I came from Plex a few years ago after their login server had an outage and I was unable to access the media that was on my local computer. Before that I'd been annoyed by them pushing TV shows and since then I've heard about them giving reports on what people have watched. All in all I'm happy.
My setup is Jellyfin in a docker container running on a debian machine with an i7-1165G7. It's got a mounted NFS link to my Synology NAS with all the files. The main client I used is Android TV running on an NVIDIA shield.
All in all, it's been great. I've got a few nitpicks---loading on ios app isn't as fast as I like if I try to jump to the middle of a movie---but all in all it's great for just watching movies, tv shows, videos, &c. All without any link to the outside world. It's lovely.
They also are producing new features at a nice clip and have a strong community. I expect it to keep getting better and better, but honestly even if it never changed I'd happily use it for years.
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
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’s easier to access Jellyfin over Tailscale. Plex’s normally clever way of exposing itself to the Internet gets in the way. It’s not impossible though.
Having said all this, Plex has better client UIs by far. They’re well organized, feature rich, and generally bug free. I still run Plex and plan to at least for the DVR functions.
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 beyond Jellyfin as a just in case.
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 TV) is either nonexistent or terrible. I've been using Swiftfin since it was one of the first alpha versions, and it constantly lost pairing with my Jellyfin instance. When it did work, which was very cryptic and usually required re-enrolling the client every time, it would randomly fail to load things, and the UI was very choppy as well. I haven't used the native apps on other platforms, but I imagine they are equally or more janky, because the Apple TV is comparatively very beefy hardware-wise vs. most other platforms.
3. The polling for new media is slow. I upped it to 10 minutes (the quickest possible setting) but I shudder to think what a full scan of a media library every 10 minutes is doing to my disks. Why doesn't it use file watchers and webhooks for new content notification?
4. The homepage has very little actionable info and doesn't work for browsing. It's not like Netflix or any of the other services where you can boot it up and see a bunch of different categories, as well as your "list". It has playlists, but you have to drill down to see them. You can go to "Movies -> Suggestions" and it has a little bit, but nothing like Netflix does. No real recommendation engine.
5. You have to maintain your own trailers or use an app like Infuse that can download its own trailers.
6. You have to separately configure tiles to be rendered if you want a nice seeking experience where it shows a live preview as you scrub through the timeline.
7. Movies and TV Shows are separated even though pretty much every other platform doesn't separate them, which requires you to click into one of 2 options before you can do almost anything.
That said, it's still far better and less janky than Plex was before I switched, and Infuse actually plays back HDR / Dolby Vision content correctly.
Does anyone else have qualms with Jellyfin? And how does Plex compare to any of these gripes?
Jellyfin feels like its almost to where Plex was 5 years ago. They are catching up fairly quickly and I think I wouldn't bother with a Plex pass if I was coming in completely fresh.
But it is not as good as Plex currently. I have a lifetime pass and there is no reason for me to switch. I personally am fine with Plex adding features, so long as they are not taking anything away. They've had a couple missteps but absolutely nothing that would make me want to switch to an experience that is definitely worse.
I'll give Jellyfin 3 years and then reevaluate and see how I feel.
Anyone care to share their experiences with some of the less common Jellyfin frontends? Which ones are most in need of contributions?
I've had a decent experience with the Samsung TV (Tizen) client. It's annoying to not have it on the app store yet and to jump through the developer-mode hoops to get it installed, but to be fair it was a one time setup and I've been happy with it since then. Seen some occasional slightly janky menu navigation, but really it's been far better than I expected.
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.
Fun fact: Jellyfin runs natively on Windows. Combined with something like Cloudflare Tunnel it's probably the easiest way to host a media server without needing to be a Linux admin.
My media center is a laptop with a broken screen, running Arch Linux and Kodi. Kodi has a web interface that you can stream to. Why might I want to add Jellyfin?
I've been happily using Jellyfin since it forked from Emby a few years ago, and whilst initially it was a bit lumpy (but so was Emby) it's been almost maintenance free for the past three-odd years.
