after almost 15yrs my plex server is no more. jellyfin behind nginx with authentik is running very nicely.
Welcome to the jelly. ONE OF US. ONE OF US.
ONE OF US. ONE OF US.
I’ve been using jellyfin for years.
My best recommendation is DELAY UPDATES and back up before you update.
I have a history of updates breaking everything so you should be careful about them.
All software recommends backing up before an update, but for jellyfin the shit is real, you really want to back up.
laughs in immich
Updating immich brings excitement into my life :)
I’ve had mine on latest for about a year and I haven’t noticed any issues… I have a cron job that pulls it every night too
It’s funny, I’ve heard this so many times. And read through the docs. But I’m a mad lad who has auto updates (I know!) and have never had an issue with Immich.
I have Jellyfin running for years too and it has never broken for me, I use Linuxserver image, so maybe they delay the updates a bit?.. Now, Immich has broken so many times that nowadays is the only docker I don’t keep at latest (and I know using latest is a bad practice, I understand the reasons, but the convenience of not worrying about the versions beats all that for me)
I’ve been using jelly since just after the emby fork and never had an update issue on docker. Automatic snapshots every 5 mins (amoung other backup tools). means I don’t need to worry much if it does.
Jellyfin still so buggy though. The UI is garbage too. I want to love it… I run both lol.
Like the version or the media?
I have it on docker with two volumes, ./config and ./cache
I back up those before each update.
A bad Jellyfin update should not mess with your media folder in anyway. Though you should have backups of those aswell as a rule of thumb.
With respect to the media, you can mount the volume as read only, preventing Jellyfin from accidentally wiping your underlying content.
or just change the folder ownership to whatever user you use in the container, but don’t give them write access. that’s how I do it so I can still edit my media as root.
the config and databases or the media, you mean?
if so, the former, but I mount the meadia with a read only docker volume just to be sure, because chances are I would never notice it
What is virsh?
command-line virtual machine manager
I’ve heard jellyfin has a lot of security issues, which I don’t know if that’s accurate or not. But the BIGGEST issue is lack of a proper tvOS app. I really don’t feel like using Infuse or some other app just to use my library. Year after year I hear about people switching and yet, the gap is simply still there.
I am also not up to date on Jellyfin security issues but the biggest one I care about is that its clients don’t support OIDC. There’s a neat plugin for OIDC, but without client support it only works with the web client and I’m not a fan of leaving login pages open to the internet.
if you use the oidc connection and apps that support quick connect you can do it. you basically end up doing things like the plex link process that got implemented when they forced everyone into their authentication service. i almost went that route but opted to leave the password auth from ldap in. its the kind of log in process most people are used too and i’ve got a few elderly users. i disabled password reset in authentik though and everyone gets a 3 word 24 char minimum password.
Use an LDAP to OIDC bridge?
To be fair there is a tvOS app in development but progress is slow because the whole project is maintained by a small handful of volunteers. They’ve put out a call for help and the maintainers post updates here
I’ve heard jellyfin has a lot of security issues
The biggest known stuff I saw on their GitHub is that a number of the exposed service URLs under the hood don’t require auth. So, it’s open-source with known requirements, you can tell easily from the outside that it’s running, and you can cause it to activate a LOT of packages without logging in. That’s a zero-day in any package that can be passed a payload away from disaster.
AS far as TVOS, I’m kinda surprised swiftfin doesn’t service you.
Yeah… that’s a non-starter for me. Not gonna risk my entire home lab when Plex doesn’t have any of that risk.
Also, running in Docker is fantastic but I’ve found Docker to be unstable at times depending on the version.
Assuming this is all true, sure its not great but how much does it matter?
Most have jellyfin in a docker. My jellyfin can’t only has read only accses to the media folder. Only the config folder has write access. Assuming the worst case scenario here, how much damage can than do?
A lot of neophyte self hosters Will try running the binary in Windows instead. Experienced self hosters will indeed use docker.
Then out of the ones that are using docker some of them will set it up as privileged.
And then how many of those people actually make read-only versus how many just add the path and don’t think about it.
