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  • Hacker News
  • Cool to see fellow Mohawk alum making the front page of HN. I wish you all the best in your future endeavors Joshua and team!
    by jbird99
  • Had no idea, that is cool! Thanks for pointing this out.
    by Supercompressor
  • Jellyfin is great for my needs, and I appreciate the effort that goes into it. Recently was having rendering issues doing HDR -> SDR tone mapping since I watch my content on a 2008 era Pioneer plasma display. I found that oddly enough while the server is pretty solid, the client experience is a bit hit or miss. I'm using the mpg-shim adapter, and I'm looking forward to them building a native app with better native render compositing.
    by hankbond
  • Small plug to ask for help with the Apple TV App? Swiftfin is really rough but the best option. It’s quite terrible, never refreshes, overlapping text constantly. It could use some love.
    by cr125rider
  • I had some issues with it too, though not as bad as you seem to have experienced. Good new is they're reworking it, heavily, and seem to be near a new release.

    For my own purposes I cloned it and pushed the build to my AppleTV... and it's considerably better than the last app store release (quite a while ago).

    I'm not suggesting anyone do the same, but just saying your problems might be about to solve themselves.

    by dd8601fn
  • I tried to get involved (in very minor ways) a while back but got basically no engagement from the project so I just let it be. I moved to infuse instead as my ios client and its been good overall. I really hate its list performance on large collections though.
    by JamesSwift
  • Infuse is polished, I lack nothing in it on ATV.
    by stasomatic
  • I use moonfin on my shield, seems to exist for apple tv?
    by Hikikomori
  • They just released the first update in years, v1.5

    I understand it will be kept in sync from now on

    Requires tvOS 26

    by eisa01
  • There’s some alternatives. I like JellyTV, pretty smooth UI. Streamyfin has a beta for the TV as well, and continues to improve. But yeah definitely some of the tougher part of the ecosystem
    by clayhacks
  • Keep an eye on Neptune. I used Swiftfin, switched to Infuse, and am now using Neptune daily. It's coming along really nicely.

    https://neptuneplayer.com

    by tbeseda
  • Huge fan of Jellyfin and the whole related stack, glad to see this is all peaceful.
    by tclancy
  • What's the related stack
    by timcobb
  • I’m grateful for this team. Jellyfin is a great product. I’ve been using llm + Tailscale + Jellyfin to manage my media box and I couldn’t be more happy. I’ve got perfect metadata, perfect organization, and multimodal search on top of it. What a dream.
    by postalcoder
  • There's never been a better time to consider writing your own media server solution from scratch.

    I really don't like the idea of transcoding on demand. It has always created a janky experience on the client. I've been using a custom solution that runs everything through ffmpeg normalization as part of the media upload phase. Whenever a client wants to stream something we give them raw byte ranges directly from the block storage provider. In practice, this feels like flipping the channels on an analog tv. Every video starts and seeks nearly instantly.

    I've long since given up on the dream of maintaining lossless master copies of everything just in case. Every practical use of that 50 gb copy of Home Alone would have you transcoding it. Most clients would choke on that bit rate. When would you actually be able to use all of the available information? Why not just discard what you'll never use? I realize it feels offensive to kill information like this but you can do a much better job with the end experience if you do.

    You can get a modern chatbot to produce this experience in a single prompt. The code can run on anything slightly more powerful than a potato because you aren't transcoding at playback time anymore. A raspberry pi would be more than enough to serve a few clients on a LAN. If you remain humble in your list of demands (a simple directory browser that plays videos linked within), you can more easily achieve total autonomy.

    by bob1029
  • Transcoding on demand is just trading compute for storage. If you have infinite storage you can store all definitions in advance for any possible client (I think that's what Netflix does); but if you don't, transcoding on demand is fine and isn't that much slower (a bit janky, yes, but only a bit).
    by bambax
  • If the novel parts are don't transcode, and clean up before adding to library, then you can just do that, right? Without having to create a frontend, which is the fiddly part (especially since losing the AppleTV client I can use with Jellyfin server would be a sacrifice). It's pretty easy to, for example, make a python script that grabs metadata from tmdb when given a URL (so the script has no need for disambiguation logic -- that's what humans are for), generate an ffmpeg command that adds that metadata, and does whatever re-encoding/re-muxing you want. Can embed subtitle files this way too.

