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Confession from a Former Jellyfin User


dannymichel

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TeamB

Cherry pie is where its at.

I absolutely agree Emby is in much better state than jellyfin but that is totally expected and anyone that thought otherwise was just deluding themselves.

However jellyfin is a different project than emby, yes they are both media servers but jellyfin is catering to a very different audiences than emby and I believe both projects can and will co-exists reasonably successfully.

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Nosepull

While I prefer Emby over Jellyfin because it's the better software for my usecase, I consider it unfair to blame somebody for acting according to a valid license, forking the code, working with it and offering the result for free and not for profit.

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Gilgamesh_48
8 hours ago, TeamB said:

Its not shareware : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareware

They did not steal it, it was freely given under the terms of the active license at the time of the fork.

The "name" does not matter it is still offered in the same general way. The Jellyfin people took code they did not write and modified it and distributed it. I do not know if they have monetized it in some way but it really matters very little as they are using code they did not write.

It may be "legal" but it is at least immoral.

The difference is like the difference between stealing a car to strip it down and sell the parts and stealing a car for a joyride. Either way you have stolen the car.

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PenkethBoy

They stole nothing - its part of the license emby was distributed under at the time allowed anybody to fork it and use it

you need to educate yourself and stop pushing rubbish

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Gilgamesh_48
3 minutes ago, PenkethBoy said:

They stole nothing - its part of the license emby was distributed under at the time allowed anybody to fork it and use it

you need to educate yourself and stop pushing rubbish

They stole the code but it was legal to do so. Just because the flawed "law" allowed it does not make it either right or moral.

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Nosepull

Ok, and that means that you and not the law decide what is legal or not? No use in any further argument here.

 

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chef

I wish they would change the clone. It looks an awful lot like emby (minus the colors). Same material design interface, same plugin architecture. Exactly the same depenadancy injections, with the same namespaces. You could probably load their plugins directly into emby and maybe vice versa. Meh... What 'cha gonna do? 

At the same time, a lot of web interfaces use material design. But, the question is, could they have written the service without having seen the Emby core code? They understood the code when they read it, enough to circumvent aspects of it, but could they have written and implemented ffmpeg without having seen the configuration? Could they have built the depenadancy injector functions, the session managers, the library scanners, the database API's on their own?? We'll never know 🤔😜😳

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4 hours ago, Nosepull said:

I consider it unfair to blame somebody for acting according to a valid license, forking the code, working with it and offering the result for free and not for profit.

Is it a bit ironic however to basically do a fork because you don't want to make a donation to the authors work, but then accept donations yourself?

9 minutes ago, Gilgamesh_48 said:

The Jellyfin people took code they did not write and modified it and distributed it. 

It may be "legal" but it is at least immoral.

A lot of people feel that way but that is the nature of the license. It used to bother me more personally then it does today.  With each new beta release of Emby it just pulls away from JF a bit more with more refined features and clients as well as enhancements and new features. I think the last major update JF had was back in July and most of that was things Emby had already done right after the fork. A lot of features JF has on paper just don't compare to the same feature in Emby.  Case in point is Tone mapping.

Just now, chef said:

I wish they would change the clone. It looks an awful lot like emby (minus the colors). Same material design interface, same plugin architecture. Exactly the same depenadancy injections, with the same namespaces. You could probably load their plugins directly into emby and maybe vice versa. Meh... What 'cha gonna do? 

At the same time, a lot of web interfaces use material design. But, the question is, could they have written the service without having seen the Emby core code? They understood the code when they read it, enough to circumvent aspects of it, but could they have written and implemented ffmpeg without having seen the configuration? Could they have built the depenadancy injector functions, the session managers, the library scanners on their own?? We'll never know 🤔😜😳

If they could of, they would have.  LOL  Why build a framework from the ground up when you can just "borrow it"?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"borrow it"?

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fizzyade

The "emby discord" is a toxic place inhabited by jellyfin users, they seem to think they're enittled to stuff for free.

When you create an open-source project, you have to accept that somewhere down the line it may be forked by somebody who has different ideas or a different vision to you.  The unfortuate thing for Emby was that the license validation was part of the source releases and that allowed it to be circumvented very easily. 

Clearly that was not in the spirit of the license granted by Emby for the source code, a license of emby itself is cheap, so with people doing this I totally get why they went closed source.

However, Jellyfin forked a version which they are entitled to do, I have absolutely zero interest in Jellyfin.  I have a lifetime license of Emby and also Plex, I was a Plex user for many years but the continued development of crapware and the not fixing of long term bugs, I switched to Emby after it went closed source.  I had been trying Emby every so often and finally I felt it had reached a point where it worked better than Plex did.  (I still use Plex for serving music because of the dedicated Plexamp app)

I have no issues with the way Emby looks, looks fine to me.

 

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10 hours ago, TeamB said:

They did not steal it, it was freely given under the terms of the active license at the time of the fork.

That is correct.  They didn't do anything illegal and the only thing I've seen them do that I object to on "morality" grounds is the removal of attribution comments from our original code so that it looks like they created it instead of us.

Overall, it is on us for allowing all of our hard work to be put out there for the taking.

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2 hours ago, ebr said:

That is correct.  They didn't do anything illegal and the only thing I've seen them do that I object to on "morality" grounds is the removal of attribution comments from our original code so that it looks like they created it instead of us.

Overall, it is on us for allowing all of our hard work to be put out there for the taking.

Yes, I recall I bring this issue will happens from like 9 years ago.

