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Synthetic7346: I can't believe the wifi got a client before ps5
nout: Jellyfin is great in that it just works. I managed to install it on Samsung TV with Tizen OS and it has been just solid experience for many years now.
lamasery: Forced server transcoding for everything. Ouch. Thought maybe at least mpeg2 or something would play directly.
gkhartman: Honestly surprised it took this long. I guess it's less than ideal, since the wii doesn't support modern tv resolutions.
dmonitor: The Wii supports 240p, though, which is very hard to replicate these days.
Acrobatic_Road: Or 480i if you want to watch classic anime on a CRT.
Forgeties79: Man what can’t you do with a Wii? Didn’t someone post an article the other detailing how they booted Mac OS X on it?
dddddaviddddd: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47691730
nerptastic: Agreed. I honestly chose Jellyfin over plex because I preferred the branding, not sure what I’m missing. I really enjoy Jellyfin, and thy seemingly have support for most devices in some way.My GF has it set up on her iPad, phone, computer. App is on our TV and has no issues. We have Netflix at home. She’s non technical and hasn’t had any trouble once I gave her a login.The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of her lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home ;) (for now)
shrinks99: Noticed that Jellyfin had inched out Plex when sorting by popularity on the TrueNAS app catalogue the other day (45,178 installs vs Plex's 42,225). The existance of this project seems to confirm that the dev ecosystem around it is getting stronger!
monocasa: And that plex really pissed off the community by changing its pricing model.
NathanielK: It can't really decode 480p/i very well.The fact that it has component video out makes it a swiss army knife for everything else 240p/480i/480p.
monocasa: Has anyone tried to horizontally scale jellyfin to running on a multi node cluster?I'm wanting to set it up for around 20 households to share, and with transcoding that exceeds a single (cheap) node.
rtpg: For hardware acceleration you might be interested in the remote hardware acceleration strategy...https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/h...The jellyfin DB itself is unfortunately sqlite instead of being DB agnostic. Maybe you could hack together something such that only one node handles writes and everyone else handles reads... if getting multiple cheap nodes gets your more bandwidth. I have to imagine that jellyfin fairly quickly stops being in charge of the media stream directly.But yeah I think the transcoding and the size of your data pipe is the only "hard" part. The DB read/writes themselves are going to not be an issue (I think)
lamasery: > The only hiccup was when she tried to watch during one of her lectures. I had to explain that Jellyfin is only at home ;) (for now)Tailscale got me outside-the-home Jellyfin with a grand total of maybe 30 minutes of effort, including signing up, getting my server connected, and getting it on my MacBook, AppleTV, and phone. I'd never used it before.
lamasery: The one trick is to make sure your file naming & organization is good. They have good documentation on it. Everything's pretty much automatic then, almost zero further work. The naming conventions aren't too bad, and the resulting file tree would be a reasonable way to organize your files regardless.
jauntywundrkind: I gave Jellyfin up and went back to upnp/dlna after the Android and iOS clients would keep losing sync, or wouldn't show me some season of a show, or would pick a white background on white text for a show.The pain just kept adding up. It was quite nice most of the time. But every single time I reached for my phone, I was wondering how badly it was going to go. Quitting Jellyfin seemed like an excellent choice.Upnp/dlna is much cruder; very direct raw BubbleUPnP client. But it works so well for me. Their transcoding server also is quite good and I can run it on any machine I want, isn't coupled to anything, can switch between them easily.Bubbleupnp is also great because it lets me turn tablets into cast screens. I love that so much. Good general protocols rock; having media server, media renderer, then separate control points was a great model, good job UPnP.
tech234a: Can anyone comment on the security of Jellyfin? When I had last looked into it, it seemed like Jellyfin had a somewhat weak security model that made me question switching family members to it from Plex.
circularfoyers: The database changes late last year is laying the grounds for other database engines[1].[1] https://jellyfin.org/posts/jellyfin-release-10.11.0/#the-lib...