    e.g., of generated command: ffmpeg -y -hide_banner -i /mnt/storage/rips/bluray.mkv -i ./eng.sdr.srt -map 0:v -map 0:a -map 1 -c:v copy -c:a copy -c:s mov_text -metadata:s:a:0 language=eng -metadata:s:a:0 title=eng -metadata:s:s:0 language=eng -metadata:s:s:0 title="English (SDR)" -disposition:s:0 hearing_impaired -metadata title="Film Title" -metadata genre="Pretentious Comedy" -metadata artist="Alan Smithee" -metadata date=2026 -f mp4 -movflags +faststart "/mnt/storage/movies/Film Title (2026).mp4"

    Do whatever encoding you want in advance too of course. Note, the above is generated from a script (not created manually) that is run like `./cleanvideo.py ./bluray.mkv ./eng.sdr.srt https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/985-eraserhead`

    After doing this for over a decade, I find that Jellyfin, or even just a caddy directory listing, make a great media library browser. Jellyfin will almost never identify things incorrectly. Can always fall back to just listing things and playing your content with `mpv https://machine.tailnet-name.ts.net/movies/...` even remotely given the use of tailscale. Or VLC from my phone, etc.

    by dundarious
  • "There's never been a better time to consider writing your own media server solution from scratch."

    If you want to go the hacker route, and do not give a flying fig about UI, you can get a long way just by setting up any old webserver that has range support (which is most of them) and serving out directories with video files and some sort of automated index. You don't even need to do any work. Browsers already are smart enough to hit a video file, extract the playback metadata with range requests and provide native seeking, speed management, and some of the other basics. Plus you get native "right click (or equivalent) -> download" support without anything giving you hassles.

    On the one hand, it's missing a lot of features. On the other hand, it can't be beat for simplicity and the bang-for-the-buck is pretty good. And anything capable of A: running an HTTP server at all and B: has enough storage to store the files can saturate whatever network it is on with video data if you want it to.

    by jerf
  • We should be clear about software vs hardware transcoding being different things. Hardware transcoding is "free" for even commodity hardware. Yes, lower end systems might have trouble keeping up with a blu-ray remux as its source to a high-bitrate target. But you can very easily buy an off the shelf mini-pc to act as a transcode-capable server and eliminate nearly all the downsides that come with trying to avoid transcoding.
    by JamesSwift
  • > Every practical use of that 50 gb copy of Home Alone would have you transcoding it. Most clients would choke on that bit rate.

    What clients are you using? I use the highest bitrate HDR videos possible. I very rarely have to transcode. 4k TVs are cheap as are 4k streaming devices.

    The main case for transcoding is playing a video in a browser that doesn't support the original codec. Everything can handle high bitrate streams now. The one other rare exception is video that's over 100Mbit/s. I've encountered a few that are that high and some streaming boxes can only handle 100Mb.

    by driverdan
  • Check out https://siloserver.org . Silo has its own API but also spins up a Jellyfin-protocol compatibility layer. This allows you to use any Jellyfin client and just point it at your Silo server.
    by jeremycarter
  • You just described Plex 0.1.

    There's a reason they turned to transcoding: it means every device can get the highest quality version it is capable of displaying. Your solution limits the video to the lowest common supported quality.

    by gamblor956
  • > You can get a modern chatbot to produce this experience in a single prompt.

    If you value your time that little and you get more joy out of building apps for multiple platforms instead of watching movies then this is the best choice. For everyone else it's probably better to just go with any of the hundres of solutions that went through years of bug fixing and pain already to get it working on all these platforms.

    by dewey
  • Note that the headline doesn't reflect the post. Here's the beginning:

    > Hello everyone. Effective yesterday, Anthony and I [Joshua Boniface] decided to depart from the project, myself as Project Leader, and he as a core team member. This is in addition to the resignation of Andrew on Friday.

    "Several core team members including the founder leave" looks a bit different from "founder leaves".

    by thaumasiotes
  • So, is there anyone left? /s
    by mvanbaak
  • Plus the title only mentions 1 person while 98% of the linked article is about 2 other people, neither of which are only person mentioned in the title. And the linked article doesn’t even have any link to find out about the founder leaving, the only person named in the title.
    by no-name-here
  • Also an important note is that they are leaving on good terms. Headline made me terrified that some bad drama was going down, but they are just ready to move on and committed to clean handoffs to whoever owns it going forward.
    by Hobadee
  • Happy to see that it looks like a peaceful transition. I’m not currently a Jellyfin user, I tried it, but it didn’t seem capable of handling my library on my hardware. I’m sticking with Plex for now, but as they move more and more toward trying to be a streaming service instead of a media server, I’m hoping Jellyfin matures to the point where it’s viable when I need it.
    by al_borland
  • what is your hardware problem?
    by techaqua
  • What do you mean they’re moving toward trying to be a streaming service?
    by 2muchtime