11 hours ago
As a new Jellyfin user of only a couple weeks, I'd like to share my journey. This is not intended to be a fluff piece so I'll put out some hard truths as I am seeing them. Keep in mind that I am not a computer tech, a network engineer, a programmer, etc. I crashed out of coding school very early on and I have been doing super basic programming tasks all of my life but I still mostly rely on tutorials and manuals. I like movies. I want to watch movies. I want all that Jellyfin promises. And yes, I do realize that Jellyfin is free and while I greatly appreciate that, I'm not going to use that as an excuse for the downsides I've experienced. I'm of the opinion that if any freeware is hampered by a lack of funding, there should be a nominal fee in order to finance the fixes. I say that of all free / cheap software. I'm that guy who keeps telling Blackmagic Design they need to charge more for their Resolve license to fund needed fixes. Again, I am thankful to the devs.
My physical media journey began, or really restarted after being sucked into the streaming scam, a couple years ago. I'd acquired a pretty substantial collection (to me, small to others) of my favorite movies on disk. We all know the reasons: quality, availability, ownership. So when I recently learned about these services that allow all of that plus the convenience of streaming, I was sold. I avoided the other guys not only because of the cost but because I don't want to have to wade through a bunch of those carpy Tubi-like channels. I just want to watch the movies I love.
I began by having my external blu ray drive flashed to rip 4k disks with the help of someone at makemkv. I ripped a ton of my movies. I got a recycled PC from work, added a hard drive with my media, and installed Jellyfin. This basic setup was surprisingly easy. However, presumably because it was an older (although still decently-spec'd) PC, local playback was very stuttery. Plus the power draw was a bit more than I would like.
So I went all in and got a couple 8TB NAS drives at about $200 each and a Ugreen NAS as was recommended by several YouTubers. Unfortunately I came to find out that the units sent to the YouTubers for review were modded by Ugreen so that they could run Docker and, in turn, Jellyfin. I reached out to Ugreen and they informed me that the unit I'd been convinced to buy does not and never will run Docker. Fortunately I was able to return that one and get their more powerful 2 bay NAS (at about twice the cost) and this one does run Docker. So about $800 in, I finally have the hardware needed to run Jellyfin. I also added a couple nvme drives I had laying around for added storage and caching plus I may eventually upgrade the RAM from its current 8GB but that's another day. While this is not Jellyfin-related, I wouldn't suggest going this route. Those spinny drives are really loud and they have to run 24/7 because they're not designed to spin down (turn off) or even go to sleep frequently. I can hear them in my bedroom with the door closed, down the hall and in my closed-door office. I would absolutely return them if I could. If you build a NAS, definitely splurge on SSD drives. You're welcome.
So with my new NAS, I had to rebuild my Jellyfin setup. I have the config files and my containers point to them but no, they don't actually do anything. It was a rebuild from scratch. That's not terrible though because with only a couple hundred movies, it's actually a fun organization process for me. I'm odd like that. There are several posts in these forums and across the internet about backing up and restoring settings but I've yet to find one that has a working solution. 99% of the time these are answered by tech geeks (that's a compliment) who don't understand not understanding networking. Yeah, I don't know how to proxy my DNS to my DHCP via the Ubuntu terminal. Those are just made up words to me. Again, not a dev.
Along the process of trying to figure out the settings for Jellyfin, I had made several posts in these forums. They were all simply asking for really basic help after searching for solutions and finding none. Half of them were removed. Most of them went unanswered. I can't imagine why they were removed for simply asking questions I couldn't find the answers to. They were on topic and to the point. I'm not trying to be the main character but answering these questions helps to build a knowledgebase that will help other users in the future. It will / can also help guide the creation of help documentation.
Last night I started watching my first full movie. Yay! This is on the same home network as my server. The NAS is plugged into my mesh and the upload speed is about 500mb/s so we should be golden. Starting out, the picture was very high resolution, probably the same as with a blu-ray connected directly. However, I very quickly noticed that while my TV (and all TVs) is 16:9 or 1.7777:1, the movie must have been at least 1.85:1 if not wider. Jellyfin squeezes the image to fit 16:9 so everything is taller than it should be. There should be black bars. There may be a setting somewhere but in the weeks I've been using JF, I haven't seen it. I'd ask the forum but, you know, see above. The next issue, which may be even worse, was the quality of the darker scenes. My TV is a LG OLED which was the top consumer model a few years ago. The picture quality on this TV is amazing. The original source was blu-ray. But watching via Jellyfin, the dark scenes are impossible to view. We've all seen 8 bit banding. This is more like 4 bit banding if that's a thing. Dark scenes are entirely un-watchable. Again, this is over a network that I regularly watch streaming 4k HDR with near theater-like quality. I could just plug into the HDMI directly but A) the noise and B) that entirely defeats the purpose of streaming local libraries. I may try this just for troubleshooting but it's not a solution.
Another issue I've come across supposedly has to do with ffmpeg. If you start a video and then back out to the menu and try playing another video, you will get an error. According to posts I've seen, it's because JF is looking at the wrong version of ffmpeg and the solution is to delete the wrong one. Well, I have like 20 ffmpeg files somehow and I have no idea which ones are good or bad. I also have no idea why the JF installer wouldn't include this file and then only use this file.
