[pudgywalsh]

It's not amazing, it's as good as it is. Which is to say not great.

There is a crazy amount of bugs which I have no confidence will ever get fixed.

If you're the type that enjoys tinkering with obscure Linux settings for hours on end, which are certain to break if you dare to update anything, it may be for you.

[zeagle]

I have no conflict of interest and feel bad for you if you've wasted time on it, but for anyone else who is considering trying it I have literally have had no issues with mine including setting up nvidia hw transcoding on a debian nas. Only thing I can think of is briefly the android tv client lagged on a major version RC so was incompatible till it updated on my box. I have to check the change log sometimes because of how seamless updating has been (kind of like paperless-ngx and immich as another plug!).

[port11]

Setting HW-encoding is a tad complicated indeed, it’s hard to debug WHY it’s not working. But once you have it, you’re good. Jellyfin has been rock solid for us in 2 years since we ditched Netflix and Prime Video.

[dd8601fn]

I haven't touched a media server setup since like XBMC and earlier tuner board + dvr era stuff, but recently did a Jellyfin setup for all my purchased physical media.

It was crazy smooth for me. TMDB stuff just worked. Movies, TV, extras organization just worked. Apple TV, Roku, and iOS devices as clients just worked. The Apple TV client isn't great, but they're rewriting a big chunk of it now.

It doesn't do the sharing scenario that people are solving with Plex, but for my purposes it has been perfect.

[clepto]

I use Infuse on the Apple TV and it’s great. I’m not sure how the free version of it compares, but they have a lifetime license for it that I believe is about $100. Definitely worth it if you have a large variety of media and frequently watch on the Apple TV specifically.

[dd8601fn]

I did a build from their repo and pushed it to the Apple TV, just to try out the rewrite changes. It's considerably improved, and plenty nice for my purposes. I didn't feel like I had to, though. I'll delete it and use the app store version when they cut a release.

I think a lot of people are doing stuff that's well beyond what I use it for. I just have my blurays and dvds on there, so it's possible I don't know I'm missing some important stuff that other people need.

[rgovostes]

Infuse is a nice app but note that it does not use the media server's transcoding service, so it can work poorly trying to stream remotely, while Jellyfin's transcoding-aware web client works better. The Jellyfin app for Apple TV was pretty unusable last time I tried it, though.

This sort of underscores the ancestor's complaint: It's not exactly dead simple to set up and understand, the community recommends third-party apps that have only partial support, etc.

[Y-bar]

I really like Infuse, I use it with Jellyfin to stream to my Apple TV. But there is one thing that I have repeatedly been irritated by, and it is that it cannot search by tags, nor can it search for words in the description of movies.

[zeagle]

I held off buying an apple TV mainly cause I don't want to purchase Infuse for DV/HDR/Atmos content. Is there a decent client otherwise?

[tick_tock_tick]

> There is a crazy amount of bugs which I have no confidence will ever get fixed.

Like what honestly I've been running one for years and have had nearly zero issues.

[petepete]

I've used Jellyfin for years and my experience is currently incredibly smooth and works like a dream for the whole family.

I only use it for movies and TV shows though, the live TV experience (with a HDHomeRun) was incredibly buggy and slow, and once you've tried it and failed, it seems like it's impossible to remove the remnants of it from your interface.

The music and audiobook support never felt like it was as polished as TV/movies either, so I gave up on that.

Now I use:

* Jellyfin for films/TV shows

* Channels for live TV

* Navidrome for music

* Audioookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts

[thaumasiotes]

My jellyfin installation chokes on audiobooks. There is a very noticeable pause between each track that it plays, despite the entire thing being queued.

That pause is presumably also present when playing music, but no one notices because each song is its own track. Audiobook tracks split in places where a pause would never occur naturally.

The second-most-annoying trait of Jellyfin in my experience is technically not a bug, but should definitely be fixed. It hardcodes expectations of how to determine what season and episode number to assign to files. And if you overwrite them, it will re-mangle them on scan unless you take precautions to stop it.

As far as Jellyfin is concerned, your files must include a tag of the form S__E__ somewhere in the filename. Being located in a folder called "Season 2" with names like "11 - name of episode" won't work. Substrings like 第2集 won't work. Setting actual metadata tags on the file ( https://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php/FFmpeg_Metadata ) doesn't work; jellyfin ignores them.

Let me provide a per-folder template for extracting season / episode information. Jellyfin already lets you prefer embedded artwork to whatever it finds on the internet. Why enforce hallucinated episode numbers when explicit ones are clearly present?

[tick_tock_tick]

I've never tried it for audiobooks frankly didn't even know it supported them.

> Let me provide a per-folder template for extracting season / episode information.

That's frankly not what I would call a bug and a bunch of work for near zero benefit. Not to be mean but why do you care? and if it really bothers you just use hardlinks let jellyfin see what it needs and you can have your pretty version for youself.

[cyberrock]

I really dislike this paradigm that the user needs to become a human DBMS, and rename/link files or write template rules for the media server to understand. It was understandable back in XBMC days but it just feels silly now. Surely it can extract some Musicbrainz-like fingerprint from the media instead of only relying on filename.

But the truly disgusting part is how XBMC/Kodi/Plex/Jellyfin just reassigns the files to another show and there is absolutely no way to audit what's going on other than realizing that some show has two files per episodes or some show you don't have is in the library. Why can't this be easier to inspect?