I use it in a docker container, if that makes any difference, and my use case is almost identical to loughnane's mentioned up-thread.
I recently found out Jellyfin supports livestreams so I've been using it to "cast" my screen to the TV (simplescreenrecorder -> nginx's rtmp server -> jellyfin webpage). Theres a few seconds of latency I can't get rid of but ime more reliable than chromecast / the built-in device discovery.
Well this is very timely and relevant. I usually access jellyfin on my network devices like `http://homecloud:8096` but now that I have been exploring adding other services, remembering the ports is getting tedious. I also am trying to be forward thinking about external access in the future.
Looks like I could use some combination of Caddy, Nginx Proxy Manager, Tailscale? What's the simplest setup?
but it still lacked some of the features that made me stick to plex (over VLC)
It'll become better over time, and probably much better than plex. plex dont do many new features, and there's still a ton of issues with it (like... audio is at like -50 dB and you cant hear shit)
Jellyfin is awesome. I started to set up Plex server, then realized I have to have an account on some centralized service to access my own server?? Instant no-go, for me. Using Kodi as a client, almost problem-free. Super cool!
I wish it only transcoded things on explicit request, not based on its opinion. The LG TV profile it ships with is incorrect, and it's not at all clear how to stop it transcoding.
The biggest thing that keeps me away from Plex alternatives is the simplicity ("it works everywhere on everything") and the experience ("it looks nice and feels polished").
There was a point where I could overlook some of these things but watching media is something that I want to feel slick and personal, and troubleshooting really kills that for me.
Plex + AppleTV for me and my folks has been a rock solid setup for us.
I really appreciate alternatives (especially OSS) like Jellyfin though and take a gander at them ~once a year.
I’ve been using this for years, it’s almost perfect but there are a few little issues here in there. My TV automatically updated the jellfin client which no longer could connect to my server that was frustrating. Another update stopped supporting many of the plug-ins I enjoyed using. I have issues with thumbnails not loading and not knowing how buffering works. I find it difficult to troubleshoot issues. 99% of the time it is perfect and I love it.
I tried jellyfin after my most recent nas upgrade (pi5 w/ external drives). It seemed _really_ nice, but it also worked extremely badly for my specific use case. It seems to want a specific folder structure for all of your media, and its layout conflicted badly with my existing conventions. My partner has our media collection obsessively organized by country, then by genre. Jellyfin made some kind of attempt at categorizing this, and just ended up showing us tons of previews for things we did NOT have (eg, our British folder was interpreted as us having The Great British Baking Show, which we do NOT have). It seems like every media solution wants to ignore your folder structure and present some fake hierarchy, which really doesn't work at all for me.
We ended up buying an apple tv and installing the vlc app which connects via smb and is happy to show us the original folder structure.
I really want to switch to Jellyfin. Plex has gone off the deep end with all their user hostile garbage.
But Jellyfin is just not good. The clients are all afterthoughts and audio pass-through fails to work on every device I’ve tried it on. 4K HDR studders like mad, when the same video plays perfectly via Plex (no transcoding)
I’m convinced that the people who “love Jellyfin” watch it using their phone or laptop. Where sdr and stereo audio is all they’ve ever known.
I’m rooting for Jellyfin, but they have a long way to go. I wish they’d focus on a unified client experience and stop adding junk to the media server.
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 crafted structure that I haven't yet fully figured out. So instead of dropping a file then watching it on the TV, I drop it, try to watch it, then have to go back to the PC to fiddle.
It’s great. A stock Nvidia shield 2019 tube (!) plays 4K HDR/DV DTS content without stutter or issues with passthrough an AVR which is impressive. I can't say Kodi and various forks were able to do that, at least in the past. Lots of griping about the tube in general as well but it manages without transcoding.
Funny how people nitpick. At the end of the day, jellyfin is free to use, ad free, has more config options than we need, and it does an outstanding job.
I switched from Kodi, Plex, then Emby years ago. No reason to look back.