Don’t confuse your good practices with what the average person will do.
swiftfin is mostly there but doesn’t support media segments, which is a deal breaker for me
really unfortunate since jellyfin media segments is a much better implementation of the concept than plex
i’m watching the swiftfin issue for when it gets added and i’ll be all over compiling and testing it
Op already said they were behind authentik
There also absolutely are apps for tv oses like Android, I use one daily.
I think they meant Apple’s “tvOS” - which powers the Apple TV set top box.
There’s no client for it, if I had to take a guess it’s likely due to the costs of doing so.Edit: Whoops, it appears I’m a bit out of date on this.
https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin i’ve got 5 apple tv users, two android tv and one webostv
Oh interesting, it’s been a while since I have tried to use Apple TV (roughly 7 years or so - I don’t use any Apple devices anymore), this wasn’t available at the time so I’m glad to see there’s finally some native support.
there’s been a LOT of progress on jellyfin, especially the past year or so. i’ve been using plex since it forked from xbmc, it ran on the bottom half of a laptop connected to a mostly working projector, both rescued from a dumpster. it’s been a fantastic platform for a long time. but i’ve also wanted off plex since they rolled out the plex account req. jellyfin is finally there for me at least.
Oh lol, of course apple just calls it TV OS
I just validated that the latest version of the LDAP privilege escalation issue is not an issue anymore. The
curlscript is in the ticket.This was the one where a standard user could get plugin credentials, such as the LDAP bind user, and change the LDAP endpoint. I.E., bad.
I chose this one because after going through all of them, it was the only one that allowed access to something that wasn’t just data in Jellyfin.
So for me, security is less of an issue knowing that, as only family use the service, and the remaining issues all require a logged in user (hit admin endpoint with user token).
Plus, I tried a few of those and they were also fixed, just not documented yet. I didn’t add to those tickets because I was not as formal with my testing.
Yeah, Samsung TVs don’t have a native Jellyfin app either. You can sideload it, but good luck walking your “you touched my computer six months ago and now it’s broken. This is your fault” grandmother through that over the phone.
https://github.com/jellyfin/Swiftfin is available for tvOS. works great for me with one bug. since i have homepods connected to one of my apple tv’s as it’s speakers. i had to change the setting to use the native video player instead of vlc to avoid and audio delay bug. that cost me the auto play next episode function. i though not auto playing the next episode would annoy me, but it’s turned out to not be a issue at all. but infuse doesn’t include that bug if you want both homepod tv speakers and auto play next episode with jellyfin. as for security, since jellyfin is more modifiable it has a lot more room for misconfiguration for sure. plex had plenty of it’s own security issues, we just only heard about them when some security blogger discovered it.
misconfiguration here i think is a dangerous way to phrase it… it implies that there is a secure way to run jellyfin on its own. jellyfin, by itself, should never be exposed to the www. it is, no matter the configuration, insecure. to run jellyfin on the www you must put a VPN or other reverse proxy with auth over the top of it
Plex still good for the boys that bought the lifetime pass. I understand why people would change. But it’s still the best plug and play option. Waiting until they break the “lifetime” thing and fuck us over.
Didn’t that already happen? Or am I misremembering?
Mostly not yet. They did restrict the bandwidth on relay, but anyone with half a brain can open a port and that still allows apps to direct connect without relay. Honestly I wish could just force it to never relay since randomly my iPad will use relay even when I’m on the same network but that’s more because the new iOS app since the rewrite is dogshit.
Lifetime pass since 2012 here.
Hmm I don’t like dogshit. Nobody ever seems to clean it up.
I’m also 90% done migrating to jellyfin. I’ve had the instance running for 6 months now, the cultural change to watch jellyfin is complete, except for my wife’s iPad.
Heck, I should just retire Plex. That will force the change.
These are the thoughts of a cold and calloused sysadmin. Didn’t get the email about the change? Too bad.
yeah it took me about 6 months with jellyfin to feel like i was ready to finally kill plex. the thing that finally did it was getting an email from plex asking if i’d like to check out whats streaming on hbomax.
What are you using to watch jellyfin on iOS?
In order of personal preference:
Maybe just try them all out and find the one that fits you best. You could also use more than one (which is what I do).