After two decades I just gave up and use the Home Video mode (just show me my directories mode) on Jellyfin to avoid having to deal with metadata.

[thaumasiotes]

For a related issue, Kim Possible was aired out of order, leading to various problems if you watch the episodes in the order they were aired. I am given to understand this is fairly common for older TV shows.

Jellyfin has major problems dealing with this common situation. To Jellyfin, the source of truth is imdb. Imdb numbers Kim Possible episodes in the order they were aired. If you want the metadata that jellyfin scrapes from imdb, and you also want to watch the episodes in an appropriate order, you have to do this:

1. Number all of the episodes in airing order.

2. Ask Jellyfin to fetch the metadata.

3. Renumber the episodes into the correct order.

4. Remember never to ask Jellyfin to scan any directory that contains those episodes again.

If you mess up, Jellyfin will attach descriptions and preview images to every file that aren't, technically, related to the episode in that file.

[rebeccaskinner]

Jellyfin will let you set up alternate metadata providers and select between different episode ordering if available (https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-resolved-dvd-order-instead-of-a...). For tv shows especially TVDB will tend to have alternate orderings most often, and TMDB will occasionally have alternate orderings available.

[bigstrat2003]

That isn't a Jellyfin thing, Plex has the same issue. And both Jellyfin and Plex give you mechanisms to resolve that issue (using the alternate episode ordering that the metadata provider has, rather than the default one, or using another metadata provider if need be).

[thaumasiotes]

> I've never tried it for audiobooks frankly didn't even know it supported them.

It's a music player. How could it not support audiobooks? You think it will rate your tracks and refuse to play them if they're insufficiently "musical"?

[ncallaway]

I think I have an idea of how it might not support audio books. What if audio books had the following issue:

> There is a very noticeable pause between each track that it plays, despite the entire thing being queued.

> That pause is presumably also present when playing music, but no one notices because each song is its own track. Audiobook tracks split in places where a pause would never occur naturally.

It would almost be like it wasn't really built with audio books in mind, but was rather designed around music.

[optionalsquid]

> It would almost be like it wasn't really built with audio books in mind, but was rather designed around music.

If Jellyfin was designed around music, then I would expect it to support gap-less playback out of the box. Albums where each track seamlessly transitions into the next are not that rare

[jorams]

> As far as Jellyfin is concerned, your files must include a tag of the form S__E__ somewhere in the filename. Being located in a folder called "Season 2" with names like "11 - name of episode" won't work.

I mean, I've got many like that and yes it does work. `s01/01 - Pilot.mkv` is recognized as season 1, episode 1, etc.

[NegativeLatency]

Could try submitting a patch?

[amiga386]

While I'd agree that the 10.11.x releases have terrible performance on some APIs to the extent that I rolled back to 10.10.x and marked it as held, until they release 12.x...

Jellyfin is a daily driver for me and works amazingly. I have thousands of films, TV shows, books, music, and it lets me navigate and use them perfectly well.

I have a wonderful little Linux media server.

What sort of bugs affect you?

[Computer0]

I just put media in a folder and then watch it I rarely have to manage my Jellyfin server

[RAM-bunctious]

Obviously not everyone will necessarily have the same experience as me, but I can't say I've encountered any problems.

I can't actually even think of any bugs. Nor do I have the same patience for tinkering with settings these days. For me, it just works, with the obvious exceptions of allowing it through the firewall, but that's unavoidable.

[FatherOfCurses]

I'm sorry that you have had a bad experience.

I have been running Jellyfin in a container on a Linux server for three years now. I am streaming video to Infuse on three Apple TV boxes and music to a Kodi installation on a Raspberry Pi with no issues.

[cpburns2009]

I'm been running Jellyfin in a container as well for 4 years. I stream to a couple Roku devices. The only problem I've encountered is Roku doesn't support DVDSUB and Jellyfin recently added automatic overlaying of DVDSUB server-side which drastically slows down seeking on Roku.

[terminalgravity]

Not my experience. Only bugs ive had are with it not correctly recognizing a media file. That was fairly easy to correct on a few files. Would be a pain if it missed for many.

[ErroneousBosh]

> If you're the type that enjoys tinkering with obscure Linux settings for hours on end, which are certain to break if you dare to update anything, it may be for you.

Can you suggest an alternative?

[whynotmaybe]

Maybe it's a Linux thing?

I've been using it on Windows for years with multiple devices and it's been working flawlessly.

[KingMob]

Could be, but it also had problems on my mac. I had to abandon Jellyfin for Emby over it.

Every so often, Jellyfin would choke ingesting a video. Worse, it would hang the whole ingestion process, so videos later in the list wouldn't get processed. Restarting didn't fix it, either, I had to delete the problematic video (which notably, played ok in things like VLC and IINA).

[abnercoimbre]

Tell me more about Emby. Solid replacement?

[KingMob]

Mostly. It hasn't had the problem of choking on a any videos, at least. Some features are locked behind a paywall, but nothing I need.

Biggest issue is it's not designed around transitory servers, like a laptop. It really wants a server with a static IP. Unfortunately, JellyFin had the exact same problem, so that's a wash. Mostly it just means logging in and out of the TV client every so often.

[evdubs]

It has worked flawlessly for me on Linux.

[doctorpangloss]

I just had an LLM set it up and never had to touch it again.

[type0]

It's probably your config or hardware issues

[Bluescreenbuddy]

I'm on Windows and it's been close to perfect. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