please can you help? I'm desperate, frustrated and disappointed by jellyfin

[dafaq]

so I spent the last five days getting my head round this programme and CHANGING my media library to cater to its whims. Not a lot of success. SO MANY films are wrongly identified, despite me giving NAME AND year, in the enforced brackets, and GIVING UP EVERYTHING else I had on file, like director names. I was hoping for jellyfin to facilitate my enjoyment of films (and in fact was pointed to it asking for a SIMPLE software).
is there none, or can I not find the setting to use the catalogue offline? all my files are on a hard drive. there is just no NEED for the internet just to show me what is already here.
how can I search by colour/BW, director, length, resolution, country or ANY OTHER perfectly banal feature?
why, if I have an srt file in the folder, the FILM shows up twice in the gallery?
from 539 items, only 514 are found? (it's NOT the 3 srt files). how can that be?
why can I not set WHAT to display on main gallery: film names and posters in original language; director; colour/BW. also, can I see actual posters and not just film stills?
why must I confirm EVERYTHING TWICE? why can I not do so via Enter?
why does it jump to the top of the list EVERY TIME rather than staying where I was?
can I please see all film names and posters in their original or MY SET language? I see a POLISH poster (yes, with polish writing) for a french film in french, jellyfin set to english!
can I please always see POSTERS rather than film stills? should I really have to edit EVERY FILM INDIVIDUALLY?
why can I not set which languages not to subtitle?
how can I search for at least: film names; director; black and white; country - and get shown ALL matches?
I cannot WRITE MY OWN PROGRAMMES! sorry, just not my skills.
please, are there solutions? I'm open for and happy about ANY constructive solution!
just please don't make me REDO ALL MY INDIVIDUAL FILES AGAIN
I must say, am also quite shocked at the culture of jellyfin! "Requests for troubleshooting will be IGNORED" on the only actual contact form. WOW. and the forum registration gives off error after error, EACH TIME forcing you to redo the stupid "captcha". Not cool.
<3

[Mel_Gibson_Real]

Could you provide an example or screenshot of your actual file structure? Maybe even what OS or container system your running jellyfin on? I dont know what you want anyone to do when you provide no information other than a giant rant?

[paulc]

You didn't provide the basic info in the guide to the first pinned post on How to Troubleshoot Jellyfin in the Forums https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-how-to-use-...ing-forums. 

Could it be you didn't understand how to setup Jellyfin just like you don't understand how to get help?

I've not experienced any of the behaviors you are ranting about Jellyfin as far as support and the culture, odd you claim that esp since this is your first post asking for support, unless you had a previous user account and trying to start your reputation over.

People are here to help and do help. Just browse around and see all the help from small, user errors to software bugs, etc.

Jellyfin, in my experience, has the best culture of help for all user levels from basic noobs to advanced users.

Minus the rant and personal injury you seem to be suffering, what exactly is the problem. It will help if you tell us what version of Jellyfin, on what platform you are using and include logs.

[Efficient_Good_5784]

is there none, or can I not find the setting to use the catalogue offline? all my files are on a hard drive. there is just no NEED for the internet just to show me what is already here.

Jellyfin does not require internet access to watch your media. The only thing it needs to connect to the internet for is to fetch metadata.
If no metadata is fetched, you can still use Jellyfin to watch your things. It will just be without artwork and descriptions.

how can I search by colour/BW, director, length, resolution, country or ANY OTHER perfectly banal feature?

The metadata providers would need  to provide that info in the first place.
Jellyfin has no way of knowing when a video is in color or in black & white.
You can do it yourself by adding in tags to differentiate with what has color and what is only BW.
Same for whatever other tags you need.

can I please always see POSTERS rather than film stills? should I really have to edit EVERY FILM INDIVIDUALLY?

What library type did you use?

why can I not set which languages not to subtitle?

Unless you got the subtitle plugin, Jellyfin does not fetch subtitles from the internet.
That means that all the subs that you're being shown are the ones present with your media.

how can I search for at least: film names; director; black and white; country - and get shown ALL matches?

Again, tags will help you out here. If your metadata source doesn't auto included them, you'll need to manually add them yourself.

I must say, am also quite shocked at the culture of jellyfin! "Requests for troubleshooting will be IGNORED" on the only actual contact form. WOW. and the forum registration gives off error after error, EACH TIME forcing you to redo the stupid "captcha". Not cool.

Sometimes, a request will be "ignored" because the only people that saw it are not capable of answering it. Jellyfin doesn't have multiple experts on standby for each possible issue that may arise at all times of the day.

Jellyfin is not beholden to any user or service. As a project, there is no expectation of forced service or support for end users.
Jellyfin is a volunteer-driven project. Work is done in the free/spare time that the devs have. The forum and community chat are also responded to when a volunteer has time.
There is no money to be made by volunteering in Jellyfin, so our time is taken by sleep and work as well.

This is to say, if you notice an issue with this, you're more than welcome to volunteer yourself and make this forum (or the chatrooms) much more active.
We would appreciate the help from all who would volunteer to help others out.

