For people that don’t know, Infuse lets you use Jellyfin on Apple TV and it’s very helpful for day purpose

Yeaah, second that! I use it on the AppleTV and across the rest of my devices! Works like a charm, and coupled with Tailscale I can access everything on my Nas everywhere :) I have it configured to use Jellyfin as the source, runing on said nas

Yes it really does, and I intend to switch eventually but from what I heard the last time I looked into it, the end user clients are a big area where plex still beats Jellyfin. Since that’s where my non technical friends and family mostly interact with the system, it’s the area I need to be the most polished and hands off.

they'll eventually come out with a completely new overhauled version of plex that's sub only but your lifetime pass will still be good for "plex classic" which they'll stop supporting

I have a lifetime pass as well, but switched to Jellyfin years ago.

Maybe I'm naive, but I feel like if Plex was going to do anything to existing lifetime subscriptions, they would have done it by now. I think we're fine for now.

really is just the normies access to it via samsung and LG TV's that hold me back.

I’ve set up literally hundreds of different self-hosted applications over the years on my homelab. I’ve configured the reverse proxy by hand, setup the docker containers, etc.

Now I can just tell Claude “Setup XYZ app on my server” and it does it all and leaves a note in my Obsidian vault documenting the service (setup instructions, backups, hostname, etc).

Trying out new things has never been easier now that the effort is near-0 to kick the tires.

As someone with coding projects in the is area would you care to elaborate on "a lot of learned lessons"?

Step one is to just let Claude have ssh access to the machine you run plex from and let him do a full sweep. I had some conflicting profile rules and was not properly blocking malware and not properly marking failures so they were never retried. This fixed a big portion of the manual work needed, but the usenet account is really what got me to nearly 100% hands off. I think I am paying $3/month for the next fifteen months, and apparently if I pay attention during Black Friday there will be some pretty cheap deals. For more months of access at even less

EDIT: Claude was also able to look at my logs and noticed that nearly all of the exe or other malware was coming from 2 trackers so we just eliminated those.

I have had claude do the same, plus reorder nfs mounts, share templates, and do some init-container magic to start vpn/gluetun with port-forwarding, all in a k8s cluster. It's become so easy to manage and debug.

Thanks, fixed

What do you mean by door lock, where does the code show up?

After reading a lot of reddit threads I settled on ReadMeABook[0] and it has been working great so far. One pretty cool feature is that it lets you connect an LLM API key and then you can have it make requests based on your library. I now have Fable 5.1 suggesting my next book.

[0]: https://github.com/kikootwo/readmeabook

Chaptarr is great! Just had their public release after a long alpha testing phase

It’s been a while since I used it but lazylibrarian has worked for me in the past.

I tried shelfarr as well with some success a while back, but haven’t needed any new books lately since I’m busy catching up on the books I’ve downloaded (the Bible is long lol).

If you don’t want to commit to one of the vibecoded no community arr clones for books then i recommend shelfmark. Lightweight grabber, easy to start with, easy to rip out later.

Are you describing a plex feature? I was under the impression they required the media to follow certain naming conventions. [1]

Maybe mkv-renamer is of use to you? [2]

1: https://support.plex.tv/articles/naming-and-organizing-your-...

2: https://github.com/ssanj/mkv-renamer

Claude is perfectly happy to do it and gives great suggestions. I can't imagine it will last, I did run into one situation where I wanted to archive all the media on a subscription site before my subscription expired, and it refused. But splitting it into one session to collect all URLs and a second session to plug them into yt-dlp with the right arguments worked just fine.

For music, I use Navidrome + Symfonium. Not quite as smooth as Plexamp was (and there's nothing on par with Symfonium on desktop), but I disliked having my music and video commingled so it's been worthwhile for me.

> bypassing Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

Can you say more about this? I've never encountered this problem in nearly a decade of running the same stack.

I switched to jellyfin about 6 months ago and I can say it is definitely worse. I’m constantly fighting to fix thumbnails, fix episodes to be in the same show, force rescans to get it to even recognize a show that already exists. I never had any of these problems with plex. Plex also defaults to transcoding which fixes a lot of gaps with clients that don’t support certain codecs. I’m often running into issues where infuse can’t play DTS so I need to reencode before I can play the movies.