Can also use the web client
Maybe, Streamyfin? its the only iOS App with Downloads and Offline-Mode
Swiftfin is what I’m using for Plex on my Apple TV
It’s perfect for me because it supports direct stream and decoding of the file for playback on the Apple TV - because the Apple TV is capable enough to do that.
This is ideal because my NAS server is a venerable but now very long in the tooth HP Gen 8 microserver from 2014, so it doesn’t have the chops for reencoded streaming anymore.
i love jellyfin i just wish there was a nicer way to highlight collections so you could make themed weekly or monthly collections of movies and shows that also still show up in the regular folders… almost like netflix.
That is coming, I saw a PR for that. Just need to be patient.
I’m probably mistaken, but I think there might actually be a plugin for this? I haven’t looked into it myself but I swear I scrolled past a plugin listing similar functionality at some point. Or I could be hallucinating. Or it could even exist but no longer work on the current version of the app. Who knows!?
I just wanna get rid of Plex so bad but jellyfin isn’t going to work for my grandma…
I understand. I have converted fully to JF which required people to get onn players, and tunnel into my network and it was a lot of work on my end too.
Do what works for you and them.
Why? It’s been much easier for me
Grandma? Pls send money.
Host both. Keep plex up for your gma, Jellyfin for everyone else. Tbh Jellyfin is also pretty intuitive. Currently I’m hosting both, but my gma doesn’t use it, so I’ll probably move completely to Jellyfin.
if my parents can navigate it your grandma can :)
If your grandma can handle torrenting over VPN, then she can probably handle Jellyfin.
The people asking why confuse me…y’all acting like jellyfin is easy to use on an off-site tv when it’s literally not for non tech savvy people. I don’t understand why jellyfin just doesn’t nut up and make an samsung tv client or something?
My 67 year old Mother has been using Jellyfin for years via Chromecast. Change the TV input to Chromecast and pull up the Jellyfin app. And that’s it. She never leaves Jellyfin and the Chromecast is never shut off, even if the TV is.
It’s amazing to me that you fanboys pretend like Plex is easy to use but Jellyfin is somehow not. It’s generally the exact same interface.
I don’t understand why jellyfin just doesn’t nut up and make an samsung tv client or something?
Because application development is expensive, and they’re open source–not funded by corporate interest like Plex. What exactly about that is difficult to understand?
I’ve heard people had luck with Tailscale playing nicely with non Plex options. I can’t say I’ve tried it. Though I do use Tailscale. Essentially if you setup Tailscale for Grandma it’ll be like she’s sitting on your local network. Even better, set it up on her router and you can literally debug all her Internet problems if you can ping it.
Beyond that a raspberry pi with a battery backup on a 4G subscription connected to the router. That would be the ultimate “grandma” setup. Connect her router/modem power to remote power cycle. But I digress.
I just got Authentik / Traefik going for Navidrome, Jellyfin is next.
Does it play well for the mobile applications? If you use them?
the ldap auth works great for the apps. apps dont play well with an oidc login process. i ended up using both, oidc for web and ldap fall back for applications. made it easier for my non tech inclined users. most of the current apps also support quick connect, like the plex link process. you auth on a web browser and enter a code into the app. so it’s possible to use only oidc for log in and, i believe it should be possible use css to even hide the user name and password fields.
Unrelated but why a full VM for Linux stuff, lxc is much more efficient
honestly every explanation probably just ends at ‘this is what i learned on and it works’. same way i religiously use nano and try to do everything in bash first. or how a couple coworkers can’t stop explaining their vim workflow and defending python unprompted like it’s a trauma response for them. my current homelab is also running a r9 with 64gb ram and 30tb storage. if i were paying for remote hosting, still using salvaged hardware or being paid, i’d invest time learning newer processes. but containers haven’t caught my interested and this set up takes basically no effort on my part to maintain, so i can focus my limited free time elsewhere.
honestly every explanation probably just ends at ‘this is what i learned on and it works’.
Yeah, lots of these answers basically boil down to “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
These days the hammer is usually docker/podman/lxc containers instead of VMs though. Like, you don’t need a container to run a self-contained statically-compiled binary, yet people still do it for some reason.
Same.