[Host-in-the-Shell]

First of, take a breather; this isn't the end of the world and a change of pace may help you clear your head.

Are we calm now? Great. So, are you aware that Jellyfin is a media server? It sounds to me that what you want is some type of media organizer/player. I mean, yeah, Jellyfin can technically do all those things, but the primary focus is with providing a way to serve your media over a local and/or remote network. This makes this type of software far more complex than your use case may need, so perhaps looking into a media organizer software with playback capabilities would be a better fit.

Now, to reiterate the points others have eloquently already made in this thread, consider that there is no corporation or commercial entity behind Jellyfin; it's all just volunteers, from coders to community members willing to read posts and help out. To come out swinging like that is unnecessary and rude. We're just offering our time here as a favor and as a way to give back to the community by trying to help as best we can. I can understand that Jellyfin's learning curve can be frustrating, but you don't really gain anything by making threads with oversized font yelling for help while also leveling accusations against the team and forum members that are offering support freely. You can ask respectfully and wait for help, or you can put on your big boy pants and read through the documentation.

My intention is not to come off as unfriendly, but I had to be blunt to set the record straight here. We are willing to help, after all, but like I said, keep in mind this is not a paid commercial service and we're not employees of some megacorp.

[dafaq]

thank you for your replies. I am happy to see that forum users seem more down to earth than the "official" culture. I am not a programmer, I'm a mere user, and was pointed to jellyfin as such. I'm sure it's huge fun to go through all of the tech if that is your joy. Mine is cinema, not tech.
I have all films on a usb ssd on windows 10. when I go offline, JF keeps spinning as if to load, but never does, even though all data are there. when I use the media player, it refuses to connect.
I can't find any of the options or settings I asked about, and the "official" help is either no help or just wrong (starting with the windows installer itself being for either AMD or ARM processors - NOT intel, and both thus refuse to run).
I don't see my version number anywhere. I assume it to be current, 10.9.10, since I only installed it a week ago.
Below is 
- my movie folder (win explorer) 
- what JF makes of it (homepage)
- a library screenshot. see how many posters are missing and a subtitled film appears twice

[Venson]

Hey there,

We offer support on our chat or here as showin on our webseite https://jellyfin.org/contact.

Please keep in mind, jellyfin is not managed by a company but people that invest their own free time and effort into this and usually do not tend to react well to aggressive users.

Lets get into it.

1.
>I have all films on a usb ssd on windows 10. when I go offline, JF keeps spinning as if to load, but never does, even though all data are there. when I use the media player, it refuses to connect.
That sounds like you are trying to connect via the internet to your JF server, not locally. Could you please describe your setup when you go "offline"?

2.
>starting with the windows installer itself being for either AMD or ARM processors - NOT intel, and both thus refuse to run)
I think you are just missunderstanding what

AMD64
ARM64

in that context means. Those are processor architectures, not processor _brands_. In this case for your normal modern pc, you want the AMD64 version. This is what x64 actually means.

3.
Lets pick one movie that did not got identified correctly, from the looks "Fahrenheit 11/9" is one of them. Please post _the exact_ file name for that movie.

[Mel_Gibson_Real]

Ok... so first I have no idea what you mean by "official" support or culture. I believe you have a fundemental missunderstanding how Free Open Source Software community driven development works. Also many people who use jellyfin myself included are not programmers, if you follow the "official" guide its actually quite a simple experience as far as FOSS goes.

As for your media layout, I recommend following the "official" instructions on how to layout your library folder. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/media/movies

And im willing to bet your losing connection because your using your LAN ip instead of your loopback ip.

[Efficient_Good_5784]

I have all films on a usb ssd on windows 10. when I go offline, JF keeps spinning as if to load, but never does, even though all data are there. when I use the media player, it refuses to connect.

You need to provide in clear steps what you do when you "go offline" for us to be able to help you here.
As in:

1. I do x
   
2. I then do y
   
3. Final result is z
   

Are you putting the PC the server's hosted on to sleep? Are you turning off the WIFI connection to a client? etc.

I can't find any of the options or settings I asked about, and the "official" help is either no help or just wrong (starting with the windows installer itself being for either AMD or ARM processors - NOT intel, and both thus refuse to run).

You clearly have a screenshot showing a working Jellyfin homepage. Unless you photoshopped it, you did get Jellyfin to run. It doesn't look like it refuses to run.

[dafaq]

thanks!
so JF is a tray icon. I click on it and right click on "open JF". brave opens to http://localhost:8096/web/index.html#/home.html and I see the screenshotted page - IF I am connected to the internet (Wifi). if not, i.e. I am offline (= wifi turned off, deliberately; or I'm travelling), I only see a spinning circle that never stops. despite NO other change, i.e. HDD still plugged in.
Ditto entering above address into the JF media player: "unable to connect", even if wifi is connected. same for its suggested "192.168.1.100:8096"

The exact filename is Fahrenheit 11-9 (201.mkv