Also in the process of ditching plex I switched to audiobookshelf for my audiobooks and I have to say it’s also crap. It’s constantly refusing to start playing, or pausing for a really long time before playing.

All that being said I’m not switching back. It’s been a pain but it was worth it.

I must be old school. I never got on board with Plex, because my "lifetime" licenses for PlayOn, TVersity and Twonky all ended up completely useless. Yes, those licenses still work, but you can't get the latest versions which provide support for the latest codecs, features, etc. There's a cutoff on the versions that "lifetime" license allows you to upgrade to, and some of those licenses were not that cheap at the time.

So of course, Plex is going to engage in the fuckery that they are. JellyFin on the other hand, for the amount it costs is surprisingly low on janky behavior.

Could you elaborate on how you set it up to extract the embedded subtitles?

> If you pick embedded subtitles with these clients, Jellyfin must extract the subtitles files immediately, and this takes a while depending on container format, file sizes and server load.

Really? How?

My expectation would be that extracting a subtitle file takes a few seconds at most. If you had to do it on the fly every time you watched anything in your library, it wouldn't matter.

The default jellyfin client works great also on my NVIDIA shield.

Young children and non technical adults can use it as easily as any streaming app. I guess you can tweak and theme it endlessly to look like your favourite streaming app but I haven’t felt the need to so far.

Self-hosting always involves a bit of jankiness, if you can’t handle that then back to overpriced subscriptions and spyware you go.

SenPlayer is also very good on ATV.

if you're running on scaleway, can I ask what you're doing for media storage? scaleway block storage?

Thanks, definitely will try that one.

Swiftfin, Moonfin are two Jellyfin clients for Apple TV.

Not OP, but I've run into similar instances of Jellyfin "going nuts."

Mixed media type libraries are depreciated and "broken" according to the documentation[1], which is fair enough, but sometimes this results in weirdness if a TV-show is also part of a franchise and has associated TV-movies (e.g. the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Futurama, or Breaking Bad). If you want to keep those movies on your file system in a folder with the other stuff from the franchise, Jellyfin often can't handle it. And it's not obvious to new users whether these TV-movies belong in a TV-shows library or a movies library.

I've also noticed it cannot handle additional layers of folders (i.e. for Genres) in TV show libraries, but it can handle that layer in movie libraries. Failure mode (the "going nuts") looks like those genre folders recognized as bizarre or obscure television shows, and nothing scanned the next layer down.

I haven't looked into how their scanning algorithms work, but it's definitely frustrating that there's not a button or feature to say: "No, Jellyfin, this is a folder, not a show or movie. Try scanning again on the subtree starting here."

Honestly, any software that either silently/automatically reorganizes a user's files and folders (not Jellyfin, but there are others that do this... even FOSS projects) or demands a specific meta-hierarchy on the file system is frustrating to anyone who deliberately keeps their files and folders well-organized.

[1]: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/mixed-movies-...

I doubt that, how would that work? You would need to give all your friends a VPN login into your local network for all of their devices, including TVs.

not necessarily always a VPN, but you can also use a reverse proxy like caddy or nginx where encryption and security are primary concerns instead of something non-essential like in jellyfin.

Their stance is actually that exposing it is fine

Frankly at this point, everything that is not explicitly fully public should be...

Unfortunately, yeah.

As opposed to what? The password needs to reach the server. Encryption is the job of HTTPS.

You can either require mesh vpn or make it easy for friends to access your library. You can't have both.

There's nothing wrong with exposing it to the internet.

There have been exploits: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/security

The project is a fork of another project (Emby) and there has always been potential for user-supplied data ending up in command-line arguments, or exploitation of the (admin) user getting to upload various files. Nonetheless, all reported security bugs have been fixed promptly, and they're proactively sweeping through the full set of APIs they inherited, looking for possible exploit paths.

Most exploits required an authenticated user.

If you're concerned about this, you should run Jellyfin's docker image, with read-only mounts of your media library, and only give accounts to people you trust, which is how you should treat your personal media library anyway.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415

A lot of Jellyfin's API doesn't require any authentication at all, as an example.

I think they are confusing Jellyfin with the crazy exploits in Plex recently.