Jellyfin 10.9 Coming Soon!

Man I am so grateful for this project, I was afraid it would feel polished enough after having been with Plex for the last few years. But hot damn Jellyfin is so much better and keeps on giving!
- I plan on switching regardless but let's say I was on the fence... Aside from it not being owned by a for-profit company, why is Jellyfin better than Plex?
  
  That “aside” is everything though.
  Plex is focused on making money, whether that is from the sale of your data or selling you products. Jellyfin is a community-driven project, so its focus is just on being better because it exists.
  With Jellyfin, it’s truly self-hosting as opposed to leveraging a third party to do some of the legwork. Plex “offers” more, but it all comes at the cost of your data, or your data+an actual fee.
  Jellyfin is available directly on most newer TV stores, iOS/Apple TV, Android, Chromecast, Fire stick, and Roku. It already takes some work to set up your media library in the relevant structures, so if you’re going to do the work anyway for a self-hosting option, why pay Plex extra for what Jellyfin can do for free since it is an open-source project?
  
  There's a few reasons, but number one for me is how incredibly clean the UI is.
  Plex is a mess. Half of it is just premium shit they're trying to convince you to use. The actual "stream my own media" functionality is buried at the bottom of the menus.
  Trying to get nontechnical family to use Plex was always a challenge, just because of how busy it is. I've never had this problem since moving to Jellyfin.
  
  The biggest reason I use jellyfin: you don't need to pay for plex premium to stream to your phone.
  I get plex needs to make money. But talk about a basic feature that people need...
  
  No internet needed, no sneaky ads
  
  You can't login to plex without internet. Why would I tell a company that I login to my server?
  
  Jellyfin is 90% plex, and it's impressive how it comes forward in leaps and bounds, but it's not better than plex. People just appreciate it more.
  If you only need that 90% that it does (and don't need things like intro detection, conversions, mobile sync, ass/sas subtitles), then you'll come away super happy with not having to pay plex and not being locked into plex.
  It doesn't really do much over that 90%, it's just neat that the 90% isn't plex
  
  Jelly fin let's you play on mobile without paying. Plex doesn't
  
  No link with their bs account system, their bs subscriptions and SyncPlay, SyncPlay is just awesome, I don't know if plex has something similar
  
  Besides all the other stuff people mentioned, a concrete one is that you can stream TV via it for free vs Plex. Just add a TV tuner to it and away you go.
  
  People mentioned a lot of things. I'll add that plex doesn't offer hardware transcoding without premium. Now, setting up hardware transcoding on an NVidia graphics card on linux is a bit complicated, setting it up on windows is really simple. While it's not just clicking "enable hardware acceleration", it's not much more complicated than that.
  
  The free version of plex doesn't allow downloading, only allows streaming. Downloading is a huge feature IMO.
  
  Plex has a known and very old issue of improperly transcoding 5.1 audio to stereo and dropping the center channel. It makes movies seem super quiet. That's why I switched.
- I need a ps5 app - without that I can’t leave plex
  
  Ironically the PlayStation app version of Plex is one of the worst ones out there. Its imo not even worth using.
  
  Can just get a Chromecast.
  
  My friend, just spend $30 on a chromecast with Google TV. You can even have it auto boot into whatever app you want with a little tweaking.
  
  Sony seems to not be willing to accept a Jellyfin client. It's not that the devs don't want to support the PS5, Sony is blocking it...

I can't tell you how many times I've looked up some feature or low-priority bug only to find the answer is "there's a PR for this that will be added in 10.9", commented like a year ago, glad to see the future plan is more frequent but smaller feature releases!
- I'm glad for people who were waiting on this release. It took so long that I wrote my own media server in the mean time to resolve all the problems I was having with Jellyfin. I hope they can get more frequent releases out for folks still using it. Having looked at the code base, I understand that the cruft from Emby slows down development.
  
  Can we see your media server?

Wtf, look at the size of this comment section. Where are you guys hiding out in all the other topics?
- The Lemmy Jellyfin Venn Diagram is just a circle.
- We don't care about other topics, the only thing that gets us going in the morning is personal media libraries and software to manage and play them!
  
  Personal media library? You mean... personal Linux distros collection?
- Idk about the rest of these jabronies, but I didn't even know jellyfin had its own comm until this appeared in my feed. But I'm gonna subscribe now that I know of it!
  
  jabronies
  You keep using that word and.... it's awesome.
  
  I wasn't actually sure I was still on Lemmy when I saw this news. But it was an instant subscribe once I found out.
  
  Same same
- Hello from "All"!
  
  Same.
  On a related note: What is Jellyfin?

