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Confession from a Former Jellyfin User


dannymichel

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TeamB
2 hours ago, acnp77 said:

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

Emby has long history and there is a dedicated and loyal user base that is happy with Enby and will stick with it. Emby (devs) also has a lot more experience building Streaming and playback apps, years of experience building this and finding all the gotchas along to way so Emby users will have a smoother ride due to this experience. This makes it a very good platform for people that just want to set and forget, update when they can and play their favorite media.

Jellyfin will always have a passionate OSS following, as well as a lot of users that feel like they are getting something for free and would rather suffer the small bumps along the way. The ride with Jellyfin will be bumpier and need more attention for updates and things breaking which the OSS users will take in their strides and feel it is a right of passage to get this software up and running.

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acnp77

Thanks a lot for your comment. I definitely count myself to the people who will stick with Emby. Nothing that works and is good comes for free :)

I really hope the principle that Emby is meant to be "my own" server will stay. (Meaning no accounts and memberships etc.)

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chef
On 5/7/2021 at 5:31 PM, acnp77 said:

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

Yeah, those are made by a community member. @puffytoes They are on the fourm. I'll try to find them.

They are here: 

 

Edited by chef
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  • 2 weeks later...
sross44

I've run Emby now for over a year and I have to say it's been awesome. It's become the only media server I use now and while I do see Jellyfin making some progress, to me it's not even a choice. From my experience as a program manager on some rather large software applications, I have to say it makes me even more impressed by Emby. @Luke , @ebr and the rest of the team spend countless hours working on the code, backend stuff and more, and yet still always have time to pop in here and talk to all us. There's only 24 hours in the day to handle such a large effort and still they focus on their users. That's awesome and not the easiest thing to do. 

Is there room for Emby to improve? Absolutely. Does the team know this and strive to always improve the product? From my experience, the answer is a simple yes. The whole team here at Emby has been awesome to work with and please know your efforts never go unnoticed! 

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Gilgamesh_48
2 hours ago, sross44 said:

There's only 24 hours in the day to handle such a large effort and still they focus on their users.

That is true if and only if you limit yourself to this universe. In other universes "time" could be completely different or, maybe, time is the same but people from certain universes have the ability to ignore time if it becomes "inconvenient." 

Nobody has, as far as I know, verified that Luke, EBR and the others are actually human and from this universe. No normal "human" could maintain the hours they appear to function and still remain functional.

I "assume" they are actually members of the "good" races that have visited us in the past. Everybody "thinks" the "aliens" are from distant planets or even galaxies but it is easier to travel between universes that between stellar systems in this one.

"Sometimes I feel like I am diagonally parked in a parallel universe."

Edited by Gilgamesh_48
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  • 1 month later...
zellonatious

So I switched to jellyfin and to be honest, it's pretty good. The main downside is the slow pace of development, limited support, lack of emby connect equivalent and the lack of published apps for multiple platforms.

I tried switching back to emby as I want an android TV app, but I've noticed that emby is very slow to load in firefox. Specifically it takes 30+ seconds to load the dashboard vs two seconds for Jellyfin. I opened devtools and found that a POST request to "https://mb3admin.com/admin/service/registration/validateDevice" was slowing down my page load. If I block it in devtools, the dashboard more or less loads instantly.

If I run the same request in curl, I see the following: "{"cacheExpirationDays":7,"resultCode":"NOTFOUND","message":"Device Not Found"}"

I'm considering buying a lifetime premiere license, but this issue would need to be fixed first. It's unacceptable to spend half a minute validating my device.

Another issue is that all your support pages are blocked from VPNs, e.g. https://support.emby.media/support/solutions/articles/44001849007-connectivity shows "We are sorry. This portal is not available at your location." Not a great look for potential customers.

Edited by zellonatious
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3 hours ago, zellonatious said:

The main downside is the slow pace of development, limited support, lack of emby connect equivalent and the lack of published apps for multiple platforms.

Lol.  I've followed both projects, and I can say with 100% certainty that Jellyfin development,  on the whole,  is far quicker than Emby. Jellyfin has come so far in just 12 months I am actually quite shocked.  As a past premium user of Emby,  I can say the two aren't even comparable in that sense. 

Jellyfin has a long way to go yet though.  The Android app is a bit buggy and crashes a bit,  not to mention its a bit slow to load, whereas the Emby android app is sleek and speedy at startup.  Both operate shit the same speed once loaded. 

