Heck yeah! Jellyfin FTW!!!
Thank you for giving me just enough curiosity to look up what Jellyfin is. I’ve been wanting to set up a media server but lost interest quick when I realized Plex seems to have completely moved away from being a media server program. I’m so stoked to give it a proper try.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfin
Website: https://jellyfin.org/
realized Plex seems to have completely moved away from being a media server program
It is still a great media server no mater what the Jellyfin fanclub says. Jellyfin is great, but from a user experience perspective it’s just not in the same league as something as polished as Plex and if your userbase is not just IT workers and FOSS enthusiasts (or you enjoy a good looking and working UI) Plex is the place to go.
I’ve only used Jellyfin, but I struggle to imagine Plex being much easier - it was a piece of piss to just run the installer and point at my folders. Complexity only comes when doing stuff like making it available over the internet.
And it’s easy to share your server with friends and relatives so that they don’t have to go through the same process to watch these shows.
I was sharing my Netflix account with my mom and dad, now that I can’t without paying more, I just pulled the plug on that subscription and add the shows they want to my server.
What is the easy way to share jellyfin over the internet? Portforwarding doesn’t work for me cause I don’t have a static ip address
EDIT: I thank all the answers but none of them seem actually easy
The easiest way is to setup tailscale on the server, then share the server with the web interface. Your friends/family simply install the tailscale client, login, and it just connects like magic. No port forwarding or firewall configuration required. There’s plenty of how-tos out there.
There’s no way that’s the simplest solution
Not the simplest to set up, to make accessible, to secure, or for everyone else to use? This solution is a pretty reasonable one considering all four.
You don’t need to do anything for plex
It just streams it straight to their brains?
Purchase a domain and host it with a reverse proxy to your internal net.
You don’t even need to purchase a domain, free dynDNS services (DuckDNS or similar) are good enough for Jellyfin and the like.
Free services always have some kind of dubious hidden product they are selling elsewhere about you to someone else, because network hardware is not free, network system maintenance is not free, internet access is not free. Facebook is free, yet we all know what it’s true cost is.
DuckDNS is run by two guys who are funded by donations. I do agree with what you’re saying about free services but I’m more willing to trust DuckDNS in this case
Okay, thanks to this post I just discovered Jellyfin and though I haven’t even downloaded it yet because I’m on mobile, i tabbed back over here from reading their description page to thank you for this.
I’ve been looking for other solutions but none of them seemed to be incredibly well supported or implemented
Jellyfin is what Plex should be.
I’m still waiting for it to be up to par, I have jellyfin on the server and I check it maybe once a month with the latest version but it still fails miserably with my library.
It’s a very clean high organized library managed by sonarr. All Files are in
“series name (year) > Season xx > series name SxxExx (episode title)”
format and yet it still just fails miserably at matching so much of my content (its a rather massive library) especially on anime. Half the time I have to manually match it, and I have to use the Japanese title in order to pull up the English metadata, because that makes sense.
Playback also just… Fails for no reason on tons of my devices. It’s been getting better recently but until it’s on par with Plex I am not leaving sadly
If it fails on anime maybe someone (such as yourself) needs to do the leg work and set build a database for it to match against?
You know that product you don’t like and have a fine, working alternative for?
You should do hundreds of hours of volunteer work to use the product you don’t like, that way it’s slightly less inconvenient.
The point stands: open source products are only good because people make them good.
If you want to put your eggs in the closed sourced paid basket, by all means go ahead. Plex will still bite you, eventually, just like every other for profit business does.
Okay doomer but my media isn’t going anywhere.
No, and thank fuck for that. I don’t think Plex would end up that bad.
I hope.
Edit: Also it isn’t “doomer” to say that for profit businesses almost always end up screwing their users over eventually. Usually it happens after the business is sold.
Plex has already deprecated the original Android app which had a “lifetime” payment.
Ooooh…wait… by streaming you mean netflix, etc…
Can we please invent a word for streaming pirated content?
I think it should be streaming.
Netflix etc. should be creaking, like streaming but slower, less content, less pressure, etc.
It gets even worse when a number of anime aren’t even licensed for your country so you can only stream them via VPN. Looking at you Crunchyroll
Or when Crunchyroll has seasons 2 and 3 of an anime, but not season 1. Looking at you, FLCL.
A huge part of that is season 1 of FLCL is two decades and entire production companies apart. It’s likely entirely down to a matter of how difficult it is to get rights for anime. Cartoon network was involved in the two new HD seasons, and is much easier to deal with that Gainax.
TIL there’s more than one season of FLCL - loved that show back in the day. Is the new stuff good?
Not really
I finally got jellyfin working and I gotta say the UI is better than Plex in most ways, and it mostly works, but it is just a little glitchy at times. As one example, the auto play next episode feature has never worked in my browser. It will just stay stuck on “0 seconds until next episode starts”. That and for some reason I had trouble getting it setup on my streaming device on the same network… Local hostname wouldn’t work. Said it couldn’t find any servers locally on my network, so I had to use my IP address. So when (not if) that IP changes I’ll have to troubleshoot.
Once they smooth out issues like that, I may ditch Plex even though I paid for it.
it couldn’t find any servers locally on my network, so I had to use my IP address. So when (not if) that IP changes I’ll have to troubleshoot.
One workaround that I can think of is to use ip reservation to give your devices the same ip address whenever they connect. You might find that setting under DHCP on your router. Or just use a static ip on the server.
I’ll try. Unfortunately my ISP showed up to connect my service and claimed I had to use their router so I’m a little stuck with whatever it can do
I just go to 9anime, whoever runs that site is a golden god. They got all the anime, a shit ton of manga and it’s all free.