Is there a tldr on what this release will have?
- Not published yet, afaik
  
  Thanks
- TBD.
- Sounds mostly like a CI/CD clean-up release tbh, putting it on a footing to actually focus on features in 10.10
  
  Absolutely not! There are a many features in 10.9, check out the "release-highlight" PRs on the repo: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/pulls?q=is%3Apr+label%3Arelease-highlight+
  That is only a part of the changes, there are some more UI changes to the dashboard, many bug fixes, and performance improvements.

Is there a place where I can see a list of features set to release with 10.9?
- I was going to ask OP to link to the thread, but it looks like he hasn't actually posted anything after that: https://mastodon.social/@hetisniels/112044929265622327
  
  Yeah not yet.
- The little fix I contributed to is on there :) https://blog.rayberger.org/fixing-jellyfin-ios-audiobook-streaming
  
  I got a bunch of commits in around searching and similarity. https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Abradbeattie+is%3Amerged, https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Abradbeattie+is%3Amerged.
- https://github.com/orgs/jellyfin/projects/43?query=is%3Aopen+sort%3Aupdated-desc
- I gather not yet but you could follow Niels on Mastodon for updates.
- You can probably check the commits since 10.8

Just donated to Jellyfin. Very happy with the work they do. Love you guys!
- Same! Been using them a while, great app.
  
  I didn't think they took donations?

Anyone have a good source that explains how to setup and find safe media. Computer literacy is not my strong point.
- Buy Blurays and rip them to your machine. From there copy them into Jellyfin.
  You will need a Bluray reader, Handbrake and MakeMKV
  
  @possiblylinux127 @Bluefalcon
  In this order:
  Rip the BluRay-Disk (or DVD) with MakeMKV, you will got the film with all languages and subtitles in one MKV-File;
  Shrink the MKV-File with Handbrake and save it as H264/H265 or better as AV1 (better because open-source and the future).
  Film #Movie #rip #Bluray #MKV #MakeMKV #Handbrake
  
  Also of you can stand the quality check out DVDs in charity shops or second hand online (Ebay etc). (And give away / resell after you made a "backup".)
- What do you mean by "safe media"?
  
  I’m guessing he means how to sail the high seas without getting scurvy if you know what I mean
  
  Where I don't have to throw my PC out afterwards due to virus and malware.
- The good old Arr Stack is worth looking into.
  Radarr (movies), Sonarr (TV), Prowlarr (for finding things), Bazarr (if you're in the subtitles gang, but most newer rips already contain it), VPN (to keep out nosey lawyers).
  Only the VPN costs money, and it may be optional depending on where you are.
  
  That doesn't really resolve the problem of is the media safe.
  From a cybersecurity standpoint you should be validating the mime type of the media at a minimum (The actual magic number, not the extension). And running it through ClamAV as well, ideally, before it's released to your media library.
- You may be better off using streamio, torrentio (a plugin for streamio,) and real-debrid.
  It’s a bit more straight forward and doesn’t involve all the setup of downloading, organizing, and hosting the media.

Congratulations to the Jellyfin Team!!!
Thanks for all of your hard work.

I've been dabbling with jellyfin lately. It doesn't seem to like my mp3 organization, which Plex had no issues with. I generally use artist/album/songs, though there are exceptions that seem to be tripping up jellyfin. For example, I split compilation cds into the appropriate artist's directory (so, artist/song), and it doesn't seem to know how to deal with that. There are also a few weird things floating around, but those might be due to bad id3 tags in the mp3s.
I know there are some issues with mp3 tags in some songs. For example, my wife's *NSync or N-Sync (or whatever the hell they are, I don't actually care) mp3s seem to have the artist name in different formats, so that's not helping matters at all.
Also, in fairness, jellyfin kind of got a bum start on my system - I installed it and started it, but I didn't have enough space on /var for everything, so the system started having problems. To get it running, I stopped jellyfin and just deleted the metadata directory (getting the server running in general was much more important than getting jellyfin working). I've since allocated more space to /var, and I had jellyfin reread all of the libraries, which seems to have been mostly successful. (It looks like I had the same issue with Plex, because I had moved its metadata /var directory to the media drive, but I forgot for jellyfin.)
I do hope the new version includes some features that are just personal preference, like for example I'd prefer the "artist" view to be first in the Music section, not albums. And I'd like to sort albums within the artist by year, not name (I suppose I could go in and give it the year as the sort key, but I don't want to have to do that for every artist). These are personal preferences, of course, not breaking bugs.
Overall it seems like a decent replacement for Plex. I watched an episode of the Simpsons using it last night on our FireTV, and it worked fine.
- Since you mentioned the /var directory, I'm gonna guess you're running a *nix server of some kind. I use easytag for audiobooks and Picard for all my music that lidarr couldn't figure out. You can match your lidarr and Picard renaming formats so that everything is organized consistently. I tend to leave compilations / soundtracks/ various artists albums in their own directory and leave any artist level grouping as a task best handled by a database tag filter in the player.
  
