thundermoose

The performance of hardware acceleration in Jellyfin is markedly worse in my experience. My A380 can handle 2-3x more streams in Plex than it can in Jellyfin. My theory is that it's the jellyfin ffmpeg port slowing things down, but I admittedly don't have much evidence to back that up beyond the fact that Plex's transcoder is built on ffmpeg as well.

Plex Relays are a feature, but that's sort of the point. You get that stability from Plex by default and it works on all clients. There is no realistic way you're going to get all remote client devices on a VPN for Jellyfin. Maybe one day Jellyfin can offer that as a paid option, a la Nabu Casa for Homeassistant.

Media servers tend to get shared around with friends and family and these edges will start to drive you nuts if you have more than a handful of users. I do not want to try to walk a family member through setting up a VPN on their smart TV.

Yeah, that part about Plex has always bugged me. You can disable logins for your server with allow-listed networks, but most of the non-desktop apps have to log into the Plex platform to run.

This isn't about want, it's a reality check. OP said jellyfin is better than Plex now, and by objective measure it is not better for most people yet. False expectations hurt Jellyfin adoption, you need to try it with the expectation of jankiness or you'll just be annoyed by the edges.

There's a really strong bias on Lemmy for OSS projects. I'm glad they get so much love here, but everything people say here about Jellyfin has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. It works and you can use it. Depending on your needs, it may even work perfectly for you. There are tons of rough edges though.

Here's a few:

• A bunch of basic functionality most people are used to is missing by default. You can get things like intro detection and subtitle downloading to work with plugins, but you have to work at it.
• Hardware acceleration still kind of sucks. You can get it to work, but the Jellyfin port of ffmpeg doesn't work anywhere near as well as Plex's.
• The variety in app experience is bewildering sometimes. Apps look and feel very different between platforms.
• Android TV app support sucks. The app is difficult to navigate and has a bunch of weird edges, like subtitle defaults not working. I have no idea what OP is talking about here, it sounds like they're only judging the app on its animation speed.
• Public network support is finicky. This is hard to quantify, but I've been on several remote networks where my Jellyfin connection dropped in and out and Plex did not. I suspect this is due to the Plex Relay service making up for bad routes between my house and the network.

Jellyfin is improving all the time, and I hope the recent EFCore update improves performance and development velocity. I'm also holding out hope it will eventually lead to externally hosted databases and active-active servers.

Disclaimer: I run Plex and Jellyfin and regularly check in on the state of things in Jellyfin. I donate to Jellyfin. I want Jellyfin to be better than Plex. I don't think any objective measure bears this out yet.

Even if it's not true, it's not surprising.

This is a weird sentence. I honestly have no idea what it means.

I Have No Hands, And I Must Meme

Oh, forgot to mention: striping in ZFS will use the capacity of the smallest drive. It sounds like you have a 1TB drive and a 4TB drive, so striping would give you access to 2TB at most.

Losing one drive in a striped pool with no redundancy means the entire pool is shot. Restoration from your HDDs may take a very long time, on top of data loss between the time of failure and your last snapshot. Striping without redundancy is fast, but dangerous.

This may work at first, and maybe you really do have a use case where this kind of failure is tolerable. However, in my experience, data is precious more often than it isn't. Over time, you're more likely to find use cases where the loss of the pool will be frustrating at best, and devastating at worst.

If you're not using any redundancy, I would create separate pools so each drive can fail independently. You'll have all 5TB of storage, but not contiguously. That at least constrains the failure modes you're likely to run into.

If you are striping with redundancy (e.g., RAID-Z1), which I would highly recommend, you can lose a drive and not lose any data. That would take at least 3 equally-sized drives though, and you'd only be able to use the capacity of 2 of them.

Companies don't generally donate for ideology, they donate for political favors. Donating to the losing party is a waste of money, there's no reason for them to donate to Democrats.

Google bought Waze 11 years ago, it's been part of Google Maps for years now

It doesn't seem weird to you that there's always some reason a Democrat prevents Democrats from accomplishing things when they have a majority? It's been like two decades of this, bud. There's always some reason for them not to fix anything.

I'll vote Democrat every time because, although they barely do anything, at least they won't actively make things worse. That choice fucking sucks though, so quit acting like Democrats aren't trash. They are trash and the only reason to vote for them is because the other side is taking policy advice from literal Nazis.

I agree with you, however Jellyfin is not intrinsically more secure than any other piece of software. You have to be very careful how you go about deploying it if you open up external access, as you are dependent on the Jellyfin devs to fix vulnerabilities and they aren't actually being paid to do this. If you're paranoid about privacy, you should be paranoid about this too; the people sending subpoenas aren't above port-scans on ISP subscribers, they did it back in the early days of torrents.

You get control and privacy, but you also get responsibility. It's a trade-off, and one I'd certainly make if Jellyfin were more mature. That's just me though, I've been hosting my own stuff for about a decade now and I can set up an isolated environment for Jellyfin to run within. Plex is a lot more newbie-friendly and I'd still recommend it for most folks unless they for sure know what they're doing.

As an aside, these concerns are common to all FOSS software that don't have deep-pocketed backers. Jellyfin is likely never getting those, unfortunately. I hope they can find some other way of sustaining themselves, they've not got much money for the scale of development needed and it's all volunteer-driven today.

https://opencollective.com/jellyfin

I want them to keep going, and I've even donated to them. I still don't think it's at a place to replace Plex for most people yet though.