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State of the Fin 2026-01-06

210 points| wise_blood | 1 month ago |jellyfin.org

176 comments

order

cheschire|1 month ago

I have to thank Plex for changing their cost model. It motivated me to setup Jellyfin, something that took slightly more effort than Plex. And by getting that inertia going, I then followed up with Navidrome, a local OSM service with routing, and finally my own mediawiki copy that has a starting point from the pre-AI days as well as an annual content refresh so my "compare" history is short and simple on all articles.

That inspired me to build a homelab finally, which then became a NAS, which then became an OCIS server to replace my commercial cloud storage.

I finally got proxmox setup, OPNsense, with Caddy for reverse proxying the externally facing services and tailscale for access to those services I want to keep only for me and not others in my family.

So yeah, all of this big massive avalanche of work started with the little tiny snowball of Plex deciding they wanted to charge me to use my own media while away from my house.

Thanks Plex!

And thanks Jellyfin for being a fantastic alternative for video.

zamadatix|1 month ago

I sort of went the opposite way. I had a giant homelab already and paid for Plex lifetime (just because I thought it was good software after years of use, not because I really needed the features or anything) but then I ended up consolidating all of my media to just being a bare metal Linux standard PC case running a plain NFS share (I guess that's still a NAS, but perhaps more spartan than the usual connotation) which clients like Infuse or a local media player app can just load directly.

MadnessASAP|1 month ago

I would also like to thank Jellyfin and the other software packages in its orbit for motivating me to keep my homelab in good running order. That and Home Assistant.

When compared to the current breed of streaming services it really shows the difference between something designed to drive up engagement and revenue while driving down cost vs something designed to actually be useful and pleasant.

Also I hadn't heard of OCIS, but it looks like something I want. So thanks for that.

mikepurvis|1 month ago

I had a rough time with Jellyfin like 6-7 years ago, with media not populating/playing properly, and metadata being lost on upgrade, etc.

Tried again a few months ago and couldn't be happier. The whole thing is very stable and reliable. I think my only annoyance is that the HW I have it running on isn't beefy enough for transcoding, and my LG C4 can't play some of the 4K codecs natively (particularly around DV). Obviously this isn't Jellyfin's fault, but this kind of thing is just one more item for the list of stuff to have randomly be a surprise when setting up this kind of thing.

have_faith|1 month ago

What does Navidrome add over streaming music via Jellyfin, is it just better more tailored client apps? The music client apps for JF are a bit bare bones, although the streaming itself I've found to work perfectly.

NoMoreNicksLeft|1 month ago

Can Jellyfin (or Emby, for that matter) get the interface half as slick as Plex? I keep checking every few months, and it leaves me underwhelmed. I've got the lifetime license from Plex so I'm less motivated maybe... but even ignoring that, there's the issue of badgering 20 or 30 other people to switch clients. It'd literally take me years to plan out such a project and I'm hoping someone can talk me into it.

throwoutway|1 month ago

I haven't logged into Plex in a while but did decide that the next time I need it will just setup Jellyfin instead. Nice to see they support all my devices iOS AndroidTV FireTV

jszymborski|1 month ago

> local OSM service with routing

Woah cool! Does it work well? Google Maps is the only Google service I really rely on these days.

hart_russell|1 month ago

Eh, I was happy to pay Plex a one time fee of ~$120 for a lifetime license. I'd rather just set up Plex in a docker container and expose that port than deal with a bunch of services constantly needing doctoring in my homelab.

phailhaus|1 month ago

This is like the infamous Dropbox comment.

- Plex

or...

- Jellyfin

- Navidrome

- Homelab

- proxmox

- OPNsense

- Caddy

- Tailscale

Plex is not worried about people like you, because you just described an insane amount of effort just to avoid a one-time cost. Most will not.

s_dev|1 month ago

It's very interesting to see Plex users slowly turn against the platform primarily due to costs being imposed. Plex has better client software than Jellyfin but the 'proprietary vs open source' debate for NAS/video streaming software seems to be reversing. Jellyfin is catching up to Plex and in a few years despite Plex having a first mover advantage here -- I expect it to surpass Plex in monthly active users.

paxys|1 month ago

It's about more than just costs. Plex started out as a home media server (a direct port of XBMC/Kodi in fact), but over time due to its success the creators decided they wanted to turn it into Netflix instead. So using Plex to stream your own media to your own local or remote devices is being made harder with every update.

jdboyd|1 month ago

I paid for Plex, but then they broke the the downloading features from the server to the Android client, and never repaired it to work reliably.

