being able to stream on demand.

Does anyone know if it's possible to bridge the gap between streaming torrents and tv?

Maybe webtorrents + casting?

[dgllghr]

I just started using Jellyfin and have been loving it! It works great and it has an impressively professional and polished UI for an open source project. The Jellyfin team is doing great work!

[chomp]

I want to move to Jellyfin, but the network effect is strong for me. I'm in a pool of about 10 of my former coworkers and we've all pooled our Plexes together for years. Moving to Jellyfin would cause me to lose access to that.

[nepthar]

Why's that? I use both.

[Handytinge]

I run a Jellyfin server, but I also run a Plex server for my non tech friends or friends already invested in Plex. You can have both.

[BLKNSLVR]

I migrated from Emby to Jellyfin pretty soon after the fork, and Jellyfin seemed a bit wobbly fit the first year and a bit, but then really kicked off and it's been stable for me for a long time.

Primarily used through Android TV app connecting to a docker instance of the server.

[Fervicus]

Moved from Plex to Jellyfin and have never looked back.

[compsciphd]

I'm in the process of moving from plex to jellyfin (even though I have a lifetime plex pass).

plex has some nicer things

1) skip intro built in and usable in all the clients I use (on jellyfin you can add it as a plugin, but not supported universally in clients)

2) the UI of plex is so much nicer/cleaner. Not a huge deal for me, but would be a show stopper for others

3) in all honesty, but much better library management (at a simple level, the ability to see what hasn't been "matched"/"identified")

probably more, but I'm just at the start of my migration

why did I switch? because jellyfin has 2 major features that plex seems to have no intention of adding

1) the ability to tonemap DV content to SDR (plex can tonemap HDR10 to SDR, but not DV, it be interesting in future if jellyfin would have the ability to tonemap DV to HDR10)

2) the abilty to have "external" transcoders. i.e. one can add cheap intel boxes (under $100) to get quicksync transcoding to an already existing installation. Can make it easy and cheap to scale.

[pwinnski]

I've tried a few times with every alternative to Plex out there, but none of them seem to do a decent job handling the wide variety of video content in my Plex library. I've tried Emby, Jellyfin, and everything else.

For someone starting from scratch, sure, pick whatever you want. But to migrate a set of gigantic libraries, ouch.

[contravariant]

I'm still somewhat unclear precisely what problem Jellyfin and Plex are supposed to solve. If you combine Jellyfin with something liks Radarr/Sonarr and Kodi then what do you need Jellyfin for? You could just cut out the middleman and connect Kodi to Radar/Sonarr directly.

[kennend3]

I moved away from Kodi over to Plex (later Jellyfin) for the following reasons:

- Jellyfin lets me keep track of what i watched regardless of where. I can watch half a show in my office, and resume where i left off in my family room.

- Jellyfin fully supports multiple users, so my kids can have their own profiles, there own "in progress" management, etc.

- There is no need to setup anything like NFS/Samba to share the library, jellyfin connects to the central server which stores the media and runs the jellyfin server.

Some of this can be done in Kodi, via a mysql connection but it is baked into jellyfin.

If i was starting out building a home media server from scratch, jellyfin would be high on my list.

Just my 5 cents.

[Cyph0n]

Think of Jellyfin as a multi-user, centralized version of Kodi. Thanks to this, you get the ability to access (and give others access to) your Jellyfin instance remotely from virtually any device.

Kodi can serve as either a Jellyfin client or as a local replacement. One thing to note is that the Kodi plugin ecosystem is much larger than that of Jellyfin, or any other media server solution for that matter.

[BeetleB]

Ha! I have the same question except for Kodi. Never could figure it out.

My use case(s) for Plex:

1. I have media on my HD. Plex organizes it, figures out what show/movie it is, gets relevant metadata, and remembers how much I've watched it.

2. I then watch it on my TV. I don't want to watch it on my PC.

3. It lets me watch said media when I'm away from home (e.g. from a hotel room when I'm traveling). This is critical for me and what got me on to Plex.

4. It lets me share media with other users.

5. DVR: I pick the shows I like, and it records them for me. This is critical for me as well.

[philjohn]

Plex pass makes it worth it for me with the native app on my LG CX OLED - if JellyFin could crack that I'd look to switch in a heartbeat.

[tekchip]

Jellyfin's login system is a hot mess and makes it a non-starter for family use.

Instead of going with the time tested login (saved) and then profile chooser (pin locked) they've decided that they would treat it like a PC with nothing but individual users. As a sort of after thought, they put in detecting if the user is connecting from the same network or not and letting a pin be used in place of the password.

First Joe User has no idea if they're on an internal network or not and the UI doesn't disclose this (probably wise from a security standpoint). So the result is users just defaulting to using their long password (my security requirement) all the time. Inconvenient, but not a dealbreaker per se. Unless you, like me, don't appreciate hearing teenagers bitch every time they have to re-type their password.

This issue is compounded greatly by the fact that the Roku app, and as far as I can tell, any other shared app situation, lets you either log the user out when closing the app, or save the login for some amount of time. In the first case we're back to the pain in the ass of every user typing their long password every single time they want to use the app (remember unsophisticated users who default to which method works every time). In the latter case in order to keep play history and such the previous user has to be logged out via a series of menus and then the new user has to type their long password circling back to where we started.

They have implemented a profile page, but the profile page is BEFORE the login phase. Which means I had to advise my family to pick fake names and nondescript images for profile images because that profile page is accessible to anyone who finds their way to the page on the internet. Quite frankly absurd.

I tried to outline this concern in the Matrix chat and the general take was "typing your password isn't that hard!" or responses that seemed to be strongly implying re-working this process would just be too hard or time consuming.

I don't doubt the difficulty, but this situation makes an otherwise awesome system entirely unusable for an unsophisticated multi-user configuration.

[raffraffraff]

I stopped trying to get it to work over a year ago. This old Reddit thread is one of many where users are asking why the scan is so awful:

https://www.reddit.com/r/jellyfin/comments/q3k3be/how_to_tro...

That's basically why I stopped trying: the media scanner was atrocious.

[entropie]

I have written a telegram bot (via node-red) that is basically a proxy for yt-dlp that allows my mother to download audio only from youtube videos/audiobooks and sort them into jellyfin for later download or to just listen. She has downloaded like 250gb so far and loves it.

[addandsubtract]

I've written a couple of telegram bots to automate / scrape things for me. However, I haven't used node-red. What does it do for you?

[dan_quixote]

So far I've been happy with Jellyfin with one exception - the lack of AppleTV app. I've been using a third-party tool (MrMC) with limited success.

[kennend3]

> So far I've been happy with Jellyfin with one exception - the lack of AppleTV app.

Isnt this a reason to be unhappy with Apple?

Jellyfin runs perfectly fine on MacOS, Linux, android set-top boxes and my Amazon firesticks....

Perhaps the app store and the walled garden is the real issue here?

Without an ability to "side load" the app Jellyfin is forced to use the store?

[domy]

I'm very happy with the Infuse app connected to Jellyfin (also paying the $10/yr for the extra features).

[graftak]

There is a TestFlight Swiftfin app that is pretty decent. The only reason I still prefer Infuse (another Apple TV app that works with Jellyfin) is the more polished UI.

[Jaepa]

There is a AppleTV client in the works that has a semi public TestFlight.

I’m unsure how far along it is, however.

[syntaxing]

Jellyfin + Tailscale is absolutely fucking amazing. It easily replaces everything Plex does without any risk like Plex exposing your network from a bug.