In conclusion, I'm not sure I would recommend Jellyfin to anyone. It is clearly created for people with a lot of computer networking and programming experience. It is not plug and play by any means. I'm hopeful that at some point the program will receive some funding while staying true to its mission so that it can offer a simplified process for setting up and using. For me, I'll probably plug away at it for a few more days then most likely, begrudgingly, move over to "that" service.
My physical media journey began, or really restarted after being sucked into the streaming scam, a couple years ago. I'd acquired a pretty substantial collection (to me, small to others) of my favorite movies on disk. We all know the reasons: quality, availability, ownership. So when I recently learned about these services that allow all of that plus the convenience of streaming, I was sold. I avoided the other guys not only because of the cost but because I don't want to have to wade through a bunch of those carpy Tubi-like channels. I just want to watch the movies I love.
I began by having my external blu ray drive flashed to rip 4k disks with the help of someone at makemkv. I ripped a ton of my movies. I got a recycled PC from work, added a hard drive with my media, and installed Jellyfin. This basic setup was surprisingly easy. However, presumably because it was an older (although still decently-spec'd) PC, local playback was very stuttery. Plus the power draw was a bit more than I would like.
So I went all in and got a couple 8TB NAS drives at about $200 each and a Ugreen NAS as was recommended by several YouTubers. Unfortunately I came to find out that the units sent to the YouTubers for review were modded by Ugreen so that they could run Docker and, in turn, Jellyfin. I reached out to Ugreen and they informed me that the unit I'd been convinced to buy does not and never will run Docker. Fortunately I was able to return that one and get their more powerful 2 bay NAS (at about twice the cost) and this one does run Docker. So about $800 in, I finally have the hardware needed to run Jellyfin. I also added a couple nvme drives I had laying around for added storage and caching plus I may eventually upgrade the RAM from its current 8GB but that's another day. While this is not Jellyfin-related, I wouldn't suggest going this route. Those spinny drives are really loud and they have to run 24/7 because they're not designed to spin down (turn off) or even go to sleep frequently. I can hear them in my bedroom with the door closed, down the hall and in my closed-door office. I would absolutely return them if I could. If you build a NAS, definitely splurge on SSD drives. You're welcome.
So with my new NAS, I had to rebuild my Jellyfin setup. I have the config files and my containers point to them but no, they don't actually do anything. It was a rebuild from scratch. That's not terrible though because with only a couple hundred movies, it's actually a fun organization process for me. I'm odd like that. There are several posts in these forums and across the internet about backing up and restoring settings but I've yet to find one that has a working solution. 99% of the time these are answered by tech geeks (that's a compliment) who don't understand not understanding networking. Yeah, I don't know how to proxy my DNS to my DHCP via the Ubuntu terminal. Those are just made up words to me. Again, not a dev.
Along the process of trying to figure out the settings for Jellyfin, I had made several posts in these forums. They were all simply asking for really basic help after searching for solutions and finding none. Half of them were removed. Most of them went unanswered. I can't imagine why they were removed for simply asking questions I couldn't find the answers to. They were on topic and to the point. I'm not trying to be the main character but answering these questions helps to build a knowledgebase that will help other users in the future. It will / can also help guide the creation of help documentation.
Last night I started watching my first full movie. Yay! This is on the same home network as my server. The NAS is plugged into my mesh and the upload speed is about 500mb/s so we should be golden. Starting out, the picture was very high resolution, probably the same as with a blu-ray connected directly. However, I very quickly noticed that while my TV (and all TVs) is 16:9 or 1.7777:1, the movie must have been at least 1.85:1 if not wider. Jellyfin squeezes the image to fit 16:9 so everything is taller than it should be. There should be black bars. There may be a setting somewhere but in the weeks I've been using JF, I haven't seen it. I'd ask the forum but, you know, see above. The next issue, which may be even worse, was the quality of the darker scenes. My TV is a LG OLED which was the top consumer model a few years ago. The picture quality on this TV is amazing. The original source was blu-ray. But watching via Jellyfin, the dark scenes are impossible to view. We've all seen 8 bit banding. This is more like 4 bit banding if that's a thing. Dark scenes are entirely un-watchable. Again, this is over a network that I regularly watch streaming 4k HDR with near theater-like quality. I could just plug into the HDMI directly but A) the noise and B) that entirely defeats the purpose of streaming local libraries. I may try this just for troubleshooting but it's not a solution.
Another issue I've come across supposedly has to do with ffmpeg. If you start a video and then back out to the menu and try playing another video, you will get an error. According to posts I've seen, it's because JF is looking at the wrong version of ffmpeg and the solution is to delete the wrong one. Well, I have like 20 ffmpeg files somehow and I have no idea which ones are good or bad. I also have no idea why the JF installer wouldn't include this file and then only use this file.
In conclusion, I'm not sure I would recommend Jellyfin to anyone. It is clearly created for people with a lot of computer networking and programming experience. It is not plug and play by any means. I'm hopeful that at some point the program will receive some funding while staying true to its mission so that it can offer a simplified process for setting up and using. For me, I'll probably plug away at it for a few more days then most likely, begrudgingly, move over to "that" service.