Limited support and no Emby connect is true though.  But then it's a free product so what do you expect. 

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10 hours ago, zellonatious said:

It's unacceptable to spend half a minute validating my device.

Hi.  This is not normal.  Is there possibly something in the browser that is interfering?  Or, perhaps your VPN?

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ng4ever
On 5/15/2021 at 4:04 PM, chef said:

Yeah, those are made by a community member. @puffytoes They are on the fourm. I'll try to find them.

They are here: 

 

 

Cool thanks!

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Bingie
On 2/1/2020 at 9:27 AM, dannymichel said:

While it's in my opinion that emby is one of the ugliest looking pieces of software out there

Sometimes less is more.  I disabled all the fancy stuff, just want simple and functional.  Love how fast everything is!  App loads quick, each menu loads quick, movie starts quick, can back out quick, can scroll quick, doesn't ask me stupid questions like who am I every time I load the app, or are you still watching?  I find myself cussing at the tv when the stream providers pull that crap.  Thank you Emby for a common sense approach.  Perfect.

I tried Jellyfin before coming to Emby, and well it didn't take me long to figure out Jellyfin was nowhere ready for prime time use.  Calling it alpha to me was generous.

I tried Plex before anything, I'm sure most people did, and it immediately annoyed me with all the crap it tosses in, fancy shmancy overload.

I've found a home with Emby.  The product is perfect for my needs, why keep looking?  "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"

I also love the community here, lots of cool people, and the devs are cool too.  I just hope I don't annoy them too much LOL I do tend to be chatty when excited about something.

 

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darkside40

Oh my god i finally found the Emby Fanboy thread where some people glorify the Emby Devs like superhumans.

Dont get me wrong, i have an Emby Lifetime License and i think that Emby is a good piece of software, but it is not perfect. There are bugs like the non working WOL integration or long lasting feature requests (eg more or individual notifications) which takes ages to be fixed or implemented. Really often you read: Good idea for future releases but than nothing happens. Must be frustrating for some users.

Also because Emby and the clients is closed source software there is not much you can do about it but wait. I can imagine why it is closed software thought, because there wasnt enough benefit by community work and the fact that it was too easy for people to steal premium features. Valid point. But lets be honest there was never really a chance for community developers to work on Emby because of the lack of documentation and comments in the source code.

But it is like that now.

Regarding Jellyfin i took a spin with them in 2020 and it wasnt good. The Server was not stable, there was no Android TV app (is there now?), so it wasnt very satisfying. From what i have seen they also shut down their Forum only communicating via reddit etc. I dont know if it was a good choice for them to fork Emby 3.5 instead from beginning a new project because of the reasons i mentioned earlier. We see what future brings.

Someone brought up that there are not so many plugins for Jellyfin, are there more working ones for Emby, or better to ask is the number increasing? I dont think so. For community developers it is hard to write and maintain plugins for Emby, which means on some point they just give up. Thinking of the TVHeadend Plugin or outside Projects like Embystat (which was a plugin before).

Like i already said, i really like Emby. And it is astounding how much work is done by ebr and Luke.

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3 hours ago, darkside40 said:

Oh my god i finally found the Emby Fanboy thread where some people glorify the Emby Devs like superhumans.

Lol,  my thoughts exactly. 

I've been running jellyfin server for 6 months now,  it's been stable.  The Android app is a little buggy though. 

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zellonatious
On 7/4/2021 at 11:21 PM, ebr said:

Hi.  This is not normal.  Is there possibly something in the browser that is interfering?  Or, perhaps your VPN?

I did some testing and found out the problem went away after changing firefox's config: network.dns.use_https_rr_as_altsvc from true to false.

Not sure why this only affects your domain (looking at DNS records).

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6 hours ago, darkside40 said:

Oh my god i finally found the Emby Fanboy thread where some people glorify the Emby Devs like superhumans.

How do you know they aren't?

I think Luke's super power is staying up all hours of the night answeingr forum posts and working on code. I think maybe ebr is going for the Clark Kent look with the glasses trying to stay incognito. :)

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fizzyade

I haven’t tried jellyfin, I have no need to, I’m satisfied with how well Emby works for me across my devices, I also think it looks great, we all have different tastes.