  Correct, running Linux. The actual songs/movies/shows are in a media array (a 15 terabyte RAID5 array that could be replaced by a single drive now); /var is where jellyfin (and plex for that matter) store their metadata.
- I follow what lidarr does. Worked great so far on my cases of adding custom tracks I didnt want to submit to musicbrainz.
- You probably know about it but there's a great program for Windows (I'm not sure about other platforms) called MP3TAG which handles (re)tagging like nothing else
  
  I didn't, but I use Linux anyway. Musicbrainz.org offers a program designed to do that, too. I'm a little hesitant to run it on my collection of mp3s without some smaller tests first though.

Please let there be Media Delete capability for Roku clients, soon. It's the only thing missing for the wife and I. It's incredible without this feature, but would be even BETTER than sliced bread with it!
- Sorry, but as far as I'm aware, this isn't in anyone's plans to work on. I know it's not on mine. I think the consensus is to keep admin functions on the web client and let the Roku client simply be a user client.
- I specifically created an admin account for that (though I manage it via nzb360/*arrs) and other admin tasks and a user account for consuming media.
  Just as a personal best practice. Administrator can't login from external.
- Client devices probably shouldn't have admin privileges those should be restricted to the admin UI.
  That's a nightmare waiting to happen when some device pushes an update that deletes your entire library, or a bug in a client does the same.

Smart playlists for music 🤞
- Plexamp is probably the best music app I've used and makes it really hard to switch to Jellyfin. Symfonium probably the closest thing to it but not quite.
  
  That's what I've been using to listen to music. As soon as smart playlists lands in jellyfin then I'll be able to ditch Plex for good.

~~First~~ Second update:
- That's the 2nd post. He started with the update regarding the restart command.
- Oh, that's cool (but trick play is not a very good for that, wth).
  
  trick play is not a very good for that
  What do you mean? Trick play is just the name of the functionality. There are several methods/formats to actually implement it, such as HLS, DASH, and BIF.
  In this case, the functionality was added to the server API using the HLS format.

Tldr of what jellyfish is?
- jellyfish
  A gelatinous animal in the sea that stings you.
  Jellyfin?
  A server & client software pair that allows you to have all your personal media available on demand. Movies, TV Shows, Music, Photos, Books, etc. All served from your server to a client device - Android, Roku, iOS, etc.
  
  Thank you

Any place to sign up for a newsletter to be let known? I'd like to trial moving to jellyfin but I might as well wait since it's not like Plex is that terrible that I have to switch now
- Just star the project on GitHub. They have a feed on the startpage where you'll get notified of releases.
  
  Huh, TIL!

So I haven't taken the time to wrap my head around Jellyfin and the Arr family.
I currently use Kodi with Seren and Premiumize. Is there a guide for converting to something to replace Premiumize with what I assume is Sonarr and Radarr? I have a few months until my next renewal though I have to say I've not been unhappy with Premiumize, it's just another bill.
- Completely different kind of service, the debrid services let you stream media. The arrs are so you can download and store media. I think it's overall more convenient to just have a premiumize or Real-Debrid subscription so you don't have to buy hard drives and keep a server running
  
  Debrid services can be used to download as well. If you’re doing lite torrenting it works perfectly fine to grab files of any kind without exposing your IP, similar-ish to a VPN.
  I’m guessing you’re talking about Stremio though, which covers a large amount of media. But will falter for older stuff, or non-popular titles. I don’t recall what it was, but I recently ran into a 2019 series that wasn’t possible to find with Torrentio.
  
  Yah, I realize that. But I'm not against just having the whole season or series on file or not have to worry about whether there's a problem 2 seasons in getting it at a low bitrate for my cabin internet connection. I kinda dislike having to scroll through to find the feed I want and half the time I accidentally pick a dubbed feed or a shitcam. I'll often go on to piratebay and just pull the entire season at my preferred resultion rather than fart around with the debrid.
  And I run a pile of servers already for other purposes and backup, I'm fine adding services.
  But on this subject I'm far enough behind the curve that I wouldn't mind some direction towards best practices before I go too far in the wrong direction.

- This comment said
  Release target is tentatively mid April according to here..
  
  Sorry added it to original post now.

let's gooo super excited to see the improvements