Meanwhile most of their updates were about streaming support, and then they started cramming their streaming service into it, and pushing it, and I just got sick of all of that. Eventually I just switched to jellyfin. It is far from perfect. The music player isn't as good as plex's, there is no download feature. But at least it hasn't turned on me yet.

0x457|1 month ago

It's not just that. It was great for all of us with large media archives, but every "big" release is making things better for those who don't run their media libraries at expense of those who do.

Syncing (a paid feature) was broken for years. It might download video, it might fail. You will find out on the plane.

When internet goes down, Plex becomes weird...my home network still works just fine.

Library navigation follows netflix pattern, but netflix pattern is to let me browse for hours without finding anything.

vachina|1 month ago

Plex misjudged their market bigly. They’re turning into a streaming company, when what people paid for is a media server.

BowBun|1 month ago

Not to pile on, but the reason we're pissed at Plex is because they did a classic rug-pull: advertise to nerds like us who own our servers + media, then slowly make deals with publishers, requiring them to police _my_ content. Then start adding subscriptions and limiting how I can share (again) _my_ content - what are they offering me anymore?

The irony is they won't have a customer base from my mom/dad. Why in god's green earth would a layperson pay for Plex when they can get streaming bundles? I just don't get it. And that's why I got rid of my ~10 year plex instance and replaced it with Jellyfin in maybe ~1 day.

Happy to help others do the same!

observationist|1 month ago

JellyFin is an open source project and is community driven and motivated by open source principles.

Plex is a VC funded project, they've raised some $50m to date. Crazy what money can buy, isn't it?

xienze|1 month ago

For me it wasn't even about cost, it was the fact that logging into my self-hosted Plex server required an auth flow that went to Plex's servers for some reason.

seniorThrowaway|1 month ago

Agree with others it's not solely about cost. For me it was about the very clear monetization drive Plex started doing years ago, while remaining nominally free to use for your own media. At some point, and I've already switched off it so maybe it's already happened, they will monetize tracking/meta data about what is in your own collection.

driverdan|1 month ago

I have a lifetime subscription to Plex. I hate everything they've been doing over the past few years. They're completely ignoring their existing users in the quest for growth.

* Social sharing stuff that shows what you watch to others by default.

* Adding their streaming services and other paid services.

* Changing the UI layout to hide self hosted content, promote paid services, with poor UX for changing it back.

* Ignoring bugs that have been known and unfixed for years.

* Ignoring user feedback, doubling down on their poor decisions.

add-sub-mul-div|1 month ago

I've never paid Plex a dime because I don't need any of the paid features. But its usability gets worse with every update, which is an underappreciated reason to want off the platform.

TacticalCoder|1 month ago

Totally. I'm not into politics and basically all I want is a local streamer and I'm running Plex (on an old HP EliteDesk NUC) but... I already tried Jellyfin (and trial was successful with a few movies), so I'll very likely be switching my entire setup from Plex to Jellyfin soon.

JuniperMesos|1 month ago

I never even looked into Plex, I don't want to run proprietary software I have to pay for on my own computer to serve my own music. I've only ever used Jellyfin and it works more or less ok for my use cases.

darknavi|1 month ago

I have a Plex lifetime subscription but hold no strict allegiance to the company.

If Jellyfin was a comparable product (in user experience and ease of use for my extended family's platforms) I'd switch tomorrow.

barbazoo|1 month ago

We run a plex server and I hate it. Hiding "timer" functionality (turn off in x minutes) behind a paywall feels like a shit move to me as a parent for whom this is a pretty basic functionality.

gosub100|1 month ago

I also want to shout out to Emby, which is almost identical to Jellyfin. It seems a bit more polished, and works very well. I've been using it for over 2 years. It does have a paid tier and nags me to upgrade for 10s on my TV, but that doesn't bother me. I have it running in a freebsd jail and it's been rock solid.

epistasis|1 month ago

Jellyfin was super easy to get running on Arch a few months ago. With a Tailscale network, I have all my media devices connected to my very small but growing collection of DVD and Blu-ray media.