I also have a plex lifetime sub, I was plex user for many years before Emby, every so often i would try Emby because I didn’t like the way plex was going, gaining vulture capital money meant they had to make those investors happy, headline features (crap ware which would become abandon ware not long after) that nobody really wanted were a priority over fixing stuff, dubious data collection and so on.  
 

My Emby trials usually lasted a couple of hours, for various reasons, it didn’t look good, it was slow, it was slow to start playback and so on.  That remained true for a number of years, and then it wasn’t.  Emby, as far as function that I needed, surpassed emby.  I ponied up the cash for a lifetime license and haven’t looked back.

however….

I have a thread on here, it gets bumped by others every so often, and it centres around plex having its own standalone music player.  I’ll admit, when plex first came up with it I was pissed they’d wasted time on a desktop player rather than fixing bugs, but boy did it make sense on a mobile platform.  Still does.

and that’s why (our collective family) music collection is served on Plex, because it’s a vastly superior experience to navigation around a video application that also plays music.  I’ve tried to impress on the importance of having separate applications for video and music, but the Emby devs don’t see what the problem is with it being an all in one app.  “You can create short cuts into the music section” is the general response.

for me, that’s not a feasible compromise. For me, I could live with it, my wife and daughter, another story, my wife often asks me which button to press on the remote control, unless it’s a music app, that plus only music, and behaves in the same manner as every other music app (and Luke specifically cites Spotify as being some  to big he regularly checks against) then it’s not going to work.  I’m going to get a constant barrage of texts “I’m stuck in videos how do I get back to music” or “I can’t see any of my music”, shortly followed by my wife signing up for Apple Music because it works exactly how you’d expect a music player to work.

And this is why my plex license is still in use today.

The Emby devs have thus far been resolute in the face of my request, as a developer myself I know we can dig our heels in when we think something is already easy to use, or works in a way that we think is logical, but generally speaking, a percentage of users are not as technically able as we give them credit for.

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Dreakon13

I keep going back to Plex and every time I do it's a very frustrating experience.  Not because I run into issues... which I do, but I run into issues with Emby too... it's that I feel I have nowhere to turn when it happens.  Plex pushed out a bad build once, which broke my Plex install, which is bad enough but when I when I reinstalled it botched media playback for a number of files (for some reason it was transcoding AAC to FLAC on my Roku Ultra which broke seeking in and resuming files) and a forum post and several bumps later, I couldn't get a single damn response.  This time around, I couldn't get the Play/Shuffle buttons to work on a g-damn Collection, and I get errors just trying to log into their forums.  That's the gold standard? 😄 

The fact I can come on here, post any number of bug reports (even the stupid stuff that ends up being something obvious or that I did wrong) and actually get a response, whether I like the answer or not, is everything for me.  I hate to sound like a shill sometimes but that's what it boils down to and I'm very happy with Emby in regards to accessibility and support.

Maybe Jellyfin would be good for that too, I feel no urge to find out... but I can't shake the feeling there'd be a lot of "the source is right there, go fix it yourself" responses flung my way lol.  Like it's great for impatient frugal coders that want to fork a fork of a fork, but it's nice there's something like Emby between that and the soulless husk that is Plex.

Edited by Dreakon13
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21 hours ago, fizzyade said:

The Emby devs have thus far been resolute in the face of my request, as a developer myself I know we can dig our heels in when we think something is already easy to use, or works in a way that we think is logical, but generally speaking, a percentage of users are not as technically able as we give them credit for.

I don't think we've ever said this was a bad idea.  Its just that it is a major piece of work (and we don't have the venture capital you spoke of) so very  hard to commit to at this point because it would mean not doing a lot of other stuff in that time.  So, we make suggestions to try and get you closer to what you want with what is already there.

And I'm going to make another one - just in case you haven't thought of it :).  What if you created some separate users for your wife and daughter like "wifemusic" and gave those users access to ONLY the music library.  Then, on their phones, they could log in to that user and, if they don't use them for anything else, just stay logged in and only see music.

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ng4ever

I thought about switching to jellyfin but don't think I ever will. Only reason I would if a feature never works or Emby goes away. That will never happen though.

