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doctoboggantoday at 2:10 AM18 repliesview on HN

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


Replies

Gareth321today at 10:32 AM

> As an aside, I recently started having Claude help me with configuring my arr stack and it has helped tremendously.

LLMs have been AMAZING for home server maintenance and improvements. I have completed SO many of my "some day" tasks. I never have to read another fucking log file ever again. It has taken all of the friction out of the hobby. It's all* fun now.

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atombendertoday at 8:45 AM

I left Plex for Jellyfin + Infuse a couple of years ago, and I'm not looking back.

But the sore point right now is outside access, which Jellyfin really isn't made for. I set up Tailscale so I can connect Infuse to Jellyfin remotely. But that's not exactly as smooth as Plex. I can't give friends and family access, either, which was dead easy with Plex.

In terms of the UX, Infuse isn't very good, but it does the job okay. The built-in subtitle fetcher is amazing; that stuff never worked for me with Plex.

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leokennistoday at 7:09 AM

Both for simplicity and portability, I am a very happy user of https://firecore.com/infuse.

I guess it's less full featured as Plex or Jellyfin (it still more than covers the bases for video: format support, different video/audio/subtitle tracks, tv series recognition, skip intros, Trakt.tv etc.); but then again all it requires is any online storage, and the Infuse app (either on iDevice or AppleTV).

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prophesitoday at 6:44 AM

Lifetime pass user long before the ridiculous price hikes for it and the direction for the service going down a path I didn't want to support. You can run Plex and Jellyfin on the same server concurrently pointing to the same media files. My Plex server was still running until I was able to transfer everything over and their mobile app ecosystem got up to parity.

firecalltoday at 2:12 AM

Feels like only a matter of time with Plex doesn't it!

I've got the lifetime pass, but it really does feel like a Sword of Damocles situation...

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jwrtoday at 9:35 AM

I also have a lifetime pass, but I'm becoming increasingly annoyed with Plex. Why do I have to regularly turn off their "recommended" stuff that is just ads for movies I can buy online? Why does it appear and re-appear?

Also, the Plex app for LG TV has been buggy and broken for years: some content will not play at all, some will not play if you ff/rewind, and some will not play until you physically turn your TV off and then on. Very annoying.

I'm glad to see competition.

darknavitoday at 2:22 AM

> 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

Any more details here? I hit this a lot and it's not too much work, but still pretty annoying.

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internet101010today at 6:01 AM

If there is one thing that needs to be re-written and consolidated it is the arrs ecosystem. Replacing/consolidating the arrs themselves is pretty straightforward. The trap that quickly becomes a token incinerator is incorporating the downloader into the library manager itself. A lot of learned lessons in that sabnzbd codebase.

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devindotcomtoday at 2:54 AM

unrelated to your otherwise helpful comment, I just wanted to note that it is "demur" (i.e. hesitate or object) you want in this case; "demure" is an adjective meaning shy or modest.

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bombcartoday at 2:48 AM

Claude and jellyfin and HASS is great. Now my phone has a “door lock” which turns off the kids user’s access, but lets the current playing finish. And another “door lock” unlocks playing for ten minutes.

dgrin91today at 2:34 AM

What are you using for audiobook requests? I also recently setup arr stack, but I saw readarr is depreciated and there doesn't seem to be a clear successor.

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jshiertoday at 4:20 AM

Also a lifetime pass Plex user, I'll leave as soon as someone has a good solution for identifying raw Bluray rips automatically. Why do I have to manually name the episodes? We had CDDB last century, why isn't there an equivalent for raw video rips? The ripped data should be identical, a simple hash should uniquely identify it.

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BLKNSLVRtoday at 2:26 AM

I just like the confirmation that AI is happy to be a Boatswain.

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villishtoday at 2:35 AM

I like them both, but I can never give up plexamp. I’ve tried navidrome and various jellyfin clients but I keep going back.

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ggmtoday at 5:29 AM

Thank you for starting this thread. Another lifetime plex pass user, interested in my choices. For now, I am happy on plex/plexamp. Good to know what jellyfin is at.

bitexplodertoday at 3:03 AM

For what it’s worth, I am very happy with Jellyfin and the *arr suite. It took a bit of agent prodding to get them all playing nicely together and bypassing Cloudflare CAPTCHAs. However, it's pretty sweet when you get it all working.

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bigstrat2003today at 2:13 AM

I (also a lifetime Plex Pass user) decided to try it out ~6 months ago, and I've switched over. I haven't had any gaps in functionality yet, though YMMV of course. While it isn't better than Plex (which is still fine for now), it isn't worse either, and I trust the Jellyfin devs a lot more than the Plex devs at this point.

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colechristensentoday at 8:19 AM

huh, yeah I should start an xbmc fork/reimagining. the limitations with the tools of the day are imagination. a LOT of the software I use these days are things I facilitated the creation of and a media player is definitely supposed to be on that list