altmanaltman: I started out my home server journey with Plex but it just kept getting worse, forcing me to switch to Jellyfin, which imo works just as well and seems to not fall into the whole pay us to stream your media business practice yet. Paywalling such a core feature was pretty harsh
throwaway894345: Heh, I just spent 15 minutes debugging a Jellyfin bug where my WebOS client thought that the startup wizard had not been completed yet (I tried restarting it several times, but the thing that did the trick was enabling debug logging and _then_ it started working properly--probably a coincidence). Jellyfin is the best in class, but the bar is in hell. It can't be run in any kind of a high availability configuration, so if your only instance goes down or has any kind of issue, you have to jump on and fix it immediately or you can't use it. When something goes wrong, some of the logs show up in stderr, but most are just written as plain files to a directory. It's free software, so you get what you pay for, but it's pretty buggy.
tengbretson: Plex could reverse this trend in a week if they decided to prioritize work on any feature that their core market actually wanted.
zythyx: What more does Plex need? I would consider myself a power user of Plex and it does everything I need it to do. I would think the only thing I can think of is fully self-hosted login instead of their cloud option, but I'm glad we have that option because I don't want to handle the authentication of my friends and family
mystraline: Intel ARC 380's are ideal at 4k realtime transcoded streams. And theyre cheap as well.You could probably do a sticky round robin reverse proxy with a few backends doing transcode.The biggest issue is bandwidth, but you probably knew that.
sbinnee: I love this kind of project. I am pretty sure the developer had a Wii console sitting around somewhere and thought about how to make it useful again. Wait, I have a PS2 sitting around somewhere…
heavyset_go: Don't expose it to the internet unless you know what you're doing, or put it on a VPS you don't care about.Ideally keep it behind a VPN and give your family members access to it that way, and let local devices on your LAN connect to it without a VPN.
VonGuard: The poster you're asking this to is probably talking about plug-ins. Plex, very long ago, supported plug-ins, but it no longer does. Plug-ins were usually for adding in support for other media scrapers (porn and anime), or even other media types, like audiobooks.Additionally, Plex tends to revise their UI and inner workings in a way that favors everything but the core media sharing platform. They add TV stations, they mix in their streaming ad-supported channels with your search results, and push them before the friends and family stuff, making it tough to help other navigate to shared libraries.I think, overall, Plex is a good shepherd for their product, but everyone knows the enshitificaiton process is inevitable. It's just a question of how long the timeline between "Plex is usable" and "Plex is sold to private equity and is now utter shit." I've been pleasantly surprised with the length, so far. But having an escape hatch is always a good idea, and Jellyfin seems to be nearing a parity.
ssl-3: Those are fine ideas.But I'm not all about getting something like Tailscale to work with my elderly mother's Roku device, nor teaching her how to use it.
ssl-3: It needs more of the feature that makes it a networked player for the media I already have (which works great -- once a person gets to it), and less of the misfeature that is the sideshow also-ran ad-supported and rental live streaming and on-demand offerings (which I will never, ever use -- and that Jellyfin lacks altogether).Plex been swinging in the wrong direction for a number of years now.
heavyset_go: Yes, it was annoying, SQLite sucks as single source of truth for clusters, and it cost less than $100 to just buy hardware that can handle multiple high res transcoding sessions at once, but not 20 households' worth.
nout: I actually like the conventions. Movie name and a year in parentheses and then it can be whatever. E.g.Movie (2016).whatever.zzz/whatever.mkv
galbar: FWIW, I have managed 10 simultaneous live transcoded streams on a ARC B580 and it could have managed a few more. With couple of them you cold be fine.The other aspect is you could share the media storage over NFS and have multiple jellyfin instances running for different houeshold groups.With 2 or 3 nodes like that I think you could make it work.
necessary: Here's an easy one: working downloads on mobile. Plex offline downloads are notoriously buggy.
aidenn0: Now we just need a tvOS client that can play music...