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fizzyade
On 07/07/2021 at 14:47, ebr said:

I don't think we've ever said this was a bad idea.  Its just that it is a major piece of work (and we don't have the venture capital you spoke of) so very  hard to commit to at this point because it would mean not doing a lot of other stuff in that time.  So, we make suggestions to try and get you closer to what you want with what is already there.

And I'm going to make another one - just in case you haven't thought of it :).  What if you created some separate users for your wife and daughter like "wifemusic" and gave those users access to ONLY the music library.  Then, on their phones, they could log in to that user and, if they don't use them for anything else, just stay logged in and only see music.

Hah!  I'm just poking you with a sharp stick 😛

I know it's probably not the most sexiest thing that you guys want to work on, and as a developer myself, I understand there's only so many hours each day and that there are much more important things to be working on.

I obviously have no idea what your code base looks like or how easy it actually is to create different builds from the same code base (this is both a "your code" issue and also possibly a limitation of the tools which you use to build the client applications), but everything I write these days is modular, it's designed to optional (if you check out https://github.com/nedrysoft/pingnoo you'll see that the main application is a shim that dynamically loads plugins, the plugins are the application - I'm not suggesting that it's feasible to dynamically link or that you even have the ability to do that on some platforms), each plugin may depend on other plugins, so removing a plugin from pingnoo may prevent other plugins from loading.

The roundabout point is that I use this paradigm everywhere now, because sticking stuff together and pulling stuff out becomes trivial, what the application does is entirely based on what modules are available, I build several commercial applications that have different purposes, but technically differ only in what I've bundled.

This stuff is easy to do when you do it like that from the start, it's increasingly more difficult (impossible) to go back at a later date and make stuff work that way.

Your last point, I can guarantee that she'll end up somewhere where she shouldn't, and that it'll be my fault for making her use it, and that she's going to go back to using Apple Music because it's much easier to use - I think this is common ground on the feature suggestion I made with other users, to us, if it does anything else than play music, it's not a viable solution.

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Chyron
On 7/6/2021 at 2:50 AM, darkside40 said:

because Emby and the clients is closed source software there is not much you can do about it but wait. I can imagine why it is closed software thought, because there wasnt enough benefit by community work and the fact that it was too easy for people to steal premium features. Valid point. But lets be honest there was never really a chance for community developers to work on Emby because of the lack of documentation and comments in the source code.

The key is to have a good dev (team). Being open-source, in and of itself, is not the primary ingredient for success. The appeal of Free Open-Source Software is that it can be improved and maintained by the community. But if the community doesn't actually improve or maintain it, there is little difference between being open or closed. 

That is also the case even in the development of an external app that hooks into an API rather than being part of the source. For example, the quality of third-party audiobook apps that connect to Plex through its API are highly dependent on the dedication and/or ability of the dev. Those apps, as also apparently is the case with Emby, live or die at the hands of a single dev.

Having said that---I'm sure, if I had the time to, I could offer help to the Emby devs in developing the audiobook functions of Emby. As it stands, I don't, and relegate myself to routinely grumbling about it. So I guess that's a case in point that if I wanted it done right, I could do it myself but I choose not to.

EDIT: I still really want Emby to improve its audiobook functionality, though.

 

Edited by Chyron
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On 7/12/2021 at 2:05 PM, fizzyade said:

if it does anything else than play music, it's not a viable solution.

but what I suggested wouldn't because the user would only have access to the music library...

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ng4ever

One small advantage right now, but not for long, jellyfin is on Synology community so it can be directly downloaded from the package manager.

Still like I said very small advantage but it will not make me switch.

 

 

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  • 3 months later...
rooser11
On 5/3/2021 at 2:05 PM, RSVR said:

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.

yea... jellyfin's still poor android tv app (even with 0.12) when it comes to subtitles handling is the only reason i am still sticking around with emby at the moment.  since my friends and family are not as picky as i am about subtitles, i am now running two docker containers, jellyfin for friends and family and emby for myself for my sony tvs.  i am keep testing other options like kodi + jellyfin or kodi + emby but dedicated clients are still better in most use cases for me. 

as you wrote, man, i cant withstand emby's theater app.  jellyfin media player is something emby devs should look into, as it works just fine with rather consistent user interface/experience across different platforms as all of them rely on the web version of the client + mpv for media playback.  

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I have a question for jelly fin users. Is it possible to side load emby plugins into the jellyrolls server?

Does it read the plugin libraries like emby would?

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