Jellyfin: We're Good, Seriously

Not happy about this post. Instead of asking to stop, they should do just what they suggest, without further ado - distribute the income to the ecosystem devs the way they see fit. Make it transparent, make application to these funds posssible, make feature bounties, write it besides the donation button.

Once someone stops donating, it is unlikely they will put up the effort of continually researching on which client/dev to support. This would be much better handled by Jellyfin maintainers.

I recently started using Jellyfin for friday movie nights with me and a few friends who no longer live near each other. The sync feature on the web UI works surprisingly well, we hang out on VC and it's as close to watching something physically together it can be. Overall I've found it to be really solid, although I've not really dabbled much with other media center software to compare it to.

My only real complaint is that for whatever reason it really does not like my folder structure - most of my files work but it'll randomly decide that a bunch of episodes in a folder are a single "file" with multiple "versions". Reading their docs it seems like they really want you to conform to a specific folder structure, but not only would this take me forever (I've been growing this collection for 15+ years now!), I just don't want to change it; I'm happy with my folder layout and it makes sense to me, it's really surprising that Jellyfin can't just show me the raw files.

    Some very-well-requested features/clients have gotten no traction at all, with no one coming in willing to start/help developing them. We've had to abandon some (like Chromecast for a while, though it's getting new life in the last few weeks) because of this.

    We're aware that probably the biggest complaints about Jellyfin are about the lack of client support, and the rough edges/lack of polish. We do hear you. We do want this to improve this just as much as you do.

    But we need people to help us do so. We need more volunteers who can help make the code better, write new code, document, and generally improve things. We need your help to push past what I call the Development Bystander Problem, get some new blood into the project, and especially, help to make it better!

    https://jellyfin.org/posts/a-call-for-developers/

It's noble to want to be a 100% volunteer force but it's frustrating that they know they have issues and a big pot of money but won't solve them.

Even without paying for development, money could be spent to improve the developer experience and attract new devs.

They have acknowledged client development is an issue in the OP and the link above. Could they not support client devs with hardware, licences, costs, etc...

I hope the project succeeds and think this is a good move. But I have a lifetime Plex pass and Jellyfin still seems not as good. I have both on my box, but whenever I try to use Jellyfin theres just something missing. I will keep checking back.

This is my first time hearing about Jellyfin, and wow what a breath of fresh air compared to the typical hyper growth model employed by a lot of OSS projects.

Any Jellyfin users here that can vouch for it? I currently have a SMB share on a Raspberry Pi 4 and I connect to that on my Amazon Fire Stick using the VLC SMB features. It works ok but the VLC UI leaves much to be desired. Would Jellyfin be better for this? Is there a client that works on the Fire TV stick? (This one I think? https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv)

Very respectable. It's behaviors like this that keep me on Jellyfin instead of Plex, even in the face of social pressures to switch.

Switched from Plex to Jellyfin a few years ago and have been happy with it. Plex had issues with movies with subtitle files. It tried to constantly reencode stuff. Couldn't work it out. Jellyfin works fine.

Also, I'm not getting nagged for features that I don't want anymore. I happily paid for my account, Plex, but just let me watch my local movies in peace. Leave me alone with television streaming, free movies or whatever else was the latest thing that was being pushed.

The $400/month doesn’t account for their labor, does it? I feel like that’s why people donate personally

I’m a happy user of Jellyfin, and I’d like to amplify what others have said about $24,000 or 40 months’ expenses being not nearly enough. At a conservative safe withdrawal rate, $24,000 of capital is only $60/month — in other words, a tenth of what the project needs to cover its monthly expenses.

If the project wants to be self-sufficient, they thus need ten times as much money. Then they can invest it, and cover expenses with the income from their investments.

If the project doesn’t want to be self-sufficient, that’s something else. Maybe they would prefer to think it will better align incentives for their users to keep them hungry? Personally, though, I think that self-sufficiency should be everyone’s goal.

Is there a Jelly Cloud solution? i.e a company that deploys Jellyfin to a EC2 instance and hooks up an S3 and gives you custom domain e.g: username.companyname.com and charges you a monthly fee for the S3/EC2 costs + other costs?

I was thinking of creating it but wanted to see what demand there is? Most Devs can easily do this themselves but I want to extend and sell it to other people as a service who wouldn't be capable and just happy to pay.

Plex and Emby would be competitors but not open source afaik.

