As a long time plex user with a lifetime pass, I always enjoy seeing the good progress with Jellyfin as it will increasingly give me a soft landing for when Plex finally does something to make me move. At the very least it will hopefully keep some of plex’s most user hostile behavior in check.

As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my *arr stack and it has helped tremendously. I used to have to babysit and manually intervene on maybe 10% of requests, now it’s near zero, plus I got audiobook requests and subtitles working great. Granted a big part of the increased success was signing up for a Usenet service but of course Claude was able to configure it all and make it work. I was a little worried Claude would demure in the face of the task, but it was more than happy to help me acquire media in this way

I had to go back from 10.11.x to 10.10.7 because the performance was bad, but I'm very confident they've fixed all the performance problems with 12.0.

I'm also confident they've found most of the bugs and have produced something you can just upgrade to, given they've had 7 release candidates over the past few months:

   12.0 RC1 - Jun 22
   12.0 RC2 - Jun 28
   12.0 RC3 - Jul 22
   12.0 RC4 - Aug 02
   12.0 RC5 - Aug 11
   12.0 RC6 - Aug 26
   12.0 RC7 - Sep 01
   12.0     - Sep 08

Subtitles are the Achilles heel of Jellyfin (at least the Android client sending the stream to Chromecast stick connected to the TV). I can see the subtitle present but it doesn't show on the movie. Ok, I will just add manually - can't, progress indicator loops forever. Ok, I will remove the existing subtitles and add - removal succeeds - addition fails. This is the same fiddling everytime. If it works, it is a miracle. I used to forget about the subtitles and start the movie - you could just fix it on the fly right?! Nope, now I do full prep before calling everyone that the movie is good to go.

This is not coming from a bad place - I am very appreciative of having a open source alternative to Plex. Just putting this out there in case it catches someone's interest to improve it.

Upgrade experiences, anyone?

I have a ~40TB library and was still on 10.10.7 because of all the performance issues with 10.11. Upgraded straight to 12.0 and was impressed with how quick and painless it was! As the upgrade instructions warn about, some of my titles disappeared until a rescan added them back, but that was the only weirdness. The whole initial migration only took a few minutes.

Jellyfin works great for me. My only gripe is logging around library scanning being pretty difficult to interpret. I'd love to add a dedicated scanner log that focuses only on logs relating to scanning, which for me tends to be the trouble spot in these systems.

That said I very rarely would even need it, the last time I thought I did was when I had my under configured to not see R rated movies because of my kids, the logs were not clear that the movie was ever scanned so it was hard to realize.

The success of jellyfin in recent years has affected me in one unexpected way: I have a project whose .com domain name starts with jelly* and at some point I started getting so many signups from confused Jellyfin users who thought it was related.

(fortunately it’s a niche thing, so I just closed signups and just give my prospective users a one time invite code)

Does this introduce basic UX changes, like saying that a media will be permanently lost instead of "will be removed from Jellyfin" which is inaccurate?

Edit: And making it more secure? Just because it is commonly for LAN doesn't mean it can be insecure

I hate people who are demanding of open source projects but... doing performance improvements and adding comic book support before making the product secure enough to expose to the internet is wild prioritization and I don't know what else to say.

Or release native clients that can use OIDC.

Doing neither sucks =[.

If you want a tv/movies solution but without self-hosting (storage is quite expensive rn), Nuvio and TorBox($3/month) are excellent and you can share with friends and family.

Nuvio is compatible with Stremio addons but is fully open source. It gained traction after Stremio started adding paid features a few months ago.