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BAlGaInTl
On 3/23/2021 at 9:19 AM, chef said:

I wish they would change the clone. It looks an awful lot like emby (minus the colors). Same material design interface, same plugin architecture. Exactly the same depenadancy injections, with the same namespaces. You could probably load their plugins directly into emby and maybe vice versa. Meh... What 'cha gonna do? 

I think this is pretty normal for a relatively young fork.  Over time, the appearance and code base will evolve.  Either Jellyfin will come up with their own design ideas, or Emby will change theirs.

I think OpenOffice vs. LibreOffice is a good example of where this has happened.

Initially, the LibreOffice fork was essentially a direct copy with minimal change.  Almost like they did a search/replace for Open/Libre.  Over time however, the design and features have started to diverge.  

It's just the nature of the open source licenses.

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Dreakon13

Never tried Jellyfin, just reading everything I had to do to get it set up felt overwhelming.

I've been a Plex user since I started this media server adventure probably 6-12 months ago (this past year has been a blur, I'd have to investigate when I really started with it).  The last straw was a bad build release almost a week ago, that pushed me to re-install everything... which would've been okay if that re-install didn't randomly bring inexplicable video/audio sync issues with a bunch of media that always worked fine before.  I posted on the forum explaining my issue with a very straightforward question to answer, and to this day I still haven't gotten any kind of answer.  Come to think of it, other than one post of mine about their download page not showing the "good" build after that snafu, I don't think I've EVER really gotten a response from the support team with Plex.

Then came Emby.  I tried it a while ago as I was deciding which one to go with, but certain issues with the Android app ultimately steered me in different directions.  I'm not sure if things have improved so much, or if maybe my experience and expectations changed a little, maybe both... but this time around everything just seems to fit.  It's not perfect, but what needs to work works and I feel warm and fuzzy about everything else getting there eventually.  The staff here seem great in general, but @Luke is a monster... every topic I make gets some sort of response and I respect the hell out of that.

I kinda wish I would've held off on the Plex Pass because that's money I would've happily put into Emby Premiere.  I'll likely upgrade at some point with a lifetime pass once I've spent a bit more time with Emby and the community... keep up the good work all, I'm excited for the present and future of this software.

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8 hours ago, Sammy said:

@Luke is a machine. He never sleeps!

Sleep is over rated. LOL

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9 hours ago, Dreakon13 said:

I kinda wish I would've held off on the Plex Pass because that's money I would've happily put into Emby Premiere.  I'll likely upgrade at some point with a lifetime pass once I've spent a bit more time with Emby and the community... keep up the good work all, I'm excited for the present and future of this software.

Don't feel bad, many people here have both a Plex Pass and a Premiere license for the same reason of switching over to Emby. :)

In case you not aware of what Premiere gives you:
https://support.emby.media/a/solutions/articles/44001173099

Keep in mind you don't have to get a lifetime license and you could always do a monthly license at least to use as a test for a month or two.

Congrats on switching to the green side.

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  • 4 weeks later...
RSVR

As an ex-emby premium user, I grew tired of paying monthly just to use Emby Theater to watch my own content on my TV.

That's all i really did, sometimes using the mobile app as a remote control but usually not.

My usage case did not warrant £4 a month for that when there are numerous free options that we could have used.

I like Emby, but my God the development at times is slow. Some of the basic bugs and features I experienced and reported never got fixed or added, and I think you'll find, that of you go onto the Jellyfin forum, or now reddit page, you'll find this was one of the many complaints about Emby.

I tried Jellyfin last year, it was a waste of time.

I tried Jellyfin 2 months ago and have now dropped Emby and moved over to Jellyfin permanently.

Maybe much has changed since the OP created his post, in fact I know it has.

The speed at which Jellyfin devs are implementing features and fixes bugs is bizarrely fast and in a different league to Emby devs.

Is Jellyfin as good as envy? Not at the moment, but in the space of a year they have gone from unusable (for me) to very usable and comparable to Emby. There are still lots TV s of bugs, but they get fixed.

They have just released Jellyfin Media Player which replaces Emby Theater just fine for me, and thank God it gets rid of that horrid Electron crap which I always had issues with. The android Jellyfin app is working fine 95% of the time for me, but once in a while certain media crashes it and I need to restart the app.

Library scanning works fine for me and is equally as capable as Emby I have found.

Everything else is much the same as Emby but with a few more bugs.

Jellyfin devs seem more than capable of writing and developing their own software and are not just blagging their way through.

If I were Emby devs, I'd be very worried about Jellyfin to be honest, another year and I really can't see what Emby will have to offer over Jellyfin.

I will say this, Emby is a bit more polished and I rarely had an issue with it other than the horrid electron and the windows 10 theater app which was a crash waiting to happen, again, and again, and again.

I still prefer Emby, but not at £48 per year.

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20 hours ago, RSVR said:

I still prefer Emby, but not at £48 per year

Hi.  Thanks for the feedback.  It is our job to make it worth it.  We plan to succeed.

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1 hour ago, ebr said:

It is our job to make it worth it

It already worth it, otherwise I will not be here as a Emby user :)

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acnp77
On 2/1/2020 at 11:02 PM, chef said:

5e35f4a58dccc_example3.png

 

@chef I really like the images for movies, tv shows etc. Are they available anywhere?
Thanks!

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acnp77
On 3/23/2021 at 9:45 AM, TeamB said:

yes they are both media servers but jellyfin is catering to a very different audiences than emby

@TeamB I would be interested to know what kind of audiences you think are the target for emby and jellyfin :)

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