Shoutout to @jellyfin - I’ve been really enjoying this piece of software the past few months, and it’s given me the drive to clean up my music collection so it presents nicely in the media library. :)
Switched off Plex I think about two and a half years ago. Its been rock solid. Literally use it every day.
The thing stopping me from using this is energy usage… I try to keep a small footprint, and the server running my VMs, NAS and Home assistant is a low power embedded Celeron, it draws about 20-30watts.
I’m wondering what I’m missing here… I have proxmox, and jellyfin is running on a lxc container, along with other stuff. The whole server uses 10W on idle. It does jump to 35W when transcoding, but is that bad? Is jellyfin notoriously power hungry?
I don’t have a discrete video card on my server, I’d need one for transcoding, when I tested adding one, just having it in raised the idle power consumption by 10-20W
I don’t use graphic card at all. But I have disabled transcoding for all users. They have to use a client on their device or use Microsoft Edge/Google Chrome (which supports x265) to view content.
Unless you are transcoding videos, streaming audio or video is next to nothing. It barely registers as using any cpu and my watt meter is basically margin of error when it is in use. Energy use is not a concern.
If you are in the Apple ecosystem, Infuse is a very slick client that can connect to Samba drives, Plex, JellyFin, and more. I downloaded it because the AppleTV JellyFin app had issues at the time with large media files. Just to test it out, I used a Samba connection and realized I really didn’t need JellyFin at all. Occasionally, I’ll power on the JellyFin vm to organize new media or for offline viewing but that’s about it
While it did save me some money on energy usage, I ended up spending that money saved on Infuse Pro Lifetime.
Jellyfin has certainly improved a lot since I started using it a couple of years ago. I remember when the web UI was much slower and posters would fail to load. Things are faster now and more consistent.
With that said, there are still some big issues that I encounter. Adding a new show has its individual episodes count towards the “Latest” item limit so a single big show can completely dominate that section with a single entry. Adding multiple episodes of a show simultaneously results in randomly ordered “new content” notifications which look really bad when output in something like Discord notifications. The web app has a pretty dated UX.
I think it’s important to be real when talking about something like Jellyfin so it’s not misrepresented. It’s a rough product that is constantly being improved, albeit slowly.
There’s also a whole other conversation to be had about the job of self-hosting Jellyfin vs. letting Plex snoop on your activity and habits.
There are definitely a number of things about Jellyfin that irk me, but not enough that I’ve really considered setting aside the time to try and contribute the improvements. :) Most of my annoyances are with regard to the android app + google cast; it’s tricky to get it into a state where you actually have control over the playback in the app.
The entirely self-hosted part is quite important to me. Local control is the top priority with anything smart-home related for me.
thats good to hear, ive been thinking of giving a try
