How does Jellyfin work on Kodi? (LibreElec)

[mishmash]

Hi All, just a little backround on my setup and what I'm trying to do.
 
For my TV, I have a raspberry pi 3b+, it has LibreElec installed on it, with my own media. I've been ripping my own dvds and blu rays for quite some time, so have a bit of a collection. I used to use just a simple file browser to navigate, but about 6 months ago I looked into Kodi/LibreElec because I thought it'd be nice to have all the extra info/pictures and interface that come along with the media scraper, so I saw how to rename my movies and shows (Bulk Rename Utility was so helpful), and its looking pretty sweet.

In general, I dont like streaming, I think it stems from having very poor internet in the past, so I just have gotten very used to playing the video file directly from the pi. Since I started using Kodi, I got the android app, Kore, where you can use as a remote, but also stream from the pi while on wifi. So thats actually pretty cool, sometimes I just might watch a show or something on my phone while at home since its a little more convenient, but that did sort of get me thinking more about streaming a show in other places, not on my home network.
 
After a bit of searching around, I feel like Jellyfin would be helpful, but wasnt totally sure how it works as a kodi addon. Would it just use the media already present in Kodi? Say while I'm out and about, and have some time to kill and wanted to watch a show on my phone, would Jellyfin need to be already running on the pi to stream to me? Or is it like always sort of running in the background on the pi?
 
I saw that there are two Jellyfin addons that you can install, one is Jellyfin for Kodi, and the other is Jellycon.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/kodi/
 
I'm sorry if its a dumb question, but which of these would be the right one to install for me? Is Jellyfin what I'm looking for? Or would Kodi have the functionality to stream outside of your home network already? Thank you for any help!

[TheDreadPirate]

I've only used Kodi for testing on LAN, so I can't definitively comment on whether Kodi can access content on its own outside of your LAN. My understanding is no. It primarily uses NFS/SMB.

One of the JF/Kodi devs commented on this old Reddit post describing the difference between the two Jellyfin plugins for Kodi.

https://www.reddit.com/r/jellyfin/commen...t/g25zc9h/

Whether or not you need to install them depends on whether your content is going to be migrated to a different host. If you plan on running Jellyfin on another host and also migrating the content to be hosted there, you would need to install one of these plugins.

If your RPi running Kodi will continue to host the media, you don't have to install either plugin. You can run Jellyfin on another host, use SMB to allow Jellyfin to access the media on the RPi, and use Jellyfin clients on your other devices.

[mishmash]

Hi there! Thank you for the reply. I think I was wrong with the way I was intending to use Jellyfin, or at least hoping to. It seems that when people are using Jellyfin on Kodi, its to integrate media from a Jellyfin host to their Kodi device. I guess I was thinking it worked the other way around, like Jellyfin using the media I have from Kodi on my pi to stream to other devices. It looks like if I really wanted to stream to an outside device, I'd just be setting up another device to be a media server. Thanks again!

[TheDreadPirate]

You do NOT have to setup another server. But you would need to run Jellyfin on the Pi that is currently running Kodi since that is where the media is. Or you could run the server on a separate device, even another Pi, and have your Kodi Pi make the media available via SMB.

Generally speaking we don't recommend Pis as Jellyfin servers due to their inability to transcode.

[mcarlton00]

I believe there's even an addon to set up a jellyfin server in the libreelec repos.

The caveat to this is that if you have Kodi and your media running on it's own and then a jellyfin server running separately, they won't share watched status without a third party tool like Trakt. This is why generally you'd set up a jellyfin server first and then use one of our addons to play media from the server in kodi.