ray_v: I set my dad up with a Linux box as a daily driver for him - he keeps the desktop on , and the roku jellyfin now has a clean proxy into jellyfin over the tailscale network. Giving him a desktop I can remote into was a great decision that paid dividends for him :)
NoMoreNicksLeft: The last time I was involved in a thread like this, I was banned from r/plex.I pointed out that Plex should do ebooks. It is a natural fit. They keep track of how far in a series or a show you are, they could keep track of where you are in a book. Many of the Plex idioms transfer well. It has a clear visual style that helps you to pick out the shows you might try, or shows like those you've already watched.BUT IT'S NOT EVEN MEDIA, YOU'RE STUPIDBooks were the first media, you must be illiterate.WHY WOULD I WANT TO READ BOOKS ON MY BIGSCREEN TV!Plex runs on my iPhone. And on yours too.[banhammered]But if you need more than one feature, I'm sure that in 10 or 15 minutes I could come up with a 90 page list of features. Without even trying.>I would think the only thing I can think of is fully self-hosted login instead of their cloud optionWell shit. Even you can come up with one thing. Plex was awesome, and then Plex wanted to be the shittiest version of whatever CBS is calling their streaming service.
ssl-3: Indeed.I watched a backup of a [480p24] DVD movie with a (hacked) Wii quite a long time ago, as a fallback after the PS3 I was using got tripped up on that film's Cinavia[1] watermarks.The Wii worked worked, but it was evident that it was barely keeping up with decoding the MPEG 2 video from the disc and putting it on the screen. Perhaps there is or was better software for that job, but there were some glitches and brief hangs.[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia
lamasery: Yeah in my case it mostly just encouraged me to clean up some nonsense I’d been meaning to anyway.I think some folks who have strong opinions about things like organizing their files under folders by director or something find it grating, but it did nothing but help my structure.
lamasery: Get your elderly mother an Apple TV and infuse, then connect with Tailscale. It’s pretty friggin’ smooth in daily operation. Apple TV’s UI is no easier to get lost in than Roku, and actually has fewer pitfalls if you toggle one setting (the one that makes one home tap open the Apple TV app, and a second press while in that app actually go home, by default; switch that to always go home on any press of that button no matter what)I dunno if Tailscale works on Roku but otherwise that would indeed be entirely viable too, last I saw Jellyfin’s app on there is really good. Likely need a server powerful enough to transcode, though, lots of (all?) Roku devices don’t have hardware decoding for newer codecs like h.265. That’s one big benefit of an Apple TV, it can hardware decode damn near everything.
asixicle: You can point Tailscale toward a $5 exit-node VPS and Caddy/nginx through a cheapo-but-memorable-domain to get a Jellyfin Dashboard up in a browser. I assume running the domain and port through the Jellyfin Roku app would work fine (can't be sure as I've never used a Roku).Just mind your ACLs
ssl-3: Perhaps.Y'all (collectively) have some good ideas.But she likes the Roku. She's even got silicone skins for the remotes (plural; spares!), and two of them are tethered near the chairs that her and dad tend to sit in.Also: The Roku stuff already exists, and is paid for, and it works with Plex (without a VPN, because my local Plex container didn't come with the caveat to avoid exposing it to the world).Buying them one or more Apple TV devices to use instead seems expensive and likely to fail somehow.Switching them to (cheap? linux?) PCs also sounds expensive and bad, particularly with my dad. He's certainly had more years to learn how to use a computer than I have, but he's spent most of the recent decades deliberately avoiding them. He hates them, and he doesn't want to learn them. He'd fall apart and give up on television entirely if I gave him a PC with a slick Logitech K400 to run it with. (He can drive a Roku with Youtube TV and Plex like a pro, but that's mostly only a D-pad and a back button.)---But since you and others have mentioned it: Transcoding. That's really not a big problem for many vaguely-recent PCs. With Plex, at least: The quite old i7-6700k desktop box I use for this transcodes to h.264 like a beast using its paltry iGPU, and does h.265 just fine with an old nVidia RTX 2080 if I elect to use that instead. Either way works well and never breaks a sweat.It may have been a powerful machine a decade ago, but a used computer with a 6700k (or so) to serve media with is cheap these days. (And a brand-new power-sipping N150 box does transcoding waaaay better, even in credit-card form factor.)
ruined: it's 480p. every box i've used in the last two decades could do that on the fly without breaking a sweat.