I'm old, I ripped all my CDs in the 1990s and early 2000s, but abandoned all of it when Apple Music replaced iTunes in a disaster of product launch. After a decade of streaming, I'm trying to head back to curated media files, at least for video. Music is far harder to obtain in ways that compensate the musicians, at least for the stuff I'm looking for.

hk1337|1 month ago

That's pretty much exactly what happened to me. At the very least, I wish I had stored all the DVDs away somewhere. :(

I cancelled all my subscriptions this year and working on getting JellyFin up and I was thinking of paying for GameFly or some other DVD service and start putting a library back together. Torrenting just seems icky to me and I am not convinced I could find good copies.

veilrap|1 month ago

The fact that Jellyfin lacks a AppleTV/tvOS app seems like it continues to make it a dealbreaker... at least for my setup.

I hear people recommending clients like Infuse, but it feels odd to swap out Plex at this point if I can't go all in on the open source side of things.

Am I missing something here wrt Jellyfin clients? I guess I could try running it side-by-side with Plex and see how it goes.

tedivm|1 month ago

Jellyfin has three AppleTV apps!

SwiftFin is what I use, and it is the free and open source option. Works great.

Before that stabilized I used Infuse, but it wasn't great.

MrMC is another one I haven't tried, but it definitely supports Jellyfin.

wintermutestwin|1 month ago

I use Infuse on an appletv and simply point it at a samba share. Easiest setup ever. What am I missing out on by not using jellyfin or plex?

CharlesW|1 month ago

There Swiftfin, Jellyfin Mobile, and Streamyfin at least. My forthcoming iOS-only music player has first-class Jellyfin support (beta sign-up: https://forms.gle/AGLePh9RtaYEfDH6A) if you're looking for a dedicated, offline-capable music app.

jgauth|1 month ago

> Am I missing something here wrt Jellyfin clients?

Unfortunately, I don't think so. I had many issues with playback on ATV using Swiftfin. Infuse works very well, so it is worth the ~$15 yearly to me. I am hopeful that Swiftfin will improve over time, they have a few dedicated developers working on it.

turtletontine|1 month ago

I have Kodi running on a raspberry pi plugged into my Google TV. The Jellyfin plugin for Kodi works flawlessly so far for me. It’s just great! Sure if I could put Jellyfin directly on the TV, that would save me the RPi. But not a big deal for me.

JimBlackwood|1 month ago

Jellyfin has Swiftfin, I’ve been using it for a few years now.

There are some small bugs that you can work around. The rework to the new version has been in progress for about two years but it works just fine right now.

pathartl|1 month ago

My parents and brother use Infuse. I would use it even over the official Plex app.

keytarsolo|1 month ago

I like Jellyfin, and run it alongside Plex.

But they have a very long way to before they reach feature parity with even just the stuff I use. Let alone everything Plex can do.

I think this year I’m going to try and find an issue or feature I can contribute on. I’d like to end up moving to Jellyfin based on it being good and not Plex being bad.

grepex|1 month ago

For anyone with a Radar/Sonarr/Jellyfin setup - do yourself a favor and set up Jellyseerr too. It's a request system for other to request library additions. Install moonfin on your firetv/androidtv and downloads can be initiated straight from your TV!

mac-attack|1 month ago

> We have been moving quickly to address these issues, delivering four additional point releases with over 100 changes since the initial 10.11.0 release. To date, most point releases have focused on resolving general and migration-related issues. The remaining migration issues are largely isolated, one-off cases and are unlikely to be resolved.

I guess that's my cue to finally try and upgrade. I dragged my feet given how widespread the friction of the upgrade, but if this is as good as it's going to get, I might as well pull the bandaid off now.

Mydayyy|1 month ago

I'm in the same boat, still on the older version and monitoring the new updates. There's an issue list on github for the .11 release, and while aaalot got resolved, theres still some big things open (#15045). But the jellyfin team is doing amazing work and I'm thankful.

A few of my users already messaged me that with the next version, the android tv app will cease to work with the old jellyfin version, so I guess I have to upgrade soon

pathartl|1 month ago

I've been having massive performance issues, specifically with the database locking. Disabling the Playback Reporting plugin resolved the issue.

wise_blood|1 month ago

My current setup, maybe to inspire someone or to get suggestions:

- server: my laptop. I manually download everything.