How do you usually go about acquiring the media? I know there are people that simply download movies via torrent, but what are the legal ways of buying video files of TV shows or movies, specially the more recent ones?
I use Jellyfin and it just works but had problems with the client on iOS. Vidhub is a reliable client solution I've found, it's pretty inexpensive. Maybe the Jellyfin client is fine I didn't spend a lot of time with it.
I've tried everything but ended up using the VLC app on my Apple TV and just accessing my NAS through Samba. Not as sophisticated (library management) as Jellyfin or Plex but performance wise it's probably the best one.
I'm deep into the Emby ecosystem now (have it hooked up to a dedicated server with transcode + a premium subscription) but Jellyfin's syncplay feature looks absolutely wicked. I may need to transition at some point.
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.
Jellyfin is not able to group series together and on top of that shows everything in random order, why bother with it when there are alternatives that can do that?
Funny how people nitpick. At the end of the day, jellyfin is free to use, ad free, has more config options than we need, and it does an outstanding job.
I switched from Kodi, Plex, then Emby years ago. No reason to look back.
Funny how people nitpick. At the end of the day, jellyfin is free to use, ad free, has more config options than we need, and it does an outstanding job.
I switched from Kodi, Plex, then Emby years ago. No reason to look back.
As somebody who just got into Real Debrid, what's the best compatible frontend that makes managing the content firehouse easier? I started out with Stremio, which works okay but only lets you add movies/shows to a single Library that can be sorted a few ways, but that's it. Not great scrolling through a single horizontal list of titles.
Ideally, there'd be a program that lets you add programs to playlists (favorite films, to-watch list, anime, documentaries, etc.) and then track the watch status, shuffle-play, show recommendations, display a big grid, etc. There's probably something like that out there but for a newcomer it's just a blizzard of "Sonarr, Radarr, Umbrella, Jellyfin, Plex, Kodi, Stremio, Roku, Seren, Overseer, Syncler," and other nonsense syllables (and seems like most of the guides are dated).
(Nb: I subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, etc., just prefer having a unified player that doesn't yank stuff arbitrarily)
Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System
(jellyfin.org)486 points by doener 15 February 2025 | 284 comments
Comments
I came from Plex a few years ago after their login server had an outage and I was unable to access the media that was on my local computer. Before that I'd been annoyed by them pushing TV shows and since then I've heard about them giving reports on what people have watched. All in all I'm happy.
My setup is Jellyfin in a docker container running on a debian machine with an i7-1165G7. It's got a mounted NFS link to my Synology NAS with all the files. The main client I used is Android TV running on an NVIDIA shield.
All in all, it's been great. I've got a few nitpicks---loading on ios app isn't as fast as I like if I try to jump to the middle of a movie---but all in all it's great for just watching movies, tv shows, videos, &c. All without any link to the outside world. It's lovely.
They also are producing new features at a nice clip and have a strong community. I expect it to keep getting better and better, but honestly even if it never changed I'd happily use it for years.
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’s easier to access Jellyfin over Tailscale. Plex’s normally clever way of exposing itself to the Internet gets in the way. It’s not impossible though.
Having said all this, Plex has better client UIs by far. They’re well organized, feature rich, and generally bug free. I still run Plex and plan to at least for the DVR functions.
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 beyond Jellyfin as a just in case.
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 TV) is either nonexistent or terrible. I've been using Swiftfin since it was one of the first alpha versions, and it constantly lost pairing with my Jellyfin instance. When it did work, which was very cryptic and usually required re-enrolling the client every time, it would randomly fail to load things, and the UI was very choppy as well. I haven't used the native apps on other platforms, but I imagine they are equally or more janky, because the Apple TV is comparatively very beefy hardware-wise vs. most other platforms.
3. The polling for new media is slow. I upped it to 10 minutes (the quickest possible setting) but I shudder to think what a full scan of a media library every 10 minutes is doing to my disks. Why doesn't it use file watchers and webhooks for new content notification?