The time it takes me to write a single function in Python is the same as writing a whole Bash-script using nano.
Also I initially set up my homelab using Docker in a VM on Proxmox. Totally useless abstraction, but I never found the time and patience to migrate the VM to bare metal.Not really useless, it’s an extra layer of management (a good thing). The Proxmox system can be nearly static while giving you external level management of the OS that manages the containers.
I have a 3 server Proxmox cluster running various VMs doing different things. Some of those VMs are my container systems.
Besides, you can run containers directly on Proxmox itself.
I can backup an entire VM snapshot very quickly and then restore it in a matter of minutes. Everything from the system files, database, Jellyfin version and configs, etc. All easily backed up and restored in an easy to manage bundle.
A container is not as easy to manage in the same way.
you can use commit, save/load, import/export for the same thing as VM snapshots
It’s not the same. You then need to manage volumes separately from images, or if you’re mounting a host folder for the Jellyfin files then you have to manage those separately via the host.
Container images are supposed to be stateless. So then if you’re only banking up the volumes, then you need to somehow track which Jellyfin version it’s tied to, in case you run into any issues.
A VM is literally all of that but in a much more complete package.
i’d consider that all a good thing, but i can also see how it’s more work
they’re supposed to be stateless because it’s easier to manage, upgrade, etc… if you don’t want that, you can just use load/save/commit (or import/export: can’t remember off the top of my head which is which) and ignore volumes: it amounts to the same thing… there’s also buildpack rebase so you can swap out the base container and keep your top level changes for quick version upgrades that are super simple to roll back
I’ve never worked with buildpack, so that’s interesting
How often do you do this?
Backups? I have an automatic job running every night.
Nice. You you restore often?
How not?
If a lxc container is in a btrfs subvolume or in a zfs dataset (those are created easily like a directory, it’s not a partition), you can do a full 1:1 copy in less than one second via a snapshot, keeping all the system files, database, version and configs
Sure, ZFS snapshots are dead simple and fast. But you’d need to ensure that each container and its volumes are created in each respective dataset.
And none of this is implying that it’s hard. The top comment was criticizing OP for using VMs instead of containers. Neither one is better than the other for all use cases.
I have a ton of VMs for various use cases, and some of those VMs are container/Docker hosts. Each tool where it works best.
VMs can also be live migrated to another server in the cluster with no downtime and backups don’t need to take the VM down to do their thing. If in the future you want to move to physical hardware, you can use something like Clonezilla to back it up (not needed often, but still, something to consider).
Both have their places, but those factors are the main ones that come into play of when I want to use a VM or LXC.
Stronger compartmentalization
Does jellyfin do untranscoded video/audio?
Haven’t used it in years but finally building up my media server again and I remember it had some funky settings for hardware encoding back then which I didn’t need because I was connecting to it via a repurposed gaming laptop that could easily handle 4k content and surround sound by itself.
I use jellyfin for unencoded audio and video on my clients that support it like my newer television, but I also use transcoded audio video on things that can’t handle the higher codecs like the raspberry pi.
i have a lifetime plex pass, but I’d consider moving to jellyfin when their closed-captioning support reaches parity with plex. i regularly spin up a jellyfin container to try it out, but i still run into issues. And jellyfin’s android apps are mediocre (in particular android auto support), especially for music compared to plexamp
For android auto, I use symfonium as it can hook into my jf library
This. I use symfonium for my audiobooks. Great app.
I find Jellyfin’s subtitle search much better than Plex’s. Bonus for leaving a subtitle file right along with your file, instead of buried somewhere else so you can’t easily edit it.
Get Bazarr so you never have to worry about subtitle searching again.
that’s about where i was at for a long while. manet finally replaced my apple carplay functionality from plexamp and plex lost it’s last advantage for me. i definitely got my moneys worth from that lifetime plexpass though.
For some reason I get permission errors on jellyfin every time I use it. Never with Plex. I’ve gone through the steps to fix it before. But when you change your shit as much as I do. I just stay with Plex because it’s plug and play. And I have the pass. I don’t have the time to fuck with stupid shit with jellyfin.
my only issue is how user friendly it isn’t compared to Plex.
i genuinely want to leave Plex (especially the more and more they enshittify) but I just could not figure out how to set up jellyfin. i use Linux every day, and know I’m at least a tiny bit more tech smart than your average PC user, but I can’t imagine trying to explain to my family how to set jellyfin up.
