1049
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
1049 points (100.0% liked)
Selfhosted
44652 readers
1196 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Alright, so I have had Jellyfin installed for years now, but my primary issue is that most devices myself or my users use lack official, readily-available clients. For example, the Samsung TV app is a developer mode install. Last I looked, nobody has put a build into the store.
I really want to use Jellyfin, but I feel like my users simply can't. I'm interested in others' experiences here that could help.
I run an Android TV box on my Smart TV, because I don't trust them on the internet.
I mean, except for Tizen OS isn't most available? You can find the client for Android, Android TV, Windows, Linux (Flatpak), macos, apple ios, and more.
https://jellyfin.org/downloads/clients/
I give all my friends the choice between Plex and jellyfin (I run both containers side by side pointed to the same media folders) and they all invariably choose Plex. I think it has a lot to do with the jellyfin UI, and I think an overhaul like jellyfin-vue or something that looks like findroid needs to happen in order for jellyfin to really appeal to regular people.
Yeah, I've written some custom css to get some better wrapping of libraries and such.
There's also the community themes worth looking into.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/css-customization/#community-themes
Damn, all this time using JF and I never thought of theming it.
While I use it on a SFF PC I have a couple of users that access my server via a couple of CCwGTV Chromecasts I handed them and so, unable to test since I don't have one to hand but can you / does it theme the UI on the Chromecast too?
Cheers!
A Chromecast TV device might fill your gap. There is a jellyfin android TV build in the app store and it works with every TV. Just costs about 50 dollarydoos
Similar price for a lifetime Plex pass (until end of April)... just saying...
True and while they are both enshitifying their services. Somehow in this one area Google seems to be going slower. And making slightly less bonehead moves
I can speak from my experience with an Apple TV, the application "Infuse" works amazing with a jellyfin server. Though the application is essentially $1 month subscription, but works across all your apple devices, if you have any. I think it's worth it.
Additionally, the official app for Android TV worked pretty well when I last tried it on an Nvidia Shield
Yeah.
Jellyfin is spectacular for LAN usage on two computers. Once you start using devices (because, you know, that is what people tend to plug into their TVs...) or going on travel, it rapidly becomes apparent that it just isn't a competitor.
Hell, a quick google suggests jellyfin STILL doesn't have caching of media for offline viewing. Plex's works maybe 40% of the time but... 40% is still higher than 0%.
I have a lifetime pass for Plex and encourage anyone who even kind of cares to get one next time it is on sale (or shortly before the scheduled price hike). I have tried Jellyfin a few times over the years and... it is basically exactly what I hate with FOSS "alternatives". It isn't an alternative in the slightest but people insist on talking it up because they want it to be and that just makes people less willing to try genuinely good alternatives.
To put it bluntly, Plex is an "offline netflix" as it were. Jellyfin is a much better version of smbstation and all the other stuff we used to stream porn to our playstations back in the day.
Jellyfin allows you to download whatever you want to your local device. But in a world of streaming, it seems to be a much smaller usecase. I take my tablet camping with me all the time, download some shows via Jellyfin and watch via Jellyfin. Maybe you're using the term "caching" differently from the use case, but if local files is what you're after, it absolutely does it. Just click download in a couple of different locations.
Yeah, I don't know what that dude's on about. My kids download stuff from jellyfin to their tablets all the time for road trips.
Did they? Or is that still the old hack of "just download the raw file. Your tablet is just a computer"?
Because I didn't see it advertised on the main web page and a quick google got me to https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin/discussions/364 which is open and abandoned tickets for the ios apps.
https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-offline-downloads?pid=16373#pid16373 suggests it is also in the same boat for android. You can find workarounds but they aren't using jellyfin.
Which is "fine". I watched WAY too many movies over the years with VLC on a laptop. But... why are we using a shim to treat a library as a streaming service in that case? Which gets back to Jellyfin just not actually being a Plex alternative for the majority of users.
Oh no! Please GOD, anything but tHe rAw fIlE!!
Seriously though, wtf did I just read? That can't possibly be your real stance, can it?
Half of my collection is DTS HD MA or TrueHD and many have HDR. Offline caching with transcoding is an essential feature if we want jellyfin to pull ahead. Berating people who are pointing out areas of improvement is not a winning strategy.
This is a huge problem. The blueray remux might be 80 gigs. Most children’s devices will already be filled with other crap.
Your kids will be ok without the 4K60 version of Paw Patrol.
Correct, they could do without, which is why I rely on Plex's transcoded downloads to cram a cross-country flight's worth of stuff onto their iPads.
Good suggestion though.
Or you just get a smaller version to begin with and save your hard drive space and your compute time.