4. The homepage has very little actionable info and doesn't work for browsing. It's not like Netflix or any of the other services where you can boot it up and see a bunch of different categories, as well as your "list". It has playlists, but you have to drill down to see them. You can go to "Movies -> Suggestions" and it has a little bit, but nothing like Netflix does. No real recommendation engine.
5. You have to maintain your own trailers or use an app like Infuse that can download its own trailers.
6. You have to separately configure tiles to be rendered if you want a nice seeking experience where it shows a live preview as you scrub through the timeline.
7. Movies and TV Shows are separated even though pretty much every other platform doesn't separate them, which requires you to click into one of 2 options before you can do almost anything.
That said, it's still far better and less janky than Plex was before I switched, and Infuse actually plays back HDR / Dolby Vision content correctly.
Does anyone else have qualms with Jellyfin? And how does Plex compare to any of these gripes?
I have also built two things on top:
A super simple PWA for my kids to use: https://github.com/philips/jellykids?tab=readme-ov-file#jell...
A NFC card based player for my kids to use: https://github.com/philips/homeassistant-nfc-chromecast
It is so nice to just have my content on an API driven thing where I can control the UX my kids experience without a bunch of hassle.
But it is not as good as Plex currently. I have a lifetime pass and there is no reason for me to switch. I personally am fine with Plex adding features, so long as they are not taking anything away. They've had a couple missteps but absolutely nothing that would make me want to switch to an experience that is definitely worse.
I'll give Jellyfin 3 years and then reevaluate and see how I feel.
I've had a decent experience with the Samsung TV (Tizen) client. It's annoying to not have it on the app store yet and to jump through the developer-mode hoops to get it installed, but to be fair it was a one time setup and I've been happy with it since then. Seen some occasional slightly janky menu navigation, but really it's been far better than I expected.
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 use it in a docker container, if that makes any difference, and my use case is almost identical to loughnane's mentioned up-thread.
Looks like I could use some combination of Caddy, Nginx Proxy Manager, Tailscale? What's the simplest setup?
but it still lacked some of the features that made me stick to plex (over VLC)
It'll become better over time, and probably much better than plex. plex dont do many new features, and there's still a ton of issues with it (like... audio is at like -50 dB and you cant hear shit)
There was a point where I could overlook some of these things but watching media is something that I want to feel slick and personal, and troubleshooting really kills that for me.
Plex + AppleTV for me and my folks has been a rock solid setup for us.
I really appreciate alternatives (especially OSS) like Jellyfin though and take a gander at them ~once a year.
We ended up buying an apple tv and installing the vlc app which connects via smb and is happy to show us the original folder structure.
But Jellyfin is just not good. The clients are all afterthoughts and audio pass-through fails to work on every device I’ve tried it on. 4K HDR studders like mad, when the same video plays perfectly via Plex (no transcoding)
I’m convinced that the people who “love Jellyfin” watch it using their phone or laptop. Where sdr and stereo audio is all they’ve ever known.
I’m rooting for Jellyfin, but they have a long way to go. I wish they’d focus on a unified client experience and stop adding junk to the media server.
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 crafted structure that I haven't yet fully figured out. So instead of dropping a file then watching it on the TV, I drop it, try to watch it, then have to go back to the PC to fiddle.
https://github.com/EdyTheCow/docker-media-center
But I'm AMAZED to see the phrase "Free Software" in an HN link description.
Thank You jellyfin.org!!!
Genuinely curious.
How is av1 support on jellyfin?
Ideally, there'd be a program that lets you add programs to playlists (favorite films, to-watch list, anime, documentaries, etc.) and then track the watch status, shuffle-play, show recommendations, display a big grid, etc. There's probably something like that out there but for a newcomer it's just a blizzard of "Sonarr, Radarr, Umbrella, Jellyfin, Plex, Kodi, Stremio, Roku, Seren, Overseer, Syncler," and other nonsense syllables (and seems like most of the guides are dated).
(Nb: I subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, etc., just prefer having a unified player that doesn't yank stuff arbitrarily)