Jellyfin

[hutchst]

After who knows how much wasted effort on Windows Media Player and Plex, and having to prove that I'm not a crook on Kodi, we now have a simple straightforward solution that does what we want it to seemlessly.

[alorotom]

How is it better than Plex?? (For someone who has had Plex working seamlessly for years?)

[ThunderSpook]

hutchst said:

After who knows how much wasted effort on Windows Media Player and Plex, and having to prove that I'm not a crook on Kodi, we now have a simple straightforward solution that does what we want it to seemlessly.

No mention of subject in text, check.
No information provided, check.
No context, check.
Claims with no explanation of those claims, check.
Useless post, check.

Well done.

[alorotom]

alorotom said:

How is it better than Plex?? (For someone who has had Plex working seamlessly for years?)

I’ve just had a quick look and for the life of me I can’t see why this is better than Emby. Which in itself is not as polished as Plex.

I just can’t see why the market needs yet another unpolished and lacking (in terms of what it can do and handle) media manager.

[thebraketester]

Yep.... look promising!

[ARHarh]

I had a rummage round their website the other week and could not find a reason to try it. I didn't get on with plex. now i just use Logitech media server on a raspberry pi that also runs a nas and pihole.

[random_username]

Quite a few people moved from Plex to Emby when Plex seemed to be more interested in monetising users viewing habits and becoming a streaming content provider themselves. There were also a few 'poor' design choices which meant if your internet or their servers went down, you couldn't log in.

Emby started as free and open source, but less polished, but then started moving some features behind a monthly subscription, to pay for some full time developers. They then took the decision to take the open source code and closed source it, as some people (who were also some of the founders of the Jellyfin project) were making patches to give you the premium features for free. A fair few of the early code contributors felt a bit aggrieved as they felt their code had been 'stolen' when it was moved to a closed source model.

Jellyfin took the 'early' Emby code and forked it to create their own version, with a commitment to keep it free/open source. As such they have a lot more (free/part time) developers, however they are a few years behind, especially around client support but seem to be catching up. A lot of their work seems to be unpicking some of the poor coding / design choices in the original code.

[ThunderSpook]

So it’s a revenge project?

[Lim]

I use emby purely because my Smart TV has a workable emby app.

It's a bit of a pain to set up, and you have to dodge the paid stuff, but now I just drop stuff in a folder, and the TV experience is pretty close to using something like Netflix.

[random_username]

ThunderSpook said:

So it’s a revenge project?

I wouldn't go as far as revenge, but it seems fairly common in the open source world:

Developer comes up with cool idea, spends all their spare time working on it, makes reasonably polished solution that people start using.
Developer realises they can get some payback for their efforts, implements paywall features and closes source code.
Some other developer doesn't want to pay <small number> of pounds per month, forks original project into 'new' free project.

Plenty of examples of this - Emby/Jellyfin, Subsonic/Libresonic/Madsonic etc

• or*

Contributing developers aren't happy with direction that the original solution is going, decide to create their own fork to go the direction that they want to - Kodi/MrMC/OSMC, OpenELEC/LibreELEC, OpenOffice/LibreOffice