You've kind of keyed in on one of the things I was hesitant to say:
There are two big uses for an "offline" media library.
Some people just use it for all the stuff they grabbed off the pirate bay (probably avoid TPB in 2025 but...). You don't really care about quality and just want to consume media.
Others, like myself, primarily use it to rip/back up their blu rays and UHDs and the like. If I am watching on my TV in the living room? I want that to be the highest quality I have available and I want to revel in every shadow gradient and so forth. If I am watching it on my computer? I don't need anywhere near that much detail. And on a tablet? Compress that shit like an exec at netflix just saw the storage arrays.
That is the benefit of transcoding and offline caching. It means you, as a "server", just focus on backing up your library/finding the best quality rips or whatever. And you, as a "user", don't have to worry about figuring out how many different versions to keep so that you always have an appropriate version for whatever your use case is that week.
I run ffmpeg on my phone. Alternately, I could shrink the file on my server and then download it without much trouble. You’re in a vanishingly small subset of users who know enough to care about file-size and know what can be done about it, but can’t be bothered to do it themselves.
I was avoiding suggesting getting more storage, but it sounds like in your case, keeping a 720p x265 version of each file(~1gb per movie) on-hand would cost you nothing.
Alternately I could keep using plex.
I mean, I bought the Lifetime Plexpass when it was on sale years back, so I have little reason to change my own setup, but I still have even less reason to stan them at Jellyfin's expense.
Seriously, one is a paid service executing rug-pulls, and the other is a free and open-source project. This level of nit-picking at Jellyfin is a shit stance to take.
I'm not so much nitpicking Jellyfin as I am highlighting how crucial transcoded downloads are for my use case, and attempting to get you to have empathy for that use case.
Like, based on the headline I was ready to try out Jellyfin because fuck Plex, but alas, I can't bail just yet.
Maybe being silent on the matter is best, people asking for features is a dumb way to improve software.
You might be right, it might play in an external player. I don't recall that or didn't notice. We're a few months from the last camping season. If it does play in an external player, seems like an inconvenience vs a dealbreaker, but I get it. We all have our things. I would argue that it's maybe a big deal for you and not a majority of users. Maybe a small but focused minority.
As someone who has attempted to switch to Jellyfin a few times now, I have to agree. Its a great project and my switch would have been successful if it was only me using it. But between my parents streaming remotely and my kids, its not even remotely close to what Plex offers currently.
I had the same experience with my parents. They have a Samsung TV and the Jellyfin experience was awful.
I ended up getting them a little N100 mini pc and installed Bazzite and the Jellyfin app from Flathub. You can configure it so it knows it’s on a TV, and responds to keyboard controls. I got them a remote from a company called Pepper Jobs that gives keyboard input and now they have a great experience with it. Even my mom, who’s a big technophobe, loves it.
My dad also has an LG TV in his workshop that doesn’t have a working Jellyfin app (cause it’s ten years old), and he uses the Jellyfin app for his Xbox on that one.
So the flatpak version of Jellyfin works for you? I cant get it to play more then one thing. hitting the play button just does nothing.
Yeah. I had to go into the settings and change some setting to get it to work with keyboard input.
https://emby.media/
They even have Android app. I mean, a server app.
Anyway, they still seem to paywall some things.
I love Jellyfin, but I always find something that I have a problem with when trying it, for example it has weak searching, tagging, and TV show identification compared to Plex.
I tried using it even as recent as yesterday for some searching and tagging, but it's searching, tagging, and even TV show identification has problems and is weak in comparison to Plex. I couldn't mass-tag certain videos which was annoying for me, I had to do it one-by-one and it ended up taking a long time, that was frustrating. Also, tags don't show up in searches anymore because it hurts performance apparently. With that said, maybe Plex has the same limitation, but it doesn't mean that Jellyfin has to. They are open-source, and they can be better than Plex, and in many ways they already are, but I keep running into pain points with how I want to use it, and it does feel a bit unfortunate. With that said, I'm a developer too, so I know it's not always that simple. It's just in some ways it feels less "complete" than Plex.
I'm still really pleased with Jellyfin though, and especially the future potential of it.
You can access Jellyfin through a browser, too. Is that an option for the Samsung TV?
I've got a Samsung TV and am nearly a complete Luddite (in the colloquial sense).
I managed to install the Jellyfin app on my TV just by following the step by step instructions on a website
I use Jellyfin client on my new Samsung TV via a Google TV dongle (ONN tv, $25 at Walmart). Seems to work well.
My only complaint is the stream volume has been very low after a recent update. Downsampling helps but seems like it shouldn' t be necessary.