- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
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 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
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
I was just able to download it on every PC I have
So, no, then.
Just use the god damn browser
Ah, if you’re allergic to flatpaks and can’t convince your distribution to include it in their repository then you can always build it yourself - https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-media-player
Or just use their web based client with a browser of your choice. :)
No idea what Flatpak is, much? Jellyfin is open-source. If your distro isn’t providing you a .deb or tarball to your liking, that’s not on the Jellyfin project.
Why would you ever bother to use either option when you can just access it via the WebUI on Firefox?
Because that basically requires transcoding for modern codecs. H265? Transcode. Subtitles? Transcode. The JF client on the same hardware can usually direct play.
Don’t ask me? I’ll ftp before I’ll WebUI like so, but for online viewing, I’ll take streaming please. My kids, wife, and mother-in-law find that a million times more convenient.
Meanwhile, there’s a dude in these comments hating on the notion that Jellyfin’s app will download the Raw file for offline viewing purposes. Please, do not ask me to pretend to care what is going on in that person’s head. In my world, using VLC to play my files is a perk. Gimme that yummy 2x or slow-mo as I see fit, please.
I use Findroid for its great UI but also its ability to download and watch offline. It’s a better experience and I was surprised Jellyfin Android didn’t support it.
Flatpaks aren’t the worst, at least it’s not a snap only
What do people have against flatpaks? I like them.
Part of it is that Ubuntu/Canonical so aggressively pushed Snaps which became a huge culture war. So you have people who hate the idea of those style of packages because they hate Snap AND people who hate flatpak because they are Team Ubuntu for some reason.
And the other aspect is that it is incredibly space inefficient (by the very nature of bundling in dependencies) and is prone to “weirdness” when it comes to file system permissions and the like. And many software projects kind of went all in on them because it provides a single(-ish) target to build for rather than having a debian and an arch and a redhad and a…
Ah, I see. I’ve not tried Snaps, been avoiding Ubuntu because of Canonical’s weirdly corporate angle. Once they baked in Amazon into Ubuntu I was out.
I like the bundling of deps. Sure it’s inefficient, but it runs, and storage comes cheap nowadays anyway.
Storage is cheap until it isn’t.
On my desktop where I have something like 6 TB of NVME storage because I am a sicko? The only thing that makes me think twice about a flatpak is if I need to give it access to devices or significant parts of my filesystem (yay permissions weirdness).
On my laptop where I can have one drive and replacing it involves opening the entire laptop AND reinstalling Fedora (or dealing with clonezilla/
dd)? Yeah… I very much care about just how much bloat I am dealing with. And, as the other person pointed out, flatpaks can balloon REAL fast.A lot of flatpaks early on wouldn’t survive a major point release upgrade or worst case would hold on to dependencies and the user would end up with an unbootable mess after an upgrade.
I haven’t seen that recently though.
However I regularly run appimages on my fedora silverblue system so take what I say with a grain of salt.
If dependencies are articulated (and maintained…) properly, it is very doable and is intrinsically tied to what semantic versioning is actually supposed to represent. So
appfoodepends inlibbar@2:2.9and so forth. Of course, the reality is thatlibbaris poorly maintained and has massive API/header breaking changes every point release and was dependent on a bug inlibbar@2.1.3.4.5anyway.Its one of the reasons why I like approaches like Portage or Spack that are specifically about breaking an application’s dependencies down and concretizing. Albeit, they also have the problem where they overconcretize and you have just as much, if not more, bloat. But it theoretically provides the best of both worlds… at the cost of making a single library take 50 minutes to install because you are compiling everything for the umpteenth time.
And yeah… I run way too many appimages too.
The space inefficiency is definitely there.
I find that clients, such as Jellyfin, Moonlight and Signal, works just fine as flatpaks but with those three apps my /var/lib/flatpak/ lands on 6.4GB.
When I temporarily had Discord installed it grew to 6.7GB, so the inefficiency is frontloaded and lessens the more of them you use.
Don’t ever connect a “smart” tv to the internet. It’s only going to become shit and steal your data.
Raspberry Pi, old pc or any kind of other external player will always be better for connectivity and control.
I agree, but having looked down this road, finding a quality external player that users will understand and is inexpensive is … not easy.
$20 Walmart Onn 4k. Degoogle it if you want or just slap smarttube and jellyfin/plex on it.
Pi running Kodi/libreelec
If you’re an Apple user the AppleTV is exactly this. It’s probably Apple’s most fairly priced computing device.
I mean that literally appletv. Barely costs more than a Roku and is vastly better than every other device on the market.
True, but there’s not much one can do about others’ stubbornness. I’ve been using cheap Android boxes with Kodi or the JF client installed. They make sense to my non-techie family. Dedicated boxes are better (something that can run CoreELEC, OpenELEC) but those are harder to find.
An old pc running Linux mint and kodi is my current setup in the living room.
I like my Shield TV: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/shield-tv/
I did need to install a custom launcher on it when the standard AndroidTV launcher added ads.
Roku does it well enough. not perfectly but it’s still not as shit as my Google tv
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/roku-says-unpopular-autoplay-ads-are-just-a-test/
hmm that’s concerning. we really need a roku/chromecast equivalent that isnt some proprietary mess (home assistant is finally getting into those with voice assistant units)
Facebook made one. They attached a gorgeous voice-controlled video-chat-on-tv setup to it, and released it just as they lost all consumer trust.