Host Jellyfin either by running their easy setup script or by hosting it on docker, in order for it to be publicly accessible you will need to either port forward and give people your external IP or you need to have your own website. It’s very easy with a docker container to get it running locally, you literally just spin it up, the same as Plex.
The only thing that plex has over jellyfin at the moment (in my opinion) is the simple sign on and user options that allow users to have their own usernames and not have to know anything about reverse-proxying a domain for jellyfin access. It’s that little bit of back-end that you have to set up that’s the problem for the ‘normie’ users that a lot of plex admins cater to. That, and there’s some holes in where the jellyfin app is available.
And Plexamp.
And a decent AppleTV app.
There’s plugins that can replace Plexamp
So it does the Sonic adventure on mobile in a free app? And has offline storage? And has a station creator?
Idk man there’s a music player
So, no.
Got it. :-)
plex is still definitely easier to get started on. i don’t begrudge anyone still going that route, i had a lifetime plexpass the last 8yrs i think. jellyfin is a great option if you either already know how to set things up and want full control. Or you’re looking for an opportunity to learn more about reverse proxy, dns and authentication/access systems. plex is still i nice gateway drug.
Jellyfin us easy to run, but then when you are running it it just doesn’t have your files. Are they in the incorrect folder structure? Who knows
I literally just run Kodi and it just works, I can browse my folders and watch stuff
I use sonarr and radarr, they automatically structure the folder system, and you can also have the same issues with Plex. I had an issue where Plex would not no matter what detect the newest episode of a show and Jellyfin picked it up no problem
this was the dealbreaker for me. the demand for specific file and directory naming schemes with no default indexer seems deranged.
How did you set up Jellyfin with Authentik? Are you using SSO or is it only through LDAP?
i ended up doing both. ldap for the apps. oidc for web based users and the apps that support the quick connect feature. the local user account system works fine too, and ldap would be enough. i just wanted an excuse to play round with sso systems, and it was fun figuring out how to connect all my servers.
authenik has a good docs site for both it’s docker container and connecting it to jellyfin. Authelia looked interesting too.
Thanks! Don’t know how I missed the Authentik docs for this.
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How is the Jellyfin software situation looking? Last time I checked it was pretty meh compared to plex. if I recall correctly the best app was Infuse and it was a monthly sub. Are there better options these days? I mostly watch plex on my TV through Android or Apple TV.
Jellyfin is a lot better than it used to be, to get feature parity with Plex you will probably need to install some plugins but I literally searched “best Jellyfin plugins reddit” and the list in the first thread I found was all I needed. The webOS, Android, and Roku apps are very good, I’m not sure what the situation is on Apple TV but I think they have an app
…and Roku apps are very good
🤘
swiftfin has reach what i’d call stable on apple tv. its a little janky still with homepods used as speakers. i had to switch the nativeplayer to avoid an audio delay bug. the native player doesn’t support auto play next episode. so far thats the only issue ive had. infuse doesnt have that bug but the issue hasnt annoyed me enough to need infuse. all my other uses are on android tv or webos and have had no complaints. for music, manet has good carplay functionality so its made a nice replacement for plexamp.
I haven’t done a bunch with it. I set it up locally on an old laptop, installed the app on my TV and on the other machines throughout the house. It works great when I use it. I stream a lot of content outside of it so I don’t use it all the time but the interface I really liked. It’s fluid even running the server on a laptop that would struggle to run a zoom call.
Believe I set it up with pop-os, but it could be mint. I haven’t had to touch it in months so I honestly wouldn’t know without going to it. I leave a RustDesk connection on it from my phone if I ever need to get to it.
I’m pretty sure you can pay for a lifetime access to infuse, cause I don’t think I pay monthly.
Its monthly or lifetime and the lifetime is like 6-8 years of paying monthly.
Ah I didn’t know that. I doubt it was that much when I first got it, but I’m unsure. I’ve had it for a long time
