[socalgal2]

I'm pretty happy with AppleTV except for the walled garden. I want to run Kodi. I do run it via XCode and a dev account but because of the app restrictions it's a 2nd class experience. Looked for alternatives like Jellyfin but the only ones on the app store all appear to spy on what you view.

[klausa]

You should check out Infuse.

Infuse is a better Plex app than Plex is; and it supports Jellyfin and a bunch of other data sources.

It is, IMHO, a platonic ideal of what a “tv-shaped” video player app should be.

[cdrnsf]

I run Infuse connected to Jellyfin on all of our Apple TVs and it's a wonderful experience.

[mrngld]

I'm not totally tracking what you're saying, Jellyfin isn't exactly Kodi, it's more like Plex, and Jellyfin does have an app in beta for AppleTV but the best way (arguably) to experience Jellyfin, Emby or possibly even Plex on any Apple product is the Infuse app.

[literatepeople]

Yeah I mean if you want something FOSS this isn't for you, but neither was a Roku which is what I was responding to

[prepend]

I run Plex and am pretty happy. Will likely eventually switch to Jellyfin as Plex is getting lamer and lamer.

[al_borland]

I’ve been a Plex user since the early days. I currently run it on a Synology NAS in a container, using the Plex app on the AppleTV as my primary client device. I tried setting up a Jellyfin container a few months ago as I’ve been concerned about the direction of Plex. It went poorly.

I have a fairly large library, which Plex never seemed to care about. Jellyfin choked. It took forever to go through it all, and I seem to remember questioning of it was working; it wasn’t clear. Plex on the other hand makes it pretty entertaining to watch covers flip over as the metadata is loaded in to see the progress. Then every app I tried on the AppleTV also seemed to have trouble. The one that worked best had to create its own local cache of everything, which required I spend hours browsing to every screen and waiting before it became reasonably smooth. After that, the layout was still pretty strange. I think it would have worked just as well to point it at a file share. Actually playing videos was hit and miss in every app I tried.

I’m still using Plex. If I need to move to Jellyfin at some point, I feel like I’ll need to build a server with a lot more power than Plex requires. Of course that’s just a theory… a theory that will be expensive to test.

For all the fanfare Jellyfin gets online, I expected it to be better. It made me question how honest the people pushing it are. But maybe they have small libraries or only tested it with 5 movies for the review. I don’t think that’s a real-world experience.

[Marsymars]

> For all the fanfare Jellyfin gets online, I expected it to be better. It made me question how honest the people pushing it are. But maybe they have small libraries or only tested it with 5 movies for the review. I don’t think that’s a real-world experience.

I don't love crapping on open source software, but I had the same experience recently - installed Jellyfin because I wanted to test hardware-accelerated AV1 transcoding, and the whole app experience felt rough compared to Plex. The UI/UX really needs some TLC.

[al_borland]

> I don't love crapping on open source software

The software is probably fine for what it is. I mostly meant to crap on those pushing it and claiming it’s better than Plex, when, a least for large libraries, it isn’t. It’s important people have the right expectations going in.

Plex has almost a decade of development on Jellyfin, and Plex itself was born as an OS X fork for XBMC, so it got a big head start from open source itself.

[lossyalgo]

Got a 7-year old QNAP NAS recently and wanted to try Jellyfin. Installed, running, indexing... 6 hours later NAS is no longer reachable. Nothing worked so had to hard reboot. Afterwards the Jellyfin service wouldn't start anymore. Installed Plex (via app store) and 2 weeks later everything is indexed and streams to multiple devices, though I did have to google a few times to fix things related to crashing while transcoding and playing subtitles. It was literally 2 toggles in the UI. The only irksome thing is it doesn't let me play audio files (which could be related to the crappy built-in Plex app on the cheap projector). I also wish there was a way to disable all the (paid) cloud offerings, I want it to be LAN-only.

To be fair, Jellyfin page doesn't list my NAS as being supported, so I had to "manually" install it (a couple commands and clicks).

[CrimsonCape]

Jellyfin's worst aspect is the opinionated file structure. You have to set up folders the way it wants, and then the resulting UI browser is what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Pretty sure it's done this way for automated metadata discovery.

Ideally, this would be designed in two parts: separate the file structure from the metadata discovery mechanism.

I personally want a file structure managed by the OS. Let me make folders and nested subfolders to whatever structure I prefer.

Then make the metadata discovery slightly more manual. Click a media file, click a hypothetical "add metadata" button, and then a simple search box with "is this your movie?" and click apply to import metadata from a search result. easy peasy.

The UI is clearly meant to resemble a typical media app but falls short if the end user prefers, for example, foobar2000's UI.

[ssl-3]

I'm OK with structuring file layouts however it wants. I'm even OK with giving Jellyfin a whole directory tree full of symlinks that are organized exactly how it desires, and then automating its ongoing maintenance.

The thing I'm not OK with about Jellyfin is that the common answer for remote access involves setting up a reverse proxy or a VPN or some other darned thing that I will never be able to talk my mom into configuring her Roku to be able to use.

[toraway]

Yeah that's the Number 1 issue I have with Jellyfin.

It seems to be tolerating whatever semi-organized structure I give it until it just faceplants on some specific show and I have to tediously reorganize the directory structure/names and manual refresh until the metadata lines up correctly.

I like that I don't feel I'm about to be rugpulled on Jellyfin and the client is pretty solid for me but the library scanning is pretty aggravating at times.