Jellyfin 12.0

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 demur in the face of the task, but it was more than happy to help me acquire media in this way

Coming from Plex, I gave Jellyfin a try, but returned back to Plex after several months. My biggest gripes were poor subtitle support and inability to differintiate TV shows from movies stored in the same folder. Does this version improve these issues?

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.

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.

I love jellyfin, been using it for years now, alongside the *ARR stack.

My young daughter recently started getting into audio books, so I installed Listenarr alongside a vibe coded mcp server [0] which I have running with all the other arr service mcp connections.

This allows the family to easily download and manage their media (err…Linux distributions) via Onyx AI, which I also have running with everything else on local box running microK8s, all on a relatively puny Geekom minipc with 16Gb

This whole setup is pretty straightforward to manage with Claude which has no issues working with K8s.

For those interested in the listenarr audiobook mcp: [0] https://github.com/leachuk/listenarr-mcp/blob/main/CLAUDE.md

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 this 12.0 release.

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

UPDATE: Upgraded to 12.0, performance is great, better than 10.10 and 10.11, including in third party apps! No problems with the migration.

I have a trifling complaint about this, which is that it smacks of LLM aid throughout, especially in headings. I wish people would aggressively filter for these things--I have a technical writing SKILL.md that tries to remove all the AI tropes it finds and use simplified technical English (it's a thing, look it up) to do docs, and that makes one heck of a difference...

As other have said the apps for devices is still the issue with Jellyfin.

For TV you pretty much have to use Kodi and all the decent theme require a surprising amount of other plug-ins to work...

Anyone know of a decent theme for Kodi that won't fall over next time it updates? I just need "Resume Watching", "Newly Added" and alphabetical lists.

Literally last night I was trying to set up books in Jellyfin and dismayed to see the bookshelf plugin archived with no mention of ongoing support.

Very happy to see it’s been folded into the server!

Something I've long wanted is something far more minimal than jellyfin that just browses my library by folder but has a web player that can transcode/remux as needed for the browser. As it stands when I want to watch a film with someone elses computer I give VLC/whatever a link to a webdav URL and it streams from that. It'd just be nice to have it be in the browser.

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.

Upgrade from 10.11.11 was also successful here - only took 2-3 minutes. Can definitely notice the performance improvement

I have a plex pass but moved to jellyfin, because I can't get plex to reliably stream from my server at all. While jellyfin works so smoothly. Look forward to this update!

How does it compare to current Plex? Are there proper, usable apps for Apple TV and iOS already?

Edit: Anyone is running Jellyfin on Qnap?

Jellyfin has worked great so far for us, I never used Plex or Emby so cant compare. They recently made an official Tizen app too, so dont have to build and sideload anymore, just works.

One of the remaining issues is that the Samsung client remuxes if you select a secondary audio track[0] - apparently fixable by using the AVPlay player instead of the HTML player.

[0]: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-tizen/issues/337

Not sure if they support multiple OPDS catalogs now.

I am on v10 (using JF for music only) and with book plugin (forgot which one) it didn't offer to split books into multiple catalogs, which was a bit annoying. Maybe I missed it in v11. Solution for me was to vibecode a simplest OPDS server with 0 css and basic auth.

Did they fix that thing where like you can’t have mixed movies and tv in the same folder without it going nuts

Dow folks migrating frem Plex ; Codex/Sol had no issue transferring played/watched status to my new Jellyfin library.

What's the situation on intro end ending detection and skipping?

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)

Exciting times, they really messed up with 10.11.x shipped half baked DB refactoring

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

[flagged]

It sounds like a real pain in the ass upgrade, I'm thankful I've put off trying Jellyfin this long.

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 =[.