- clients: everything in LAN with a browser, plus Jellyfin android client.

- typical use: open android app, cast to big tv, watch on big tv.

next planned steps:

- move the server to a minicomputer. Still download everything manually from the laptop to the server

- convince myself it's time to use the *arr programs

- once Jellyfin has a Tizen client, ditch the android app + chromecast for good

anacrolix|1 month ago

I can't understand the love for Jellyfin. Kodi lets you pick multiple sources of data, but Jellyfin flips it on its head and requires you pick a single server, choose the sources there, then add Kodi or something else all over again. It's just more steps for no gain.

wackget|1 month ago

Does anyone else not really "get" these media managers? Personally I still find it much easier to grab media from a torrent and watch it on a computer using VLC. It requires zero setup.

I do have the benefit of a PC connected to my living room TV, but even if I didn't, most TVs these days can natively play media from a network share.

jaffa2|1 month ago

The benefit of plex ( and jelly fin falls down here) is that anyone with any smart tv can access your media library just like Netflix . So family, friends etc can download the plex app, sign in and start watching your stuff.

There’s wide compatibility with all sort of devices and you dont need to firewall tunnel vpn or do any setup. It’s totally grandma friendly.

Your approach works great for a single user with a tv connected PC. Lets say with your current system you want your parents, right now, to be able to view your movies files. How easy is that to do, and how much technical knowledge or assistance is required?

kevstev|1 month ago

I kind of hear you on this- its not super necessary, but it can be convenient. I use Synology VideoStation which is a part of their NAS Suite. We keep a small library of often rewatched stuff- holiday movies, a few of the wifes favorites, etc... and the nice thing is I can play it on any TV in my house from an app on my phone. I can also stream to say my local laptop when I am away if I wanted to as well, though I think I have done that exactly once.

What is a little nicer about it is that we can hear about something, have it downloaded to the folder that gets indexed, and have it available to play near instantaneously. My NAS also does transcoding if necessary, so that eliminates a lot of hassles around codecs and such as well.

A lot of people take this a step further and avoid all paid services and just use tools like radarr and sonarr to get whatever content they are interested automatically off the high seas and play it when they want to.

The network share is the hard part- well really having the always on server that hosts it- plex/jellyfin/emby etc are just a little bit of sugar on top that make it a nicer experience. And IME, you install once and you are done, there is no maintenance to deal with afterwards so there is little downside.

flylikeabanana|1 month ago

Beyond just playing the files from storage, I also get subtitles, metadata, play history / continue watching / next up, a nice 10-foot UI, and the ability to satisfy my ADHD curiousity by clicking around tags / actors / directors and seeing what else I have from them in my library.

barnabee|1 month ago

It's mostly about the UI. Browsing a network share is pretty ugly (generic icons, filenames, etc.) and can be unintuitive. Basic things like quickly finding the latest file you've added can be quite difficult.

Ultimately if you just want to browse a filesystem, network shares are fine, but if you want a nice looking front end for that with logos/artwork, descriptions or reviews from the internet, or features that require the files and metadata to be indexed in a DB of some kind, then these UIs come in handy.

Plus they look nice are generally easier for other less tech. savvy members of the househould to use.

nvarsj|1 month ago

I went down the rabbithole when I started getting into seasonal Anime watching. Doing that manually is a huge PITA for every show/episode.

Now I just get a pop-up on my phone that Plex has the latest episode. I sit on my couch, hit play on my nvidia shield, and watch on my giant OLED. It's great - and I've been doing this for years now.

Once you go through the initial set up, the UX is fantastic. Far better than anything Netflix, or any commercial provider has ever built.

And for music - Plexamp is an ode to Winamp and is worth it alone. It completely brought me back to the pre-Spotify world of music enjoyment.

worksonmine|1 month ago

As a hoarder the *arrs makes adding content seamless. I just set my preferred quality and it will download it as soon as it's released from the trackers I've setup. Even for movie collections it adds sequels I wasn't aware was in the pipeline. It's more about the ecosystem than the individual tools.

And my content is always available from my NAS no matter where I am or what device I have with me.