Then they decided it wasn’t selling.
So they killed it instead of open-sourcing it
just saying.
While I agree with you 100% and every tv in my home is under this mantra I get where the parent comment is coming from. Family members and friends visiting have asked about access to my Jellyfin library and they aren’t necessarily keen on buying additional hardware, aren’t willing to educate themselves on setting up options that would be objectively better for connectivity, privacy, control, etc.
They just want an app in their TVs app store. It’s convenient and easy. I disagree with them but I don’t blame them. It’s human nature to go for the option that results in expending the least amount of effort. But then they don’t get my sweet Jellyfin library. If you cant run the client or kodi then I can’t help you, sorry.
Remember when programming a VCR was a stand-up comedy joke?
Yes and I also remember when there were stupid things like early universal remotes that had big timers on them to circumvent the internal programming needs (but then you had to program the remote and sync it)
Managing your own AV equipment has always been a pain in the ass.
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 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.
There’s a jellyfish app on Xbox?
Yep. My dad said it’s working great for him.
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.
Just played a bunch of episodes on Fedora KDE (Flatpak from flathub, Jellyfin client v.1.11.1, Jellyfin server v.10.10.6) without any trouble.
Are you by chance using Wayland?
yep!
The only major pain point I had with Jellyfin was getting it on my Samsung TV yes. It is absolutely not a good recommendation for people with Samsungs unless they’re willing to get their hands very dirty. Now, once I got the app side loaded on there, it works perfectly well, but the process sucked ass.
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.
I’ve never had an issue with the apps. It’s on my Chromecast and my android phone, and I typically stream to the TV from my phone.
My only issue is that they require a real cert (which is good tbh) and I am having trouble getting letsencrypt working due to my isp blocking port 80 and me dragging my feet getting DNS working
Let’s Encrypt supports DNS verification, if you have access to update the zone file. It makes automation harder, but there are scripts to do the DNS update for the verification.
@bamboo @Chocrates “acme.sh” is pretty much the easiest solution for that.
https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh #letsencrypt
Yeah that’s what I’m doing next. My domain name/DNS provider doesn’t let me do it though so i have to self host DNS first. Turned into quite a rabbit hole, and would have just worked if I could just get traffic on port 80!
@Chocrates acme.sh has a manual option…that way it should work with your current provider
https://emby.media/
They even have Android app. I mean, a server app.
Anyway, they still seem to paywall some things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s honestly kind of silly to suggest that only technically minded users care about file sizes. We’re lucky enough to even know why the file is so big. My regular friends will just complain that it won’t fit, blame jellyfin, and then go back to Netflix.
You know that regular people with 64GB phones exist right? Suggesting that a non technical person should just know that they need to convert a 30GB remux using ffmpeg is absurd.
Your regular friends are constantly using your Plex server to download files for offline viewing, eh?
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.
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.
As I was curious, Findroid gives you an android client that allows offline mode and downloading/playing/removing movies from the client.
Seems Infuse Pro (paid) version also has support for it if you’re an iPhone user.
edit: I see the discussion regarding filesizes and I believe that Findroid is downloading the raw file in the background, so for those that wish for smaller transcoded versions in the cache it isn’t a solution. I don’t own any apple devices so can’t tell how Infuse handles it.
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.
Huh? I used jellyfin just fine in the hospital on public WiFi on my ancient busted iPad air [some number].
The only thing I did was install pivpn and upload my VPN profile file to Google drive so I can remote into my network. I legit never even had to set anything up it just worked, didn’t even need to know the IP of the server because my locally run DNS server (and failing that, the basic hostname based DNSMasq in the router) took care of everything.
I don’t even have any reverse proxy or firewall because I still pretend to value my sanity and my time, nor did I expose it to the internet either, thanks to almighty NAT.
Didn’t have to do any caching or anything crazy like that, no idea what you’re talking about, but I think there’s an option to download the files right through jellyfin.
I watched star trek TAS while having fun with opioids and it was a great time.
That’s nice.
That doesn’t work if you are on an airplane (unless you want to spend the entire flight downloading one episode). Or if you just don’t want to deal with hotel wifi. Or if you just don’t want to expose your internal home network at all.
Which is the point and why this is one of those big features of plex that there are so many tickets and requests to get into jellyfin et al. Because yes, you can just copy files from your NAS to your phone’s internal storage (assuming you don’t care about transcoding and the like)… at which point there isn’t much use to a metadata oriented media server/service.
Or you can just set up Plex to always download the next 10 episodes of whatever show you are watching when it has network access. I mean… that probably won’t work (see: 40%) but when it does, it is awesome. Which is the “it just works” functionality.
Which gets back to the issue where, because it is FOSS, it is the greatest thing ever and anyone asking for anything else is wrong and stupid. Which is a shame because if the Jellyfin devs could actually get the “download the next N episodes” functionality to reliably work (even at 80-90%) it would be a killer app. And, for what it is worth, I have liked the devs a lot when I interacted with them in the past. But the users and evangelists are just… what we can see in this thread.