I have been a Plex fanatic for quite a few years but the tides of been changing in a way that worries me. I am also an ad blocking fanatic and I have noticed trends between Plex, content I watch, and ads. I know they do something but I haven't quite figured it out yet even when putting my Plex behind a really aggressive ad blocking DNS configuration. They also mess with suggestions, doing things like hiding my own content in favor of their own, some other little annoyances...

I stood up a Jellyfin docker a few months back and instantly noticed for local playback is was swift, the UI is super fast, and also it just felt more polished in terms of overall experience in certain areas. I haven't switched yet but the project is so far more along in such a short time period that I will be watching very closely going forward. I love the humor and I love passion to build good software that respects a human.(privacy)

Why streaming? I can understand when one needs some media to play on different devices at the same time, also remotely, but for individual use I found a kodi box near my TV and configured to navigate NFS/SMB directories and filenames on my NAS, to be so immediate that I can't imagine doing things differently. Also, by streaming from box A (NAS) to box B (PC) it would probably need a lot more computing power from the usually smaller and less powerful hardware, and it would also move a lot more data on the home network because the video is transcoded by the weaker hardware and before being transmitted. ...Unless streaming in this context means a completely different thing and therefore I'm wrong.

40-month runway is not that long and doesn’t account for any exceptional issues that may arise…

Love jellyfin, I'm even considering port forwarding so my friends can make use of it!

"stop donating" respect!

Is Jellyfin an all in one solution for media management and streaming?

I normally just use transmission and serviio (vastly superior to Plex IMO), and only recently found out about sonarr, radarr, etc.

Really though, is there not any 'all in one' solution, instead of all these various programs chained together? I get keeping the serviio bit separate, and maybe the torrent client, but the rest could easily be integrated into one app.

They have money and lots of bugs and don't know what to do with one and another? Maybe do some bug fixing bounties?

$24k is not a lot to have in the bank for an org who is (whether they like it or not) mortal enemies with plex

I have an android TV running Kodi. Kodi connects via SMB to my NAS (Odroid HC-4, OpenMediaVault) and can easily show all my content.

Would Jellyfin improve my experience? I could run it on odroid without transcoding, and then use the official android-tv client. Would it be worth the effort of switching?

I need to take the time to finally switch from Emby (what Jellyfin was forked from).

I always had Jellyfin as second option with my Plex Lifetime membership. Glad they improved a lot since the first days on their reddit community.

Now I prefer using Stremio+Read Debrid, Kodi as my main player for local movies.

Now this is what open source should be: well funded but also the community highlighting the projects building off of it — in this case the main project highlighting and advocating for the folks that build front ends to JellyFin.

Why wouldn't they redistribute to other maintainers of the plugins/clients. They have much more knowlegde of where money is needed or where resources are lacking.

Or pay devs, not in their circle to build the features the community wants but they can't (lack of expertise, or otherwise) implement?

I think it’s a massive mistake.

They currently have 3 years of runway but that’s ridding on the high of the announcement and this communication will dry up donations. Plus, they ask people to donate to clients instead of the core product but they could do so themselves with the money they receive.

I've tried it all: Jellyfin, plex, Emby. They all want to transcode all the time. I ended up going back to minidlna, with a layout of images/etc it likes, combined with an android app called BubbleUpnp, and it's better, than all the other setups.

I had a very weird experience with Jellyfins team.

Recently I decided to give the app a try, and it worked fine, but I have serious issues with their media scanner (nested structures, a lot of misc content like interviews, etc.).

Years ago I wrote my own script that scans my drives, downloads imdb database, and 100% accurately matches media to imdb-id and fetches all auxilary data like cast, synopsis, posters, and so on.

I asked on their forum if I could use that to somehow bypass the scanner, prepopulate the database or write my own scanner based on theirs.

I was repedatley said it would be impossible and to not touch the code. "Seriously, do not do this" said one of the team members. I mean I do understand they were trying to save me a lot of headache, but at the same time they're running a campaign for developers. I just found it very odd.

I wish they could get added as an official app to the Samsung TV app store, etc.

I mean, if people are so heavily donating... why not implement a full time dev ?

Imagine if Wikipedia did this. Bravo to Jellyfin for being practical.

(June, 2023)

No you're not. You need at a minimum approximately $180,000 for a project with your expenses to be self-sustaining. With this burn rate, you'll end up asking for donations again in three years.

Further still, you'd need those reserves to grow at more than 2% per year, and more realistically somewhere much higher than that, just to ensure your donation reserves keep the project self-sustaining in the face of inflation.

How do we get so many smart people in tech who don't know how to manage finances?