HauntingPin|1 month ago

I use Jellyfish so I can access my library from anywhere using any of my devices like my phone or laptoo. My partner can also easily access my library using her browser.

TacticalCoder|1 month ago

> Does anyone else not really "get" these media managers? Personally I still find it much easier to grab media from a torrent and watch it on a computer using VLC. It requires zero setup.

I do both. But when watching with the family it's much easier to have them a media streaming server than to have to hook the PC to the TV (or projector) and use VLC.

Now at times for whatever reason some media file won't play over the network: dunno why... Maybe it's a blue moon, maybe there's a space in the filename, maybe I didn't respect the directory naming scheme or the file permission or whatever freaking bullshit. When that happens, I put the file on a USB stick, then on to a laptop, then HDMI cable. And that always work. (just had to make sure the TV wasn't using interpolation to 60 Hz or whatever otherwise every movie looked like a soap opera).

dandano|1 month ago

I'm almost like you, I just download what I want to watch. But instead of going through network files - I have Plex Media Server on my M1 Macbook Air. Plex looks at the downloads folder, indexes it into a nice viewing experience that I use Plex app on the TV to connect to my local Plex server. It's a very seamless experience.

monocasa|1 month ago

Is anyone running a horizontally scaled instance jellyfin?

I have a weird setup where power isn't really a concern, have a bunch of ancient blades, access to a fast uplink, and am looking to set this up for a smallish collective of about 100 people.

A single node would definitely fall over, but a little cluster should be able to do a good job.

austin-cheney|1 month ago

Jellyfin, and my current job doing enterprise API management, inspired me to build out a home lab around a custom built application that does server monitoring and launches servers and proxies for both HTTP and WebSockets in seconds.

glimshe|1 month ago

Jellyfin is love.

A game changing project that solved my streaming scenarios. It just works.

ninju|1 month ago

> While nothing has been finalized yet, we are considering 'dropping' the major version 10, which would make the next release 12.0

You mean to say dropping version 11 (and moving straight to 12)

gavinsyancey|1 month ago

The previous release was 10.11 and the next would ordinarily be 10.12. They're considering dropping the leading "10" so the next is just 12 (from the minor version).

cdrnsf|1 month ago

I'm glad Swiftfin is getting some attention. Their Roku app is solid and Infuse is an excellent option for Apple's ecosystem.

wishJFWorked|1 month ago

Can Jellyfin finally passthrough audio like Atmos? When I checked mid-2025 on my Nvidia Shield it _still_ didn’t work properly.

tylerflick|1 month ago

If you’re referencing the Android TV client, yes I have both Atmos and DTS:X streaming as passthrough to my receiver. One thing of note is that DTS:X only seems to work with MKV containers on Android.

zenoprax|1 month ago

I've been running a Jellyfin server for nearly four years now. I never tried Plex or Emby but JF has been an impressive bit of software.

The availability of clients (Roku, Apple TV, Android, Xbox) is good enough that I have no problem inviting friends and family to join mine. I've learned so much about the tech bubble I live in simply from getting them onto the server.

I think the biggest obstacle to adoption beyond simple home servers is the reliance on SQLlite. If it were possible to set it up with Postgres you could run a monster server on AWS with RDS, S3, a Kubernetes. Not sure about the business case for that... but I would enjoy setting it up and pushing it to its limits.

cdurth|1 month ago

I don't understand the jellyfin hype tbh. Every year I spin it up to test and am always disappointed. If you only consume your media on a web browser, then 100% recommend jellyfin. If you consume on anything else the apps are bare bones and seriously lacking, potentially not even existing. I despise the frequent and ugly Plex UI changes they push out, but the app works on every device and TV brand I've had.

The take away is the app ecosystem needs some serious bolstering. That's the holdup for most people I know who are still sticking with Plex.

gadders|1 month ago

JFC just write a proper Samsung client.

[I'm aware there is one I can muck around with and install via Samsung developer portal]

osamagirl69|1 month ago

The second to last bullet point on the post is about the Samsung client, which (as you are aware) has been written but is currently held up in review Samsung. The first round of review took about 3 months(?!), and they are working through reproducing the vaguely stated issues found in the review.

It is thankless work, but they are actually quite close!

hexbin010|1 month ago

Ditch Samsung mate. Their consumer/appliance division products are trash